There are pockets in the world where people live longer.

Not just a little longer, but many years past the average life expectancy.

In fact, in some of these places, people have three times the chance of living to 100 than Americans do. Ouch.

And they aren’t warehoused in a nursing home or confined to a wheelchair. They are still active, engaged in life, and happy. They enjoy living and prefer it to the alternative.

I certainly don’t want to be an old creaker, sitting in a diaper while somebody feeds me warmed-over pablum. But if I could live to 90 or beyond and still  be healthy, happy, and active, would I want to? You bet. And I bet you would too.

So what do these centenarians have that we don’t?

- Want to Still Be Dancing at 100? Do This, Not That, Barrie Davenport.

I’m continuing my Radiant Goddess journey this month and one of the things I’m working on is my Healthy Living Manifesto. It’s a list of all the truths and principles that I believe and can live every day to experience an energetic joyful life. This article from Live Bold & Bloom shot straight to the core of what my Healthy Living Manifesto will define.

Barrie shares eight lessons from four communities around the world in Italy, Japan, America and Costa Rica. Only half of the lessons relate to exercise and food. The rest focus on family, friends, spirituality and purpose. I particularly love: Have a reason to wake up in the morning.

May your mornings be full of sunshine from your grand purpose in life. Because you are grand and you have purpose.

I value honesty: honesty to ourselves and to others, honesty from ourselves and from others.

I value growth: to learn, to seek knowledge, to change, to improve, to grow.

I value freedom: the freedom of choice and the freedom of expression.

I value perspective: the understanding and insight gained from viewing things up close, from far away, in different environments, how things change and how they stay the same.

I value imagination: to dream, to create, to transform the world around us into something new.

I value love: the love shared between people, the love for community, activities and things that feed your soul.

I value delight: to be delighted by the world and to express delight with applause and giggles and smiles and laughter and dance and hugs.

I value optimism: to see goodness in people, events and the world, to expect goodness from others and opportunities in the world.

My weight has not held back my self-confidence and it doesn’t stop me living life, doing new things and grasping at new opportunities. This made it easier to ignore my weight and work on every other aspect of my life. Now it is the one thing that doesn’t fit with the woman I’ve grown into. It’s the one thing out of balance. I feel unbalanced at odd moments and sometimes topple over before I can right myself.

The last and only time I’ve lost a lot of weight I was swimming three times a week, limited sweets and removed carbs from my dinners. It worked for a while until I went back to my old habits and the weight slipped back on again. It wasn’t my weight that was unbalanced with my life but my relationship with food and exercise. The weight is only a symptom.

I realised at the end of last year that if I really wanted to have a long lasting change I would need to make it a priority, commit the time and effort to learning about myself, listening to my body and repairing my relationships with food and exercise. Almost as soon as I’d made the decision to put my health and wellbeing as my top priority I came across the Radiant Goddess ecourse and it was an amazing, transformational experience.

It’s helped me begin to form my own philosophy about food and with that to guide me I’ve discovered some inspiring people with the same philosophy:

• Live Bold and Bloom
• Trading Pounds
• Raw Reform

I’ve barely kept on the path since the Radiant Goddess ecourse finished. I’ve been trying to ignore my hunger, warring with it. I have been trying to feed my emotions with chocolate and desserts. None of it works like it used to. I know things now that I can’t unlearn. I hear my body when it’s full. My taste buds rebel after a few mouthfuls of rich sweets. I can’t over indulge without the gross after affects that only reinforce what I already know. I can’t go back to how I was. I can’t stay in limbo here. I can only go forward.

And so I turn to the Radiant Goddess ecourse once again and invite you to come along on this journey with me. I’m off for a week in Turkey from Sunday to spend ANZAC Day at Gallipoli and I’ll be back just in time for May 1^st and a month of radiance.

