January Update: Art

I once said in one of these blog posts, or some other blog of mine, that six months is about as long as I can go without writing before I start feeling the pull. Well, my last update here was July of last year. Here I am, six months later, here to report...progress?

Indeed. As is fairly typical, I spent the first week of January sick with a cold. But once the misery of that started to fade, the whisperings of characters with stories untold began to stir in the back of my mind. I got to thinking that maybe, just maybe, I'd like to write instead of paint. One of my resolutions this year was to make space for writing, after all. And I was finally in the mood.

I ignored the mood, though. Out of spite? Out of anger? Out of indignation? Out of apathy? I'm not sure. But, much like my dog, when ignored, it gets louder. So, I gave in. I opened up the Sally Prescott adventure I'd been working last year when the muse abandoned me. And I did the thing I always do. I started reading, and when I got to where I left off writing, I was pissed there wasn't more. I always get pissed that there isn't more. That the story didn't magically write itself or someone else didn't go in and finish writing it for me. That I am the one that has to write the words if I want to know how it ends.

Ugh.

But it's okay. I poked at the previous adventure to get my brain back in the right timeline space, and then I dove in. Four days later, I've written three thousand words and moved the story along pretty well, if I do say so myself. I even had fun, researching pirates and figuring out how Sally figures stuff out. My brain did the thing it always does when mulling over a plot, looking at things from every angle, trying to find the simplest, most efficient way to get to what I'm trying to do. I do worry that I may be stuck again, but I am also confident I can hand wave and/or figure it out. If not now, then the next time the need to write strikes me.

I'm hoping it continues to strike me for a bit longer this time, although I have a developmental edit coming up in a couple of days, so I'm running out of time to work on this. I don't like working on my own stuff while editing for other people. I have to live in the world to write and to edit, and I can't fully immerse myself in two worlds at the same time. Or at least, I've never tried, and I don't want to start, now.

So, yes. I may write a couple thousand more words before I get my editing project. And I may write five thousand or ten thousand more after I return the editing project.I don't know. I do know that I did what I always do when I start writing again, and hit the "project timeline" pretty hard. I started a new wordcount spreadsheet for this year and set my monthly goal for 5k. I logged into MyWriteClub and fixed the dates for all the projects I have in there. And I've made a plan of what I want to work on each year for the next decade. AND went to iStock and Selfpubbookcovers to contemplate covers for SP and Mystwatch. UGH. Why can't I just work on what I currently have open and not worry about what comes next? Why do I have to think about writing as producing product? Still? After all this time? You'd think I would have broken that by now, but I am now skeptical I ever will. I think I will always make a ten-year plan every time I start writing again. It sucks.

But I am trying. I read a newsletter from a watercolor painter I took some tutorials from last year. And she talks about art in a non-goal-oriented way. Well, first, she talked about goal setting and how we do it backward. First, you should figure out how you want to feel, and then figure out what it will take to feel that way. Then, you figure out the steps it will take to get there. I haven't taken the time to flip my way of thinking--my goals were all, "write one weekend a month, paint one weekend a month, adventure one weekend a month." Which, I think are good goals, because I feel good when I write and paint and adventure. But the other thing she points out...or actually one of the other artists I follow points out...is that you can't force art. You can make space for it, but if you don't enjoy it, don't do it. If you don't feel the drive to do it, you're not going to succeed. This is why I never did more with the singing classes I could have taken for free for a month. This is why I never play piano for more than a few weeks a year. I like the idea of singing or playing an instrument, but I don't enjoy practicing, and you have to practice to get better.

Painting...writing...I enjoy the practice for that. That's why I love Sally Prescott so much. She's practice. I can go into her world and play around with ridiculous stuff without consequence, because she's ridiculous and the world is ridiculous. And it's why I am so intimidated by finishing CLC and fixing Mystwatch. That's the performance. That, I don't want to get wrong. With painting, I feel like every painting I do is practice. I've never sat down to paint and thought, this is it. This is the performance. This is race day. Well, except once. When I painted my first NAMIL Art painting. That did feel like a test, y'know. A test of all my skills. But this year, I'm hoping to make those into practice rather than performance. Because I like practicing painting. Although I'm just not quite good enough yet to just paint. I still feel like I have to follow tutorials, which certainly complicates things. I'm close. My own paintings get better every time I have a freestyle painting weekend. But my best paintings are still the ones I paint while following someone else.

Anyway. The painting thing was a bit of a digression. But it reminds me so much of when I first got serious about writing. I would spend hours writing stupid things that didn't matter. In fact, the magic of the first Mystwatch book, before it was Mystwatch, before it was even going to be a series, was that I was just writing for practice. At some point, I stopped writing for the joy of writing, for practice, and felt like every time I wrote, I was performing. And in a way, I was. I was writing with hopes of publication. I'm not anymore, except for wanting to create physical copies for friends and family. But I feel like I broke that part of my brain. I walked the neural pathway so many times that it's permanent, even after the last few years of giving up on my publication dreams. Maybe because I still have this small hope of being a professional writer someday. A lot because I write these scenes, especially Sally Prescott, and I wish they could be movies or TV shows. That can't happen if these stories stay on my harddrive. But of course, that probably won't happen even if they were out in the world for all to read.

That was another digression. But. I've been thinking so much about art, lately. I've actually been thinking a lot about myself lately. I've been feeling lost. I've been out of touch with my spirituality. I have been out of touch with nature. I have been long adrift at sea, away from the harbors of writing. And it's now been a month since I did any painting. All of the things I use to define myself are very far away. And the finances haven't been going well, either, which is another thing I use to define myself (sadly).

So. Here I am. On my writing blog, talking about art, because I think art truly is part of the core of me. And I hope that because of or even in spite of my goals, I do manage to do more art this year. Painting without performing. Writing without worry. Taking photos without putting them on a website. Art is for me. And while I preen under the validation of art well done, at the heart of it, I have to do art because that is where I find value in myself. For better or worse.