A very small three hours

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I’m sick today, kids, but I figured I’d toss this up for you all since I’ve been away for a bit.

The blog is looking much spiffier thanks to my aforementioned awesome brother.  He did some updates on the ol’ WordPress stuff, adding the nifty new layout in the process.  I wouldn’t doubt that things may change around here in the coming months as I become more familiar with how the software works.  I didn’t have a lot to work with before, and as my brother said, “The back end on this is completely different,” meaning I can do more cool and fun stuff.  I told you he was great, right?

I don’t feel like I’ve been doing much lately, although I did set aside about three hours of time to work on the sculpture last week.  Three hours.  Sounds like a lot, right?  Sounds like I probably hung a bunch of stuff on my frame and now we’ve got some marbles rolling around, right?  Well…

spiralramp0011Here’s what you get.  Three hours of work is apparently enough to make a six-inch long little ramp.  This stuff always seems like it should go so much faster, but doesn’t.  There are all these tiny details that come into play, at least when I do it.  I have to figure out what direction the ramp comes off at, check how it will line up with the rest of the sculpture lines, figure out how much of a rise I need to get the marbles rolling, figure out where to make the appropriate bends, get stuff bent, cut, and filed down appropriately, and then lots of times I just have to shrug my shoulders and say, “I have no friggin’ clue if this is right or not, but if I keep sitting here it will never get done.  If it’s wrong, it’s wrong, but I’ll figure out some way to fix it somewhere down the road.”

Some day, after I’ve been doing this for a while, I’ll pick up easy or at least standard ways on how to take care of some of these problems, but for now it’s a lot of guesswork.  It’s a learning process, this creative stuff.  For now I have a niggling three-hour problem wrapped up, and it’s on to the next challenge.

Brotherly awesomeness

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Sometimes I just feel like I’m blessed with uncountable awesomeness in my life.

Tuesday my brother sent me an email with “Sculpture material” in the subject line.  Now, my brother doesn’t do any sculpture that I know of, so I wondered what this could actually pertain to.  I opened it immediately.  “I found these in Ryan’s basement.  I thought you could use them for your sculpture.  They would look cool all rusty and beat up like they are.”

Attached was a photo of two objects that were definitely rusty and dirty.  They looked like giant drill bits, the sort that are used for earth or concrete work.  I couldn’t exactly tell how big they were, but they were maybe a couple of inches around and about two or three feet long.  Nice.

“There’s one more,” he added.  “I’ll bring them over later.”  More nice.

Thursday my brother stopped by my place only moments after I got home.  “Check ’em out, man,” he said, laying two of them down on the floor of my back hall.  “Aren’t they cool?”

Oh, yes.  Yes they are:

With my trusty beverage fuel can for reference, you can get an idea of how big these things are.  Ben opined that the middle one and the one on the right were actually one piece way back in history, and at some point rent assunder.  The one on the left is just a shorty, poor thing.  I wonder if it ever felt insufficient in the bed of the construction truck next to the other, longer augers. 

Clearly, my brother rules.  It touches my heart that he said, “I saw these three rusted, broken, dirty things, and I thought of you.”  That’s love, dudes.  These pieces of cast iron are now destined for greatness at my hands.  The only real problem now is that I have to create an entire sculpture specifically in which to use them, maybe even two separate ones.  I’ve never exactly shied from more sculpture work, though, have I?

It will stand!

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My brother and I were going to work on the Chevelle on Sunday, but by 2pm I hadn’t heard anything from him. I figured that, since I’d wanted to get some sculpture done, I might as well get started on it while I waited for him to call or come over. This turned out to be my greatest and wisest decision of the day.

My previous sculpting session had netted me with some design plans and three curved pieces of wire. I could have posted that the other day, but it was pretty unimpressive-looking, even though doing the work took me over an hour. As I mentioned previously, sometimes real progress doesn’t look like much.

