Dreams of wild bears loose in a house, animal bonding, wild animal freedom; teaching art classes, leading people in making art together in community; books, what is a book; questions of what is art, what is it to be an artist; completing the Nanowrimo challenge ...
11/30/11
10:54am
It had rained a long steady rain overnight. The sun came out a moment after she sat down to do her last stint for the Nanowrimo challenge. It was the last day of the challenge. She woke that morning to the sound of drips in her window. It could have been the drip that woke her since one of the drip sounds seemed as if it could be coming from inside the house. She worried whether the workmen had covered their roof work. She had experienced leaky roofs on so many different occasions and places that such drip sounds aroused in her almost a fear of what kind of deluge might be about to break through. The drip stopped soon after her waking. She had not gotten up to investigate. That the drip stopped meant the rain had slowed or stopped.
She had had a somewhat scary dream of being in some big house, (always with the many rooms or living quarters), and catching sight of one or two large bears rumbling around inside downstairs. She had been able to close the doors to the room she was in, but she feared the doors would not hold against these bears who were in search of food. She went around various back stairs and hallways to spread the word there were bears downstairs. If she remembered the dream, everyone seemed oblivious to the possibilities either of there being bears, or their being a danger. She had felt unable to get her message across, to get anyone to pay attention. At one point either the bears changed to lions or there was also a lion on the loose, though it was not yet a huge lion. It seemed she woke from the dream before anything more dangerous could happen.
She believed there were at least two things prompting the particular imagery of this dream. She had just started reading Bernd Heinrich's The Nesting Season. In the beginning he told of his experiences fostering goslings and how geese and goslings had to bond so strongly that they were always attached until maturity. It meant goslings made such pitiable sounds if separated from a parent and the parent had to respond to these sounds. Upon reunion the gosling made sounds of pleasure, sounds that were positive feedback to the parent as well. Heinrich told how this communication or feedback loop created the same response in him at least.
She was not sure how this related to the bear dream but she felt it did somehow. Perhaps because of a film she had seen recently, a film by and starring Robert Redford. There was a bear in this story. The additional material with the movie showed the animal trainer working with the young bear actors. These were orphan cubs he had raised and now much older. Part of his method was to wrestle and rough house in play with them and constantly speak to them in praising tones. They needed the wrestling and the praising to maintain the bond that existed. She had seen how the trainer rolled around on the ground with the bear, completely entwined with it. The bear was not a small animal, certainly at least as big as the man.
In the movie, the bear had badly mauled one of the characters, to the point the man was seriously debilitated for the rest of his life. It had returned at some point, caught, and sent to live a miserable depressing existence in a local wildlife zoo. The victim of the bear attack wanted to see the bear, to face his own fear, and his attacker. Upon seeing the caged bear, the man knew he could not live with himself knowing this magnificent wild animal was living such a restricted existence. He insisted that his buddy get the bear free somehow. They managed to free the bear.
Was the dream about bonding, freedom, wild nature? She did not need to pin down an answer. She did not need to understand an answer. It could be enough to just be affected by the feelings from the dream. Things would unfold over time.
She had gone to the last Nanowrimo 'write-in' just to check in and let the leader know that she had indeed been keeping up with the work. This time they did exchange ideas and experiences. The leader said that all stories, whether fact or fiction, were part of the collective unconscious, and that all stories were mysteries. One told a story to share the mystery the story held. Also that all stories were variations on a theme. One could not find a new story to tell - it was just how one told it,
She thought she had come to terms with how she would cope with holding her classes and fulfilling various art request agreements. She had looked forward to meeting with her students the next morning, much as she would have preferred to be able to sit down to do the Nanowrimo session instead. The night before class there had been too much on her plate to prepare the house for class in the evening. She would have to leave it this week except for the rearranging of furniture to accommodate the students. She had just moved one table when the phone rang. One of the students was cancelling because of an unexpected schedule conflict which could continue indefinitely. She moved the table back to its usual spot and rushed around to complete the rest of her morning preparations. She was ready as she could be at the appointed time. The other two students were usually about ten minutes late. She realized that one had left a message also cancelling coming to class. Now it was too late to call the other student to cancel the class. Usually that had only mildly troubled her. She preferred to have the flexibility to cancel herself if she really needed it, though she rarely did.
The session had gone nicely with just the two of them. But it was a huge side trip or interruption for her. There had been all the emotional energy spent just worrying about how or whether to carry out the preparation routine she usually went through the night before class. She had been ok with that part of it, because it meant that she was following a housekeeping routine. She liked that part of it. But there was always the worry over whether she had the materials on hand that she needed for class, and just how did she intend to proceed with the lesson. That had become a little easier since she had started the free class for adults at the library. At least there, since she had already done some aspect of the lesson, she had some plan to follow already and did not have to create a new plan. She also found the lessons themselves a body of work. But she had questioned the purpose of such a body of work.
She believed that people did not really need art lessons. She herself had hated going to class at art school and cut school so often. She could barely bring herself to get to classes. She really believed that people should and could be learning on their own. On the other hand, yes there were plenty of things she had learned from other people, but mostly in the business of going about one's day and just being open to the ideas of others. There were things to learn everywhere. She loved her lessons in theory but who would ever really learn anything from them? If one had what it took to learn, one could invent all this stuff for oneself. If one did not have an open learning mindset, one would be immune to the effects of the lessons. She wished she could see them in a different way. What else were they? What else could the lessons be seen as? Her approach to how she made up lessons was based on what she used to do for herself when she did make it to her painting classes in art school. She had found the drawing or painting of the model or still life so boring. To keep her own interest she had simply applied various arbitrary restrictions on how she would handle a study. These were not lessons for herself, simply something to make it an interesting exploration or study for herself.
She supposed that the overall story or organization of her lessons was that it somewhat followed a calendar based theme in an attempt to cycle through the diverse limited themes her students liked.
Her involvement with the Nanowrimo project found her old doubts about being an artist resurfacing. She was questioning it all over again. Why had it been so compelling to do this concentrated writing and not art in the same way? But then she had been so far away for so long from her original intentions about art. Those ties had become so tenuous that she no longer had faith there was anything left there. Whether it been the actual writing, or that she'd worked almost daily, on one project with such focus, she did not know.
12:25p 1544 words
The sun was now shining fully and the sky was clear. The winds had been blowing the clouds out from the southwest. The southern or southwestern window had rattled a few times from the strong gust. It was to be a warm day as well.
The kids' class the previous day had been almost a full house. She loved it when lot of people came to class. They had done drawings of Native American motifs and subjects. The first was of a highly stylized and patterned eagle design. Work of this nature allowed people to let loose and color wildly. Because the design was so abstracted, so obviously different than a 'realistic' eagle, yet still identifiable as an eagle, they were freed from the judgement they carried inside them. She loved to see them all so engrossed in their work. She loved the quiet sound of their concentration. And she loved all the work they did. This was what she loved about having classes. If she was able to bring a group of people together in the shared activity of making art together, and having them enjoy the process, she felt her heart swell with joy (and pride). The private classes were more troublesome in that she felt more obligation that she was supposed to 'teach' because they were paying for the classes.
What if the lessons were a record or a kind of book of the art experiences, the history of the classes. Perhaps that was a better way to look at what she was creating overall with the lessons. Just as she loved writing in her journal for her own memory to be able to look back on how she had been thinking or dealing with something on a given day, dealing with events that came up cyclically. Her journals had been such a personal reference source for her. Once she had started with them and found them useful to herself, she had gone on to do it because she wanted it for herself.
Something on that order was what had started her series of painting local scenes. There were several factors, but one was when she had pulled out the stack she had in her painting bag to show a friend. They felt like a book because of their size. They were not bound as a book, but had the feel of a book just because they were a stack the size of a picture book. She knew she wanted one day to make a book of some (or all) of the paintings. And now it did not even matter if she herself made the book. The fact that the paintings existed as a body of work made them have at least the spirit of a book. It was part of their nature.
What was a book? That definition was changing in this day and age. A book was a world, or a window on the world, that one could hold in one's hand and turn the pages or leaves of. There was something about being able to hold it in one's hand with the feeling that one could step through the small space into another world. What about the few huge books that also existed? What made them books? That they had pages to turn? She had heard about some of these world's largest books. If she remembered correctly, one was an enormous atlas. She thought perhaps there was also a large book by Audobon - of birds.
1:03p 2130 words
She was nearly at her word count quota to fulfill the Nanowrimo requirements. Whether she had come to any real resolutions for herself she did not know. Could such questions ever really be solved? She wondered what she would feel like when she was done with it. Would she be as glad as she had presumed she would be, or would she be nostalgic or sad that it ended. She did not imagine that she would try this again the following year. If by then she had learned she could write fiction, if she indeed she had discovered she really wanted to do that or to know she could, then she would not need to do it in November. What would be the point of doing it then? Why would she wait? She had certainly found out she could write that many words in that time frame. If the purpose of it was to prove to oneself that one could write that amount in a month, while at the same time creating a novel, then once one had proved it, one knew it. One did not need to prove it again. One might want to up the ante on it. Once one knew one could make up stories and knew one could write in that time frame, but also knew one wanted to write fiction, one would assumedly go ahead and do it.
This seemed such a different proposition than making art, since she was still so confused over why she made art. She had different levels and purposes for making art. Perhaps that was fine. The art school idea of what art and being an artist meant, had been such a burden to her. It had taken most of her life to outgrow that and she still was not completely free of it.
She wanted to explore this idea a bit further but for right now she wanted to see if she was done with the word count. Her understanding herself as an artist would have to wait.
1:18p 2473 words
As far as she knew she was finished. If she found when she went to validate, that the count came up short, she would have to be ready to write some more. She had better validate early enough to allow for extra writing time if needed.
1:28p 2568 words
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
Getting work done, inventories and indexes of art lessons, press releases, blueberry fields art class, making something beautiful with what is, finish
Getting work done, inventories and indexes of art lessons, press releases, blueberry fields art class, making something beautiful with what is, finishing the writing, art class press release, how to wrap up the writing, Jack Kerouac ...
11/28/11
3:19p
She had had a good day this far, though she was only coming to her Nanowrimo writing project in the late afternoon. At least she was still getting to it on a teaching day. The morning had been the free adult drawing class at the library. The previous day she had gotten in a good stint with her writing, done some work on the art project that was overdue, done the chores that most needed doing, and tracked down materials for the art class. There had been a press release to write for the next month's art program. That meant searching for art examples to send with it. In that process she was able to index two more topics for her index cards of lessons materials.
She had inventory lists of the art lessons in her many boxes of mostly chronological lesson folders. She kept the lists of each box's contents, in one binder. Finding material on a topic or lesson meant visually scanning through each list. Her plan was to index each topic as it came up in her roster of monthly lessons. She had just indexed winter and Christmas, so that each subject had a file card stating the box location and number of folders of that topic in that box. With each file card completed she would be better able to find her material on that topic. She was up to 21 file cards now, and gloated that she had gotten that far. There were about 12 file boxes of lessons, each with 50-60 lesson folders.
It had taken awhile to gather photos of the art for the press release. The photos had needed the usual enhancing. Then there had been the struggle to decide on the wording of the announcement. She needed to keep the description flexible enough to allow for changing circumstances, yet still interesting enough to appeal to readers. It seemed like a constant battle to keep up with writing the monthly press releases for the two art classes she taught at the library. She kept thinking that once a year's worth was done, she could simply use the same announcements again. But there was always tweaking and new ideas that came along. Or, because of the calendar, a rearrangement of one lesson to another month.
The dinner she made the night before had been delicious, again. She had sauteed in olive oil, chopped eggplant with granulated garlic and fresh chopped basil - to a brown and somewhat charred state. This she tossed with fettucini and grated parmesan. Half a packet of shrimp ramen soup seasoning gave the flavoring and salt. The meal was so tasty that she had this time not been able to save half of it for the next day.
They had worked on images of crimson blueberry fields. They started by brainstorming a group list of qualities, associations, and visual aspects about the blueberry barrens. The five students came up with such an array of ideas. They had songs, foods, the type of land blueberries grow on. She learned several new things about blueberries that day.
They started with an exercise of two continuous line drawings from the photos. Whenever she had less photos of one image than could go around, she distributed the photos by random choice. For the first exercise they were to draw from one photo then switch with someone and draw from that photo. They then drew two continuous line drawings of invented blueberry scenes. For the final picture they each chose a photo, but these she again distributed randomly. Her theory was that if students worked with the image they liked best, the next time the topic came around, anything else would be a disappointment. Better to learn to make something beautiful out of what one had on hand.
This was a principle by which she cooked. She was realizing that it could also be applied to her commission work. That was the challenge - to make something beautiful and meaningful with whatever is in front of you. Besides, holding art classes and doing commission art work provided subjects to write about.
She had finally seen, though she was sure she would revisit the same conflicts repeatedly for quite awhile still, that with her obligations, she needed to own them - to find a place where she wanted to do them for the sake of doing them. When she got to that spot, all concerns about deadlines and the expectations of others fell away. Once she wanted to do the thing for itself, it did not matter to her whether it was on schedule or not. She was by then standing behind the work so much that the expectations she had projected about it, no longer held power over her. How did she get to the place of owning the project? She had to stick with it until she was hooked on doing it. It might still be like pulling teeth to get down to work on a thing. If she could manage to warn people what they might be dealing with, perhaps the process might be easier. For now she had to find a way to remember this outlook whenever she found herself in this position. She should write this up on a file card and keep it somewhere as a reminder.
