1.

It snowed today.

Reconsidering my plans to study in Canada now.

I have no idea what I was thinking (maybe that it IS February?) but I decided I’d be warm enough in just a sweater. Which I was. Nearly.

But…snowgasm! In a Sweater! At least it didn’t settle.

2.

I haven’t written pretty much since my exams ended. What’s up with that? So I’ve started on TLOL again.

I would have done so earlier, but it really irritates me that WriteWay does not allow you to open 2 WIPs at a time and I haven’t yet had the time to go print it out.

3.

1-2-3 isn’t going very well. I didn’t do it

I’m just finding it to be such a chore. Damn it.

Habituating

1.

How perfect would it have been if I had managed to make this the first post with this tag.

Alas.

2.

There are a lot of studies that have concluded that willpower is a finite resource.

I won’t link to them here, but I do believe it is true.

It makes sense. Everything else is finite. Why wouldn’t willpower be too?

I do, however, also think that willpower is like stamina. If you use it enough, if you work it enough, you’ll have more of it. Similarly, if you use it for running mostly, your stamina goes longer if used for running.

That is, you can also use efficiency more efficiently.

For instance, once you get used to writing every day, it’s easier to write every day. You need less willpower to write every day, so you can have more willpower left over to do other stuff.

3.

Efficiency can also be achieved in another: setting attainable (but not too attainable) goals that are well-defined, i.e. not nebulous.

You don’t want to waste willpower fiddling over how you are going to achieve your goal.

If you say you want to write x amount of words a day, that’s easy. BICHOK.

If you say you want to read more craft books, make that…I don’t know, one every month. I think one every two weeks would be pushing it, but what do I know? I read economics blogs for fun.

4.

This year, there are two things I would like to add to my daily life. 1-2-3 is one of them, and the other is stitching pretty much every single day.

Primarily, the reason is that I need to relax more. I just don’t like waking up about a quarter of the way to a panic attack. Or sitting in a lecture and trying to Zen my heartbeat into a more normal rate.

Now combine the two, and exchange lecture for exam? That’s called a catastrophe waiting to happen.

5.

So new and better habits.

So I can be a better, improved version of me.

1.

Morning pages have yet to happen.

I am thinking about turning them into night pages. To empty out my head so I can start afresh in the morning. Maybe it’ll help me sleep.

For now, lunch pages seems to work. We’ll see when my schedule fills up a bit more.

2.

TLOL continues to percolate. I’ve essentially reworked the plotline for the third act, but I still need to fix the first.

I have found my not-so-pretty protagonist’s defining trait, so the first act must change. The plot works, but not the way it is currently written.

3.

MO has titles. Now it needs writing. I will probably work on this in parallel with TLOL, because it has so much in common.

Themes, worldbuilding, timelines even. I think the characters in MO will appear in TLOL and vice versa.

4.

The weather…OMG the weather!

It was freaking chucking it down yesterday. An actual Snowgasm in February! What. The. Fuck?

Talk about January-in-February! Which is, thankfully, going much better than the weather.

Self-Improvement

1.

I have a fetish for it.

I like to be able to say ‘I’ve done this in ____.’

It’s less that I want to be a better person, but I want to be better prepared to take over the world to seize every opportunity that comes my way, and just to do things better.

2.

In 2007, it was learning to be more extroverted.

That one was hard.

But it was a good year for that. I think it made my first year away from home a lot easier than it would have been otherwise.

3.

2008 and 2009 was meditation.

The reason why it was the same in 2009 was because 2008 was a bust.

So was 2009, come to that.

4.

Which is how we ended up in 2010.

I’m looking for my replacement for meditation, if that makes sense. A way for me to clear The Space in My Head. Hence 1-2-3 and The Year of Starts, to enable more Stabbing Fabric with a Needle.

I decided that this year, I am going to attempt a multi-pronged approach. 1-2-3 is active, whereas stitching every day is passive.

We’ll see how this one goes. 1-2-3 is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. *bangs head*

5.

I periodically do this with my gadgets too.

I have given up on Outlook. Chrome has to go. Word doesn’t quite fit my writing needs so now I have WriteWayPro. Twitter is better with a Twitter client rather than on web. So forth.

I may settle for Google-izing my laptop in the short-term*, but I doubt I’ll actually do that. I don’t like Chrome. I really don’t like Chrome.

6.

I think that everything can be improved. It’s just a question of whether the improvement is worth the time you spend getting there.

I am, after all, an economist. Marginal marginal marginal!

*Defined as for the next year to eighteen months, as I’ll almost definitely switch out my current laptop for another, or at least get a secondary.

1.

I did get around to 1-2-3. Just at lunch time rather than the planned breakfast time.

I expect that I’ll be doing it at the same time tomorrow as I have a 9 o’ clock start and I’ll be out late tonight.

2.

TLOL still suffers from the Heebie-Jeebies.

3.

I may start messing around with my M.O. Which because I think I’m funny, I have tagged Modus Operandi.

Even though it actually stands for Magnum Opus.

4.

But I’m still in social butterfly* mode, so you know, unwriting and not much work will be done.

*That’s why the start mentioned in yesterday’s post has yet to happen.