Journal ATC's

I finally made a batch of ATC's I really like. I did some found poetry ones a few months ago, but on pretty lazy backgrounds. This is the first set that felt like ME.

The background was one large masterboard that was a diagonal rainbow done in watercolor crayons, topped by stamps, topped by embossing. I cut it down, added out of context lines from old journal entries that I typed on my typewriter and edged them with a black ink pad.

I'm in love.

This May makes 4 years since I started writing daily again. I took a break for about half a year while life was difficult, only writing here and there. Started up again last month. 

Some old entries are heartbreaking. A lot are inane. 

My confession about the peas I grew not tasting good made me laugh until I cried. Some of the things I record are so dumb.

Oddly, these 3 are the ones that have been claimed so far. I'm not on swap-bot (and don't have enough dedication to strict deadlines right now to go back yet) so I am trying to find homes on instagram- always a bit of a hit or miss. 

That's all I got for now.

Did I promise a mail related post last week?

I lied. Here's a short story I wrote last year for a swap. The prompt was "an approximately 500 word story about winter" which was a vague and horrible prompt and I can say as much because I am the jerk who hosted the damn thing. It's gathering digital dust on my hard-drive so I may as well put it up here while it's still chilly out. 

The Architect

I sat at the college station, smoking a candy cigarette and waiting for the four fifteen bus back to the less interesting side of town. Generally in writing you list what someone is doing in order of importance, so trust me, at that particular moment, the candy cigarette was the important part. I exhaled carefully into the atmosphere, the cold making my breath into a trail of smoke, before boarding the bus.

It was a single bus with plenty of room to spare. I took the seat across from the exit and watched the sunset out the side windows as the bus slunk across town. With every departure, my legs were assaulted with a cold rush of air. I turned my collar up towards my neck and pulled my scarf over my chin. With every passing second I considered moving to a different part of the bus, but some masochistically neurotic part of me was convinced if I moved I would somehow be violating my manifest destiny of sitting in this seat and watching the sunset.

When the sun had nearly set, the lights inside the bus flickered on and the windows turned to mirrors just in time for the next group of bus people to board. I caught a glimpse of a familiar face in the reflection and smiled under my scarf. The architect. I knew it was him by the scar on his nose and the way he locked eyes with each passenger, one by one.

In a warmer month, we had spoken. He had sat next to me and commented on the chain of flowers in my hair, asking if I was on a quest to bring back transcendentalism. He wanted to know what my plans were, if I had any, where I was heading to. He informed me he had been an architect with the same level of flippant certainty that he told me I was a wanderer. At the time, it felt like an affirmation, but at this moment, it was another disappointment. Here we were, different stop on the same bus route, concrete evidence how little I had managed to wander.

He sat near the front of the bus, facing towards the back. I could tell he had noticed me, but not if he had recognized me. The same small part of me that wanted to move to a warmer seat wanted me to walk over and talk to him, but the rest of me was still adamant that it was my destiny to sit here, cold, staring at the emerging stars in the indigo sky.

I listened to him laugh and chatter with the people in neighboring seats, most of whom seemed less than amused to be making small talk, until he stood, walked towards me with a warm smile, and departed the bus. He disappeared into the poorly lit side streets before the bus had a chance to continue towards its next stop.

The wild part of me still wanted to wander, to find snowflakes to put in my hair, but as I disembarked my tired feet took the same path home as they followed every night and morning. At the moment, it was a disappointment. At the moment, I did not know how many more moments it would take to become a triumph that I lived by words I had spoken instead of ones I had been told.

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.

----------------

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

Happy 2018, procrastinators.

Sourcing Inspiration pt. 2

Way back before I had a 15 year old (so about 6 months ago) I wrote a post about sourcing inspiration because at that particular moment I was so incredibly inspired and had so many irons in the fire creatively, it seemed obvious to enthuse about my inspiration.

Today I want to go back and punch that smug asshole in the face.

It's not that I am struggling for inspiration, it's that that post reads like so many books I have read on writing where the author is talking about how whenever she needs inspiration she just pisses off to her cabin in the woods and consults her zen master and rides her bicycle to the cafe to have conversations with biker gangs about how she's writing and how she's struggling to find the time to really write anymore because once a week she has to teach an hour long class on underwater basket weaving to the local animal shelter which she has been thinking of canceling but you know, think of the kittens.

Like, that's great for you, lady, but I got these weird humans stinking up the house asking about dinner and laundry and haircuts before they go to school/ have an interview. Unless my zen master wants to come sit at my kitchen table and talk to me while I make these 96 zucchini muffins because my relatives sent me home with more zucchini than they stock at the farmer's market, I think we're going to have to rain check.

