Setting Creative Goals that Work

A lot of creative people struggle with disorganization. Not everyone fits the stereotype, but many of us admire messy artists—an abstract and freeform lifestyle can imply inspiration, heightened creativity, and a liberated or enigmatic personality. More often than not, the reality of this romanticized stereotype of the scatterbrained artist is far from a carefree, bohemian existence. Just like everyone else, we need to set goals to be successful.

Try as I might to moderate the impulse, I'm addicted to goals. I always have something in mind, I'm always on a quest for self-improvement, and I'm always asking what more I could be doing.

I'm also always falling short. Life never goes as planned, and a combination of perfectionism, high ambitions, and ADD can lead to some big disappointments. It's as important to look at how we set goals as it is to consider what those goals might be.

As a compulsive planner, I tend to forget that ultimate, satisfying success isn't planned. It comes from staying ready to embrace opportunity, both by having an open mind and by knowing yourself well—knowing your values, your style, and who you want to see looking back at you in the mirror every morning.

Of course, we all need something to help us stay fulfilled while we're waiting for opportunity to drop by our living rooms (or wherever you like to wait for opportunity). That's where effective, healthy goal-setting comes in.

I'm currently working on a solid list of creative goals for 2011. However, poor goal-setting can lead to failure and—even worse—low self-esteem. Here are some things to keep in mind when making those oft-intimidating New Year's resolutions:

1. Think about your values and choose goals that inspire you. Sometimes, we're really good at something that doesn't have an important place in our value system. Or maybe we just think we should want to get a promotion, find a better-paying job, or write for 20 minutes every single day. When do you feel most rewarded for your work, most happy and fulfilled? For example, I love music, but making it is a collective experience for me. As such, I get little enjoyment from hacking away at a song on the piano alone for hours, but playing or singing with an intimate group of people makes me feel absolutely fantastic. So a good goal would be getting over my fear of singing for friends, not learning an intensely challenging piece on my own. As much as you can, set goals that align with your deeper values and make your efforts feel worthwhile. Life isn't all about numbers.
   
2. Don't fight yourself. Instead, get to know yourself. How and when do you work most effectively? When do you perform at your peak? It's tempting to set goals based on the negatives: things we want to change. Instead, think about your strengths and apply them to what you'd like to accomplish. It's a lot easier to push from good to excellent than from bad to mediocre.
   
3. Get excited. If you're not excited for what's in store, how are you going to stay motivated? Make sure you connect with your goals and know where you want to end up as a result of achieving your goal, whether it's fitting into your college clothes, saving money for an amazing trip out West, or applying for that artist-in-residency program you've been daydreaming about.
   
4. Set goals that you can control. I love to write things like "have a solo photo exhibition" or "write a stage play and see it performed" in my list of long term goals. However, the end result is ultimately in someone else's hands, so it's not a good goal. Healthy goals provide a challenge, but leave success up to you and you alone. Writing a stage play, then reaching out to five different theatre companies to see if anyone's interested is far more productive.
   
5. Break it down. If I want to submit to six literary journals this year, that means I need to set weekly and monthly writing and editing goals to support that. If I want to write a stage play, I need to set a goal to read scripts on a regular basis, experience plenty of live performances, research proper formatting, and find a competent and critical friend to read it when I'm done. Setting a big goal without stepping back and addressing the steps to get there will set you up for disappointment.

How about you? What strategies have you used to kick off 2011? How do you set and manage goals, and when do you check in with yourself to assess your progress?

So This is the New Year...

If you haven't noticed, Mix Tapes & Scribbles has taken a holiday break. I had a mind to announce this, but decided I would just make sure I kept posting over the holidays instead. Instead, here's what I've experienced:

1. Watching the last Broadway performance of Rent  before leaving for Christmas (not even in the same class as the movie version, folks).
2. Traveling to PA for a whirlwind four-day weekend of Christmas festivities.
3. Singing with my dad, cousin, and the church choir on Christmas Eve and experiencing four-part vocal harmony for the first time.
4. Finding out that yes, if pressed, I can still play the piccolo proficiently.
5. Getting good at the drums in Rock Band.
6. Spending two days trying to fly from Baltimore to Los Angeles, including some really exciting foul-weather landing attempts and an unexpected overnight stay in Houston.
7. Finishing my wool wrist warmers and beginning to knit an afghan.
8. Taking a lot of photographs and feeling inspired to write.
9. Seeing Black Swan at the Arclight Theater in Hollywood..

