Creativity

Making Better Choices About Time

By / October 21, 2012 / 1 Comment

It is the interstitial moments that are my downfall. They are the spaces between one task and the next, when I’ve completed one email for business and before I’ve gathered my parenting thoughts to write the next one to a teacher. In that fraction of a moment some part of my brain tells me I should go check twitter. So I do. In fact I click through my saved tabs taking a look at all of my regular websites to see if there is anything new. If there is, I read it. If nothing is new, I feel like I want something new, so I am tempted to click something else, to go find something new. Ten or twenty minutes later I resurface and turn my mind to the next task. Sometimes that brief click through actually does refresh my mind, making me ready for the next thing. More often it fractures my focus, filling my mind with distraction. I have decided that I need to pay attention to this tendency, to acknowledge that sometimes I need a break, but that I should focus my break time on activities which actually refresh and refocus instead of those which distract and fracture. To that end, I have made the following list. These are the things I should do instead of clicking through internet tabs for the umpteenth time.

  • Spend time in spiritual study and scripture reading. Granted this is a larger break, but a very worthwhile one.
  • Go to the gym. Again a longer brake, again very worth the time.
  • Do a five minute house chore like switching out laundry loads or vacuuming a room.
  • Step outside my house and breath outdoor air for five minutes.
  • Spend a few minutes on a gardening task or watering the indoor plants.
  • Glance through fiction notes to see if new ideas jump out. (This one may lead into writing hijacking an hour.)
  • Spend ten or fifteen minutes working on the family photo book projects.
  • Declare writing time and go write fiction for awhile.
  • Read one of those books I’ve been intending to study for style and prose.
  • Read or watch one of the articles or TED talks that I put away to look at later when I had time to focus on it.
  • Just sit and stare at nothing to see what thoughts parade themselves into consciousness.

Some of these things will take more time thank a quick click through websites, but they actually feed and rest my brain in ways that clicking doesn’t. Having the list is a good start. The next part is learning to be mindful.

Being Back at Home

By / October 1, 2012 / 1 Comment

One nice thing about being away from home for a week, it makes me glad to return to all the little tasks of the house. I’d completely forgotten that there is a satisfaction to dishes and laundry. Doing these things definitely becomes a burden over time, but being away from them for a week let me remember when I first started doing my own laundry and felt very grown up about it. This evening I enjoyed the process of planning and preparing dinner, even taking time for extra touches like putting a pitcher of water on the table so that everyone could remain seated instead of constantly bobbing out of their chairs to go get drinks or salt. I need to try to remember that these things are nice instead of always feeling burdened by them.

Kiki cried last night. At first it just seemed part of her head cold or perhaps just a cranky day. However it quickly became apparent that the real reason was that I had come home. She’d been strong and responsible all week long, with me home she could relax and confess how hard it had all been. Except, she told me, it wasn’t all hard. Lots of it was interesting and fun. She liked being grown up, but it was really nice to stop for awhile. I hugged her tight and reassured her that I want nothing more than several months of all of us staying home. It was what she needed to hear, not just that I would be here, but that I wanted to be here. She’d been picturing me off having a gloriously fun time only to return to the work of mothering. I did have fun, but I also spent a lot of time wishing that I were at home doing my regular things.

The other kids did not cry, but they were all quick to drop what they were doing and come hug me. Then they ran back to their things. None of them had tales of woe or worry. They were just glad to have me back.

So today I’ve been picking up where I left off. I’ve shipped out the orders which accumulated in my absence. I cycled many loads of laundry. I tackled the accounting. I slept in my own bed. All is well. Yet there are still reminders of my trip. I just picked a leaf out of my keyboard, remnant of sitting outside to type. I’ve also decided to aim for writing 500-1000 words per day. Those words can be blog posts or fiction. I’m not going to post word counts publicly, I’m just going to try to stretch a little and see where it takes me. If I don’t do something, then it would be all too easy for me to just dive into routine. I watched today how all those little tasks, which I was newly happy to do, each took a bite out of my day until it was consumed. If I want to write, I have to prioritize writing. So I shall.

