A Few Monday Links

I seem to have found a stomach bug.

My idyllic, facebook-free healing time took a little bit of a sharp left yesterday when I caught the attention of some kind of evil bacterium, intent on making the next 48 hours an unpleasant place to be.  

(I had this whole post planned about the magic power of hibernation in regards to heart-healing after loss, but it was hijacked.  Sorry.)

That said, tummy bugs are good for watching things and reading things.  

And naps.  Many naps.

But since I can't share my naps with you, here's a few interesting links I've found on my (green-tinged) travels.

First, a Thing for people asking about metal watercolor tins.

I bought one of these just to check for quality, since this price is somewhere near fell off the back of a truck low for watercolor tins.  (They can run you as much or more than the filled pans of artist-quality paints.  Not even kidding.)  I kind of expected them to be made of soda-can grade aluminum or have a bunch of sharp edges.

Not so.  They're nowhere near as thick as the more expensive models, but they're of decent quality, hold half or full pans well and securely, and have good mixing space.  I'm sold.  (Especially when the 48-color size is $13.99 USD.  Seriously.)

Downside is that the middle section, which is usually intended for a brush, and usually will accommodate another row of half pans, isn't wide enough for that.  But at this price, I can get a second one if I need to, so it balances out.

Because Terry Brooks is semi-local and fully awesome:

This is an entertaining way to spend 17 minutes of your life, and will add validation to all your efforts to do things that Society, capital S, may feel is beneath you/frivolous.  

Plus, Brooks is awesome.

Hygge your tailfeathers off.

Hygge, the danish concept of making yourself nourished and happy during the long winter months (simplified description, since it's one of those words that doesn't have a great translation into English, like friluftsliv, which is another thing I want more of in my life, thankyouverymuch), is getting a lot of buzz right now.  There are tons of kindle books being self-pubbed by internet marketeers seeing dollar signs over its popularity, but this post by blogger Yes and Yes is still the best one I've found, with 29 practical things you can do to hygge your butt off while the snow flies.

I want to try almost all of these 29 things over the next four months.

Bring on the Woo for winter solstice.

Lori Andrus, of the Priestess Pathway podcast, posted an episode and text post all about four ways to honor and celebrate the winter solstice.  All four are practical ways to settle in for the change of season, and have made me want to schedule some time into my day to mark the passing changes.  

Even if you're allergic to woo, they're still good ideas.

That's enough for now.

I need to go lay back down and bemoan the fact that I have intestines for a while.  I should be back-ish later this week, minus the colony of bacteria that decided to call me their home. :)

Three Good Things

Even when things are tough, finding the good stuff in my life keeps me on an even keel.

I blame it on being a relentless optimist.  (Kind of an annoyingly relentless optimist, to hear some folks describe it, even.)

But seriously, even when stuff in the world presses down like crazy, if I can just manage to find a few things I'm happy about, I know I'll be okay.

Today's writing prompt was just "three good things", and in looking back over my pictures from the last few weeks, I'm reminded of something important:

I've got a lot more than just three things to be happy about.

I had trouble picking three things to share, even.

#bestproblemever

#1: These handmade watercolor paints from Redwood Willow.

Redwood Willow's an etsy seller.  She's one lady, who takes raw pigments and turns them into these paints (and paint sets).  She sells out in literally seconds when she updates most of the time, and for good reason: these paints are awesome.  

I lucked out and got a popsicle set (and a prussian blue, because that's kind of my favorite color ever) a couple months back, and have been using them since.  It's my favorite limited palette right now, and the earthiness of the colors is stunning.

This is her shop, but I'd suggest getting on her instagram, where she announces when she'll have shop updates.  And be quick when it goes live, too.

(sidenote: I just noticed she's got two new-ish colors, Green Earth and Dark Slate Gray, that I don't have.  I think I just licked the monitor.)

#2: The Quinault Rain Forest

A couple weeks back, when I was in the thick of dealing with the sick puppy, I had to get away for a day.  J had the day off, so I packed up a bag and drove the hour and a half north to the edge of the peninsula, and walked around the Quinault in the light, not-so-cold drizzle.  It only took minutes to feel my stressed muscles unclench, and after two hours, I was sopping wet and full of Okayness.

The world is moss-covered and fern-carpeted in the Quinault.  Everything smells green, and the sound of waterfalls and forest songs float through the air.

It literally feels like another world, something primeval and comforting and wild.

And it's only two hours-ish from my front door.

I'm truly blessed.

#3 Virtual Races from Yes.Fit

I know I run the risk of sounding like a total dork here, but...

I don't care.  I'm totally motivated by trinkets.

There are days when I don't want to walk across the room to get my drink, but if I'm working on one of these virtual races with yes.fit, I'd walk across the state for a medal.  (The same thing happened when I was starting to hike, all those years ago, by the way.  I was all ewww outdoors on purpose at the beginning -- being kind of a California girl at that point, but when I found letterboxing and found out that there were hand-carved stamps waiting for me if I followed simple clues on a hike?  BRING ON THE BOOTS, BABY.  I'm easy, see.)

I've won two medals (above) for short to mid- sized races, and am working on a third that's much longer.  And to reinforce the point: I doubled my daily steps since I started.  Literally doubled them.  I love that.

If you don't know how it works, here 'tis in a nutshell:

Having a fitbit helps, but isn't required.  (If you have one, you connect it to yes.fit and it tracks for you.  Otherwise, you have to manually input your mileage every day.)  You just pick a race from the list, pay a really nominal race fee that pays for the medal at the end (which is right around $20-25).  Tell the system how you'll be tracking miles (fitbit or other tracker, or manual), and then walk your patootie off.

As you go along, yes.fit sends you updates mostly every day.  It tells you how far you've gone and what you've unlocked on the map.  Most of the time, that's a google street view of where you're "walking", with occasional side information or PDFs with interesting info about the area.  It's great for this time of year, when getting outside to walk would be inadvisable or dangerous (no frostbite for you, missy!), and lets you feel like you're actually travelling along the routes.

They're adding new races all the time and the facebook community for it is awesomely supportive and positive.

I'm a fan, and totally grateful for all the motivation they're putting out there.  

And yes, the medals are pretty awesome, too.

All the Yes.fit information is here.  (No affiliation, btw.  Just an enthusiastic user of its services.)

So there we have it: my three good things list.

What are your three things today?

Drawing All The Things

A while back, I found this set of Nature Encyclopedias at a thrift shop for less than five bucks for the set.

Of course, they had to come home with me.  I had no real plans for them, but I figured something would come along eventually, even if that was just flipping through them and marvelling at the way we got our info before the internet was invented.