So I sat down with my three pieces of wire which were to form the frame, and I thought about what I wanted to do. About all I knew was that I needed them to form a sort of tripod. Oh, and that the ends of each piece were to be curved in small spirals themselves (I do believe a theme is developing here, no?). Seeing as how I couldn’t assemble the frame without the pieces being curved first, I went to work on those. I used a piece of small pipe for the “big end,” and a small screw driver shaft to form the “small end.” After initial work, I had this:

The photo above shows the main supports along with a rough drawing depicting the top and side view of what I’m going after with this one. The top coils are yet to be modified into spirals at this point.

Above you can see the results of working the top coils into spiral shapes. Once that was done I brought the pieces together into a standing configuration. This took a bit of doing. At first I thought I was going to have to build a wooden frame to mount and position each piece. That would have obviously eaten up a lot of time, and I didn’t want to get that involved. Instead I took a stab at lining everything up by eye, and I’ll be hanged if it didn’t kind of work! I was completely amazed that I was able to get these pieces even remotely even/straight/aligned without a miniature scaffolding and sixteen extra sets of hands. Actually, that one pair of vice grips to the right performed amazingly well, and I thank it for its assistance.

The one thing I hate about lining stuff up is, once you have it all positioned and you’re sure you can really do it the way you wanted to do it, you have to take it all apart and prep the pieces to solder them, and then put it all back together all over again. This I do not like to do, and so after I got the pieces positioned and became exalted over the relative ease with which they came together, I stared at it for a little while, simply not wanting to take it apart…and then I took it apart.

Surprisingly, amazingly, and fantastically, when I got all this stuff lined up and positioned and put the torch to it, I only bumped it out of alignment one time. And when I bumped it that one time, I was unbelievably able to get it nudged back into place within seconds. Truly, angels and things otherwordly and and awesome were at work here, because that s*** just never goes my way! I got pretty darn lucky, though, and after a few tense moments was rewarded with this not-too-perfect-looking bit of solder work. It could be better, and I wish it were, but I got a good, solid joint, and that’s the important thing. This photo is before I washed and scrubbed it, so it looks a tad better now.

Here’s the finished effort! It stands alone after only four hours of work! (Well, it did after I took the clamps off, I assure you.) Not bad, kids, not bad. I honestly cannot believe that I got all of that stuff lined up and soldered using a pair of vice grips and two Third Hand clamps. Really, I’ve spent hours doing seemingly far simpler tasks and been rewarded with endless frustration. This was gold, gold I tell you! (Of course, right after I decided to knock off for the day I wished I’d gotten even more done. Never satisfied, I tell ya.)

The next step is to start hanging spirals. I realized immediately that adding elements to this might necessitate heating up that initial joint which I’d just made, and this freaks me out. Sometimes that stuff just falls apart again if it gets too warm. This could be a really big challenge, one that I’d not foreseen. Hopefully I’ll find a way around it. It’s looking nice so far, and it’s been fun. I hope it doesn’t turn into a nightmare. (Nightmares are great in movies and all, but they kind of suck at a workbench.)

On a related note, after I went to the doctor this morning (nothing serious, just annoying), I got some coffee in the building’s coffee shop. Dig the glass wall sculpture in the background! However, my main focus as I sat there waiting for my latte was these stands that they had for their lamps. The metal which comprised them was about as big around as my thumb. The night before I’d been fighting with a pair of needle-nose pliers to bend .10-inch copper into little spirals. I just looked at this thing and went, “Wow, must have been some big pliers.”

Sculpture Soundtrack: She and Him – Volume Four

Twistin’ the Night Away

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Well, it wasn’t the whole night, but it felt like it constituted the bulk of my activity for last evening, so there ya go.

I told myself once again that I was going to dedicate one hour of my evening to doing sculpture.  This program seems to be producing results, so I’m sticking with it.  Yestereve (it’s not a word, but, eh…) I had gotten two coils bent and gotten most of one spiral formed.  Last night it was dauntingly simple: make more spirals.  The plain simple obviousness of what needs to be done, the real work rather than the planning or figuring or talking about it feels intimidating, but I went back to the prayers from the day before, and I was on my way.