For now, it is time to step away from the computer and complete the remaining small tasks of the day.

Bits of Stories all Around

By / September 27, 2012

One of the reasons I like walking in the woods is because I see things that beg to be made into stories.

This little clearing was completely covered by this round leafed plant. My brain wanted to explain that the ground was somehow sacred and that I must tread lightly.

These mossy holes in the river bank look like a fairy apartment complex to me.

The structure of these mushroom caps make me think of terraced alien life forms.

I passed by this log and immediately thought of troll skin, or perhaps the skin of some long sleeping mountain giant.

And nearly running into this web across the path reminded me of the spiders and webs in The Hobbit. I’m pretty sure Tolkien met some actual forest spiders before writing that one.

A friend in a writer’s forum mentioned how good it was for writers to do right brained things, like tromping the woods or drawing pictures, instead of always being tangled up in words all the time. I agree. I need to spend time filling up my idea well. Of course a forest is not the only place to find ideas. The jug pictured below is in my room at the retreat. I’m in “Dr. Walker’s room” which used to belong to an actual turn of the century doctor. Many of his medical texts line one of the benches. Seeing them fills me with thoughts about historical medical practices. But the jug also drew my attention. I thought it was kind of cute. Then I got up close for a look. I think those may be human teeth in the jug’s mouth.

Surely these are simply baby teeth that some artist collected after they fell out, but my brain assures me that there are other stories I could tell about this jug. This is particularly true since at the moment I’m reading Mamma Day, a book which has voo doo as a plot element. For now I’m trying not to think about the story possibilities inherent in that jug since most of them are creepy and I sleep in the same room with the thing. I’m sleeping in the same room and the house is over 100 years old. The possibilities for ghost and horror stories abound. But I’ll ponder that when I’m far away back home.

Speaking of home, I miss it a lot today.

My Travel Day

By / September 24, 2012

I began the morning with an intense focus on last minute things. This was because I required the intensity, not because the things needed it. If I did not train my brain into focus, it wanted to wander around the house thinking maudlin thoughts about each and every thing I touched. I really don’t need to contemplate that this is the last time I’ll touch my regular hairbrush for a week. (I have a smaller brush I use for travel.) I made sure to hug my kids and tell them I loved them. I left enough cookies behind for a week’s worth of lunches. Then I got in the car and focused all my thoughts toward getting myself onto the right plane.

As the plane launched into the sky, I wanted a distraction, something to turn my brain off for the next four hours. Instead I began my writer’s retreat. I pulled out my laptop, I read my study materials, I let these things swirl in my brain and made notes on the mixtures and combinations that resulted. I had thoughts about how my 90% complete SWH draft was aimed in the wrong direction, so I knocked it back to 65% to try again. I observed some of the story techniques that I want to use in my magical realism book and some that I did not. I wrote a letter to one of my kids (remaining letters to be written before the mail comes tomorrow) and noted how the slow and contemplative nature of a handwritten letter changed the way I was thinking about that child and my relationship with him. These may be the first of many letters over the next years. On the ground in Atlanta I noted how empowering it is to be able to find my own way through an airport and onward to my destination without anyone there shepherd me. While waiting at the shuttle drop off point for my ride I contemplated how far I was away from home, and noted how that distance was affecting a portion of my emotional landscape. Then I arrived at a house that has been lived in and loved for three generations, you can see it in all the details. I want to wander everywhere and look at everything. Instead I made the acquaintance of some of the other writers over a late dinner. And now I am here, on my computer, in the familiar little piece of internet home that I brought with me.

Oh, you thought I meant physical travel. That part was pretty boring. It involved sitting in a too small space on a crowded airplane and a too small space in a shared airport shuttle. But the enforced stillness gave time for my thoughts to slow down, expand, pay attention to longer thoughts. It is like the difference between watching the ocean and watching a stream. Both are lovely in their own ways, but different.