Because National Sketchbook Filling Month is kind of continuing indefinitely, I figured this was an opportunity.

I have blank pages to fill; these things are full of photo references of things I'd like to know more about.  Win-win.

This month, I'm using an A5 (landscape) Strathmore journal for my fill-it-up sketchbook, and I've been blowing through these volumes, drawing four or five things from each one.  It's mostly just my usual pencil-and-watercolor stuff, with a few gouache experiments here and there.  It's been keeping me occupied and my hands moving, and for that, I'm grateful.

A few from this month's play so far:

I'm on volume 4 (of 12), and I'm already about half-way through the book.

Which means this will probably be a longer-than-a-single-sketchbook project, but I'm okay with that.  (Planning on donating the set when I'm done with them, too, so this is both clear-out AND drawing practice.  Bonus score.)

p.s.  I did also "win" NaSkeFiMo last month and filled up the entire Pentalic journal during the month.  I'll see if I can't get a flip-through sometime soonish.  AND I finished the last pages in a journal someone gifted me with in 2014, post-storm, tonight.  Again, I'll see about a flip-through.  It's been interesting to see the evolution of style in the last two years. :)

It's been kind of a week.

(Or, to be more specific, it's been kind of a six weeks.)

After he was acting strangely for a day or two, we took Wilf to the vet to see what on earth was going on.  He'd been needing to go out several times a night, and the vet told us he'd managed to hump his Squeaky Cow into a UTI for himself.  And because that's so totally Wilford, we didn't even question it further.

But all the antibiotics weren't helping.  He went from being up and down a few times a night to being up and down every hour, day or night.  I was averaging less than three hours of sleep there for a while, even.  (Things were getting a bit surreal -- there are two days in there that I literally, even when reading back things I'd posted on Facebook or had written in my bullet journal, could not remember.)

His vet is a lovely woman who clearly loves her job and all her patients, and wanted us to be patient with him.  Some dogs, she said, just take a little longer to respond to antibiotics.  We shouldn't panic yet.  If one more round didn't work, they'd do other tests.  She calmed us and gave us Xanax (again, literally) for the little guy.

A week later, after a brief rallying, we noticed the W was losing a lot of weight.  We could see his spine.  His rib cage was visible.  This is not normal for a dog who could routinely eat his own weight in our other dog's treats.  He started throwing up one night, and when I called in the morning, they had us come in immediately.

It wasn't a UTI.  It was bladder cancer.

In less than an hour, we went from worrying about the surgery to remove kidney stones to having to make that most horrible of decisions.  The doc was relatively certain he wouldn't survive the anaesthesia for another surgery, and told us that, in this kind of cancer, you're looking at a 90-day prognosis, even with palliative care...and worse, that his pain would only get worse and worse as his body grew weaker.

J signed the papers and held him while he passed.  (I was at home with Cash, who has hip dysplasia and couldn't walk around with us if we'd gone together.  And to be fair, I thought W was just going in for another type of antibiotics.  Worst case scenario was surgery for kidney stones...not losing him altogether.)

I'm starting to wonder if I'm ever going to stop crying.

Grief is this weird amorphous, illogical thing.  

I flip around between thinking that we didn't do enough, didn't try enough to save him...and thinking that I was blind to how much pain he was in because I didn't want him to be sick anymore.  A UTI is uncomfortable, sure, and that explained everything, right?  The lethargy and vomiting were side effects from the antibiotics (which they totally can be).  How long did I leave him in pain because I didn't want to see it?

And then I'll have moments where the grief lifts a little and I don't think about it for a while.  Or I know that it's all okay now.  Or I think that yes, the decision sucked, but it was made out of love.

I do know that crying all the time sucks, but I'd rather cry all the time than be the kind of person who doesn't cry at all.

For now, I'm trying to put it all away so I can process the loss.  I stepped away from most of the internet, and I'm finding that moving around in physical space is helping.  I'm cleaning out boxes and closets and inboxes, and doing a fair bit of writing.  I'm getting all the benefits of a power outage, but by choice. :)

Still, I miss my friend, though.

I suspect I always will.

On Filling Up Sketchbooks in November

So this happened the other day.

I'm still toddling along on my weekly theme schedule, trying to balance action creation with all the culling out I'm doing.  I'm reading an insane number of books, putting collage materials and art supplies in "to sell" boxes, and generally trying to give myself the space to breathe.

Somewhere in there, I thought I might also do NaNoWriMo this year, because I love the sense of community and shared goal, but as it's grown close to November 1, I've been feeling a lot of dread about it.  I write a lot.  Not just on writing weeks, either.  A couple years back, I finished NaNo in four days, if that says anything.

So when my friend Corinne posted the books she's made, and I went through my (totally insane pile of) sketchbooks the other night (there are, I kid you not, about fifty in the queue), I joked that maybe we should all try to fill a sketchbook in November instead.

And #NaSkeFiMo was born.

It's totally informal.  We have a facebook group.  The rules are essentially just PICK A BOOK and FILL THAT SUCKER IN A MONTH.

For some people, a 36 page Field Notes book will be a challenge; for others, one of those hundred-page monstrosities will be more in line.  I figure you know your limits and what will be a challenge for you.  Do that thing.  We'll cheerlead.

Moreover, you don't have to paint or do some kind of fine art.  Write.  Write songs.  Write conversation snippets you overhear and collage in your coffee receipts.  Scribble a map of your neighborhood or journal personally.  Stick down photos or selfies or random color charts.  Experiment.  Play.

It doesn't matter how the pages get filled, just that they get filled.

My plan (subject to change) is to dive headlong into a Stillman & Birn softcover.

I actually filled one of the ring-bound ones in October, so I know it's achievable.  And if I finish early, I may start a second one.  Either a Midori insert (maybe) or one of the kraft paper books, or one of my hand-bound sketchbooks...I don't want to decide too far ahead, but I do know that I won't be hesitant to make it two sketchbooks instead of one if I need to.

I guess my goal is just as many pages as possible, plus two.

Girl's gotta stretch, see.

If you're like me and you've got more sketchbook pages than you have time to use them, you're totally invited to play along.

Come on over and join up.

Let's make beautiful pages together. :)

Big Ol' Catch-Up Post

I'd be sad I didn't get more writing done, but there was this.

The Pacific Northwest in the autumn is amazing, y'all.  And while Wander Week didn't start until today, technically, I'm all about the spirit of the thing versus the letter of it.  My whole purpose for these weekly themed "retreats" is to try and give myself dedicated time to focus on one thing at a time, and to make sure I still have a breadth of exposure to the things I love doing.

And if I'd missed this, I'd have missed something I love.  I need more experiences (thus, the focus weeks), not fewer.  So this.  This, this, this.

