Back into the Creative Stream

I begin to think it is inevitable that I finally follow my heart -- to live a life full of creativity and art. I am not the only one in my family to choose to follow the artistic path as I found out a couple of days ago. My brother has gone back to school to become an architect, a fact which Hoity-Toity finds a bit baffling as he began his academic pursuits during the time he was fixing the home he had shared with his ex-wife and the state of which Hoity-Toity blames on their two daughters, both adults (or barely adults in the youngest's case). The house was trashed and much was left behind because it smelled bad (likely like cat urine given the evidence). I'm not willing to cut the Mushroom's ex slack because she is the parent and was living in the same foul-smelling sty and did nothing about it except decamp when it became obvious the Mushroom would no longer pay the mortgage since his obligations ended when the youngest was of age and child support ceased. Oh, well, that's a nightmare tale for another time.

At any rate, my brother, the Mushroom, has indeed gone back to school to study architecture and has completed, or is completing, his second semester, quarter, whatever, a fact which escapes Hoity. She has not decided to pursue further studies having gotten out of high school everything she needed and moved on into adulthood sufficiently equipped for life. My brother evidently feels differently since he also is pursuing another line of academic studies on his way to becoming an architect, something that would probably be just as adequately served if he had chosen engineering instead of architecture. His reason for going back to school isn't a love of art -- as it is with me -- but the need to be able to draw projects, likely building projects, in blueprint form. I know of engineers who do the same thing, but his choice and his path.

I recently discovered art classes at Craftsy.com when I was searching for some other classes on cooking and baking and a whole new world opened up for me. I began drawing in the 4th grade when I was panicked about the last day of school when our teacher told us we would be drawing the last day of school. I had never drawn anything in my life and, being the studious type, didn't know what to do? How could I fail the last day of school to produce anything? I didn't know how to draw.

Mom suggested I try drawing. I picked up the first thing with pictures -- my piano book -- and tried copying what I saw. My fears diminished as I produced nearly exactly copies of the simple drawings. I could draw.

Possibilities, endless possibilities, lay strewn before me like a king's ransom of jewels. But was my drawing ability limited to the drawings in my piano book? Could I draw other things? I ventured onward as any good scientist through more experimentation. The comic pages in the daily newspaper gave way to colored comic pages in the Sunday paper which gave way to sketching things around the house, from toys to knick-knacks and finally out into the wide world where I sketched the people around me. I've always gravitated towards people and there is where I found myself happiest -- drawing, sketching, painting people.

In later years after a gift of oil paints and an easel, which I took to the spare room behind the garage when I was 16, I labored for days over an oil painting of Mark Lindsay, the cutest guy in the band, Paul Reverd and the Raiders. The painting was done on paper for oil painting and turned out quite nicely considering I had no instruction and no idea what all the solvents, oils, etc. were used for and how to paint with oils. As with everything in my life, I followed my instincts.

I took art classes and learned to do quick 1- and 5-minute sketches with charcoal and pencil and did very well. My teachers praised my work, but did little to explain how to effectively employ oils, brushes, palette knives, etc. while bestowing praise, As, and scholarships for advanced classes in pastels at the Columbus Academy of Art and Design's Saturday classes for talented beginners. I took to pastels and soon excelled in the class, but still had no idea of what the various techniques (gesso, impasto, under painting, etc.) meant and happily floundered my way through classes, even to taking a few life classes at OSU while still in junior and high school. I worked in clay and carved tiles for block printing, earning a lovely scar I still carry when a blade scooped out a hunk of skin along with the carvable section of the tile I worked on. Blood-spattered and continuing on blindly I explored the still nebulous and mysterious world of art, taking my As and praise in stride as I strove to go as far as possible in the art world. I painted Beanie, my youngest sister, several times, and even took her to school with me during summer school (honors class) while I painted her in acrylics directly onto a 24 x 36 inch canvas, which Beanie now owns since Mom gave it to her when she died. I couldn't be trusted because I would have destroyed the canvas; it wasn't good enough, the product of an untutored artist with little or no direction from my teachers. I've done better -- and worse -- over the years, but Mom used that as one of her prize possessions where every visitor (no matter how close and familiar with the piece) must be taken to see and praise her for my meager accomplishments because she was the one who saw talent in me and supported me without question.

