1. Details of my realization that the week after shipping week is often family member melt-down week. I was the star on Monday. Tuesday featured Gleek and Patch. Today approached normal, but I’m still playing catch-up with accounting, house cleaning, and homework.
2. A great big thank you post to all the people who helped out with our shipping event. They are worthy of praise, warm fuzzies, and treats.
3. The reasons why my shipping system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. The end result may look almost exactly like what I currently have, but the process will either replace my weird Jerry-rigged system, or will demonstrate to me that I just need to continue making-do. This whole thought makes me tired.
4. An intensely thoughtful post about how a hard school year is not necessarily a bad school year. This post would include the definitions of “bad year” and “hard year.” Short version: a bad year results in coping strategies which need to be dismantled. A hard year leaves one exhausted and drained, but positioned well for things to come.
5. My answer to the question “So, are you ready for Christmas yet?” This question pops up everywhere in casual conversation and, while I have a chit-chat sort of answer, the true answer is long. The true answer involves my whole approach to the Christmas holidays, the shape of our traditions, and why I’m just leaving the boxes of decorations out where the kids can decorate, or not, as they wish.
6. A long blog post responding to a discussion on whether the introduction of children into one’s life is the end of creative output for the next few years. Short version: No. It is just the beginning of a whole new set of decisions to make about priorities and how hours should be spent. Answers to these questions will (and should) vary according to person and circumstances. This post would also cover how beginning parenting is a learning process and multiple learning processes have trouble running in parallel. This could be why those established in creative careers seem better positioned to maintain them despite the arrival of small children.
7. A post describing how I’ve been deliberately seeking out things which are visual rather than wordy. This is followed by thoughts about how many photography images on the internet are photoshopped into a better-than-real perfection. This is not just in advertising or photos of people. The internet is full of better-than-real landscapes, product photos, and animal pictures. Then there are thoughts about what feeding ourselves a steady diet of hyper-perfect dream realities does to our psyches and expectations for our lives. This one must draw on psychological research, the Dove “Real beauty” adds, and several articles I’ve read lately.
8. Thoughts about self-promotion and whether there is any benefit to collecting followers, “likes”, etc. There is a definite benefit to having truly committed fans who are willing to support the creator and the work, but people who follow or “like” in order for a chance at a prize are not committed and will vanish as fast as they arrived. Again, this one will have links to articles and supportive research.
9. A post about the office remodel that I am slowly inching my way toward. This includes thoughts on how physical spaces affect the way I view my work and how form can re-shape function in odd ways that will linger for a long time unless one deliberately shakes out of old habits. It is possible that this will include an anecdotal story about a roasting pan. I would try to make my planning-my-shiny-new-office ramble into something relevant.
10. A look forward into the next year and the shape my professional life needs to take. I would view upcoming events with an estimation of whether or not I’ll be attending. I continue to strive for creative balance, pushing, shaking up old habits of thought, and yet being very careful not to spend much time in anxiety land. This would include thoughts on stress, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, anxiety, and probably a measure of whining.
11. An exploration of how my mind is pretty much always this full of 5-10 different thoughts about which I could blog. I fill notebooks. Though lately I’ve been trying a one-notebook approach which has been an interesting switch from my previous methodology of scribble notebook, blog-post notebook, and official journal. This post would probably also include an update on the progress of my River Song journal, which is still accumulating, but much more slowly.
12. Thoughts on calendars and the various holidays all over the world. I recently made a list which had limited space and I had to choose which holidays to include. I would have liked to include them all. The reasons that people declare annual celebrations are fascinating to me. I also find it fascinating that no matter the tradition or geographical location, August appears to be a holiday dead-zone. I wonder why that is.
13. Working on building relationships with kids individually and thinking of them as people rather than collectively as “my kids.”
14. Those blog posts continuing the series about financial structures for creative people.
15. I’m sure there was something else, but I’ve forgotten it now. If it is important, it will come back to me. I’ve had to learn to trust my brain to circle back around to important things.
These all sound like fantastic future blog posts. I’d be particularly interested in #6. Adjusting to a third child in the house has been an enormous challenge, and figuring out how (or whether or not) to weave my creative pursuits into our new family rhythm is something that I’m still puzzling over. I’d love to hear your thoughts at some point.
Thanks again for a fun Saturday morning! Darren and I really enjoyed ourselves.
Thank you so much for coming. I’ll move #6 back up the list of Things to Be Written.
On #6: Those comments in that thread really made me angry. You know what I mean, I’m sure. Luckily they’ve triggered a “you can all bite me” response more than a despairing response from my psyche. If I had a more traditional job, no one would blink if I wasn’t going to quit.
On #3: If you want help with that, I’m happy to think it through with you sometime.
I’m glad you got mad instead of depressed.
I will definitely want help thinking through how to fix the shipping system. However, step one is for me to call my current service providers and see if the problem is user error. I may be failing to make use of features which have been added since I first started shipping. But I’m not going to muck with it until January at the earliest. Between now and then I have too many things to ship.
On number #12, I’ve always considered August pretty dead myself. Though maybe the western half of the Forest Service’s ‘fire season’ can be considered to start in Aug. Not a celebration as such, but it looms large in the mind of all those with some possibility of their forest getting hit this time.
I really appreciate where you’re coming from. What I usually do when this happens is to set down and save somewhere offline a bunch of titles with short descriptions of what the posts under them are going to be about. But blogging them is good too–that way you can get further inspiration from your readers!
Blogging the list has the added benefit that for some of these topics, I can now just consider them blogged and let them go. Others are just notes for piles of thoughts which are still in my head.
Glad to know I’m not the only one who does note taking as a head-clearing activity.
You might be interested in obon celebrations in Japan. Basically, the month of August is for bon odori (obon dancing) with festivals all over the place, usually with fireworks. Mostly, I think it used to be too hot and sticky during the day to do much, so let’s have a party once the evening starts to cool off a bit.
Obon, actually, is the festival when the spirits of the dead return to visit their families.
I will definitely look into obon celebrations. Thank you.