My life right now feels less about sourcing inspiration and more about scheduling inspiration. Which looks like a lot of half jotted down thoughts, a lot of artwork that feels tedious, but is necessary, "write" and "paint" listed in my to-do lists in my planner along with "laundry", "kitchen", "start the kombucha" and "eat".

Anyhow here are five small things that inspire me.

Ridiculous moments (and all the other moments)

One of the most common things that gets me stuck in writing especially, but art and correspondence as well, is that I start to take my work and myself too seriously. 

Life is ridiculous. Life is making a petty as fuck art display out of the mess your husband leaves on the counter daily and your kid coming into the kitchen, pointing at the squashes, asking "is this a squash?" and then giving an awkward thumbs up before running away. Even the most serious moments are ridiculous. There's snot and awkward laughter and bad ringtones at worse times. 

If I feel like I've been stuck on a scene or whatever, I let something ridiculous happen. I let the characters be human, accidentally laugh, mispronounce a word, throw a cup dramatically across the room only for it to not break. It brings it back down to human again and makes it less intimidating.

Limiting myself (fridge poems)

Sometimes creating just seems overwhelming. I have to think of a subject, a composition, a style, a theme, and a million other details with a billion choices each. 

When this happens, I take away some options. 

I sit down in front of the fridge and compose poems using only the power ballad themed set of word magnets. I limit color scheme or pick just one medium. Sometimes I give myself time restraints, whatever I can do in 45 minutes. Taking away the options that don't matter leave more room to focus on the ones that do. 

Bric Bracs

Likely pretty self explanatory. I keep a lot of little objects around the house, sentimental shit, stuff people send me, souvenirs, things that seemingly magically appear. Asides from collecting dust, they are always an endless source for something to draw or something to describe or to write the real (or fake) story of.  

Retelling the same stories (again and again)

I have my go-tos. For art, it is hands right now. For writing, it is one period of time I lived with my sister. 

(and had a haircut like a tropical bird)

If I am stuck, I can always draw a hand or write that same story. Sometimes something new comes up, some little unexpected snippet, other times it just gets me comfortable enough to spring off into a new direction that hasn't been done to death. They are spring boards, the same trail head for a mountain with infinite trails. 

The mundane (many balconies.)

Life is ridiculous, it is also a lot of quiet little moments. 

Not getting caught up on not having big things to write about (especially in regards to correspondence or blogging or whatever) can be incredibly difficult, but your mundane is often someone else's novelty. 

Like my house, where we have a porch and two balconies, one of which is so small you can hardly walk on it. I've been here long enough I have gotten used to it, but when I tell people about it or we have someone over who has not seen all the balconies, there are always giggles. Because who designed this house? It looks like something I'd design in the sims. 

Mundane is in the eye of the person who lives there.             
           
I started drafting this post back in September and just now got around to finishing it. In case anyone was wondering where the hell I got zucchini in November. But hey, blog posts two weeks in a row? tight.           

The Goddamn Dishes

On October 31st, 2014, I lived in a one bedroom apartment with my husband a bit south of San Diego. There was a hostage situation involving midgets 2 blocks from our house and the dishwasher didn't work.

My sister started to poke at me that November was National Novel Writing Month and I had to do it. I had to. Had to do it. Had to. Being the good little sibling I am, I told my husband to ignore the dishes in the sink, I was going to write a novel.

So I sat down at my desk and started writing the first thing that came into my head, loosely based on a memoir I never wrote, a short story I never finished, a dream I had and some mysterious notes I found on my desk one afternoon that had been preceded by some serious shower vodka. I finished that novel, and then the next issue arose.

I did not want to edit.

So I wrote a new novel, that, conveniently, could allegedly be read before or after the first novel and either way would give new information and revelations, which sounds ambitious, but is a fancy way of making sure I had an excuse not to polish off the first novel, because naturally they both need to be open at once.

And I finished that novel.

And I still did not want to edit.

So I painted, did the dishes, went to the dentist, got help for my severe depression, completed EDMR therapy, started a garden, found some semblance of religion, taught myself to crochet, moved to another place where the dishwasher also did not work, started buying paper plates, started a blog (hello!) and then I started to rewrite and edit.

But there was another problem. I needed to write a sex scene and I could not get through it without sitting arm's length from my laptop and making a constant ewie eew eww ewwwwwww face. So I practiced for a week until it felt natural so I could go back and do those rewrites on my novels. Armed with all the knowledge I needed...

I started another novel.

I broke my personal record and hit 50 thousand words in two weeks and lost interest.

