I shoulds of me

I should be working on my freelance jobs.
I should be writing my nanowrimo novel.
I should be unpacking the too many boxes in my dining room that have been there for a year (OK longer, but I tell myself it is only a year) since they moved out of storage and I ignore them as if they were schizo ghosts I shouldn't be hearing or seeing (I think individual boxes are starting to hum themes from Holst's The Planets).
I should be packing for my trip to Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach for the family reunion/launch. (Note: Don Pettit is my husband's brother-in-law and very fine chronicler himself from outer space to his ice down under adventures.) And I should be recharging my good camera's battery and packing the tripod because we get to go to the night viewing. Since it is a night launch, if it launches on time, I hope to get some great shots. I wonder if I should bring something to suggest size, as in a troll doll to photograph on the tarmac with the mongo rocket behind it?

But no, I am back to writing sonnets for a crown of sonnets sequence. Seven sonnets where the last line starts the next. I've picked the perfect obsessive yet deeply varied subject, marriage. I am not used to writing in form and it really is hard. I showed one to my friend Chris and after the encouraging bits he wrote, "there are a couple of moments where the syntax gets a little stilted to get the rhymes in the right place," which is a really nice way of saying I'm writing like I have marbles in my mouth. To do what I consider a modern sonnet I want it to read aloud like it isn't in form (no sing-songiness) but show its chops on the page. Wish me persistance because luck is not what sonneteering is about. But then again, neither is a novel. Word by word by word.

My NaNoWriMo graph

Freelance work & election slowed me down (red wordlessness) but today was wordy...

Another issue of Alimetum almost out

I spent the day tidying up and correcting the interior and designing the cover of issue seven with Peter Selgin, publisher and coeditor of Alimentum: The Literature of Food. Peter is also an award winning author, teacher, and artist as well as a good looking guy who swims a lot. If he also happens to be a bit tense when we are down to the wire, I forgive him. I swear a lot at the computer, the software, and blame the aforementioned for my slowness of finger/brain connection.

Peter mentioned he doesn't need NaNoWriMo to get him going. Well fine, I thought, you don't need the world-wide-will and energy of thousands to make you type a word, but I do. Deadlines and rah-rah are getting me into the habit of daily writing. This is a good thing.

Peter is working on two children's books now. I think I'll invite him to meet me & Chris Raschka. He has a great eye. Even if we do growl a bit at each other over punctuation and art placement. Out of growling comes this great collaboration, one I am proud of, one that will appear on news stands and bring reading and looking pleasure around the US and the world. By the way, Alimentum makes a lovely holiday gift...

7766 words (25 pages) only behind by 2230 words

Think of me as Rip Van Winkle waking up after the election and saying "holy cow I missed a day of typing how am I ever gonna catch up?" The good thing is that after some serious procrastination attempting to find photos of Bushwick Avenue specifically and Williamsburg in general in 1910, and then time procrastinating with a what's playing on Broadway in 1910, as well as a general hunt for kids in 1910... I finally stopped procrastasurfing and did some serious verbiage. 2369 words this afternoon. Catching up with myself. Oh yeah, Obama is still president.

A special break for election '08 coverage

I had a fantastic time last night, along with about 100 million other Americans. And masses of others across the globe, no doubt. First Jim and I joined Len at the cool Exit Art election event. Big space, huge screens with CNN, much smaller silk screening area making posters and fabric with a quote about change and then someone sewing the fabric into change purses! Also masks and cupcakes and photos and poster art on the walls. Lots of people, fewer seats. But when the bands began to play and the TVs no longer made noise, as in talking heads, we left for Times Square, taking along Charlotte an interesting new New Yorker who assured us her home state of California would give Obama the win. And it did.

Times Square was the place to be. We were surrounded by tourists speaking French, German, Italian, Spanish, and English in non-American accents. Not to mention acres of young American voters. At 11 pm when the results came in and Obama was crowned President elect, a wave of joy went through the streets. TV crews went by filming our jumping and cheering. I waved my hat. Escaped balloons briefly hugged the McCain image and then wedged themselves firmly next to Obama.