A 21-day nutrition, movement & meditation journey to revitalise your body, mind & soul! You’ll be guided by gorgeous menu plans, movement plans, spirit + inspiration projects, and meditations to guide you as you reawaken your Radiant Goddess self. This is perfect if you’re ready to be moving, meditating, eating & discovering in a joyful, spirited goddess way. Ready to feel blissed out, inspired & radiant?

• My read through is complete. Yay! It took much longer than I had hoped but in the end it was an hour every day that got me to The End.
• My first draft scene list and character lists are complete. Yay!
• I don’t have significant notes on what needs to be changed though some ideas did come to me during the read through. I found that I needed to zoom out from the first draft manuscript, transform my scene list into a Draft II outline and add a plot breakdown to my Draft II scene list before I had enough information to start brainstorming solutions.
• I know almost everything about my first draft. Analysing the first draft from different angles (scene, plot, character) will reveal more weak points and more opportunities.
• I’ve mapped the beats, action and introspection across the scenes that made the cut into Draft II.
• I’ve rearranged Draft II scenes for maximum impact.
• I’ve only vaguely considered theme and message so far.

Revision. February 29.
New plot outline, connecting hook and climax should be complete and solid. All character arcs showing growth and characters de-cliched.

• I have a new plot outline (Yay!) but it has a lot of gaps.
• My hook and climax are solid and haven’t needed to change. Though I have come up with a new idea to make the hook even stronger. Shiny!
• I haven’t done any work on characters yet, though with 46 named characters in the first draft there is certainly work to be done.

Revision. March 31.
Getting into the nitty gritty of theme, message, tension mapping and beats. Scenes rearranged for maximum impact. All these should be firmed up ready for Quarter 2.

• I’ve mapped the beats, action and introspection across the scenes that made the cut into Draft II.
• I’ve rearranged Draft II scenes for maximum impact.
• I’ve only vaguely considered theme and message so far.

I’m really happy with my progress. It took a while to get back into the regular writing/revision habit and make peace with the fact that where revision is concerned I’m a real newbie. I’m finding my own methods and structure within the revision process and I’m excited to move from an analytical phase into a brainstorming phase. Perhaps best of all I still believe in the story.

* Revision schedule for Quarter 1 from Project 2012.

I didn’t end up using all the columns in my spreadsheet but I did find The Sentence structure worked really well in combination with the Notes column. This first draft came in at 67 scenes and 46 named characters.

After emerging from the read through I went back to the Project 2012 posts and recapped the recommendations for Step 1. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my Story Question and Climax lined up.

Story Question: Can Deborah fulfil Charlotte’s last wish to help the beach village prosper?
Climax: Deborah hosts a fair at the beach village to celebrate the end of summer with new business, new opportunities and new visitors.

My interest in the story has survived step one of the revision process and so I moved onto step two: scene selection.

I spent some time puzzling over how to represent this initial outline of what would become Draft II. I had scenes that could be quickly removed but in most cases I could merge several scenes into one. I didn’t want to lose the clarity of my read through notes and yet I didn’t want to burden Draft II with anything from the first draft. I turned to Scrivener in which I’d written the first draft, created a new folder for Draft II and began creating new numbered scene cards with a single sentence description. I then cross referenced these numbered scene cards on my spread sheet to show which scenes from the first draft had made the cut.

It was incredibly refreshing to start the outline of Draft II from scratch. I could follow the flow of the story where it was strongest without the terrible feeling that I was deleting thousands of words or even one scene from the first draft. The whole structure and text from the first draft is still there in Scrivener under the Draft folder. The reference in my spread sheet was enough that I could zoom in to the scene level when I needed to while still allowing me the freedom of restricting the novel as it needed. And so Draft II was born with 40 scenes.

Then I got to grips with Draft II. I read up on everything Merrilee had linked to on story structure and revision. I colour coded my scenes in Scrivener as beats, action or introspection and moved them all around. I stuck to rearranging the existing scenes, adding only two new ones that I’d thought up during the read through, and found I was confident in my decisions and didn’t rethink or undo any changes. Once I knew a scene would fit better earlier on or between two scenes that’s where it went and it stayed where I’d put it. Right away I could see the story becoming stronger, moments with the antagonist were brought in much earlier, each beat was generally followed by a scene of introspective and then the action would rise again until another beat.