I continued to dabble in paints, eventually doing an oil rendering of the first (and only) school pictures my ex-husband sent me when the boys went to live with him. I gave that painting to AJ who claims he doesn't know what happened to it. I wish now I had kept it, carting it with me as I've carried my medical transcription reference books and my Andre Norton books wherever I've gone. I've sketched interesting face (interesting to me) from time to time and my skills have not exactly diminished with time, achieving a level of facility and ability conferred by time and mature years, though it wasn't until very recently that I picked up what I had put down more than 20 years ago -- the path of artist. My skills have somewhat diminished from lack of use, but my eye remains fairly good. The artistic eye, of course.

My supportive mother told me years ago I couldn't make a living as an artist -- or a writer for that matter -- and should focus on something that would ensure a stable income -- data processing, computers, IT. Anything but art or writing and in spite of my many awards and certificates of achievement, along with my meager skills. I have since turned that creative temperament and ability to hobbies, like cross stitch, but not for sale. Simply because the arts feed a need that is as much a part of my DNA as my grey eyes. And I have returned to the creative arts, specifically drawing, in the form of colored pencils. I have a set of pastels around here somewhere in the box where they were packed, but I'm exploring colored pencils for now with the same single-mindedness I have always shown when it comes to art, limping along and finding classes to help me learn the use and extent of possibilities inherent in the medium.

My work desk has become my drawing and sketching desk and I'm exploring more classes and different kinds of colored pencils to find the one that suits me and my rusty style.

I am not alone. Many people who have reached -- and passed -- their middle years have gone back to pick up where they left off or unpacked a long held dream and followed it in their twilight years as I have done with art -- and specifically portraiture. My parents are dead and I make a decent living with medical transcription, but nothing fills me with the joy or feels my soul the way art does, and I'm finally discovering the bedrock of art that I should have learned many years ago when teachers patted me on the head and sent me to honors classes on scholarships without really giving me the grounding I needed in the mechanics and uses of the media they passed quickly over. I'm really learning now and I have the tools to delve as deeply as I wish -- and all the classes I can afford to take.

I won't waste time thinking about what I've lost over the intervening decades or bemoan the unrealized abilities that could have been part of the dust of my decomposing corpse had I not reached this age (60 for those of you who prefer details to dreams) with the ability to reach back and take what was once mine. I'm not going to worry about what I can and cannot do, but simply reach for more and take to my soul all that I can as I venture back into the creative stream to capture the world as I see it without the struggle (sometimes fruitless) for the right words and constructions that will take me from the first fire of discovery in a novel or story through the doldrums of the middle and the elation of the end of the tale. At least with art, I need not worry about critics and complaining readers, but do what I will with the tools at hand and render the life around me as my hands and talent allow. I have no one to tell me no and no one to browbeat, bruise, and cudgel into a more lucrative and acceptable form of work. This I do for myself and the devil take the hindmost.

That is all. Disperse.

In Death as in Writing

Tough week and it's only Tuesday. That's what happens when the week begins with death. In this case, the death included Osama Bin Laden and my half-brother Timmy. I'm glad Osama is gone (talk about your anti-climax) and have mixed feelings about Timmy. He's been ill for a year and in the hospital for the past three months, most of which I have spent on the phone with our mother. Well, actually she's his mother and my biological mother and aunt. Figure that one out.

Death takes the wind out of my writing sails. They've been as flat as though I was becalmed in the great Sargasso Sea. It's not like I don't know where I'm going in the latest book, I do. I'm having trouble summoning up the requisite literary energy and discipline to dive back into the book, which I put off because I was launching the print version of my latest self-published work. Here it is May already and I'm stalled when I should be finishing up the first draft of my Victorian gothic tale. April showers are supposed to bring May flowers not May stalls and I am definitely stalled.

Now comes the urge to rant about all the things that are keeping me from writing and none of them are valid. It's as transparent as Cuddy's mom's lawsuit and need for a probate lawyer to change her will because Cuddy and House conspired to heal her. It's never about what you think a fight is about and always about the subtext. Another stall. Maybe I should consider a horse or two with all these stalls and, if I were flying a plane, I'd be right about to hit the hard deck really hard.

I can't concentrate. I have too much to do. I have to work and read review books and write the reviews and keep up my blogs and talk to family and pay the bills and all the little excuses I have always had that didn't stop me when I was writing my last novel or the one before. Then I could focus; now, not so much. I think there is something inherently wrong when a fully realized story with great characters, lots of history and a killer plot can't get written -- by me -- at all. I've been stalling on this one for a while and it's not making me feel any less incompetent or like a fraud and more like a failure every day. Isn't that the way, though? As if I needed an excuse to feel like a fraud. I wonder if other writers feel that way?