Then we went to a Westin bar to hear the speeches. The whole bar was silent for the two candidates... John McCain gracious in defeat, the old honorable John McCain, not the snide liar inhabiting his body in the last few months, was back. Then Obama. I admit that the 10 year old scotch may have loosened me up, but I cried through most of the speech and I am pretty hard to affect this way. It was just so good to hear the American story retold through his mind and heart.

Cheers rebounding from buildings, subway cars, and from the streets all the way home and for hours after. Called my daughters, both voted of course, Caitlin for the first time, she told me Skidmore students so happy they had an impromptu parade singing patriotic songs that spilled from campus into downtown Saratoga. Feels like America has really turned an important corner. Away from the fear, illegal war, unregulated greed, Guantanamo concentration camp, political Palin-style suicide, racism, and disasterous economic and disaster relief fumbles of the last 8 years. One CNN guy was a bit surprised Obama got 78 percent of the Jewish vote. How can he be surprised? Duh. Jews and Blacks have been looking out for each other for a long time, they both know a little about persecution... Jim said he hoped science and intelligence would once again be supported. I want to see WPA style options for the young and out of work. I want change.

And so begins the real sweat of turning promise into action. Mario Cuomo said "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose." Yeah, but even realizing part of Obama's vision is going to help the US. I am so glad I don't have to feel quite so apologetic with my European and Canadian friends anymore.

4021 words, must sprint, must type faster

Falling behind a bit. Had a lot of freelance work yesterday and just clipped my fingernails so I can type here and pull levers in polling booth with greater ease.

My father, having read this blog, is now also writing a novel in a month. How cool. And he is already up to chapter 5. Being the most prolific of writers, I suspect dad could write two or three novels in a month but won't do so out of politeness to my efforts.

Here is what he wrote:
Dear Claudia, The nice thing about reading your blog is that I can follow your activities and enjoy the way you write (and illustrate) your activities. When I read your blog last week about November is Write a Novel Month, I thought, hmmm. Could I try that? So I started a novel, using the theme of Faust. Now in Goethe's Faust he begins with Faust at mid-life criseis, about 50, and follows his life for the next 50 years (mostly leaving a wake of unhappiness behind him, although he is redeemed in the end). So I make Faust at 50 a sort of Augustinian Confessions and follow his first 50 years and make him the anti-Faust, the Goethe Faust being a calumny against his good name. I then romp through the Renaissance and follow his good deeds and good thoughts. So far I've done 5 chapters (all short) and have a vague idea of where I am going. So thank you for getting my creative juices flowing and come December we can trade first drafts. love, Dad

When Life Goes to the Comics with Bechdel

I just read Alison Bechdel’s memoir in a graphic novel, Fun Home. It is as obsessive as a (visual) villanelle. The novel keeps cycling back to the moment when her father's life ends in an accident that could equally well be a suicide. Her father, her family, were clearly a painful collision of secrets and surfaces. It stunned me. It is well written, well drawn, and above all brave.

For me, with my own mother who died at 43 (Bechtel's father was 44) when I was 18 (she was 19) this memoir comes the closest to capturing the pleasure and terror of having an artistic narcissistic closeted self-destructive teacher parent. We had parents that both flunked parenting 101 and still manged to pass on their capacity for hard work, aesthetics, and enthusiasms. Fun Home was the equal of autobiographies (with no pictures) such as Mary Karr's funny and sharp The Liar's Club. It shared something of Robert Coover's cycling through plot while exploring meta-fiction in his Briar Rose. I could go on. It was good in a way that startled me, given my mother. I have explored memoir in my first book of poetry, but Bechtel's homage shows me there is far more to say and more ways to say it. If I chose to go there. If I dare.

UPDATE
Ms. Bechtel made this fan very happy by thanking me and writing "'obsessive as a (visual) villanelle!' I think that's my favorite thing anyone's ever said about Fun Home!" See, not all gushing fan mail goes unanswered.

3,774 words and typing

Day 2 of the nanowrimo Olympics found me at another Cosi restaurant in the Village. One enormously long table had been created and I recognized fellow writers from yesterday. Cheery hellos. Then I sat down and just started...typing.

