Book Review: How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy) by Julia Cameron and Elizabeth Cameron

How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy) by Julia Cameron and Elizabeth Cameron

The 80 odd cartoons illustrating some of the creative excuses creative people come up with for why they aren't creating are the spoon full of sugar that helps the medicine go down.  The medicine being the little shots of reality disproving the excuse and the sugar being the LOL hilarity in seeing your excuse enacted by silly dogs dressed up as humans.  It takes the sting away while keeping your gazed fixed on the sharp needle of truth embedded in the contradictions between what you have said and what you have done and what is the reality.

Paraphrasing, here are some of the excuses I identified with the most:

• Demanding 15 hour blocks of free time before considering getting started while using scattered 15 minute chunks for frivolous things.
• Preferring to watch the movie on the screen over watching the one on the back of your eyelids. (your story)
• Feeling depressed you don't have time to write.  Then turning on the TV to make yourself feel better.
• Over-committing your time and energy elsewhere--people, jobs, organizations, housework, make-work.... 
• Acquiring high-maintenance relationships that suck time and energy and overload you on drama that doesn't belong to you and leaves no room for the drama of your stories.
• Surrounding yourself with negative naysayers.
• Setting yourself up for failure by planning a project too big and complex for your current skills.
• Talking about your WIP more than you work on it
• Getting stuck in the planning/research stage forever.

This was the one and only book I read cover to cover during the read-a-thon Saturday.  I'm still feeling haunted by some of those images and challenges.  And I've reached for it several times in the last few days for booster shots.

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Sunday Serenity

I made it the full 24 hours again.  First time in 2 years.  Before spring of 2013 doing the 24 hours was easy breezy.  It was my thing.  The thing I could still do with the best of those who could.

With my visual impairment it is no longer possible for me to excel at reading fast or reading long so my metrics on number of pages or completed books are sad.  So I would always, since the first Dewey thon in 2007, take pleasure and satisfaction from being one of the few who could breeze through the 24 hours.

After all I'd had a lot of practice since my tween years.  It's always been my thing, staying up all night.  And usually gone hand-in-hand with reading.

But spring of 2013 I was put on a new antidepressant, Trazadone, which made me groggy and kept me that way for 8 to twelve hours.  Skipping doses would have nasty repercussions--headache, dizziness, vision issues and anxiety attacks--so for the last four thons I had to quit two to four hours before the end.

The end for me here on the Pacific Coast was 5am today. I made it.  As I hoped I would the moment I got the OK from my med nurse to withdraw off the Traz.  But when I was unable to sleep the night before that put me already 17 hours awake when the thon started for at 5am Saturday.  Thus I've been awake for 41 hours and it looks like it will be at least 42 before I'm actually asleep.

I did manage to read one book cover to cover for the thon: How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy) by Julia Cameron and Elizabeth Cameron (artist). 80 odd cartoons illustrating quite LOL the many excuses artists use to explain why the aren't doing their art.  Too many of them too true of me:

• Demanding 15 hour blocks of free time before considering getting started while using scattered 15 minute chunks for frivolous things.
• Preferring to watch the movie on the screen over watching the one on the back of your eyelids. (your story)
• Feeling depressed you don't have time to write.  Then turning on the TV to make yourself feel better.
• Acquiring high-maintenance relationships that suck time and energy and overload you on drama that doesn't belong to you and leaves no room for the drama of your stories.
• Surrounding yourself with negative naysayers.
• Setting yourself up for failure by planning a project to big and complex for your current skills.
• Getting stuck in the research stage forever.

OK that last wasn't in the book but it should be.  It is one of my things.

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Hope & Dread

Hope & Dread
The traveling companions who make the trip feel like forever

Busy preparing for a quest that's full of equal parts hope and dread.

Sometimes you just have to go after answers even if they might be something you don't want to hear.

Wondering can sometimes be wonderful.

But there are times it can be torturous.

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Sunday Serenity -- The Old Woman Who

She'll Swallow Almost Anything

This afternoon that old song was playing in head relentlessly and I couldn't resist playing with the words.  I suspect it isn't finished as a few more concepts have arisen I might play with but mostly I've been tweaking word choice, punctuation, rhythm and verse order for hours and I'm still not happy.

