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Like my art fridge magnets? Find a typo in my post and let me know, and I'll post one of these to you. :-). This one is of snow in Venice.
The title of my novel will remain a secret until I am ready to publish so I will simply call my first novel, “Secret”, to give it a name, to talk about it here..

Tonight I have spent 4.5 hours in preparation time on my novel, “Secret”..

I have not written a word of my novel, I do not intend to write the novel until November,

Tonight I completed the time management planning to write the novel and allocated other aspects of my life into a secondary position in my life to give the novel, a primary focus

The division of Time I have allocated to each stage.

I have generously allowed myself 21 hours a week to work on the novel.

1/ Preparation and research - 3 months, Begun.

2/ 1 month to write, the novel, in November.

3/ 5 months to get it properly, edited and re written to a finished stage.

Total of 9 months, lol, ‘that would be right, that is how long it takes to produce a child’.

 

·        What have I achieved tonight, doing the past midnight oil fat burner?

Time Management Plan to Gain a 21 Hour Novel writing working week.

1/I have allocated 3 hours x 7 days a week to my novel writing project, giving me a 21 hour novel writing week. This should be more than adequate to do a good job.  2/ I will continue to blog and I will do EBooks and art prints for sale from my blogs also free form link work and advertising as I will need to save my money in case I self publish a book

3/ I will discontinue my gym and focus on ¾ of an hour of cardio exercise and ¾ of an hour of strength training exercises on alternate days, from ‘home’ as this will save me time. I will not be active in the 12wbt forums as I need to find additional time I have to cut back on some actions. Similarly, I may move entirely into my Kathy Shell page on facebook to chat, my site I publish my blogs to, purely due to needing to find this extra 3 hours a day.

4/ As my time for exercising will be reduced I will need to be more focused on eating clean.

5/ I will be packing my paints away, for some time. A novel will be my major work of art for the year, I have achieved painting I am ready for new achievements.

6/I may learn how to download audio books to an IPod or get a portable CD player to listen to audio books while exercising fulfilling some additional exercise benefit and learning more  about the craft of novel writing by listening to the work of good authors.

7/ After an initial stop start attept to begin the novel preparation work, earlier in the night I realized that this work will have to happen after reg retires for the night. 

8/I discovered as I researched my novel, I found great ideas for blogs so I actually deviated and did some blog topics while they were flowing off my fingers into print easily,  that 'works for me', in the same way as sharing how I write this novel, can be a useful blog topic for those interested.

Happy with the time management plan above and placing it into action immediately, I am ready to write the

Plot Chart

 I am ready to begin to write the rough plot chart for the novel, plan where it will start and how it will end and prepare my character descriptions.

 
 
 
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Are your art activities sedentary?

Do not Allow A Sedentary Job to Kill You.

Art does not have to be sedentary.  You can have a balanced, healthy, slim and creative life. I intend to make this creative and fit, lifestyle, my future. I want to see other creative people maintain their health so they can do their best creative work well into their advanced years.

People who sit at a desk for six hours a day are almost twice as likely to be overweight. I would spend six hours a day in sedentary creative work and know the need to ensure that this does not cause health problems and obesity.

I m learning to balance, my love of a creative sedentary job,(my creative skills of writing and painting), with fitness training.

First, I had to decrease the amount of time I spent in my sedentary work as my fitness, was gained slowly. Initially by gentle movement in water, not a huge calorie burner, so I needed to do a lot of that exercise to make any appreciable difference in my energy expenditure. This meant a lot less time available for sedentary creativity.

Then I moved on to walking, again, from walking to weight work outs, then full body work outs as I gained strength and flexibility and now all of a sudden I find I can jog.  This is the breakthrough I need as I can now allocate an hour a day to a huge calorie burn aerobic exercise session. I combine this with healthy portion controlled eating and offset some of the lowered metabolism my creative, sedentary lifestyle had been doing to me.  It took me three years and almost three months to increase my fitness to this level where I know I can return to a lot of the sedentary lifestyle of the writer and painter, and be able to balance it with enough aerobic exercise that I will not find myself gaining weight during an intense painting or writing session again. 

All I need to do is to remember to take care of myself physically and not just my inner passion for my art.

Small but important ways I can nurture the physical me is in taking time to use  night creams, see a hair stylist a little more often, make sure I have good quality runners and clothes suitable for jogging.

Here is a great article in Sparkpeople, with tips to avoid allowing a sedentary job to cause you to gain weight.

 
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Blogger-Jogger; Achieving the balance.
 
 
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I worked hard yesterday afternoon and set up my home gallery and then I worked in my writer’s studio until 2am. 
I woke refreshed at 6am so I got up and began work again, thinking at the same time how I was doing what I have warned against in previous posts, 'getting on a creative high', and making a note that I must rest later today once I've completed my current creative writing assignment.

It is rare for me to be up before dawn and see the sun rise and it is most enjoyable, I think I should make it a permanent part of my life.  But can I?