For tonight, I finish my trip by settling in to sleep. In the morning I’ll have daylight to look around the woods.

In Quest of an Edible Lunch

By / September 17, 2012

The volume of kvetching over school lunch offerings increased this fall. Though that sentence does not paint an accurate picture. My kids would state their complaints if asked, but mostly they engaged in silent protest. Two of them independently decided that they would rather go hungry than eat anything served at school, and a third began hauling salt and spices to school in order to doctor the meals. Adding up all the information makes clear that something has changed in our current kid and school lunch configuration. Paying for school lunch bought me a measure of stress relief, but this year the kids are not demanding as much from me in the way of homework support, so I have extra cycles to explore home lunch options.

I began by ordering some bynto boxes from Goodbyn. These are three-compartment containers with lids. I figure we have a better shot at getting the kids to actually eat lunches from home if I can make the presentation enjoyable. The boxes are due to arrive at the end of the week. Until then my kids will be bagging it. I fully expect there to be challenges in the form of lost boxes, boxes left at school, and boxes not rinsed out after school. My junior high and high school kid have both been subjected to the indignity of having to actually seek out their lockers and learn how to open them so that they will have a place to put their lunches. I guess they’ve just been carrying all their books all day long.

The biggest challenge for me is going to be coming up with variety while keeping the prep process as brainless as possible. Kiki does not like sandwiches, while Link does not like wraps. Patch does not like cheese very much and everyone else does. We’re going to have to do some experimentation to discover which foods best survive transportation to school and sitting at room temperature. In theory this should be familiar ground. I grew up bringing lunch to school and considered buying school lunch to be a treat. I know how to do this, but knowing theory is different from practiced knowledge. It is going to take us time to add this into the rhythm of our days. That process is going to be disrupted by my departure next Monday, or maybe it won’t. There is every chance that Howard and the kids will own this process in my absence and I’ll come home to discover that there is a working system.

Let the quest for edible lunches commence.

Pulling Things Out of the Closet

By / July 25, 2012 / 1 Comment

Little things can make a world of difference. I have been frustrated with my closet for years. The shoes were always in a jumble at the bottom. I thought about getting a shoe rack, but if my shoes took up vertical space, they would interfere with hanging space for shirts. So I kept having to rummage in the bottom of my closet any time I wanted to wear a pair of shoes that had been out of use for awhile. It was only a little bit frustrating, but a little bit of frustration each time begins to accumulate. A couple of weeks ago I was again rummaging for shoes and I felt sad that the rummage process sometimes squashed some of my more attractive shoes. In fact I’d taken to leaving my prettiest shoes in their shoe boxes to protect them. Except that exacerbated the rummage problem. This was when the light went on in my head. I have pretty shoes. They are intended to be decorative. They can be decorative even when I am not wearing them on my feet. I bought a simple shoe rack and put it out where my pretty shoes could make my room feel nicer. It worked. Every time I walked into the room and saw my pretty shoes lined up on their rack, I had a small happiness in my day instead of a small frustration. This week I’ve been doing lots of organizing and I realized that I’ve been hiding away other pretty clothing items which could be decorating my room. I’ve now fixed this.

My scarves and shawls look lovely hanging next to the shoes. The hooks are just adhesive hooks. They don’t damage the dresser at all. Even better, it only took me fifteen minutes combined to assemble the shoe rack and put up the hooks. My work shoes and snow boots still lurk in my closet, but I don’t mind if they get jumbled around.

I also pulled out my earrings where they can be admired.

To hang my earrings, I just used hot glue to affix a fabric mesh into a picture frame. Perhaps later I’ll find a prettier frame, but this works for now.

The hooks for Howard’s hats are not quite working yet, but it still gets them out of the closet and looks better than the jumble which used to adorn the top of the dresser. This picture does not do justice to the lovely warm brown of the top hat.

Bit by bit I am making my house a place full of small beauties and happinesses rather than small frustrations.

