It’s like an ABC After School Special, only I CAN read (as many of you may have already guessed).  That is, I have a completely awesome functional ability to read.  I’ve done a pretty good job of it ever since that summer after first grade when my mom made me read 100 books.  (Thanks, mom!)

The deal is, I’m actually not allowed to read.  No kidding.  This Artist’s Way thing?  No reading this week.  Fer realz.

I’m sure you’re all “OMG!  WTF!” and I can hardly blame you for your exclamated lettery confusion.  I was a bit surprised and confused myself.  When I saw the header in the book I went, “Well, yeah, but they don’t really mean no reading at all.”  Yeah, wrong about that.  No reading.  No books, no magazines, no email, no interwebz, nada.

Were I to be totally obsessed and freakish, I’d have refused to do any reading at work and would probably be in some sort of disciplinary meeting right now.  Seeing as how loss of my job would seriously curtail some of my creative activities (like buying massive rolls of copper wiring, plus clock parts off of eBay), I’ve decided to make an allowance for work.  There are also a few other unavoidable necessities like road signs or packaging at the grocery store, but by and large I’ve cut most of it out.

The idea is that reading is one of those insiduous “busy time” activities in which we often partake to keep from doing other things that might be more beneficial to us.  We don’t think of it as wasting time like we do if we’re, say, watching every episode of The Wire all in one week, night after night, day after day.  (Who, me?)

I’ve realized that I spend a TON of time on the internet reading crap (and good stuff).  I’ve only read a couple of non-work emails that were a single sentence long.  I’ve cut out my daily doses of Barista Brat and customers_suck.  I’m not checking in on the Yahoo Rolling Ball Sculpture email list on and off all day, looking for new links, or combing through old posts for bits of info I probably don’t need right now.  I can’t even read any comments that wonderful, superfab people have left for me on my own blog this week.  (I’m treating them as Christmas presents for Monday morning.)  Oddly, I can write whatever I want, so long as I don’t go back and read over it, which I’m not doing, so this post is a first/only draft.  Thinking behind this is that you’ll suddenly free up a bunch of time and be forced to turn your engergies toward stuff that’ll encourage your creativity.

So what have I been doing?  Cool stuff (pics always clickable, btw):

So, there we are, kids.  Creative stuff with my non-reading free time, and that’s only since Monday!  Okay, the spiral actually started at Masterpiece in a Day, and I promise to bring you an update on that with pics.  The extremely short version of it is that it was stupendous, and I had a blast, and I can’t wait until next year to do it again.

Even though I can’t read comments this week.  I still love them, and will be reading them as soon as it’s allowed!

Oh, and I’m carving sixty jack o’ lanterns for Halloween, but more on that later.