Essay: What I need to be creative.

It’s spring break and I have finally started sewing the two dresses I originally planned to have finished for the first day of school.  The first day of school plan didn’t happen, and I assumed that after the big exhaustion that is September, I would have them finished by the end of October, at the latest.  As you can see, that didn’t come to pass. In the months since I completed my last sewing project—the uniform aprons—I’ve had no energy to put in the direction of sewing.  My creative spark has been drained.  That got me thinking about what I need to be creative.
There are a few areas in my life that I see as my creative realms:  sewing, writing and gardening.  I think that this last fall/winter/spring, writing has really sucked up all of my creative allotment, leaving no room for sewing or gardening.  I’d like to achieve more of a balance among the three, but not at the expense of the amount of writing I’ve been doing.  It sounds like a tall order.  But here’s what I need to be creative at all.
A regular routine.  I first learned the power of a routine from Flylady (www.flylady.net) and her lessons have been reinforced by HabitRPG.  (habitrpg.com).*  Both of those philosophies encourage me to do things regularly, before they become overwhelming.  When I was writing the first draft of the novel I’m working on, I felt like writing 500 words per day was a pace I could keep up and so my routine was that every day I had to write at least 500 words.  If I wrote more, that was fine, but if I missed a day, there was no writing 1000 words the next day to make up for it.  Each day gave me one chance to do my daily writing, so I had to make the most of it.  Most days I enjoyed the writing, so I didn’t need to have a hard and fast time to write, but I did try to do it “first,” either first thing in the morning—writing usurped exercise when I realized that I wasn’t motivated to go out in the cold and exercise—or first thing when I sat down at my computer for the evening.
The details of my life need to be under control.  This was also learned from Flylady and is supported by HabitRPG.  The dishes must be dealt with, the house must meet a minimal clean state, my finances have to be in order and I have to have adequate food and regular exercise.  If those things have spiraled out of control that energy tends to take over and kill any creative energy.  When things have gone undone for too long, I procrastinate more, avoiding both the undone task and the fun creative thing I would rather be doing.  I can get very stuck this way, and HabitRPG’s daily tasks really do a good job keeping me from falling into that black hole.
I can’t be obsessed with anything.  A short list of things I’ve been obsessed with in the past year:  The TV show Veronica Mars, Just One Day/Just One Year by Gayle Forman.  Every book by Gayle Forman.  The TV show Friday Night Lights.  Channing Tatum.  This is an area I don’t really feel like I have much control over, which disturbs me.  We don’t have cable, because it’s expensive and I would rather not be swept up in TV.  But I do get entire seasons of TV series from the library and am not very good at putting the brakes on them when I’m enjoying the narrative.  The same goes for books.  Sometimes I’m successful in setting limits, but not as often as I would like.  When I put a lot of energy into whatever I’m obsessed with, not only do I reduce the time I can be creative, I also tend to skip those all-important details which leads me down a very bad path.  I’ve got the first season of the New Girl arriving soon, and I hope I can keep things under control.
Easy accessibility.  I don’t like to spend a lot of time getting ready to be creative, I just want to jump in and do it.  With writing, it’s pretty easy, because I just turn on the computer and go.  With gardening, it can be more difficult because the three minutes it would take me to get out the tools for the day can be enough of a block that I can’t make myself start.  Sewing is even more formidable because six different things must be retrieved before beginning, then put away when I’m done.  For gardening, I’ve taken to leaving out the three most essential things I need.  With sewing, I try to make a ritual of the setup and break down.  Last spring I fell into a pattern of getting materials out on Friday after school and putting them back Sunday afternoon and that was helpful.  It wasn’t something I could do after summer, so I guess I need to refigure how I approach that.
Time.  If it’s something I’ve not done before I need a lot of time.  And it’s not even time to do the thing, what I need is vast amounts of time to roll the thing around in my head before I even begin.  I see this a lot with sewing.  If I have a complicated pattern, I need to give myself the space to read the directions and then walk away for a few hours or even a day or two.  This can be a problem when weekends are packed full of activities that aren’t sewing.  Thus, I tend to start big creative projects (sewing, home repairs, gardening) on my vacations.  When I need to do something and don’t have a ton of time, I try to focus on the smallest part of the next step and not think too far ahead.
So that’s what I need to be creative.  Knowing all this doesn’t mean I’m super successful in all my creative endeavors, but knowing these things about myself does keep me more productive, rather than flailing.  And you?

*I wrote an essay about the basics of HabitRPG which you can read here.  The site is even better now than when I wrote the essay.  Or you can read about it by just going to the site.

Postcard from Virginia

This came with news of the beginning of the sender’s re-watch of the Veronica Mars TV series.

Also some instructions.

I’d like to say that I was the the one to assemble, but it was Matt.  I was having one of those vacation days when there wasn’t enough time to get things done, and I just couldn’t make this work.  So Matt happily assembled.  It’s now a pretty bird on our pot rack.