Anthropomorphizing my laptop may have been a good business decision

By / June 21, 2012

I’ve always liked the idea of personifying places and things. I think it is cool when people have names for their cars and their houses. For the most part my things acquire fairly dull names like “the van” because I don’t take time to make a cool name stick first. But this time I had it in my head that I’d like to have a Calcifer in my life. Calcifer is the flame creature which powers and runs Howl’s Moving Castle. I wanted something like that in my life, a source of magic and energy, a familiar. So the name Calcifer was already in my head when I realized that the need for a new laptop was dire. My old laptop computer (called “my laptop” even thought I’d attempted to label it Scribit at one point) had reached unusable levels of battery life and memory. Calcifer seemed a perfect name for a portable computer, so I wandered the store looking for which of the computers met my needs and seemed the most like a Calcifer. I settled on a Toshiba brand with a pleasant wood grain look to the casing.

Calcifer came home, and here is where giving him a name makes a difference. If I left him sitting untouched for too long, I started to feel guilty. It was not the guilt of “I spent money I should use this thing” it was the niggling feeling that my friend Calcifer was lonely, that he was waiting for me to use him to write stories, or blog entries, or something. In the month that I’ve had Calcifer I’ve spent a lot more time dwelling in a writer mind space. Today I drafted fiction for the first time in I don’t know how long. It is a weird little psychological feedback loop. The existence of Calcifer in my life encourages me to write. Then I like Calcifer better because he nudges me to do writing. The more I like Calcifer the more motivated I am to make sure he isn’t lonely. I’m quite aware that this laptop I’ve named Calcifer is in fact inanimate. It doesn’t think or care, but names have power over me. I like the results of bestowing this one. Now I just need to get Calcifer a pretty sticker to cover up the Toshiba.

Enabling Creative Dreams

By / May 28, 2012 / 2 Comments

When my fourteen year old son comes to me and tells me he has a plan to change the whole world for the better, I listen. When he clarifies that this plan is for him to video himself talking about his thoughts and life, I give him the video camera and get out of his way. His plan may completely lack in distribution planning, he doesn’t intend to edit anything. It may be uninteresting and unmarketable to the world at large, but even if the only thing in the world that is changed by this effort is my son, then the effort is worthy. Son, have a video camera. Take over my office for an hour at a time. Record away. Because I remember twelve years ago when your father, the full-time cartoonist, took up doodling as a hobby.

Dreams are worthwhile because they change the world, starting with the internal world of the dreamer.

Irises as Spanish Dancers

By / May 12, 2012 / 1 Comment

My Spanish dancers are blooming. Okay, they’re Irises, but every time I see them I think of the swirling skirts of Spanish dancers.

Even holding still the petals seem full of motion.

I also love the way that the petals sparkle when you get up close to them in the sunlight.

This year’s crop is thick. I’m going to have to transplant some in the fall so that they have space to grow tall and glorious again next year.

All too soon these beautiful blooms will be gone, but for now I can sit close and enjoy the fragrance.

Project Fugue

By / March 19, 2012 / 1 Comment

Rather unexpectedly my two days of drifting after sending SEOS off to the printer transformed into several days of driven project fugue. I discovered all of my creative energies and spare moments spent upon pulling together my 2011 One Cobble at a Time book. While I was doing it, I identified a pile of blog entries to be considered for my sampler book. Then I had a realization about what the cover needs to look like, so I spent energy on that. This tearing hurry is because I realized that if I want to have copies of my sampler book in my hands in time for LDS Storymakers, I need to send it off for POD printing by April 6th. I’ve only got three weeks for editing, layout, and cover assembly. It can be done, but only if I do not waste any time. Which is why I spent all of today on this. And now the 2011 One Cobble book is done. Tomorrow I will do a quick edit on the probable sampler blog entries and send them off for opinions from my two volunteer critiquers. Then I will emerge from project fugue and pay attention to everything else. Like my house, which definitely could use some attention.