Operation Achieve Anything: Day Eighty-Five, Dateline 3-26-2018
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“Learning to deal with setbacks, and maintaining the persistence and optimism necessary for childhood’s long road to mastery are the real foundations of lasting self-esteem. ”
Good morning Crickets. How are things going for you on this Monday morning, better known as day number eighty-five of Operation Achieve Anything? I’m excited because the time has finally come for me to take a few days off to head up and stay at my older sister’s house for the closest thing I’ve had to a vacation in quite a while.
Yeah, I’ve gone easy over the past couple of weekends from the visit being postponed but it’s not the time away from work that I’m excited about. In fact, I’ll still be putting in a couple hours' worth of writing each day in order to keep the blog seeming seamless. I’m more excited to get a break from my surroundings while spending a few nights away from the people that I see every day. Not that I really need a break from anyone at this point but it is nice to mix things up from time to time.
Alright, now I’m going to use the above reference to how well I’m currently interacting with other to crowbar in a transition to start talking about yesterday’s assignment that focused on accepting your own responsibilities. This assignment might be the most related to achieving the goal that I set for the end of the year that this Achieve Anything… book has yet to have because it wants me to list things that I’ve been holding off on starting while I wait for someone else to get involved and then come up with options to resolve this.
Based on the lesson alone, I could make this list about anything like cleaning room where the option to resolve this could be to either stop slacking and just clean, learn to live with the mess, or work harder to find a job that would afford me a maid to take care of the problem for me. In this example, I’m still able to count on the help of others as long as the plan is feasible and realistic. Hiring a maid could be an achievable goal over just wishing the mess never existed in the first place or that it would somehow just magically be taken care of.
This blog, in general, is actually my attempt to take matters into my own hand, considering that I’m dyslexic, which led me to pay very little attention in English classes while I was in high school and my writing struggles to this day because of this ignored issue. This is why my main focus was writing scripts in the first place. I always figured that a screenplay would only be read by the cast and the crew so if I could just write a good story everyone would then ignore the typos and grammatical errors since they wouldn’t be seen on the screen.
I wanted others to take care of the mess of a situation I got myself into without actually having to put in the extra work to learn how to write correctly. That’s not to say that I wasn’t trying but the fact that a screenplay is more of a blueprint than a document that’s meant to be read made it easier for me to justify missed mistakes. Though I’m sure I still miss many mistakes, since switching to blogging as an area of interest, I’ve been much more focused on my choice of words and am finally starting to see some major improvements.
I still need an editor though. I’d say that this need for a second set of eyes might be the biggest hurdle between where I am now and where I want to be. This is a tough one because there is no working around the fact that I need someone else in order to get this to work and can’t simply do it myself but I do need to figure out how to reach out for this help.
I’ve been tempted to throw out an ad on Craigslist to see if there are any volunteers but I used to use Craigslist all the time when working in film and it always felt like a gamble that I’m not all that ready for right now. There’s also been a few time that I’ve contemplated turning to dating site since I would prefer a female editor to help make sure my female characters are well represented but I’m afraid that would just come across as some creepy move to get into someone’s pants. The true solution would be to focus on getting a better job in order to just hire the help that I need but that’s easier said than done.
What I really wish is that there was some reader out there who was intrigued by my work that would just email me and volunteer. This is why I include a link to my first attempt at a book that I plan to self-publish as soon as I get it to a publishable stage but no one seems to notice. I’m not all that surprised because I do absolutely nothing to promote this site other than sharing links to my posts on social media, so maybe marketing myself might be a better place to start.
At this point, I was just supposed to come up with a plan, so as for now, I’m considering yesterday’s assignment to be done, which means it’s now time to delve into today’s task at hand. Today’s assignment plays into my favorite quote of all times, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm,” since the assignment is to practice persistence and optimism while acknowledging there will be many ups and downs.
As someone who has been a prolific writer for over twenty years without a lick of success, I’d like to think I know about persistence and the ups and downs with fleeting moments of optimism but you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to see how I fulfill the task at hand. Until then, it’s now that time for my signature sign off, so with that I’ll say, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects!!!
Talk to you soon.
Sincerely,
The Wicker Breaker
P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.