4:22p 894 words
She hoped to go check in at the Nano write-in at the library, to at least let the presenter know she had been working all along on the project. It would be the last write-in, if it was still going on. She could have sent a message instead, but she preferred to meet face-to-face if possible. She wondered where things stood with the others who had started out in the group.
In the morning she had felt as if she had plenty to write about this time. She even had thoughts running through her head of how she would wrap up her ideas, the ideas she had been struggling with. The process of writing like this and writing so extensively about her current concerns, made her wonder who all those self-help gurus and lifestyle experts were that laid out all sorts of answers over how to lead or live one's life. She wondered how they could be qualified to give such answers , since she rarely seemed to meet anyone who held the same ideas she did. It seemed like a very self-inflated position to be in, for herself or anyone.
She was scraping the barrel again for what she wanted to think or tell about, that she felt free to tell about.
The press release she had just sent out for the adult art class announced three classes of holiday cards, scenes, and ornaments. She wanted to do some papercutting and perhaps some paperfolding within the classes. This aspect had to be subtley spoken about, as some people did not like doing that kind of thing. They only wanted to handle drawing and painting instruments and had strong resistances to anything different. There was resistance to so much on each front - whether about specific subject matter or about media. One student spoke in class that morning of hating the 'drills', and just wanting to get down to the picture making.
4:48p 1218 words
When she returned from the library, she would have to do the weekly minimum cleaning preparation for the students coming in the morning. Then to scratch up something for supper. By then it might be too late to get any more work done on the art project. She would have to see how she felt for that.
The students who came in the morning would be doing the blueberry fields lesson. One had done it last year and loved it and had been hoping to get to doing it again. Another had missed it that year. The last student may have done a similar one many years ago. At least working with so much red color pleased all of them.
That seemed to be it. Her head seemed to be empty of ideas. There was nothing else to tell about except the state of having nothing else to tell about. In that freeform continuous writing method, which she was somewhat trying to do but not really, one was supposed to just write about having nothing to say, if one had nothing to say. That was what she was doing now - filling out as much as she could about having nothing to say. Imagine being in conversation with someone --- why what a ridiculous supposition - one would never consider talking nonstop or repeating such a thing over and over again to another that there was nothing to say. It would be an assault to the ears, an assault to their mental space. The two things of talking and writing were very different.
She had to remember to make a copy of a page of native american drawings a friend of hers had made at the age of seven and shown recently. That person had grown up to study art and work in art. She felt the drawing was such good example for kids of how real 'artists'' young art had looked just like theirs at that age. The kids' class topic was to be native american motifs, costumes, traditions. It would be great if she had an example of the artist's art as an adult.
5:13p 1575 words
How would she finish this whole writing? It might have to just stop, having continued exactly as it did. Some questions had perhaps resolved themselves if she had indeed found solutions to them. She certainly would not be reading through all that writing to see what she had written about. She could remember some of it. She had tried to keep a little bit of track of things she had touched on by keeping a list of the titles she'd given to each days writing. Some of the early days might still need titles - or they had just been given place holder titles. There was so much repetition to this writing she knew.
She had never read Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. She had never been interested to read it. Now she would have to look into it just to see what the big deal had been about.
5:21p 1728 words
11/28/11
3:19p
She had had a good day this far, though she was only coming to her Nanowrimo writing project in the late afternoon. At least she was still getting to it on a teaching day. The morning had been the free adult drawing class at the library. The previous day she had gotten in a good stint with her writing, done some work on the art project that was overdue, done the chores that most needed doing, and tracked down materials for the art class. There had been a press release to write for the next month's art program. That meant searching for art examples to send with it. In that process she was able to index two more topics for her index cards of lessons materials.
She had inventory lists of the art lessons in her many boxes of mostly chronological lesson folders. She kept the lists of each box's contents, in one binder. Finding material on a topic or lesson meant visually scanning through each list. Her plan was to index each topic as it came up in her roster of monthly lessons. She had just indexed winter and Christmas, so that each subject had a file card stating the box location and number of folders of that topic in that box. With each file card completed she would be better able to find her material on that topic. She was up to 21 file cards now, and gloated that she had gotten that far. There were about 12 file boxes of lessons, each with 50-60 lesson folders.
It had taken awhile to gather photos of the art for the press release. The photos had needed the usual enhancing. Then there had been the struggle to decide on the wording of the announcement. She needed to keep the description flexible enough to allow for changing circumstances, yet still interesting enough to appeal to readers. It seemed like a constant battle to keep up with writing the monthly press releases for the two art classes she taught at the library. She kept thinking that once a year's worth was done, she could simply use the same announcements again. But there was always tweaking and new ideas that came along. Or, because of the calendar, a rearrangement of one lesson to another month.
The dinner she made the night before had been delicious, again. She had sauteed in olive oil, chopped eggplant with granulated garlic and fresh chopped basil - to a brown and somewhat charred state. This she tossed with fettucini and grated parmesan. Half a packet of shrimp ramen soup seasoning gave the flavoring and salt. The meal was so tasty that she had this time not been able to save half of it for the next day.
They had worked on images of crimson blueberry fields. They started by brainstorming a group list of qualities, associations, and visual aspects about the blueberry barrens. The five students came up with such an array of ideas. They had songs, foods, the type of land blueberries grow on. She learned several new things about blueberries that day.
They started with an exercise of two continuous line drawings from the photos. Whenever she had less photos of one image than could go around, she distributed the photos by random choice. For the first exercise they were to draw from one photo then switch with someone and draw from that photo. They then drew two continuous line drawings of invented blueberry scenes. For the final picture they each chose a photo, but these she again distributed randomly. Her theory was that if students worked with the image they liked best, the next time the topic came around, anything else would be a disappointment. Better to learn to make something beautiful out of what one had on hand.
This was a principle by which she cooked. She was realizing that it could also be applied to her commission work. That was the challenge - to make something beautiful and meaningful with whatever is in front of you. Besides, holding art classes and doing commission art work provided subjects to write about.
She had finally seen, though she was sure she would revisit the same conflicts repeatedly for quite awhile still, that with her obligations, she needed to own them - to find a place where she wanted to do them for the sake of doing them. When she got to that spot, all concerns about deadlines and the expectations of others fell away. Once she wanted to do the thing for itself, it did not matter to her whether it was on schedule or not. She was by then standing behind the work so much that the expectations she had projected about it, no longer held power over her. How did she get to the place of owning the project? She had to stick with it until she was hooked on doing it. It might still be like pulling teeth to get down to work on a thing. If she could manage to warn people what they might be dealing with, perhaps the process might be easier. For now she had to find a way to remember this outlook whenever she found herself in this position. She should write this up on a file card and keep it somewhere as a reminder.
4:22p 894 words
She hoped to go check in at the Nano write-in at the library, to at least let the presenter know she had been working all along on the project. It would be the last write-in, if it was still going on. She could have sent a message instead, but she preferred to meet face-to-face if possible. She wondered where things stood with the others who had started out in the group.
In the morning she had felt as if she had plenty to write about this time. She even had thoughts running through her head of how she would wrap up her ideas, the ideas she had been struggling with. The process of writing like this and writing so extensively about her current concerns, made her wonder who all those self-help gurus and lifestyle experts were that laid out all sorts of answers over how to lead or live one's life. She wondered how they could be qualified to give such answers , since she rarely seemed to meet anyone who held the same ideas she did. It seemed like a very self-inflated position to be in, for herself or anyone.
She was scraping the barrel again for what she wanted to think or tell about, that she felt free to tell about.
The press release she had just sent out for the adult art class announced three classes of holiday cards, scenes, and ornaments. She wanted to do some papercutting and perhaps some paperfolding within the classes. This aspect had to be subtley spoken about, as some people did not like doing that kind of thing. They only wanted to handle drawing and painting instruments and had strong resistances to anything different. There was resistance to so much on each front - whether about specific subject matter or about media. One student spoke in class that morning of hating the 'drills', and just wanting to get down to the picture making.
4:48p 1218 words
When she returned from the library, she would have to do the weekly minimum cleaning preparation for the students coming in the morning. Then to scratch up something for supper. By then it might be too late to get any more work done on the art project. She would have to see how she felt for that.
The students who came in the morning would be doing the blueberry fields lesson. One had done it last year and loved it and had been hoping to get to doing it again. Another had missed it that year. The last student may have done a similar one many years ago. At least working with so much red color pleased all of them.
That seemed to be it. Her head seemed to be empty of ideas. There was nothing else to tell about except the state of having nothing else to tell about. In that freeform continuous writing method, which she was somewhat trying to do but not really, one was supposed to just write about having nothing to say, if one had nothing to say. That was what she was doing now - filling out as much as she could about having nothing to say. Imagine being in conversation with someone --- why what a ridiculous supposition - one would never consider talking nonstop or repeating such a thing over and over again to another that there was nothing to say. It would be an assault to the ears, an assault to their mental space. The two things of talking and writing were very different.
She had to remember to make a copy of a page of native american drawings a friend of hers had made at the age of seven and shown recently. That person had grown up to study art and work in art. She felt the drawing was such good example for kids of how real 'artists'' young art had looked just like theirs at that age. The kids' class topic was to be native american motifs, costumes, traditions. It would be great if she had an example of the artist's art as an adult.
5:13p 1575 words
How would she finish this whole writing? It might have to just stop, having continued exactly as it did. Some questions had perhaps resolved themselves if she had indeed found solutions to them. She certainly would not be reading through all that writing to see what she had written about. She could remember some of it. She had tried to keep a little bit of track of things she had touched on by keeping a list of the titles she'd given to each days writing. Some of the early days might still need titles - or they had just been given place holder titles. There was so much repetition to this writing she knew.
She had never read Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. She had never been interested to read it. Now she would have to look into it just to see what the big deal had been about.
5:21p 1728 words
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Effects and benefits of writing, resentments, promises, lowering expectations, getting what one wants....
Effects and benefits of writing, resentments, promises, lowering expectations, getting what one wants....
11/27/11
12:45 pm
The previous day she had not started her Nanowrimo writing until well into the evening. She had had to start working on a long overdue art project. Something had put her in a foul or blue mood for the whole day. Now she wondered if it was because she'd set aside the Nano writing and left it tll late evening, when she then also had to cut it short because the machine was acting temperamentally. Working on the Nano with such a routine had given her a different sense of purpose and outlook, even though she still could not quite understand why she had chosen to try it. She had only known once she'd gone just a few days into it that it was having an effect on her, a very positive effect. Having such a lousy day the previous day, she knew she had to keep the Nano work as the first main effort of the day after the normal maintenance routines. She hoped she would still be able to make good progress on the other obligations. Too many things needed doing in the same time frame. It said something that all these competing things were not respectfully planned for. She would have to face this and make some real decisions about them. She knew it was said that not to decide about something was also a decision. Those were the decisions one was not willing to stand up for and state fully that one had decided them. One was unwilling to come out and say the thing.
She had been trying to take what she hoped was an easier way of trying to stay focused on what she thought she wanted, until that had such a strong hold that everything else fell away and became a moot point.
For supper that day she had decided to see if she could make a soup out of the one year old half bag of frozen chopped squash that was still in her freezer. One could make such a soup but what kind of freezer burn would it taste like? She rinsed off all the frost that had developed around the chunks of squash and set it to boil with chicken bouillon, a bit of vinegar, some curry powder, a pat of butter, and water to cover. As soon as the squash was soft enough she mashed it with the potato masher so that it was soupy. She poured off a serving into a small saucepan and mixed it with a serving of packaged turkey stuffing. She let the mixture sit for five minutes, and then ate it. Very tasty. That was her early evening meal or perhaps it had been her lunch. Later that evening she had the rest of the squash again mixed with the stuffing and again it had been tasty. She had even tasted the squash soup without the stuffing in it. That had been fine. The stuffing was just to make the whole thing more substantial. She had thought she might add cheese to the last serving, but it had been tasty enough as it was. If something was good without cheese, she should eat it that way, since she ate so much cheese as it was.
There were a lot of things she could have been writing about all along but many of these things referenced specific things in her life that she was unwilling to have pinned down in her Nanowrimo project. She did not think she had stated where any of this was taking place. She did not think she had named anyone in her life specifically. These were the elements that allowed the writing to have for her the quality of being an parallel reality, or at least of herself being an parallel observer. Whether that made it all fiction or not, she did not know. It gave a fictional experience to her in the act of writing. That she was typing the writing rather than writing longhand, brought it one step closer to being shared at some point. Typing it gave it a different presence and substance, in her mind and experience at least.
1:24p
Could she possibly put out a statement saying all the things she was not good at doing, so one should not expect these things of her? She hated returning most phonecalls, She hated returning most letters and messages. Often this was because they required new decisions to be made, decisions she did not want to have to make. She hated having most commissions. She hated most orders for merchandise. What else did she hate like that? ...She could say she would only answer by luck of the draw or flip of the coin!
There was a fellow who had written a very popular book - something like the four hour work week it was called. Part of his counsel was that one should establish standards where one drastically reduced what one agreed to engage in with others. His advice sounded so refreshing in theory. It also required setting up a business that ran on autopilot. That struck her as also nice in theory, but the problem in general seemed to be that people did not know what was involved in running a business. How would they figure out how to do one that worked on autopilot, or even find such businesses?