Though the restructure was a vast improvement I had begun to see where sub plots began, had only a tentative middle and were never resolved. I turned back to my spread sheet, populated it with my new structure and added a column for each sub plot (four) and two columns for the main plot, one for protagonist and one for antagonist. I did have these columns on the sheet I used for my read through and here was where I needed to fill them in. For each scene I noted down what happened for each plot. Some scenes only covered one plot while others had elements of three or four. This showed me which scenes were pulling their story weight better than others and I could now read each plot outlined as an individual story. It also showed me how quickly or not each plot advanced through the novel.

I’ve identified many gaping holes in my story and it’s time to go back into brainstorming mode. I’m off to become intimately familiar with each of my plot lines and each of my characters to come up with the truly shiny ideas that will strengthen the story and let it glow.

I learnt how to set plans to reach my goals. You break a goal down into all the little steps that it’s going to take for you to get there. You make them small enough that you feel confident you can achieve them. You tackle them one by one, stepping each time closer to your goal.

I thought that if I knew my goal and I knew how I was going to get there (my plan) that I just had to follow through with the plan. Step by step and I would get there, crossing off items on the to do list as I went. My plan didn’t tell me HOW I was going to reach my goal. It told me how I would BEGIN to reach my goal. It told me one way that I might reach my goal. I was under the fallacy that it was the only way.

If I began to fail it was because I wasn’t following The Plan. I ate chocolate, I skipped a day of writing, I didn’t follow The Plan and so I failed. But it was never The Plan that had failed. I didn’t have contingencies in place. I didn’t make a Plan for failure.

As I’ve written recently we are all constantly changing and growing. We change quicker when we are in pursuit of or challenged by something. In pursuit of our dreams our first plan will only hold up so long as we are the same person who made that Plan. We need an ever evolving Plan that changes as we change. The first plan will get us started and even a long way towards our goals. As soon as the Plan stops working CELEBRATE! You are no longer the same person who set out for that goal. You’re probably not the same person who will reach your goal but you’re one huge step closer to it. Reset. Update the Plan and keep going.

We also need to plan for failure but we’re not planning to fail. Any fiction writer will know the many obstacles we place between our protagonist and their story goal. Just like our protagonist’s journey to their goal includes struggle and triumph so does the journey of any human being setting out to create a change in their life. We must expect to be challenged. We must plan to slip up. Life will always happen. There will always be a family or work or personal emergency to take a day away from writing or catch you running for the tub of ice cream at a vulnerable moment. By expecting to be challenged we can plan how to respond when we are challenged. We will see that each challenge is one of many battles in the war to win our dream. You may lose some battles but if you keep fighting long enough you will win more and ultimately your dreams will be yours.

Joy Juice Prompt 33: Embracing Hope has been very timely and asks:

What is a realistic goal I have set for myself right now?
What is my plan for achieving it? If my first plan fails, what
are my other options?

If the goal is more difficult than I imagined (it takes longer,
it’s not fun, it’s way harder that expected), what kind of
hopeful self talk can I use?

“What most people fail to realize is that editing, like writing, is a skill. Like writing, it gets better and easier with practice, methods, and attention. But just as each pie baked makes you a better baker, each house designed makes you a better architect, and each book written makes you a better writer, so does each editorial process make you a better editor.” – Rachel Aaron, c/o Not Enough Words.

Guilty.

Okay, I knew that editing was a skill. What hadn’t sunk in was that editing skills develop almost independently to writing skills. I’ve written six to ten first drafts. I’ve revise only two novels of those novels. The first was a NaNoWriMo novel, a historical novel based on no research that I abandoned after beta readers confirmed the plot was based on a historical fact that was actually fiction. The second broke my confidence and almost broke my writer’s spirit. I thought that a lot of my writing skills, if not all of them would translate beautifully and smoothly when applied to revision. When they didn’t I questioned not just my competence in revision but my competence as a writer.

