I’m sure this will come to a total shock to everyone, but breaking the habits of a lifetime is a process that, apparently, takes a little while.
If you’ve read my earlier blog posts this month, you’ll know that I’ve been trying to be more organized and get myself into a routine. Well, results have been… mixed.
On the whole, good progress has been made and I’m happy about that, but I am by no means the entire way there yet.
With regards to my reading goal for the year, I’m sitting at two books ahead of schedule with a total of six books completed so far.
I am, for the most part, on top of the housework and am not being overwhelmed by a mountain of socks (or anything else).
I have re-joined Slimming World and lost a further four-and-a-half pounds this month.
I caught up on all my accounts and submitted my tax return which was quite a big task that had been weighing on me.
I haven’t been too bad about getting out for walks most days, even if it’s only to the local shop.
I have been sticking to a steady upload schedule for the Women Aloud NI YouTube channel and am on track to have the backlog of footage all online by our events in March. I have started planning the Women Aloud NI event I’m coordinating in March. Both these things remain to be finished.
I’ve been semi-successful in sticking to the general day-to-day routine I set for myself in that I am getting myself behind a desk and using the office for it’s intended purpose, but doing so ‘before noon’ each day as I had planned turned out to be a bit too much of a stretch. I still can’t really do mornings. I can barely do afternoons.
Being at my desk helps me to focus, but not always. The other day, I sat watching videos on my iPad as one I had edited exported on my laptop. That was fine but, when the time came for me to put the iPad down, I didn’t. I fell down a rabbit hole of the internet instead. I’m trying not to beat myself up too much about that, because some level of procrastination happens to everyone, but it is something I need to be careful doesn’t become a common occurrence.
Some writing, editing, and plotting has been done but not nearly as much as I would like. My hope is that I can get a bunch of other tasks out of the way tomorrow and find more time for my novel in February. Allons y!
I’ve come to the conclusion that, too often, the goals I set are unrealistic. I usually make a list of everything I want to do — everything I want to be — and that’s that, goals made. This year, however, I’ve been putting more thought into it. It’s why I’ve held off announcing my resolutions for the year before now, because I hadn’t made any firm decisions before now. I had my updated list of everything I wanted to do, same as always, but I wasn’t making a direct translation of it to my ‘to do’ list because some of what I want to do just isn’t in my power. Prime example: getting a literary agent. It’s something that I’ve been striving towards for a long time but it’s not something I can make happen completely under my own will. It’s in my power to make my novel the best it can be and it’s in my power to submit that novel to agents, but there’s absolutely no guarantee that an agent will take it. Great books get rejected every day. It’s not a failure to be one of them. Not when 
I like to wait until the very last week in December before sharing review posts like this because, if you’re not at the absolute end of the year, who knows what still might happen? Prime example: two days after Christmas last year, my husband and I acquired a dog. This was completely unplanned, to the degree that if you had asked us thirty minutes prior to it happening if we were getting another pet we would have looked at you funny and wondered where you got such an idea.
Last month, I wrote about how difficult we were finding things and I signed off 
If you’ve been on social media the past day or so, you may well have seen people complaining about changes to a platform called Tumblr. I, myself, was a site user and I myself have been 
For Culture Night Belfast this year, the theme was love. Women Aloud NI had two events in the programme. At the one I read at, each of the readers was given a letter and told to write a love letter to it. I got the letter L, and this is what I made of it:
Back in June, I posted a