Sneak Up On Your Dreams

I have spent a great deal of time designing my life so it’s exactly how I want it, with the right balance of work, family and leisure time, but now the economic situation is making me nervous.  I wonder if I should be worrying more about money. I wonder if I should be earning more money for when bumps in the economy occur like they have now.  I’m worried that I’ll have to change my plans.

There’s no way that I could have predicted a downturn like this one. In some ways, I guess, this is the “emergency” that I’ve been planning for.  I learned that I’m supposed to have an emergency fund and be saving for retirement and to keep my debt as low as possible. I’ve done all of that. I wish I had more. I wish I had more in my emergency fund and had even less debt, but I’m in pretty good shape.  Now the problem is to not freak out and remember that my goals are still the same, I just need to keep working on things slowly.

These types of crises slow things down. What we thought we could achieve in just a couple of years will probably take longer.  I sometimes feel like there’s something wrong with me if I change my timelines.  Sometimes I have to remember that I had no control over this economic downturn and I need to try to roll with the punches.

The trick now is to breathe, make relatively safe decisions and continue doing whatever is needed to advance goals. When you get tense about world events, go back to my concept of “creative living.  Think of creative ways to manage during these hard times.

I’ve already worked on a list of what luxuries I can do without if I start earning less money.  I realize, though, no matter what, my plans probably need to change somewhat.  Remember that if there is a big problem, if you lose a job or have other difficulties, keep your eye on your goals, but revise the steps you need to take to achieve them.  Things may take longer or you may take a different path.  Doing these things is frustrating and can make us feel beaten, but try to remember to just recalculate what you need to get where you’re going, while taking into account the new circumstances in your life.

Yesterday I finished writing the rough draft of my novel. It’s a little over 65 thousand words and is fourteen chapters long. I’ve had some ideas for this novel on my mind for well over a year, but hadn’t done anything with it even though I’ve been able to write full time since July. The structure of NaNoWriMo was what was needed. These are the lessons I’ve learned from taking on this project and how I hope to structure future projects.

Plan: I first looked up the NaNoWriMo site in the middle of October. I can’t remember exactly where I had heard about it, but I googled it and found it and checked out the rules. It said that I couldn’t write any of the novel before November started, but I could outline to my heart’s content. I always prefer to have a guide for my writing so I started looking for methods of outlining and found one that worked for me. I outlined every part of every scene for the first 9 chapters or so. After that I wasn’t sure where my novel was going to go so I just outlined the basic idea of what I thought would go in the chapter. This worked great. For the first nine chapters I never had to spend too much time thinking about what to write as I could just refer to my outline. After that. I had to spend a day outlining the rest of the chapters, which was much easier once I knew what the characters were up to. Because I had an outline I rarely faced a blank page with few ideas. Lesson: Every time you have a large project to do, take the extra time to map it out and break it into pieces that doesn’t require too much thinking. That way when you get stuck you’ll have your very own cheat sheet to refer to.

Pressure yourself: In the beginning I was high with writing. I wrote long scenes with little effort. I was giddy and wanted to write every day. That didn’t last long. Near the end of the second week I didn’t want to even open Microsoft Word. The weight of my commitment to finishing an entire rough draft of a novel in just 30 days seemed too heavy. I wanted out. After that initial honeymoon there were days that I didn’t write, but there were far more days that I didn’t want to write, but I did anyway because I knew I had the deadline. I don’t think I would have pressured myself if I didn’t have that deadline of getting the whole thing done in November. I would rationalize to myself that I just needed to do a couple thousand words to help move me along so that I’d have less to do in the end. There were some days that I was dead set against writing and had to drag myself to start, but once I’d started I finished a few thousand words. Lesson: Whine and complain all you want, but make a deadline and stick to it whether you want to do it or not. On the worst days do less than you’d like, but at least do some.

Wonder in Amazement: My last few chapters flew by. I could see the end so I wrote a chapter a day for a few days. I had only a couple of scenes left at the end and I just didn’t want to write them. I don’t know if I was actually upset about finishing or I was just too tired of writing. I set up a time in my schedule and went to a local coffee shop and finished them. I was then in a kind of shock that I had actually done exactly what I said I was going to do even though it sucked. The non-sucky part is that I know have a halfway decent rough draft of a novel. I’m going to leave it for a month then give myself the month of January to edit the whole thing. Lesson: Working, even if by self-force, little by little on a project will get you to the end. Sit in amazement at your ability to do something that previously seemed impossible.