Editing is hard, especially if you haven’t done it a lot yet. You wouldn’t get mad at someone who couldn’t play the piano perfectly after their very first lesson, so don’t hate on yourself if your first edit goes less than smoothly. Don’t get frustrated when you don’t know how to solve a problem. Instead, step back and think of things in the bigger picture.

Most importantly, edit daily. Just like you write every day during the first draft, edit every day during the editing process. If you get stuck, move on to another problem, but always remember that you are practicing a skill, and unless you’re a savant, you’re not going to be great at it to start with. Have patience with yourself and your book. Don’t give up. You learned enough about writing to get to The End, you can learn enough about editing to get your manuscript ready for publication.

Now I understand that when it comes to novel revision I’m a complete newbie. When it comes to writing a novel I’m not. Just as I’ve committed my time and attention to learning to write and writing daily I’m now committing my time and attention to learning how to edit and editing daily. – Rachel Aaron.

It may have taken the third attempt to approach a revision with the right attitude but I have and this time it’s going to be lucky.

Mark All As Read.

It was the most freeing thing I had done in a long time. As soon as I pressed the button and saw the bold three digits turn to a soft grey zero I felt lighter. I smiled, I breathed deep and went to do something fun to take me forward. I had to trust that if it was important enough I would find out some other way. I had to trust that all the opportunities I’m supposed to take will be presented to me when I need them. I had to trust that the information I need right now will be here for me when I need it.

*

I’ve always collected books, horded books, books that I couldn’t possibly read in one year, two years or more. I did a book exchange of sorts when we visited New Zealand, taking back books that I had read and bringing home books from the to-read bookshelf kept at my parents. There were books I didn’t even remember owning, books that I wouldn’t have picked off the shelf and bought today. I brought back with me the first two books of Juliet Marillier’s Bridei Chronicles. I remember loving her Sevenwaters trilogy, but I must have read them over five years ago. I managed 200 pages of The Dark Mirror before I gave up on the story. I’m almost positive that five or more years ago I would have been enthralled but not now. I’ve changed and my tastes have evolved over time. I’m not the same person who bought those books.

Even worse than collecting physical books has been my collection of Kindle samples, 76 samples that I haven’t read. I struggle to make time to read the books I have bought, the books I still love never mind the books I think I would enjoy, the books I’d be more likely to grow out of before I was able to read them. I ruthlessly deleted all but four of the samples I had on my Kindle. I didn’t stop there and went through my other collections to remove books and documents I’d downloaded onto my Kindle with the intention to read. I felt like I was making way for the books that would truly engage me, that would help me grow.

*

The path we’re all treading that is taking us towards our future is guided by our experiences but it is ever changing as we are ever changing. We cannot guess what we might need in six months or a year’s time. We can set our goals and our dreams but as I’ve learned we may not always need or want the same things we do now by the time it comes around to making it happen. The book or article that might guide us today may not be the same message we need to hear in a week, a month or a year’s time. By keeping a to-read list that takes us month and years into our future we are anticipating where our path will be. By holding onto ideas and ideals set out by our younger self we risk not being open to new ideas, books and opportunities.

Letting go of this control has opened a vast field of possibility for me. . I trust that if I’m meant to read that book or that article I will remember it or rediscovered it at the time it’s perfect for me to read it. I love to track down new books and new articles and I can still savour that search when I have the space and desire to devour the story as soon as I’ve discovered it. I expect I will enjoy the experience all the more for the anticipation and the unknown.

