For those of you that know me, you know I love to sew. Mainly, I sew crazy nerd bags, but I also love to sew crazy nerd clothes as well.
 
The first project on my roster is a Time Bandits dress. A dress with a hood! I'm currently designing it now, so what it looks like will have to be a surprise!
 
I found this amazing fabric that reminded me of the map from the movie. To make it really 'read' as a Time Bandits dress I’ll need to add the clock trim to the hem of the dress and maybe around the edge of the hood. I’ll also need to add the colorful symbols throughout.

It’ll be difficult, but I’m hoping the end result will be worth it!

The second project I’m going to work on is adding two more dragon bags to my collection.

I found this beautiful gold/brown reptile patterned vinyl that will make a perfect Daenerys Targaryen dragon companion.

The white reptile patterned vinyl was just too pretty to pass up as well. I originally made a white dragon bag out of plain white vinyl, which turned out great, but when I saw this I knew I had to upgrade!

And finally, the third project I’m working on is a couple of Shadowhunter shirts for me and my fellow nerd girl F.M. Sherrill! We’re huge fans of the book and show and want to show our love by making clothes with the Shadowhunter runes. I designed this fabric on Spoonflower.com, and it should be coming in the mail next week!

I promise as soon as these projects are done I will post them on my blog and on my blog with F.M. Sherrill at www.2nerdgirls.com.

We all have bad habits (i.e. Internet surfing, phone addiction, watching too much TV etc.) but why can’t we have good, healthy habits as well? This is the question I ask myself all the time.
 
If it’s easy to form bad habits, logically, wouldn’t it be easy to form good habits?
 
The answer is no.
 
Okay, not no, but truthfully, bad habits are easier because they tend to be the things that entertain or relax us. Good habits usually include: exercising, eating healthy (which can be not so appetizing), writing every day, reading every day, or anything else you want to be doing with your life but you aren’t. (Because you’re too busy partaking in your bad habits.)
 
So, if you’re looking to start creating some good habits in your life these are the three things I do to make it happen:
 
1. Lists.

Yes, lists can become overwhelming and even more stressful, but they can also take all the noise that’s buzzing around in your head and give it direction. Just make your lists small and doable. I try to make a list of things I need to do during the day in the mornings, then check them off as the day progresses.
 
Three or four things probably should be your max, anything more than that and your head might explode from feeling overwhelmed. (Remember, feeling overwhelmed can lead to paralysis of the brain, which equates to doing absolutely nothing, which equates to guilt and even more stress, so keep it simple.)

Now that you’ve got your list: add one thing on it that you want to become a good habit. For me, it was exercise. I started this fifteen years ago and I’ve been exercising ever since. It became a part of my daily routine because I added it to the list. It sounds over simplified, but it really worked for me.

2. Do it every day.
 
In order for something to become a habit, I need to do it everyday for at least two months. Otherwise, if I forget even one day before that time, I won’t do it for months. My brain and body need to feel like whatever it is I’m doing is permanent, or it’ll slip right back into doing nothing again. I did this with exercise and writing. For me the elliptical was the best way to form an exercise habit. I love watching TV, so I figured, if I’m watching TV anyway, I might as well hop on the elliptical while I’m doing it. And like I said, I’ve been doing it for fifteen years!

As for writing, I started small, writing five hundred words a day for thirty days. Then I upped it to a thousand, and now I’m at two thousand words a day. Once it’s a habit, I can take a day off here or there, but the impulse to write two thousand words a day is officially ingrained in my brain, which is exactly what I wanted!
 
3. Accountability partner.
 
It always helps to have someone you can develop good habits with. It makes it so much easier if you have someone you can call when the last thing you want to do is write, or exercise, or read, or any other good habit you’re trying to lock into your brain.
 
Choose your partner wisely though because you don’t want to enable each other back into your bad habits!
 
The important thing is to at least try. If you want to change your life, you can. It just takes some determination and persistence!

I wish this were an adventure to THE DOCTOR, as in Doctor Who, but no, this was my nightmare journey to my doctor for blood tests. (My doctor is pretty bad a$$ though, in another dimension he probably IS Doctor Who!)
 
The morning started out perfectly. I woke up early so I could leave at an hour before the appointment time. I hate being late and an hour would give me plenty of time to traverse Los Angeles traffic and make it on time.
 
Ha, ha.
 
Even though my doctor’s office is only ten miles away, this trip took me an hour and twenty minutes. So, yes, I was twenty minutes late, which for people who know me is a nightmare unto itself.
 
But let’s start at the beginning.
 
I was already in a slightly grumpy mood considering I had to fast for these blood tests, so I filled up my water bottle, fed my cats and got into my car an hour early (as stated above).
 