So I did the dishes, took a vacation, started the process of obtaining my very own child, wrote the end of the novel, hated the novel, started learning Dutch, deleted half the novel, got the child, moved to Oregon, made the child do the dishes in the dishwasher that actually works...

and finally finished the novel.

So where is this going, you may wonder. Did Met start a fourth novel? Is Met announcing that one of her books is out in the world for people to read? Are they looking for beta readers? Moving to the mountains to be a hermit? Promoting child labor?

No to all of those.

I started a fucking etsy.

Here's the link if you are interested. The link is here if you aren't interested too.

I'm going to try to get back into blogging. I lost this last month to NaNoWriMo, the four day hangover that I experienced after Halloween, some depression bullshit, setting up business stuff and apparently partnering with my friend at Pawsitive Pooch Training getting artwork done for their office space.

To thank the 5 people who read my blog and play favorites, until the 23rd of November, 2017 you can use the code "GODDAMNDISHES" to get 15% off your order. It's our secret. shhh.

All my productivity is just thinly veiled procrastination...

Every Day

May 6th of 2015 found me filling the last two pages of a journal I had been nursing my way through for 10 months. I cannot tell you what exactly catalyzed my rage that day, but the last page ends with this paragraph:

"The lack of failure has made you feel good about yourself

 when you should realize it means you haven't been trying."

I continued my entry on into a new journal, and I have written every day since.

I write... a lot.

I didn't know at the time I was going to write every day. My initial goal was to just try to fill a notebook about once a month like I used to, just to try to get myself writing again. After that notebook was full, I started another one and somehow I just kept coming back to my notebook every day until it became clear that writing daily was just part of my life again.

Most days I write in my journal, if I am working on a bigger project I type on my laptop, occasionally, I pull out my typewriter. I write about my day, I write about the weather, I write about food and conversations I overhear and lizards I see basking. I write poems and rants and novels and scenes that have no defined characters or context. I write lists of words, I write haikus and excuses, I follow prompts and record my weird dreams. Over the last two years my notebooks evolved from plain black pen to illustrations and shit glued in and millions of obnoxious colors, but the important thing, the only thing I care about, is that every day, I write.

Some of my writing I share with the world (like my blog posts), some of the writing I hope to share with the world eventually (like my novels), but the vast majority of the writing is just for me. I write to get all the ideas out of my skull so I have room to think of new ideas. I write to record the things I want to remember. I write to get better at writing. I write because I like how my handwriting looks on the page.

I write because I am drunk and have "too much chapstick my face".

Now, I have failed at many daily projects before. Of the three times I have tried to "make something every day" I got 170, 45 and 30 days consecutive successfully before everything went to shit. I have tried smaller projects where I only managed to get a week into it before failing. Doing things every day kinda sucks, so I wanted to share how, exactly, I managed to actually pull it off this time with a few tips.


How to do start doing something every day
if you're me
which you probably aren't
I'm no expert, but this is how I do things

Define "Rules" Clearly 
(but leave wiggle room)

Before you get going on your project, figure out what counts towards your goal. If you are aiming to make art every day, what counts as art? stick figures? finger prints? shadows?
Is your goal based off of showing up? spending a certain amount of time on your project each day? producing a certain amount of work?
Leave yourself some wiggle room, but do not be too broad or aimless.

"Making something" every day failed for me because every day I had to struggle to decide if breakfast counted- with no set boundaries for my goal, it did not really mean anything. At the same time, do not set such lofty goals that you are doomed to fail. You probably won't make an 8x10 oil painting every day, you likely won't fill a new journal every week. Do not set yourself up for failure.

Consider What "Every Day" Actually Means
(the toothbrush rule)      

If you asked me what I did every day, writing, eating, and, brushing my teeth would be the first things to pop into my head. Admittedly, in the last two years there have been days I missed doing all of those things. Days I was too sick to eat. Days my jaw was too swollen from oral surgery to open my mouth and brush my teeth. Likewise, there were days I did not write. But that doesn't mean I do not eat, brush my teeth and write every day.

Make Time, or Don't
(take advice with a grain of salt)

Some people swear by writing/making art/ whatever at the same time, same spot every day. They carve out a chunk of time and it is just their routine like someone might eat breakfast at the same time every day. This has never worked for me, so I do not do it. If you are the type of person who thrives on structure, do it. If you're the type of person, like me, who gets discouraged if you miss a scheduled time to the point of not doing at all- don't!

Same with every other bit of advice people give about starting and maintaining daily projects, if it works for you, you aren't doing it wrong. If it doesn't work for you, do it differently.

Spice Things Up
(doing things daily is tedious)

Join challenges, challenge yourself. Try new things, set little sub goals, find accountability buddies who are working on similar projects.