I'm sure there's more, but during this crazy adventure (which remains ongoing—I'm still in L.A.) I haven't had much blogging time in my days. Not to worry, I'm working on a new piece of writing about it all and once the dust settles, I'll have a lot of fodder for the blog. Until then (i.e. until the weekend), posting will be light.

However, I have another artist feature in the can and I'm going to leave you with a short list of resolutions for 2011. These will return with some friends in an upcoming post about goal setting/management, but for now, I'd like to do the following in 2011:

1. Write a script
2. Finish my novel
3. Be in a flashmob
4. Learn a dance
5. Submit to six literary publications
6. Write and feature more guest posts

What do you have in mind for the new year?

How Do I Measure a Year?

Just like I promised, I gave my manuscript away to another reader on December 1. The other day this reader said, "I always envy writers because they can invent such engaging scenes, images, and details. How do you come up with all that?"

If friends or lovers were to ask me, "what do you think of when you think of me? What details?" I would come up with rich little vignettes, full of sensory experiences, this time real and not imagined. I remember by scent, touch, the particular slope of the outside corners of eyes. I remember tiny gestures of love long forgotten by anyone but me.

What I remember less are pictures. For example, winter in Pennsylvania is less a memory of pale gold mowed fields against purple December skies. It's the thick quiet-sound of night with nothing but trees surrounding me. It's wood smoke carrying on cold air that crackles in my lungs.

But sometimes we want to show others what we see. Words paint most of my pictures, but photographs can tell a story not so much about what's there in front of eyes and lenses, but what our hearts and minds can see. I hope that any photograph I take of winter in Pennsylvania will say wood smoke, will say night pulling against your eardrums.

Sometimes I talk too much. Photographs provide a place for thoughts to linger, where we don't need to craft layers of explanation.

I never felt this about photography more than when I worked on this series of nighttime photos:

Even wandering my own house, absorbing brand-new warmth after days with no heat, I'm still enamored with my ability to see.

Naturally, completely unembellished, this is how I see.

I know it should look this way, but I'll always know the flattened and
semi-mysterious,hazy-shape-and-color truth.

These are the dust and shadows I study when I'm trying to find my next
sentence.

What do you remember? Are there sounds in that space? Words? Pictures? What do you remember about a defining moment in a relationship?

Disaster Station

Some weeks are great for goal-setting, relaxing, or doing lots of things you intended to do.

Other weeks are none of the above.

Sometimes, your longest and most tiring days are bunched up at the beginning of the week, you don't go to bed at a reasonable hour, and you're positively bombarded with every crisis imaginable at work. Then, on top of that, the new World of Warcraft expansion is released the same week as your class ends, so you can't play with your friends because you have a ton of writing to do. Oh, and to top it all off, your furnace dies, saddling you with a huge unexpected cost and a heat-free house when it's windy and below freezing outside.

What, that's not how your week happened? Oh, I must be talking about mine!

The end of an era: after over 40 years in operation, my trusty
furnace closes its doors.

Though this hasn't been the greatest week for pondering creative goals, learning a new song on the piano, or getting out my paintbrushes again, it hasn't been without its victories. In fact, I'm exhibiting a hitherto-unforeseen ability to see the light at the end of the tunnel: things won't be crazy forever. They'll be crazy until Sunday night. And on Monday, I can start anew, sans class and sans this week.

After my major project success on Saturday, I was interested to see what would happen when I went to work on Monday morning. As luck would have it, no obvious miracles happened. Life was far more hectic than I expected, and I certainly didn't demolish my entire outstanding task list. However, I managed not to fall behind or panic about how I would get things done. My email inbox stayed under control, I communicated with everyone promptly, and I think I had a far better attitude than I may have expected under the circumstances. So yay for that!

In other news, winter always inspires knitting projects. This time, I decided to take a stab at making my own wrist warmer pattern, making me a bona fide knitted garment designer! I've never been good at lighting stuff to show cable stitching, but here's what I've got so far:

In a few days I should be able to show off the final product on my hand, complete with a little sleeve for my thumb (that part was tough to figure out!).