I decided to head up the mountain one day on a whim, and ended up hiking by an insane drop-off into that river valley below, surrounded by giant Noble Firs and patches of wild carrot.  I sat on a log by the beach at Coldwater Lake and drew the path.  I logged an insane number of fitbit steps.  :D

I wandered.  I invoked the spirit of Walt Whitman and Thoreau (and probably a little Bill Bryson, because it is me we're talking about here), and gallivanted off into the wild.

I loved every minute of it, too.

I also read all of the writing-related books in the house, save a half-dozen that I put aside for next time.  The rest are being passed on to new homes, because the Giant Declutter is still A Thing(tm) around here.

So this week was Art Week.

I did a few things over the past couple weeks.  (A few things that have all but filled a sketchbook, which I'm calling a huge victory.)

*  I've been touristing in my hometown, practicing some things I read about in some urban sketching books.

*  I've been participating peripherally in #worldwatercolorday's monthly challenge, which was kind of summery-themed this month.  (Lots of seaside topics, which is totally cool with me...it just seems a little more July than September to me.) 

*  I even tried to make my own watercolor paint.  I already had the glycerine and gum arabic, and after remembering that eye shadow is essentially just pigment and binder, I crushed up a couple shadows and went for it.  And it worked!  Not the best saturation (while it's pigment, eye shadow is pretty diluted so it doesn't kill your eyes), and way more sparkle than I usually look for in a paint, but it totally worked.  I'm trying not to go insane and buy pigment to play with.  The struggle is real.

I also read through the last of the art books that I'm getting rid of.  (Which is all of them, save seven -- one on anatomy, one on botanical illustration, two on urban sketching, one on sacred geometry, one on keeping a nature journal, and the Laws Guide to Nature Drawing.)  The ones left over are foci for upcoming Art Weeks.  It's nice to have a focus and not feel so overwhelmed with the possibilities, I have to say.

Technically, wander week starts today.

I'm planning on going out today and drawing more things, if the weather holds.  (It's threatening to rain as I write this.)  My friend Laurie, of Glitterfoot Studios, is heading up to hang out and be all creative and junk together.

But most of this week is the final book push.  I've got a small stack of ecology-related/wander-y type things/transcendentalist lit still sitting here that my brain refuses to let go of until I've at least speed-read through them.  

(For the record, once that's done, I've got fiction left in the house, and a scarily small pile of nonfic that I still want to get to.  And I'm done.  I've completely cleared almost a dozen shelves, not including the art supply shelves.  Not even kidding.  It's crazy.)

And maybe -- just maybe -- I can get back onto a mountain somewhere before the snow flies, too.

ww: space to move

This is from the past few days, folks.

It doesn't include books I already dropped off at the Little Free Library, either.  And you can't see the second stack, behind this one, about half as high.

I've been reading books I started and didn't finish.  Or bought and intended to read, and didn't.  Or bought for some inexplicable reason (probably a recommendation from someone) and didn't click with.

In addition, there are four more stacks in different categories on my dining room table (I know, I know...temporary locations, blah blah blah, but it's working for me), and probably two full shelves with my rocks and rattles (mostly nonfiction spirit-y stuffs), and a shelf full of nature stuffs for the Kamana program I've been working on for two years now.  (Master Naturalist program.  It's pretty in-depth and resource-heavy.)

My shelves feel like they can breathe.  I feel like I can breathe.

It's not happening overnight, because I'm insisting on reading things I think are valuable to me.  And since I bought these books, most of them are things that I think are valuable to me.  Go figure. :)

I've also started in on the art supplies and clothes and extraneous stuff that just accumulates with the carnival of living, and I feel like I'm making decent progress, there, too.  Slow.  But decent.  I haven't given up to binge-watch Netflix and stuff my face with pie, so I'm calling that a win.

(Sidenote:  how did I end up with three dozen pink-ish nail polishes?  Is there a Polish Fairy I don't know about?)

As things start to go, I'm finding something important, too.

Stuff is energy.  

It sounds weird, but it's true.

Your stuff has energy.  Energy you put into it, either from your time, your money, or your desire to use/enjoy it.

And when you start shifting that energy around, you get some of it back.  Especially if you use it/pass it on rather than just trying to "organize" it.  

(I put that in quotes because if you're anything like me, "organizing" is just a game of Crap Tetris, where you're not really making it accessible or anything...you're just shoving it more efficiently into a non-accessible space, so getting it out is even more impossible without causing an avalanche.  Perhaps Crap Jenga is more apt.)

I knew, from past experiences, that if I have less, I do more.

I think I just understand now why that is:  I'm reclaiming energy, focus, and attention from the places I put it to store it for a while. 

Moving forward, I just want to be more judicious in my use of Energy Tupperware, I think.

Interestingly enough, Reading Week starts tomorrow.

I love it when one activity dovetails this nicely into the next.  Gives my week some Flow.

This week, I'm continuing the shovel-off.  It's shelf-clearing week.

That means I'm going for volume again this week instead of a particular theme, so to speak.  As per usual, I'll post a list of what got read at the end, and I might be a little quiet while I've got my nose to the papery grindstone.  

But I'll be reading.

And freeing up more space and time and energy in the process.

ww: Clarity.

A big part of my wander weeks is just...thinking.

It's thinking about things that I don't have a lot of time or energy to think about when I'm doing Other Things.   Thinking about adventure or the spirit thereof.  Thinking about lightening my load, both personally and my footprints.  It's watching the world around me and having the ability to take a deep breath and actually see it rather than rushing by it at the speed of light.

For some reason, this week, that's led to what can only be called a clear-out of epic proportions.

I really don't know how I managed to amass this much crap in two years.  Two years ago, I was sitting on a futon mattress at my mother's house, boggling at the fact that we went from a house full of stuff to us, the dogs, and the clothes on our back in four minutes.  I had the stuff in my purse, thankfully (IDs and credit cards and such...things that aren't hard to replace but which are a pain in the patootie to replace in a reasonable timeframe.), and the iPad that I'd grabbed to read in the dentist's office lobby.  (I still boggle at the timing the tornado had.  Even an hour later and we'd have been in that house, too.)

Cut scene of drastic, unplanned minimalism to now.  

My studio's full of stuff with which to make other stuff.  My bookshelves are stuffed to bursting.  I did already clear out my insane stockpile of toilet paper and canned tomatoes, once I realized some sneaky PTSD was turning me into an involuntary prepper, but the part of my brain that buys dental floss and deodorant every time I'm at the store apparently didn't get the psychological memo.  We will not discuss the sheer volume of blank journals I have, because I'm actually embarrassed about the height of that stack.

