Do you ever feel out of balance in your life? Where you find your days lopsided in your to-do’s, and you aren’t able to dig into your well to do what you really want to do? Have you found yourself with the desire to create stuffed inside but no way to come out? Am I the only one who needed a mental and creative break at the end of last year?
When I say creative break, what I really mean is giving my brain a chance to catch up with itself. Taking the time to organize thoughts, goals, wins, and losses, and get out of the funk I found myself in.
Susan May Warren added the Sacred Rest assessment in her 2022 Brilliant Writer Planner (that I love!). It’s a way to determine the rest you are lacking (and what you are not). It’s all about balance. And she organizes our needs into these buckets:
For me, my mental and creative areas are sorely lacking. And taking time over the last two weeks to purge through some to-do piles, evaulate my year, and write out thoughts, made me realize I don’t schedule this type of downtime for my brain enough.
And that’s exactly what the assesment is supposed to do.
Help you figure out areas you should focus on this year.
For me, I like time to let my mind catch up with my inputs. Let my mind wander. With my scheduled life, I don’t get a lot of time to do that. Yet when I did recently, I found the creative juice I’ve been missing.
Ideas began to pop into my thoughts. Energy to dive in and get to work.
And that what was so exciting, because WORK is my word for 2022. Something I chose because God isn’t finished with me yet. And I am not finished with this writing journey.
He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it. Philippians 1:6.
Noun: exertion or effort directed to produce or accomplish something
Dreams don’t work, unless you do.
My manuscript is a work in progress
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart….Colossions 3:24-25
Which is exactly what I plan to do for 2022.
I process my thoughts by writing. I explore what’s in my brain by writing. And what I found myself not doing at the end of 2021 was writing.
It takes work to write. And I’m now ready to get to work.
In her Sacred Rest Assessment, Susie May asks three questions at the end
1. What areas do you need to focus more on this year?
2. Why do you feel you are depleted in those particular areas?
3. What activities can you pursue to refresh your life with Sacred Rest?
And just like that I figured out how and what to schedule (what I need to bring balance back to my life) into my week.
How about you? Are you in balance with your Sacred Rest?
You may want to schedule some time to assess to help you bring yourself back into balance this year and together, maybe we can help each other do just that!
Denise M. Colby loves to write words that encourage, enrich, & engage. Every year, she chooses a word to focus on. Her word in 2021 was Wisdom. If you’d like to see more of Denise’s posts on this blog, you can check out her archives.
0 0 Read moreI’m super excited about 2017. It’s going to be a great year!
Kitty Bucholtz decided to combine her undergraduate degree in business, her years of experience in accounting and finance, and her graduate degree in creative writing to become a writer-turned-independent-publisher. Her novels, Little Miss Lovesick, A Very Merry Superhero Wedding, and Unexpected Superhero are currently available on Amazon . The free short story Superhero in Disguise and the new short story Welcome to Loon Lake are available wherever ebooks are sold. You can find out about her courses on self-publishing, marketing, and time management for writers at her website Writer Entrepreneur Guides.
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Every January 1, people make a New Year’s resolution. They’re going to lose weight or quit smoking or finish that book. New gym memberships soar at the beginning of the year, as do registrations for weight loss programs and courses to walk away from those cigarettes for good. But there is no such animal for finishing a book that stretches over the long term.
I should mention that there are some tools out there for completing a book in a short amount of time, such as NANOWRIMO (http://www.nanowrimo.org), which is National Novel Writing Month. It occurs every November and encourages writers to complete their book over the course of that month. There is also Book In A Week by author April Kihlstrom (http://www.sff.net/people/april.kihlstrom/), which teaches a method of planning out a book over the course of four or five weeks and then actually writing the first draft in a week’s time. (I’m considering using this method myself for my February deadline.) These are excellent programs, which can encourage a writer to put themselves into the chair and make writing a priority, even if just for a short period of time.
But what about the rest of the year?
Very often, more than half the people who sign up for those gym memberships and weight loss plans and kick-the-smoking courses will drop out before Valentine’s Day, even if the change still needs to be made. Everyone knows their list of “shoulds.†I should lose weight, I should get more exercise, I should quit smoking.
I should work on my book.
The truth of the matter is that all of these changes—weight loss, exercise, quitting smoking, finishing that book—can only happen when you’re ready for it to happen. It requires dedication and a desire to want that change more than anything. To want it so much that you are willing to throw away that last opened pack of cigarettes or walk away from those home-made chocolate chip cookies or get on that treadmill.
That you are willing to do things like get up an hour earlier or miss your favorite TV program to make time for your writing. That you are willing to join a critique group and put your writing out there for evaluation, or drive over an hour to your writers’ meeting.
If you want something badly enough, you know you will do what it takes to get it. How many of us have stood in line for an hour to get on a ride at an amusement park or for tickets to a movie or concert we really wanted to see? How many of us have braved the airport or the highways during the holidays, dealing with airline delays and bad weather and congested traffic because we wanted to be with loved ones on that special day?
Why not put your writing at the top of your list of things you will make a priority from now on?
It’s not such a lofty goal. The average mass market paperback is about 365 pages long. That means if you write one page a day for one year, at the end of that year you will have a book.
That doesn’t sound like much, does it? The average word count for one page of a manuscript is 250 words. You probably write emails longer than that. But if you manage one page a day for a year, you will have a completed first draft of a book before the ball drops in Times Square the following year.
Now it’s hard to make long term change without accountability. Get your writer friends and your critique partners involved. All of you can set goals and check in with each other. Get together after the writers’ meeting or start a Facebook group or, for those of you on Twitter, follow trending topic #writegoal, where you can post your writing goals for the day and then later post again when you have completed that goal. (I find this very useful for keeping up with my own deadlines.)
Forget the New Year’s resolution. Let’s go for the All-Year’s resolution and keep that dedication going long after the confetti has been cleaned up and the champagne bottles have been recycled.
The power is in your hands to make it happen.
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More info →A Slice of Orange is an affiliate with some of the booksellers listed on this website, including Barnes & Nobel, Books A Million, iBooks, Kobo, and Smashwords. This means A Slice of Orange may earn a small advertising fee from sales made through the links used on this website. There are reminders of these affiliate links on the pages for individual books.
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