New Feature! (Music Vignettes)

Back when I was writing Words + Images, I made a strict blogging schedule.  I did this primarily to draw traffic, having read somewhere that a predictable schedule increases readership.  About the time I realized my "blog nights" were starting to control my social life and it seemed like a second job, I shut the blog down and reconsidered, eventually landing on this format.

While I doubt Mix Tapes & Scribbles garners me the same kind of Official Blogger rep, I feel better about its goals and intent.  At the same time, I do miss having some kind of structure and connecting thread.

For now, that thread is going to be a weekly creative non-fiction piece.  I'm excited because it's a gratifying genre and this feature will keep me producing small pieces of writing on a regular basis (this feels more and more necessary as novel editing progresses).

Since I talk so much about writing in here, it's apt to give my strong feelings about music a platform.  Each vignette will be told through a musical experience (clues in the post title).  I'm hoping to have the first one up sometime tomorrow (and on Sunday or Monday every week thereafter), so look out!

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.

Busy Summer

Things have been a little tough lately: lots of weekends away, the end of my online class looming close, WoW beckoning me to power through the home stretch to level 80.  So many distractions!

Tonight, I'm turning that around and putting off outlining my final project in favor of posting a little something on the blog.  Also, as I recently posted on Twitter, Hemmingway wrote 500 words per day.  500 words seems like hardly anything at all, and it makes me want to set a similar goal for myself.  However, I got to wondering, where does this leave me for editing?  Sometimes I'm doing a lot of cleanup work and might not make a net gain of 500 words even though I've written/revised that many.  This is a quandary, but on the bright side, I opened up my manuscript tonight and noticed 1000 words had jumped in there somehow!  I'm now up to 52,528.  In case you were wondering, here's the latest addition (comments welcome):

Writing Excerpt Time!

I haven't posted a writing excerpt on here for a while, and I thought it appropriate because I've been adding big chunks of content to my manuscript.  Here's something I did last weekend:

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!

Grad School Week One

The other day I began wondering if getting my master's degree might be a big mistake—all that time disappearing.  Truthfully, I'm intensely ambitious in the present only.  I do make a hobby of crafting big goals for my life, but I suspect it's just because the act of making plans is such an engaging pastime in the present.

Trying (and failing) to think of one long-term goal I have set and actually brought to fruition, I realize I may have a commitment issue.  The immediate pain of losing time to spend with friends, work on my manuscript, play my piano, watch movies, and play WoW makes me feel I've lost something.  Not to mention all those activities are immediately gratifying: a level gained here, a chapter polished there, a phrase suddenly becoming smooth under my fingers.

This isn't the first time I've gotten into one of these self-questioning frames of mind and rationalized my way out of a commitment, either.  But wait!  This story has a happy ending, after all.

Instead of feeling discouraged, I did something uncharacteristic, something I haven't done before: I visualized my future.  I love to hate the word visualization, mostly because my mind generally refuses to craft a clear image.  In this case I don't think I needed one.

All I needed was to imagine how it felt.  I let my imagination wander, curious where it would go: I imagined my sandaled feet disappearing beneath  a long skirt, eyes in their comfort zone hitting matte black at every angle.  I was backstage, but on a quiet day, surveying.  Something smelled like sawdust.  I imagined a group of jovial adults gathered there to rehearse in the evenings, much like the groups I used to perform with—a pit orchestra wedged between empty seats and stage.  Kids in a classroom reading a script for the first time, maybe even one they had written.  Opening nights.  Music.  A small office, tidy, maybe with a secondhand couch, that I may or may not walk into with a baby cradled against my body in a sling.

I may never have this.  Life has a way of handing us something slightly different than we had planned.  But in imagining what I could create someday, I made my current efforts seem worth it.  I guess this is what overly optimistic types call "keeping your eyes on the prize."  I don't think I ever thought about what that means.  Now I have an idea: when it's hard to see past the and nots (and not having endless hours to wander through writing and singing and aimlessness), sometimes we need to reach out and touch the thing we're working for in the end.  Because in reality, 18 months is hardly any time at all.

And as a creative person, that imagining shouldn't be so hard to do.

And the Graduate Adventure Begins...

Yesterday I began my first grad school course.  I think I've been feeling as if, because my degree program is exclusively online, I can weave it seamlessly into my everyday life.  Not so.  An accelerated 18-month master's program does not slip into one's life unnoticed.

