2018: Let Go & Thrive

People keep telling me about their word of the year. I admit, I thought it was kind of a cop out the first few times I heard the concept. Like an ambiguous word doesn't really have that much tangible accountability. Mind you, this is coming from someone who schedules eating 3 meals a day into their planner to make sure I don't go flailing off track, so don't take it as me being snobby.

But this year I set a word. Thrive. Which, more specifically, is making efforts to change my mindset from "survive" to "thrive". And the first step to this, because of course I am breaking down a word into steps, is LET GO.

I am endeavoring to let go of my ideas. Especially with my novels. I keep having these dreams of being a ghost and I realized it is because I have been writing in a vacuum, trying to make everything perfect to me, 3 novels worth of perfect, before doing anything with them.

I decided a few nights ago that I am going to focus my work on the main novel, the first one, and leave the other ones in the closet (so to speak) until such time as the first novel is published. If I want a break on the novel, I can start something completely unrelated. But writing a trilogy all at once before sending out any queries on the first one is insane...

But I was doing it because I need to let go of my fears too. I need to let go of my need to be validated. Need to let go of the idea of rejection being a bad thing and embrace that rejections mean you have been trying. And need to accept, that at the end of the day, it is ok to do some projects that are just for me, as long as they are not for me, forever. Because at the end of the day, art and writing exist to be shared, not hoarded.

Horace the Grotesque is actually looking for a forever home, if you really love him. 

Finally, I need to let go of some of my expectations for myself as an artist. I am, at my very core, an eclectic person. My art is eclectic, my writing is eclectic. There is no one style I could stick with and be content. I like to stencil pleasant pop art doggies. I like to make horrible creepy grotesque masks out of paper clay. I like to do painstaking realism paintings in ink. So many artists I follow you can scroll through their instagram feeds and they have a brand, all their content looks pleasingly similar. Mine looks like it was run by about 15 different people. And that's ok, having a "brand" is ok, so is not having one.

I need to let go of that nagging itch to compare myself to other artists.

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"remember that you will die" (and remember that first, you will live.)

Happy 2018, procrastinators.