I have been watching the mist rise over the oat field and the sun coming up and highlighting the creamy yellow green heads against the deeper green base, it seems only a week ago that they were just a short grass crop.  Reg and I fantasise as we always do when gazing out over a panorama, that this is all our land, our wealth, lol, well it is, we get to see the beauty of it and have none of the responsibility or work of planting maintenance harvest and sale of the crop, how much greater wealth is there that that?

It is chilly but beautiful. I think I could enjoy working in the morning peace at 'this time of day' but I would have to get my body’s rhythms set to get to bed by 10pm, unheard of for me.  At 63, can I make this change?

It is 7.15 am now and Reg has joined me. He is in his window seat armchair with is breakfast and the morning sun is streaming through our window, removing the crisp, chill in the air.  It is going to be a beautiful day here in Northern Victoria, and I am so pleased I did not miss a moment of its daylight beauty. :-)
 
 
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Reviewing my goals to becoming a better blogger.
Reviewing my action plans to share my creative skills though this blog.
Reviewing my action plan and ‘to do list’, to become a better blogger.

My work course on how to become a better blogger in 31 days has been met with some frustration as my server weebly was hit by a death ping attack and they were several days working around the clock bringing in experts and purchasing new servers, trying to overcome a denial of service attack.  Eventually they were forced to go to a great deal of expense providing a more powerful new server to counter this problem.  This threw me out of my late night work on the web routine and I began sitting inactively at the computer during what was previously, may be active afternoons.  Here i am today, mid afternoon and still at my computer.  How quickly do we slip back into non constructive bad habits?  What’s the point of trying to write a creative lifestyle blog, (this one), and two active lifestyle blogs, and becoming a sloth?

The work load to do my assignments in the 31 days to becoming a better blogger, has escalated and I find myself still striving to complete some of the preliminary work that is to get my own domain, for this blog pointing to the correct location and striving to get a google ranking for my new owned domain name artslim.org.   In the mean while I struggle to find time to exercise and keep up with my house work and I think it’s time to remind myself not to become obsessed in my creative work(in this instance, learning to have better blogs), to the extent where I fall back into a pattern of self physical neglect, and become sedentary again.    Keeping myself ‘in check’, staying motivated to self care as well as trying to help influence and motivate others not to make the same, becoming too inactive, mistakes I made in the past, due to a creative life, is why I started my http://www.artslim.org  blog.

So ‘I am here’, I’m just taking a step back from writing actual blog content while I learn more about how to improve how I do this and keep my time management principles  and slimming goals in mind.

A lot of the work I am doing at the moment is a once off effort that will be well rewarded in the future.  Like returning to studies, it’s worthwhile as long as I keep aware of maintaining a balanced lifestyle and make myself a definite, ‘clock on and off’ time.

I have completed 4 hours in studying how to be a better blogger so far today.  4 hours is the total time frame a day x 6 days a week,  I have set up in my action plan to have better blogs. As my set up phase, this initial 31 days is a 1/ priority of importance and urgency for me, I am prepared to double my allocated time now, and go back on line from 8pm till 12mn in the evening during the month of October, and this will then allow me two days a week off from writing for the remainder of the year which will bring me back to this job that I love, refreshed and eager to write.

Now having planned why I believe it will be OK to increase my computer study time and how I will credit myself with this extra time spent and made allowanced for how I will still fit in my physical activity and the bare bones of scaled back home maintenance, I’m happy with a new action plan with a definite upper cap, on how long a day I will allow myself to be sedentary, and a definite slotted in bed time.

Tips for creative people:-

*Make definite working hours, self employed creative work is never finished, you need to know in advance, when you intend to knock f, then ‘do it’.

*Decide in advance when you will go to bed and get up.  Self employed creative people can work around the clock on an adrenaline high, Bi Polar disorder is common amongst creative people and even can be mimicked in behaviour.  The highs associated with Bipolar can even be managed by pre setting obsessive tendency restraints in place.  If you don’t have ‘a boss’, when you are not ‘on a creative high’, set yourself restraints you believe will be in the interest of your own, physical and emotional health, while still allowing yourself to be highly creative.  Then when you are ‘on a creative high’, keep that action plan you have made, where you can see it, and ‘stick to it’.

Note:-  I come from a family of eccentric, highly creative people, believe me I know what I’m talking about here, obsessive creativity out of control, can be very self and family destructive, make reasonable limits and you will live longer, create more and enjoy the fruits of loving supporting relationships. It is worth curbing the extremes of our creative desires and your creations will not suffer, if you live a decade longer by caring for yourself, you will get more work completed than if you never clock off for proper meals, exercise, balanced lifestyle or sleep.

LOL, spoken by one who had a stroke at 32 because I thought I could live on 5 hours sleep a night, work late at night then hike up a mountain to look at the view, with a 7 year old child on my back.  Believe me; I know about excessive, creative, enthusiastic, self destructive behaviour.  Please LOVE YOURSELF MORE than your creations, and hold it in check with pre planning. J.