(Fine.  It's up to my chest.  And I'm not a short girl.  Told you it was embarrassing.)

When this wander week started, I was already in the beginning throes of Consumer Rejection Seizures.

I'm not sure what set it off this time.  Maybe it's that the weather's finally starting to cool off from another long, hot, uncharacteristically-dry northwest summer.  Maybe it's just that I looked around and could not find the floor as easily as I should have been able.  Maybe it's random alien mind control.

Whatever.

The point is that there comes a point for some people,  I think, where they look around and realize that enough has tipped the scales of too much, and there's a sudden overwhelm that can not be denied.  And my scales tipped.  I started looking around at what I actually use vs. what I want to use.  I didn't like what I saw.

So I threw things out.

Or, rather, I've set many of them aside to donate, because none of this stuff is older than two years.  (With the exception of used books and such.)  Someone who needs a book to read may be pleasantly surprised/chuffed to have some of them, and such.  I'm hacking and slashing and reading the ends of things that I abandoned earlier (probably for something more shiny, to be honest), and my goal, if I'm completely transparent about the whole thing, is to be able to fit just a few books into a box and have that be enough. 

I'm not even close to that yet.  But it's a good goal for me.

I mentioned on Facebook that there are two categories of things that are hard for me to get rid of.

These are:

1. Fiction books I haven't read yet.  Despite the fact that I have roughly four billion of them to be read.  I buy fiction with the intention of reading them once and passing them on, since I mostly read for entertainment.  We will also not discuss how high THAT pile is, even with my reading weeks' frenzied devouring of pages.  (Hint: it is higher than the stack of blank journals.)  and,
2. Things that I think reflect or represent my identity.

It's this second one that I'm wrestling with right now.

How do you express who you are if you don't have stuff to do it for you?  The books on your shelves tell a story of who you are.  The clothes you wear, what's in your house, the art on your walls.  All of it makes visible the parts of you that make up you, right?

If those things are gone, what does that mean about you?

You'd think I'd have better perspective on this after already clean-slating it not all that long ago, but I really don't.  I'm reluctant to get rid of things that make me look smart, or deep, or cool, or interesting...probably because of some secret fear that I'm none of those things.  I'm just this dorky little thing bumbling through life like an inflatable pool noodle.  If I don't have things to tell people that I'm worthy, or successful, or cool, then it's up to me to live in a way that expresses those attributes.

And, frankly, that's terrifying.  

Behind the OMG if I get rid of all the art supplies, then what will I even DO all day? panic (which is largely unfounded since I wouldn't get rid of ALL the art supplies, ever, anyway, but my rebellious inner voice is a little bit of a dramatist), I think that's really the fear.  That I won't be seen correctly without external indicators of who I actually am.  I'll be misunderstood, or worse, unseen.

I mean, I'm way too lazy to have to communicate that to everyone who sees me.  It's much easier to just have things that speak for you.  The right book, the right watch, the right pen....all subtly telling others that I am this.  I belong to this tribe.  I am.

It's not stopping me from getting rid of things yet.

I'm still planning on burning through all the things in my life that aren't essential and functional and, yes, to get all Marie Kondo on the situation, which bring me joy.  

I'm just interested to see what will be left.  How it will feel to voluntarily have only the most essential of things.  What kind of living that opens up for me, mentally, physically, spiritually.

More space to wander, most likely.  And more space when the wanderer comes home to rest.

ww: adventure, ho!

It's wander week!

And since it's also Labor Day weekend here in the US, I'm heading out to find some adventure somewhere.

Possibly multiple somewheres.

Will check in as soon as I'm able.

Art week addendum: buckling paper

Stolen shamelessly from Blick, obviously.

So I just read something interesting and had to share.

When you use wet media on something, and the paper goes all wavy?  That has a name.

It's called "cockling".

Yes, it sounds like a baby rooster.  But it's actually science.

See, the way they make paper is this:

Fibers of various kinds -- tree pulp, cotton, linen, other stuff -- are mulched and pulped and essentially shredded into individual fibery bits.  Those are flattened out into exceedingly thin, flat, even layers.

Those layers are then stuck together with some kind of glue into thicker sheets, and then dried.  How they're dried determines the finish.  Cold press is, y'know, cold pressed on big drums.  Hot press is essentially ironed into having that super-smooth texture with very hot drums.

(I'm assuming rough is created by bored wizards between spelling cows to fly or whatever they do.)

All of that is the finish, but the main bit -- the fiber layers -- are the same for everything.

Some have sizing in them, which keeps the paper from eating water like a hungry sponge, too.  In fact, the sizing is what separates watercolor paper from, say, a cheap dimestore notebook's finish.

So then, it gets to you, and you put watery stuff on these fiber layers.

And here's where the magic happens.

All those fibers in there, which have been nestled neatly together in organized rows, are reactive to water.  If you've ever seen a wooden window frame when the rain gets in, you'll know what happens to plant fibers that get wet: they swell.  And these fibers are no different.

Imagine for a second that you glued together about a hundred of those Grow Your Own Insects into a flat sheet shape.  (You know the ones.  The ones that come in a capsule and you put them in a glass of water, and in an hour, you have this huge super cockroach or something that's 100x the size of the original capsule.)

Or a boyfriend, apparently.

If you dunked a strip in the middle of the group into water, in about an hour, you'd have a strip of giant insects, with the other, un-wet toys still their original size.  It would not even remotely be flat anymore.

This is what cockling looks like, only much, much smaller.  

The wet fibers suck up water and expand, which soaks out into the fibers next to the originals, which also expand.  They push outward, but are still constrained by the glue between layers and the dry, more rigid bits at the edge.  They grow into kind of a cup shape, creating valleys made of expanded fibers in various stages of expansion.  The dry parts are pushed up into peaks.

Voila.  You have wavy, not-at-all-flat, cockled pages.

Personally, I don't mind wavy papers in my journals.  Means I worked on those pages and I get a little prideful about finished pages.  Some of my journals have pages that are so cockled that the book puffs open like a fan, barely able to be contained by mere binding anymore, even.

If you want to avoid cockling on bound pages, you need books with thicker papers.  The finish doesn't matter as much as the thickness for this issue -- all papers of all finishes will react similarly with exposure to water.  The degree to which this happens depends on the thickness of the underlying number of layers, which prevent the swelling from taking the whole page with it when it goes rogue.

For unbound sheets, stretching your paper in advance will take out most of the problem, since the WHOLE page is wet down at once, and then flattened out and left to dry evenly across the surface.  Since the fibers are dried with some room between them that way, the water expansion won't affect the neighboring fibers as easily, and you won't get the ripply bits.

Blick has a good youtube video on stretching watercolor paper, if you're interested.