The Old Woman Who
by Joy Renee

There was an old woman who swallowed a sigh
I don't know why she swallowed a sigh
she just might cry

There was an old woman who swallowed her pain
to stop it infecting her kith and kin--but all in vain
for she's gone insane

There was an old woman who swallowed her pride
it squirmed and burned and pricked her inside
there's nowhere to hide

There was an old woman who swallowed a lot
that gurgled and curdled and clotted her gut
it moves not a jot
just sits there to rot

There was an old woman who swallowed a lie
that took her for a twisty ride
now her mind is fit to be tied

There was an old woman who swallowed her words
they scratched and sliced and stabbed her innards
she wants to holler and howl and curse
perhaps she'll burst

There was an old woman who swallowed her voice
to keep the peace she had no choice
now it's choking to death her joy

There was an old woman who swallowed her story
said it was boring but she feared its glory
now they grapple in purgatory

There was an old woman who swallowed her fate
which ate and ate
until it escaped

There was an old woman who swallowed her name
hoping to hide herself from shame--
for having no name there's no one to blame

There was an old woman who swallowed her face
it can't be replaced
she won't be embraced
who'd have the grace?

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What's Important Is --Author Quote -- ROW80 Check-In

Now that the restart is done I've got journaling worked in to some of my days.

My Round 1 intentions: seek to regain my joy/Joy in writing and to prepare the soil for its blooming with these time investment goals:

• Storydreaming 15min Daily (I never lost this one since instating it in my first round in 2012.  A ROW80 win!) 100%
• Read/Study Craft 15min Daily 100% (reading blog posts on topic)
• Move/Breathe/Meditate 15min Daily 50%
• Personal Journaling 15min Daily20%  [this should be added before next check-in. yep, it was the needed restart making me reluctant to open another ap, file or tab beforehand]
• Read Fiction 30min Daily 100%
• Social network activities 30min Daily (writing Joystory posts doesn't count only social reaching out like reading/commenting on other blogs, guest posts and posting to fb, twitter, pinterest etc) 50% 

Current Joy Meter: under 30%  That is down from mid week.  Mood has been volatile.  Tho my mood is low I've still avoided a meltdown going on two weeks now.  Two weeks as of Tuesday.  The last one started on Sunday evening and lasted through the wee hours of Tuesday.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: "The The Impotence of Proofreading," by TAYLOR MALI

"The The Impotence of Proofreading," by Taylor Mali

Poet, Teacher and Stand Up Comic

I frilly kneaded the these belie loafs two dais.

Deicide it wood make a good Fryday Four raze posed to. Knaw I'm free to watch snore Tailor Molly.

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Not Even Crawling -- ROW 80 Check-In

Eggs Catly.  No Yolk.

I haven't checked in for over two weeks.  I've got little to show ROW80 wise for those two weeks.  Yesterday's post can explain some of it.  But the primary issue has been the high level of drama in my personal life.

But on the other hand that drama might have been less intrusive if the issues I discussed yesterday had not become issues again.

As I said yesterday, I have a choice to make...

My Round 1 intentions: seek to regain my joy/Joy in writing and to prepare the soil for its blooming with these time investment goals:

• Storydreaming 15min Daily (I never lost this one since instating it in my first round in 2012.  A ROW80 win!) 100%
• Read/Study Craft 15min Daily 10% (reading blog posts on topic)
• Move/Breathe/Meditate 15min Daily 10%
• Personal Journaling 15min Daily 0%
• Read Fiction 30min Daily 20%
• Social network activities 30min Daily (writing Joystory posts doesn't count only social reaching out like reading/commenting on other blogs, guest posts and posting to fb, twitter, pinterest etc) 20% [posting to ROW80 fb and replying to comments there are among the activities I engaged in.]

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Kits N Giggles

I think the music in this vid increased the feel-good factor exponentially, adding humor and happiness.

Yes I'm still on my daily vid vitamins.  My happy pills.  I don't think it's my imagination that it is relieving the grief over loosing Merlin.

I'm also remaining on the hiatus of regular programming here and I'm fairly sure I won't return to the way it was.  Things have been shook up and, in a sense, it feels like it woke me up and I'm groping for a new normal.

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Laughter is the Best...

...Comfort.

My therapy continues with more vid vitamins.  A baby's laugh is a happy pill.

Missing Merlin is constant.  The hardest hours are bedtime and morning routines.  He always slept with me at night and dogged my feet when I got up until I put food down for him.  Then there's lunch time when he followed me all over the kitchen begging while I made lunch for Mom and I.

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A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance

A Chinese talent show.  A three year old dancer.

Watch to the end it's worth it.  Hear his answers to the judges questions: Why do you dance? and What is your dream?  

Old soul, or what?

Watching, reading, listening to uplifting things is my therapy for pulling me up out of the emotional morass of the last 9 days.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Quote

yore memreez ai rewryt 4 u k?

I've been inundated by a flood of memories this week as I've been tending to our dying fur baby, Merlin.

