i love this tiktok by artist @itsadambudd and have it saved in my favorites because i find it strangely inspiring.
on an unrelated note: with the amount of seltzer i consume, my blood should be carbonated by now.
writer & musical theatre lyricist
the UK does reality competition shows better than the US
yeah i said it.
i had a whim last night to rewatch the 2010 Bravo show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, in which 14 artists “battle it out for a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum and a cash prize of $100,000.”
i remembered liking it and was pleased to discover full episodes on youtube. but one glance at the comment section reminded me that American reality competition shows tend to be–
forced conflict. artificial drama. disingenuous editing.
one helpful commenter suggested watching UK Portrait Artist of the Year instead. i’m already two episodes in and loving it.
perhaps the only instance ever in which looking at the comment section paid off.
short story vs. novel
today i attended Reedsy’s “Writing a Short Story” online workshop hosted by writer Shaelin Bishop.
i’ve been a big fan of Shaelin’s youtube channel since last fall and love her perspective on fiction writing. (and her short story “Cherry and Jane in the Garden of Eden” is one of the most beautiful and evocative pieces i’ve read in a while—check it out here in The Puritan.)
this workshop was such a great round-up of her advice and reminded me of something i jotted in my notebook last September while watching another one of her videos:
i recommend starting with “15 Tips for Writing Better Short Stories!” and then working through the entire “Short Stories” playlist on the ShaelinWrites channel.
fair vista, blue sky
it’s been nothing but rain and overcast skies and foggy streetlights for a solid week here in Charlotte, NC. on a good day, that’s a mood. on a bad day, it’s seasonal affective disorder.
my new go-to gripe while journaling or making zoom small talk with prospective cat adopters for my day job is how SICK i’m getting of my stupid daily walks around the neighborhood.
(i still do them. if there’s a writing metaphor here, i refuse to acknowledge it.)
today, the clouds broke. sunshine and a cold breeze. i walked my well-worn routes as if for the first time. staring up at treetops and shit. how embarrassing.
colorful boxes
i’m tweaking the outline for One Way today and deciding what dusky red font color best matches the pale yellow highlighter.
so much of writing for me is making color-coded tables in google docs. in a moment of celebratory accomplishment last year, i snapped a picture of a completed first draft progress bar and texted it to a friend.
i figure: if the writing is hard, and i’m trying to coax myself through a years-long drafting process (or even a twenty-minute session), there are worse distractions than making colorful boxes.
horizontal thinking
i bookmarked an instagram post by writer Elizabeth Gilbert in which she decries the dangers of “horizontal thinking.”
“The most dangerous place in the world for me was lying alone in bed — not sleeping, not reading, but THINKING. And the most dangerous part of my day was that time period between when I woke up and when I stood up. And the longer I extended that time period — the longer I stayed in bed, captivated by what I came to call ‘horizontal thinking’ — the worse off I would be. The disease of my depression wanted me to stay horizontal for as long as possible, where it had me hostage.”
comedian Gary Gulman, who shares mental health and comedy writing tips via his twitter, once said:
or take Gilbert’s advice:
“I created a script to say to my mind: ‘If you are awake enough to tell me that I am history’s biggest piece of shit, then you are awake enough to start the day.’ That empowered me to stand up. And sometimes, standing up is the biggest victory of all.”
business as usual
we’re coming up on one year in a global pandemic.
the other day, a friend passed along these reminders from their therapist:
“… so that you can anchor yourself in how exceptional these life circumstances are right now for nearly everyone: that traumatic stress takes a toll, that new trauma brings forward old trauma, which means that everything gets magnified, that grief is a normative and healthy reaction to trauma and loss, so you will notice it coming up more the longer this pandemic goes on and perhaps even more so once we sense the virus' containment, that regression is an instinctive reaction to uncertainty/change/transition/fear but also how we conserve our energy before growth, and that the social isolation and circadian rhythm (ie, sleep) disruption of winter along with the myth that most of us have internalized to greater or lesser extent of a ‘new year’ being a ‘new beginning’ or a ‘clean slate’ exacerbates rather than relieves symptoms when it feels like just a continuation of the same.”
i pass this along in the hopes that it takes some of the pressure off, as it did for me.
“We want to pretend that, other than the obvious, life is still business as usual. It's not. Many of us are trying to hold ourselves to standards that are unsustainable in these circumstances.”
the enemy of the good
today i’m thinking about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
i first encountered this idea—which is based on an aphorism attributed to Voltaire—in Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project.
just because you’re not composing a sprawling, academically-rigorous blog post with sparkling insight and original artwork doesn’t mean a just-okay blog post won’t suffice. YA KNOW, JUST AS A RANDOM EXAMPLE.