Science, man.  It's awesome.

Art Week - A Dilemma and a Plea: On Hoarding

A friend of mine mentioned her dilemma on Facebook.

And since I've known her forever, I'm totally throwing her under the bus here.  Not because her dilemma is unusual, but because I hear it all the time.

In fact, I've lived this problem.

Z said that she buys all the things, but is then too afraid to use them for some reason.

Oh, girl.  I hear you.

For me, that fear falls into a few different reason categories:

1. I spent a lot of money on them, so they're now "precious".  If I use them up, I'll have to spend more money on more of them.  
2. I'm just going to mess them up.  I don't feel like I'm worthy of using such precious, beautiful, pristine things to slop around with my negligible skills, or just for practice.  I should save them for when I know how to draw better/use the medium better/won't be wasting them.
3. I don't have the time to use them.  I have other things I do much more often, and I bought these things largely as an aspirational piece, because I see what other artists are doing and want to do that, too, or because I think that if I own all the things, I can automagically do all the things.

They're all perfectly good reasons/excuses.  They've all got a valid basis, really.  

But here's the thing I want to beg you to do, folks:  USE THEM ANYWAY.

Yes, they were expensive.  But I'm here to tell you: most art supplies aren't used up in a day.  Or a week.  In some cases, years worth of use.  Up 'til the tornado ate them, I had certain supplies that I had for more than a decade.  And those are supplies that I regularly used.

And now?   I have, say, watercolor tubes that I bought two years ago, use literally all the time, and haven't even made a dent in.  I'm using them up, for sure.  But the incremental use is so tiny that I'd need to literally stop sleeping and do nothing but paint with that color to use it up soon enough for it to be a problem.

Obviously, some things are more easily consumed than others.  Pens will run out.  Markers will get used up.  Books get full.  But if you're like me, those pens and markers are more likely to dry up than get used to death, and I'm probably going to buy more supplies anyway because shiny.  The chances of me reaching the bottom of the art supply pile and not having anything but a stick and some mud with which to draw on the side of the house is so laughable that I'd guffaw out loud...if the pile of drawing pens wouldn't fall over and crush me if I moved that much.

When you don't use them for fear of scarcity, you're not letting them do what they were created to do.  They were made to make marks, hold words and pictures, and flood color onto a surface.  They were not made to live in your drawer.  You're cockblocking your art supplies, and by proxy, your creativity.

Yes, you're going to mess some things up.  That's how learning works.  You make a whole lot of crap before you make things you like looking at.  It's called practice for a reason -- you have to make practice (n) a practice (v) to get from here to there.

And since the materials you're using are kind of integral to the thing you're practicing, you have to use those materials in order to learn how to...uh...use the materials.  It's sort of circular, there, but it's true:  practicing with inferior materials won't teach you how to use the thing you're hoarding.  It'll teach you how to work with inferior materials.  Or, worse, if you don't practice at all, you won't learn how to use ANY materials.

Why did you buy them again?  TO USE THEM.  So do that.  Your practice is important.  The crap you think you're producing is an important step.  You're so worth it. 

Yes, things take time.  It's kind of how time works.

Funny thing is:  whether you take that time to actually use your stuff or take that time to stare at the television fretting about not using that stuff -- the time's still spent.  Might as well use it on the good stuff.

Which brings me to the only reason I'll ever advocate for ditching things: the crowd.

The stuff you bought because XYZ artist uses it and you thought you needed it, but you tried and hated it for your own artmaking?

Throw that nonsense out.  Or better, donate it.

Either way, life's too short to spend mental energy making excuses for stuff you've tested and don't like using.  There are way too many areas we all have to deal with in this life that are unpleasant...your artmaking shouldn't be one of them.

The same with stuff you might want to learn how to do someday.

Either try it, love it, and use it...or try it, hate it, and ditch it.

Those are the options.

Stuff that sits in a drawer isn't art.

It isn't doing you any good.  It's not a magic wand that will spontaneously create works of staggering genius when you're not looking.

You have to use them.  You have to give them direction.  You have to use them as the tools they are to practice your way into skill.

They won't bite.  Or won't bite that hard, at least.

Go.  Make something.  The world needs your voice and your vision.  Use your tools, and make that happen.

Hijacked!

Because of the aforementioned head gasket,

things around here have been a little scrambly.  J's been taking extra shifts at work, and I've been kicking it into gear with the letting go of artworks that I've been holding onto.

(Most artists can tell you -- there's a time in the process where you're really too close to the thing to see it objectively.  It's your baby.  You made that.  And that holding on phase can last a while.  It does, eventually, end, and you can show or sell it at that point, but before that...it's like taking a too-small child somewhere and leaving him for the first time.  Seriously.)

I have a whole bunch of very large canvases that I've done in the past couple years.  For some reason, the big ones mean more to me.  I didn't do them with the intent of selling them, really -- they were more for me, which means they're more personally meaningful of course, but also that attachment thing has been stronger with them, too.

But lately, even before the gasket of doom, I've been feeling like it might be time.

One thing this retreat schedule's taught me is that I need space to focus.  Too much clutter -- physical, mental, or otherwise -- and the weight of the possibilities starts to drag me down.  

I need space to stretch.  Empty places where I can rest my eyes and my cup of coffee.  Where my attention isn't torn into fifty directions.

After all, stuff is energy.  It demands you pay attention to it, to care for it, to let it live up to what it's supposed to be doing with itself.  You can't give it that kind of attention if you can't even remember what all of it is, even.

And these big paintings have been behind my couch for safekeeping for a long time.  That's a lot of stuck energy.

So I decided to un-stick it.

I'm listing them slowly, because I'm giving them an extra coat of UV varnish and touching up the edges on each one.  (Also because every time I touch one, I'm all like but I love this one, despite the fact that I'm saying that to every single one of them, and my house doesn't have that much wall space.

Let go.

Let go.

Let go.

Check them out if you're looking for art.  Or you just want to adopt an overly-coddled baby canvas.  Or you want me to come to your house.

(Well, if you're in Seattle, Portland, or points inbetween, that is.  If you buy a big one, there's a discount for hand delivery or for local pickup.  Shipping big paintings is kind of a production number, and I worry about them in transit sometimes.  So, yep.  I'll bring them to you.  I'm just that kind of midwife.)

And y'know what all of this has to do with writing week?  Not a thing.  I've been hijacked by the letting go-ness of it all.
As soon as these are photographed, I'll be writing again.  I'm listening to a lot of writing classes/books, but that's not writing itself.  

Sooooon.  SOOOOON.

The End of August's Reading Week

I think the heat's throwing off my internal compass.