It has struck me that memory is crucial to story.  It is in fact story telling.  Your memories are stories you tell yourself.  But the moment you put them into words you are telling a story to others as well as yourself and its no longer the same story.  It seems you can't avoid fictionalizing your memories when you capture them in words.

This flood of memories has dominated the theme of the last three posts:

• Merlin Moments
• 164th ROW80 Check-In
• Of Magic, Memories and Coping Mechanisms

This makes four.

I've also been contemplating the role my memories have played in my fiction and poetry and noticing how this current flood has been stimulating ideas for more poetry and fictional stories.

I've been holding this vigil with Merlin since Tuesday morning.  He's still with us.  Barely.  He's still drinking water but to my knowledge has not taken any food since the slivers of salmon off my dinner plate Tuesday evening which gave me a burst of hope.

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Desperately Seeking Sleep

Insomnia iza nawn senz wurd.Sleep less? R U dysturbd?

Past my bedtime so no time to linger.  Woke with 7.5 Tuesday morning, breaking the more than two week chain of less than 7.5.  Woke with 6.5 Wednesday and 8 this morning. Hoping to make that 8 the first in another unbroken chain like the one I'd had towards the end of April.

Just spent the last  hour or so looking at pictures of sleeping cats on cheezburger.com and sleep quotes on Brainy Quotes and Pinterest.   Hope something rubbed off.

Tho my issue is not so much insomnia anymore.  Not if I take my meds on schedule.  I mostly fight the need for it, hating to give up my day.  But I need to take recent lessons seriously.  The 'productivity' I gain by dissing sleep is an illusion.  There is always a pay day and the cost is high.

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For Net Neutrality SNIPS InterTubes

Net Neutrality = Neuter the Gatekeepers

The FCC's Net Neutrality Proposal Is Out: It's Time to Make Our Voices Heard: 'via Blog this'

Net Neutrality on Wikipedia

This is a more complex topic than I thought going in and after reading arguments on both sides I feel incompetent to make my own with cogent logic.  So I admit flat out that I'm taking my stand on gut feeling.

Just based on the lists of proponents and opponents to Net Neutrality legislation and regulation I would have to choose the proponents to stand with as I respect the range of philosophies and political affiliations of most of the names I recognize whereas I cringe at most of the names I see on the opponents list.  Some of whom I know think library users are freeloaders and would consider me a parasite for needing tax payer support and like to talk about boot strapping yet are now advocating for having those bootstraps cut just as I'm about to lift myself up by them.

A partial list of proponents and opponents is in the Wikipedia article.

I find the idea of an ISPs ability to discriminate data transmission based on ability to pay a downright deathknell to the inde startup entrepreneurs like I'm hoping to be.  That they have and thus could be allowed to use the technology to decide how fast data between my business sites and my customers and clients can move based on whether I can afford to compete with billionaire corporations able to pay for premium service that provides their data cutting edge speed makes me alarmed that my prospects for success have been neutralized.

Even more alarming is the ISP capability of censoring data according to content or the application it was created by and for.  Audio Visual, including VOIP, being slow-streamed for non-premium customers for example.  I imagine with horror what that could mean for my vid chats on Google and Skype with Ed or the book trailers for my self-pub ebooks.

What if they can discover the political or religious views contained in the data and censor it according to their own preferences?

And there have already been attempts by ISP to redirect traffic to a premium client from their competitors.

What would all this mean for the non-profit organizations?

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Quote

Warz teh wyteowt?

Yeah.  I kinda got rewrite on my mind this week.

Scrivener and the Whiz
My Other Desktops

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I'm HAPPY and I know it Clap your hands!

I Haz a Hap-hap-happy!

It's been a long time gone.

So pardon me while I go spend some quality time with my HAPPY.

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2 Sillee 4 Wurdz Sez Kitteh

It dose sound pretty silly

Today and tomorrow are last two days for Camp NaNo.

I've made a major breakthrough on my Camp NaNo project rewrite of my story Blow Me a Candy Kiss.  A breakthrough that isn't limited to the one story but translates to all story WIP.

The upshot is that I'm no longer afraid of my rough drafts.  Not even the NaNo Messes.

I had two major insights about myself as a writer.

I'll be writing all that up for Friday Forays in Fiction this week.

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Sunday Serenity #386

This is ROTFLOL for any reader, watcher or writer of stories

This Studio C vid can speak for itself.

Story is the universal language.  It's vocabulary is archetype, image and symbol.  Its grammar is character, plot and action.  The first being discrete representations of meaning and the latter being the arrangements and interplay of those representations.

The reason so many stories are so similar when broken down into those components is that the human mind is designed to think in story.  Story is the template that our native language is imprinted on.

So much for letting the vid say it.

