Tag: time management

Blog Post #26: Open Source Programs & Why You Don’t Need to Pay $50+ a Month to Be an Indie Author

Anastasia Frost2 Comments

Indie Authors who have an arsenal of tools and experience in their back pockets can utilize open source programs instead of resorting to spending $$$ on popular programs, such as Adobe’s Creative Suite.

Hope you all had a good holiday weekend! My husband and I spent the weekend together enjoying quality time, something that we both needed dearly.

Today I want to tell you all about Open Source software and give you a few suggestions of programs that I use as a writer and graphic designer.

Per, wikipedia (lol yes, wiki, because it had the most straight forward definition of what OSS is):
“Open-source software is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner.”

In short: they are free (depends on the program but I will only be suggesting those that are free) software alternatives to some of your favorite programs such as MS Office Suite, Photoshop, Illustrator, In-Design, and so many more.

No longer do you have to pine over whether you can justify a monthly expense just to make a book cover. No longer do you have to deal with MS Word constantly telling you it needs a product key. You can just do it for free, because others who can code also wanted to do it for free. The catch is that there is a learning curve to these programs, as copying a published program line for line would be copyright infringement at the minimum. The programs I will discuss can do all the functions of their more pricey, well known counterparts, it’s just the mechanics of how to do that (buttons, drop down menus, etc.,) will be different from their pricey counterparts as well.

Now, like explained above, not all OSS programs are free, as there are innumerable OSS programs in existence and more being coded every day. Here is a list of my favorite FREE programs.

1) LIBRE OFFICE

Libre Office is a free OSS version of Microsoft Office which includes a comparable program for each of MS’s programs. As a writer, my most used Libre Office program is Libre Writer, basically an exact replica of MS Word. My second most used program would be Libre Calc, their replica of MS Excel. I used Libre Calc to make my writing tracker, something that I use daily when writing to track my word counts, projects, quarterly goals, and progress.

2) GIMP (GNU IMAGE MANIPULATION PROGRAM)

GIMP was a program that was introduced to me back in 2008 by someone who wanted me to stop using my cracked version of Photoshop CS3, something that I was unwilling to do at the time. By the time I was 17 I had spent so much time in Photoshop (CS and CS2 before) that I knew exactly what tools I needed and how to work their functions. Attempting to translate that knowledge over to GIMP, a very similar, and yet, different program proved too tedious for my underage self, and eventually the computer that had that copy of CS3 died, killing my cracked version with it.

Now that Photoshop is behind a paywall and I’m an adult fully capable of being prosecuted by the fullest extent of the law, GIMP has become my program of choice for graphic design. It has the same functions as PS, and you can even upload PS brushes in GIMP for use! Just be aware of the steep learning curve with how the tools function, Luckily, there are a TON of resources online about GIMP and its tools, and how to use them achieve whatever you need. I will admit, there are times where GIMP lags, but I had that problem with PS. I’ve never had a graphics project ruined or had GIMP crash on me in the middle of a design. I am also VERY aware of how many individual layers I have, and I work to compress them as I go. Remember, be patient in getting GIMP to be your gimp (lol, I couldn’t help it I had to).

3) INKSCAPE

Inkscape is a vector graphic design program, the equivalent of Adobe Illustrator. Admittedly, this is not a program that I use at all, just because my projects haven’t required vector work. However, anyone with an eye for marketing can see the vector trend running rough shot over the entirety of the contemporary romance and YA cover styles at this time, and if these are your genres and you’ve considered doing your own cover, this is the program for you!

I am including this program in my review as it was suggested to me by a friend who does graphic design work with vectors, she had nothing but GLOWING reviews about this program and the sample work she showed me came out really great!

Keep an eye out for the next installment of Dejavu tomorrow! Hope you all have a blessed day and thank you for reading!

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Blog Post #24: Finishing Rough Drafts and The Last Fifty Pages

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Goals for the rest of the week and my thoughts on James Scott Bell’s The Last Fifty Pages.

The past week I celebrated completing the first draft of my dark fantasy romance book Silver Blood. Now it’s on to writing additional scenes for pacing.

Finishing my fourth manuscript felt a little surreal. It’s the first completed manuscript of 2022, and as happy as I am with the draft, sadly, nothing feels good enough when it comes to self-publishing. It’s definitely the most clean of my manuscripts, requiring only minor additional scenes and no major changes to the plot, but I still can’t help but feel like I’m behind the 8-ball. Always behind.