Great.
 
So, I’m driving, using Waze to avoid any unnecessary traffic (ha, ha) when…
 
A fire truck needs to pass. Okay. No problem. I pull over, as does everybody else. BUT… another one, then another, then, yes, you guessed it ANOTHER fire truck whizzed by. I hoped everyone and the building they were racing to was okay and pulled onto the freeway.
 
Sigalert! (For those of you that don’t know what this is it’s when the cops stop everyone on the freeway for an unknown amount of time.) Thanks, Waze, thanks. Way to give me a heads up.
 
I’m sitting in the parking lot that is the freeway and my eye catches a flashing light. I’m almost out of gas. In a sigalert. On the freeway.
 
I can’t even move over, we’re literally stopped dead. I wished and prayed I wouldn’t run out of gas while I was sitting there. Imagine how happy the LA drivers behind me would be if when the sigalert was lifted, they STILL couldn’t move. Not very happy. Kind of like I was in that very moment.
 
Finally, the sigalert ended and I was able to get off the freeway and get some gas. I quickly called the doctor’s office (at this point it was already appointment time!) and told them my situation and that I’d be there soon. They were very understanding (like I said, I seriously have the best doctor ever) and told me to be safe and that they’d see me soon.
 
After that hiccup, I actually made it to the office in less than twenty minutes, which was not great, but good enough. I was starving at this point and I went to grab my Cliff bar that I had promised myself I wouldn’t forget only to find that I had completely forgotten it.  So, basically, after taking blood, I’d have nothing to eat and it was already getting close to noon. (I hadn’t eaten since 5PM the day before!) I was feeling a little dizzy to say the least and I hadn’t even had any blood taken from me!
 
I hurried down the stairs of the parking garage completely ignoring what floor I was on. (They mark the floors as different kinds of food, and when you’re starving the last thing you want to see is a giant picture of food!)

As soon as I arrived in the office, they ushered me back into a room where I had to wait for my doctor. I decided to fiddle on my phone while waiting. When I turned on my phone there were three missed calls and my Ring (a video camera attached to our doorbell that allows you to see who’s at your front door and talk to them) was going off and there were two cops at my door.

Apparently, my adorably naughty cat, Snake Plissken (it’s probably our fault for naming him that) set off the sensor alarm inside our house. I tried talking to the cops to let them know that everything was okay, but, of course, there was no signal in my doctor’s office so they couldn’t hear a word I said.

I tried calling and texting my husband, but he was at a work breakfast and his phone was turned off.
 
So, yeah, awesome.
 
Taking blood was the easy part and my amazing doctor gave me a power bar to eat afterwards (remember when I told you how awesome he was? Yeah, he’s really the best).
 
I left the office, called my husband and found out that he had taken care of everything. The cops were cool and my husband disabled the sensor that Snake set off.
 
Walking to the parking garage, I figured out I was on floor Grape, drove home without mishap!
 
I really wasn’t expecting my doctor’s visit to be such an event, but that’s how life goes sometimes. I’m just glad I’m home! Now, to eat!

How many blogs or articles have you read that tell you writing sprints are the key to EVERYTHING? Let’s just say: a great many.

They’re not wrong. I, myself, have written a blog or two of the importance of sprinting. Whether it be a ten minute sprint just to get my creative juices flowing or a two hour sprint when I’m on a deadline and need to get the words on the page. Sprints are the number one way to break yourself out of a writer’s block and get you to that finish line.
 
Why is this?
 
Why is something so simple so effective?

My theory is that it forces your brain to focus when the last thing on the planet it wants to do is FOCUS.

Procrastination is the hardest thing to overcome as a writer or quite frankly in life. I don’t know about you, but I can come up with a list of things I need to do every day before I allow myself to sit down and write. Even though writing is more important that every single item on that list.
 
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m actually a fairly prolific writer. Not Brandon Sanderson or Stephen King kind of prolific (they seriously must write 8,000 words a day!), but I usually write about three books a year. So, prolific, but not as much as I know I could be writing.
 
Sprints make that happen for me. I can absolutely have writing days without them, but it’s the timed focus that helps me create my best work. If I know I only have ten minutes to write, then all my attention is focused on those ten minutes and it stops my mind from wandering, or eating things I shouldn't...

...or worse: Internet surfing! (Duhn, duhn…. Duuhhhhnnnnn)

I tend to do one hour sprints, since those work best for me and I can usually crank out a thousand words or so, but sometimes you just need that five or ten minute sprint to get your head back in the game.
 
So, yes, I am one of the many that have fully boarded the sprint bandwagon, but trust me, they work. If you don’t believe me, just try a ten minute sprint and you can witness the glory yourself lol!