Usually, I have pretty good luck with randomly picking cheap and free Kindle books.  So much so that I've got something like four BILLION of the things on my devices, awaiting attention.  

It's book hoarding.  

It isn't pretty.

But seriously, I have a big queue, and since books are so plentiful (thank you, O Killers of the Gatekeepers!) and affordable now, I have a rule for myself with books these days:

A book has fifty pages to "hook" me, or it gets deleted.

I used to be a completionist, y'know.  That person who starts a book and must finish every word because it shall not beat me.  And most of the time, even novice authors get into the swing of things within fifty pages, so I don't do a whole lot of deleting, even with the rule.

People, this week about broke my head.

I'm a firm believer in promoting what you love instead of bashing what you hate, like it says up there.  So I'm not going to list out the more than a dozen books I started this week and gave up on.  All I'm going to say is that some of them were just boring.  Some of them were really trite (can we ban books that start with someone waking up to an alarm clock now?).  Some of them would have given a permanent eye-twitch to english teachers and editors universally.

I literally abandoned several of them before my fifty-page rule, because it was clear that the author did not understand even basic spell-check, much less how to tell a story.

More...than....a....dozen,  folks.

Imagine a sad head-shake here.  Because that was totally me, every time I moved a book to the trash folder.  If anyone follows me on Goodreads, they probably think I've lost my mind, since books showed up, were there for, like, an hour or something, and then disappeared without a trace.  (I don't bash individual books over there, either, most of the time.  Just delete them from my "currently reading" and forget they exist.)

So now, I'm moving back into writing week.

There probably won't be a lot of posts here this week, since I'm working on things that won't be ready for public consumption yet, if all goes well.

(Of course, if all does not go well, I'll be posting all the adventures that are distracting me from doing what I'm supposed to do.  I'm okay with that.  Posting is writing, too, right?  Right?!)

I'm chuffed to have the last/first writing week under my belt, too, since I know a lot more about how I write and what makes for the best writing days.  All of that stuff's pretty valuable in the grand scheme of things, really.  The fact that it's not found in any book or class, but only by my own experimentation, makes these weeks more important than I'd like to admit, too.

Onward and upward.

p.s. If you want to see the very few books that I actually finished, August's summary is right here.  It's a very short list.

The End of the First Wander Week

Perhaps the universe is teaching me about obstacles.

That's really all I can come up with for this week, which was supposed to be all about the wandering, but ended up being about just about everything but.

1. It rained, more than it has for most of the summer.
2. The truck blew up in a spectacular metaphorical fireball of gimmeallyourmonies.
3.  I got smacked with a migraine, because of course I did.
4.  And finally, now it's heating up to be un-northwesternlylike temperatures yet again, making wandering dangerous for those of us pasty-faced and not good with heat.

Seriously, y'all.  It was like enough already.

That said, there's also been some awesome.

Things like being offered as many tomatoes as we can reasonably eat without actually turning pink.  Finding blackberries in my own back yard.  Starting to read Tristan Gooley's amazing The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs, which I didn't get nearly enough time with.  Fitting in time to make -- and photocopy/assemble -- another couple of wanderzines with which to stock more wanderstations.

And today, I finally got to wander, though it was by car, since I bought a little Subaru to get us through until J's truck gets fixed.  It's an old, grungy thing, with a manual transmission and just the right amount of character.  And I love it with an unreasonable fervor.  We went to Blick together, and picked out a few colors of gouache that made me happy, and drove home through the green foothills along the path of the river, with blue mountains hazy in the distance.

Now we're back in reading week.

I'm still focusing on the physical stacks where I can.  I need more shelf space.  But I've also got some fantastic audiobooks and ebooks that I'm not going to be rigid about this second time around.  In fact, I might even focus on beach reads this week, since the temperatures are going to be so uncharacteristically steamy.  (I have an embarrassing number of cheesy romances on the ol' Kindle, and we all have our guilty pleasures.  So there.)

Here's hoping this week is a little less eventful, and a whole lot more entertaining.

ARW Days 1 and 2: Preparation-ish

My thought was to try and complete my big ol' SRII* journal.

My heart was in the right place.

However, my heart seems to have forgotten two things:

1. Paint does not dry instantly.
   Not even in 90-degree heat.  At least, not when there's also 80+% humidity.  The paint just sits there in a pool, fanning its face, and laughing at you behind its perfectly manicured hand.  Paint is sloooooow sometimes.
2. There are a lot of pages in that book.
   Seriously.  The thing's, like, two inches thick.  There are more than two hundred pages.  I can do two about every fifteen minutes, even WITH a fan and a heat gun helping me, without having the pages go all mind-meld on each other.  Which means that after working for two days on them pretty much solidly....?  I've done maybe fifty backgrounds.

Let us just say that this is slower and less productive than I'd like.  

I'm probably going to lay off the painting for the rest of this week and just concentrate on filling the pages of a different practice journal.  Read some books and do some exercises instead.  Maybe paint a page or two every time I'm over there near the desk by the acrylic paints, but....no.  

Of course, this means that the retreat week is doing exactly what I wanted it to do:  to show me what's possible in a week.

I think I'm going to end up finding that I can draw/watercolor more practice pages than I can more formal or more collagey pages.  I'm generally much slower at that kind of artwork anyway -- it's not really my natural inclination, but I love the finished result so much that I do it regardless.

So I've got three books set aside, and a whole whack of classes I can work through if I want to tomorrow (if I don't end up finally heading to the Fair to draw prize-winning cows and such).  

Oh, and I had a big Happy today when I finally figured out how my overhead camera thing works.

Now I just have to figure out how my *camera* works for video, and how to edit said video, and I'm gonna be able to let you see exactly what I'm doing on art weeks.  I expect the first few to kind of suck, but I'll probably be super-proud of them anyway.  Sorry in advance for any squealing you might have to listen to.  I'm gonna feel like Spielberg even if the camera jumps around more than a caffeine-addicted kangaroo.

*SRII

A few years back, I took Melody Ross's Soul Restoration II class (which I think she's changed the name of now, to Life Restoration).  One of the activities is building a book, separated into sections, kind of like a book-bound vision board in six or eight different categories.  

That book is one of my favorite possessions.  It's broken, dirty, and smells like tornado.  Pieces of muddy corn fall out of it when I open it.  Some parts are really damaged.  I don't care.  I keep it anyway.

Some of it, though, is a little dated now.  My perspective's different from how it was five years ago.  There are different things I want.  Fewer things.  More important things to me.

So my thought was to do another book, which is exactly what I'm doing.

(I just forgot how long it took me to paint the backgrounds last time, and they were much smaller sections with that one.  Hooboy.  Long-term project, it is.)