I now realize my entire problem with unedited writing is that my muse is in fact a sweets addicted 6 year old who favors touching scenes devoid of evil and irony. It kills me that I, once voted the most sarcastic salad chef to work a Magic Pan in Minneapolis, the most utterly nasty putdowner of cuteness ever allowed to prowl a toystore in a mall, the gimlet eyed social satirist of a short lived college cartoon strip, am writing sweetness that borders on full bore Disney. I should just march over to the editors of American Girls Dolls and say take me, I am the voice of your dolls...I can only watch the unfurling candy ribbon of prose and tell myself that in rewrite my harsh cynical editorial voice will take a chainsaw to the fudge.

I did have this fine thing happen on my trip to the write-in. Sat next to a dad and his son talking in what even I could tell were London accents. So naturally, after drawing for a bit, I asked them where they were from. "Upper West Side," says the dad, "but I was born in London, as was my son. But my other children were born here." His munchkin was one of those amazingly cute little geniuses. He was sounding out words like "transportation," as he read a subway map. "Look son, this woman to the left of us is drawing and this woman to our right is doing physics." And it was true. "So what do you do in the middle?" "Oh me, sitting? oh, work?" (Europeans just don't naturally discuss what they "do" for a living, I guess this is a rude American thing and yet he chose to live and beget here so I guess it is OK to ask Americanny questions). "I'm an accountant but I'd like to be able to draw--don't know how at all, I like your drawings, and I'd also like to be doing physics. I want to do everything but don't have the time what with changing nappies." I urged him to check out the Art Students League, cheap, pay by the month, stick-figure-only beginners welcome. A month of classes and your doodles would be better, I said. His son likes to draw. We talked about that for a bit. And then it was time for them to get off. Sometimes you meet people briefly and you just know they are good dads. Hope he doodles, classes or not. If I can write a novel, he can draw.

On my way back home I finished my sketch for a graphic novel style food story I plan to submit to Alimentum. Here is what nanowrimo is doing for me, just the act of creative flow (even if it is pure non-diet froth) is freeing me up elsewhere. I'm blogging more, I'm drawing more, I'm smiling more.

The role of a novelist is toppling off that English major pedestal. What Neil Gaiman and so many others have said, you write a book word by word. (Is a small voice whispering talent, research, rewrite? Ignore that smartass until December.)

Of course, I will probably have some deflation of joy in the second week. Plus all that freelance work. But tonight, I'm happy my fingers are creating words and shapes.

One thousand eight hundred and one words

I did it! I wrote the first 5 pages of my novel. It isn't very good, I am aware I haven't found my tone, it suffers from repetition and a lack of research--which for a historical is a tad troubling--I freely accept that it has the depth of coffee lid and the stale aroma of refried plots, that I was a fool to turn from verse to prose, but it is getting written. Welcome to the first draft.

It was lovely to join a back room of fellow nanowrimo enthusiasts at a nearby Cosi restaurant. I much enjoyed their company. And how nice to answer the odd questions, as in "what did people cook with in dorms before microwaves?" which I was in a position to answer, "toaster ovens and hotplates." Or "what would be a good name of a fake literary novel in a lit course?" And I said "the somethings daughter" since so many novels are named this way lately. As in the Mapmaker's Daughter or The Kayak Maker's Wife... And they helped me with finding names for characters.

They had 10 and 15 minute timed drives, to type full speed ahead with no other aim than quantity. Some were able to type twice as fast as me. I was astounded. Such speed... But at my rate, I realize that it will take me a minimum of two hours a day to do the writing. That pausing for research, quality, or even good plotting probably isn't necessary, and if I must do these things, do them later after the rush of just writing.

And in the small world department, the lovely funny young woman to my left who goes to Barnard turns out to be friends with the one person I know going to Barnard. So I told her to say hi to Hilly and she tells me Hilly is also a nanowrimo-ist and maybe the three of us should get together to write sometime and I am just so happy really that there are all these other people going through the same struggle at the same time.