Entering the Matrix

Nearly four months ago, I moved the furniture around on the second floor of my house to create a bright, orderly, sunny, inviting new office. I'm typing there now, sipping coffee and gazing at the winter morning sun reflecting pale and clean off of telephone wires and buildings.

This was a great move, except for one thing: when I created my office, I left behind another room. A room with too many furniture pieces, a room where we discarded everything we weren't sure what to do with. Every time I entered this room to clean it up, my thoughts seemed to disperse, fleeing in every direction as an overwhelmed feeling washed over me and I shut the door again. I literally pretended this room did not exist in my house for four months.

Yesterday morning I stood in the living room with a pill in my hand. I felt a little like Neo in the Matrix, on the precipice and able to choose between two worlds. I tried to remember what I'd told my rational self: if I had a chemical imbalance anywhere else in my body, I would have no moral objection to medicating it. I had completed a rough draft of a novel, and not finishing it would be devastating. I wasn't getting what I want out of life. Oh and hello, I had been living minus one room in my house for months.

So, with some trepidation over how I would feel, I took it—ritalin.

I make mention of ADD as it relates to work and creativity on this blog fairly often, but I don't get nitty gritty about what my life is like. Honestly, it's a little upsetting. But at some point recently, I realized that being strong-willed and high-functioning might not get me everywhere I want to go. I had long ago accepted that life was just going to be harder for me. I could have some of the same successes others had, maybe even more, but I would have to work far harder. And outside academia, where I had the benefit of not needing to try to succeed, I was losing some key battles. Most importantly, I was tired of existing at a baseline of anxiety and panic mixed with persistent lethargy—it is one of the most uncomfortable feelings I can imagine.

So what happened? Internally, I felt calm and quiet when I needed it, plus an exhausting sense of focus (I say exhausting because I never work on anything continuously for that long, and I was beyond tired by the time I was done). The curtain call finally came for that clamoring need to do 10 things at once, and somehow when I opened the door to that room I felt okay. I understood that some things needed to be thrown away, some taken downstairs to the tool chest, some put in the storage room, and others given away. After a couple hours of work I looked at the floor and was dismayed at how much I still had to do—until I realized I had sorted everything into bags according to where they needed to go in the house.

My husband came in to help me untangle a huge ball of yarn. I watched him work on it until he told me to start winding it into a new ball and realized that usually, watching him work on a task like that would have made me feel like I was about to climb up the walls. I would have gotten impatient, yelled at him for taking too long, tried to rush the process by grabbing at a piece of the yarn, and eventually frustrated him enough that he would walk out of the room, leaving me to work alone. This time we worked as a team. I stayed calm and grounded and in control.

By 2:00, I had earned the prize I'd been waiting for: a trip to Target to shop for an area rug for my new room. Not only that, I had found a significant amount of cash laying around as I was cleaning—enough to cover the cost of the rug, two 16x20 photo frames, and some new Christmas decorations!

Unfortunately, I don't have 'before' photos. I should have taken some, but if you've seen Clean House, you know what a room looks like when the furniture is thrown in every which way and a lot of random possessions are discarded in the space. I couldn't walk across the room without tripping or stepping on something. And by dinnertime, the room looked like this:

Sometimes people refuse to believe I have a problem. I think this is because my primary motivator is fear of failure. Things really get accomplished when my stress levels about them reach a breaking point. That's why I'm great on a team, I get the important stuff done at work, and I always got good grades.

However, I've always been hiding something: the incomplete personal projects, the closed-off room in my house, etc. And the worst thing about having ADD as an adult is this: no matter how successful you are where it really counts, you still don't feel like a successful person. You still feel like there's something wrong with you, or like you may never achieve your dreams or be as successful as those around you. It becomes almost impossible to relax because there are always things looming at the edge of your mind, even though you aren't doing a thing about them.

