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BrainStorm

Creating Media of All Kinds

Friday, July 29, 2005

All the colours in the rainbow + one

Woke up yesterday still juggling with this question of what I should be focusing on, and if it was ok to put writing on the back burner to some other projects right now. Wrote in my morning pages, "Universe, I welcome your input on this!" Moments later, walked into another room and opened up the shades to see this:


Talk about your messages from the Universe! Love the second rainbow - something can be secondary, not foreground right now, but add to the beauty of the first. Doesn't have to be all or nothing...

So then I went to get my new hairstyle:

Hint: the blue wasn't there before... What's really interesting is that indoors it blends into the darkness of my hair, but in sunlight it's striking! My "outside" personality vs. my office personality perhaps...

I've never dyed my hair before - fun! It's like when you're young, you play with your dolls hair and clothes and move them around, and tell stories about their lives. When you're in your twenties you find out you can control the doll that is you. Change her hair!
Give her new clothes! Change her job! Take her out somewhere new! Feed her! Give her a new boyfriend! Give her a would-be girlfriend! Confuse her! Abandon her! Watch her cry! Pump her full of bio-chemicals but don't tell her the cure! Move her from city to city!

Since some of these things are now off the docket, the hair is a fine area to play with pseudo-dramatic change...
Help her preserve her youth! And the stories I create can be about other people's dramas - don't have to create my own...


Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Jane of All Trades?

Up Early - wonder if I can get by on 5-6 hours of sleep per night. That would rock.

Have been pondering lately about the diffusion of creative energy. There is a general belief that we must choose one thing to be good at if we are to succeed. Michael Jordan couldn't play baseball, it turned out. The phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none" echoes in my ears.

But there are other examples. Leonardo da Vinci (not to reach TOO high...) was a brilliant scientist and artist. My friend Julia is a scientist and writer/philosopher/inspirational teacher. My friend Zadie is attempting to find a way to combine her passion for music and theatre. (this is one area where it's apparently acceptable to excel at two artistic fields). John Lennon enjoyed writing and performing songs, but also drawing and political activism. There are many actor/directors.

I've never been able to choose only one area to focus on. As an undergrad at Oberlin, I was fortunate enough to get a good old fashioned Liberal Arts Education. I took a bit of everything my first two years, then got to the stage where we had to pick a major. I literally flipped through the catalogue until I stumbled across the category "Interdisciplinary Studies." Here I found something I could live with - instead of taking 2-3 courses in one subject for my final 2 years, I could continue to try it all.

I admit it: I want it all. When my husband and I travel, we're known for "packing it in." Why visit one city/state when you can visit five? The down side is sometimes we only have time for a one-hour quickie visit. But that still feels better than no visit at all...

So it is with my creative life. Perhaps if I focused all my energy on writing fiction, I would become more skilled. But I think instead I would become bored an frustrated. Some people can apparently write for 4-8 hours a day. One to two is about all I can handle. If I can get out my 1000 words or so, that's enough for one day. There doesn't seem to be a writerly equivalent to doing scales - writing letters of the alphabet? The only activities I know that help prime the pump are Morning Pages and freewriting. So that's another hour, max.

Editing I can do for longer stretches and at any time of day (as opposed to writing, which is generally a morning-only activity), but just barely. 2-3 hours at the most.

Same with poetry. How many hours can I give to creating and editing poetry in a single day? Certainly more than I do, but I just know in my heart that I couldn't spend ALL my time on poetry. It's just Not Enough for me.

So that leaves so many hours in the day! One thing Julia's book Unfolding taught me was to follow my energy. My energy leads me to to screenwriting (a natural progression) and from there to filmmaking (another form of story-telling), but also to a very different area of manipulating digital images by making web pages and Flash animations and programming code!

I sometimes ask myself "If you HAD to choose only one thing, which would it be?" Not writing fiction - it feels like Work too often. Not poetry, as I would get so caught up in language that I might literally start to sound nuts. Film is too exhausting to do full-time. Which leaves the computer stuff - something I can do anytime of day, that gets me excited, turns my crank, uses both my geek math side and my visual sensibilities, and has endless possibilities. And oh yeah, pays the bills. And the only time it feels like Work is when I'm making a website for a client and trying to answer to their vision of how it should look. But even then, that feels like a challenge - how can I make this work?