There is also this delicious urge to write more than our equivalent city. Are we competing with Toronto or London? Does it matter? We are in this inexorable flood of creation, even if it is all dreck, it is dreck in progress, a novel, a rough first draft. Doable. Only 170 pages to go.

nanowrimo madness

Many of you may know that November is National Novel Writing Month.

No? It was started ten years ago by 21 people in the San Francisco Bay Area who decided "someday I'm gonna write a novel" was now. It grew. It grew under the leadership of Chris Baty. And grew some more.

So here's the deal, me and about 100,000 other people will each try to write a 50,000 word (175 page) novel in one month. Last year 15,000 actually did it and have bragging rights. The month of November, as in 4 days from now. I will write about 5 pages a day. For a month. Rain, shine, turkey, or nerves. The idea is I'm writing a first draft at such speed that the internal editor will be double parked in Milwaukee while I'm out of earshot and zooming across the Nevada highlands. Or something like that. A first draft that won't stop for quality, punctuation, fact checks, or inconsistencies. Quantity, not quality. Zoom zoom. I may not finish but I suspect that I'll get a lot of writing exercise. Since going freelance I haven't been putting enough time into my writing. This will get me in practice to write an hour a day, even if I produce a novel that is a steaming pile of effort. And I'll exercise my imagination and finger muscles.

Luckily I have a plot outline that uses a fairy tale for a framework and it is set in an unfairytale setting. A setting I've researched a bit. What I don't know I'll just add the word "lookitup" and keep going.

First prize quilt

How splendid, the wedding quilt my stepmother is making me and my husband just won best in show at the Smithtown Stitchers Quilt Exhibit XIII. It also won best use of color and best large pieced quilt. She is very good at this.

Here is what I said five years ago when I was planning our wedding and Nedra asked what colors and themes I'd like for one of her heirloom quilts. Well... a compass rose, I had a long journey before I located Jim. Plus all those years I spent making maps, I love maps. And purples and greens, those are great colors together. Go wild though, just let yourself have fun. And she did. Including quilting stitches shaped like roses and another quilt block that suggests the statue of liberty's crown...

These things take time, all the designing, selecting fabrics, piecing, hand stitching...one set of friends had a wedding gift, the "forever quilt" that took decades for Nedra to complete. Luckily I think we will get ours a bit sooner than that. But I suggested she enter it in other contests...it is so vibrant, the photo doesn't come close.

Dad says he is so proud the buttons are busting off his shirt. Plus, luck was spelled Carlson today, my sister Christina won one of the quilts Nedra and a team of quilters made and raffled.

The unbelievable incredible dream drawing brain

Last night as I was dozing off I thought about how I would draw a parade. Suddenly my brain began to transcribe this into a dream animation, my pencil drawings of anxious ogres and witches and middle managers staggering or swaggering under the influence of over sized drums and explosively feathered and beaded hats... I could see it in good perspective, nice tints of watercolor applied, and the B4 pencil digging and smooshing into the lightly toothed bond. But they were moving, singing, jazzing, and celebrating in my own mind's eye. I had no idea I was capable of such good 3D animation. As I slipped over the gibberish edge of true sleep I was so sad that my awake ordinary self could not produce such a scene in the flick of a thought. That no matter how I tried, I'd never capture it as well or as effortlessly. My mind was gleefully playing with the whole idea, I could barely catch half of the fun and visual puns. I think by day we are shoddy franchises getting blurred faxes from our subconscious genius director. Oh the disconnect, where is my carnival now?

happy birthday to me...

I had a very nice birthday which included treating myself to an envy inspiring retro look dress from Liberty House, an art opening, a poetry reading, a bag of chocolates, a haircut, a big healthy berry and bee pollen and god knows what else but no milk shake, and a small box from Jim which contained a lovely Venetian glass necklace I had admired at a street fair recently.

I also did no work on my birthday since it is my personal national holiday.

Just in case anybody is wondering, freelance life is going pretty well, now have almost more work than I can handle. All good. And tonight we are going to a lively evening at Drom. The event is the Global Brass Explosion: Titubanda, Environmental Encroachment, Paprika & Hungry March Band. Brass, eats, laughs, and unquenchable beat shared with friends.

