Creativity Redux

So for like the 8th time in recent history I've started The Artist's Way again.  Clearly there's something in this creativity program for me if I keep doing it.  I think one of the signs for me is that, since I now sort of work on the fringes of publishing, I see all these mom&pop publishers putting out 3-5 eBooks a month on random topics, and somehow they're making it.  They're not millionaires, but I'm buying books from them, and I know others are too because they have employees, and book designers, etc.  They seem to be making enough to be comfortable, and I think to myself, "well I could do that."  

So why don't I?

I mean, I know eBook publishing as well as anybody else out there doing it (probably a lot better than anyone else out there doing it).  I already have a market in place with libraries.  I know good writing.  I've even done some good writing.

So what the hell is my problem???

I have a gazillion excuses - time, energy, job, yada fucking yada.  But I still have 24 hours in the day, just like Gandhi did.  He managed to win independence for an entire subcontinent.  And I can't put out a few eBooks?  Seriously?

I hit a fork in the road recently with my bipolar diagnosis, and then the summer was spent rehoming the cats and tearing down the home office J built me, but I'm starting to get into a groove now that Hannah is settling into a schedule that gives me at least 2 hours in the evening, and an hour in the morning (if I'm lucky) in which to do some creative work and still get a decent night's sleep.  I'm adjusting to my meds so that I don't feel like I got hit by a truck upon waking up every day.  

And the best part is that next year I'm not going to be working as much.  We have decided to move back to Pennsylvania and I'm going to take on contract jobs, hopefully staying with my current organization, and then maybe picking up some other projects along the way.  So I will have time in which to pursue some of these other goals I have around writing and creativity.

Every morning these days I get up around 5:30 or so to write.  I do my Morning Pages, and I'm working on actually finishing a damn NaNoWriMo book.  Which is good, because every day I get more book ideas.  But I actually have to finish one first.  So that's a goal for me, before the next NaNoWriMo in October.  Lots of editing and rewriting.

I have several friends who have had books published this year, and I'm hella jealous.  One has become quite a big deal - I see her books in Barnes & Noble, and I'm so proud of her - and she's an amazing writer.  But I'm tired of being on the fringes of that world.  I want to get in there and create and publish my own stuff, and stuff I've chosen.  I want to have a say over what gets created and published, too.  Life is too short, and I don't want to have some kind of crazy midlife crisis in 10 years because I never followed my dreams when I had the chance.

So here we go using the tools of The Artist's Way again.  Stay tuned to see what comes of it :)

50 Things

So there's a gap in my life right now:

For the first time in four years, since having a baby and not needing to be obsessed with fertility/clomid/shots/ovulation/peeing on sticks, I have a lot of energy and a lot of creative thoughts, and, more than anything, I have the drive to actually complete my creative ideas and take these things that I've been thinking about for years to the next level.

And...

My time is not my own.  I can sit down to a blank page and five minutes later there is crying, and someone is teething and needs to be comforted, or hungry and needs to be fed.

So here I am, with all this energy and ideas, and a complete inability to plan things out.  For a while I said I was going to get up at 6 every day to do my creative projects.  Then Hannah started sleeping like crap, and then she started waking up at 6, too, and really there's a limit to what I can do with this level of sleep deprivation.

When I was in New Zealand I reconnected with a very dear friend of mine who has her own business doing creative work.  I knew her when I lived in London; in fact, I was her intern.  She's about 10 years older than me, and we are ridiculously similar.  We both self sabotage the crap out of ourselves, and we also have grand ambitions that we'll probably never be able to meet.

I spent a lot of time with her, hashing out ideas for the businesses I want to run, the books I want to write, etc.

We came up with an idea.  The 50 Things idea.  It's based on the thought that if you do something every day on your creative idea, even if it's just five minutes, you can accomplish a huge amount.  If you do one Thing over 50 days, you have 50 Things.  If you do one Thing every day for a year, you have 365 Things.  A year seemed a little daunting to get started, so we decided 50 days was doable, and then we could reconsider.

