Time and Light Switches

I wrote something on Sunday night, at 10:13 pm, and it went a little something like this: I’m taking break from the writing of my book. I know how it sounds, I’m scared to do it too. But I just needed a week to think about it, just a week of no pressure and no stipulation that I reach a word count, just a week with permission to sit and think about my story. Just a week away from staring at my computer screen and waiting for something that may or may never come.  I was teary when I decided to give myself a break, gave myself permission to rest and think. Because the truth of the mater was that I had built in so many precautions and support systems to be able to rest. And I was doing myself a disservice by not taking advantage of the system I had built. I had written draft zero in such a way that I could leave it for weeks and come back and still know everything. There is no way I was going to forget anything because I had written it all down. But still I was scared to take a br...

Last Friday I reached an accomplishment and a celebratory one at that. I finished draft #0 of book #1. I’ve been talking about this draft 0 since the beginning of the year and excitingly I’ve concluded it much sooner than I thought I would. I had gotten a little stumped near the end, because of all the lose ends and set ups I needed to have the pay off for, but I managed to push through and am now onto writing the first “real” draft.   The way my brain works, with its slow processing speed and short term memory loss, I had to find a different way to write and plan my writing, so draft 0 was born. It is 26,781 words simply stating what happens in the story. There is no concrete dialogue and there are very little place and character descriptions. It’s an outline detailing every single sene in the book. So for me the story is completed, I’ve seen the entire thing play out on the screen in my mind, and to be quite honest I think its awesome.  I spent all last weekend with a gr...

It’s the first layer. I never used to truly enjoy the first layer of a painting. It almost felt pointless, in that I was impatient and wanted to have accomplished more. Now the first layer feels like something akin to freedom. There’s no pressure yet and its really not possible to make a mistake, because 90% will be covered by the final layer anyway.   After the holiday break and getting caught up in my book writing, I finally got back to painting yesterday. I put the first layer down on a painting that I have been putting off for a year. I had done my initial sketching and plotting of the painting last year, and then have put it off ever since. It wasn’t going to be like my sky series of paintings, not just in technique but in emotional process as well.  I have previously talked a lot about how my emotional and mental heath impact my creative process, for better or for worse. And well this painting that I was embarking on wasn’t a simple one emotionally. It is my best att...

  Writing endings has never been my strong suit. I can remember having to write stories in middle and high school, and I remember that I ended every single one of them abruptly and on a cliff hanger. I think because at that time I had no idea where I was going with the story and had no inkling about how the end would look, or even what the goal was.   I wasn’t very polished back then, but even now the end has become difficult. I’m at the end of my story, trying to piece together all the parts of the puzzle that I’ve woven and pull all my threads together. I thought it would be easier than its turning out to be.  One piece of writing advise I heard was, pick the most outrageous impossible out of the box idea because that’s the great idea. And I’ve clung to that statement like a life raft. The whole year I’ve spent writing draft 0, every time I got overwhelmed and anxious about how hard it was to weave this story, I just thought back to that statement. Because it feelin...