After only an hour of work I had this:

Woohoo!  Sweet!  Five spirals of varying sizes.  They look nifty, don’t they?  I think they turned out quite nicely, if I do say so my humble self.  I tested a marble on all of them, and it looks like they’ll serve pretty well just the way they are, although some minor tweaking will likely result during the rest of the build.  The exit ramps are a bit touchy for me as well, but I’ll have time to fuss with that later.

It’s incredibly satsifying to be able to crank out some complete sections like this in one sitting.  A lot of RBS building involves gradually piecing together sections over a period of time, sections and elements that can’t be tested or used until a certain point is reached.  It can feel like no progress is being made.  Last night it was easy to see the progress in my work.  I value those moments.  Perhaps I’ll come back and read this entry some time when I’m knee-deep in soldering together support braces or some similarly necessary yet time-sucking and not so fun task.

My big issue now is I’m not sure how to integrate the spirals as a whole.  I’ve come up with a couple of different ideas, but not I’m not married to one or the other just yet.  They kind of look like little flower blooms, don’t they?  Hmmm…  Stay tuned, it’s getting interesting!

All Coiled Up

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These past few days I’ve sort of renewed my commitment to working on sculpture.  I think it started sometime last week.  After my post at the beginning of the month I had a delay in activity for about a week, and then I realized how much I was procrastinating.  I went and found a machine shop near my office to do some work on part of my sculpture.  It’s literally a five minute machining job.  Unfortunately, the particular shop I found is a commercial shop, and they don’t handle five minute jobs.  Sucks to be me.

I’ve not found another shop yet.  I’m still looking.  These sorts of places usually operate for tradesmen, so it’s not like they have evening hours or weekends.  I certainly know where some shops are located, but it’s difficult to get to any of them without sacrificing half a work day to do so.  I’d rather not burn vacation hours or take time without pay for this job, so it’s taking a while to find a shop.  I got some ideas from a friend last night, though, so maybe I’ll have more to report on that before long.

In the meantime, I realized I was once again sitting on my haunches and not doing any work.  I have this huge problem with setting aside time for art.  I always minimize its importance in my life and to the world at large.  It’s fun, I say.  It’s playing around, I think.  It doesn’t need to be done when there are more important things to do, I lecture myself.  This is how art does not get done.

I finally told myself, in fact I wrote it down: “I’m going to work on sculpture for 30 minutes tonight,” and then the next day: “I’m going to work on sculpture for 60 minutes tonight.”  This is how art gets done. 

Since I’m in the middle of this larger sculpture with the crazy brass and clockwork lift, I figured I’d spend my extra/down time on a small one.  It’s a bit of an experiment to see if I can make a small one that’s interesting and fun.  My inclination is always to go for the complex and/or grand (see the pottery I’m decorating – Oh, wait!  You can’t.  That’s because it’s complex and has ended up taking weeks instead of hours.).  This is an exercise in restraint of scale and complexity.  This is hard for me, but we’ll see how it works out.

Coils/spirals are pretty easy to do if you don’t make them too large.  They can be pre-formed easily around a piece of pipe, and this offers the added benefit of me not having to use my right hand so much as it still bugs me a little bit.  I used two different sizes of PVC plumbing pipe clamped in a vice as my forms for the sprials below.

These don’t come out quite as nice as they look here, but with some massaging it’s pretty easy to get them nearly uniform, and while bending them around the pipe it takes the majority of the kinks out quite nicely.  I can cut these into sections and make several different sizes of spirals out of them.  None will be very large in diameter, but that’s fine with me.  This is my exercise in a more simple design.  I’m guessing I may be able to get anywhere between three and five spirals out of these.

