With the new year ringing in, millions of people vow to turn their lives around and hold fervantly to their New Year's resolutions. People vow to stick to diets, develop better study habits, meet their one true love, save the world, quit smoking, and even get their Hogwarts letter in the mail before summer ends. True, some of these goals are attained in a year's time, but on the flip side of the coin, it's absolutely astonishing how many New Year's resolutions fail because either the goal holds too much impossibility or that the person making the resolution instantly forgets about his or her resolution a few weeks (or in some cases, a few days) after making it. Am I saying that New Year's resolutions are stupid and fruitless? Not at all. It's excellent to set goals so that we may constantly strive to achieve them. I'm saying, think carefully about your New Year's resolution and prepare to follow through with it. Make it realistic, so don't beat yourself up when you follow the path for absolute flawlessness or perfection--perfection is pretty impossible to attain anyhow. Plan to follow through with your goal and keep it stored in your mind as you progress through the year. By the way, it's also a pretty good idea to write it down in case you do let it slip your mind. Making resolutions means hope for improvement. I believe that we can always strive to improve ourselves and work towards the goal of achieving our "ideal self." Maybe I sound too much like a humanistic psychologist, but perhaps it's the path to a meaningful life. Back about a month ago when I was preparing for a debate, a friend of mine and I discussed the definition of what it meant to have a meaningful life. Many people equate a successful life with a meaningful life. I admit that I certainly did about a year ago when I made my New Year's resolution to achieve much more success in 2012. True, I met that resolution, and I'm certainly more successful than I was before. Look at me now: five foot one young woman with a lengthy résumé that threatens to stretch longer than two pages with my added accomplishments in poetry, art, writing, music, and academics. But am I closer to ideal happiness with all my accomplishments? Not really. At the bottom of this blog, I'm posting a video that definitely made me reevaluate the idea of success. If anything, I've learned how I must balance out everything to merge closer to a meaningful life. Last year, I burnt my candle at both ends always working and studying and practicing and not really taking a chance to enjoy the other things around me. All I knew last year was stress and deadlines and how to keep pushing through each day to strive toward a larger goal. But where was anything involving enjoying life outside of work? While I did have many great moments of sheer enjoyment last year, most of my days were dominated by "do this," "finish this," and "who needs a break when you can keep up the pace and continue studying?" We, as human beings, can't always be working. We need down time/fun time/chill time. Life isn't about the destination of our success; it's about the journey we take to success. It's important to live each day with some form of happiness making each day important to ourselves. Praying for the end of the day or just a method of survival is no way to live. Life life with meaning. In 2013, I want to slow down a little and enjoy some time with friends and seek out a meaningful life. Oh, I'll still continue building my résumé, but I just want to stop stressing about every little thing to make it absolutely perfect. Life's too short to overstress. This year, I'm going to balance out my life and merge closer to a meaningful life.
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For over a month now, everyone who has heard of my wild writing adventures has been asking for a blurb, a synopsis, an excerpt, a poem, or just any writing of mine to read. I'm finally ready to post my novel blurb from my much-heard-about 50,000 word novel that I penned during the month of November this year. Tada! Here's my work-in-progress novel blurb for my 50 K novel titled A Poetic Life. Enjoy!
