I’ve been with my wife Vickie for eleven years, married to her for eight of those. Yet I still have a hard time talking with her about what I’m doing.
Take the writing course I signed up for recently. Vickie found out about it not when I told her (I didn’t) but when I mentioned it on Facebook.
It’s like I feel as though I need backup before I tell my own freaking wife anything of real importance.
Why? I don’t know. No one is more in my corner than Vickie. I just… I suppose it’s because I have a hard time believing in myself that I have just as hard a time believing that anyone else could believe in me.
Because I’m not as much in my own corner as Vickie is.
That’s a mental state I really want to change.
And I think I’m making progress.
Tuesday afternoon, I found myself thinking about the things on my plate and the things I’d like to achieve. I decided I was going to set myself a deadline on each of the projects I wanted to actually get finished.
But this time, I was going to bloody well tell Vickie about them before I announced them anywhere else.
The Proclaimer: Sunshine on Gordonvale
After I cleared out my e-mail and my in-tray this evening, I turned to Vickie and in hammy voice made some proclamations.
Vickie declined to respond to each. A wise move; not only am I the Notorious G.U.N.N.A, but I also have a tendency to take any kind of criticism or suggestion as a sign that I have no idea what I’m doing and should quit while I’m behind.
(Another state of mind I want to move out of.)
So now that those pronouncements have received Vickie’s Seal of… er… Don’t Stop On My Account (I love you, darling), here is at least one of them (the rest I’m keeping between Vickie and I for now):
The Elizabeth Vaughan Novel-in-a-Year Challenge
GOAL: To complete, edit and and make ready for querying or self-publishing, a novel manuscript.
DEADLINE: September 16, 2013.
If you listen to the Paid to Play Podcast, you probably know that Elizabeth Vaughan expects me to have a novel finished by the time I interview her again, one year after I interviewed her.
I’ve gone with the date of the actual interview rather than the date I published it as a way of keeping myself honest; it also means that I’m exactly two months down the line already.
Now that I’ve got my goal and deadline, I face a strong temptation to Get Cracking!, do stuff in the hopes that it’ll all add up to a finished product at the end. But I think that impulse is what’s doomed my previous attempts to failure.
Instead I’m going to take a little time (maybe a month; now I have a deadline I know I don’t have lots to spare) and mull things over, figure out just why my previous attempts have ploughed nose first into the dirt and come up with other ideas to try this time.
There may be some mind-changing, but I reckon that the progress will still be forward, regardless!
I’ll post more on other projects soon – I’m saving them up for a couple of upcoming events!
Are you curious?
When have you struggled with sharing the important things in your life with the important people in your life?
I’ve read that a goal is a dream with a deadline. Tell me about your dreams. What deadlines have you set yourself for their achievement?
What dreams have you already achieved? How did a goal, a deadline, a plan or all of the above help you?
Featured image taken by Jade and sourced from MorgueFile.
Novel plan image sourced from the blog of Steve Ince.