More Tips To Clear Your To Read Lists

1. Review all the newsletters you’re subscribed to through email. The carefully hidden unsubscribe link is usually in small print at the bottom of the email. This is especially easy to do if you’ve been on holiday for a week or two as they’re usually the ones you’ll skip over or archive thinking you’ll read them later.
2. Review all the blogs you’re subscribed to through your RSS feed reader. Some may no longer be active, others you may only skim over articles or skip all together. Be realistic about the volume of posts you can keep up with in any given week and be ruthless.
3. Look at your to read pile or to read bookcase and pretend you are in a book store and have to buy your books all over again. Which ones would you buy and which would you leave behind? Donate all the ones you would leave behind to your favourite charity.
4. Track how many books you actually read in a year and limit your to-read list accordingly.
5. Trust that you will remember or rediscover the books and articles and news you need exactly when you need them.

I’ve wrestled with myself on the train home from work. Do I get off a stop early and go to the gym or ride the train on home to the couch and TV? I’m very conscious of my feelings but getting to the core of why I’m feeling anxious or tired or afraid can leave me in more of a hopeless, pathetic tangle than when I started. I’ve tried focusing on Goddess Leonie’s motto: Do the easiest thing. You’d think the easiest thing would be going home to eat junk food and watch TV, but no. The thought of doing that can bring more anxiety and self-loathing than going to the gym because going to the gym is more true to myself. I try imagining myself taking one path, then the other to see which makes me feel more at peace. I’m fighting against something in myself, some thought, some belief, that I’m not conscious of yet and the anxiety wins either way. In more cases than not I end up rushing off the train a stop early to escape the growing anxiety and my feet take me to the gym. After a swim or a class or aerobic session I feel connected again. Junk food and TV are a part of the woman I was, not the radiant goddess I am or want to always be.

I’ve eaten green smoothies for breakfast, bananas and raisins and plums for snacks, soups and veg filled leftovers for lunch and still in the mid-afternoon I can be ravenous. I’m stuck at my desk, no food in my lunchbox, no change for the vending machine and growing steadily hungrier. I dream of chocolate. I dream of chocolate coated raisins and soft cookies and chocolate buttons and chocolate buttons with caramel in the middle. I’m not at peace with my hunger. I feel a failure for having neglected my body to the point where the hunger takes over all thought and feeling. I think of all the ways I can obtain food that will fill me up and make me feel better, forgetting the feeling of failure. I hate eating on the go and yet I devour two cookies on my walk from the office to the train station. I feel full and uncomfortable. I’ve not only failed by letting myself get hungry but by eating food that tastes good but doesn’t feed my body and by eating it in a way that makes consuming and digesting the food all the more uncomfortable.

A is for Acceptance.

Acceptance, as requisite for self-love, is a call for compassion, not an excuse for apathy. Embracing our whole self allows us to unfurl and feed our true desires from a steady base of honesty, clarity and self-love. – Molly Mahar, ABCs of Self Love series.

I’m still learning how to listen to my body. I’m still learning how to understand what it’s asking of me and how to provide what it needs. My emotions are interfering with the messages from my body. It’s like static over a radio signal. I need to be patient and be compassionate. I need to step outside my emotions and tell myself that it’s going to be okay. That I’m going to get through it. I’m going to learn from it and be better for it. I need to allow myself to be frazzled, to accept the anxiety and know it will get better.

D is for Determination.

Want success? Make more decisions, choose more often, gain more control, and then take responsibility over your success. Period. Want to care for yourself better? Make more decisions, choose more often, gain more control, and then take responsibility over yourself. Period. – Ashley Ambirge, ABCs of Self Love series.

I thought all I needed for now was Compassion. Compassion led me to Acceptance and I knew I could handle another anxiety riddled train journey or bout of ravenous hunger. Then I was reminded to own my choices. I could accept another failure on the path to success but the way to continue on the path to success is to deliberately choose how to deal with the failure. I can deliberately choose to go to the gym no matter how anxious I am on the journey to get there. I can deliberately choose to buy a healthy, filling snack instead of leaning on the emotion crutch that is chocolate. I won’t always be able to deliberately choose the option that’s truest to myself but I can deliberately choose more often. And soon enough, more often will become all the time.

You can get your own FREE copy of The ABCs of Self Love and discover all the fabulous women behind the stories at Stratejoy.