She was lagging at finding anything else to write about. Had she written that she'd done her regular journal writing already? For the past month of the Nano project, she had set aside her regular journal writing til after the Nano writing was done. Now she could see why it would have been better to hold off on that. It took a lot of time to do it. It delayed the Nano writing and the rest of the work that needed to get done. It would be that much harder to do the art work when the light started its changed atmosphere, its descent. And it was a grey day, so it would be that much darker. At least it would not be that lovely sunlight that became so wistful as it moved to late afternoon.
The most obvious solution to many of these problems was to learn not to promise anything. So much easier said than done - just as it was so much easier to promise something than to do it. She would have to practice that.
1:49 pm 1083 words
Did she dare put off the rest of the writing until later in the day and move on to working on some of the other things needing doing? Was she being self-indulgent by doing this now? No, she knew if she had left this until later she would have gotten too far behind and she had stuck it out this far into the project that she was not going to let go of it now. No matter if she could find nothing of substance to write about - the 'novel' of philibustering'.
The art project, though she was pleased with the idea she was working on, and pleased with the work she'd done on it, she was so resentful of what could well be just projected attitudes coming from the commissioner. That she felt the other person was annoyed, whether the person was or not, was spoiling things for her. She always had this dilemma. She would put off the project because she did not know how to solve it, or hated the reason for the projects being, or hated even that a request had been made (how ungrateful), and hated most that it so often felt as though a request was to fulfill the need to feel self importance or status. The commissioners were unaware of that. These things might well be simply projections on her part. But she believed them and they spoiled the gift and the surprise of it for her. What way was there around it though. She would hardly choose to do these works on her own. Only if she really wanted to surprise someone and managed to keep a work a secret until she showed it to them was she able to do things people wanted. Was that her answer - to really be clear that she would not promise anything?
Even when things were not promised and got started, there were too many other things that got in the way so that too many projects of her own went unfinished. There was the constant interruption of the classes. That work was not just a matter of a few hours a week, though she always rationalized to herself that it was. The people were always in her head with her when she worked on her own projects.
2:14p 1469 words
In many respects it was an emotional drain. On the other hand it was hard for her to give up that coming together with others and creating a space in which to be together as a group while also making art. She did find this meaningful. She would love to have it be something completely free so that she did not have to prepare material for it. She would not be responsible for the happiness of others. That was another thing that she could not seem to shake. If people were paying for something there was always a pressure to make sure they were happy. One of the things she wanted to teach, or that she was so troubled by, was that people did not understand they needed to make their own happiness. So here she was with the same problem. If she wanted to make her own happiness, she had to first find the happiness in what she had, and then go get what she wanted.
Funny how one could believe that one could get what one did not want. How did one come to believing that one could not get what one wanted? What was the difference? If one could get what one did not want, why could one not just as easily get what one did want?
2:26pm 1693 words Yay!
11/27/11
12:45 pm
The previous day she had not started her Nanowrimo writing until well into the evening. She had had to start working on a long overdue art project. Something had put her in a foul or blue mood for the whole day. Now she wondered if it was because she'd set aside the Nano writing and left it tll late evening, when she then also had to cut it short because the machine was acting temperamentally. Working on the Nano with such a routine had given her a different sense of purpose and outlook, even though she still could not quite understand why she had chosen to try it. She had only known once she'd gone just a few days into it that it was having an effect on her, a very positive effect. Having such a lousy day the previous day, she knew she had to keep the Nano work as the first main effort of the day after the normal maintenance routines. She hoped she would still be able to make good progress on the other obligations. Too many things needed doing in the same time frame. It said something that all these competing things were not respectfully planned for. She would have to face this and make some real decisions about them. She knew it was said that not to decide about something was also a decision. Those were the decisions one was not willing to stand up for and state fully that one had decided them. One was unwilling to come out and say the thing.
She had been trying to take what she hoped was an easier way of trying to stay focused on what she thought she wanted, until that had such a strong hold that everything else fell away and became a moot point.
For supper that day she had decided to see if she could make a soup out of the one year old half bag of frozen chopped squash that was still in her freezer. One could make such a soup but what kind of freezer burn would it taste like? She rinsed off all the frost that had developed around the chunks of squash and set it to boil with chicken bouillon, a bit of vinegar, some curry powder, a pat of butter, and water to cover. As soon as the squash was soft enough she mashed it with the potato masher so that it was soupy. She poured off a serving into a small saucepan and mixed it with a serving of packaged turkey stuffing. She let the mixture sit for five minutes, and then ate it. Very tasty. That was her early evening meal or perhaps it had been her lunch. Later that evening she had the rest of the squash again mixed with the stuffing and again it had been tasty. She had even tasted the squash soup without the stuffing in it. That had been fine. The stuffing was just to make the whole thing more substantial. She had thought she might add cheese to the last serving, but it had been tasty enough as it was. If something was good without cheese, she should eat it that way, since she ate so much cheese as it was.
There were a lot of things she could have been writing about all along but many of these things referenced specific things in her life that she was unwilling to have pinned down in her Nanowrimo project. She did not think she had stated where any of this was taking place. She did not think she had named anyone in her life specifically. These were the elements that allowed the writing to have for her the quality of being an parallel reality, or at least of herself being an parallel observer. Whether that made it all fiction or not, she did not know. It gave a fictional experience to her in the act of writing. That she was typing the writing rather than writing longhand, brought it one step closer to being shared at some point. Typing it gave it a different presence and substance, in her mind and experience at least.
1:24p
Could she possibly put out a statement saying all the things she was not good at doing, so one should not expect these things of her? She hated returning most phonecalls, She hated returning most letters and messages. Often this was because they required new decisions to be made, decisions she did not want to have to make. She hated having most commissions. She hated most orders for merchandise. What else did she hate like that? ...She could say she would only answer by luck of the draw or flip of the coin!
There was a fellow who had written a very popular book - something like the four hour work week it was called. Part of his counsel was that one should establish standards where one drastically reduced what one agreed to engage in with others. His advice sounded so refreshing in theory. It also required setting up a business that ran on autopilot. That struck her as also nice in theory, but the problem in general seemed to be that people did not know what was involved in running a business. How would they figure out how to do one that worked on autopilot, or even find such businesses?
She was lagging at finding anything else to write about. Had she written that she'd done her regular journal writing already? For the past month of the Nano project, she had set aside her regular journal writing til after the Nano writing was done. Now she could see why it would have been better to hold off on that. It took a lot of time to do it. It delayed the Nano writing and the rest of the work that needed to get done. It would be that much harder to do the art work when the light started its changed atmosphere, its descent. And it was a grey day, so it would be that much darker. At least it would not be that lovely sunlight that became so wistful as it moved to late afternoon.
The most obvious solution to many of these problems was to learn not to promise anything. So much easier said than done - just as it was so much easier to promise something than to do it. She would have to practice that.
1:49 pm 1083 words
Did she dare put off the rest of the writing until later in the day and move on to working on some of the other things needing doing? Was she being self-indulgent by doing this now? No, she knew if she had left this until later she would have gotten too far behind and she had stuck it out this far into the project that she was not going to let go of it now. No matter if she could find nothing of substance to write about - the 'novel' of philibustering'.
The art project, though she was pleased with the idea she was working on, and pleased with the work she'd done on it, she was so resentful of what could well be just projected attitudes coming from the commissioner. That she felt the other person was annoyed, whether the person was or not, was spoiling things for her. She always had this dilemma. She would put off the project because she did not know how to solve it, or hated the reason for the projects being, or hated even that a request had been made (how ungrateful), and hated most that it so often felt as though a request was to fulfill the need to feel self importance or status. The commissioners were unaware of that. These things might well be simply projections on her part. But she believed them and they spoiled the gift and the surprise of it for her. What way was there around it though. She would hardly choose to do these works on her own. Only if she really wanted to surprise someone and managed to keep a work a secret until she showed it to them was she able to do things people wanted. Was that her answer - to really be clear that she would not promise anything?
Even when things were not promised and got started, there were too many other things that got in the way so that too many projects of her own went unfinished. There was the constant interruption of the classes. That work was not just a matter of a few hours a week, though she always rationalized to herself that it was. The people were always in her head with her when she worked on her own projects.
2:14p 1469 words
In many respects it was an emotional drain. On the other hand it was hard for her to give up that coming together with others and creating a space in which to be together as a group while also making art. She did find this meaningful. She would love to have it be something completely free so that she did not have to prepare material for it. She would not be responsible for the happiness of others. That was another thing that she could not seem to shake. If people were paying for something there was always a pressure to make sure they were happy. One of the things she wanted to teach, or that she was so troubled by, was that people did not understand they needed to make their own happiness. So here she was with the same problem. If she wanted to make her own happiness, she had to first find the happiness in what she had, and then go get what she wanted.
Funny how one could believe that one could get what one did not want. How did one come to believing that one could not get what one wanted? What was the difference? If one could get what one did not want, why could one not just as easily get what one did want?
2:26pm 1693 words Yay!
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Anxieties, time pressures...
Anxieties, time pressures...
11/26/11
7:06p
She was anxious about her Nanowrimo writing for the day. She had not gotten to it until late in the day, never a time that she had been able to work on it. She had had to work on one of the art projects hanging over her head. There had been a little progress on that. Not perhaps she could get in a little Nano work before cooking some dinner. The Nano work could not be left too long. Neither could the art project. They were in competition for the time available. Always the time factor squeezing everything. No wonder she kept having such a heavy feeling in her chest. She was finding this all quite depressing and she was feeling anxious about all of it.
She kept trying to think of ways to get out of what seemed like a prison she had built up for herself. She reminded herself that she had to keep her mind on what she wanted to do, not on what she wanted to get away from. If she could keep her mind, her vision, on what she wanted, it would fall into place. It certainly seemed like that was how things usually worked out. What seemed tricky was when she was not clear on what she wanted. Whenever she knew something she wanted, something she wanted to do, it was as if it happened instantly. Why did it seem so hard to understand what she wanted?
Was she scared to want something? Was she scared to accept that she wanted something? Was she scared to say she wanted a particular thing, or to believe she wanted something? Perhaps she was afraid to want something only to find out she did not want it. Why should that be a problem? Weren't people allowed to change their minds?
She was feeling so guilty that she was only now starting this art project. It was a project she did every year at this time. Last year she had started it much later than this time. She believed the person it was for was annoyed at being kept in the dark about it. The person was waiting to see how things stood. But she was not ready to communicate about it until she had some solid work done on it.
She had made the mistake the night before of calling her mother to check in. That meant an hour and a half was spent mostly listening to her mother. When the call was over, there was no more emotional energy to spend on any kind of work. She needed to go completely to personal free time. She wondered how people were able to function at constant 'go' levels. They seemed so driven. She had stopped that a long time ago as much as possible. It still seemed there was too much of it in her life. There had to be a way to arrange things so they did not always seem so pressurized.
She again had had no idea what she might want to write about for the day's Nano session. Earlier she had done quite a bit of writing longhand in her regular journal.
She just figured if she could at least make a small dent in her daily quota, that was better than nothing if it came down to that. There were only a few days left of the challenge. She felt she really needed to get most of what was left done now, since her two teaching days had rarely given her a chance to write. How she longed to be done with this challenge.
At least last night she had finally registered her Nano project and validated the word count to that point. There she had had another round of doubts over whether her project qualified. She was having trouble even saying the word 'novel' in referring to it. She was calling it 'project' instead.
7:36p
She did not want to talk about the drawing she'd been working on that evening. She had two of them going. They were to be composite views peering through the slender branches of blooming rhododendron bushes, with a hummingbird perched in a branch, to a view of the lighthouse in the bay. This was a springtime scene. The composite was that the rhododendron with the hummingbird had actually been facing a house on the hill rather than out to the ocean.
The new neighbor downstairs had such a heavy walk.
7:43p 751 words
11/26/11
7:06p
She was anxious about her Nanowrimo writing for the day. She had not gotten to it until late in the day, never a time that she had been able to work on it. She had had to work on one of the art projects hanging over her head. There had been a little progress on that. Not perhaps she could get in a little Nano work before cooking some dinner. The Nano work could not be left too long. Neither could the art project. They were in competition for the time available. Always the time factor squeezing everything. No wonder she kept having such a heavy feeling in her chest. She was finding this all quite depressing and she was feeling anxious about all of it.
She kept trying to think of ways to get out of what seemed like a prison she had built up for herself. She reminded herself that she had to keep her mind on what she wanted to do, not on what she wanted to get away from. If she could keep her mind, her vision, on what she wanted, it would fall into place. It certainly seemed like that was how things usually worked out. What seemed tricky was when she was not clear on what she wanted. Whenever she knew something she wanted, something she wanted to do, it was as if it happened instantly. Why did it seem so hard to understand what she wanted?
Was she scared to want something? Was she scared to accept that she wanted something? Was she scared to say she wanted a particular thing, or to believe she wanted something? Perhaps she was afraid to want something only to find out she did not want it. Why should that be a problem? Weren't people allowed to change their minds?
She was feeling so guilty that she was only now starting this art project. It was a project she did every year at this time. Last year she had started it much later than this time. She believed the person it was for was annoyed at being kept in the dark about it. The person was waiting to see how things stood. But she was not ready to communicate about it until she had some solid work done on it.
She had made the mistake the night before of calling her mother to check in. That meant an hour and a half was spent mostly listening to her mother. When the call was over, there was no more emotional energy to spend on any kind of work. She needed to go completely to personal free time. She wondered how people were able to function at constant 'go' levels. They seemed so driven. She had stopped that a long time ago as much as possible. It still seemed there was too much of it in her life. There had to be a way to arrange things so they did not always seem so pressurized.
She again had had no idea what she might want to write about for the day's Nano session. Earlier she had done quite a bit of writing longhand in her regular journal.