Last night I wrapped the second coil, and having finished that, I began making one into a spiral.  Actually, it wasn’t that easy.  I held it and stared at it for a little while.  I made the coil more tidy and uniform.  I was fiddling.  I was afraid to start.  I was afraid like I’m always afraid: What if it doesn’t turn out right?  I’m going to ruin it!  I’ll make it crooked!  This is going to suck, it’s too little.  I’ll never get this right!

At this moment I remembered a couple of the prayers that I learned from the Artist’s Way: “It is my job to do the work, not judge the work,” and, “God, I will take care of the quantity if you take care of the quality.”

I sat there and said those two things to myself as I started bending.  I certainly cannot take care of the quality.  I never think my work is good enough (well, not never, but I try!).  If someone or something else is taking care of that, all I have to do is take some action, and so I let go and went to work.

After about an hour’s worth of work, here’s what I had.  It turned out rather well.  This spiral is about at its point of termination.  I can’t really turn it down any farther and still have the marble clear the exit.  I’ll likely snip it off the rest of the coil at this point.  I’ll make some more of these.  They will vary in diameter and, consequently, the number of turns then have in each.  Hopefully this will add some variety to the piece and make it fun to watch even though it will be of small size. 

I’ll bring you more as I progress.  I love building this stuff, and I can’t wait to see how it’s going to turn out. 

Oh, and Olivia, weren’t you going to send me Hot Wheels and stuff, or was that just a tease?  I was all fired up about that challenge.

Metallic return

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Finally.  FINALLY!  I’m working on sculpture again.  It’s not much, but it’s more progress than I’ve made, more work than I’ve been able to do, in over a month, and, man, does it ever feel good!  I’m coming up from the basement with sooty black marks in random places on my face, and my fingers look slightly blackened and they smell like metal.  Life is good.

This is the top gear for my chain lift.  Getting things to line up and track properly could prove to be a challenge that will have me cursing and swearing on future blogs, but I trust you’ll all get a big kick out of that anyway.  The chain is called ladder chain.  I found it on the web.  The gear is out of a windup clock, because I thought the gears that you could buy to fit the chain perfectly were ugly, being plain black plastic.  This is way more hip.  It will likely be the source of much cursing (aforementioned), but you can’t tell me that it looks unbelievably boss.  The bracket holding the whole mess is a cut up and bent harmonica reed plate.  I think I found that one in the kitchen, or maybe the bathroom…or maybe…it was on my dresser.  I don’t know.  It’s serving a better purpose now.

I hope to have more RBS niftiness to blog about as the weeks go by, but progress on these things can be slow.  Tonight I found out that I need to get the shaft for the lower gear turned down at one end, and I don’t own a machine that can do that.  Kind of a problem.  We’ll see how I figure that out.  Much of the immediate work will be getting the lift positioned and mounted properly.  It’s not the most interesting work, but there’s no way around it.  I’m just happy to have my hands on metal once again.

We do it all, apparently.

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Scene: Tom sitting at desk at work.  (Yes, I do go to work.)
*ring! ring!*
“Thanks for calling Service-Oriented Finance Establishment.  This is Tom.  How can I help you?”
“Yeah, Tom, I need to do a price check.”
(Tom becomes intrigued, plays along.)  “Okay.”
“I need to know what your cheapest forty gallon water heater is.”
“Well, sir, we are a Service-Oriented Finance Establishment, so I don’t have any information on that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.  I must have called the wrong number.  Thanks.”
“No problem.  Bye.”

This is only mildly amusing taken by itself.  It slides into intruiging when you consider the fact that we get these sorts of calls quite often.  I don’t mean “quite often” as in at least once a week.  I mean we probably get six or eight of these a week.  Many times they only say “Oh, sorry, I got the wrong number,” or they hang up on me (love that one, by the way, thanks).  However, the scant number of times that the caller has identified the nature of the call leads me to wonder just what in the hell people are using for a phone directory.

