A New Creative Year – Mindfully Scheduling My Daydreaming

No, I didn’t disappear off the edge of the world in 2016. I have indeed been engaging in social writing activities. Here’s my proof.

The blog has suffered in my absence because I’ve been focussed on revising my work. I also moved into a new house and have a fantastic new writing room!

I’ve started this year off with a new motivation, writing new material and enjoying my critique group. I’m also participating in Storystorm to generate one new idea for a book each day during the month of January.

On day two of Storystorm, the founder, Tara Lazar wrote an amazing post on mindfulness. It’s a hot topic everywhere. Mindfulness is the ability to be here in the present moment.

My grade one teacher wrote on my report card, “Rebecca has a tendency to daydream.” After reading Tara’s blog post, I’m embracing this as a positive. For many years I saw this as a negative. While I do get distracted, daydreaming has helped me to dream up wonderful stories to tell.

So this year my writing goal is to strike a balance between mindfulness and daydreaming.

To help me with this matter, my writing buddy Alison Stegert gave me the most amazing diary for Christmas. I am scheduling in time to daydream while being mindful of important deadlines. Writing makes me happy and when I’m not, I’m deflated.

Here are a few other thoughts I've had about mindfulness and daydreaming.

Children need time for free play and daydreaming to foster creativity, which helps them excel in many areas of learning.

The Labor Party is opposing changes to parallel imports, which would have allowed cheaper titles of the same Australian book to be imported from overseas into Australia. Thankfully, they are mindful of the impact this will have on the Australian publishing industry, ensuring the support of local authors, illustrators, publishers and more importantly, preserving and dreaming about Australian culture in literature.

So who is going to join me this year in mindful daydreaming?

P.S. If I schedule blog posts into my diary, you should hear more from me this year.