Letting out the insecurity without a leash is a bad idea, so scratch everything that came before, except for missing Timmy. He was only forty-eight years old and now he is gone. Finally and completely and no take backs gone. He had such a rotten time of it the past few years. No one should have to feel that way, and yet so many people do, and we're back to fraud again.

I can't seem to shake the excuses, and feeling like a fraud is one of those excuses. I should just shut up and write. It's what I did in the past, churning out mediocre stories with faint glimmers of literary goodness. It shouldn't take this long. It shouldn't be this hard. Writing isn't easy. It's hard work and balancing all the demands of the usually full and busy lifestyle and I no longer have the excuse of children taking up my time. At least then I could write. Things are too quiet. The room's too cold. The wind is coming out of the wrong direction. Anything just so I don't have to sit down and face the blank screen, cursing blink-blink-blinking at me, waiting patiently and mechanically for the next word and the one after that and the one after that . . . . That's how it goes. Some days are up and some days are down and most days the writing gets done, not great writing, but words on the page that will eventually morph into something good. At least that is how I hope it will go and hope blinks eternally in that blasted cursor.

I guess you could say I have nothing to write about, at least not here, and I should just buckle down, get up early, put my fingers on the keys and type. It's what I've always done, turning life into art and pain into tragedy and comedy and everything in between. Getting through the hard days is the trick and I'm all out of tricks, so it's back to the keyboard for something real and tangible. The next word and the next sentence and the next paragraph that leads from half-finished to ready for editing and rewriting. That's how the work gets done.

So, for Timmy, who kept telling me how proud he was that his sister was a writer, this one's for you.

A time of dreams and fantasies

Movies are compelling with their images and colors brighter than those seen in the living rooms and dens and bedrooms where the movies play. It's no wonder talkies took off the way they did in spite of the people who claimed movies would never take off. In movies there are no limits to the imagination. People have traveled farther in movies than they ever have on land or in sea or air. Makes me wonder how far we would have traveled if the people involved had been as keen to achieve space flight as they did to crack the boundaries of time and space on the big screen.

The first flights of fancy took place around fires in caves and on the plains and in the mountains and hills and at the sea side when night ruled and men huddled close for comfort and protection. Was it a lie that started the first storytellers to spinning fancies and fantasies out of shadow and leaping firelight? Or was it merely wishing to penetrate the darkness and stave off the predators waiting to pounce?

Fiction writers are considered liars, but I don't see us as writers, but rather as dreamers and visionaries. Is it a lie to wish for better or to want to travel beyond the confines of gravity? Anyone capable of such courage and wisdom and ability would have to be special and so the story is born.

I am constantly amazed by the wide variety of stories and movies and even more so by the time it takes to watch someone else's dreams and let my own lie fallow. That's the lure of movies and books, like a come-hither from the king of the leprechauns that leads to wrack and ruin, and the death of dreams.

I'm guilty of following the easy entertainment of the written and acted word, caught like a dazed fool. I'm getting better at discipline, but it's not second nature yet. I'm too much the rebel when it comes to settling down to someone else's rules -- and even my own. I don't like fences even the kind that limit time and spontaneity. Time heals all wounds and wounds all heels so that keeping the roads hot isn't quite so easy any more. It's probably why many take up writing later in life when children are grown and there are hours and time to fill. There's so much to look back on and record, so many thoughts to follow to the rainbow's end and fantasies to to eave from threads into whole cloth. It's also why some begin writing in their youth -- time to fill, dreams to follow and fancies to weave.

I'm in the middle of life, but have always found time to write. Now that there is more time with fewer distractions during summer break, I should be able to finish a couple more books. I write waking and sleeping, but I think for a while I'll leave my working hours for actual work, toiling toward the goal of time to write. There are worse things to do with the time, and I've done most of them. Time to do better and be good for a change or I'll not get a single good night's sleep as stories and characters have found their way into my dreams, luring me with penny bright phrases and evocative prose.

Creative Stretching

Movies and books and sleeping, mostly sleeping, have been the shape of my days for a few days now, as happens infrequently when my back decides to go on a slide slip and leaves me with an acute awareness of how things work and don't work -- mostly don't work. I've been out of it for five days due to a bout of muscle spasming and a slight shift of a lower back disc. It happens.

The last time when we left our intrepid adventuring author she was touting the benefits of doing more than sleeping in bed in response to Tim's doctor's claims that a bed is to sleep as floors, counters and other furniture are to sex. That is not to say that Tim, sweet young man that he is, was in any way involved in things to do in bed other than giving me the idea. He'd be a prodigious young man indeed if his talents stretched from New Jersey all the way to Colorado. And, no, the pictures of nether parts my sister sent me were not Tim's but someone she knows very well and has known for y-e-a-r-s, so now you can stop emailing and calling for details. Some details are meant to remain hidden.

