Rough Starts, Outlining, and a Cackling Plot Bunny

I can’t believe it’s already the 10th of January. Time is already flying by, which is a scary thought for the rest of year, and for all my plans.

The first week of January was pretty brutal on me. Mentally and emotionally at least. With my history, that combination is a rather large detriment to accomplishing goals and staying on top of my plans. If my mindset just isn’t there and I can’t shake something, I go nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. That was my entire first week for the most part, which is not a great start for my attempt to reclaim my life this year.

I think I made it through the first four days of the New Leaf 30 Day Meditation Challenge before I gave up under everything going on. I haven’t sat down to meditate for probably about a week now. My will to either work out or do yoga once a day has also gone down the crapper pretty quick. I think I managed to do it twice so far this year, and that was really only because I got lucky enough to have the house to myself so I could use the living room.

As expected, I’m beating myself up over letting them both slip so quickly as well. I’m trying to tell myself “you had a rough week, now turn your chin up and push forward to try again” but that’s not always the easiest thing to do. I may not be good at practicing positive thinking, but when I can manage it, I do see the difference it makes.

Which, now that I’m thinking of it, I do have a serious question for anyone and everyone willing to answer. I could use all the insight provided.

How do you keep yourself motivated and hold yourself accountable to the things you wish to accomplish? How do you get yourself moving on goals or to-do lists or even daily tasks? How do you keep yourself from wasting time away and saying “I’ll do it later”?

Any answer is a great answer to me, for I just simply need to find something that works for me that will keep me going. The more ideas I get, the better chance I have at finding something that works for me.

I know for starters my goal of working out in some form every day will become easier when the weather warms up and I’m able to go outside to do any kind of work out, but until then it’s going to continue to be a struggle on me. I’d almost be better off getting a gym membership, but I do not have the want to be going somewhere almost every day. I would rather be able to do it in the comfort of my home and on my own whacky time schedule. What would be really great to have would be a treadmill, but…unfortunately I don’t have that. Yet.

So, yeah, so far 2017 has pretty much tanked, but it’s starting to look up a little bit again.

After hitting rock bottom at the end of the week (part of the reason there was never a Friday blog post) I’m beginning to claw my way back out of the darkness. Things have been worked out and a shred of motivation is starting to return. Yesterday I managed to straighten up my room and get caught up on a lot of things. Today I kept that momentum rolling and got the Sunday Snippet blog hop out of the way and continued catching up to the things I ended up neglecting last week.

It’s not much yet, but it’s a start. There’s only two things I need to finish to be back to where I had wished to be.

Okay, wait, maybe three.

I need to get at least two Sunday Snippet posts scheduled for the rest of the month since my next two weeks after this one will be nightmares with inventory. (I might as well do all three for the rest of January.) I need to finish writing out my goals in my secondary planner and update that for this week. And lastly I need to finish outlining Clockwork Heart so I can hit writing hard on it.

The first two are easy enough to finish, it is the outlining that may take a bit of work.

But wait!

In all the darkness that was the first week of January for me, I did manage to have a brief spot of light Wednesday night!

With a couple of friends we revamped our version of NaNoWriMo without the NaNo and had our first virtual sit-in writing session. And do you know what I used that writing time for?

Yep, you guessed it! (I think.) I used that time to begin the outlining for Clockwork Heart and so far it’s coming along nicely.

Normally I don’t outline very far or at all, but since this is a short story and because I have a deadline and word limit on it, I decided I needed to do some sort of planning so I would  both be finished on time and remain within the word limit allowed. If I just let myself run with this one I might have ended up rambling on for too long, or I would end up leaving myself way too many notes that would require way too much editing. Keeping this story below 20k might be a challenge even with my outlining, however.

We’ll see how it goes though.

I’m about half way done with the outlining and I plan to do some more work on it tonight. Last night as I finally laid down for bed my brain became a live wire and start rapid firing answers to questions I had for the story and a lot more. Needless to say I was up and down hurriedly grabbing my phone to jot things down before I could forget for a good fifteen minutes or so.

Speaking of outlining and planning, earlier last night my brain decided to spring another plot bunny on me out of nowhere. I was putting away decorations from Samhain finally — I know, way overdue on that one, blame the holiday season in retail — and I suddenly had the thought “what if Halloween decorations came alive for one night out of the year?” Then…

BAM!

Suddenly this new, shiny, little black plot bunny was hopping around my head, cackling away madly. At that point I could do nothing but sit down on my bed and follow the little bastard around my head until I found out where the idea was leading me, as well as swearing at it and banging my head off the bedpost because I didn’t need the little sucker. You can bet your arse I wrote down the idea though and have filed it away for my next Halloween short story.

It’s quite amazing where ideas can come from when you think about it. I mean, all I was doing was putting away decorations and staring at a black, glittery plastic spider! But alas, that’s all it takes for an author it seems.

I’m thinking perhaps once I get Clockwork Heart finished and submitted, and I finish writing Fated to Darkness, if I have words left to be written in April’s Camp NaNo I’ll work on the Halloween story because, for a reason I still have yet to determine, it’s nagging at me to be another VTP entry just like Embermyst, and Clockwork Heart.

Really, brain? You do realize I have a novel, a series I’m trying to work on and finish, right?

*Sighs*

It doesn’t listen to me, just like my characters don’t listen to me. Although, the new addition of plot bunnies and ideas reminds me of something I saw on Facebook yesterday that I’m not even going to try to lie my way out of. It went something like this…

Here’s my question to that though: Do fictional friends count? Like, the ones in our stories? If so then I might be able to dispute this one with a straight face. LOL. Ah, oh well, we all know I’m an introvert anyways. I guess I better just head back to the drafting board and create some new characters to go along with those new ideas.