This is part of my work in the Julia Cameron Artist’s Way series. The work this time is from the book the Sound of Paper. The responses are self-examinations and assessments based on work through a daily series of exercises. While I do keep some material offline as it can be very personal and jarring, I often opt to be fairly open about my experiences, both positive and negative.

I’ve done this exercise more than once already, but it’s still good to review.

1. Clearing the dishwasher.
2. Doing a station declutter – just picking one area, a corner of a room, and decluttering JUST that.
3. Making paper.
4. Baking.
5. Meditating (about half the time. The other half it’s the opposite of grounding.)
6. Eating a communal meal, usually with Mike. Actually, how grounding it is depends on my dinner companion. I always prefer the grounding sessions to the aggressively intellectual ones. Those are the people that spend time with me for me, not for what they think I can do for them.
7. Walking.
8. Doing push-ups, sit-ups or a short stretch. I often just push up against walls as I move from room to room during my workday.
9. Ticking check boxes on to-do lists. It’s affirming, and gives me a sense of purpose.
10. Doing my beauty routine – the one I’ve been skipping a lot, to the detriment of my often chlorine-dipped skin.

Tags: magickalrealism

This is part of my work in the Julia Cameron Artist’s Way series. The work this time is from the book the Sound of Paper. The responses are self-examinations and assessments based on work through a daily series of exercises. While I do keep some material offline as it can be very personal and jarring, I often opt to be fairly open about my experiences, both positive and negative.

1. In high school, I wrote poetry and short stories at every still opportunity. Between classes, during lunch, at any fallow time in the schedule. I would clear my homework, sometimes I might read, but mostly – I wrote. None of it was material turned in for any class. I even wrote during church sermons, and I considered this some of my best writing times. It helped that it was obvious to me that only one pastor I ever listened to did NOT miss the mark when it came to bringing the spiritual to the human.
2. During the period where J.J. dumped me, I wrote to deal with questions about my sexuality based on how he had infected me with his  questions about his sexuality, making me doubt myself. It made the time much less confusing for me; it’s only as a near middle-age adult that I realize how much of a misogynistic prick he was, so much so that he blamed me for his actions. Writing my way through it helped me recognize there were things going on that I could not grasp. I still have those writings, and plan on combining them in an essay about how to define your own sexuality when the people around you are trying to force you into their definitions of it. It especially helped since Beth was a complete jerk about what had happened to me, and joined the men in their victim-blaming of me.
3. In graduate school, the mentality of the school was killing my creativity. I came from a journalism background and thus without the piles of reading the other students had done; from my point of view all that crawling around in classical lit actually made most of them terrible writers that were afraid to break any new ground. They were trying too hard to be “literary.” Fan fiction saved me. It saved my creative soul, it helped me play nice with the literature students, and it helped me remember where the creative part of my brain was.
4. During my divorce I did write an entire book. While it never saw print, it did fulfill a contract.
5. While grieving my father I did write. Not much, but I did continue to blog, and did get back to the extremely difficult book that I have on deck for publication now.

Tags: magickalrealism

This is part of my work in the Julia Cameron Artist’s Way series. The work this time is from the book the Sound of Paper. The responses are self-examinations and assessments based on work through a daily series of exercises. While I do keep some material offline as it can be very personal and jarring, I often opt to be fairly open about my experiences, both positive and negative.

This is a good exercise, in part because of an incident last night that I still feel bad about. My partner has wanted to help with Fat Chic for a long time, and one of the specific ways he asked to help was to design my business card. He was very proud of his design, where the word “fat” was too big for the card, and then shoved off to the side, almost cut out from the overall image.

I had to say no. I was the fat girl in the family portraits that got shoved to the edge of the picture and almost cut out of the image. I am not the only fat girl that was subjected to this treatment, over and over again. One of the pictures I removed from my father’s funeral collage had a double whammy: not only was it a “cut out the fat girl,” the photo itself had been preceded by my mother and sister converging on me with makeup and the general creepiness of women who think they’re dressing a live doll. I was first becoming aware something was not right with either one of them, and something was extra not right with their attitudes towards me. Female social violence wasn’t a term yet,but I was aware of it, and aware I had no tools to handle some poisonous snake that lay within the bellies of my family members and peers.

