It’s supposed to be “Focus On: Art” right now and for a four-month period, where I spend most of my creative time working on things like drawing and painting and otherwise creating works of art. I’ve done some of this.
I have some limitations. The money I’d hoped to have earned in the last four months, making furniture, never materialized. So I don’t have money for new canvases. I have a couple to work with (one thanks to a generous friend), but that won’t last me long. I have a bunch of drawing to do, but I keep procrastinating that – my room is beginning to look clean again though, which is nice, and may help. At the very least it will help because once it’s entirely clean I won’t be able to use cleaning it as a procrastination tactic.
I’ve been doing some work on the art project I started during Focus On: Writing, which basically amounts to drilling thousands of holes at this point. Soon I shall have to contruct a complex series of stencils, and I’m not 100% sure of how I’ll do that. I have to run some tests, see how different materials stand up to the spray paint I’ll be using, and then spend dozens of hours manually cutting out the huge array of stencils I need. I shall almost definitely require new printer ink to complete that part of my task. And perhaps some spray adhesive, though I believe I may already have some of that lying around. But for now, I have another couple thousand holes to drill, and the raw tediousness of that operation makes me want to avoid it.
There is also the matter of the correspondence Art course I signed up for, am still paying for, and stopped doing any assignments for, months and months ago. I plan to complete the entire rest of the course within Focus On: Art (that is, before the end of Exober). But it’s the third week of Triober starting today, and I haven’t even pulled those materials out yet. I need to get on that, ASAP. I hate wasting things I haven’t finished paying for. (Like the Bowflex that sits out there collecting dust right now.) So there’s that.
And then there’s last night.
I didn’t get much sleep the night before – I woke up early (for me) because I expected to have to go out at a certain time and cut down a big tree with my father. So last night before midnight, I was tired – sort of. Anyway, I got offline and went to bed and … well, I couldn’t quite sleep right away, so I grabbed Dude, Where’s My Country and read the final chapter. My eyes were pretty tired and my mind was wandering (as I described the other day), and though I did my best to reign myself in properly it took until about 1AM to finish the chapter. Which was fine.
But by then my mind was really active and awake, even if my eyes wanted to close, and though I tried I could not quite sleep. There was a story in me, waiting to get out. It started (and then ended, which I thought was nice) with the sound of a woman’s shoes click-clacking against a hard surface as she walked. I wrote and wrote and half-way through I realised I was not on track to reach the length I wanted, that I was writing another short-short story, and I paced around in my empty room for a while, already wanting to re-write it from the beginning, already coming up with ways to expand it without just fluffing it up. But I decided, finally, to finish the first draft before I started work on the second. And with only a little hiccup where I lost track of the point of view for a sentence or two, I managed to write the rest of the first draft. And it came out to a reasonable length. I shall have to see how long it comes out to when I type it, but based on prior works, I expect it is around half the length I was aiming for. Which may be okay. It is the first story in an anthology of ten, and it may be a good thing for the first story to be a quick hook. Certainly it needs to be re-written. There are details missing here and there, and the writing style shifts a little bit, back and forth within it, and it shouldn’t. But it’s a good first draft. Parts of it are very poetic.
And after I wrote that, I flossed and brushed and used listerine. And as I was brushing my mind was still working, and it forced me to sit down at my computer.
And I wrote an article for Comixpedia. And I edited it and re-wrote it and over-checked it, and emailed it to my contacts there. And from the looks of things this morning, there’s a good chance they’ll publish it.
Which is so weird. What’s wrong with me? I’ve never written articles before… I’ve never even considered that I might be able to. But there I was, writing 1000 words on how compartmentalizing the different jobs required to keep an online comic going can increase its success across the board. Are there more articles in me, waiting to get out? Written for a particular audience, on a particular topic? It was only Friday I was discussing with someone the fact that I’d never considered myself capable of such a thing, that I didn’t think I could take the write-magazine-articles path to publishing success. And there I was, uncontrollably writing exactly what I thought I couldn’t.
So last night I spent three hours writing, when I should have been sleeping. Or should have been working on Art. Because my health is important, and because it’s supposed to be Focus On: Art right now.
I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try drilling some holes this afternoon. Hey, does working on ME24 count as Art? I was planning on putting together another week or two worth of strips, too. Sigh.
Oh, and I’m supposed to be working on furniture, too. I’ve got it down on my list of things to do here to find a piece of manzanita to make another floor lamp, for some reason. Maybe I’ll do that today.
