With all the wedding planning behind us, I feel like I have my life back. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, I found I had less and less time for exercise, writing, and reading--but it wasn't just that. I also had less and less time with my wife to be. We saw then--though we were somewhat helpless to do anything about it toward the end there--that we were spending too much time on the upcoming wedding and not enough on the upcoming marriage.

So my advice to young couples thinking about getting hitched: make some time to nurture the relationship during the stressful time of wedding planning. And men: get involved as much as you can, even if you're pretty sure you want her to have the final say in everything.

And back to the subject of writing. Of course, our wedding planning time has now been taken over by unpacking and organizing ourselves, as well as thank-you letters and returns. And of course I'm adjusting to having a full time roommate for the rest of my life and consolidating bank accounts--ack! It's not as overwhelming as I thought it would be. Yet.

But nothing hogs time like a wedding, and if I'm going to put off my goals again just because there's still stuff to do (there'll always be stuff to do), then I'm never going to get anywhere with my art.

So I've created an eight week program for myself to get myself back on track (Was I ever on track? Not in years, maybe.). It involves health and exercise (waking up in the morning to run and/or lift and making dinner rather than eating out so often--now that I have someone to cook for), performance (picking up my guitar again after a six month hiatus--there's a lot of coffee clubs in our new area and this is pretty much the only way to market my album locally. So I'm putting together a few sets. I'm also going to be putting together a headshot and acting resume to see if I can get some local work performing in shows again--yes, after some time off the stage, I'm getting the itch to act again), writing craft (minimum 250 words per day. As writer Jim Van Pelt has demonstrated and as I have learned, even if you start with a low number of words as your goal, you tend to surpass it most of the time. The easy goal is something less intimidating than, say, my million word challenge), and computer skills (I still haven't had a chance to experiment much with the Mac OS, and I'd like to fool around in OSX when I get a chance. There's still all my finished and unfinished works to convert to the new format. Oh yeah, and I guess I could be better about updating the website and all...).

Filed under Journal, Vanity Smurf

Comments: Discuss this entry at LiveJournal