I spent a couple hours at the bookstore yesterday, thinking about writing and drawing and children’s books. It feels so awesome to be excited about all that again. My Amazon wishlist is full of all sorts of books about creativity and writing and children’s books and everything, and it all feels like it happened suddenly. I know what happened, but it feels like it was all instantaneous and miraculous and deus ex machina.
So what happened was I was working too much. Way too much. And I found myself in every meeting doodling on my papers. And while I waited for a download or an upload or a backup or a recovery, I was drawing on on the back of all my outdated database diagrams. And I was loving it. I was developing a distinct style– something I haven’t really had ever. I mean, sure, you can tell that it was something I drew because it looked like everything else I drew (or at least my brothers would have recognized it), but it didn’t have a “style” before.
I’m excited to see what appears on the page now. I started a new sketchbook just before Thanksgiving, and I am already 1/3 through it. I never draw that much. Not even in school. I kept a sketchbook with me all the time, but I never used it. I wrote in them, did my taxes in them, but no drawings. Okay, some drawings, but really it was more about the idea of having it with me, more than the fact that I might actually use it to draw in. But now I am!
I asked for Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird for Christmas, and my little brother gave me his used copy from school. I had one at some point, but I lost it along the way. As soon as I got ten pages into it, I was scrambling for the computer to put some words down. It felt awesome! Now I am just looking for ways to make it simple to do on a regular basis.
Like this blog. I was so hung up on writing my own software to do it before that I was stalling out. I didn’t want to get too invested in one particular piece of software, for fear that I wouldn’t be able to mine my work out of the system when I wanted it. But this b2 is open-source, PHP and MySQL, so I can tear it apart if I want. And I can write my own software later to mine my thoughts back out to put into a new system. If I want. Or I could just go with what is working.
Of course, I am not actually doing anything with this yet. It’s not public. But I am writing in it as if it were. I’m still hung up on doing everything myself. I have to design an image database now too. I have the enchantedceiling.com stuff almost there now, so I could theoretically canibalize that. It’s more or less the same principle– organized by date, images and thumbnails, notes about the drawing/photo, etc. I just throw in some categorization and voila! (or as Alaska Allan likes to say, “wah-la!!”)
But so anyway, I am ready to write now. But I am a chicken, so I am writing here, where I will eventually have an audience to keep me going. Hopefully there will be some kind of audience anyway. That’s why the public website and blog and all, isn’t it? Is that weird? I’m too chicken to just write and keep it on my hard drive, so I have to set up a blog site where I can frenetically barf my thoughts onto the keyboard and show all my crappiest writing to anyone and everyone?
All these writers that have written about writing that I have been reading talk about how neurotic they are and how it is just part of being a writer. Until just a minute ago, I thought I didn’t have any neuroses weird enough that they could keep me in the game, but now I am not so sure.