The newest addition to my writing book collection is James Scott Bell’s The Last Fifty Pages, a book very pertinent to my current project. James’s books are very straight forward, a major plus of his craft books because he doesn’t waste time (or pages) being overly verbose; he just tells you exactly what to do. That isn’t to say that you can’t be creative; the entire purpose of writing is to be creative, right? The succinctness of his style just means you’ll be on to writing your manuscript that much quicker. This book is marketed as a writer’s guide to perfect endings, and I hope to utilize the advice in my own revisions.

I’ve made a list of about 19 scenes to add to Silver Blood. If I can write 1,000 words for each scene, that will be 19K words added, bumping me up to (hopefully) 65K words. Then it’s just line edits and proofreading.

Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for a special announcement! Thank you, each and everyone of you, for reading my blog! I promise, I am not going to keep you guys hanging!

Blog Post #23: My Daily Schedule as Someone Who Rarely Leaves the House

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Juggling work, housework, and leisure is essential to all workers, but especially those working from home or managing a business launch.


I rarely leave the house, it is the reality of my life now that I don’t have a job to go to everyday.

My days as a housewife consist of three main duties: cooking, cleaning, and writing. Once I have a baby life will be thrown into the utter chaos of love, baby feet, and poop, but for now it’s simpler. My husband and I have always had the goal of me being a stay at home wife and once Covid hit I’ll be honest, I wasn’t exactly hitting the pavement trying to get a job in the middle of a pandemic. My husband, through his hard work and conscientiousness received a very big promotion, and he began working overtime weekly as an IT manager, requiring me to manage the house.

This means that all meals and cleaning falls on me, something that I enjoy. I had many jobs as a housekeeper at hotels in my young adult years, and thus I know how to clean a house rather quickly. It’s just getting the motivation to do it, heh. In turn, I try to plan the meals out for the day, as my husband and I are working on getting in better shape before we try for a baby again. Once I have my surgery, I’ll have to wait a month or two for my hormones to stabilize and then I’ll be able to get pregnant and carry a full term baby.

My medical conditions, as well as various other experiences that happened during the year has depleted our emergency savings, and now we’re working to stash it back again. That’s achievable by me cooking basically everything.

My mornings start with coffee and fasting. I fast a lot. Generally, I fast between 16-20 hours a day, only drinking coffee, tea, and water in that time. I avoid carbonated drinks, but I have a soft spot for Truly’s on the weekends. Generally, I’ll bring my husband breakfast between ten and eleven, lunch around two to three, and dinner at six to seven. Then I do the dishes and shower for the night. Twice a week my friends come over to workout the makeshift gym in my basement. We’ll be going on a bachelorette weekend getaway in a month and we plan to look as good as possible!

As for writing, from approximately 9AM to 5PM I’m at the computer trying to write. According to my writing tracker spreadsheet (which I will be uploading for download here at some point) I have averaged 2500 words a day during this manuscript. My highest day was 5600. I hope to hit 10K at some point, but I doubt that will be consistent on a daily basis. Maybe one day. Hopefully. In the early morning I’ll check my social medial pages (as of today I only have a twitter) and post some positive and feel-good content. My goal is to never talk about politics or anything negative; I imagine people are readying dark fantasy romance to ESCAPE reality and to ESCAPE the negativity of the world.

My average writing sprints are 25-55 minutes but I don’t keep a timer, I just try to get myself into flow and don’t stop until I am done with the scene or I get stumped at what should happen. I have a few tricks in my back pocket now if I get stumped, including backing up the previous interaction and sending it into a different, more interesting direction.

I hope in the following weeks to get more a stable schedule with everything in my life. At the very least, I have begun to write and schedule my blog posts, so that I do not just blip off the map for a two year stint again.

Also, I finished my first draft (YAY!) at 45K words. I am working on brainstorming scenes to bring that up to 65K. Then it’s editing and completed! I will keep you all posted on my plotting and editing systems.

See you all Monday!

picture credit: “person holding yellow plastic spray bottle photo” by JESHOOTS, published on unsplash.com

Blog Post #22: Under Pressure

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Caught between plans and executions. Also details about my current manuscript.

I’ve been re-reading Jewel Allen’s Rapid Release (attempted to link below) and it’s been inspiring, yet intimidating.