WRW Day 7: Um. Well, then.

graphic by the amazing Noel Shiveley, who is my new hero.

What I Did With My Writing Week Final Day
by Elizabeth Metz
aged 45 1/2.

Well...

Um.

I kinda wrote words on a piece of paper at one point...

before I burst into flame and proceeded to melt into a puddle.

And then, to be honest, I took a nice nap.  Watched a few videos from the one class I'm working through, because I figured that might give my supposed writing focus some legitimacy, despite the fact that I wasn't really, y'know, writing anything.

This heat sucks out my will to live.

I wish that was different, but I'm fighting biology here.  And yes, I can turn on the AC in the bedroom and write longhand, but then I get all eye-droopy from the relief of not fighting to stay ahead of the heat and my brain just shuts right down.

I'm kind of a high-maintenance writer.

That said, I did get in the thousand words that I want to make a regular thing.

See, before this, I've always treated my writing like a sprint.  Spend some time outlining and dreaming about story points, sure.  But when I go to actually write the thing, I've been known to go completely off the rails.  We're talking fifteen or sixteen hour days with few breaks until the draft is done.  And since I'm one of the lucky ones who usually writes pretty good first drafts, my work is about 90% done by the end of that frenzied whirlwind of wordslinging.  I run it through some editing software that I've got (ProWritingAid, for the interested), which picks apart the grammar to a degree that would make the strictest of English teachers sit back and think daaaaang...that software is harsh.  Then it's usually ready to go.

All of it, once the writing starts, takes me about a week if I've outlined things well enough.  I've logged nearly twenty thousand word days before.  I woke up with claws for fingers and with semi-permanently crossed eyes and with the ability to make coherent sentences stripped from my arsenal of skills, but that's just how I've always done things.

Y'know that hackneyed old phrase about things being a marathon rather than a sprint?

I'm trying that.

There are no rabid wolves on my tail, making me write a book in a week.

There are no Writing Snipers outside my windows with bullets made of silly string and rotten tomatoes who will get me if I write in a more sane manner.

The zombie apocalypse is not here and angry mobs will steal my computer and hand me over to the brain-eating monsters if I don't completely overdo things.

So I'm aiming for sanity on a regular basis, vs. batsh*t crazy for a few days.

It's probably the biggest thing I've learned from trying to be artificially superproductive during a heat wave.  (As opposed to being inspired, which I've previously waited around to be, before beginning.  Which is dumb, since I know my muse likes motion.)

One or two thousand words a day is easy.  It's painless.  Or, rather, painless in a different kind of way.  It's still sometimes like having bamboo shoots inserted under your toenails to begin, but I can hit that goal in such a short amount of time that I barely notice the pain before I'm done for the day.  I can keep going if I want to sometimes, or during writing retreat weeks, but I won't have to.

I'm gonna do things a little different this time.

I truly think adding this bit to my already-established morning routine may be the most valuable thing to come out of this past week.

And it's priceless, if it gets me going every day.

Tomorrow starts Art Week.

My plans are big for it, of course, but if reality is anything like what the last two categories have been like, I'm pretty sure I'll be scaling them back and finding where I can make the best progress over the course of this first, foundational week.  (After all, these are the baseline weeks, where I'm learning what can be done and how to do it.)

Planning on updating etsy (finally), and maybe filling up an art journal (I've got one in mind), and probably reading/doing a bunch of drawing/painting exercises from some books I've been hoarding.  I'll try to get as many pictures as I can, since this week is (presumed to be) mostly visual.

But first, maybe a few more words for the count before this writing week expires.

Or just a cookie.

Day 6: In Which We Do Absolutely Bupkiss...Kind Of

I told myself that if I hit 5k words for the day, I could go to the fair.

And since I love the fair with an enthusiasm usually only seen in small children and particularly hopped-up puppies, I figured this would be a big ol' carrot at the end of the writing stick.  

My writing brain, however, was having none of that nonsense.

I ended up watching about sixty thousand youtube videos about how to build your own teardrop trailer.  I learned how to keep the weight under fifteen hundred pounds, and even how to install solar panels.

In short, I learned lots of things that had not a thing to do with what I'm writing.

It was procrastination in its purest form.

::sigh::

As I licked my own self-inflicted wounds, I figured it'd make more sense to go on Friday, anyway, since then I can draw all the animals and have it be on-theme, even, rather than a reward.  Which, despite being born from sour grapes, actually does have kind of a logic to it.

So instead of oogling cute farm critters, I went and got groceries like a good little slave to the pen.

On the way home, I pulled through the drive-thru at McD's, thinking I'd grab something small and a cup of coffee, because I really, really wanted breakfast at three p.m. for some reason.  I ordered, and did a little bit of a double-take when she said the price.  It was way lower than I expected.

At the window, I said, "Are you sure?" when she gave me the total.  She read the order back, and added, "And Wednesday's Senior Day between three and five."

::blink blink::

Did she just say....senior day?

On what planet do I look like a senior citizen?

To be fair, the girl was roughly the age of a zygote. I think she may have had bad eyes or something.  Or is just a really bad guesser of ages and didn't want to insult me if I was a senior citizen, because those folks can get loud when you miss a discount.  I thought about correcting her error, but figured McD's doesn't really need the extra money (you know that even with the discount, they're not losing money on that order), and I totally deserve it for not hitting that girl upside her whippersnappery little head with my bedazzled cane.

So I took my McHeartAttack and smiled and came home to put some extra Oil of Olay on my crow's feet.

Just in case.

Tomorrow's the last day of the words.

I plan on finishing strong.  I did come home and write more than 2K words anyway, after dyeing all my grey hair back to a youthful shade never seen before in nature, so the day's not lost.  I'm not 100% pleased with my progress so far, but I've been unfocused with this heat.

Still, I'm farther than I'd have been without this week, and I'm calling that good.

And now I'll go watch Murder, She Wrote episodes and polish the tassels on my decked-out walker or something.  WTF SENIOR CITIZEN.

 

WW Day 5: In Which We Arrange Many Things

I'm not sure what happened to me today.

Actually, I take that back.  I do know.

I was really hot, really tired from yesterday, and the dog broke my toe this morning.  (Those pointy-looking shelves up there that I'll talk about in a minute here?  Dog knocked a pointy bit off a different shelf and directly onto my second-to-the-last-toe on the right side.  I heard a pop and two seconds later, had some rather blinding pain.  I think because he's so cute, the universe had to balance that out with a nice dose of clutziness to keep everything fair.  Ow.)

While I sat here and contemplated whether to take half a vicodin or to go to the doctor, my will to do anything other than whine sort of went out the window.  So I did something I rarely do:  I flipped on the teevee and decided to be a mindless entertainment zombie until I could walk around without feeling like tiny rabid weasels were nibbling at my foot with razor-blade teeth and particularly sting-ey venom.

