A trapped-at-home mom of three, freelance fiction editor and romance writer, Cynthia Selwyn has been married to the same man for nearly twenty years. If there's anything she knows about relationships, it's that humor can keep the love alive (or at least on life-support).
Cynthia started writing at the age of six and has been writing since then. After many rejections, she finally earned a contract with The Wild Rose Press with Kissing Trick, (written as C.D. Yates) and is now writing exclusively for Breathless Press, where she hopes to earn enough money in royalties to support her coffee habit. Her goal with each book is to bring a smile to her readers' faces and love to their hearts, by writing a sexy story with a touch of magic.
She invites writers and readers to reach her at cynthia@author-wise.com.
Flying without a Deadline
Despite the fact that the world is reputed to be ending in December of this new year (what, again? It's been schedule to end for the past two years), consider setting goals anyway. Even if the world does end, at least you can say you accomplished something.
Here's my goal for 2012: Not to make goals. At least, not ones with a deadline.
What? How can you set a goal without a timeline? If my goal is to not set goals, then I will be able to say—as I float away in a burst of interstellar dust, or sail to heaven, or become one of the Enlightened—I did it! I accomplished something this year! (Complete with fist pump. Unless I'm dust. Then I'll just…well…dust.)
It's not that I don't think goals with deadlines are wonderful things. Some of us need them in order to function, and in order to write, especially. Like posts in a fence, they give us something to aim for as we travel this long road of ours. Just get to the next post, we think, and keep trudging despite disappointment, fatigue and all the other obstacles that appear in our path. And that's good.
But I prefer the leap the fence, circle around, hide behind a rock kind of a strategy as I go. Flexible, like a guerrilla fighter (or better yet, a ninja!) I have to be ready to leap, tuck and roll as I make my way through each day/week/month…year. Yes, I have some kind of destination in mind, but the way I get there isn't the straight-and-narrow-eyes-on-the-prize kind of way. And, when I arrive at where I needed to be, I can quietly celebrate even if I didn't get there within a certain time frame.
That's part of the reason I don't like daily/ weekly/monthly goals. "I will write 20,000 words by the end of the month," for example. If I write "only" 19, 500 words by the end of the month, I won't be able to say, "I did it!" But if I have the idea (which is different from a goal) that I need to write 20,000 words as soon as possible, hopefully sooner than later but later is okay if I need to do something else first, then I know that I'll be able to accomplish it. I won't have set myself up for failure but for success. A wishy-washy kind of success, true—but one that works with the rest of my rolling, leaping, flying, falling kind of life.
It's okay to be wishy-washy sometimes. We try to do everything just right all the time, with structure and timelines and deadlines, and then we get frustrated when things don't work out the way we planned.
Speaking of plans…I wonder how the prophets for this year's The World is Going to End prediction will feel on December 22nd, when everyone's still here and things are just the same as always. Frustrated…a little silly. Certainly, they'll feel like they've failed.
If only they used my method of goal setting. They'd tell you, "The World is going to end. Sometime." And they'd be right. Success!
