progress report

Doing What I Love Takes the Sting Out

Lynette M Burrows

Doing what I love takes the sting out. Much of it anyway. Not all. The death of my husband overwhelmed me and impacted what I have accomplished so far this year. It’s been messy. I’ve not met many of my intentions. But tracking what I have accomplished and reporting on it here reminds me of what I have accomplished. Takes the focus off what I haven’t done. Do what you love, and do it well – that’s much more meaningful than any metric. Kevin Systrom Intentions Instead of goals or resolutions, I use intentions. You can miss a goal. You probably break most resolutions. But an intention is a focus. When life impedes your plan, take care of that event or disturbance, intending to return to your primary plan. Every morning begins with a renewed intention. Making I didn’t finish the revision on my work-in-progress as soon as I had hoped. But I finished the first set of revisions on If I Should Die. The book is out to my Beta Readers.  Beta readers are voluntary. They understand that this is not a polished draft. They comb the manuscript for inconsistencies, slow pacing, or other story problems. I usually give […]

Coming Out of the Storm

Lynette M Burrows

It’s the end of the month and time for me to come clean with how productive (or not) I’ve been. Fairly recently I had a friend compliment me on this regular feature of my blog. She said it was a courageous way of making myself accountable. I suppose it seems courageous to some. It’s definitely a way to keep myself on track, but I hope readers enjoy the glimpse into the messy life of a creative too. A creative’s progress on any project will be messy, like a storm is messy. Storms stir up all kinds of good and bad stuff and strew things randomly across streets and yards. Creativity is like that. Sometimes it’s a raging storm. Sometimes it’s deadly quiet, like the eye of a hurricane. Even before my husband died, sometimes finishing a project felt like coming out of the storm. And once the storm is over, you won’t remember you how made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the […]

A Wild and Woolly Third Quarter

Lynette M Burrows

It’s been a wild and woolly third quarter. Emotionally and professionally, life challenged me. It was also a three-month period of growth and of promise for the future. If you’re a long time reader of this blog you know that I set Intentions not goals (though that’s mostly semantics). You’ll also recall that I divide my things to do into four buckets: Making, Managing, Marketing, and Home. And I analyze each month and quarter in terms of hits and misses. Making In the making or creating bucket, I edited thirty-two chapters of If I Should Die. That includes a baker’s dozen NEW chapters. I made another trip to Subtropolis to refresh sensory details and learned that I’d mistakenly put a does-not-exist cool detail into the manuscript. Then I had to figure out how to take that cool detail out and keep the story intact. And I did. *Smile* September was the first month I posted three times a week in the past eight months. But my blog posts received a lot of attention and some comments from you all. Your comments are the best part of blogging. Managing The managing bucket has been more difficult for me to accomplish during this time. […]