UPDATE
Wonderful joyous music, feathers bobbing on hats, bunny ears on the men, jugglers with glowing balls, waving flags, and as each band left and joined the audience it became a mardi gras parade on the club floor...and best of all a surprise arrival from my daughter Caitlin who I hadn't seen since she left home for college. Happy for such delight.

Tomorrow I go out to my folks and they will make me dinner. Leg of lamb. Ah. Life is good. And my friend Martin tells me that I share a birthday with Oscar Wilde, Eugene O'Neill & Gunter Grass. Go team.

Monday welcomes The Anxieties

I am thinking of (re)joining CBIG. Children's Book Illustrator Group. Way back when, I met the excellent Jada Rowland and Chris Raschka through them, and many others. Then I had kids, worked as a book designer and didn't do picture books... But just thinking of getting back into the illustration biz led to these sketches...

Manna from Cricket as the stock market dives

Here's what I love about Cricket Magazine. Every now and then I get an unexpected contract in the mail because they want to reprint one of my illustrations. Just as I was listening to the bad news about the stock market and world wide financial crises, I discover one of my mazes for kids will be reprinted and I will be paid again for work I did years ago. Take that gloom & doom.

On the other hand, my folks can't sell their large house and move to a smaller house in this market. Dad says that if we have another Depression, he'll have plenty of rooms for his adult children to move into. Hmmmm. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. I don't think I'm ready to relive my teen role in the family. It was bad enough the first time and that was improv, this would be a scripted rerun.

Maybe I should do new mazes for adults, like find your 401K and looking for a car loan. I could have high hedges and variable routes to obsfucate the seeker. With sharks circling the murky waters and dead ends heaped with worthless stocks. I can see it, but don't have the heart to draw it. Yet.

Go listen to Neil Gaiman read his new book

It's free, on his site, and has afforded me a week of daily pleasure. I was in the audience for the first chapter in NYC. Right up front. I loved it. I even sketched him in the dark... As he reads his expressions and his pauses become an entire cast (not counting an actual cast on finger). He has done a multi-city U.S. tour, reading a chapter a night, and the video tapes are up and free and wonderful and the concluding chapter made me cry because it was so good and partly because it was over. He knows a thing or two about coming of age and how to tell an utterly true story in a totally made up place. Bravo.
(P.S. my question was on his site yesterday...)

Shakespeare and Neruda and William Carlos Williams, oh my

One of the great things about having daughters in college is they get excited about their reading and performing and I get to vicariously fall in love with poets again. Caitlin is enraptured with William Carlos Williams. She is taking a book history and binding class and plans to put shorter WCW poems into the pages she is building. She is at that stage of quoting a few lines and practically swooning, "Tufts of purple grass spot the / green meadow and clouds the sky" she says, "I could eat those words." Not to mention the plums.

I have directed her to Neruda (Twenty Love Poems & a Song of Despair) and the visual treats of William Blake.

Natalie is performing a gruesome scene from one of Shakespeare's bloodiest romances, Cymbeline, for her acting 3 class. As princess Imogene she awakens next to a headless corpse she believes is her husband, the appropriately named Posthumus. Lots of shock and weeping, and smearing of gore. Delicious amounts of rage. She did a summer intensive at Shakespeare & Company when she was 18. Since then she has had classes that have added more depth to her understanding of the language and context. Not to mention becoming 21. How I wish I could see her perform. I hear the excitement in her voice.

And I am rereading the wonderful poetry of Bill Matthews. God he could write. He made the meditations of a drunk man pissing off the back of a boat into poetry. His language has that immediacy of surprise. The sure heft of original observation. So good to rediscover and find it still is as good as I remembered.

When I was 18 I was crazy about Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel poems. I still am.

Why drawing with wacom is kinda lame

Can't help it, even with a pretty good wacom tablet and a program like photoshop or painter, I still draw like my mind is in a cast.

