week 9: a repeat

Last week was one of those weeks where it was all about putting out fires. My car did not get repaired until late Thursday afternoon. My son got the flu. And there were other requests, needs, and sundry other things to deal with that kept popping up. I did manage to spend 1-2 hours per day on creative work, though I felt guilty about it. I’m finding that quite interesting, if not somewhat disturbing, so have decided to keep this goal in place because it does not feel like a habit yet. I would like the daily creative work to get to the point of it being a habit, and not feel at all guilty about it. I also did not get susurrations burnt to DVD because I had no car. And though I did get a start on my grant report for the film, I did not manage to get it anywhere near finished.
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Week 8: balancing time

A day late again. Yesterday I did a lot of teaching and my car died a sad electrical death in the middle of a busy intersection. I think the teaching kept me sane, and the car is getting a new alternator today. The upside of all this is that I am house-bound today, which I think I really needed. Continue reading

week 7: re-organization

A day late with this. I decided to take yesterday off as both E & J were home. Read. Spent most of the day in my pjs. Then went to my Modern Dance Technique class which revved me up for the rest of this week. J is off school all week so I think my goals—which are totally unformed in my head at the moment—will reflect that.
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weeks 5 & 6: colony, colony, colony

Last week was gloriously full. I got a lot of work done, but also had a lot of fun. susurrations sat for a few days, the Regina 60×60 event was fun and I met some great people, and the MidWinter SWG Salon was a great success and created more fans of Klingon Opera. Spent a lot of time with the fabulous Tracy Hamon. I didn’t get enough sleep, but I’m catching up.

It feels like things are flowing as they should at the moment and opportunities for collaborations and projects are coming up. These goal-setting posts are helping me to keep focussed on my work and what is important at the moment as opposed to becoming overwhelmed by what is in my calendar.
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week 4: just before a segue

I’m almost at a segue with my goals this week. It’s partially because I’ve managed to complete all four goals I started out with and part of me is thinking “now what?” Today I’m going to try to come up with some new goals and still keep the reasonable aspects of them.

Last week was very successful in terms of my one goal: to do a rough edit of susurrations. I completed that with ease and did some audio editing and mixing with Gilles at Froghappy Studios. I’ve gone beyond that and have done more video editing and the titles. Gilles and I are meeting again tomorrow to do what will hopefully be a final audio mix for the piece.

So though it was useful for me to only have one goal last week I surpassed it, which feels good but makes me think I could have added another goal. I’m not convinced that is a reasonable way to think about it but there it is.
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habits & goals

Over the holidays I read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit. It’s a book geared towards creative individuals that encourages them to look at their work habits closely in order to create ones that serve the work they want to do. The last five years have been a whirlwind for me, and since recovering from such a long illness and being (happily) thrown into a new cyclone of work last fall, I’ve found that I had lost a lot of the creative habits I had in place before we moved to Japan in 2003.

So it’s time to create some new ones. For the New Year I’ve made a morning routine that I think may serve my work well, and plan to blog in here weekly about my projects and goals. This blog became a promotional tool last year, which I am enjoying, but I also feel it’s not really fulfilling my vision of what I’d like the blog to be, which is a document of not only the work I do, but some of the processes I go through to do the work I do.

As a template for these weekly goal-setting blogs, I’m using my own version of Carol Lloyd’s “partnering worksheet” from her wonderful book Creating A Life Worth Living, which, if you don’t feel quite ready to deal with what Tharp asks of you, has a slightly less steep learning curve on how to set up a life where creative work is of prime importance. I have used this partnering worksheet on my own and with others in the past, but for whatever reason, feel that it’s time to go public with this sort of work.

What I want out of this is a public statement of “this is what I’m working on and here’s how I’m planning on going about it”, which I hope will create a sense of realism about my goals because I am very good at setting unreasonable ones. It will also make my process public, which shifts me from doing my work in a vacuum, to me doing my work in a public forum, no matter how many hours I spend alone in my studio.

So here we go….
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