I posted this sentiment on my Facebook profile last night and a friend commented, "welcome to no time ever!" I've always struggled with time management.  Actually, I'm surprised I don't have a tag for it yet.  The fact that workaholic me said right off the bat I need to make sure I set aside time to practice piano, play WoW, and watch movies is a good sign, though.  I'm no stranger to burnout, and every once in a while I take great pains to avoid it.

However, I feel distinctly ready to break out Stephen Covey's Seven Habits again.  At times like this I need to remember, above all, how everything we do is a choice.  Putting away dishes while a pot of water is boiling.  Getting lost on Facebook, spying on people I haven't spoken to since 2003.  Using my early Saturday morning to write, not clean or play video games, because I know mornings are where my ideas live.  Sitting down at the piano.  Watching a movie with my friends or husband.  Working extra hours because I feel overwhelmed by my workload.

Each of these things represents prioritizing one thing over another.  One of those half-hour jags on Wikipedia could have been a half hour of writing practice.  I need to remember that making time for fun stuff is okay (not to mention necessary!) and I should feel good about viewing each time expenditure as a conscious decision.  Would I really decide not to write on my manuscript so I could spend 45 minutes reading about people I don't know on the internet?  Do I feel comfortable justifying an extra hour at the office—which, let's face it, is not going to be the thing that makes the difference in terms of praise or achievement—in favor of cooking a nice dinner with friends I'm intensely thankful to have in my life?

At first I feared all this time crunching would lead me away from the blog.  I think it may do the opposite.  It may make it better.  Incidentally, the first articles I've had to read have focused on creating multi-dimensional definitions of success by recognizing your own needs, values, and work style.  As I continue to face plenty of challenges and shifts in the course of my life, this sort of critical thinking will serve me well.  It will also, more than likely, give me plenty of fodder for my writing.  We'll see where this big adventure leads, but I'm quite hopeful the challenge will prove worthy of my efforts (and vice versa).

Reading.

Yesterday I went to the library to pay my fines (I'd gotten in a bad way post-surgery and neglected to return a big stack of books), enjoy the air conditioning, and pick out a new stack of novels.  Being able to walk four blocks to my local library definitely ranks high on my list of things to love about city life, hence why I was appalled that my convalescence, followed by my late fine issues, contributed to my only finishing four (!) books so far this year.

Mind you, there are others that I've started and not finished, but that hardly counts.  Any artist worth her salt knows you've got to expose yourself to what's out there if you want to succeed.  Even if you're creating work that's wholly original, it still exists in our cultural context and in the larger canon of People Doing Work in Similar Genres.  So even if no one's doing performance art quite like yours, there are still thousands of performance artists out there and you'd damn well better know what a a bunch of them are doing.

To that end, I've been trying to take in a healthy dose of young adult fiction.  Part of me feels very reassured by what I'm reading, in that even though this is published work, I feel I could still mark it up and give plenty of editorial suggestions.  Also, when I work on my own manuscript I feel more and more like it's developing the proper tone for a young adult novel.

The only hang-up is, sometimes I find young adult fiction a bit patronizing or superficial or just plain, well, juvenile.  And that's not what I want for my work—at all.  So I feel I need to walk a fine line between addressing "adult" issues and content in a way that's accessible for younger (i.e. late teen) readers and producing high-caliber writing.

As an aside, remember how I read a 472-page book in one sitting a while back?  I've already finished one book since 3:00 yesterday afternoon and I'm well into another.  This is a genre I tend to plow through like snack food at an all-day conference: after going back a few times I realize I've eaten way more than anyone could consider dignified.  I'm offsetting this by also reading The Tempest and a real and true grown-up novel that kept catching my eye on the library shelves.

While we're on the subject of books, here's an open call: of the young adult fiction I read, much of it has (spoiler alert!) LGBT themes.  If you've got any favorites, especially ones that focus on the 'B' in LGBT (underrepresented, you don't have to tell me), please let me know!

May Rundown

June is here, May is over, and it's time to take a look over my goals for 2010 and see what I've been up to.  Struggling with ADD often means I lose track of the contents of my days pretty easily, so pausing every once in a while to reflect really helps me figure out what I'm doing with all this passing time.  While everyone at the office complains about doing their monthly reports during the first week of the month, I'm thankful for the benchmark/barometer.

