#Trust30 – prompt #6 – Come Alive

Come Alive by Jonathan Mead

Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you had one week left to live, would you still be doing what you’re doing now? In what areas of your life are you preparing to live? Take them off your To Do list and add them to a To Stop list. Resolve to only do what makes you come alive.

Bonus: How can your goals improve the present and not keep you in a perpetual “always something better” spiral?

(Author: Jonathan Mead)

_______________

Is it just my interpretation or are these prompts a little darkly bent? “You have 15 minutes to live, do before you die, you have one week left to live”. I guess the prompt authors lean towards the extreme in order to get the essence of their prompts across in a couple of sentences, and, of course, now that I dissect it, I could be accused of doing the same in my own work, but–still– leaning towards the dark here.

Now that I’ve protested a bit much, I must admit that I wouldn’t change a single thing about what I am currently doing… oh, you know, I would like to sell more books, we’d like to own some property, and maybe have a little less stress and more money, but we are on the ground floor–actually maybe we are a couple of rungs up the ladder towards the life we always wanted to build. I hope everything grows, expands, from here, but I would still chose to write, to be a storyteller. I am not too sure I could survive (mentally) doing anything else.

For the bonus section of the prompt: in regards to goals improving the present, I am launching a mini marketing campaign this week for After the Virus – I believe that slow and steady growth will help me find my readers, who may not necessarily be my friends and family (though their support is greatly appreciated). So, to that end, I am starting to request reviews and spend some time in a few book related forums on Kindle and GoodReads.

However, the more I read about marketing your books, the more it becomes apparent that the best bang for your time is to actually write more books, so, to that end, I will be dividing my time accordingly, and am actually looking forward to digging into a new project.