I'm picking two areas to work on (ie two Things a day).  One is creative, one is admin.  I need to get rid of some cats.  One of the major holdups to us moving back to Pennsylvania is the amount of cats we have.  If I did one Thing a day on the cats, for 50 days, I'm pretty certain we'd have found a home for at least a few of them (anybody want a cat?).  The creative area is going to be my book.  I have a NaNoWriMo book I've been working on for years.  I want to complete it.  I'm not sure whether I'm going to publish it on Smashwords or not - I'm not sure that it's quite to the level I'd like it to be.  But I need to finish it, because it's lingering with me.  Every new thing I start to write has the story woven in somehow.  So I need to complete it so I can start new things.

Our 50 Things start on May 10.  

In the meantime, I'm taking a lot of inspiration from this Ira Glass quote on the creative process.

Art People vs Slide People

So it's Friday night and I just took down the Christmas tree.  I know it's supposedly bad luck to leave it up past the Epiphany (though I am a firm believer in keeping it up until then - if we can put the decorations up after Halloween we can at least leave them up until the Magi got to the Baby Jesus).  But last year I diligently took everything down on January 6, thus avoiding bad luck for the year.  And I lost Baby Teysko.  So I think that whole bad-luck thing is a load of hooey, and the tree came down tonight.  Sweet - we get our living room back! But the cats are all wondering where their jungle gym went.  Bummer for them.

One of the big assignments in The Artist's Way is that you're meant to go on Artist's Dates with your Inner Artist at least once a week.  Yesterday J and I went to LACMA.  I hung out in the medieval rooms checking out various paintings, each called Madonna and Child.  They either didn't have very good imaginations, or there wasn't much else to paint during the middle ages.  I'm thinking a combination of both.  

That reminded me of an art history class I took in college.  So I was a history major with a minor in the humanities, so I wound up taking a lot of classes like art and music history.  So let me be clear to start with by saying that I'm not the most visually-stimulated person in the world.  Landscape photography touches me; capturing the magic of creation, nature, etc.  But paintings...not so much.

So the class was huge.  It was like Renaissance Art 101 and there were about 75 people in it.  I wound up in the back.  A non-visually-stimulated person in a huge class in the back row.  And it was only once a week for 3 hours, and because the professor taught like 4 of those classes, he was lazy and always let us out after the break; something I liked at the time, but now I can see that I would have gotten more out of it if I'd actually had three hours of teaching.  Because the professor had too many students, he made the tests all slide-identification.  One word answers with no essays, while I had always excelled at paper-writing and essay questions.  He also said that he would take the term paper out of the syllabus for our class because he didn't want to read 300 papers.  So the whole grade was dependent on those damn slides.  And I was in the back, and not visually stimulated.

I got a D, and a comment on my final exam that I wasn't an art person.

I decided right then and there that art wasn't my thing, and I wasn't into paintings and 'stuff like that'.

When I lived in London, I worked literally on the other side of Trafalgar Square from the National Gallery.  One of the greatest collections of art in the world, right at my doorstep, and it's free.  Took me almost a year to go there.  I'd go to lunchtime evensong services at St Martin's in the Field, but I'd never get over to the gallery.  Too many tourists, and I wasn't into art, I'd say.

So then I started The Artist's Way and needed to go on an artist date.  I figured that it would be a good thing to visit the National Gallery and check out the Leonardo Da Vinci sketches they have (I'm a big Da Vinci fan, just because he was so awesome).  I can't even tell you how blown away I was.  When you're standing up close and personal to a painting, and you can see the brush strokes, and you can see how they made the colors, and how they did the shadows - it was nothing short of mind-blowing.  I was in awe.  My new favorite thing became going to the National Gallery once a week and picking a random painting, and just studying it, learning it, and getting to know it really well.