The act of actually finishing a project really gave me a boost in self-confidence. And while there's no magic bullet—medication doesn't make you feel like a regular person, your mind and body are both aware that something external is making you productive—there are tools we can fall back on. In this case, I used a tool that allowed my mind to understand a complex task and take it on. The decision to enter this experiment pitted me against my own stubbornness and willpower, which is why it took me years to get here. I'm sure I'll continue to have thoughts on it (which I will share, of course), but hopefully I'll have more to report than just making my space more inviting: things like completed manuscripts, more days at the piano, a nice little art corner in the basement.

If you've had any similar experiences, I'd love to hear them! I know the issue of medication and attention disorders is a contentious one, especially among adults, but I also know a lot of people close to me have had their own struggles and successes. Feel free to share your story as well!

Productive in All the Wrong Places

Yesterday I resolved to wrap a few things up at work, then head home so I had some extra time to pack for our Thanksgiving travels. While I cleaned up my desk at the office I occasionally stopped to add to my list of things to pack: manuscript, next week's class readings, notebook, camera...

Surely I didn't want to forget anything.

Then I realized, I always pack these things, but I come home disappointed with how little I've gotten done. Holiday travelling is far from a golden opportunity for productivity. It's a time when we do lots of driving, visiting, and more visiting. So this Thanksgiving, I'm packing my manuscript, but I'm just going to concentrate on enjoying the time off as much as I can.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Friday Surprises

What a busy Friday! I don't know about you, but my office provided no shortage of chaos this morning. Fortunately, everything settled down and when the mail came, I had a surprise! 16 exposures of monochrome film for Polaroid fun this weekend.

Hope you had some nice surprises today, too!

Rumors are true: whenever I use my phone to take pictures for the the
blog, I insist on stylizing them.

Facebook Fast at Mid-Month

Near the beginning of the month, I embarked on a Facebook Fast. I call it that because, similar to how you don't actually stop eating for a fast (just drink gross stuff like broth or wheatgrass), I haven't given up Facebook for the month. I can't. I get paid to do just the opposite.

But I don't get paid to use it at home, so I decided to find out how banishing it from my house would affect my life.

I don't spend hours on Facebook, but I do end up there whenever I get distracted or am not sure what to do next. For a person with ADD, this happens a lot. Without Facebook, two things have happened: first, when I don't know what to do next I'm forced to spend a few seconds considering how I want to spend my time. This has made me more intentional about what I do.

Secondly, when I want to share something, I can't just throw it up on my Facebook wall. I have to decide whether I want to share it on twitter, the blog, or in a personal email to a friend. I have replied to some long-overdue emails and, even more surprisingly, returned two phone calls (anyone who knows me knows I don't do telephone conversations). After all that, I wrote a letter.

Our society seems to be gravitating toward a default practice of universal sharing. I'll be the first to admit my Facebook page is important. I put a lot of effort into making sure it represents me in just the way I want. But at the end of the day, those personal emails to friends, those phone calls, those handwritten letters—those are the real substance of human connection. Facebook is like pop music: fun to indulge in and maybe even necessary, but not something to put at the foundation of our existence.

Sometimes, though, we need to remove extraneous factors to figure out what should be at the foundation of our existence.

Life is a Strategy Game, Too

Occasionally, I make reference to the fact that I play World of Warcraft. I generally use it as an example—something purely recreational, something I could cut out of my life in order to leave more time for art-making.

Not today though. Today I want to talk about my proclivity for gaming in the context of doing creative work. Don't worry, I'll keep it simple so you won't need to turn in your membership card to the Cool Kids Club at the end of this post.

For those not in the nerd universe, World of Warcraft is an online, multi-player game with more than 12 million subscribers as of this writing. Players create a character and enter into a virtual world where they can interact with various beings/creatures, complete a wide range of missions, join social groups with other players, and progress through a plot and leveling system sort of similar to Dungeons and Dragons.

The game has no end, really—to keep their loyal following addicted and paying their subscription fees, the game developers need to change the playing field from time to time.

Recently they introduced a new system for consuming your character's energy and converting it into abilities and attacks. Players now generate a secondary resource when their character performs certain actions, and consuming that secondary resource provides access to extra abilities.

I've been thinking a lot about this change to my game play, and I've concluded that it really jives with me. It encourages higher-level strategy and decision-making because you need to work out what ability is most appropriate for any given situation (lest you run out of resources before your task is complete), both in terms of short-term gains and long-term investment.