She just figured if she could at least make a small dent in her daily quota, that was better than nothing if it came down to that. There were only a few days left of the challenge. She felt she really needed to get most of what was left done now, since her two teaching days had rarely given her a chance to write. How she longed to be done with this challenge.
At least last night she had finally registered her Nano project and validated the word count to that point. There she had had another round of doubts over whether her project qualified. She was having trouble even saying the word 'novel' in referring to it. She was calling it 'project' instead.
7:36p
She did not want to talk about the drawing she'd been working on that evening. She had two of them going. They were to be composite views peering through the slender branches of blooming rhododendron bushes, with a hummingbird perched in a branch, to a view of the lighthouse in the bay. This was a springtime scene. The composite was that the rhododendron with the hummingbird had actually been facing a house on the hill rather than out to the ocean.
The new neighbor downstairs had such a heavy walk.
7:43p 751 words
Friday, November 25, 2011
Process over product, book/story making group, a velvet party dress, chairs ....
Process over product, book/story making group, a velvet party dress, chairs ....
11/25/11
11:24 am
She had briefly settled or decided how she would cope with her dissatisfactions with teaching for the time being. The last class had pleased her because she had created some art in the process of the class. She was always telling her students it was process not product that they should be striving for. It seemed she was not immune to that desire for product. Maybe one needed to always working for both, or at least to know one was always moving forward on each aspect. She would have to keep looking for ways to do both - to make use of the opportunities to practice that she had in class, and to create art in a way that she could complete in the time allotted. Perhaps it would help to have a list of ideas and approaches handy so that it would be easier to make a quick choice. It also helped to collect the work into a more formal unit so that the fragments then became part of a continuum which formed a whole, or several wholes, as soon as it gathered enough segments. The binders of lessons she had started collecting over the past year had helped a lot in that way.
The experience of watching the raccoon painting sitting out waiting to be finished for days on end had been disheartening. She believed it was that she had written about it that had gotten her to act upon it and complete it. She had been on the verge of deciding the single raccoon in the upper left hand corner of the page would have to be cropped out to make a whole. Once she had made the move to work on it, she saw immediately that what had really held her back was that the interruption had allowed her to hesitate about continuing. The first coon was nicely painted. She had feared whether she would be able to paint another one as nicely. Perhaps she had realized that even if the second coon was no good, she would still be able to cut out the good coon to make it into a whole.
While she would continue carrying on with the classes and keeping her personal purposes in focus, she would keep in mind her vision of an ideal. Did she even have such a vision? The thing that most got to her was the apparent constant battle with schedules, deadlines, due dates, the passage of time. The passage of time did not really matter except that it was so prevalent because of the nonstop stream of deadlines. It seemed that no matter how few deadlines she managed to whittle down to, the emotional pressure they generated in her made them feel ever present.
One of the reasons she had started the routine or series of monthly art demonstrations was that it meant deciding ahead of time what that month's lessons would be. She was in theory free of having to decide the night before class what the subject matter would be. This had been such an anxiety provoking part of holding classes - worrying about choosing something the class would respond to. Now that pressure was reduced to one day a month. It was still the same pressure. It was there every month. Now it was also a pressure to draw in new people. So how did one approach such efforts without the worry over whether a thing would go over well or not? Perhaps one had to simply make a decision, and hold to it, that one was going to offer what one chose to offer, She kept losing sight of the fact that the monthly press releases in themselves formed a body of creative work. They were in effect forming a curriculum outline of proposals. Each one was illustrated as well. She was beginning to see at least some of the value in this, to see that her efforts were not a loss.
She was pausing too long in reflection.... wondering what she was willing to write about next. How she wished she had the skill of making up stories on a whim. It did seem as if she were yearning to be able to do that, or to believe she could do it. Developing that skill, if it was a skill, was one of the things that would have to wait til more of these immediate obligations were out of the way.
She had for a long time had in mind to hold a bookmaking or storybook making group - something that would be a group, not a formal fee based instruction. Perhaps that was something she could do at the library. It could be tried just for a month. Unless she did it in additon to the Christmas card theme she liked to do in December, it could be done in January. She would think more on this idea.
She was worried about the December adult program. She was losing her confidence about having the class be drawing rather than painting. But the kids class was drawing and no one had a problem with that. Perhaps she needed to simply reduce the adult class to a drawing class. That way no one could feel they had been mislead. What was the difference between painting and drawing anyway? Pastel work was considered painting and yet it was considered drawing. She would have to look up the definitions of each. She had been disappointed and almost resentful that people were so enamored of the medium of watercolor that they rejected drawing in color. It was an attitude that was so symptomatic of so much of what bothered her about teaching.
The two elderly ladies who had been coming faithfully to the adult drawing class had said how they found themselves looking differently at the world around them since working in the class. They were starting to observe the geometric shapes one could see in the visual phenomena out there. They were enjoying that. It also meant they were discovering new things. To hear this was very gratifying.
12:23p
She was sweeping her mind waiting for something she wanted to write or think about to pop in. There had been lots of things passing through that morning. She had written nothing down, hoping instead that something would return when she sat down to write. Her mind felt blank of anything interesting enough to ponder upon. This was perhaps the result of only being willing to work with certain valued ideas. Should one be able to write about anything? Should one be able to find questions, and relationships about anything?
In front of the bay window panel to her right, the west, she had a box of old newspapers that held references to the annual event she was involved with. The box was covered with a little board, which in turn was draped with a mauve velvet cloth. The cloth had been a little girl's handmade party dress that she had found in a thrift shop years ago. She had bought it to use for whatever creative projects she might want it for. It had a lace trim around the neckline that looked like it was hand crocheted. It had pearl buttons down the front, which she assumed were faux. She did not remember whether the dress had actually been finished and she had cut off parts of the hem and sleeve cuffs, or she had bought it that way. For years she used it as part of her Christmas tree set up - to cover up the tree stand. Now it lay over this little board as a place to set up art work for quick photographing. It was a handy quick backdrop.
Who was the person the dress had been for? Had the person outgrown the dress or ended up not needing it for some reason. What was the occasion the dress was made for? How did the dress get to the thrift shop? How old was the dress if that was in fact hand crocheted lace? She had assumed it was handmade. It occurred to her that she had never looked inside the dress to see if there might be a label. There was indeed a label, a size and lot tag, and a garment workers union tag.
12:49 p 1394 words
Another impasse....
To her right where she sat almost in her sunny bay window, was a white metal folding garden chair. She had brought it out here to use for sitting at her writing, but had gone back to sitting in the old falling apart winsor chair. The garden chair was one of seven folding chairs that one of her students had given her a few years back to use for her classes. She had gotten so much use from these chairs. They were not the standard folding chairs, but a variety of types. She cherished these chairs. They had been so instrumental in being able to hold classes.
The winsor chair she sat in had been appropriated from the basement of an apartment building she'd lived in. An elderly couple had died. The apartment had been cleaned out. Certain furniture items had been put in the basement to be picked up by the junk hauler - probably the auction junk hauler. Her friend had seen a set of two chairs down there. They had run down and taken them. Another friend had traded her a found dropleaf table for one of the two chairs. These two items had been her basic 'livingroom' furniture ever since. The chair needed periodic pounding back together as some of the spindles always worked their way out of their holes. One of these days she might find a way to repair the chair.
1:12p 1635 words
She wondered how she would continue with the writing when the project was over. She knew she meant to continue writing by hand. She also knew how important it was to her to write daily on the machine, even though there was the constant push to worry about meeting the crazy quota. She figured she would continue by just writing what she wanted. Would she keep on writing in this nameless voice? That had been a big part of giving the experience its *atmosphere.*
1:25p 1723 words
11/25/11
11:24 am
She had briefly settled or decided how she would cope with her dissatisfactions with teaching for the time being. The last class had pleased her because she had created some art in the process of the class. She was always telling her students it was process not product that they should be striving for. It seemed she was not immune to that desire for product. Maybe one needed to always working for both, or at least to know one was always moving forward on each aspect. She would have to keep looking for ways to do both - to make use of the opportunities to practice that she had in class, and to create art in a way that she could complete in the time allotted. Perhaps it would help to have a list of ideas and approaches handy so that it would be easier to make a quick choice. It also helped to collect the work into a more formal unit so that the fragments then became part of a continuum which formed a whole, or several wholes, as soon as it gathered enough segments. The binders of lessons she had started collecting over the past year had helped a lot in that way.
The experience of watching the raccoon painting sitting out waiting to be finished for days on end had been disheartening. She believed it was that she had written about it that had gotten her to act upon it and complete it. She had been on the verge of deciding the single raccoon in the upper left hand corner of the page would have to be cropped out to make a whole. Once she had made the move to work on it, she saw immediately that what had really held her back was that the interruption had allowed her to hesitate about continuing. The first coon was nicely painted. She had feared whether she would be able to paint another one as nicely. Perhaps she had realized that even if the second coon was no good, she would still be able to cut out the good coon to make it into a whole.
While she would continue carrying on with the classes and keeping her personal purposes in focus, she would keep in mind her vision of an ideal. Did she even have such a vision? The thing that most got to her was the apparent constant battle with schedules, deadlines, due dates, the passage of time. The passage of time did not really matter except that it was so prevalent because of the nonstop stream of deadlines. It seemed that no matter how few deadlines she managed to whittle down to, the emotional pressure they generated in her made them feel ever present.
One of the reasons she had started the routine or series of monthly art demonstrations was that it meant deciding ahead of time what that month's lessons would be. She was in theory free of having to decide the night before class what the subject matter would be. This had been such an anxiety provoking part of holding classes - worrying about choosing something the class would respond to. Now that pressure was reduced to one day a month. It was still the same pressure. It was there every month. Now it was also a pressure to draw in new people. So how did one approach such efforts without the worry over whether a thing would go over well or not? Perhaps one had to simply make a decision, and hold to it, that one was going to offer what one chose to offer, She kept losing sight of the fact that the monthly press releases in themselves formed a body of creative work. They were in effect forming a curriculum outline of proposals. Each one was illustrated as well. She was beginning to see at least some of the value in this, to see that her efforts were not a loss.
She was pausing too long in reflection.... wondering what she was willing to write about next. How she wished she had the skill of making up stories on a whim. It did seem as if she were yearning to be able to do that, or to believe she could do it. Developing that skill, if it was a skill, was one of the things that would have to wait til more of these immediate obligations were out of the way.
She had for a long time had in mind to hold a bookmaking or storybook making group - something that would be a group, not a formal fee based instruction. Perhaps that was something she could do at the library. It could be tried just for a month. Unless she did it in additon to the Christmas card theme she liked to do in December, it could be done in January. She would think more on this idea.
She was worried about the December adult program. She was losing her confidence about having the class be drawing rather than painting. But the kids class was drawing and no one had a problem with that. Perhaps she needed to simply reduce the adult class to a drawing class. That way no one could feel they had been mislead. What was the difference between painting and drawing anyway? Pastel work was considered painting and yet it was considered drawing. She would have to look up the definitions of each. She had been disappointed and almost resentful that people were so enamored of the medium of watercolor that they rejected drawing in color. It was an attitude that was so symptomatic of so much of what bothered her about teaching.
The two elderly ladies who had been coming faithfully to the adult drawing class had said how they found themselves looking differently at the world around them since working in the class. They were starting to observe the geometric shapes one could see in the visual phenomena out there. They were enjoying that. It also meant they were discovering new things. To hear this was very gratifying.
12:23p
She was sweeping her mind waiting for something she wanted to write or think about to pop in. There had been lots of things passing through that morning. She had written nothing down, hoping instead that something would return when she sat down to write. Her mind felt blank of anything interesting enough to ponder upon. This was perhaps the result of only being willing to work with certain valued ideas. Should one be able to write about anything? Should one be able to find questions, and relationships about anything?
In front of the bay window panel to her right, the west, she had a box of old newspapers that held references to the annual event she was involved with. The box was covered with a little board, which in turn was draped with a mauve velvet cloth. The cloth had been a little girl's handmade party dress that she had found in a thrift shop years ago. She had bought it to use for whatever creative projects she might want it for. It had a lace trim around the neckline that looked like it was hand crocheted. It had pearl buttons down the front, which she assumed were faux. She did not remember whether the dress had actually been finished and she had cut off parts of the hem and sleeve cuffs, or she had bought it that way. For years she used it as part of her Christmas tree set up - to cover up the tree stand. Now it lay over this little board as a place to set up art work for quick photographing. It was a handy quick backdrop.
Who was the person the dress had been for? Had the person outgrown the dress or ended up not needing it for some reason. What was the occasion the dress was made for? How did the dress get to the thrift shop? How old was the dress if that was in fact hand crocheted lace? She had assumed it was handmade. It occurred to her that she had never looked inside the dress to see if there might be a label. There was indeed a label, a size and lot tag, and a garment workers union tag.
12:49 p 1394 words
Another impasse....
To her right where she sat almost in her sunny bay window, was a white metal folding garden chair. She had brought it out here to use for sitting at her writing, but had gone back to sitting in the old falling apart winsor chair. The garden chair was one of seven folding chairs that one of her students had given her a few years back to use for her classes. She had gotten so much use from these chairs. They were not the standard folding chairs, but a variety of types. She cherished these chairs. They had been so instrumental in being able to hold classes.