While I couldn’t confirm it, that day where I was treated like less than a person by people that supposedly loved me for the sake of “pretty,” and then actively marginalized by the photographer who literally shoved me to the margin of the frame has stayed with me for a very long time.

That’s a lot of baggage for a business card.

This was not my sweetie’s intention – he just thought it looked cool.

But I’m pretty sure any fat woman would see exactly what I saw, and on a subtextual level it would send the opposite of my intended message with Fat Chic.

I work really hard to be encouraging and positive in feedback, and Mike was so excited to be helping me. I need business cards, I haven’t had the bandwidth to design my own, and he was taking time out of his busy schedule to make it happen. So add critic’s guilt to my complicated emotional response. I didn’t want to criticize, but I couldn’t in good conscience let this one sit – there was certainly no malice or contempt in Mike’s design; he just thought it looked cool. It did look cool. It just sent a message he did not realize it sent, that I knew other women who have lived through what I have would see almost immediately.

Fat Chic has to be center frame with the head still on. We’ve talked about headless fatties and fat people shoved into frame edges far too long for me to do it with my own logo. So my husband did something extra sweet for me – and I had to turn him down, because he wasn’t aware exactly how loaded his sweet gesture wound up being.

I am not a terrible person, but I feel bad as I prefer to boost Mike’s self-esteem, and while I don’t think I crushed him on this one, it did make him sad.

In fact, this does fall in my list of things I like/consider good about myself:

1. I go out of my way to protect people I believe need protecting. The incident above is one version of that.
2. I work hard to be positive. If I write about negative experiences, it’s about getting it out of my headspace to allow positive possibilities to grow.
3. I do make an effort to take care of myself. Sometimes this comes in very small ways, but I try hard to look to my own good.
4. I am generous, sometimes to a fault. I am actually teaching myself to hold back on the gifting and assists.
5. My natural state is one of a happy person. When I am not dealing with someone else’s ego projections screwing up my vibe, I’m joyful, and prone to appreciating what is right in front of me.
6. I am a damn fine looking woman.
7. I have the guts not to apologize for liking how I look.
8. I seek out new things to try. I rarely fall into ruts because of this.
9. I am very willing to learn. When a problem in life confronts me, I hit the books, I take a class, I meditate on it, and I look for approaches I have never tried before.
10. I am generous with what I learn just as much as I can be generous with material giving. I don’t believe in keeping market information secret, etc. Competition doesn’t upset me – in fact, I love the concept of cooperative competition.

Tags: magickalrealism

This is part of my work in the Julia Cameron Artist’s Way series. The work this time is from the book the Sound of Paper. The responses are self-examinations and assessments based on work through a daily series of exercises. While I do keep some material offline as it can be very personal and jarring, I often opt to be fairly open about my experiences, both positive and negative.

5 small steps to continue creative development:
1. Practice making origami goats. (There’s a reason, but it’s a bit too undeveloped to share.) Maybe some frogs, too. I’ve already cut the magazine paper for practice.
2. Continue to practice getting up by 6 am until it comes naturally.
3. Go for a walk, daily.
4. Pick one conflict to address.
5. Meditate after spending time around people to get my energy back.

Tags: magickalrealism

This is part of my work in the Julia Cameron Artist’s Way series. The work this time is from the book the Sound of Paper. The responses are self-examinations and assessments based on work through a daily series of exercises. While I do keep some material offline as it can be very personal and jarring, I often opt to be fairly open about my experiences, both positive and negative.

In this, I’m to name 5 projects I’m in and their seasons of creativity. While typically it’s supposed to be spring beginning, summer lush richness, fall wrapping up, winter dry, I’m going to redefine fall for “beginnings” in specific circumstances because it’s very much “school’s in.”

