(Un)Productivity

Today marks the 142nd day of my life outside of my last job. I quit working a 9-5 (or rather 8-late) job in mid October and decided to dedicate a full year of my life to developing my writing for children and getting at least well on the road to being a published author. So far, so not happening! Okay, granted I subtract 14 days or so for re-adjusting to life without working my butt off to fulfill someone else's dream and with minimal compensation or equitable appreciation. And granted there are those interruptions called daily life with children, spouses, friends, and telemarketers. And then there was that whole interruption of the holiday season and birthdays. And granted my father hasn't been in the best of health and my mom has been suffering there too and I was going into Vancouver and spending time with them that was not spent writing things down. I have no other excuses... oh wait... I have one more excuse: I've been doing a lot of drawing and doodling and sketching. Other than that, it might be that I'm not sure what direction I'm going in.

I went to the Vancouver Public Library on Feb 21 to attend a Q&A session with some local published authors. It was billed as "Everything You Need to Know About Getting Published" - after 2 hours, it occurred to me that I already knew most of what was being discussed through all the research and reading about this task that I'd done on my own over the past 142 days. I'm wondering why I haven't taken advantage of a couple of "headstarts" that God has blessed me with: my brother is friends with Randy Alcorn and with Allen Say. The former doesn't write children's books and the latter is an award-winning illustrator and author. But they are both published many times over. The other thing is that my sister and niece are both educators and have agreed to help me with the curriculum alignment aspect of one of my book ideas... But I'm still not there. I have revised the story about 6 times now and I'm still not happy. For crying out loud: it's not like it's Wuthering Heights! It's a PICTURE book.

So... what can I do to boost productivity? I've got to stop getting distracted (I think I discussed this before in my post on goal setting - SMART. Discipline... discipline... discipline.

Sigh... I think I need to go to sleep... I'm depressed now.