Sound familiar? We're all working with a very finite resource: time. Waking hours. Energy. We need to choose carefully what we do each day so we don't eat through all our time and conclude our evenings feeling exhausted but not having gotten what we needed out of life.

At the same time, we need to know what replenishes our stores in a more profound sense than just sleeping off a long day. We can't just pound away at our hardest, most productive work without a break. We'll burn out. I have to fight the urge to feel guilty every time I watch a movie or fire up a game on my computer. After all, shouldn't I be devoting every spare moment to my novel?

Despite my knee-jerk reaction, the answer is no. To spend creative energy, I have to generate it first. And sometimes unwinding and having a good time loosens my mind, lets me forget about the six stressful things happening at the office, and puts me in a frame of mind where I'm ready to sit down and work. It generates creative energy in the background so I have something to draw from later.

The more I play strategy games, the more I realize I never really stop playing. Life is all strategy, like the old adage says: don't work hard, work smart. We all start out with a unique set of resources, but it's how we invest them that makes all the difference in the world. And sometimes that investment means slipping replenishing activities into the rotation to make sure we have the creative energy to burn when it really matters.

Where Photos and Life Intersect

Sometimes I like to be on the fringes of life's major events, volunteering to take photos so I don't have to figure out how to involve myself directly. An art degree can be an introvert's best friend.

Other times, documenting an experience with photos feels intrusive. I put my camera away and just watch, trusting my eyes and my heart to preserve the only record. Such was the case as I cared for my cat in the last few weeks of her life.

Sometimes we go through a harrowing time with our partners and the world feels completely closed off, our hearts fusing together and throwing up a shield that mutes the rest of the world for a little while. I never could have predicted how hard today would be. This morning, less than an hour before we left for the doctor to have our cat put to sleep, I turned to my husband and said, "I want a picture of her just like that, with the sun behind her."

And so it was: for the first time since the whole thing began, I wanted to take just one photograph. And in the end, I feel like it sums up exactly how I saw Katie at that moment. When it works, that's what photography does: it takes what your heart and mind are seeing and places it in front of someone else's eyes.

Imminent Ends and Beginnings

Today I realized 2010 is almost over.

I'm not traumatized per se, especially because the end of the year brings Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas, and then New Year's quickly followed by our annual Vermont ski vacation. Plus, by this point I'm over 2010 anyway. I'm more than ready to be a year older and start planning a new set of adventures.

However, I also have to face my list of creative goals for the year. So far I've crossed off seven of my 17 goals, which isn't terrible, but I also need to be realistic about my outlook for the next two months: I'll have a class to contend with for most of that time, I'll be away for a week and a half surrounding Christmas and New Year's, I have a five-minute video to produce for work before November 9, and my cat is terminally ill. I have plenty of distractions to keep me busy.

More and more, I've been assessing my goals against the backdrop of doing NaNoWriMo this year. Granted, winning again in 2011 is on my list of goals, but doing so would come at the cost of many others. I may not get to declutter the house, learn a song well on the piano, or fill three notebooks. Maybe most importantly, I may not finish the next draft of my current novel, and I'm absolutely committed to getting that done.

Hard as it may be, I might need to prioritize my other goals, plenty of which include writing. In fact, I may even resolve to do something creative every day in November, as a reminder that even though I'm not writing a novel, the month should still be dedicated to meeting my goals and getting things done.

More than the year being nearly over, the important realization here is how much of life is about choices and managing a finite number of resources. But that's another post—maybe even one involving video game metaphors. For now, I need to spend the last week of October regrouping and figuring out how to make the end of 2010 the best it can be!

There and Back Again.

When I wrapped up my undergraduate degree (BFA with a concentration in painting), I had some seriously conflicted emotions about my art.

Firstly, transferring schools once and changing majors three times in my college career had resulted in a sprint to graduate on time: loading up on fine art studios and absolutely immersing myself in art-making. This sounds great in theory, but it was a recipe for burnout. That's even before you factor in the ironic fact that in the beginning, I'd rejected a BFA in music performance at Berklee in favor of a BA in psychology at Lehigh, and why? Well, I'd gotten the idea that performance degrees demanded you reject everything else you loved in life, including writing and visual arts, and I didn't feel I could make that sacrifice.