Well I can't even tell you how pissed off I was for that douchbag professor who was too lazy to read term papers or do his job, and thus led me to think that I wasn't an art person.  I forget his name now and I'm not going to bother looking it up because he's not worth it, but he was so wrong.  At the time I still remembered his name, and I would buy postcards in the gallery gift shop sometimes and write messages to him telling him that he was too quick to judge people, and he should do the job that student tuition paid him to do.  And I would tell him that he was wrong about me, and that almost cost me the joy of art, but I would forgive him if he didn't do it to any other students.  I don't know whether he ever received these, and I don't really care.  It made me feel better to send them.

The point is, I am too an art person, I'm just not into slide identification, and anyone who thinks that's what makes you an art person is just a slide person and doesn't have an ounce of art in their soul.  

Resolutions and Declarations

I'm thinking about my New Year's Resolutions, and I find that, like most people, I make the same ones every year.  They always involve writing, being more creative, being more self-expressed, doing the things that I really love doing (writing, going to museums, meditating, etc).

This year, I am whittling it all down to one Resolution, which is only a 12-week commitment anyway.  I declare that I will complete The Artist's Way, starting yesterday.  If you don't know The Artist's Way, it's a book/course on "discovering and recovering your creative self," and I've owned this book since my sophomore year in college.  No kidding.  That's like 15 years, I think.  There are exercises, writings, readings, meditations, etc., and at the end of it, you're living a much more created/creative life.  I see the value in it.  I see that there's no way I can do all the exercises over 12 weeks and not lead a more creative life.  And yet I have resisted this book for so long.  I've never gone past page 59, somewhere in the middle of week 3.  I reach a point where things start to happen, I get confronted, and I bottle it all up.  I'm one of those people for whom success is much scarier than sitting on the sidelines, talking about and analyzing why I'm not living the life I want to be living.  Suddenly other things become really unbelievably important, and I close the book, literally, on the course, and go back to talking and analyzing.  

A friend of J's is doing the course.  He mentioned it to me, not knowing what exactly it was, and I just sighed.  "I have the book.  I can't get past page 59," I said.  And so my ever-supportive husband has decided to do the course with me.  At first it was just to support me, and keep me from weaseling my way out of it. But now he sees the value in it for himself, too.  

So here's a story on my creativity.

When I was a kid, I loved to write.  I wrote all the time.  I wrote stories in my Hello Kitty diary.  I wrote books and stapled the pages together.  I love writing instruments.  I love notebooks in which to write things.  I love books.  I love words.  I love the power of stories.  Being an only child, my first best friend was Laura Ingalls.  My second best friend, when I was a little older, was Anne of Green Gables.  Oh, how I longed to be with Anne, and call her Cordelia, and spin stories in the Haunted Wood!  

Nobody ever came out and was really mean to me about a creative career like writing.  But my dad, having lived in refugee camps when he escaped from East Germany (and thus knowing what true hunger was) valued security and always guided me to good stable careers.  Teaching, for example.  To this day, my dad would like nothing more than for me to be a teacher back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he could watch over me and take care of me.  

I love my Dad.  But in some ways, he just doesn't get me.  I don't know whether there's a blocked artist living inside of him somewhere who was repressed so that he could be "responsible" and provide for his family (I suspect there is) but he drilled into me the idea that creative careers were for young and irresponsible people, who haven't yet graduated to the Big People Table on which is a spread of mortgages, bills, children, car payments and other Duties Requiring Responsibility.

I never wanted some stable corporate job.  I always wanted to go out and experience the world, and write about the things I saw, and share stories, and be around other storytellers, and read and write and read and write, and generally immerse myself in words.  Words words words, trains, words, planes, words words, nature, words and then more words.  All day, every day. 

I never thought I could actually be a writer.  So I majored in history, and did writing projects on the side.  I created a kickass website on Colonial America, for example - over 150 html pages of information on food, clothes, church, music; basically everything you could want to know about Colonial America.  You can still find it on the web archive if you search for colonialamerica.org and look at the site from around 1999.  Man, it was some kind of wonderful for the early web, and won some awards too.  Go html!  Go geocities!  (Remember Geocities?  What the heck happened to Geocities?)