In the writing-craft book, Allen explains how she pens 50,000 words in the span of a week, allowing her to push out romance books on a monthly basis. She writes escapism romance, a niche that is both in demand and fairly simple to write (in terms of research, concepts, etc). She explains how marketing plans will still need to be devised by authors as rapid releasing is only one marketing strategy.

If I were to say my goal, it would be to take dark fantasy/sci fi romance and mimic what Allen is doing with escapism romance. I want to launch long series consisting of books which are about 70,000 words. I am not able to write 50,000 words in a month yet, but on my current manuscript Silver Blood I’ve written over 17,000 words in August alone. That manuscript is at just over 40,000 now.

17,000 isn’t enough, though. Even with this last remaining week in August I’ll need to push myself to write as much as possible to finish my draft before September.

Silver Blood, the working title of my current manuscript, is about a new kind of vampire. Today I will, hopefully, be powering through 5k words to finish the final chapter. Then the rest of the week I will add additional content needed to calm the fast pace of the story in its rawest form. It is a fantasy concept based on an old roleplaying forum board my best friend and I made back in 2002 on a website called avidgamers.com which doesn’t exist anymore. (Back in the heyday of free website hosting for no explicable reason, where I, and many other people, cut teeth on HTML.)

Ultimately, my end of year goal is to:
1) Finish Silver Blood first draft and editing
2) Finish Americana Wasted first draft and editing
3) Finish Americana Wasted 2 first draft and editing
4) Finish Dark Requiem editing

Successfully completing these goals will give me four completed books and set me up with 2 continuing dark fiction series and 1 stand alone series of horror/thriller books which will be released annually in October.

I forgot to mention, I have another manuscript I wrote in the summer of last year. It’s a fantasy about a demon hunter who’s possessed by a grim reaper in exchange for help in executing revenge against the entity that killed his family. It is VERY rough, and at this point I’m holding back on it because this character is going to tie into Silver Blood, just not yet. In my mind they are two protagonists, and their story will begin with Silver Blood and end with the other series. They just haven’t met yet.

That’s about it for today. I have more thoughts about potentially having a second pen name for straight up feel good romances that write easy and sell easier. I just don’t know when I’ll have time for that. If I can juggle two writing projects at once, though them being entirely different (outside of the romance subplot) may actually allow me to pursue something like that. And then, what kind of romances? Contemporary? Regency? Western? Historical? All of them?

I don’t have a real job anymore, so how much can I write until I burn out?

Also, enjoy the rebrand. This blog is gonna be looking different as I decide how to design it. I need to figure out how to get dark fantasy romance across in my site design. So for now you’re getting Mucha flowers!

Jewel Allen’s Rapid Release:

(I tried to link the book from amazon but wordpress blocked it so…. search it on Amazon, it’s definitely worth a read if you’re looking into self-publishing.)


Blog Post #17: In The Hopes of Beginning a Routine that Works

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 I have always been a night person. Now I’m coming to terms with how that’s not conducive to getting any additional work done around my 9-5 office job. 

Happy Sunday guys, Sunday is the day before the new week, and thus I want to discuss something I’m starting new tonight: going to bed early and changing my system.

One of my giants to slay has been my lack of a good routine (or system, as I’ve heard them referred to as well). My husband has a great one, he goes to bed every night at 10:00PM he wakes up every morning at 6:30AM, works out most days, showers, packs his food, and leaves for work, giving himself an hour to get everything done and ready for his day.

I’m NOT like this. I hit snooze five times in a row, run out of the house with my hair in a sloppy bun, no packed lunch in hand, not even my water bottle, and definitely no coffee.  At this point I not only sabotaged myself out a peaceful morning, I’ve sabotaged my own diet goals by forcing myself to eat out, thus also sabotaged  our budget, the savings we’re trying to stash before we make the next great leap: parenthood.

I generally steal sleep in the morning, I always have, ever since I was a teenager and talking all night online became the new cool thing and because I don’t go to bed to give myself enough time to get up early, I go to bed with the least time so I can spend it at night, I ruin any hope of a good morning before work. And what do I generally do all night? By the time I get home from work I’m too burnt out to think about writing anything, so I sit around and play video games, watch videos on YouTube, and extend my lowkey night of doing nothing, letting the dishes sit in the sink, left over take out in the fridge, and staring at my phone into the small hours.