1. Divorcing a Real Witch book – late summer/early fall – I’m on draft 5, and seeing very much where rewrites are needed. I think I may have a few more drafts to go. Fall will be a busy season of pitching and writing articles related to the book, and I am putting my wish out there: I need a partner to help me make the online documentary.
2. Fat Chic - end of winter/spring. I got burned out on the marketers more than I did the blog. I think I’ve found a new way to handle all that, because to me, it’s still about the content, not about the partnership prospects. I also had a vision of where I want to take Fat Chic as a company, and I believe in the vision. I’m hoping this week is the first big step in making time to allow it to evolve.
3. Perfumery and witchy product making – it’s winter. I am unable to show up every day because of my writing and fitness schedule.
4. Pagan Newswire Collective – Fall, as in “school’s in.” Much of what I’m doing right now is about teaching, rather than about reporting.
5. Fitness – end of winter/early spring. I’m showing up 4 days a week, and getting myself to 5. I want to do 2 Pilates/2 Water Aerobics/1 day of the treadmill. It’s a matter of leveraging my inertia so that I just sort of slide to the gym out of habit, which is working most days, although I am struggling to balance between my fitness life, my home life, and my social life.

Tags: magickalrealism

This is part of my work in the Julia Cameron Artist’s Way series. The work this time is from the book the Sound of Paper. The responses are self-examinations and assessments based on work through a daily series of exercises. While I do keep some material offline as it can be very personal and jarring, I often opt to be fairly open about my experiences, both positive and negative.

I hope that

1. …I can pull off the whole party/tailgate thing. I don’t even know if Mike called those theaters.
2. …I find a writer’s group that’s a truly good fit for me.
3. …I get to the point where the Nice Ride bikes are routine and easy for me.
4. …my remaining relatives are exposed to the rest of the world for what they really are.
5. …that I get the right editor with the right attitude for my book.
6. …that I can clear the path I mean to clear with my notes, with my craft projects, with everything.
7. …that I figure out how to let go – I know what to let go of.
8. …that I really do put my own dreams and goals first.
9. …that my health continues to improve, until I’m just “healthy.”
10. …the inner noise dies down so I can just be here, now.

Tags: magickalrealism

This is part of my work in the Julia Cameron Artist’s Way series. The work this time is from the book the Sound of Paper. The responses are self-examinations and assessments based on work through a daily series of exercises. While I do keep some material offline as it can be very personal and jarring, I often opt to be fairly open about my experiences, both positive and negative.

1. Laugh, hard. It’s also hard to make me laugh, which is why I’m always on the hunt for good comedy.
2. Dance. I found a “safe place” to dance once a month, but I’m having trouble honoring my self-commitment to go dancing twice a month. On the fence about finding a dancing buddy.
3. Karaoke. I actually really love singing in public. I don’t even need booze to do it.
4. Digging. By digging I mean reading every magazine a library database has. I mean finding the most obscure of obscure flickr groups. I mean finding source documents scanned onto the  Internet from 1860. I actually get a thrill from deep research.
5. Decoupage has turned out to be more than mildly addictive.
6. Pranks. Low/no-cost pranks, to be fair. My rules are: no actual property damage, and only low-level emotional trauma.
7. Questing. I used to create really bizarre goals in life – “stick gum to a car tire while in moving traffic,” “Play frisbee with an offering plate” (that last one doesn’t work well – if it DOES fly, someone WILL get hurt.) Creating small, absurd, achievable goals brightens me up and as a teenager gave me a sense of both rebellious freedom and a minute amount of control over my life. I haven’t needed it as much, but when I use this method, it’s still very effective for me.
8. Watching chick flicks by myself. The Artist’s Way actually explains why I want fluff over substance – it’s because I need that fluff. I write stuff with a whole lot of substance, and I read books thicker than brick walls on a regular basis. The fluff is necessary, a way to relax, laugh, enjoy; it frees me from the need to be pressing and serious. Serious things will still be serious, I certainly don’t need to affect a Serious Demeanor for those things all the time.
9. Gardening. I get enormous pleasure planting, trimming and using herbs.
10. New experiences. It can be just about anything, as long as it’s new: new shop, new restaurant, new TV show, new game – I like to try things, and while I don’t like them all, I like that I’m actively seeing out those fresh experiences. Sure, habits and hangouts are nice, but I always want to know EVERYTHING that’s out there. It’s why I’m exploring Saint Paul on artist’s dates in between making use of my museum passes this year.

Tags: magickalrealism