The winsor chair she sat in had been appropriated from the basement of an apartment building she'd lived in. An elderly couple had died. The apartment had been cleaned out. Certain furniture items had been put in the basement to be picked up by the junk hauler - probably the auction junk hauler. Her friend had seen a set of two chairs down there. They had run down and taken them. Another friend had traded her a found dropleaf table for one of the two chairs. These two items had been her basic 'livingroom' furniture ever since. The chair needed periodic pounding back together as some of the spindles always worked their way out of their holes. One of these days she might find a way to repair the chair.
1:12p 1635 words
She wondered how she would continue with the writing when the project was over. She knew she meant to continue writing by hand. She also knew how important it was to her to write daily on the machine, even though there was the constant push to worry about meeting the crazy quota. She figured she would continue by just writing what she wanted. Would she keep on writing in this nameless voice? That had been a big part of giving the experience its *atmosphere.*
1:25p 1723 words
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Quiet of Thanksgiving, writing methods, freeform, author publicity stunts...
Quiet of Thanksgiving, writing methods, freeform, author publicity stunts...
11/24/11
2:23p
She had decided not to go anywhere for Thanksgiving. She wanted to stay home to feel the stillness of the holiday. But she had just spent almost two hours trying to update the time allotment for her phone. She had finally, by luck, managed to track down what the error was that was preventing the update to take place. It was a good thing she had figured it out. There had been some out of date information, but nothing indicated there was out of date information on record. By chance she happened upon it. She would have continued to have the problem had she not found out what was wrong. That would have caused other problems.
She was still having good feelings from her marathon Nanowrimo writing session from the previous day. She had worked straight through for five hours and written about 5000 words. She had been wandering in the world of the writing for all that time. It had crossed her mind this day, that one reason she might want to go out for Thanksgiving was to go get some stories to write about. But she just did not feel up to being immersed in other people on this day. A holiday like this meant that most people were out with loved ones celebrating being together. That made a holiday have its own very special peacefulness. She loved to simply soak in that atmosphere. Being in the middle of activity amongst others, masked the stillness of the day.
Now she would have to fish for things to write about again. Nothing to speak of had come up in her life since writing though her marathon session. She had tried to find out more about the continuous writing method. This had led her to an advertisement for information on how to write a novel very quickly. The instruction advertised was intriguing, but also quite expensive. She'd done some sleuthing to see if she could find the same information in other ways. This had led to other information about writing fiction, and just writing in general.
She was able to find out it was not Guy De Maupassant who'd promised to write a novel from a suspended glass cage. It had been Georges Simenon. The event was to occur outside the Moulin Rouge, a well known club in Paris. It was not a bank, but a newspaper that was to sponsor the event. The newspaper folded before the event could occur. Simenon at least made some money just for agreeing to accept the proposal. It was to have taken place over 72 hours rather than 36 hours. And he did later on set up shop at some public location where he banged out a novel on his typewriter, much as if he were a performer. Maupassant's own publicity stunt had been to send up a hot air balloon advertising the title of his latest short story.
She wanted to dream up publicity stunts just for the fun of it, even if she never put any into play. Dreaming up publicity stunts or events seemed like a good brainstorming practice. Like coming up with a list of story line ideas.
She had thought more about the possibilities lying in her boxes of stuff. There was the old yellow plastic sewing kit whose latch did not hold properly. It held very old spools of threads, a package of assorted sewing needles that she'd gotten when she was quite young, several Mexican silver thimbles, an ordinary thimble, among lots of other sewing things.
There was a box of blue glass - bottles, glasses, vases - she'd been collecting to use as still life material for her art classes. She just realized that now she could do still lifes with the class, now that they were meeting at her home. When class was at different locations, it was too unwieldy to cart objects about for still lifes. With a still life there was always the problem of which view would be the good view. In art school the still lifes had always been big enough that such things did not matter. If she were to do this, she would also have to have a different seating arrangement. This was something to consider though. She was also in a better position to make a still life and take photos of it. There was so much more room in this apartment to do this in.
3:14p
The continuous writing method was called 'freeform writing'. She had tried this a long time ago and had never mastered it. She just balked at doing it even though she believed it probably had a lot of merit. She had always done her own version of it, which allowed her to pause and reflect and to correct as she went along. To get more freeform into the writing one would have to use an instrument that was not as easy to correct as one went along - a pen or a typewriter. There the difficulty in correcting would inhibit the desire to correct. The slowness of the method would also allow thoughts to come out more thoughtfully she supposed. It did not seem that one could ever truly think aloud in writing, just because thoughts had to come faster than one could write or speak. One could only approximate the experience.
She had stopped using a pen for her journals a long time ago. She used a pencil - not because pencil was erasable, but because pen faded so much over time, and quickly.
She wanted to look back in her journal for last Thanksgiving to see how she had felt about it then. She suspected she had wished she had stayed home. She would check this later.
3:29p 962 words
She was dragging now and again run out of anything to write about. Her eyes were getting glazed as she found herself almost wanting to drift off to nap. Luckily this was not at the stage of overwhelming yet. She just needed something or she would have to get up. She was also getting chilled as the sun headed low to the horizon. The heater had not kicked in yet. When it did, it would get too hot in the room. There, it had just kicked in.
She had also finally been able to dig up that letter with her economics question that she had sent to her economist friend. The letter had been very hard to track down. The initial correspondence expressed that he had written a couple of novels, but here she had not been able to find out anything more about them. When she had known him so long ago, it had seemed like he had wanted to be a writer. She wondered what else had become of that, how and why he had become an economist instead.
3:46p
The sun was just going down and the sky above the western horizon was getting overcast. It was not yet dusk. She had not heard what the weather forecast was to be. She would check on that after she finished her writing, if she ever could. To be stuck sitting here with nothing to write, was a bit like having to sit at dinner while she chewed the last pieces of gristle and tried to swallow it. This was one of the things she had had to do when her stepdad came on the scene. Dinners changed then. He did not allow her to be picky with her food, a bad habit that meant that she had written her own ticket over what she would or would not eat, until she was almost eight years old. That seemingly endless time of endlessly chewing the same bite of meat and trying to get it swallowed had seemed like torture back then. She did not remember how she grew out of it. She must have somehow figured out how to bury the dreaded food in mashed potato or applesauce so that it could go down the gullet easier. For awhile the parents were on the Adele Davis health food kick. They would often have liver or kidneys for dinner. Her mother did not know how to cook liver so that it was tasty. The worst tasting food of this health food kick was the brewer's yeast 'tiger's milk' her Dad made. The taste of that could not be disguised inside of mashed potato or applesauce. It was a drink and she found it revolting if not downright nauseating. She could remember the taste of it now.
4:05p 1431 words
This was going very slowly.
Tomorrow she would have to write two press releases, on top of her Nano writing. She had to write up what the December kids drawing classes program would be, and what the adult program would be. She just realized that she had not checked with the library about room availability for the Monday time slot in which she held her adult classes. The library was closed tomorrow. For all she knew, the newspapers were closed as well. She could not send out a press release without having that information confirmed. She would have to get the material written, approve the time on Saturday and send it out then. One paper at least would accept it. Perhaps that material had been due yesterday. There were images to prepare for it as well.
Now she wanted to know more about writer's block. Just what was it. Her dad had said it was when one was trying to write about something one did not know about. She thought it was when one got stuck and did not know how to resolve a problem in story line. Or bigger then that - where one did not know how to begin writing something, or did not have anything to write about, or did not have anything one wanted to write about.
She had tried to find out more about Charles Dickens writing method. All she could learn was that he wrote for serial publication. He was continually publishing what he wrote. Also that he worked closely with the illustrators. He gave them story lines in advance so that they could be working the illustrations up in advance. He had to supply them with character descriptions so the illustrations would match what he had written. Her friend had told her there was no evidence of how he had kept track of all the plot lines. No one knew whether he had outlines all worked out to the end of a book. If he did not, then he would have been forced to find resolutions to those 'written into a corner' places because there was no taking back what had already been published.
4:28p
She was intrigued with the idea of doing this, though she did not believe it was something she would want to carry out when it came right down to it. She first wanted find out if it were possible to learn how to make up and write a story. A possible practice would be to make up a daily tiny story to do it as a game. Try such an exercise for a month.
4:32 p 1873 words
11/24/11
2:23p
She had decided not to go anywhere for Thanksgiving. She wanted to stay home to feel the stillness of the holiday. But she had just spent almost two hours trying to update the time allotment for her phone. She had finally, by luck, managed to track down what the error was that was preventing the update to take place. It was a good thing she had figured it out. There had been some out of date information, but nothing indicated there was out of date information on record. By chance she happened upon it. She would have continued to have the problem had she not found out what was wrong. That would have caused other problems.
She was still having good feelings from her marathon Nanowrimo writing session from the previous day. She had worked straight through for five hours and written about 5000 words. She had been wandering in the world of the writing for all that time. It had crossed her mind this day, that one reason she might want to go out for Thanksgiving was to go get some stories to write about. But she just did not feel up to being immersed in other people on this day. A holiday like this meant that most people were out with loved ones celebrating being together. That made a holiday have its own very special peacefulness. She loved to simply soak in that atmosphere. Being in the middle of activity amongst others, masked the stillness of the day.
Now she would have to fish for things to write about again. Nothing to speak of had come up in her life since writing though her marathon session. She had tried to find out more about the continuous writing method. This had led her to an advertisement for information on how to write a novel very quickly. The instruction advertised was intriguing, but also quite expensive. She'd done some sleuthing to see if she could find the same information in other ways. This had led to other information about writing fiction, and just writing in general.
She was able to find out it was not Guy De Maupassant who'd promised to write a novel from a suspended glass cage. It had been Georges Simenon. The event was to occur outside the Moulin Rouge, a well known club in Paris. It was not a bank, but a newspaper that was to sponsor the event. The newspaper folded before the event could occur. Simenon at least made some money just for agreeing to accept the proposal. It was to have taken place over 72 hours rather than 36 hours. And he did later on set up shop at some public location where he banged out a novel on his typewriter, much as if he were a performer. Maupassant's own publicity stunt had been to send up a hot air balloon advertising the title of his latest short story.
She wanted to dream up publicity stunts just for the fun of it, even if she never put any into play. Dreaming up publicity stunts or events seemed like a good brainstorming practice. Like coming up with a list of story line ideas.
She had thought more about the possibilities lying in her boxes of stuff. There was the old yellow plastic sewing kit whose latch did not hold properly. It held very old spools of threads, a package of assorted sewing needles that she'd gotten when she was quite young, several Mexican silver thimbles, an ordinary thimble, among lots of other sewing things.
There was a box of blue glass - bottles, glasses, vases - she'd been collecting to use as still life material for her art classes. She just realized that now she could do still lifes with the class, now that they were meeting at her home. When class was at different locations, it was too unwieldy to cart objects about for still lifes. With a still life there was always the problem of which view would be the good view. In art school the still lifes had always been big enough that such things did not matter. If she were to do this, she would also have to have a different seating arrangement. This was something to consider though. She was also in a better position to make a still life and take photos of it. There was so much more room in this apartment to do this in.
3:14p
The continuous writing method was called 'freeform writing'. She had tried this a long time ago and had never mastered it. She just balked at doing it even though she believed it probably had a lot of merit. She had always done her own version of it, which allowed her to pause and reflect and to correct as she went along. To get more freeform into the writing one would have to use an instrument that was not as easy to correct as one went along - a pen or a typewriter. There the difficulty in correcting would inhibit the desire to correct. The slowness of the method would also allow thoughts to come out more thoughtfully she supposed. It did not seem that one could ever truly think aloud in writing, just because thoughts had to come faster than one could write or speak. One could only approximate the experience.
She had stopped using a pen for her journals a long time ago. She used a pencil - not because pencil was erasable, but because pen faded so much over time, and quickly.
She wanted to look back in her journal for last Thanksgiving to see how she had felt about it then. She suspected she had wished she had stayed home. She would check this later.
3:29p 962 words
She was dragging now and again run out of anything to write about. Her eyes were getting glazed as she found herself almost wanting to drift off to nap. Luckily this was not at the stage of overwhelming yet. She just needed something or she would have to get up. She was also getting chilled as the sun headed low to the horizon. The heater had not kicked in yet. When it did, it would get too hot in the room. There, it had just kicked in.
She had also finally been able to dig up that letter with her economics question that she had sent to her economist friend. The letter had been very hard to track down. The initial correspondence expressed that he had written a couple of novels, but here she had not been able to find out anything more about them. When she had known him so long ago, it had seemed like he had wanted to be a writer. She wondered what else had become of that, how and why he had become an economist instead.
3:46p
The sun was just going down and the sky above the western horizon was getting overcast. It was not yet dusk. She had not heard what the weather forecast was to be. She would check on that after she finished her writing, if she ever could. To be stuck sitting here with nothing to write, was a bit like having to sit at dinner while she chewed the last pieces of gristle and tried to swallow it. This was one of the things she had had to do when her stepdad came on the scene. Dinners changed then. He did not allow her to be picky with her food, a bad habit that meant that she had written her own ticket over what she would or would not eat, until she was almost eight years old. That seemingly endless time of endlessly chewing the same bite of meat and trying to get it swallowed had seemed like torture back then. She did not remember how she grew out of it. She must have somehow figured out how to bury the dreaded food in mashed potato or applesauce so that it could go down the gullet easier. For awhile the parents were on the Adele Davis health food kick. They would often have liver or kidneys for dinner. Her mother did not know how to cook liver so that it was tasty. The worst tasting food of this health food kick was the brewer's yeast 'tiger's milk' her Dad made. The taste of that could not be disguised inside of mashed potato or applesauce. It was a drink and she found it revolting if not downright nauseating. She could remember the taste of it now.