Last week I got a call for a doctor’s office.  After I identified myself the woman said, “Okay, my name’s Idont Listen, and I need to speak to Doctor Wallace.  I’m not feeling good.”
A few weeks ago I got about a DVD.  After I identified myself a second time the caller said, “Oh, this isn’t Walmart?”
We used to get calls for transmissions and engines.  That one was actually kind of frequent, so I was able to figure it out.  After I got the supposed number they were dialing, I looked it up and found out that our 800 number was one digit different from a transmission and engine company that sold stuff on eBay.  People were simply hitting one digit instead of another.  Before I figured that one out it was confusing, especially when the first or second time I answered one of those, a guy asked about an engine for sale.  For a split second I wondered how he knew what was in my garage.  Then I wanted to say, “Well, I’ve got this old Ford 351 that I’m thinking of getting rid of.  It’s a Cleveland block.  You need it?”

I have this feeling there’s a web site out there somewhere that directs anyone looking for any phone number for any business anywhere in the U.S. to dial our 800 number.  Next time you look up a number on the web and call a business, don’t be surprised if I answer the phone.

Words, Wonderful Words!

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Just a few short weeks ago I was introduced by way of Editor Unleashed to writer Quinn Cummings’ blog, The QC Report, Notes from the Underwire. I became an instant fan. I’m not a former award-winning child star, nor am I a wife with a husband and small girl (not that I ever aspired to either of those), yet her writing appeals to me as much for its subject matter as for her treatment of it. She writes about the every day foibles, frustrations, and momentary near-triumphs of being a parent, a wife, and simply of being herself.

As she says in her initial post: “…my life, right now, can be summed up by a mathematical equation: PP+ 20m= PH(e)2.
That is, any Private Pride I feel about my ability to run my life, take care of my child, attend to my business or behave in a way that could be described as competent will be followed, in less than twenty minutes, by a Public Humiliation that is equal to the Private Pride squared.”

Not only does she write with a sense of humorous self-deprecation that is all too easy to identify and laugh along with, she does so while displaying what is, for me, an enviable vocabulary. (I shake my fist at the words that have somehow fled my noggin’ over the past fifteen or twenty years.)

It should go without saying that I love words, and Mrs. Cummings’ blog is a trove of wonderfully playful verbiage. It got to the point where I started writing certain ones down that I admired. In the course of a day I came up with some favorites:

riparian – having to do with the banks of a river or stream (Awesome! Far better than “a river with banks.” Blah.)
travertine – a type of striated limestone, also used to refer to marble (Lovely)
ziggurat – a terraced temple, Sumarian in origin (When used to describe a plate of food – hilarious!)
picayune – of small value, trifling (This big word makes the small sound even smaller. Love!)
Dorothy Parker – sharp-witted U.S. writer of the 20th century, known for her drinking as well
Sparkletts – bottled water (yeah, had to look that up)
Dorothea Lange – photographer noted, in part, for her depictions of life during the Dust Bowl era in American History (The visual counterpoint to Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.”)
traditional Ixtec – I wasn’t able to get an exact answer on this one. It’s obviously of an ancient culture or race, but it eludes me.
mendicant – beggar. (What an outstanding word for folks who come to your door at Halloween! I’d forgotten all abou this word!)
gelt – slang for money (Used by her as reference to Halloween candy. Literal and verbal sweetness!)
ecumenical – referring to the Christian church as a whole (Yes, being Catholic, I should know that off the top of my head – and now I do.)
brio – displaying enthusiasm for (I love this word!)

Mrs. Cummings continually tosses about such words with what appears to be such ease and comfort, if she weren’t so much fun to read, I’d dislike her intensely. Seeing as how I’m not one to hate another simply due to their awesomeness, though, she’s safe from any of my literary ire. I’ll save that for people like James Frey.

While it pains me somewhat to admit that I’m not familiar with all of these words, and while I continually say to myself, “Where did she learn all these?!” I can’t help but enjoy every one of them. The good that comes out of all of this pertains directly to what I just watched Stephen King say on a short Youtube video the other day, and what numerous other writers say repeatedly: You have to read in order to write. Even if I’m not creating much at the moment, at least I’m absorbing a few things.

