Scheduling and the Creative Process (January 22, 2010)

Partner to my writing creative process is my artistic creative process. It's one I've been overlooking lately. It's been probably a month since I did anything more than the occasional doodle in the margins of a notebook. I used to paint and draw and even collage occasionally. But lately I've found myself bereft of the willingness to break out even my Derwent Inktense pencils, which I dearly love, and work on something. I get a weekly art prompt from IlloAnnounce and yet I don't draw. (Perhaps it's because they didn't display my only submission a few months back and I feel snubbed by them, but that's another matter.)
 
Art has its own way of freeing me, as does writing. It's a completely different way of expressing whatever stuff is inside me that needs to be put down on paper, or, in some cases, electronically. I enjoyed the brief detour I took with my graphics tablet a few weeks ago, but nothing more has come of that. I pondered breaking out the tablet again this week, but the week seems to have gotten away from me. I have a lot of little chores to do, a bunch of actual work to do, and some hobby stuff, in various states of completeness, that would like a little love too. And household chores, don't get me started. Dark laundry leers at me from the hamper in the closet, reminding me that I will soon run out of clean socks if I don't wash it already. The newspapers on the kitchen table threaten to topple out of the chair I put them in, ready to crash to the floor in a petulant demand that they be put into a paper bag and tied up for the Boy Scouts to take one Saturday a month.

Time Flies

I find myself constantly asking, "Where does the time go?" And in response, my mind, trained on an old MUSH I've been a member of for years, says, "Schenectady, ma'am." Well, come on back from Schenectady, there, time, 'cos I got a lot of stuff that seems to not get done every day.

It comes down to scheduling, I suppose. My Morning Pages and daily writing sessions have imprinted a sort of framework for my day, but after dinner it all seems to go every which way. After dinner is, my mind seems to say, play time. You worked during the day, writing and whatever else, and now you get to play computer games, which is what I spend too much time doing in the evenings. And there's a variety of games I visit: I've got a lot to just play on my own, let alone the Internet games that involve other people.

I find that I have difficulty slowing down. The computer contributes to that. Sometimes I long for a quiet evening spent reading or doing artwork. I've been attempting to schedule myself a 'no computer evening' once a week, but that hasn't quite taken off yet. I used to have 'no computer' Saturdays, but my habit of sitting here and writing, on the computer, every day, has kind of put a damper on that. I get my best writing work done, so I believe, in the mornings, before lunch. So I sit here and type for a while before getting distracted by the Internet, eventually to be sucked down into the rabbit hole for at least an hour, reading email or checking Facebook or what have you. There's some time I can reclaim.