Planning

I am sort of a tea addict. I structure my day by cups of tea.

-S.T. Joshi

Include joy

when making plans

big enough to shift worlds.

Or risk

building a windowless castle

whose stones keep out the air.

Song Choice: Running Down a Dream by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Notes from the Real World: Ah, the day after Christmas, when my thoughts turn to… decorating! Decorating a fresh new planner that is. For the last few years, I’ve been trying to be consistent with keeping up some sort of planning system. I think I’ve finally found one that I love (thank you BenebellWen for creating a kick-ass planner for the metaphysically minded, even if you did take out the “Books Read” page on this year’s model). Though it took watching a planning video by Vlogger Jessi Huntenberg to really crystalize what it was I’ve been after by keeping up this practice.

At its worst, a planner is a glorified to-do list (a to-do list with lots of washi tape, stickers, and gel pen doodles in my case). And that’s not a terrible thing, because it’s harder to lose a planner than a list scribbled on the back of some junk mail (my favored organizational system in my 20’s). But it’s kind of a waste of money if that’s all it is.

It’s a place you thoughtfully figure out what it is that’s really important to you, so you can structure your actions to support that. It’s not just for keeping track of how busy you can be, but for noticing the natural way your days (weeks, months) flow and respecting your limits, especially when you actually can see when you peruse its pages that you are in danger of being overwhelmed or losing yourself in activities that don’t support the goals you set for yourself (you can in fact schedule your down time – and put all the cute stickers you want on the page to make a note of it). Because one of the worst feelings in the world, for me at least, is finding out you’ve been working like a fiend in a way that takes you farther from your goals rather than closer.

Moving ahead with my writing is clearly going to be one of my biggest goals of 2019. As I sit surrounded by ribbons and glitter pens the rest of this week, I’m going to be figuring out what S.M.A.R.T. steps I can take so when I’m sitting down again on Dec 26, 2019 I’ll know where my time went, how I used it to get better, where I missed the mark, and how to fix it.

Also I will be editing one page to make it a “Books Read” page and another for “Teas Tasted”. Because it’s important to make time for the sweet little pleasures. And also because I can. So there.

Because of course I chose the kitsune image for my planner cover.

By Rommy Cortez-Driks

The S Word

I pride myself on being a relatively intelligent person, but know I can be a stubborn one as well. For some some time now I've been thinking it might be best to go on a s-s- *cough* schedule. *shudders* (OK one of my friends has been strongly hinting it might be a help and I've finally decided to listen).

I don't know why the idea of a schedule (ugh!) makes me cringe so. It may be a tiny bit of defiance left over from my teen years where I insisted I was clever enough to get everything I needed to get done in time (usually at the last minute) and still get A's. My youthful arrogance got a hard smack of reality once I hit college. Oh I still did well, as long as I kept some sort of system to organize things.

So fast forward to today. I have so many things I want to learn and do in this lifetime and it has become sadly apparent I can't do them all. I need to prioritize (*pouts*) and organize (*cries*). I love writing, but I need to keep "office hours" that stay more or less steady and mesh with my other responsibilities (work, being a mom, being a wife). Organization sounds overly confining and limiting, especially when talking about artistic endeavors, but it also is a pretty good way to make sure I have time to enjoy doing what it is I like doing. 

I started feeling better about this whole organizing business when I put down my writing hours for both prose and poetry (as one of the newest Toads in the Imaginary Garden, I'm stoked to regularly participate there and over in Dash of Sunny as well). I scheduled in some review time for my other interests (shimmy drills, Japanese tea ceremony postures, and doodling all get their quick bursts of review time as a reward for other hard work). While a lot of my daily spiritual practices are reflexive at this point, I set aside some time for some extra development of knowledge bases I was interested in exploring. I even managed to formalize the way I do chores a bit better.

Yay, doodle time! 

So yes, I'm still a little leery about the whole schedule thing, but I've promised myself that I can be flexible and adjust things as time goes on. I also plan on giving myself goof off days once a month just to know there'll be one day I can bum around and do nothing if I want to. I'm cautiously optimistic this will all work out and that far from being rained upon, the passions in my life will march on in an orderly parade, rather than bang into each other like angry moshers. 

By Rommy Cortez-Driks

Song Choice: Don't Rain On My Parade

When Mayhem Attacks!

First, I make a list.

At least I would, if I remembered it.

Then I should gather all the necessary supplies,

which I would have accounted for on that list.

One

slow

breath

in.

A fine idea indeed.

Find

where

I

stand.
Standing means not crawling.

And then I look for the punch line.

By Rommy Cortez-Driks


Song Choice: It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by R.E.M.
This poem was created from a prompt offered by Magaly Guerrero for NaPoWriMo (Day 25: Anticipating Mayhem -  write a poem about how you ready yourself before facing known troubles, and what you do to cope once mayhem has done its thing).

I can haz writing plan! - An Insecure Writers' Support Group post

This is part of the Insecure Writers' Support Group posts

So I am going along, reading my blogs when I ran across this post by Magaly Guerrero (who in turn got it from from Ms. Misantropia who got it from Gypsy Spirit Rising) and I thought, "Lists...why is it always lists?"

Things like lists make me twitchy. I hate "haftas" and the thought of rigid scheduling makes me feel like this. But I know I've done great work when I have a solid framework to stay in. So I took this idea and applied it to the spiritual portion of my life, (I might blog about that later) and came up some specific tasks with timelines and everything - and it's been working beautifully. Yay! Go me!

And then Magaly and I started chatting about writing, and the process of writing, and I realized I could tweak this too. I already have my modest writing goal, but I could do with setting up a few more and I mentioned it to her.

Turns out that lady is full of ideas, all of them for more work! The great news is I have written enough small stories for a compilation or two and one of my short stories could be expanded to novel length. This doesn't mean I'm abandoning the novel I'm working on, but it does mean that I've given myself permission to work with other stories I've been feeling pretty good about (but thought needed something more). One the one hand, that seems like crazy talk. On the other hand, the idea of doing more stuff, playing with more characters - it's exciting! And it’s that bit of excitement, as mad as all the rest of it sounds, that I think will help me produce stuff I am satisfied with.

So Magaly, all this is your fault! Thanks amiga!

By Rommy Cortez-Driks

Yeah I know I used this song on an earlier post. Shush, I like it.