This drills down to a deeper level of insecurity: How can I be a good parent if I can’t even make sure I get a shower and pack myself food before I leave for work? How am I going to juggle everything if I can’t even get the basics right? How could I possibly think I could handle parenthood, all of the daily house stuff, and maintain a job? How do other people do all of this, even do more, and keep their heads?

Negative self-talk swirls, feelings of failure swell, but before I let it all mount and drown me, I take a deep breathe and remind myself that tomorrow is a new day, that I have time to get myself together. But like water, the time I have to get it together feels finite, it runs out of my hands, pours out of my control…Or does it? Aren’t these micro failures facilitated by my own actions, my own hands? What if I’m just making excuses?

Listening to people make videos on YouTube, I heard a girl refer to her daily routine as a system, and it really opened my eyes, really made me step back and recognize a routine as not just a daunting list of boxes to check each day, it’s a network of symbiotic relationships between blips of time you spend doing something productive. The system of skin care to maintain my cystic acne prone skin. The system of eating moderate portions of healthy foods to maintain your body, creating a system of work out plans and weight loss/strength goals. Sleeping enough at night is vital to everything.

My goal is to go to bed tonight at 9:00PM, so that I can wake up at 6:00AM. That would give me enough time to cycle, shower, prep food to cook throughout the day, grab all the stuff, and maybe even let me plot my current book for a little bit, all before leaving for work.

I’ll be sure to update you all with my progress (with this, in addition to the book of course), but I’m hoping that by taking the options of sleeping more away from myself (just because I won’t be tired if I allot myself that much time), I’ll be able to have a productive morning, and therefore, a relaxing evening, where all I have to do is pick up the house before bed.  It will be so nice to relax after work and not feel the guillotine of uncompleted chores hanging over me all night.

Make sure you all get enough sleep too 🙂

Blog Post #10: Indie Publishing, Staying Focused on the Original Goal, and Preserving the Integrity of your Piece

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Facing all of the avenues of success as an entrepreneur and independent author can be overwhelming, but the trick to achieving your own success is focusing on what you’re passionate about and not pushing yourselves into spending all your creative energies on side projects.  

Hey guys, I know it’s been awhile — approximately an entire month and then some — since my last blog post.  To sum it up, I needed to focus solely on my manuscript, which resulted in June being my most productive month so far!  As of now, I am working on chapters 17/18 and I’ve reached just under 65,000 words on my first draft.  I am estimating this book to be 25 chapters in total, so my completed, super rough first draft should land around 90,000, and my brain/plotting notebook is already filled with small editing notes on what to add in my first rounds of developmental edits.  My goal is to do all my own developmental and line edits (multiple rounds each), and hiring a freelance proof reader before publication.  I have friends who are readers, writers, and artists who are very interested in the concepts of my story and who have told me they will review chapters and leave ARC reviews for me once I’m ready.

This brings me to the point of this post today: No, this isn’t me telling you I’m done with my blog, I’m telling you it’s gonna be randomly published on, at least for now.  My hope is to do one or two, maybe up to four posts a month, but as of now they won’t be on a set schedule, they’ll be written whenever I think of them.  I need to dedicate this time to my book, this story that I’m falling in love with writing and these characters I have very roughly developed arcs for that need fleshed out.

My initial intention for this blog was to pound out two posts a week for you beautiful people, but what I realized was I was exhausting myself and exerting my creative energies on a side project, not the real project.  I love this blog, it’s a great space to clear my head and get some advice about following creative passions as an adult, but stepping back from it for a few weeks revealed that my rigid schedule was going to turn this blog into a recycled piece of garbage, the same posts you’ve seen done countless times by other people.

Let me explain: I don’t want this blog to be another mouthpiece of a writer-working-to-author just trying to peddle books out to any readers who come across it.  I don’t want this to be another blog that doles out contrived, try-hard posts about a craft I’m still developing my own skills in.  The direction and intention of this blog is to be a place for me to organize and collect my thoughts, to give my two cents on how to juggle following your passions and keeping a roof over your head; not a direct piece of my marketing strategy, where I create a false persona of myself for “fans” to falsely idolize and I write blog posts that everyone has already read (or watched on a YT/vlog channel) somewhere else. Frankly, I’m not that person, and I never want to be that person, and running my creative energy into the ground to write articles about topics I either don’t care to write about or aren’t really qualified to do so, to hit an imaginary quota I put on myself makes me not want to do it.

