I don’t believe in making New Year’s resolutions.  I always forget about them.  By about January 4th, I find myself getting back to the daily BS of ‘justgettingby’, and New Year’s might as well be a figment of my imagination.

In fact, it seems to always be the ‘justgettingby’ that gets me.  I spend a lot of time in survival mode, and that’s hell on creativity.  

3 or 4 years ago, I was an artist.  I ate, slept, and breathed art.  I was involved in several art exchanges and interesting guerilla art projects.  I felt alive and creative and brilliant.  My brain was on fire with idea after idea, most of them never seeing the light of day since there are only so many hours.  When I had some money to go to school, I decided to go for a long-time dream of mine and pursue graphic design.  I dug it, but it didn’t hold the same fascination as working with the actual tactile materials that I loved.  At the very least, I thought, it was a sellable art form.

I was deluded.

In the time between when I started school and graduated, the market bottomed out on graphic and web design.  The economy tanked and NOBODY was hiring.  In fact, out of the 5 graphic designers I knew, 3 were canned, and the other two were working double time for half pay, because they knew how lucky they were to have jobs.

So I floundered.  And struggled.  And was out of work for a year.  And my marriage ended.  And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah..  (There’s always something..)  But I never quite got my urge back to create art.  

Fast forward about 2 years to a time where I begin to think, “Hey, I’m creative.  I majored in English lit.  My grammar doesn’t suck, and I read a lot.  Maybe I SHOULD be writing a novel!”

And I have been writing.  VERY sporadically.  My goal is 120K words, and I’ve reached 21K.  Why so sporadic?  

There are several reasons why I haven’t been writing consistently.  The first and most profound is the sickness and death of my father.  It took any motivation I had for anything and thrashed it.  There’s just no way to be your creative best during something like that.  Unless there is, and I just haven’t tapped into that.  

Then, I decided to try NaNoWriMo.  It was a great way to jumpstart my passion for writing this story again.  On November 4th, I had a huge ovarian cyst burst.  I was SO sick and SO miserable.  I basically slept for a week.  And as far as NaNo went, there was just no coming back from that.  So I got lazy again, and wrote a little here and there.

Add to that the 2 jobs (one of them truly soul-stealing and miserable), and I just don’t have a ton of energy left over at the end of the day, much less the wild creative energy that I need to see this through.

But I’m trying.  And it may take me 3 years to write this fucker, but I will continue to keep trying.  And I will be derailed, because that’s life.  I’ve been following other authors that I admire on Twitter, and I’m completely impressed by their tenacity and discipline.  Then I wonder how they would do under similar circumstances.  It’s just not fair to measure myself by people who are actually already doing this for a living.

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This blog is a start.  My relationship is settled, so the emo chaotic blog I kept during that crazy time really doesn’t get updated much.  Since I’ve mellowed in this relationship, the adult-oriented BDSM blog doesn’t hold too much appeal either.  Those both represent a very distinct phase in my life of finding myself.  And while those are still parts of my personality, I need to focus on creating something again.  It’s just time.

Again, I don’t believe in resolutions.  But I do have a GOAL.  I want to work on being more creative.  That’s general enough that it’s manageable, and I have the passion right now to see that through.  So I’m going to pursue it.  

In the coming weeks, I intend to stop spending so much time on the social time-wasters, like Twitter and Facebook, unless I’m following people who really, truly inspire me.  I need to change my surroundings.  I’m giving up the mindless chatter for things that will feed my creativity.

I also want to get a change of scenery.  My boy doesn’t mind visiting coffee shops or bookstores with WiFi, and I have a new battery in my laptop that gives me mobility.  I intend to use that to feed the muse.  He’s taking on some new projects as well, and I think it will be good for both of us.  I must say that it is great to have a partner that doesn’t try to tear down my every creative effort.  

I will hopefully be back here quite often to do character sketches, plot points, post pictures of my inspirations, etc.  I want this to be my supportive atmosphere to work through the writing and creativity process.  Hopefully I can show the development of my world (titled Glint), and my characters here.  This will be a place for me to come back and note my progress.

I also intend to try to work a bit more on visual arts.  I love taking photos, drawing, building things, and just creating something beautiful.  I need to do that a bit more.  Maybe if I work on one project at a time, I can finish some things.  We’ll see how that goes.  

So that’s it for now.  I’m going to read, because that’s definitely another way that I feed my muse.  And I’m tired.  And I will try to find time to write tomorrow.