I'm in a strange mood today, bouncing from sleep to reading to trying to find a position in which my open mouth does not emit a high pitched scream of sirens bearing down on a stalled car in the middle of the main drag, although sirens were definitely screaming last evening, at least a two-alarm blaze in practice heralded by the thunderous boom of, well, thunder. At least it sounded like thunder. It was probably nothing more than hollow booming echoes from somewhere people were engaged in actual work and not lollygagging around the house in search of comfort and quiet, especially since ear plugs don't deafen the noise of your own screams. There it is, screaming again. If I keep this up, everyone will believe I'm in actual pain, which is not the case at all. As long as I breathe shallowly and don't move too much, I'm fine.

I did have one interesting few hours this weekend when I looked over a friend's novel. As I do whenever I critique a novel and don't have it in a format where I can -- as one friend would have it -- bleed all over the digital page, I keep a pad and pencil at hand to take notes. There was about a page of notes (the usual things: grammar, spelling, extra words, etc.) and a sense at the end of the book that I had been had. The book was good and I've read enough YA novels to know good when I see it -- from my perspective. Intrigue, really good red herrings, memorable characters and a satisfying ending were all there. The big flash is that during the time I read the manuscript I didn't think about my back, except when Nature forced me to rise and attend to the necessities. No doubt the author, a misguided soul who actually reads this blog, will be surprised to see his experience sandwiched between the mundane daily maunderings and sirens screaming. He shouldn't be. After all this time, he should have figured out I only mention things and people worth mentioning. He's one of them.

In the course of writing I often change the names of the guilty and the innocent just to keep things even, but the stories are all about people I actually know or have known, and I have known a lot of people. Comes with the territory when you've traveled as much as I have over the past nearly fifty-five years. I'm not shy -- never have been -- about approaching people and talking to strangers. It was one of the things that worried my parents most when I was a child. I didn't understand that stranger didn't mean potential acquaintance and possibly friend. I'm still indiscriminate that way. I talk to anyone and anyone talks to me.

For instance, this morning a young man (I say young, although I don't really know, because most people seem young to me these days) contacted me about what kind of radio he should buy starting out as a newly licensed amateur radio operator. He had some very strange ideas about power, believing that it isn't possible to reach someone across the country, let alone across the world, without a big rig -- radiowise, of course. I yanked that idea out from under him and gave him the name of a reputable ham radio operator who has proven that you can reach anywhere in the world on 5 watts of power and a long piece of wire. He's pretty amazing that way. I also explained, in my capacity as team contact, that he could talk to old and grizzled professionals at the exam session next month who would be glad to talk first radios and their attributes and drawbacks. I could practically see the glow in his words and on his face when he thanked me. That's me, a fount of trivia and information, none of which is trivial.

Since pain has a tendency to make it difficult for me to concentrate on editing and writing, I decided to take up pencil and paper and do a little sketching, stretching creative muscles I've not used in over a decade. I was surprised to find my muscles in fairly good shape once I took off the restraints and let go the worry and recognizable human features appeared on the page. I've decided, like many other creative people, that I need more than one medium in which to work in order to remain fresh and creative. Drawing and painting have always provided me with new creative energy and fueled my writing as much as watching people and researching and reading. I've occasionally considered writing a children's book and doing all the art work. Maybe one day I shall. Right now I'm in search of creative fuel and different creative muscles to flex, hence the drawing. Unfortunately, sketching with charcoal and sepia are not enough. I need color, the feel of chalk and brush between my fingers as I play with color. I'm sure there will be knives involved at some point; I can feel the handle in my grip and the joy of slashing through layers of colors to open a gash for the light to pour through. That would be a palette knife for those of you worried I might pick up a carving or butcher's knife.

Music has also been helpful in boosting creativity, and I don't mean just Mozart's brain-boosting rivers and streamlets of skirling notes, but all kinds of music. I do have to draw the line at anything with vocals because I have a tendency to begin singing and that throws off the writing. I reserve vocals for cleaning and chores because I forget how tedious bagging trash, vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing toilets and tiles and other household chores are when I sing.

There are so many creative outlets and most of us tend to choose one and ignore the rest, concentrating on getting it right. It is in the exercise of many different arts that we return refreshed and renewed to our primary art, and for me that's writing. Painting. Drawing. Singing. Dancing.

Living.