4:05p 1431 words
This was going very slowly.
Tomorrow she would have to write two press releases, on top of her Nano writing. She had to write up what the December kids drawing classes program would be, and what the adult program would be. She just realized that she had not checked with the library about room availability for the Monday time slot in which she held her adult classes. The library was closed tomorrow. For all she knew, the newspapers were closed as well. She could not send out a press release without having that information confirmed. She would have to get the material written, approve the time on Saturday and send it out then. One paper at least would accept it. Perhaps that material had been due yesterday. There were images to prepare for it as well.
Now she wanted to know more about writer's block. Just what was it. Her dad had said it was when one was trying to write about something one did not know about. She thought it was when one got stuck and did not know how to resolve a problem in story line. Or bigger then that - where one did not know how to begin writing something, or did not have anything to write about, or did not have anything one wanted to write about.
She had tried to find out more about Charles Dickens writing method. All she could learn was that he wrote for serial publication. He was continually publishing what he wrote. Also that he worked closely with the illustrators. He gave them story lines in advance so that they could be working the illustrations up in advance. He had to supply them with character descriptions so the illustrations would match what he had written. Her friend had told her there was no evidence of how he had kept track of all the plot lines. No one knew whether he had outlines all worked out to the end of a book. If he did not, then he would have been forced to find resolutions to those 'written into a corner' places because there was no taking back what had already been published.
4:28p
She was intrigued with the idea of doing this, though she did not believe it was something she would want to carry out when it came right down to it. She first wanted find out if it were possible to learn how to make up and write a story. A possible practice would be to make up a daily tiny story to do it as a game. Try such an exercise for a month.
4:32 p 1873 words
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Marathon writing, teaching art classes, cooking, word counts, making up for lost writing time, an unfinished children's book, story creation by storyb
Marathon writing, teaching art classes, cooking, word counts, making up for lost writing time, an unfinished children's book, story creation by storyboard ...
11/23/11
12:42p
She was starting her Nanowrimo writing session late in the day again and she had had to miss two days of writing this week. Much as she had thought she would be able to make up a day's writing by starting the work later in the day after the morning's obligations had been done, it had not worked out that way. It was as if the obligations consumed too much emotional energy to have anything left to put towards the writing for the Nano project. Since that writing was done with such a different attitude and voice than her usual writing, she found it could not be done in bits and pieces with the extra time pressure hanging over her. Or, at least in her mind, it had itself become an obligation that restricted the free flow needed for wriiting. She found it inhibiting in a way. Once that much time had been spent doing things seemingly willed upon her from outside of her, she simply balked at answering any further demands, even if they had been self imposed demands. At that point they had crossed from the border of desire to the border of demand.
She had been worrying how she would be able to make up the word deficit. Two days missed and this day still was three days of writing to make up. It had taken her a long time to catch up from those first two days missed. And how would she fare next week when the same schedule problems came up again? Could she possibly write enough extra every day to make it through?
And why was it so important to make this challenge? She realized why. Because she knew how much she had been writing all along over the years. She wanted visible proof so that she could say to the world she could do this. She wanted to be able to say it as an artist, not as a 'writer'. A writer should be able to do this easily. But an artist doing it was a different story.
This was much the same as years ago, when she had first taken up bread baking. She had tried a few recipes and then decided she would make bread without a recipe. After that, she always made bread without a recipe, and almost every other food. It was not that she had memorized the recipe. She simply made it up. She would try to write her own recipes after making something she particularly liked. These were often recipes of remembered and guessed measurements because her cooking was usually done by feel and 'eyeball'.
She hated having to write by word count. It put the focus so much on whether she was there yet, instead of on what she wanted to say. It put too much pressure on counting. The counting pressure made her feel the writing had to be done as fast as possible. That made her stay away from certain topics. There were already enough topics to stay away from.
She had seen the other day that at least her having classes gave her material to write about. So did going out on errands. That had put a new light on obligations. If she could think of obligations that way, what possibilities that might open up. The other problem with the 'obligation' was the pressure of their time constraints. She hated that pressure of things having to be done by a certain time. But there were times that having to be ready by a certain time was fun. Perhaps the problem was not the time constraint, but that one had not fully embraced a committment as being of one's own desire and choosing. If one had the smallest amount of resentment about it, the feeling that one had to do it because of outside demand rather than inner desire, one balked and rebelled. How did one change how one looked at a thing? Could one just will that away? Or did one have to find a way to look at it so that one could see that it was truly one's own choice AND that one always had the choice to do the thing or not.
Then perhaps the problem was also that one was accepting for oneself a judgment that one did not measure up if one did not do whatever particular thing one felt one was supposed to do. Those were mostly expectations one had for oneself or presumed that others held for one. Why was one unwilling to believe that for the most part others would accept the expectations one held firmly for oneself. When one thought it was others holding the expectations, it was simply because one's self was holding those expectations. Was this because one did not want to be responsible for making the choice to stand apart? One wanted to be able to put the blame elsewhere for why one did or did not do a thing, or pursue a thing?
This morning she had hit upon an idea for how to get around the word count. It could be considered a certain kind of cheating. She had looked through her hand written journal, which she had been keeping all along with doing the Nano project, though not as frequently as usual, and found that she had written there almost 17000 words in November. She could transcribe entries and insert them into the Nano piece. She had no idea how redundant it would be. It was a completely different kind writing. It could be inserted chronologically or as a appendix. There were several others ways to do it too. She did want to at least test how hard it was to transcribe a section of it.
1:27p
It was nice to have the diary transcriptions as a back-up plan, but she felt that part of the Nano challenge for her had been to see if she could write this spontaneously and as fast as possible. No she did not like it, but she wanted to see it through in the manner she had set out, if possible. Doing it that way had brought up such interesting results and revelations, that she wanted to find out if there were anymore there by carrying the process out for the full term. Theoretically one should have been writing every day. That rule had been broken several times.
Had she already told about the article she had found, on publicity stunts that writers had been pulling over the centuries to promote their work. There was one author who had advertised that he would write a novel with non-stop writing in 36 hours while suspended in a glass cage in a bank. The story of this challenge event to be had attracted a lot of attention in the public eye. The author did not have to follow through on it because the bank went bust before the event was to take place. Perhaps they had hatched the plan as a joint promotion to help the bank as well. Perhaps the author had known this would happen and could therefore feel free to say he would do such a thing. She thought the author was Guy De Maupassant. Perhaps that was the reference her father had made when he spoke of that working method of non-stop writing being followed by certain authors during a certain time in history. Had that particular author been a novelist though? She thought he just wrote short stories. She wanted to look further into this.
1:46 p 1267 words
So many things had been running through her head that she had thought she could relate in the writing, but as often happened, they disappeared from mind or lost interest when she sat down to the actual writing. How on earth did those marathon writers of long ago imagine and write for such a long period of time? Or had no one actually done it. It was like the senators who stood up to do the philibusters. They had to just keep talking non stop, even though no one was listening she guessed. She had seen that movie where Jimmy Stewart played a character who had to stand hours on end in his philibuster mission. She could remember nothing about the movie other than him standing there continually in his attempt to hold the fort and keep talking. What cause had he been fighting for?
She could not even write non-stop for one half hour it seemed. She still wanted to try the practice of doing that. She had to keep that purpose separate from the Nano project. That would be a separate skill to practice. She had no idea how she would practice it. It was too easy to stop when one sat writing one one's own using a machine that one could so easily correct with. She thought she had heard about devices that taught one how to keep writing continuously.
Could one do it if one did it as a promotional event? She did not believe she would have the guts to try that public a challenge. It certainly was easier in a way to follow through with a goal if one announced it publicly, if one did it in public. Perhaps that was also the purpose of the obligations she accepted, though she had refused to see them that way. She did often look at her art classes that way. it was when it seemed like she had not really created anything herself in a given class that she felt her efforts were wasted. She needed to consolidate her documentation of her lessons more so that they continued to create a body of work as she continued with them. What kind of quick piece of art work could she make at the minimum within each of her adult classes? She thought the raccoons painting might have been a breakthrough, even though she had waited so long to finish it. The direct style of painting, without an underdrawing was a necessary aspect to this if she was to get it done. The challenge of it was to paint without drawing beforehand. To paint with minimal correction. This was a skill she felt had a lot of room for development still.
2:09p 1724 words
How did those marathon writers make up a long story on the spot? This question was intriguing her. Could she find out more about how they did it? She wanted to run off and find out about it right away. She hoped she would remember to check into this later.
She had had two art classes the previous day. The private adult class did a turkey drawing painting lesson. They were to start off by trying to paint the subject in somewhat flat designed shapes like a stencil design, in a dark monochrome. They were to try the figure twice, or do two different figures, Then they were to do it in reverse - to flip the image around. That was a difficult skill. She found it difficult to do. The littlest interruption could throw off one's concentration and mess up how one was painting it. One was also painting this directly - no under drawing, no correction. They moved on to creating the turkey figure using calligraphic flourish strokes. The problem was that they were using brushes instead of pens or otherwise stiff tools. The brush did not like to loop around in its path. Perhaps it was because the were using the floppier rigger brush. A rigger brush was made for painting long thin lines, like those of boat rigging. If one tried to loop it back on its path, the hairs caught on the paper and broke the curve of the loop. It might be different with a small 'round' brush, but those could not make long thin marks. They started out thin and quickly widened. Neither could a smaller brush hold enough paint to make a a long stroke.
They had worked hard doing the turkey painting exercises. It had taken them longer than she had realized by the time she had checked the clock to see how much time they had left. Their turkey paintings were to be painted as they wished. She was able to finish her turkey painting much before the others this time. Usually she was so far behind them. That was perhaps part of her resentment over these classes. The students were always rushing through every exercise it seemed. It was as if they did not understand anything about practicing. She would get absorbed in whatever the practice was and they would be waiting for what they were supposed to do next. They did not know how to work at improving a skill on their own. She felt at her wits end in trying to communicate how to practice a skill. She could not accept that this concept of practice and skill improvement could not be understood.
This time she had finished a little painting before the students had finished theirs. She had started packing up her painting gear as they continued working. She had announced also that they were already past the appointed ending time of the class. Never mind that the students always came late to class. She supposed somewhere that was a precedent she had allowed to continue.
There was another thing that she felt troubled by. One of the students had said that day that coming to class was important because it kept the dream of artistic self expression alive. It was the one place of self sanctity through/from which art could and did emerge.
2:44p 2285 words
She was aching to find out more about those marathon fiction writers and how they could possibly make up one story over such a condensed time period. Perhaps it was no different than people playing a long chess game together. Did they play chess for such extended times? It seemed like there were other games that people played over many hours in one stretch. She also wanted to find out what had been written about whether one could learn the skill of how to make up stories in the first place.
Had she described how she had gone about doing a simple story that first time? She had similarly wanted first to find out if she could. Back in those days she had been intrigued with the idea of being able to write and illustrate at least one children's book. But she had felt at a loss about making up a story. She had no idea how to go about it. Somehow she got the idea she could start by making some thumbnail sketches, in a little storyboard form - just to make a story visually. This could be the simplest of stories. So she started her storyboard thumbnails and had been immediately able to scribble down some text for each sketch as it came out. The text and basic image ideas had come out hand in hand. She had worked up enough scenes to fill the requirements of a basic book printing in those days. She had worked up the first few scenes in a more formal illustration style. Soon after, when she went to a talk by a children's book editor from a well known publishing house, she had learned that certain kinds of story endings were considered nono's by editors. Her story had that kind of ending - ...and then the hero woke up. So, she was stuck on how that story would resolve itself. The illustrations that she had carried out for it, she had been selling all along as greeting cards. She always had to apologize how these images had been meant for a story she had started, a story that had been pushed way to the back of the stove for such a long time now.
It had now been already a few years ago that she had finally pulled out that story again and taken further steps with it. She had just been browsing her old art work and come across the scribbled storyboard, as she did periodically, and looked once again wistfully at it. This time however, she realized that nowadays there was such a thing as letting readers put their own endings to stories. That was enough to give her ideas for actions she could take on the story/book. First she wanted to take just the rough sketches and reproduce them in larger format so that they could stand alone as a book dummy, draft, or even something people would enjoy having in that form. If an artist's sketches or sketchbooks could be sold, why not a little series of story sketches? She had followed through with the basic reproductions of the sketches. From there she set about making larger ink drawings in a loose style, rather than in the intricate style of her first few illustrations. She saw that these drawings would also be good coloring pages. She had worked steadily through the scenes making them all as coloring pages. She wanted to be able to have these drawings as a small easily produced volume. One could make such a volume, and copies of it, in the most basically accessible methods. She had completed all the drawings. All that was left for producing a coloring book was those final mechanical set-up details that she had allowed to hold her up because she hated that part. She had to let those drawings see the light of day. They had been out of sight for too long.
As for the ending of that story, just the other day she remembered suddenly, "Wait a minute, didn't Alice in Wonderland wake up from her fantastic dream?" . And what about The Wizard of Oz? Did not Dorothy wake up from the delirium of an illness?
3:30p 2989 words
It was looking like there was a possibility that she might be getting back on schedule with the writing. She wanted to break to eat a lunch, but that could be too much interruption. There was a small sandwich she had leftover from her breakfast preparation that was waiting for her still. It could wait a bit longer.