I can't watch HGTV, y'all.

I can't.

I get all hopped up on the home improvement crack and think that I can renovate ALL THE THINGS, despite the fact that I can injure myself with a shelf and a dog.  I begin to think that if I only had a paint sprayer, my life would be sooooo much easier.  I get all blaze' about house prices and find myself thinking that a 3500 square foot house is a total steal for $3.6 million and that budget of $3.1 million is just way too restrictive.

(I don't have 3.1 million of ANYTHING.  Except maybe dog hairs.  I may have that many of those.  Dollars, not so much.  But I can be totally cavalier with other peoples' millions of house budget dollars in my mind.)

Luckily, today, I was hampered a bit by the toe thing and couldn't immediately start cutting the legs off all my furniture to create a cozy asian-inspired living room or whatever.  But I did end up using that energy by organizing the living snot out of part of the studio/office.  Put up those shelves.  Organized some others.  Threw out a bunch of stuff that I know I'm never going to use or finish, to prep for Art Week this next week.  Wrote a couple letters.   Put away some laundry.  Found out that when a toe's broken on your driving foot, driving over to get some take 'n bake pizzas is an adventure.  (I thought it might be easier than trying to stand and cook.  Not so much, my friends.  Not so much.)

There may have been tiny bits of writing-related stuff.

Not much, admittedly.

I read a few chapters in some writing books.  I wrote those letters.  I filled up the last of one of my writing notebooks and set up a new one to start with tomorrow.  I did a little more outlining.

But really, it was kind of a writing-free writing retreat day.  I'm okay with that, only because the past two days have been a flurry of words and progress, and not every day can be, or burnout'll be the name of the game.  A large percentage of creative work is thinking, and when I'm mindlessly organizing shelves or sorting through papers, I do a lot of that.

Knowing myself, I know I can't do too much of that whole puttering thing or creative inertia will set in and I'll do nothing else, under the guise of puttering...but, really, I'll just be procrastinating.  I'm a master at procrastinating sometimes.

On the plus side, when I hit it hard again tomorrow, I'll be doing so in a much cleaner, more well-organized space.  

I'll take that as a win, even if I have to hobble over for the celebratory high-five.

Dogs.

WR Day 4 - In Which We Have Pie

I woke up today feeling a little bit like a surly porcupine monster.

I'm sure it was a combination of heat and hormones, but I was pricklier than a titanium pufferfish, despite my best efforts to knock it off already.  Everything was annoying me, from the dogs to the weather.

And in my writing, it showed.

I bypassed my typical kinda funny  and went straight into  super sarcastic territory.  It was not pretty.  It was not what either of my current projects needed, either.

After my third instance of hating on my main character with sarcastic asides, I knew something had to be done.  Something drastic.  Something that would knock me out of this little hate machine I'd found myself in.

Enter Jezebel.

I don't think I mentioned it here on the blogbits since I was kind of not updating at the time, but a friend of mine was looking to get rid of her bike a few months back, and since I've been all bike-lusting for a couple years now, I snapped it up so fast that my fingers left little trails of flame in my YES PLEASE CAN I GIVE YOU MONEY NOW email to her.

I named her Jezebel (the bike, not the friend) and we've been happily ticking off the miles together every few days since.  (I'm aiming for every day, but, y'know, life happens.  As do things like stomach flu bugs and deadlines, both of which are not all that conducive to racking up miles on the saddle of a bike.)

Today, I figured that all this prickly annoyance was probably a wee bit of anxiety on my part.  (Another random fact: I've got generalized anxiety disorder.  It's mostly under control, thanks to the power of chemistry.  But every so often, I get some breakthrough, and it's almost always as a result of having too much energy and not enough of the blowing off of steam.  Today was no different, I figured, and thought that maybe if I just hopped in the saddle and wore myself out, it'd fix things up quite nicely.

And it totally did.

Nearly twelve miles of riding in hot-as-satan's-armpit heat, under the blazing daystar, with stops at a local garden shop and random places that caught my eye, and it worked.  I was exhausted.  And sunburned for the first time in roughly forever.  And I hit a hundred cumulative miles (since I started keeping track about a month ago).

I also got pie as a totally self-defeating reward for hitting a century.

But more importantly...it got rid of the Grumpy.

Between the sun and the exertion, I was pretty tired when I got home.  I only hit 2500 words for the day, not including the sarcastic thousand that I deleted.

But those words?  Back to my own voice.

#worthit

First Writing Week: Day Two

This picture has nothing to do with today's entry.  I just found it in my pictures folder, where it's sat, unloved, for something like a year.  (I made it for a friend of mine once, when we were discussing what our autobiographies would be called.)

In today's issue of What Writing Taught Me...

I've learned several things.

1. That I was right.  If I start the day by writing, I'm like a spigot turned all the way on.  That Everest Switch in my brain is in the WRITE NOW position.  Clearly, my muse prefers to be in motion.
2. Writing is very hard work.  I knew this before, mind you.  But I forgot how much a big writing day can knock me on my cupcakes.  After hitting more than five thousand words for the day, I literally passed out cold for a few hours and didn't wake up until nearly 10 p.m..
3. I'm not cut out for project monogamy.  My word count for the day was split over three commercial projects that have been waiting for attention.  In all three cases, I've tried doing the hyperfocused just-work-on-this-one-thing thing, and burnt out to the point where I closed the file and thought they were dead projects.  They weren't.  They just needed me to not try and force myself to work in a way that doesn't work for me.  Duh.
4. I have to have some balance.  My fitbit thinks I may have died, my step count was so low.  That's just a heart attack in the making, right there.  And now, at 10 p.m., I kind of feel simultaneously antsy to the point of distraction, and paranoid about walking anywhere at night.  So balance needs to happen during daytime hours.
5. My slider bars are still connected.  During times of Great Creativity, I get Great Nacho Cravings.  I don't get it, either.
6. My brain can't do meta.  Just before I passed out for a nap, I was looking at a group that I'm in.  It's all writers, discussing the craft of, y'know, writing.  And it sucked all the motivation out of my head.  I can either write or I can talk about writing.  The two are mutually exclusive and can not exist in my head at the same time.  Talk or do.  There are my options.  I know which one I want to pick.

That said, I've had a six thousand word day.

I've significantly added to three previously-dead projects, outlined the living snot out of all three (since, y'know, road maps get you to your destination faster), and even ended up watching a few segments of a class on the business side of things, rather than the craft side of things.  (Those don't seem to suck out my will to live.)

And I did go get some Taco Time nachos. 

You can't fight biology.