There is a big push on independent authors to do EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE.  Going through the videos on Author Tube (YouTube’s author community), you get told that in order to cultivate the amount of people necessary to succeed at sales you need to juggle email lists for newsletters, pump out blog posts or vlogs on YT, start a patreon, join a bunch of social media groups with other authors and start critiquing each other’s work, consider putting out classes that people pay for, and other innumerable ways to push yourself out there. It is a lot, especially when you as an author plan to write books for the rest of your life to support an income and live your dream. The expectation is to start doing most, if not all, of this before your publication (while you’re still working for most people) in order to use it as a marketing hub, which is a perfect strategy, but you run the risk of flying too close to the sun and melting your wings.  Putting all of your time and energy in managing an empire of side gigs when what you really started for was to write stories you love isn’t rewarding.

Self reflection says it could just be me whining about what’s par for the course.  I could just be feeling the impending stress of needing to begin true marketing prior to a book publication and be getting overwhelmed.  Every publishing house hypes the launch of a book prior to release, that’s how you get the most people to buy it.  I guess the bone I’m picking at more is the struggle with keeping your sincerity and integrity while pushing out so much work and getting noticed, ensuring to not create a facade of a glossy, perfect person and putting that out into the world as the real thing. That’s ultimately what social media is, the best of everything projected as if that’s your real life, the visage of what you wish to share. It’s about the management of true quality control, ensuring everything you put out isn’t a rushed piece of shit that doesn’t give fans true value.  It’s about ensuring you have enough energy to keep writing your work, the real reason why you’re doing all of this in the first place.

As an aspiring independent author looking at the long game prospect, I am reflecting on what my true goal in this game is.  I feel like the story I’m wrestling with is very high concept, it requires a lot of world building and character arc development and it’s very taxing to weave these character developments into the overall pacing of the rest of the story.  It’s something that I will be working on for years to come, before starting other series I have notes written for stashed away.  TAW is my baby right now, with all of the different long game ideas and weaving in an entire flashback arc at the end about society before WW3 and the atomic decimation of the globe, it could be eight, ten, twelve books total.  Considering possibly weaving my other book ideas into the same universe, like the fantasy series being a comic book in my dystopian world, a horror series set in the pre-dystopian reality. Just different ideas that I have to keep somewhat fresh, yet preserved long enough to dedicate myself to TAW.  I brainstormed TAW: WRP for five years before it came out to be an idea I could divulge myself into (and before I stopped telling myself I could never do this and stopped doubting myself); I can hold on to these ideas too.

Shout-out to Sarra Cannon, I’ll link her website and YouTube, Heart Breathings, below.  I haven’t read any of her books but I love her web series, she’s a great example of a writer who turned her creative passions and entrepreneurial spirit into an empire; writing what she wants and supporting her family by following her heart.  I hope to do the same; writing from home while homeschooling my future children until I can afford to get them into private school.   She also provides classes to purchase, and I would argue her experience of writing 20+ books in multiple series for the past ten years puts her in a different echelon of mentor than others in the AuthorTube community who also offer classes.  I eat, sleep, and breathe her Anchor Series and when I begin editing I’ll eat, sleep, and breathe her Editing Series, both linked below.  I love her message of writing what you love, always studying the craft of writing to be a better writer, and focusing on high concept story ideas to make sagas that fans adore.

So, artists, remember to stay true to what you want, and don’t get caught up in your side games while focusing on crafting the true product. Grow and accept needed change, but always remember your original goals.  Think about what you want to pursue, and manage how much creative energy you spend.

Also, please feel free to message/comment any topics you want me to write about in the future.

Sarra Cannon / Heart Breathings:

Website: https://sarracannon.com/
Heart Breathings YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCasYwEzMc7tjKuAS-
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Elements of a Best Selling (or Anchor) Series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyDruOi1q9A&list=PLg6zjsQP4PwcpMEj3Uo2b1sPFWrcule9
How To Edit Your Novel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg6zjsQP4PwejATdBaHiF_lyrV9Pw585u

Blog Post #9: 3 Reasons to Opt for a Stay-cation

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Stay-cations at home are great ways to unwind and realign your focus when you’re juggling working full-time and pursuing passion projects part-time. 

Mr. Frost and I are trying to stash as much money as we can before we journey into the next step of adulthood: parenthood, and thus, we have no big summer plans of beaches or cabins for 2019.

Instead, I’m giving myself a few five-day long weekends to give myself time to not only to relax or catch up on housework, but also to write and brainstorm ideas for my saga.