After an intense run as a linguistic thinker and learner in a painter's clothing, I graduated intent on identifying as a photographer. Despite countless hours in the painting studio working toward my concentration, my best artwork—and the stuff I felt most deeply in my heart—was my photography.

Yet, my adult life has thrown my into more than one identity crisis. Most recently, I've embraced writing again. Incidentally, writing and photography were my first art forms, and remain the ones I gravitate to the most.

Everything comes full circle eventually, though. Last week I went shopping with a friend and inexplicably found myself at Barnes & Noble buying a copy of Artforum, of all things. I made a birthday card last week from magazine cutouts (every art kid remembers those cutout projects, right?). I've been making plans for Instamatic photography, reloading cartridge film, returning to my darkroom. Strangest of all, as I take a mallet and crowbar to my basement and turn it into a blank canvas, I'm feeling a need to draw an art corner into my plans. I want to leave room to tack up a canvas, put in a drawing table, make a collage.

Huh?

I guess I just needed some time to cool off, write a novel, get a piano in my house, take a voice class. Now that I'm free to do anything, I'm going to do just that—in whatever medium feels right.

Recovery Mode

I was sick most of this week, and rather than try to get anything done while I was home from work, I decided to leave two of my characters on the cusp of an important reunion and watch season one of Veronica Mars in bed.

Yesterday, though, I felt good enough to install cable television in my house, so there was no excuse for slacking off today! I got up, made some coffee, and finished up the alternate ending for my novel. Woohoo!

To add to the success of the morning, I have to share with you some important findings that will send me back to the darkroom in the near future (assuming my construction in the basement doesn't interfere with its light-tightness).

With good news all around, I discovered I can buy 126 cartridge film. I ordered two rolls, but it was steep! Look at that shipping charge, not to mention $9.95 per roll sticker price.


Good thing the internet possesses answers to all things, because this video has given me the confidence to learn how to reload those cartridges with regular 35mm film. Check it out:



So I ordered two cartridges, which I'm going to shoot and then try processing myself. After that, it's all about practicing reloading!

Rituals

This morning I found myself sitting in my office at 10:00, feeling not so great on account of an allergy attack, thinking where am I?

I like my job just fine, but I go back and forth on whether or not it's helping or hurting my personal endeavors. On one hand, balancing a full-time job with a house, relationship, classes, and recreation can provide the perfect excuse to slack off on writing. But my job also grounds me and keeps me productive, in addition to being a great place to learn, grow, and socialize. During the rare times when I've been unemployed, I've gone stir-crazy and halted any sort of productivity.

Life—personal and professional—is all about discovering and playing to your strengths. This morning, as I woke up a half hour later than I like to at 7:30, I felt cheated. See, I'm a morning person. People make disgusted faces when I say this, but it's true: I do my best creative work early in the morning, when the light is pure and the whole day lies ahead of me.

I also enjoy getting to the office by 8:00, securing at least an hour of uninterrupted work time before the rush begins. Then I get home by 4:30 and have all the way until midnight to enjoy my evening.

Lately, though, I'm realizing this is an either-or proposition. I can't get to work at 8:00, continue going to bed at midnight, write for a half hour or so before work, and get home by 4:30. I need to pick and choose. Most of all, I need to stop fighting my nature. The fact that I do my best work in the morning is not about to change, so I need to establish a morning writing ritual. I'm going to try it for the next week or so and see how it goes. Wish me luck!

New Office!

People who know me well likely know how much I love the back room on the second floor of our house. The walls are a pleasing color, the south-facing windows let in an abundance of natural light, and I have managed to keep it more clutter-free than any other room in the house. I decorated it with an area rug and futon I love. I wrote the first draft of my manuscript at the tiny brown desk against the outside wall. It's a fantastic room. I even wrote about it during my 28 inspirations in February.



Well, today I destroyed it. I had originally planned to make this room my office once we remodeled the basement, but suddenly realized I could move it along more quickly by just switching the furniture in our upstairs rooms. After all, our ugly office in the middle room couldn't get much worse, right?



