Picture Day Friday: First Edition of Emma by Jane Austen

John Murray’s three-volume first edition (1816) of Emma by Jane Austen.


[Image copyrighted by The Paris Review.]

Mission Statements, Life Lists, Goals, Schedules: define, design, discharge

Here are four of my posts that have proven to be among the most popular on this blog. They have all to do with architecting your life starting with small daily steps.

A Personal Mission Statement is a set of mottoes for your life that define the boundaries of who you are, what your deepest held beliefs are, how you interact with others, and what you think of yourself.

A Life List is a mondo-beyondo list of your life's dreams. There are no limits as to how many items there can be on this list. It's a personal list, so don't be shy of wishing for the most outrageous, the most selfish, the most greedy, the most anything. Every deeply held desire needs to be on this list. Don't compromise on your dreams.

Goals Making and Keeping and committing to bringing your resolutions to fruition. Goals give you something concrete to work towards and to measure progress against. Goals also give you a sense of accomplisment once you've reached them.

Scheduling Your Life is important, because if you don't label your time to dedicated actions, then that piece of time is either attached to another task or frittered away. The most basic rule of thumb when keeping to a schedule is: There is no making up lost time.

Picture Day Friday: Lindisfarne Gospels

From the British Library: "The Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the greatest treasures in the British Library’s collections, is now back on display in The Sir John Ritblat Gallery. This Latin Gospel-book is thought to be the work of one remarkably gifted scribe and artist, who created it around 700 on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, Northumbria. Its importance lies not only in the beauty of its carpet-pages and its miniatures of the four Evangelists, but also in the tenth-century gloss of its text that is the earliest example of the Gospels in the English language."

Resolute About Resolving Your Resolutions

Are you resolute about resolving your new year's resolutions this year? Here are some tips to help you on your way that have helped me tremendously. This blog is a repeat from last January.

Don't make generalized resolutions, such as "Be Happy." Instead make specific, measurable ones, such as "Do a yoga retreat in Hawaii over the summer"—you can measure whether you achieved this goal or not and how you felt about it.

By all means, make smaller sub-goals with deadlines that will keep the bigger goal on track to being finished.

Work on only one habit at a time. Say, in January, you'll work on X and on Y in February.

Start with the smallest, easiest habit first. And do it just for a few minutes once a day. Feeling a sense of accomplishment from the very start is what keeps the habit of habit-forming (heh!) going.

And the first step in starting a habit is to simply start. Inertia, procrastination, a feeling of being overwhelmed can all lead to a tendency to want to only imagine you having the habit, but afraid to start the work in forming the habit. So, just start!

Write it down. Well, the mind's not good about keeping everything in the foreground. Old things often get pushed into the background, even though when the thoughts first came in, they were deemed high priority. We forget; we fall into old habits by, well, habit; new issues crop up that require our immediate attention; we're tired so we say we'll do it tomorrow; etc.

Accountability is the sticky glue that binds us to our resolutions on paper. If you have to report in to a friend or a group of like-minded individual or even to your online journal, it serves as a reasonably pressured deadline that has to be achieved.

Don't have only negative or "you-must"s resolutions. Have fun ones as well, such as the yoga retreat mentioned above. If you plan only drudgery for the year, then it's guaranteed that your list of resolutions will have nary a checkmark. This is the main reason, I call them goals, not resolutions.

And the complementary one to the above is that you should feel free to abandon a resolution part-way through or even before beginning, if you feel that it's something that's never going to happen no matter how many years it shows up on your list. For me, that would mean giving up on reading Tolstoy's War and Peace in this life at least.

Revisit your list constantly to revise, add to, or subtract from the litany. It keeps the energy alive about what needs to be achieved next and it keeps the list fresh and current.

My Reading Goals & Blogging Perspective

I'm not a blogger. That is, I'm not a book blogger by the commonly-held definition of book bloggers. I don't comment on the publishing industry and trends, nor do I review books or critique reader perspectives and trends. My blogging is eclectic: books mais oui, but also history, humor, craft, conferences, the writing life, and so on. I'm a reader most certainly, but I'm also an aspiring writer, an editor, and a proofreader. So when I do comment on books online, I usually do so rarely and I go for my gut reactions as opposed to a detailed analysis.

However last year, I commented on fourteen books since I participated in Wendy Crutcher's TBR Reading Challenge and also talked about book gifts by Connie Brockway and Joanna Bourne. My blogging became more readerly.

When I first joined Romancelandia in 2006, it was as a reader. I joined Squawk Radio, a group blog by close writer friends; the Risky Regencies, a historical writers' blog; and the Word Wenches, another historical writers' blog. I became a Bluestocking at Candice Hern's message board and a Bon-Bon at Eloiosa James's (later Eloisa James's and Julia Quinn's) message board. I launched this blog, Cogitations & Meditations, that same year. I later became part of the Romance Novel TV community and blogged for them.

As I immersed myself in the community of other aspiring writers, published writers, and famous writers and their generous advising, I became entranced with the idea of becoming a romance writer myself. I was trained for other types of writing, editing, and proofreading, but I had never before thought to combine my reading love with my writing love. It took courage to admit to reading, much less writing, romance. My first step in this direction was to attend the Romance Writers of America annual conference. My blogging reflected my interests, veering away from reading to writerly interests.

And that's where my blogging stayed until last year.

Last year, many of my new Twitter friendships were readers. Suddenly I was involved in the reading side of Romancelandia. I became involved in kerfuffles, read reader blogs, and discussed books on blogs and on Twitter. Where kerfuffles were concerned, I quickly learned to step smartly over rabbit holes to avoid the stress of them all. However, I was totally seduced by book discussions with really smart bookish people.

So while I still wear all the other hats (writer, editor, proofreader), I'm pleased that my reader hat has come of age and is thriving.

Naturally, I now have reading goals.

1. More non-romance
2. More literary fiction
3. More nonfiction
4. More children's fiction AKA my daughter's recommendations
5. More poetry
6. More diversity
7. Wendy's TBR reading challenge

I achieved some of these goals last year. My detailed reading analysis post coming in February will show some trends as compared with previous years. However, I want the trends to go up exponentially this year. I already have a giant list of books I want to read this year, and it is most likely going to take me all the way through December.

I made a good start on #6 with Flower in the Desert by Lavendar Parker, thanks to tweets by Sonomalass, Liz, Ridley, and Meoskop. It was a complete departure for me—American contemporary romance featuring an African American heroine and a part Native American hero—and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I've made a start on #3 and #7 with a very interesting little book on vignettes of life in a minority community in India: The Travelling Parsi by Kamal Sunavala.

I've made a start on #4 with another of my daughter's recommendations: The Alchemyst by Michael Scott.

I just finished re-reading Flowers From The Storm by Laura Kinsale—read it with Marijiana. Religion plays a large part in the book—but this is not an inspirational—and this to me falls in the #6 category.

I've made a start on #2 with North & South by Elizabeth Gaskell.

I have The Writer's Life by Julia Cameron waiting in the wings for #3.

So far, 2015's off to a good reading start. And my reading list for the year is healthy (perhaps a tad overweight), but at least, it's robust.

A New Beginning...