50 Things

So there's a gap in my life right now:

For the first time in four years, since having a baby and not needing to be obsessed with fertility/clomid/shots/ovulation/peeing on sticks, I have a lot of energy and a lot of creative thoughts, and, more than anything, I have the drive to actually complete my creative ideas and take these things that I've been thinking about for years to the next level.

And...

My time is not my own.  I can sit down to a blank page and five minutes later there is crying, and someone is teething and needs to be comforted, or hungry and needs to be fed.

So here I am, with all this energy and ideas, and a complete inability to plan things out.  For a while I said I was going to get up at 6 every day to do my creative projects.  Then Hannah started sleeping like crap, and then she started waking up at 6, too, and really there's a limit to what I can do with this level of sleep deprivation.

When I was in New Zealand I reconnected with a very dear friend of mine who has her own business doing creative work.  I knew her when I lived in London; in fact, I was her intern.  She's about 10 years older than me, and we are ridiculously similar.  We both self sabotage the crap out of ourselves, and we also have grand ambitions that we'll probably never be able to meet.

I spent a lot of time with her, hashing out ideas for the businesses I want to run, the books I want to write, etc.

We came up with an idea.  The 50 Things idea.  It's based on the thought that if you do something every day on your creative idea, even if it's just five minutes, you can accomplish a huge amount.  If you do one Thing over 50 days, you have 50 Things.  If you do one Thing every day for a year, you have 365 Things.  A year seemed a little daunting to get started, so we decided 50 days was doable, and then we could reconsider.

I'm picking two areas to work on (ie two Things a day).  One is creative, one is admin.  I need to get rid of some cats.  One of the major holdups to us moving back to Pennsylvania is the amount of cats we have.  If I did one Thing a day on the cats, for 50 days, I'm pretty certain we'd have found a home for at least a few of them (anybody want a cat?).  The creative area is going to be my book.  I have a NaNoWriMo book I've been working on for years.  I want to complete it.  I'm not sure whether I'm going to publish it on Smashwords or not - I'm not sure that it's quite to the level I'd like it to be.  But I need to finish it, because it's lingering with me.  Every new thing I start to write has the story woven in somehow.  So I need to complete it so I can start new things.

Our 50 Things start on May 10.  

In the meantime, I'm taking a lot of inspiration from this Ira Glass quote on the creative process.