Beauty Monday & SWIM

My Beauty Monday post this week is short, as I am so excited to tell you about about the Summer Writing Inspiration Movement, or SWIM, co-hosted by Revisionista of The Revising Life and Kiki of the The Prosecco Life.

Actually, forget Beauty Monday for a moment. Let’s first talk about SWIM. First, love the badge:

I think it’s a fantastic way to ensure some support and accountability in getting writing done this summer. Revisionista and Kiki are both working on large academic writing projects this summer, and both have personal writing goals to balance with the professional writings.

I, on the other hand, would really like to use this summer on more personal writing goals, most of them related to this blog:

(1) I know I have mentioned I have been on quite a journey health and energy-wise, and I am working on a way to blog about all this that is useful information for others without revealing too much personal information. And, I admit it, I keep putting it off – some of it is because it’s work to write about something personal without all the personal details. But enough of that! My goal is to write two posts a week on this topic for the next few weeks, until I have a critical mass of posts and can see if the concept unfolds in a way that works for me. Then I will start publishing them. My goal is to start publishing these posts on weekends starting the weekend after July 4, and keep up at least 1-2 posts a week on the subjects for the summer.

(2) Before I start posting about this journey, though, I would like to finish all my half-written posts (I found a draft post for back in February just the other day, eeek) on my blog.

(3) Relatedly, I would also like to publish all the food content I have that involves copying recipes out of cookbooks (as opposed to the easy cut and paste from food sites or blogs) and generally have used all my food content for up to May (with the exception of some seasonal recipes where the items had such a short season, I might as well save the post until next year).

(4) Maybe morning pages – or just getting back into journaling in general as a start. I have really neglected it since the winter.

So those are my long-term goals for the summer. For this week:

(1) Finish 3 draft posts from like Spring and, gulp, February.
(2) Blog at my usual rate, but focus on some food posts that require a bit more work.
(3) Write two “energy/health” posts in preparation for posting on my blog in a couple of weeks as part of a larger series.

And now for Beauty Monday – I finally tried out Essie’s Eternal Optimist color, which I mentioned in my post on Essie pale pinks a few weeks ago. As you can see the picture below, Eternal Optimist is a very pinky nude. I like it better for hands, but it was fun to try it on toes as a change from my usual bright colors.

Badge from Summer Writing blog, picture of my toes by moi