I just sent a thumbnail sketch for a cover illo to a client. I could have created it in a program with my digital pen/mouse/touchpad but the truth is, I don't feel nearly as free to change my lines or see alternates in the all too crisp world of laptopville. Pencil on paper, smudges, eraser bits, rubbing my finger to create shadings of gray...I am sure some of you can do all that without analog artifacts, but I can't. There's something in how I see it, or see things into it, like cloud shapes and ink blots, a venue for vague, a possibility field.

Also, sketching and layout in a program makes it seem much more finished (crisp edges, perfect shapes) than it is. Until I figure out how to draw inside my apple box, here's to old tech (sound of scotch & soda clinking).

I sent the client a photo of my pencil sketch. And then wrote a sonnet.

The literary graphic novel

I am entranced with Posy Simmonds new book, Tamara Drewe. It was originally published serially in the British paper, The Guardian. But it is nothing like the lame stale joke comic strip such as Garfield or the macabre fantasy operas of Gaiman and company (Sandman). Her social satire is deliciously contemporary, pungent, funny, spot on, and she builds it using the frame of a classic novel. This one adapts the plot of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. Her previous graphic novel was based on...well the title tells all: Gemma Bovary. And her drawing is as good as her dialogue. Advice to teens and wannabe novelists, don't let Ms. Simmonds overhear you ranting in public, she'll capture every nuance with ease and transform it into art.

Her bumbling middle aged characters are drawn with both affection and remorseless accuracy. The pencil and watercolor are so convincing I start to see my world with her strokes.

I lent a copy to my friend Hilary and she couldn't put it down once she started it. It becomes a novel with sketches. But more than that since Simmonds makes use of all the tropes available in the form, the speech bubbles, the pacing, juxtaposing image and word. I'm deeply inspired. Last time I got this gaga over a graphic novel was with Shaun Tan's The Arrival.

Many years ago a friend gave me a copy of Simmond's picture book, Lulu and the Flying Babies for me to share with my daughters. I thought it a lovely way to introduce the pleasures of art museums and the girls loved it. This is like getting the same thrill for adults.

The anthology I edited with Jeanne Marie Beaumont, The Poets' Grimm, featured poems that used Grimm fairy tales as a starting point and poets had remade them into something strange and new and utterly their own. So much can be done by creative adapting. An armature, a recipe, a sandy footprint in which you press your own bare toes.

Rochelle's memorial

It was lovely, all agree she was generous, intelligent, talented, at times fierce, always tenacious, and missed. She taught writing to people affected by illness, bad luck, or bad choices, in prisons and community centers, she edited, she translated, she fought bad politics and policies, she wrote a lot of poems and novels, took photos with the same passion as she wrote, she loved her husband, city home and country house. This saying goodbye is hard stuff. Jim and I grouchy after, the sadness collecting into an itch of the spirit. I am thinking, when I am gone, throw my ashes off a cliff and get rip-roaring drunk in a bar as you roast me, toast me.

Once home, I made my weekly trip to the library, return & take, and Mondels chocolate shop, spend & savor. I am so thankful I live in this neighborhood. The college town bars and cafes and bookstores. As I popped and crunched the dark chocolate rum balls in my mouth and strolled down Broadway on this particularly clear afternoon, I nodded at the guys playing chess and slapping their timer, the vendors selling their dusty romances and sci fi books on rusty card tables, the college students in their artfully distressed sneakers, the double decker strollers with the double pairs of eyes, the pastel paintings of Hilary and Obama done by Hani now fading back into cement, and the legions of hounds on leashes splashing curb and post with their own, I was here.

If a life well lived is to be remembered as Rochelle has been, then I have some work to do. As I get older the giving back part is starting to seem a whole lot more important than it used to.

A different look at the creative process

Yesterday, as I was implementing my free WiFi with one costly cuppa joe at the local Starbucks joint, it occurred to me that visualizing the fits and starts of getting back into illustrating would be good fodder.