May had 31 days to it this year, and I only sat down and did my daily writing practice for 21 of them.  That's barely even most of the time, so I need some work there.  On the bright side, I wrote a lot on some of those days, in addition to doing some good work on my manuscript.  I just need to make sure I'm carving out time every single day and not letting "extenuating" circumstances become an every-other-day occurrence.



In the latter half of May I finally got myself down to Single Carrot Theatre, which is certainly something I'd like to continue doing.  In college I had a friend who'd take me to plays, and I guess part of me thought I'd always have a person like that in my life.  This month I learned that maybe I need to be that person for others!

A plug for Baltimore folks: Single Carrot is in a great spot (Station North: lots of new art spaces, plus easily accessible and free of the parking and/or transit complications of Mt. Vernon or downtown) and provides an intimate theatre experience not to be missed.  The show I just saw was the sort I can measure by how long I spent cocking my head to one side—it's a slightly embarrassing habit when I'm really studying a piece of creative work.  Plus you get a complimentary glass of wine or soda and a cheerful greeting when you walk in the door!

Directly after our theater excursion, my husband left me all alone for a weekend, and I took advantage of the opportunity to spend the morning writing at Carma's Cafe in Charles Village.  Baltimore plug number two: Carma's is another absolutely can't miss.  Sitting for two hours and focusing solidly on my work was a challenge, but that's why I made it a goal in 2010!  That work session got me over a big editing hump, and I think this weekend I'll try dropping by the Evergreen, where all the trendy writers seem to hang out on their laptops.

In terms of big projects, I rededicated myself to editing my manuscript and got some really nice work done on it.  I also started decluttering the house and making way for my new work space by spending an entire weekend in the basement sorting through stuff (and deciding to give most of it away to the Salvation Army).  Big life news arrived on the scene, too, as I enrolled in an online MBA program concentrating in non-profit management.

While I'm not ready to move/create my office quite yet—our quick-and-cheap basement remodel needs to happen first—I did buy a real desk chair.  My back is thanking me at this very moment, and typing away at my desk feels so much nicer!

All in all, I feel good about May, if not the first half of June.  I've gone through a lot of rededication to my creative practice, and it feels good to be getting my life back again after my surgery disrupted the rhythm of things so much.

Trying to Avoid a Crash

Summer is definitely upon us, and this is one of those busy summers that comes around every couple years.  Last summer was beautiful and adventurous and full of friends and mojitos and space to slow down if we wanted to.  I dug a big pile of bricks out of the yard and used them to edge the garden, I weeded and I cleaned.  I stayed out until 4:00 and 5:00 in the morning caught up in late-night, lounge on the couch, doze off and wake up conversations.

This summer promises to flash before my eyes, swept up in a whirlwind of weddings and scheduled family weekends and reunions and...done.  Right now stands a chance of being the worst of it, with twice-a-week physical therapy, busy times at work, and some ill-planned trips out of town.  We returned from Memorial Day weekend on Monday night, only to leave this Thursday for another weekend away.

I haven't felt an exhaustion this bottomless since October, when I was part of a dreadfully understaffed team putting on our first-ever gala event at work.  I keep wishing for something to grab hold of me and pull me safely to the other side.  Now, like then, I'm not sure how I'm going to make it to the next foothold: next Friday.  A free weekend.

Through all of this, though, I've been making a concerted effort to have restful time in the evenings. Tonight I came home from a nine and a half hour work day and promptly devised a way I could avoid doing laundry until Monday.  Then I played the piano for a while, wrote in my notebook, washed the dishes.  All things that enforce a slowing down.  An even pace.

Somehow, through that dedication to not running myself completely into the ground, I've managed to get into editing full swing.  Chapters are getting chewed up, expanded, soon even added.

It's so helpful to slow down at times like this, remember what makes me feel most satisfied about my life, and stop to do something that gives me space to think.

Speaking of pianos, great news!  Mine arrived safe and sound about a week ago, and it looks beautiful in my dining room.  It's anywhere between 80 and 100 years old, and I've played it every day (assuming I've been home) since it arrived.  This piano has been in my family since at least the 1930s, broken for most of that time, and just now fixed!  Ironically, it just took someone like me saying "I want to fix this," because the repair itself was surprisingly inexpensive.