She had made no real arrangements, no real decision about plans for Thanksgiving Day. There were a few possibilities for where she could go if she wanted, but she thought she wanted to stay home and be in the atmosphere of stillness and peacefulness that holdays so universally celebrated seemed to exude. Yes, she enjoyed celebrating Thanksgiving with others, but more and more she had felt that sense of obligation in having to run off at a a certain hour to be somewhere else. People never seemed to really sit down and be together truly attending to each other.
The children's drawing class had gone very nicely the previous day. The topic had been Thanksgiving Feasts and Cornucopias. One family had arrived just at class start time so they had begun the class. Others had drifted in later. One very large family came. This was a family that had come only a few times over the years, usually around the same time of year. She had seen them at the store and suddenly recognized them - "Hey! You're that big family!". She reminded them about the class, that it was still going.
They had trooped in, including the three year old who had been a baby the last time they'd come. She asked Mother how the little one would be. The little one loved to draw Mother assured her. This group of kids, especially the little ones, were quite attentive and focused in their work. That had been a delight. So often there were such problems with three year olds. As she saw it, it was because the children were over indulged, coddled, and interfered with. Here were little kids who could concentrate, who could content themselves. Her Thanksgiving feast had been that day in the drawing of it and in the coming together of that group of children and adults enjoying each other's company as they drew images of the bounty and celebration.
3:58p 3374 words
Now she felt she had really had nothing left to ponder in writing for the day. She could imagine what she might have for dinner. She could describe what she had had for dinner the past two days - it had been the same both days since it was certain foods that had to be used up then. It had been a simple wholewheat spaghetti cooked in chopped stewed tomatoes with a bit of canned artichoke hearts and french cut green beans. If one cooked this with just enough liquid the pasta could cook in the sauce liquid and the whole would cook down to a proper consistency. It needed a bit of vinegar to stretch the tomato taste since this was stewed tomatoes rather than actual tomato sauce. She had put in a bunch of the fresh basil chopped, some garlic granules, beef boullion, and a bit of olive oil. When it was cooked - she'd let it cook a bit too much so that it had gotten stuck to the pot - she put cheddar cheese and grated parmesan on top of the mess in a bowl and covered it so that the cheese melted. Very tasty though this time she had added some brown sugar. It was a touch too much, almost spoiling the balance. Sugar needed to be in good balance with how acidic the dish was.
This evening she had to cook the turkey burger. If she did not eat it, there was still time to freeze it. This was the day it was either to be eaten or frozen.
She was really grasping at straws now. She had made it past her minimum word quota. There was a bit of a word count credit now that she had caught up on the two missed days' worth, but it was only good to add to the writing owed for this day. She could make up the difference and she would be at a 0 balance. Why should it matter that she have a credit. This was looking like it was as obsessive a counting game, a scoring game, as people's obsession with being at whatever money balance of thing balance they thought they should be at.
At the library last night, she'd gotten involved in a somewhat political discussion, or gripe session, that a friend of hers and one of the librarians were engaging in. She had a different view than they did. She tried initially to share it, to play devil's advocate, but soon realized she had better just listen. They were very emotionally caught up in their views. This was all about economics, polarized religious beliefs among family members, the financial state one was now in and how one had to keep working because one did not have the financial security to be able to retire. They were also upset because they felt they had been sold a bill of goods. They wanted what they thought they had been promised.
4:30 p 3874 words
It was dark now. The road still sounded wet out there. They had again not gotten the snow storm forecast. She had no inclination to go out even if it was no longer raining and/or snowing. Wet roads would probably soon ice up. The one thing she had felt she really should have on hand and which she had been out of for days now, was the delicious raisins she liked. She usually only bought them at Thanksgiving time because she needed them to make her traditional cranberry sauce. She had bought them last year but never made the sauce. Instead she'd gotten into the habit of eating the raisins as a tasty snack. One mouthful and she would have to eat several more mouthfuls. No raisins and there would certainly be no special cranberry sauce. She just did not want to go through all that cooking production. All she ever made for Thanksgiving was her special mashed yams, and special cranberry sauce - both recipes she had reconstructed from her favorite dishes that her best friend's mother made at their Thanksgivings. For years she had gone to their house for Thanksgiving and had the fondest memories of those times. This was a friend from high school. She guessed she'd stopped going to their house for Thanksgiving when her job at the bakery required her to work on the holidays. It had always been fun to work on the holidays. Working at a bakery meant one was part of many people's holiday in a way.
4:46 p
Further Tday traditions? She could continue in this line if she returned to this section of writing later in the evening. She never looked at the previous day's writing though. She had to remember on her own what lines of thought or story she wanted to continue to tell about. It had to come upon her. She was possibly repeating some stories too.
4:50 pm 4201 words
She had made a big mistake in the word count. She had misread it and thought she was so much further ahead than she was. She discovered this when she updated the word count and found she had so much less than the previous count. Now there was just a very manageable amount left to complete the three days and still have the credit she had managed to build up. She was laughing at what the writing resorted to by the end of a session. What ridiculous things one turned to writing about, just because one kept on looking to see how far one had gotten, It was like the children trapped in a car travelling long distance to the family vacation, with the endless question of "Are we there yet?" or "How much further?"
Where else could she travel now? How much further could she travel? All for the sake of travelling a certain distance, and of getting somewhere, rather than watching where one was going or attending to the beauty one was passing through. This was what people did with their lives too. Her library friends had been following the prescribed rule of working hard all along at work one did not know if one enjoyed and assuming that the day would come when one could upon retirement pursue the interests one really wanted to engage in. They were upset because it no longer looked like there would be a retirement at which one would be able to do those long put off interests. Why did people wait though? Why did people believe they had to wait? That was something she found disturbing. She had taken more of a risk than others in that way, but she too was caught up in not daring to believe she could do the thing without a safety net. Why couldn't this also be approached as a challenge - like doing the Nano challenge? She wanted to consider this.
What challenge could she set herself that would be in keeping with something she really wanted to see if she could do. The way she'd set up that proposition for herself about doing the boat painting, finding the owner, and selling it.
She could for example do some new series of art works along her more desired lines, to be done within one month, to be further produced and made available to others in such a way that she did not have to maintain any product inventory, but to set a goal that she wanted to make a certain income with it - just to see if she could. She would have to brainstorm a list of possible ways for this new image series to earn income.
Perhaps she do the images hand in hand with a story. The other story would have to wait yet again. Was she going off starting another project? This part happened too often it felt like. Was it really a problem to leave things unfinished? Did it really matter? What in life was ever really finished when it came right down to it? This was another question she would have to ponder further.
5:25p 4730 words
Now her arms were getting numb from being in this constantly held forward position. She was so close - she felt compelled to continue until she had finished the three days worth of writing.
The next question was whether that would leave her so oversaturated that she would not be able to write on the next day?
What else could she possibly write about now? The looking around the room for writing triggers did not work. ...
Another thing she wanted to do as soon as she could get to it was to retrieve a letter she had written to an economist friend. This was an old friend from her hometown that she had reconnected with just momentarily. She had not known until then that he had gone on to become an economist. She had posed in her letter the many questions she had about economics, along with her own theories, of which she knew that she was not qualified to be airing, but no one had ever given her solid enough reasons to think differently than she did. She had asked her dad, the economist, about these questions. He had either not heard them correctly or not heard them at all. His answers had been completely unsatisfactory. They had seemed to make magical solutions to the question - a rationale that was magical thinking.
ooh she had not recorded the last stopping time. It had been around 5:45 p she thought. Yes! she'd figured out she could pin the time down.
4982 words
She had set up her dinner to cooking. There were sliced red potatoes cooking with spinach, chicken boullion, curry powder, splash of vinegar, and water to cover. Once cooked she would add cheddar cheese to melt on them. She had warmed up a glass of red wine from the bottle of wine that she kept stored in the fridge. She had still to sautee the turkey burger. It would be a delicious dinner.
6:53p 5059 words
11/23/11
12:42p
She was starting her Nanowrimo writing session late in the day again and she had had to miss two days of writing this week. Much as she had thought she would be able to make up a day's writing by starting the work later in the day after the morning's obligations had been done, it had not worked out that way. It was as if the obligations consumed too much emotional energy to have anything left to put towards the writing for the Nano project. Since that writing was done with such a different attitude and voice than her usual writing, she found it could not be done in bits and pieces with the extra time pressure hanging over her. Or, at least in her mind, it had itself become an obligation that restricted the free flow needed for wriiting. She found it inhibiting in a way. Once that much time had been spent doing things seemingly willed upon her from outside of her, she simply balked at answering any further demands, even if they had been self imposed demands. At that point they had crossed from the border of desire to the border of demand.
She had been worrying how she would be able to make up the word deficit. Two days missed and this day still was three days of writing to make up. It had taken her a long time to catch up from those first two days missed. And how would she fare next week when the same schedule problems came up again? Could she possibly write enough extra every day to make it through?
And why was it so important to make this challenge? She realized why. Because she knew how much she had been writing all along over the years. She wanted visible proof so that she could say to the world she could do this. She wanted to be able to say it as an artist, not as a 'writer'. A writer should be able to do this easily. But an artist doing it was a different story.
This was much the same as years ago, when she had first taken up bread baking. She had tried a few recipes and then decided she would make bread without a recipe. After that, she always made bread without a recipe, and almost every other food. It was not that she had memorized the recipe. She simply made it up. She would try to write her own recipes after making something she particularly liked. These were often recipes of remembered and guessed measurements because her cooking was usually done by feel and 'eyeball'.
She hated having to write by word count. It put the focus so much on whether she was there yet, instead of on what she wanted to say. It put too much pressure on counting. The counting pressure made her feel the writing had to be done as fast as possible. That made her stay away from certain topics. There were already enough topics to stay away from.
She had seen the other day that at least her having classes gave her material to write about. So did going out on errands. That had put a new light on obligations. If she could think of obligations that way, what possibilities that might open up. The other problem with the 'obligation' was the pressure of their time constraints. She hated that pressure of things having to be done by a certain time. But there were times that having to be ready by a certain time was fun. Perhaps the problem was not the time constraint, but that one had not fully embraced a committment as being of one's own desire and choosing. If one had the smallest amount of resentment about it, the feeling that one had to do it because of outside demand rather than inner desire, one balked and rebelled. How did one change how one looked at a thing? Could one just will that away? Or did one have to find a way to look at it so that one could see that it was truly one's own choice AND that one always had the choice to do the thing or not.
Then perhaps the problem was also that one was accepting for oneself a judgment that one did not measure up if one did not do whatever particular thing one felt one was supposed to do. Those were mostly expectations one had for oneself or presumed that others held for one. Why was one unwilling to believe that for the most part others would accept the expectations one held firmly for oneself. When one thought it was others holding the expectations, it was simply because one's self was holding those expectations. Was this because one did not want to be responsible for making the choice to stand apart? One wanted to be able to put the blame elsewhere for why one did or did not do a thing, or pursue a thing?
This morning she had hit upon an idea for how to get around the word count. It could be considered a certain kind of cheating. She had looked through her hand written journal, which she had been keeping all along with doing the Nano project, though not as frequently as usual, and found that she had written there almost 17000 words in November. She could transcribe entries and insert them into the Nano piece. She had no idea how redundant it would be. It was a completely different kind writing. It could be inserted chronologically or as a appendix. There were several others ways to do it too. She did want to at least test how hard it was to transcribe a section of it.
1:27p
It was nice to have the diary transcriptions as a back-up plan, but she felt that part of the Nano challenge for her had been to see if she could write this spontaneously and as fast as possible. No she did not like it, but she wanted to see it through in the manner she had set out, if possible. Doing it that way had brought up such interesting results and revelations, that she wanted to find out if there were anymore there by carrying the process out for the full term. Theoretically one should have been writing every day. That rule had been broken several times.
Had she already told about the article she had found, on publicity stunts that writers had been pulling over the centuries to promote their work. There was one author who had advertised that he would write a novel with non-stop writing in 36 hours while suspended in a glass cage in a bank. The story of this challenge event to be had attracted a lot of attention in the public eye. The author did not have to follow through on it because the bank went bust before the event was to take place. Perhaps they had hatched the plan as a joint promotion to help the bank as well. Perhaps the author had known this would happen and could therefore feel free to say he would do such a thing. She thought the author was Guy De Maupassant. Perhaps that was the reference her father had made when he spoke of that working method of non-stop writing being followed by certain authors during a certain time in history. Had that particular author been a novelist though? She thought he just wrote short stories. She wanted to look further into this.
1:46 p 1267 words
So many things had been running through her head that she had thought she could relate in the writing, but as often happened, they disappeared from mind or lost interest when she sat down to the actual writing. How on earth did those marathon writers of long ago imagine and write for such a long period of time? Or had no one actually done it. It was like the senators who stood up to do the philibusters. They had to just keep talking non stop, even though no one was listening she guessed. She had seen that movie where Jimmy Stewart played a character who had to stand hours on end in his philibuster mission. She could remember nothing about the movie other than him standing there continually in his attempt to hold the fort and keep talking. What cause had he been fighting for?
She could not even write non-stop for one half hour it seemed. She still wanted to try the practice of doing that. She had to keep that purpose separate from the Nano project. That would be a separate skill to practice. She had no idea how she would practice it. It was too easy to stop when one sat writing one one's own using a machine that one could so easily correct with. She thought she had heard about devices that taught one how to keep writing continuously.
