Hello from gorgeous cow country in upstate NY!
Have you ever heard of the "Word of the Year?" You probably have. The Oxford English Dictionary always has one at the end of the year. Probably other media outlets do too. But I recently ran across an old friend whom I haven't talked to in a while. She's recently started her own business and seems to be doing very well for herself.
Her recent newsletter talked about making a word for your upcoming year as a way of focusing your attention on what's important.
It got me thinking. What was my word for the last year? My immediate knee-jerk answer was something like "distraction" or "disaster" because there have seen plenty of both this past year. And a year ago, I probably would have written you an email with exactly that word as the subject line.
But recently, I read this wonderful book called The Road Back To You by Ian Cron. It's a book on the Enneagram, written from a Christian perspective. And I found out, to my delight and relief, that I'm a 4, that is, a ROMANTIC. No surprise there. But what did surprise me was that the "deadly sin" of a 4 is not what I expected. It's ... envy!
And a lot of things started to fall into place for me. My tendency to blow things up out of proportion. Letting my emotional state determine how much I work and what I work on. Allowing the natural melancholy of my emotional type to go way beyond that Russian sense of nostalgia to something a bit more chaotic and dangerous.
And I realized that, if I stop and think, my word for the year is actually very different. It's BALANCE. This is the first year in a long, long time when I consciously worked on allotting time for all the things that make my life rich. Not work only, but much more family and faith and service.
And you know what? I checked, and now I can say for a fact that I managed to get more done, write more new words, than I ever have.
And next year? I'd like 2020's word to be "Breakthrough". Let's see what happens.
I was on Live Radio!
For the first time in my life, I was interviewed on live public radio. It was a lot of fun.
To read about it and to listen to the recorded interview, click here.
What's coming soon!
Next week, I'm going to send you all a sneak peak at a new project I'm working on. Oh, and book 5 is plugging along nicely. I'm pretty sure I'll be about 25,000 words into the story by the end of next week. After that point, usually the writing speeds up a lot. But I'll keep you apprised of my progress.
Thanks, as always, for joining me on my writerly adventures!
~Nicky
PS I've switched to a new email delivery company, and you might be getting occasional hiccup emails from me from an auto-response sequence. Feel free to ignore it. It should only happen for a short time while all the kinks work themselves out.