Share prompts and inspiration with other people, go outside your comfort zone. A million ways of me saying- do not let yourself fall in a horrible little rut because it can make something you love a horrible chore.

One of my favorite writing spices is doing informal events with other writer friends. We agree on a goal or theme (poetry, sex scenes, dialogue) and at the end of the week report back with how we did.

Keep Inspiration for Later

You will not always be inspired. Even if you keep showing up to your workplace, you make your creative routine, some days you will draw a blank. So when you are overflowing with inspiration, leave yourself notes for later.

Compile the things that resonate with you, make playlists of those songs that sound just right, set aside ideas for later, collect images and anything else that makes you feel something. I keep a little writing cubby for this purpose with books, trinkets and mascots that I keep coming back to when I need a push.

Some times when I have too much inspiration I set up notebooks for future use, I go through and add the quotes and images and prompts that inspire me.


Share
(but not too much)

Support and accountability is great. Especially with art or visual daily projects. It can seem like a great idea to commit to posting your daily drawing or whatever online until you hit that day where ding dang damn this painting looks like shit and I don't have time to do another. or ding dang damn I just am drawing a blank no matter how much I work on this thing. Don't put extra pressure on yourself to produce something shareable every day. Just putting the effort in is enough, share when you are happy with what you created and let the rest fester on a dark shelf knowing you still tried.

Know When to Stop

I was going to say, go as long as it makes you happy, but if I believed that I would have quit writing on day two. If you find yourself not getting anything out of your daily habit, consider changing it so it works for you. Some days it might feel like a chore, but if it consistently is something you loathe doing, stop!

Sourcing Inspiration Pt. 1

In the last week I created oodles of pop art inspired postcards, wrote nearly 15,000 words starting on a new novel, made major breakthroughs on editing issues I had been mulling over on one of the other novels and still found time to actually clean the house, keep up my journal and venture out to enjoy the beautiful weather outside.

When inspiration is hitting you over the head with a mallet, it is hard to believe you were ever sitting at your desk staring at a blank piece of paper like it was the world's shittiest Sudoku puzzle. It seems obvious to me right now to just write every single number on the paper in whatever fashion I like, but I know it is not always that way.

In the spirit of inspiration, and also in the spirit of wanting to get back to getting actual work done, I thought I would start a series of blog posts for things that inspire me. Expect these to pop up from time to time.

Quiet places inspire me.

Pictured is the interior of a small mill in my aunt's backyard, I spent many summers as an adolescent laying across that catwalk with my arms dangling to the lower area writing in my notebooks. The very first novel I ever started had chunks of it written there as did many of my short stories and poems all the way through high school.

Sometimes it feels like all you need to be inspired is to let the words come to you. To sit there and listen for them with nothing better to do. Little ambient noises in the background and familiar little smells. When I look at this picture I can still smell the giant container of goldfish food kept up there.

Museums inspire me.

How are you going to think of anything neat if you never see anything? The brain doesn't magically materialize ideas, it chops apart the ideas you feed it and then reassembles them. I love museums for gathering new information. The words along with the things just delights me.

This picture is from the Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City. I was absolutely struck by this skeleton that it was one hundred percent belonging to a mermaid. For a second I was going to say I wished we could move to Oklahoma just so I could sit in this museum and draw every skeleton in it with the flesh my imagination thinks it should have.

Growth inspires me.

Seeing new things grow among the old, little trees sprouting up and establishing themselves in a several hundred year old lava flow, in the case of this image, or ivy claiming unloved buildings. Any case of plants creeping in inspires me. The juxtaposition of destruction and regrowth.

I am an avid recycler of ideas that do not quite work so I think of a lot of my writing and artwork like this. Old abandoned canvases or stories I ripped to shreds supplemented by new ideas. It is a sort of depth that makes things stronger and more interesting to me.

Weird signage inspires me.

Really any sign I see can get me wondering "why did they decide they needed to put that up" or "what's the story behind that?"

This one in particular got me because who on earth decided that "do not touch plants" was a confusing enough a concept that they needed to illustrate it? Not to mention the double negative going on here with the red slashed circle underneath the DO NOT. If you see this sign, remember to Do Not Not Poke the Flowers. They're being coy, perhaps, flirting, "oh no don't poke meeee".

Shit this post is getting weird.

Words inspire me. 

In all forms. I like hearing words. I like saying words. Sometimes I write random words down to keep or decide to use them in conversation just for fun. Sometimes I sit at my desk mumbling "schublade" under my breath.

I specifically like disjointed words. No context just the word.

