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?

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.

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.

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.

day one observations.

Day one of writing week has been....interesting.

And, oddly enough, very not-writingsome.

I had a lot of big plans to sort through a bunch of writing instructional PDFs and classes that I have sitting here that I've never really looked through, to watch a bunch of web-based classes that, again, I've had sitting here without every going though them, and to read some of the writing books that have piled up.  My thought was to do these things first today, just a little at a time, so I'm clearing out clutter/useful things during my frenzied periods of scribbling.

A funny thing happened, however.

I discovered something valuable.

My brain can either be in receptive mode (learning) or creative mode (doing).  The two are pretty much mutually exclusive.  And once I'm in learning mode, switching the giant red switch in my brain is kind of like climbing Mt. Everest.  It could happen, but not without a sherpa, and possibly, a miracle.

As much as I tried to flip that switch after J went to work, my brain was just not having any of it.  I went for a bike ride, I picked roughly a billion blackberries, I went grocery shopping, I tried sitting down and forcing myself to do it.

Nada.  Nope.  Big, fat resistance at every turn.

My muse is clearly screwing with my head, the clown.

On the plus side, this means I know what I can't do, moving forward.

I still think it's valuable, during writing weeks, to learn as much as I can.  (I'm also finding I know more than I think I do, since most of this info that I've been holding onto so tightly is stuff I'm finding I already know.)  From here on out, however, I'm going to alternate intake days and writing days.  If I can write on a learning day, I totally will, but I'm not going to beat myself up for not writing on these days.

After all, everyone creates differently.  Some people can write entire novels from a single prompt; some have to meticulously plot and plan on paper weeks ahead of time.  That kind of thing.

For me and my brain, well, we just need a separation of intent.  I can write like crazy and outline things off the cuff and produce fairly high word counts on writing days.  Those writing days just need to be different than the days I'm learning about writing.

All in all, a pretty important first day, even if it wasn't quite the way I expected it.