Lila Cohen is a junior English major studying at the university seeking the creative writer's "enlightenment" but life keeps giving her dose after dose of pure undiluted chaos, throwing her possibly more than she can handle. Full-time student, part-time theater stagehand, occasional wedding musician, and now the newly appointed staff writer for the local literary magazine, The Writer’s Block. New to the professional writing world, she is, but soon enough she is promoted and given a new assignment writing a monthly column dedicated to discovering what it means to live “the poetic life.” She is told to embrace this journey for enlightenment, but how can she when everywhere she turns life is tip-toeing about the edges of a cliff? Life can be described as many things, but can it always be described as poetic? Okay, now it's time for me to answer the handful of questions I've received in the last month that I've either neglected answering or halfway answered. 1) What's the title of your novel and where did it come from? It's titled A Poetic Life and the idea sprung from a blog post from a fellow writing friend of mine who inspired me to meditate on the idea of what it meant to have a poetic life. 2) What's it really about? Well, the novel blurb is posted above, but I'll divulge a little more. My novel deals with the main question "What does it mean to live a poetic life?" For a writer, it should be easy to write about, right? Not really. First of all, is life even poetic? How can death be beautiful much less poetic? My main character is basically trying her best to understand the complexities of life. My novel is a story of discovery, of heakbreak, and of hope for the future. 3) Is your main character modeled after yourself? Haha, not really. Lila Cohen is bold and she's certainly not afraid to speak her mind. Her personality is quite different from my own...maybe an alter ego of mine? Perhaps...I mean after all she did come from somewhere in my mind. 4) So...is your novel done? Nope. 50,000 words is a great start, but it's nowhere near finished. I probably have another 40,000 words or so to go before I get to penning the ending. And then I'll have the editing and revision process up next...ugh. 5) Now what? I'm putting the novel writing down for a good while. Meanwhile, I'm working on getting a book of poetry published by submitting my first query letter to a publisher who has been interested in my work for a few years now. Currently, the working title is A Close Proximity to the Heart. This collection deals with matters close to the heart and issues that pop up in our lives that hit rather close to home. Matters in close proximity to the heart resonate deeply within us, bringing out our most powerful emotions. For those who have passionate hearts, every little pebble, stone, or boulder encountered in our path of life evokes an emotional reaction of some sort either positive or negative. We live life fully with intensity, with sappy sentiment, with alternating bouts of love and hate, with occasional sadness darkening our minds, with a dreamer's hope, and most importantly, with a beautiful passionate heart that'll carry us through life. A Close Proximity to the Heart shows how our gamut of messy and powerful emotions is what makes us human. 6) What poems are going to be published in this collection? "All I Seek" "What I'm Trying to Say" "Things Fall Apart...No, Love Falls Apart" "Get Me Some Flowers" "Such Weight" "Would You Write Me a Poem?" "You Are a Beauty" "Gifting Love" And plenty of other poems! Exams are done, first semester of freshman year is over, and I'm officially home for the holidays. It feels great to be back in town and back at home for Christmas break. Time for a break. Such a lovely relief!
Not only is Christmas coming but so is my nineteenth birthday. Everyone always asks "What do you want?" or "What are doing for your birthday?" My answer: Nothing much really. I'm not planning anything special for my birthday. No parties or big celebrations. Unlike most people, I don't want an iPhone or designer clothes or a television for my dorm room. I'm asking for something very simple: a pair of warm slippers and some fun time. The slippers would certainly be nice to wear on my way down to the practice rooms at night and the fun time is an absolute necessity for me right now. For the past few months at college, I've been up to nonstop practicing, doing homework, working, performing, novel writing, and so forth. It's been constant stress on my plate and no time for chilling or relaxing. I know what burnt out feels like. All I'm asking for right now is a break away from stress. I need "me time." I need fun time. I need time with my friends. It's the holidays. Time to laugh, to joke around, to reminisce, to drive around town and look at all the Christmas lights, to take a break from chaotic Christmas shopping and go explore the new books in a bookstore, to see friends outside the realms of Facebook and go for frozen yogurt or out to see Les Miserables in the theaters or even ice skating (any one of these would be quite lovely to do). It's time for me to relax and destressify. As many of you already know, I recently completed my NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days...actually for me, it was less than 30 days. Hmm...let me start from the beginning. Coming into the month of November, I was quite disappointed to realize that college