Interesting, didn't know I was going to wax so eloquently about interactive digital media (how happy was I to discover THAT term?) when I began to write that last paragraph. Maybe I'm not as torn as I think I am... The thing about writing is that it's how I've defined myself as an Artist for the last several years. It took a long time to give myself permission to even BE a writer/Artist. I don't want to give it up, and I don't think I need to. But it's definitely NOT my sole obsession, or creative outlet. And I need to give myself permission for that to be O-K.

More on this to come, I'm sure...

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Summer of Creative Bliss

Have been chastised for not updating my blog, but really truly so much is happening that it's hard to justify taking time to do something that has no deadline/tangible product. But justification if needed for myself is that a) I've just cleared through an email box called "reply to" that included a note from 2003! Sad. So the least I can do is catch up here for random friends and passers-by and after all, a request was made...

and b) it would be good to Document some of this incredible creative activity for myself. After 3 years of sneaking in an hour here or there, it's overwhelming to have these 6-hour blocks of time to focus on My Projects.

Cast 2 great actresses for my short The Coffee Maker (Marjolaine Hébert and Tracy McMahon). We'll be getting together this week to get to know each other and plan a couple of rehearsals. I've been warned by two people I trust not to "over-rehearse" so I'm going to take that to heart, especially as it's such a short film - save it for the camera baby! I'm very psyched to have Andrew Forbes as my DoP. I'm waiting for him to get back from a trip to Europe and a gig in T.O., but he has already shared some great ideas he has about shooting.

Before the auditions, I was feeling a bit over my head, but they went great, and now I'm hooked I tell you - talking about and applying film theory like how to get performances out of actors, having other people think about my ideas and vision and how to make it happen, hearing people try to bring my words to life - heady stuff.

Trying to storyboard a short animated film to be made in Photoshop/Flash. Something I've wanted to do for a while, but had a story inspiration this weekend so now I have something to work with.

Script supervised on David Zellis's comic bloodfest for 2 weekends this month. Had to fight nausea at times, as I can't really watch this kind of thing in general even on the screen, but the crew and cast were so fun that it was actually a great time.

Editing poetry to include in the WWG's upcoming chapbook. Enjoyed the MayDay poem-a-day project, and am culling poems from there to edit and add to the send out file. Need to send out another set of poems - like to do groups of 5 and the final set came back recently. Batted 1 for 5 - not bad.

Struggling to get back to a Daily Writing Hour so I can work on Sisters aka The Family Novel [titles submissions welcome], as I did get a grant for it and apparently told them I'd be done by the end of summer!

Studying up on CSS and applying it to creating a website for the Winnipeg International Writers Festival. Reserved a couple of domain names for potential sites for me to run, though I haven't touched TTT in months... More details to come...

Reading: A Complicated Kindness (finally), Cracking the Millionaire Code, The World's Greatest Salesman (yes, really!), The Screenwriter Within, Developing Digital Short Films, and - yummy - Javascript Programming. Haven't gotten my hands on the new Harry Potter yet...

Fave movie so far this summer: Wedding Crashers - I'm a sucker for Owen Wilson's blond spacey sincerity - oi.

Back in Toastmasters to try to raise my speaking skills up another notch. Had another disasterous recital experience, so have been talking to one of my musician friends about how to perform more confidently - strange that the public speaking skills don't translate over.

Planning a big bash for our 5th Anniversary in August. Hard to believe it's been 5 years, but we worked hard to get where we are now as a couple and as individuals and deserve to celebrate!

Had a great trip to Oklahoma and the East Coast. Saw friends and family and went to games in Camden Yards, Yankee stadium and Fenway. May get down to SD/MN/KS in August for one last summer roadtrip. Need to buy a new-used car before that happens!

The Day Job is fine - the stress level is non-existent, and get to learn about digital copyright, free culture, digital learning objects, web coding and accessibility, etc. All good.

And to top it off, Canada passed Gay Marriage=Okie Dokie Act. You go, Canada!

OK so that's it for now. Will see if I can work regular blog updating into my Schedule/Action List. (multi-sheet Excel spreadsheet, believe it!)

Peace out.