Stay-cations, for anyone who doesn’t know, is using time off from work to stay home instead of spending large sums of money on a real vacation trip elsewhere. I recommend these basically to anyone. Give yourself days off, give yourself long stretches of days off, especially if you feel like you’re in a rut, a proverbial hamster wheel of bashing your face into the ground, failing at your personal goals and feeling lacking at work.

Here are 3 reasons why you should give yourself a Stay-cation this summer.

1: You got A LOT of stuff to do at home and you can’t find the time. 

This is the bane of every weekend warrior: two days just aren’t enough. Whether it’s cleaning out the basement/attic/garage or the piles of laundry stacking up, or the yard turning into a jungle, don’t be too proud to give yourself an extra day or two off work to get your home duties finished. You will feel much more prepared for work when you’ve taken your house work off of your mind.

2: Work is stressing you the fuck out. 

If going to work every day sets your anxiety sky-rocketing and sends you down a proverbial rabbit hole of dread and anguish, not only do you need to schedule some days off to relax, you should spend some of the time looking for a new job.

3: You need to catch up creatively.

Creatives tend not to foster good creations if we are stretched too thin and unable to dedicate time to our crafts, so make sure to give yourself days off to spend honing your skills and making new art.

Make sure to take care of yourself in the wild journey that is adulthood and responsibility, and don’t tell yourself you shouldn’t have a vacation because you have no money to go anywhere.

Blog Post #4: Shedding Procrastination and Planning to Relax

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Being stuck in a never ending cycle of procrastination and working till the last minute (or longer) is hard on yourself, and a habit even harder to break. Once you establish the habit of a system that works for you, you can plan time to relax without feeling like you’re cheating something else.

I was a habitual procrastinator. I’d wait till the last week to write fifteen page final papers. I’d write small papers that night, or an hour before class if I really wasn’t prepared. I stayed up all night for a morning Art History final, managing to pull out a pass grade due to sheer force. Projects waited until the last moment, chores waited until Sunday night before I was able to get to sleep, and some weeks dishes still sat piled in my kitchen, a terrible start to the new week. I often ran late for work.

In feeble attempts to combat this, I would make lists of things I needed to do, house chores, yard work, exercise regiments, drawing goals, writing goals, meal planning to combat ordering out (which I will make an entire post about at some point, because meal planning is really a great way to get your shit together and save money); basically filling up my weekend (and weeknights) with a mountain of shit to do, with only two days (or a few hours after work), which destroyed my chances of really having any time to relax. With no scheduled time to relax I would “cheat” from my own lists, blow off the dishes for the day, fuck working out, “I’m drinking cranberry and vodkas tonight and we’re getting Chinese takeout and pizza!” I’d say to Mr. Frost.

At the end of the week was the worst, Sunday afternoon through the night, after enjoying a fun Saturday with my husband, I’d be scrambling to get the laundry done, to get the dishes clean, to meal prep lunches for the week. I’d be so burnt out even though I just “relaxed” the day before, all because I set up expectations that couldn’t be met within that time frame and then sabotaged myself in a blaze of liquor and defiance.

I came to terms with the fact I needed to start getting a head start on things, I had to start keeping up with the dishes every night (I don’t have a dishwasher, and probably won’t until we remodel the kitchen, and God only knows when that will ever be). I had to start the loads of laundry Friday night. I had to get up and go grocery shopping on Saturday, and do the weekly cleaning in the morning so I could enjoy Saturday night and all of Sunday. When I took the time to strategize how to tackle chores as they were needed rather than pushing them off, I was able to unlock all the extra time I needed to pursue writing, both as a novelist and a blogger.

I’ve also started waking up an hour early to work out with my husband in our mini home gym, which consists of a bunch of hand-me-down cardio and lifting equipment from family and friends. Working out is a release for me, but it’s always been a point of contention, feeling like another arbitrary task on a list of shit I had to do. Now that I’m not up all night putting laundry away or scrubbing dishes, I’m able to go to bed on time and wake up early.

Procrastination does not set a person up for success, and making a plan that actually works is the key. Once you’ve established a plan that you can execute effectively you’ll realize you have time to enjoy, without having to take away time from your responsibilities. This allows you to really enjoy your leisurely time, rather than stress during it, perpetually guilt-tripping yourself.

Artists, remember your responsibilities and tackle them ferociously, don’t cower and push them off! Schedule the time and activities to keep yourself sane!