coursework was what stood between me and penning a 50,000 word novel. Quite frankly, I didn't think that it would be possible at all to balance a novel and the life of an already chaotically busy music major! November 1st came and it was quite upsetting to think that I could have started a novel, but I hadn't. I was going to take another year off from noveling and writing. In 2009 and 2010, I had successfully completed the writing challenge, but that was high school when the workload wasn't nearly as high as it is currently in college. Writing a novel is like taking care of a baby. Always needs to be attended to, takes so much out of you, requires so much planning and so forth. Writing 50,000 words in one month seemed impossible at that time. November 1st...November 2nd...November 3rd...people began bombarding me with the question "Are you novel writing this year?" My answer: A 50,000 word novel isn't a realistic goal I could reach this year, so I'm sitting this year out. It bothered me to admit defeat without even having at it, but it just seemed impossible with all of the things that needed to be accomplished in the month of November. Some people were uncomfortable with the fact that I was already giving up without even attempting the challenge. These people kept pushing me further and further to go ahead and try it anyhow even if I only totaled 26,997 words by the end of the thirty days. They pushed me and pushed me, and it's these people I have to thank for actually getting me to actually do NaNoWriMo this year. It was late at night on November 4th that I was finally pushed over the edge to write a 50,000 novel. I was going to write a novel...but about what? Plot? Characters? Title? A little before midnight my roommate was rattling off names of her Facebook friends to help me figure out a name for my main character. That night I was writing on the fly racking up as many words as I could. Almost 8,000 words behind at that point going into November 5th, I knew I would spend most of the month of November playing catchup to regain those valuable writing days I had missed. What challenges did I face in the process of writing a 50,000 word novel? 1) I started 4 days late and about 8,000 words behind the average number of words I should have had. Obvious problem, huh? 2) Lack of time. Need to attend class, do homework, study, practice my instrument, eat, bathe, go to work...who needs to sleep when you can write a novel? 3) Getting into the writing mode. Sometimes I needed music in the background. Sometimes I couldn't stand the sound of Bernstein in my head as I'm trying to delicate scene in my novel. Sometimes, I needed complete silence, but well, that didn't happen. Sometimes, I tried eating and typing at the same time...that didn't work too well. I tried noveling after two hours of hardcore practicing, but my fingers ached. Every day was a different method to get into the writing mode. 4) Work, work, work...oh, and then you can write a novel. In the month of November, I had three papers to write, one music technology project due, four tests (one of them being a final exam), and nine performances (a few of them involving me playing the violin). Oh, and I was also balancing all of that plus four jobs. Tough, huh? 5) The emotional aspect of it all. Stress and emotions don't mix very well. This month wasn't easy at all. It was miserably difficult and there were days that I did want to drop the novel entirely because I didn't think I could do it or I thought my novel idea was stupid. Sometimes, I had no direction of where to go with my novel and I just put it down for a day or two. In the final week of November, here began my late night writing sessions (primarily working until two in the morning or until I had enough words to make me happy for the moment). My fingers ached, my eyes were completely bloodshot, I looked like a trainwreck, and I was tired. The end of the month was certainly harder than the beginning. Writing novel wasn't easy, but it was rewarding once I had the finished product. I finished my 50,012th word exactly four minutes before midnight, just in time for me to say that I officially wrote a 50K novel in the month of Novemeber. People always ask me "What do you get from this?" My answer: bragging rights and a 50,000 word novel that you wrote. That's enough for me. Maybe sometime, I go back and begin the editing process and also finish up writing the tail-end of my novel. For now, I'm going to take a slight break from the nonstop novel writing sessions that sometimes went until even three o'clock in the morning. So you guys have an idea of my next writing project, I'm going to submit a query letter with several of poems to a publishing company by the end of this month; with any luck, I could potentially have a book of my own poetry published. Maybe this will happen, maybe this won't. Doesn't hurt to try, right? Until December 12th (aka. the day I finish up finals), I'll be incommunicado for the most part. Two finals this week along with my flute jury and three finals next week. Four Christmas presentations for which I'll be playing violin...not flute. Now that I've gotten all of the music for the production, it's time to cram and learn it all before the presentations in less than a week. Wish me luck. |
AuthorKendall Driscoll is an accomplished writer/ musician/ artist/ academic scholar. Archives
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