I like seeing people who have single lone words tattooed on them. I like seeing signs that contain just one word. "Dip." "Bump." I like stickers that have seemingly inexplicable words on them. I'm a sucker for the mistranslated sayings that seem to come standard with kawaii stationery.

Don't even need to do anything with all the words. Sometimes just knowing they exist is enough.

Perhaps

I woke up this morning to the ding of a rejection email hitting my inbox and felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I submitted a few poems weeks ago and it has been nagging in the back of my mind that my favorite concept of the bunch could have been done so much better if I hadn't tried to play it safe.

When I took my first ever art class in high school I knew eff all about art. I had a pretty solid understanding of color theory and doodled sometimes, but that was it. Halfway through the semester, we were doing landscape paintings, mine was of a castle in Scotland with a meadow and many trees in the foreground. I settled in a nice pastel almost washed out, non offensive color scheme. My art teacher kept coming by and telling me it was too light, too generic, not bold enough. She finally walked up to my desk, dipped a brush in lime green paint and smeared it across my pastel meadow. "You have to push the values." she reiterated and wandered off.

I sat, quietly fuming, for a few moments before adjusting the rest of the painting to match the awful bright green in the foreground. And she was right, the painting looked much better after I was pushed out of my comfort zone and had to be bold. Once the other values were pushed, the green she had smeared across the painting looked perfect.

I can create comfortably. I can write proficiently without shifting around and glaring at the walls and feeling like maybe I need to wash my hands or sit in the bottom of the shower with a stiff drink afterwards. I can paint and draw without someone adding splotches of bright green paint. But my strongest work in anything comes from those "oh fuck" moments. It comes from the "there is no way I can salvage this, I should just give up" moments and working through them or shelfing the project until I am ready to work through them.

Today when I got the generic, "your work is not right for us" notice I was relieved because I knew in the first draft and concept work of that poem I felt the lump in my throat and the discomfort, and that I edited all of that out in favor of something no one would probably love, but no one could really hate either. And now I have it in my head that not only do I get to rework that poem, but that I should definitely write an entire manuscript of uncomfortable poetry. I have a title all picked out and a million other things I should be doing, but who am I to hang up on my muse?

Which brings us to what I spent all morning doing, because it certainly wasn't actually writing these poems. No, I made a book to write them in, inspired by a sort of poetry manifesto I did several years ago in college.

Much like this go around, I was inspired first with a title. "Perhaps". I made a mini book (about 3.5 x 3.5, 18 pages) from one large sheet of watercolor I had mix media'd. The dirt looking stuff on the cover is tea, incidentally. 

I started with the word Perhaps and just went from there. Any time I got stuck, I wrote the word perhaps again. 

I wrote on the bus, I wrote at the pizza joint I would treat myself to any time I went to the bank, I wrote between classes, hunched over on the sidewalk, pretty much anywhere an idea hit me I was writing. 

This was also before I ever heard of zentangling. Call me a hipster but I was doodling like that before it was cool. 

"Perhaps" never was entirely finished, but some of the content was cleaned up and turned into a 3 part mini zine series a few years later. It should have been about 5 or 6 parts, but I naturally ended up distracted by some other project and now it's been several more years and I don't think "Perhaps" will ever be "finished". 

With that project in mind, but wanting a book that was a little bit bigger to fit a full manuscript worth of ideas in, I set out to make a journal.

I started with a mixed media masterboard on bristol board. I wish I had thought to take progress photos because this was one long series of "oh fuck" moments. 

Initially I had thought I would coptic bind the notebook with the pretty cover, but the idea of the inner pages being boring made me sad, and the idea of decorating a million pages made me bored. Thankfully I had one last piece of GIANT drawing paper to jazz up. 

It was unintentional how much the end color schemes resembled "Perhaps". I like what I like, I guess. 

This is the other side of the paper, before I added some watered down white acrylic to subdue the nonsense. I do have to write on it after all. 

Ah, I missed photographing a few steps after this due to tense moments. The paper and the cover were all still very damp with paint so putting the holes in tore chunks instead of neatly piercing. I added a ribbon for structural integrity purposes and kept going.

The cover turned out perfect. I just need to cut some letters out to stencil the title on once it dries. 

I love how the edges of the pages look. The entire reason I didn't let it dry was to get that damp torn look. I recall now that usually when I make these books I let them dry and then wet the edges again to tear them. Definitely works a little better... 

I need to let this dry about 50 years before I write in it now, but I am very pleased with how it turned out. I can't wait to start drafting my poetry manuscript in the free time I specifically cleared up so I could work on rewriting the two novels I am already working on... I'm pretty sure I don't even like poetry.