Story has been the theme of April for me with Camp NaNo all month and the Dewey Read-a-Thon yesterday.

I'm heading to bed early tonight as I had two short sleeps in a row.  Anticipation kept me awake late Friday night so I started the thon on four hours and then I got six this morning after giving in to sleep at 3:30 with only 90 minutes to go.

Those two nights broke my string of 7.5 to 9hr nights that had lasted nearly two weeks.  I need to snap myself right back into my regular schedule.  So altho I haven't even been awake twelve hours yet I'm heading to bed.

The rest of this week I'll be pushing hard on my NaNo project--the rewrite of my story Blow Me a Candy Kiss.

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Lost In NaNo Land

Bestest NaNo Finkgn Kap Evur

Need to save my words for Camp NaNo today.

It's catch up time.

And time to give the new workstation a hard workout.

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Sunday Serenity #385

Practicing Jitter Bug

I spent some quality time on the cheezeburger.com site looking for smiles and giggles.

Still trying to pull out of the quagmire I stepped in Thursday.

Sometimes you just have to do whatever it takes to get the smile back.

Then hope happy follows along like a puppy on a leash.

Or even like a cat on a leash.

As long as it follows along or allows you to drag it.

Smile until you mean it.

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National Library Week 2014: Lives Change at the Library

Lives Change at the Library
moar kittehs  caption share vote

This week is the 2014 National Library Week sponsored by the ALA  The theme this year is Lives Change at the Library.

The event began in the fifties (the spring after I was born) and is intended to raise awareness of all that the libraries and their workers do for individuals and communities and encourage the funding for those services.  

Now, during these economic hard times, this is more urgent than ever as libraries have been loosing funding and closing down.  In those that survive services, hours and materials have been cut.  Which translates to fewer librarians and their aides, fewer books and magazines, fewer multimedia items, fewer days open, fewer events held at local libraries.

It is the most astonishing shortsightedness on the part of library levy voters who can't see that the value they get from the libraries compounds the value of the money levied many times over even if they don't use the services themselves.  

And what can I say about the alarming arrogance on the part of community leaders, politicians and local business owners who are often spouting off about how they got where they are without setting foot in a library?

How can they all not see that even if they don't use the library themselves they are benefiting as much as anyone who keeps their card tapped out at all times?  Or that there are library services they could be using that could save them time and money if they didn't see it as a status step down or a violation of their libertarian doctrines?  Or that the services provided contributes to community health in ways that save hundreds of dollars for every dollar spent on the library?

Consider these few:

• Help with tax forms.  Besides those on fixed income like the elderly and disabled there are the employees of local businesses whose peace of mind translates into more efficiency at work.  But not if the library is never open when they are off the job site.
• A source of information on the people and issues on the next ballot.
• Fact check via phone or email.
• Activities for juveniles that keep them safe and the community safe from their boredom fed shenanigans while inspiring their imaginations toward their future contribution to the community and expanding their aspirations.
• Resources for study and homework help for the students who will be the next generation of employees and entrepreneurs.
• Resources for teen and adult hope-to-be entrepreneurs in learning all the requirements to setting up and running a business.
• Resources for homeschooling families who are also heavy consumers of specialty products provided by local business.
• Help for non-native speakers of English in becoming proficient at communicating in English enhancing their value to employers and the community at large.  Not to mention relieving one of the stressors contributing to dysfunctional behaviors that break down family and neighborhood cohesion and clog the justice system.  How do those costs compare to the few dollars per month asked of local property owners for a healthy vibrant library?

I blogged several times about the Southern Oregon Library System's closure in April of 2007 and how it reopened that fall with most of the 15 branches cut to less than twenty hours over two or three days.  It has yet to bring those days and hours back.  Several of the branches opted out of the system and closed altogether.  It still saddens and angers me.

But I'm currently living in Longview, WA and using the library of my childhood and it seems to be as vibrant and bustling as ever.

I've talked often here about how much I owe to the library systems I've patronized.  

• I've called them my universities.  
• This autodidact has depended on libraries to satisfy her every craving for story or knowledge.  
• I've checked out several thousand library books over my life-time and without libraries I'd never have had access to most of the several hundred novels I've read.  
• 95% of everything I've learned about the craft of writing and storytelling I owe to library books and media.
• The research for my stories depended entirely on libraries before the Internet and it is my belief that the Internet will never completely replace libraries for serious researchers*.  

*Research librarians with advanced degrees in media storage and information technologies still outshine and outsmart the search engines--especially now that most of the common free ones are now sponsor driven or the top tier in search results achieve their positions not because of their relevance or usefulness or even truthfulness but rather because someone with something to sell has paid for the slot.

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