When we actually started moving furniture, though, it didn't seem like such a great idea anymore. I was about to ruin my sanctuary and change my favorite spot in the house forever. Also, look how much dust was under my Doug's desk. Gross!



However, I'm typing this sitting not in a windowless room with walls painted a blue-green I can't stand, but in the back room, looking out the window (yes, I do type and look out the window at the same time) and listening to nighttime bugs outside. My desk is amazingly clean. I feel like I'm sitting in an open space where I can do a lot of writing, not in a dark and stuffy clutter-cave that feels like a chore to be in.

I haven't forgotten that we worked really hard today and still didn't finish the job. The green room is such a disaster I had to close the door and pretend it doesn't exist. A few random items are still littering the floor in our new office. But I don't have classwork for a few weeks and Doug promised to keep working with me until we get it done. For now, small victories: look at this nice space! I'm really close to accomplishing one of my big goals for the year: creating a dedicated space for writing where I can be productive.

Separating Me

"He was expert in knowing the thoughts and actions of living beings"

– Vimalakirtinirdesha Sutra 2

"Jesus knew all people and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone."

– John 2:24-25

From Jesus and Buddha: the Parallel Sayings

I don't hang with organized religion too much, but I do believe that if we quit with our own fears, agendas, and wants, our greatest spiritual thinkers have a lot to teach us about life strategy.

Lately I've felt out of touch with myself. For a long time I thought it was because I wasn't writing on a regular enough schedule, but that's not quite it.

Talking to a friend today, I might have found a piece of the problem: I'm constantly reacting to the world. Rarely do I step back from a situation and just watch and listen. I'm always feeling something.

This isn't just about feeling like my life is a loosely controlled whirlwind of emotion. Writers are always writing, every second of every day. That means we're also always observing. And if I'm mostly reacting, mostly just seeing my own feelings and actions, then what does that say about the characters I write?

How Much Do I Love Being Alone?

One of my goals for this year is to go on a creative retreat. I already have an ideal location all picked out. My family shares a little house on the Jersey Shore with (gasp) no cable TV, no internet access, no extras. Just a little bungalow with a three-block walk to the beach and a two-block walk to the bay. If you're really ambitious, you can plan a five-mile morning hike up to the northern point of the island to see some beach-y wilderness, shipwrecks, and plenty of shells and driftwood.

This sounds perfect for a weekend of solitude, the days quietly passed writing and taking photographs, right?

The only problem is, as antisocial as I can be sometimes, I don't really like being alone. I like being left alone, meaning my husband works on making a video game mod while I gnaw away at my manuscript (figuratively, of course).

But while I'm happy to engage in separate activities most of the time and meet in the middle for a movie or some two-player Little Big Planet, when my husband leaves for a significant period of time I tend to get the hell out of there. Guaranteed, when he starts up his four-hour night class this Fall, I'll be calling my best friend in the next neighborhood over to schedule weekly World of Warcraft and television dates.



So I'm torn. Half of me is in love with the zen-like quiet of the shore house in the Fall/Winter, the smell and feel of the beach, the removal from everyday life. But the other half is raising a cautionary finger and reminding me I'm most productive when I'm quietly engaged in parallel with someone else. That, and I ask my friends to babysit me when I'm faced with a long stretch of time in an empty house.

What's a girl to do? For now I'm going to pencil it in and think a little bit more about what I need and how I can give myself an amazing, productive, and (maybe semi-) detached weekend.

Side note: because I was traveling for a long weekend, the weekly creative non-fiction will be a little belated. Never fear, though, it will make its appearance tomorrow!

Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Street Musicians, Video Games, and Wandering Thoughts

This week's creative non-fiction is really meta-writing, a window into a sleepy morning trying to write but continually getting distracted.

Volume

Somehow, in getting to my class website (don't ask how, it's on my bookmarks toolbar!), I get waylaid on an art website for someone with whom I graduated high school.  Both of us went on to earn our BFAs, but in the years since then she has obviously continued producing visual art at an impressive rate.  I haven't maintained this kind of volume.

Mind you, I am writing, but I'm not submitting to literary magazines.  I'm not monitoring Art Deadlines List very closely and I'm not keeping up with Baltimore Art Blogs to see calls for submissions.  In short, I'm not filling out my CV.  The content under my "Exhibitions" and "Collections" headings is decidedly thin.