Check out Mrs. Cummings’ blog if you are in need of some humor and some fine writing. I should note that she has a book coming out in January of ’09 as well. I think I might have to make a purchase.

It’s Just Not Working Out Right Now

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This will be my second attempt at a post.  I can’t seem to get much written lately.  I can’t seem to get much of anything creative done lately, actually.  When Awesome Reader Olivia asked about why I hadn’t blogged, I told her what was going on and why, and she said, “Why don’t you blog about that?”  Since the situation is really annoying, and it’s been bothering me, I’m giving up on appearing competent and writing about “How This is Just not Working Out Right Now.”

I’ve created almost nothing in the last nineteen days.  In November I did almost nothing except work on my novel for NaNoWriMo.  I scheduled one hour during that month to work on one of my sculptures.  Other than that, it was all writing.

When NaNo came to a close I took a deserved mini-break, but did write a couple thousand words during the first week of December.  I think I sat down one Saturday and hammered some out, or maybe it was that Sunday at the coffee shop with the girl reading Wroblewski.  Anyway, I wrote then, but that’s all I’ve done on the novel since November ended.

Not long after NaNo ended something funny happened to my right hand.  I’m not at all sure what I did or how I did it, but I strained something in my hand, and now I can’t do anything too strenuous with it.  I can still pick up stuff, type, eat – all that good stuff – but I can’t grip very well.  It hurts to do that.  Feels like a muscle strain.  I can’t practice guitar, and that’s been bugging the hell out of me.  I can’t really do any sculpture work, because I’m right handed and that pursuit is all about the firm grasping of tools and wire, so there’s been no sculpture for at least two weeks.

I think the guitar and the sculpture stuff has backed me into a corner on the writing as well.  It’s just one big pile of suck, and I’m not doing so well at getting out of it.  And for those wonder, no, I haven’t gone to the doctor.  Are you mad?  That might help!  Actually, it seemed like such a small thing when it happened that I just figured I’d leave it alone and not stress it for a while and it would go away.  I’ve actually had this happen before in the past and it has gone away.  This seems to be lingering, however, and I’m not sure if part of it is just the fact that these days I’m doing a lot more that requires hand-work, or that maybe I’m just better at taking care of myself these days and I’m not apt to just ignore it and do whatever I want anyway.

I’m debating the doctor visit.  I don’t like doctors.  Actually, that’s not true.  I don’t mind doctors at all, it’s the taking time off from work and spending half a day sitting around in an office only to be told, “Yeah, there’s not much we can do about it.  You’ll just have to avoid using it as much as possible.” that really bugs the crap out of me.  This seems to happen to me most of the time when I go to the doctor.

Perhaps there will be some writing done this weekend.  I really am missing the guitar and sculpture work, however.  I had a thought before Christmas to make some ornaments for family from copper wire, and I can’t even really do that.  Not fun.

At least there’s a blog post up.  I’ve not been 100% taken out of the game.

On Winning NaNoWriMo, (Not) Finishing, and The Artist’s Way

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Yesterday I posted a horrendously long, rambling, and only vaguely coherent comment on someone else’s blog.  I’m not telling you whose, because it was that bad, or at least it seems that bad.  Really, the length is what’s embarrassingly astounding about it, and it just looks heinous.  As a too-kind soul who reads that blog as well as mine immediately pointed out, I had not even put an entry up on my own blog in quite some time.  In an effort to drain myself of whatever wordery may be mucking up manky sponge that is my brain, I present to you what will likely be a long, rambling, and only vaguely coherent blog post.  Enjoy?

NaNoWriMo has come and gone in its 30-day fourish of literary madness and caffeine.  I enjoyed it thoroughly, except for the part where I didn’t reach the end of my novel.  Oh, I hit the word count all right.  I nailed that fifty thousand word minimum with a big ten-penny spike on the 18th of the month, so winning the challenge was not really a problem.  Of course, in my head I figured that I’d battle out my novel with myself until somewhere around 50K, and I’d reach the finish line, exhausted but exalted at the end of the month.