My senior year in college I had a wonderful semester with a creative writing professor who really nurtured my dream of writing.  He told me I had talent.  He told me I could totally make a living as a writer.  He told me to write write write all the time.  

In December that year, I tagged along on a field trip that my boyfriend's economics club was taking to the NY Stock Exchange.  I had been on an Enya kick for about 2 years, and considered myself pretty hip to the new-age music scene, and spent the entire drive up listening to The Memory of Trees on my discman, and thinking about what I wanted to do when I graduated.  I had received my creative writing portfolio back the day before, with my final grade, and the professor had made some kind of comment to the effect of, "if you don't give it a try, you'll regret it forever."  So I was thinking a lot about how one "became" a writer while listening to "Book of Days".

The bus dropped us off near Central Park, and boyfriend and I were walking through the park when a girl handed us a  flyer for a CD signing at Borders that very afternoon.  The person signing the CD's was Enya - her greatest hits CD, Paint the Sky with Stars.  I knew from having read countless websites about Enya that she rarely did CD signings.  Like, hardly ever.  

I knew it was a sign.  

I grabbed boyfriend and ran to Borders where I waited in line for three hours while he patiently read motorcycle magazines.  When I finally got to go up and meet Enya, I was like Ralphie from A Christmas Story when he meets Santa.  "I want to be a writer, and I think that I could be a writer, and my professor says I should try, but I don't know because I think that I should do something secure so I'm not broke, but I also think that you don't have to be broke to be a writer because there are writers who make a living writing, and I was thinking about it on the drive up here today and I don't come to NY very often, so this is so weird, and this girl was handing out flyers, and I really love your music and I think that I should try to be a writer, and if you say I should, then I definitely will.  What do you say?"  

To which, the lovely ethereal Oracle of Eithne (that's how you spell her name in Celtic, I'm told), replied, "Who should I make the CD out to?"  And gave me a heavenly smile. 

The next semester I took a paralegal certificate course so that I could have something "practical" to do after graduating with my Humanities degree.  I did buy a Writer's Market, but found the whole thing so overwhelming, I didn't know where to start.  If you ever want to get me to stop something, just overwhelm me.  Overwhelm is my thing. 

There was another period when I lived in London when I was officially "freelance" for about a month.  I woke up and meditated.  Then I went to Bar Italia in Soho and drank a hot chocolate, sitting on the silver metal chairs and looking up at Soho Square and the BT Tower, and thinking how grand and bohemian I was.  I would be like Henry Miller!  I couldn't wait!  

Then I would walk up to the internet cafe on Frith Street, I think, plug in my laptop, and get to work.  The internet cafe where I went was also a coffee bar, and they allowed smoking.  I would smoke Silk Cut (because that was the brand that Bridget Jones smoked, and I didn't know any other brands, not being a smoker), and drink cappuccino, and feel very bohemian and liberated.  "Ahh, this is the life," I thought.  And I would wonder, "why can't I live like this all the time?  Where is it written that I have to work in an office?  Where is it written that I can't create beautiful words and stories and somehow make a living from that?"  

But then my UK visa expired, I went home and spent the next year working in a law firm, thus killing the whole Henry Miller mystique.

I started blogging, I do NaNoWriMo, I journal, I am a Vine Voice on Amazon (which means I write good reviews and get free books - yay!); I hover at the sidelines of writing, looking at the people actually doing it and wondering how they figured it out.  

People look at my situation and think I have it made - I work largely from home, I require little supervision from my boss, I am pretty much in charge of my time and what I do with it.  I am fairly compensated.  And I am very lucky.  I really am.  I'm not knocking it.  I'm very grateful for it, in fact.

But losing Baby Teysko has made me rethink everything, and one thing I'm thinking about is that life is too short to not try.  My professor was right - I am kicking myself for not trying sooner.  

So this New Year's I am doing The Artist's Way, and I'm pretty sure that doing it, finishing it, declaring myself the creator of my life, and living out the the things I learn from it will set into motion a whole new life that I can't imagine yet.  

Here goes...