If I publish a novel that will certainly be a game-changer in terms of my artistic self-image, but for now I'm wondering: am I doing enough?  Art requires ambition above all else, and sometimes I fear I haven't established myself in a community of fellow artists, haven't been creating at the rate I should be.

At some point, just (ha, just) having a fat manuscript sitting in my writing folder won't be enough...will it?

Lately I've met a few artists who are "just sort of living right now," which I've found to be synonymous with being happily unemployed.  And in a state that doesn't ask people to provide proof that they're searching for jobs in order to collect unemployment benefits, why wouldn't they be?  However, there's a disconnect there, too.  A lot of creative people seem to feel art will just come to them, that inspiration is innate.  In truth, one of the best things art school taught me is hard work and ambition are as important as training and talent.

When I come home from deadlines at work only to work toward deadlines for school, I end up feeling like I need down time.  I feel entitled to squeeze in an hour of gaming or television.  Even though it feels like what I need at the moment, it doesn't feel like ambition.  And while we can't be frightfully ambitious 24/7, I'm unsure where to draw the line.

How necessary is downtime to sustain productivity?  How much should we be cutting out in favor of pursuing our dreams?

And, as I've asked myself many times before: do I really have the ambition it takes to pursue a long-term dream?

At the end of the day I think I can answer yes to that last question, but it would involve eliminating some of the more heinous timesucks from my life.  Disorganization is starting to make my life feel like one big ADD adventure again, and it's time to reign it in.

As I keep posting my writing and creative journeys, I think I'm also going to return some focus to the decluttering of life and home.  Simplifying and purifying.  Because time and inspiration aren't things we have innately, they're things we create in our lives.  And I think I need to create a lot more of both.

Bouncing Around, But Getting Things Done

Despite code red air quality alerts, unpleasantly hot (99°) temperatures, and a lack of sufficient air conditioning throughout my house, I made today's paid holiday hours productive ones.  This is encouraging, since the forecast is calling for highs of 103° for Tuesday and Wednesday.  Hopefully I'll be able to keep a positive outlook on life until things calm down (read: cool down) later in the week.

On the bright side, today felt more balanced than my life has in a long time.  I woke up in a good frame of mind, thinking about various professional development I've undergone lately, specifically where I've heard the words "don't fight yourself."  Clever girl that I am, I contemplated how I could apply this to my life at home, too.  I think ADD adults spend a lot of energy fighting our natures, and sometimes it's important to remember we need that energy for creating positive, self-affirming strategies for living our lives.

I'm past making excuses for my house: it has become a pit.  I love a clean, simple, orderly environment, so this makes me feel bad down to my core.  And since I've gotten behind on so much stuff, catching up seems positively overwhelming.  To make matters worse, the second I see clutter in the hallway, I tend to discount all my efforts in, say, our office.  Today I decided to be more reasonable, setting a goal of one room per day and no more.  So today I cleaned the bedroom, for real and true, and then accepted the fact that more work would lead to intense fatigue and eventually bad feelings about myself/the house/life in general.  Clutter in the hallway was okay, because it gets its own day (not today)!

This small victory really started me rolling, and after I was done I didn't go back to my reading for class (time for that later).  I took a break and played some WoW.  Then I went back to my reading, added 1000 words to my manuscript (exciting!), and took another WoW break.

I work best when my life is fragmented, likely because I lack the attention span for longer tasks anyway.  I get interrupted nonstop at work, but this rarely throws me off because, as I see it, I would have interrupted myself anyway.  My mind bounces from one thing to the next, and it's often best to preempt it if I can.  Forcing myself to work really hard on a single task (like cleaning out my basement) for a painfully long time leaves me feeling drained and often irrational.

Today, I encouraged myself to stop a task before I got super fatigued and celebrate my victory.  This left me feeling energized for the next activity, especially since I built in breaks for myself throughout the day.  In the end, I got an amazing amount of stuff done, including washing dishes, doing nearly all my reading for class this week, hitting level 75 with my druid, making my bedroom tidy and clean, and writing 1000 words on my novel.  Yay for days off from work!