I am not prepared for it to be July. I mean, I know I’m never prepared for it to be the next month, but I only wrote 7200 words in June (taking two weeks off was…IDEK if it really rested me any, so…anyway…).
So this month is…book proposals and finishing a novella and…well. There are 2-3 book proposals to write, so honestly, if I get the novella and the proposals done that’ll be quite a lot of work. Especially if I do as well with the one as I’d like to.
On other fronts I have a series of…challenges? IDK. Projects? Both, tbh. Which I would like to try to accomplish over the next six months. I kind of want to do this “learn to draw in 100 hours” thing, because I genuinely found the entire video inspiring. I’m not starting at zero the way that guy was, but at least half of that project was learning fundamentals that I’ve never actually gotten good at, and I’d like to try. Of course, the fundamentals are the really boring part. :p
The hardest part of doing it, though, is REMEMBERING to do it. It’s one of those “I tend to remember at 10pm” sorts of things, and at that point I’m supposed to be trying to get ready for bed, not “I remembered at 5pm when the only thing stopping me from doing it is ennui.” So IDK how to get past that, particularly since I don’t want to clutter up my phone calendar with daily notifications of the same thing. But that’s probably not a problem to solve right now.
I also want to do this 60 days of walking program (which is, astonishingly, actually free: afaict everything on this site is, and I’m going to have to become a supporting member if I start using it regularly), which…I did the first one? Just 60 minutes of walking non-stop? That was harder and netted me fewer steps than I felt like it should have. I had a nice walk, though. I mean, I then sweated for like 14 hours, because my god I’m good at sweating, but. :)
And the last thing I want to do is practice Spanish, which it occurs to me is something that could possibly be done while walking. I’m vaguely contemplating the Udemy language course, so I’ll take a look at that later, when I’m not supposed to be writing. My husband suggested that my son (who is taking Spanish at school) might look into doing an immersive week course in Spain, so I’d like to get better (and challenge my son to improve) before doing that. :)
So yeah, those are like…the challenges I’d like to set for myself for the second half of the year. If I were to do all of them every day it would really only take a couple of hours of my time, and it would be a much better use of said time than doomscrolling. I HAVE been a lot better about that, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve read 60 books this year! But I’m still really noticing myself reloading and then at the same posts on bluesky for long periods of time, and I’m working on breaking away from that more.