No.

At 10K I wondered if I’d be able to make it to fifty. 
At 20K I realized I had finally actually started writing the real story (plot). 
At 35K I started to get jazzed that I was really going to make it to 50K!
40K…starting to get concerned that a major character still hasn’t shown up yet.
45K – realizing there’s no way on God’s green earth I’m ever going to wrap this up in five thousand words.
50K – pretty elated, for maybe thirty minutes.  Keep writing.
60K – realize that another ten thousand wasn’t going to do it either.  When will this end?!  Attempt to get through major plot points and scenes as quickly as possible.
70K – Nope, that’s not gonna be enough either.  Start furiously writing extremely shortened scenes in attempt to finish all major points by November 30th.
74K – Having written 2K in two hours, have a major revelation about the plot and several characters while brushing my teeth.  Immediately rinse mouth, return to laptop, and spend 30 minutes typing up the story I should have been writing 74K ago.  Feel elated.  Fall asleep.
76,884 – Written on November 29th whereby REALLY finishing it wasn’t seeming so dire or possible anymore.  Start forming plan to complete novel anyway following existing plot so I can say “I did finish a novel,” and then immediately start rewriting entire book all over again with the “real, good” idea that came at 74K.

I learned a lot, kids.  A ton.  A literary Spruce Goose full of information was handed to me via many mornings, afternoons, evenings, nights, and full weekend days of writing.  For one, writing takes up lots of your time!  (This is a newsflash you’ll surely pass on to anyone you meet in the next thirteen seconds.)  For B, a lot of the hard work of “crafting” a novel isn’t sitting there in front of the screen/paper trying to find the perfectly exact awesome way of describing the trees in Bloomington, Indiana on a fall day, or thinking up the perfect synonym for the “red” of a girl’s hair.  It’s actually going, “What?  They just met that dude, and now they figured out this thing, and it would be perfect if they met this other dude tomorrow, but they can’t run into other dude until Tuesday, and it’s Saturday.  What the hell do I have them do for three days?”  It’s also about sitting there going, “Uh, why did he just do that?  He wasn’t supposed to do that!  I didn’t even know he was going to do that.  Now all this other stuff has to happen, and I have to write about all this other stuff, and I really, really, really just want to GET. ON. WITH. THE. STORY!

Ah, the wisdom of the “been there, done that” scenario.  Now I have said wisdom.  What other lovely wisdom awaits me?  Rewrite wisdom?  Finishing the novel wisdom?  Writing the climax wisdom?  Figuring out how to tie up all the loose ends at the denoument wisdom?

Stupid wisdom.

What else has happened?  Let’s see, I finished the Artist’s Way.  Big yay.  I mean it.  I’m not overly overjoyed right now, but yay.  I wrote a lot.  A ton.  I hand wrote 270 pages worth of journaling.  This does not include writing that was required for the Weekly Tasks, or the Affirmations and Blurts stuff.  I used up an entire full-sized, college-ruled notebook and started on a second one before I was done.  Now I’m not done.  You are challenged to do at least the Morning Pages and Artist Dates for the next ninety days – three more months.  I’m on Day Four.  We’ll see how this goes.  The Artist’s Way got me a repainted kitchen door, a finished rolling ball sculpture, a trip to Bloomington, a trip to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, some self-decorated pottery, a look at art work from the Ming Dynasty, a bunch of colored name signs for friends and family, a (nearly) finished novel…how long can this list get?  I’ll stop there.  I got a lot out of it, more of which I plan to blog about, since I already spent tons of time taking the pictures of it.  It’ll be out of sequence, but I hope you enjoy them just the same.

I hope that cures me of some of my apparent need to talk about everything and nothing all at the same time on other people’s blogs.  I hope.