Goals for September

It's September already. I'm so glad to be nearing the end of summer here in North Carolina and entering the season of the spooky. Autumn is my favorite! I need to start getting my Halloween costumes together...
Just as in August, I'm going to list my goals for September. I will try my best to actually stick to them this time. Only time will tell if I'll be successful!

Finish the second draft of the novel. I just finished my second draft of Chapter Nine, so I have six chapters left to edit. They get increasingly shorter as the end of the book approaches, so I don't think this will be too difficult.

Read a novel about vampires and a novel about something else. Next in my stack of vampire books is Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist; it comes highly recommended and I'm excited about it. My husband also wants me to read The Bachman Books by Stephen King. So, that's currently my plan. Next in my tour of fine vampire literature I think I might try to read some Anne Rice, just because. We will cover that in October.

Get back in the habit of doing morning pages. Morning pages are a tool for developing creativity described in The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I was doing morning pages for bellydance for a while last year, but abandoned the practice due to lack of gumption and/or sticktuitiveness (a quality the Japanese refer to as ganbaru). I need to get my ganbaru back, and I hope this will help. I have found that training ganbaru is like training a muscle: it gets easier when you do it more and harder when you slack. Knowing this doesn't make it any easier to work at it, however, especially when I'm so out of practice.

Work hard on choreography at least 3x a week for at least 2 hours at a time. I have shows I need to prepare for and I am not a fan of sucking. That means choreography and choreo practice are necessary. I hate choreography; I love choreography practice. Whatever. I have to do both regardless of my feelings or preferences.

Write a damn pitch for the book. I could whine about how I don't want to, but instead I should channel all of that energy into making it happen. But... uuuughhhh I don't want to... --SARA! NO!

Keep blogging regularly. I get a pass for this last week and a half because I was busy preparing for and then hosting an AWESOME workshop weekend with Mira Betz, who is basically my bellydance spiritual guru at this point. Is that creepy? Perhaps. Do I care? Not even a little.

Those are good goals. If I can get that much done, I'll be happy with myself. I'm more employed now than I was this summer, so I don't have quite as much time to stare at my words in my glowing rectangles. Nothing a few responsible habits and time management strategies won't fix. Ah, semiadulthood.