Could one do it if one did it as a promotional event? She did not believe she would have the guts to try that public a challenge. It certainly was easier in a way to follow through with a goal if one announced it publicly, if one did it in public. Perhaps that was also the purpose of the obligations she accepted, though she had refused to see them that way. She did often look at her art classes that way. it was when it seemed like she had not really created anything herself in a given class that she felt her efforts were wasted. She needed to consolidate her documentation of her lessons more so that they continued to create a body of work as she continued with them. What kind of quick piece of art work could she make at the minimum within each of her adult classes? She thought the raccoons painting might have been a breakthrough, even though she had waited so long to finish it. The direct style of painting, without an underdrawing was a necessary aspect to this if she was to get it done. The challenge of it was to paint without drawing beforehand. To paint with minimal correction. This was a skill she felt had a lot of room for development still.
2:09p 1724 words
How did those marathon writers make up a long story on the spot? This question was intriguing her. Could she find out more about how they did it? She wanted to run off and find out about it right away. She hoped she would remember to check into this later.
She had had two art classes the previous day. The private adult class did a turkey drawing painting lesson. They were to start off by trying to paint the subject in somewhat flat designed shapes like a stencil design, in a dark monochrome. They were to try the figure twice, or do two different figures, Then they were to do it in reverse - to flip the image around. That was a difficult skill. She found it difficult to do. The littlest interruption could throw off one's concentration and mess up how one was painting it. One was also painting this directly - no under drawing, no correction. They moved on to creating the turkey figure using calligraphic flourish strokes. The problem was that they were using brushes instead of pens or otherwise stiff tools. The brush did not like to loop around in its path. Perhaps it was because the were using the floppier rigger brush. A rigger brush was made for painting long thin lines, like those of boat rigging. If one tried to loop it back on its path, the hairs caught on the paper and broke the curve of the loop. It might be different with a small 'round' brush, but those could not make long thin marks. They started out thin and quickly widened. Neither could a smaller brush hold enough paint to make a a long stroke.
They had worked hard doing the turkey painting exercises. It had taken them longer than she had realized by the time she had checked the clock to see how much time they had left. Their turkey paintings were to be painted as they wished. She was able to finish her turkey painting much before the others this time. Usually she was so far behind them. That was perhaps part of her resentment over these classes. The students were always rushing through every exercise it seemed. It was as if they did not understand anything about practicing. She would get absorbed in whatever the practice was and they would be waiting for what they were supposed to do next. They did not know how to work at improving a skill on their own. She felt at her wits end in trying to communicate how to practice a skill. She could not accept that this concept of practice and skill improvement could not be understood.
This time she had finished a little painting before the students had finished theirs. She had started packing up her painting gear as they continued working. She had announced also that they were already past the appointed ending time of the class. Never mind that the students always came late to class. She supposed somewhere that was a precedent she had allowed to continue.
There was another thing that she felt troubled by. One of the students had said that day that coming to class was important because it kept the dream of artistic self expression alive. It was the one place of self sanctity through/from which art could and did emerge.
2:44p 2285 words
She was aching to find out more about those marathon fiction writers and how they could possibly make up one story over such a condensed time period. Perhaps it was no different than people playing a long chess game together. Did they play chess for such extended times? It seemed like there were other games that people played over many hours in one stretch. She also wanted to find out what had been written about whether one could learn the skill of how to make up stories in the first place.
Had she described how she had gone about doing a simple story that first time? She had similarly wanted first to find out if she could. Back in those days she had been intrigued with the idea of being able to write and illustrate at least one children's book. But she had felt at a loss about making up a story. She had no idea how to go about it. Somehow she got the idea she could start by making some thumbnail sketches, in a little storyboard form - just to make a story visually. This could be the simplest of stories. So she started her storyboard thumbnails and had been immediately able to scribble down some text for each sketch as it came out. The text and basic image ideas had come out hand in hand. She had worked up enough scenes to fill the requirements of a basic book printing in those days. She had worked up the first few scenes in a more formal illustration style. Soon after, when she went to a talk by a children's book editor from a well known publishing house, she had learned that certain kinds of story endings were considered nono's by editors. Her story had that kind of ending - ...and then the hero woke up. So, she was stuck on how that story would resolve itself. The illustrations that she had carried out for it, she had been selling all along as greeting cards. She always had to apologize how these images had been meant for a story she had started, a story that had been pushed way to the back of the stove for such a long time now.
It had now been already a few years ago that she had finally pulled out that story again and taken further steps with it. She had just been browsing her old art work and come across the scribbled storyboard, as she did periodically, and looked once again wistfully at it. This time however, she realized that nowadays there was such a thing as letting readers put their own endings to stories. That was enough to give her ideas for actions she could take on the story/book. First she wanted to take just the rough sketches and reproduce them in larger format so that they could stand alone as a book dummy, draft, or even something people would enjoy having in that form. If an artist's sketches or sketchbooks could be sold, why not a little series of story sketches? She had followed through with the basic reproductions of the sketches. From there she set about making larger ink drawings in a loose style, rather than in the intricate style of her first few illustrations. She saw that these drawings would also be good coloring pages. She had worked steadily through the scenes making them all as coloring pages. She wanted to be able to have these drawings as a small easily produced volume. One could make such a volume, and copies of it, in the most basically accessible methods. She had completed all the drawings. All that was left for producing a coloring book was those final mechanical set-up details that she had allowed to hold her up because she hated that part. She had to let those drawings see the light of day. They had been out of sight for too long.
As for the ending of that story, just the other day she remembered suddenly, "Wait a minute, didn't Alice in Wonderland wake up from her fantastic dream?" . And what about The Wizard of Oz? Did not Dorothy wake up from the delirium of an illness?
3:30p 2989 words
It was looking like there was a possibility that she might be getting back on schedule with the writing. She wanted to break to eat a lunch, but that could be too much interruption. There was a small sandwich she had leftover from her breakfast preparation that was waiting for her still. It could wait a bit longer.
She had made no real arrangements, no real decision about plans for Thanksgiving Day. There were a few possibilities for where she could go if she wanted, but she thought she wanted to stay home and be in the atmosphere of stillness and peacefulness that holdays so universally celebrated seemed to exude. Yes, she enjoyed celebrating Thanksgiving with others, but more and more she had felt that sense of obligation in having to run off at a a certain hour to be somewhere else. People never seemed to really sit down and be together truly attending to each other.
The children's drawing class had gone very nicely the previous day. The topic had been Thanksgiving Feasts and Cornucopias. One family had arrived just at class start time so they had begun the class. Others had drifted in later. One very large family came. This was a family that had come only a few times over the years, usually around the same time of year. She had seen them at the store and suddenly recognized them - "Hey! You're that big family!". She reminded them about the class, that it was still going.
They had trooped in, including the three year old who had been a baby the last time they'd come. She asked Mother how the little one would be. The little one loved to draw Mother assured her. This group of kids, especially the little ones, were quite attentive and focused in their work. That had been a delight. So often there were such problems with three year olds. As she saw it, it was because the children were over indulged, coddled, and interfered with. Here were little kids who could concentrate, who could content themselves. Her Thanksgiving feast had been that day in the drawing of it and in the coming together of that group of children and adults enjoying each other's company as they drew images of the bounty and celebration.
3:58p 3374 words
Now she felt she had really had nothing left to ponder in writing for the day. She could imagine what she might have for dinner. She could describe what she had had for dinner the past two days - it had been the same both days since it was certain foods that had to be used up then. It had been a simple wholewheat spaghetti cooked in chopped stewed tomatoes with a bit of canned artichoke hearts and french cut green beans. If one cooked this with just enough liquid the pasta could cook in the sauce liquid and the whole would cook down to a proper consistency. It needed a bit of vinegar to stretch the tomato taste since this was stewed tomatoes rather than actual tomato sauce. She had put in a bunch of the fresh basil chopped, some garlic granules, beef boullion, and a bit of olive oil. When it was cooked - she'd let it cook a bit too much so that it had gotten stuck to the pot - she put cheddar cheese and grated parmesan on top of the mess in a bowl and covered it so that the cheese melted. Very tasty though this time she had added some brown sugar. It was a touch too much, almost spoiling the balance. Sugar needed to be in good balance with how acidic the dish was.
This evening she had to cook the turkey burger. If she did not eat it, there was still time to freeze it. This was the day it was either to be eaten or frozen.
She was really grasping at straws now. She had made it past her minimum word quota. There was a bit of a word count credit now that she had caught up on the two missed days' worth, but it was only good to add to the writing owed for this day. She could make up the difference and she would be at a 0 balance. Why should it matter that she have a credit. This was looking like it was as obsessive a counting game, a scoring game, as people's obsession with being at whatever money balance of thing balance they thought they should be at.
At the library last night, she'd gotten involved in a somewhat political discussion, or gripe session, that a friend of hers and one of the librarians were engaging in. She had a different view than they did. She tried initially to share it, to play devil's advocate, but soon realized she had better just listen. They were very emotionally caught up in their views. This was all about economics, polarized religious beliefs among family members, the financial state one was now in and how one had to keep working because one did not have the financial security to be able to retire. They were also upset because they felt they had been sold a bill of goods. They wanted what they thought they had been promised.
4:30 p 3874 words
It was dark now. The road still sounded wet out there. They had again not gotten the snow storm forecast. She had no inclination to go out even if it was no longer raining and/or snowing. Wet roads would probably soon ice up. The one thing she had felt she really should have on hand and which she had been out of for days now, was the delicious raisins she liked. She usually only bought them at Thanksgiving time because she needed them to make her traditional cranberry sauce. She had bought them last year but never made the sauce. Instead she'd gotten into the habit of eating the raisins as a tasty snack. One mouthful and she would have to eat several more mouthfuls. No raisins and there would certainly be no special cranberry sauce. She just did not want to go through all that cooking production. All she ever made for Thanksgiving was her special mashed yams, and special cranberry sauce - both recipes she had reconstructed from her favorite dishes that her best friend's mother made at their Thanksgivings. For years she had gone to their house for Thanksgiving and had the fondest memories of those times. This was a friend from high school. She guessed she'd stopped going to their house for Thanksgiving when her job at the bakery required her to work on the holidays. It had always been fun to work on the holidays. Working at a bakery meant one was part of many people's holiday in a way.
4:46 p
Further Tday traditions? She could continue in this line if she returned to this section of writing later in the evening. She never looked at the previous day's writing though. She had to remember on her own what lines of thought or story she wanted to continue to tell about. It had to come upon her. She was possibly repeating some stories too.
4:50 pm 4201 words
She had made a big mistake in the word count. She had misread it and thought she was so much further ahead than she was. She discovered this when she updated the word count and found she had so much less than the previous count. Now there was just a very manageable amount left to complete the three days and still have the credit she had managed to build up. She was laughing at what the writing resorted to by the end of a session. What ridiculous things one turned to writing about, just because one kept on looking to see how far one had gotten, It was like the children trapped in a car travelling long distance to the family vacation, with the endless question of "Are we there yet?" or "How much further?"
Where else could she travel now? How much further could she travel? All for the sake of travelling a certain distance, and of getting somewhere, rather than watching where one was going or attending to the beauty one was passing through. This was what people did with their lives too. Her library friends had been following the prescribed rule of working hard all along at work one did not know if one enjoyed and assuming that the day would come when one could upon retirement pursue the interests one really wanted to engage in. They were upset because it no longer looked like there would be a retirement at which one would be able to do those long put off interests. Why did people wait though? Why did people believe they had to wait? That was something she found disturbing. She had taken more of a risk than others in that way, but she too was caught up in not daring to believe she could do the thing without a safety net. Why couldn't this also be approached as a challenge - like doing the Nano challenge? She wanted to consider this.
What challenge could she set herself that would be in keeping with something she really wanted to see if she could do. The way she'd set up that proposition for herself about doing the boat painting, finding the owner, and selling it.
She could for example do some new series of art works along her more desired lines, to be done within one month, to be further produced and made available to others in such a way that she did not have to maintain any product inventory, but to set a goal that she wanted to make a certain income with it - just to see if she could. She would have to brainstorm a list of possible ways for this new image series to earn income.
Perhaps she do the images hand in hand with a story. The other story would have to wait yet again. Was she going off starting another project? This part happened too often it felt like. Was it really a problem to leave things unfinished? Did it really matter? What in life was ever really finished when it came right down to it? This was another question she would have to ponder further.
5:25p 4730 words
Now her arms were getting numb from being in this constantly held forward position. She was so close - she felt compelled to continue until she had finished the three days worth of writing.
The next question was whether that would leave her so oversaturated that she would not be able to write on the next day?
What else could she possibly write about now? The looking around the room for writing triggers did not work. ...
Another thing she wanted to do as soon as she could get to it was to retrieve a letter she had written to an economist friend. This was an old friend from her hometown that she had reconnected with just momentarily. She had not known until then that he had gone on to become an economist. She had posed in her letter the many questions she had about economics, along with her own theories, of which she knew that she was not qualified to be airing, but no one had ever given her solid enough reasons to think differently than she did. She had asked her dad, the economist, about these questions. He had either not heard them correctly or not heard them at all. His answers had been completely unsatisfactory. They had seemed to make magical solutions to the question - a rationale that was magical thinking.
ooh she had not recorded the last stopping time. It had been around 5:45 p she thought. Yes! she'd figured out she could pin the time down.
4982 words
She had set up her dinner to cooking. There were sliced red potatoes cooking with spinach, chicken boullion, curry powder, splash of vinegar, and water to cover. Once cooked she would add cheddar cheese to melt on them. She had warmed up a glass of red wine from the bottle of wine that she kept stored in the fridge. She had still to sautee the turkey burger. It would be a delicious dinner.
6:53p 5059 words
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