Packing and moving and writing among the ruins

The nice thing about having a computer-based business...I mean career (but let's face it, business) is that you can do it anywhere and at any time. Right now is a case in point. There's hardly any furniture left in the house, but I can still hunker on the floor with my array of legal stimulants (am) and depressants (pm) and type away.

The not-so-nice thing about having a writing business is that the deadlines give not a damn about my moving, how ruinous my life looks or whether the cat has to be micro-chipped before his release among the rockpiles of West Prescott.

So forgive the lack of posts. I have lots of great ideas and can't wait to start posting more, but have to catch up on the following:

• Meaningful sleep
• Meaningful protein consumption
• Deadlines for my lovely anchor client
• Deadlines for my news site
• Deadlines for getting out of my lovely, erstwhile abode

A note: What I have more than nearly everyone I know is boatloads of freedom - I'll be in Moab in a week- so don't take this post as complaining. It's just that...you know...dare I say it...freedom isn't free. Oh God. My therapist is waiting.

On the care and feeding of the creative life - PART 1

It's been an interesting couple of months. I stopped my magazine for awhile and now with the help of a new partner, I'm fixing to restart it. I got invited by my landlordette to be homeless. I stopped a relationship and had a not-so-shiny rebound. I didn't even know what a rebound was until this year. Seriously. I thought rebounding was the province of effete goth people who listened to minor key electro-pop music. You know, music like Dido, a chanteuse with great skills at song-writing and bad skills at love.

I've been listening to Dido for weeks.

And so, what with my life falling down around my ears and all, you can imagine that maintaining my productivity and creativity has been a challenge. Oh, I'm writing really bad love songs and journaling my ass off, but the most important bits, the bits where I take authentic action towards driving my career as a publishing writer, sometimes fall prey to these depressed tetris-playing, Dido-blasting jags that go on for far, far too long.

And so, since I've been sucking a little, I figure I can ALSO find a way to suck it up.

In the past, when I was teaching school and had to be 'on' – broken heart or no (and there were a few) – I discovered that feeling like dookie didn't mean that my output was going to be any better or worse than it would normally. Simply put, creative/social juice or the lack thereof determines the level of fun I'll have but not the quality of output.

Based on that bit of hard-earned wisdom, I knew I just had to find a way to 1) think my day through and 2) follow through, regardless of my level of pain or distress. In my next post, I'll tell you what I came up with.

On the care and feeding of the creative life - PART 2

In PART 1, I described my emo-roller coaster rides and how I wanted to manage them with regard to my creativity and productivity. Here's what I've come up with.

Hour-long chunks. See, there's 8 of them in a day, so if you allot an hour or so to all active projects, you can get a heck of a lot done in one working day. For example, Saturday I scheduled one hour for journalism, one hour for http://www.readitnews.com/ and one hour for my commercial work (Accounting for the limited hours: I had a wedding that afternoon - in fact, I'm typed a draft of this entry out at the Juniper Well Ranch).

Starting to work wasn't easy. For some reason, when I sit down to commence my day, I often feel a paralyzing anxiety wherein I become terrified to make a decision of what to start. The one hour chunks mandate I do something, and since none of the chunks are long enough to actually create a protracted suck experience, I'm finding that I can actually start and then subsequently don't need to procrastinate too much.

The other part of it is that the the short intervals demand that I pick the most important thing to attack and then stick with it for the duration. It actually forces a bit of unconscious prioritization. I'll never get it all done in one sitting, so I have to chose the the things with the most juice to get to.

While this is a new experiment whose success is uncertain, quite a few of my old experiments have worked, and so I have hope. This is, in fact, an expansion on a old approach wherein I spent .5 - 1 hour writing and playing music in the morning. And about the same amount of time cleaning beforehand. I've been doing that routine for months now with wonderful success.

I'll keep you posted on how well it works.

Vivan art and creativity, but don't confuse them

I was going through my old email account when I rediscovered one of signature lines, a quote:

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." The quote has everything to do with my morning practice.

In the last 5 months, I've begun my day by cleaning my soon-to-be ex-casa and then sit down for 1/2 hour to be creative - a prescribed period of time when it's ok to make mistakes. After brewing a cup of tea, I sit down to my Pocket PC to write (I use my Pocket PC because it's so much easier to be creative with a computer lacking Internet). I take solace in this scheduled time; there's nothing in all the world that I'm supposed to be doing besides creating and that takes the pressure off.

For me, it's super important to create a scheduled practice to make sure my writing, that thing that's so important that I've made countless sacrifices to keep doing it, actually happens. And I've found that doing the important stuff first thing is the key to making sure it doesn't slip through the cracks.

The practice worked very well while I was creating - I could write anywhere from 300-1000 words depending on how easily the writing was flowing. But then I finished the story I was working on, and I faced a conundrum. Do I start creating something else, or do I spend that 1/2 hour doing art, the deciding what to keep?

For the time being, I've decided to do what inspires me, which means I've spent the last two days doing art - cleaning up my mistakes and creations from last week and turning them into something that I'd be willing to show my friends, and eventually, if all goes well, the world.

Why leaving home and death are not so fearsome

After my very sweet landlordette told me that she had plans for my house in July, it was tempting to let it all go to hell. Stop feeding the birds, stop playing my keyboard, blow off laundry and shopping and just wait around until the next phase of my life took hold. But then I thought 'There's an end to everything, so why not just embrace the futility on a fractal basis - a little death now, a big death later?'

And so the birds continue to eat, my keyboard to make beginner noises and my washer to churn and rumble the grease of days past out of my clothes. Everything must, after all, come to an end and all we have is today.

What I want to be growing up at 33, and still writing

I'm fixing to go on a road trip (Goddess willing and the creeks don't rise) and want to blog about it. I've been getting seriously into FaceBook (here's my profile - be my friend!) as a creative outlet, but want to be able to write more and do more.

The other thing is that after I dragged my magazine out to the woods and shot it, I've been flopping around trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. It's come back to this. I want to be exactly what I am, a creative writer, focusing mainly on non-fiction. My beat is essentially finding out what people are most passionate about and where they get their meaning and purpose. And so what I write about tends to focus on conservation and social issues.

Little by little, I'm clearing away the things in my life that don't support my purpose in some meaningful way or another. That means I'm no longer marketing myself as a copywriter, for example. Back in 2005, when I stubbornly went homeless to focus exclusively on writing, I wrote the following journal entry. I'll probably reproduce it in full one of these days. It pretty much sums it up. Writing's what I do, and I do it full-time and full of life. So stay tuned!