Three sentence movie reviews: Blue Jasmine

I loved watching these two actresses navigate their adult relationship, one of them a sister who had fallen from her upper-class life, the other a working-class, good-natured woman.  Cate Blanchett kind of went to an entirely different dimension.  It was cringe-worthy, watching her try to navigate through her new life, but incredibly moving.*

Cost:  Free, thanks to Heidi M.
Where watched: At Heidi M’s house.

*Also, these were some fabulous female characters, while the men were rather lacking in different areas.  Interesting that Mr. Allen can write women so well.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2013/blue_jasmine.html

Laurel Dress. Making more bias tape and a setback.

I concluded I did not have enough bias tape to complete this project, so I made some more.  Matt helped.  I have good spacial relations, but not good enough to be 100% confident that I could make the bias tape exactly as before with those stripes.  

Also, I discovered my iron has sprung  a leak.  I store it on top of the file cabinet when I’m not sewing and I discovered a wet, rusty mess below the file cabinet.  This involved moving the file cabinet and cleaning under it.

Then I propped it up on bars of soap so air would circulate under and dry the bottom, without leaving rust stains.

I felt very smart to think of this solution.

Should there be any future reference needed, this is the way you slice your stripy bias tape to get bias tape to come out vertical.

Here’s my new bias tape maker!  It’s the yellow thing on the right, nosed against the iron.

Here’s my good helper.

And here I am sewing together sleeves.  You can see where the iron drips.

Three sentence movie reviews: Bletchly Circle (sp)

What with the 50s-era setting, the marginalized, incredibly smart women and the intriguing mystery I was all in.  This is a great period piece and a very astute commentary about why it’s important that every person gets to work to their full potential.  Also a sly commentary on movies/t.v. that marginalize women’s stories.

Cost:  free
Where watched:  at a woman from Kenton Library Book Group’s house.

poster from: IMDB

Three sentence movie reviews: Veronica Mars (again!)

Let’s face it, sometimes the glee at seeing something very anticipated means you miss stuff the first time around.  So seeing this movie again was a reward for doing an odious task and a very good reward at that.  It was as fun and funny and fresh as the first time around.

Cost:  $5.00
Where watched:  Living Room Theater

poster from:http://www.impawards.com/2014/veronica_mars.html

45RPM: Both Hands Ani DiFranco

Where I match a song to specific memory

 It was perhaps inevitable that I would come across Ani DiFranco’s music in college.  It was the 90s, it was a women’s college, there were a bunch of girls from everywhere in the states, so DiFranco and I were fated to meet.  In this case, she showed up on a soundtrack of  a play my friend had written.  Our college was small and fostered the belief that we could do anything.  So when two women said, “Let’s each write and produce a one-act and then direct it” that’s exactly what happened.  Well, nearly.  The other women didn’t write her own one-act, but she directed an already written one.  My friend wrote and directed, because that’s the kind of woman she was.

I was enchanted by this friend: she was from Canada and had a father in the Air Force, so she had lived many different places.  She was intelligent and a strong feminist, and with a long-time boyfriend.  Strangely, she seemed just as interested in me.  Her play was the first time I saw the words of a person I knew come to life, and realized with a jolt how much of their own lives writers use in their work.  This song always reminds me of her, not only because it was used in the one-act, but also because after we left school, she disappeared, not answering the letters I wrote to her.  It turned out she had, without telling me, applied for the same full-ride scholarship to a transfer college and got it, leaving me high and dry.  I heard about her coup from a friend.  We never spoke after college.

Three sentence movie reviews: Divergent

I found this movie to be more successful than the book, mostly due to the fact it was more fun to watch the Dauntless faction run through the streets and jump on and off trains than it was to read about it.  The story is thin, but it was well acted and the futuristic Chicago was fun to look at.  They did the Hollywood usual tamping back of the awesomeness of females, but not to the degree I’ve seen in other movies.*

Cost:  $5.00
Where watched:  St. Johns Cinema

poster from:  http://www.impawards.com/2014/divergent_ver8.html

*Still looking at you, Gone Baby Gone.
But let’s discuss for a moment what they did, because I found it pretty egregious.  Not once did they show Triss winning a fight, which she does a few times in the book.**  Also, in the book, she was ranked first in the Dauntless initiates.  FIRST! It was a big deal, because ranking first is important, but also because her male counterpart, Four, had also ranked first when he went through training.  This was not mentioned at all in the movie, which I found particularly telling.  Furthermore, in the book, one of the fears that Triss must overcome in her thought landscape, is having sex with Four, knowing he only wants her for her body.  In the movie, they turned this into a quasi-rape scene which is not at all the same thing.  But why show some nuance in the female psyche, when you can head right back over to that reliable rape thing?  It makes me want to spit.

**This is annoying because she spends the second book in the traditional female role of having the men take care of her, which means that we never got to see her kick ass on screen.

ps.  Oh hell, let’s just add in the poster of Mr. Pamuk, while we are at it.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2014/divergent_ver2.html