I came to NYC just out of college with the intent to write and illustrate books. I underwhelmed a number of art directors with my portfolio. I illustrated one modern fairy tale book for an obscure press (with a tie-in to Sting, go figure) and a Darrell Schwitzer tale in Twilight Zone Magazine. I looked at my work and decided I had to learn to draw better. I took classes. My drawing got better but then I realized I was passable but never gonna be someone whose illustrated works I'd buy eagerly. I lost heart. I was not a genius. Plus life was becoming busy with learning how to be a book designer and starting a family and yadda yadda here I am, still drawn to drawing and wondering what to do with it.

So when a well dressed young woman sat down next to me and whipped out a shiny new mac book air I tuned my battered mac to google images and pulled out pencils and paper. Take that you newer toy showoffsky...

And I personified the whole mess.

The maze and amazment of research

Tonight I amused myself by searching for images of plants and animals on tiles. I need inspiration for a home page I'm designing. This divides into several paths: terracotta carved and polychromed tiles, majolica plates and panels as well as tiles, Edwardian illustrations hand painted on tiles, mosaics dating back as far as the ancient Crete and Rome, and some seriously ugly refrigerator magnets. Apparently the world is stuffed full of crafts and the people who are crafty.

Some of the most beautiful were old friends from the Topkapi Palace. Not that I've been to Istanbul, but years ago the first story I illustrated was Frank Stockton's "The Lady or the Tiger?" which I took a week off work to research images from books in the New York Public Library and also peering at the illuminated manuscripts at the Metropolitan Museum. It's pretty cool that I can stay right here on my couch and do all the research with web searches.

All those artists making so many walls and plates and floors and baths with patience and enormously skilled fingers. People just need to say, I was here, even unsigned. With a leaf, a dragon, a lotus, a brilliant blue.

Silly brain and the creative process

Jim and I sit around and pretty regularly congratulate each other on possessing brains that have plenty of alternate route signs posted. If it weren't for all the road blocks, we'd never have become so adept at finding local lanes that offer unexpected visions. Some people might think it inconvenient to forget where you parked your to do list, or be incapable of following directions, but we have come to see it as an advantage.

Well, not always such an advantage. We don't have a swanky lifestyle. Jim isn't Emperor of Wall Street, I didn't become a CEO or investment banker... Hey, wait a sec, bunch of those folks will soon be out of work. They lost their jobs due to someone taking the quickest route to Greedyville. I quit my job so I could go slow. Slow myself into doing creative work. Work that requires me to deliver surprises.

So if you hear me say garlic when I meant ginger, or I get that misty look in my eyes that has nothing to do with needing to clean my lenses, you'll know I'm cogitating through the creative zone.

The thing about drawing maps

especially historical maps, is they take forever to do. I'm struggling a bit with all the new tricks Adobe Illustrator does, but that isn't the real problem... It's not the software but the sources. The dozen old maps I'm using were drawn over a span of 3 centuries by people of various skill, getting the pieces to line up is is kinda like jamming a puzzle that warped in the rain.

And you can't just cheat and use a Google map. Things change in 400 years, they do, rivers are dammed up or change course, town centers shift, cemeteries fill up, ponds disappear, land fills fill up, and wars change things. Plus modern highways and rail bridges obscure the sheep paths and hills that seemed to dictate the way roads happened back then.

I'm learning a lot. Bet most of you didn't know Walden Woods (of the famous pond) was a skanky hummocked tract of sandy unfarmable land, which is why it was a woods when Thoreau hung out in his cabin. Or that freed slaves moved there.

I didn't know that so many writers serially lived in one house in Concord that just going there should relieve writer's block. Here it is: The Wayside home to: Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Sidney (who wrote the Five Little Peppers, I can't be the only one who ever read those books!). How many transcendentalists does it take to screw in a light bulb? None, they were lit wicks.

But I'll be glad to leave Concord when I'm done with the map. No offense. I'm sure it is a lovely town, even two centuries later. But I need to stop gawking at all the old sites.

The freelance life for me

It has now been one week since I last sat in an office and had to wear nice clothes to work. My cat and dog are delighted. The dog now sits by my foot at 3 pm because she knows this is when I'll take her out for a walk. Which is a brilliant way to deal with the afternoon doldrums, just follow dog, past windows and trees in the park, and pick up poop. The cat is gradually learning that piles of paper that I'm gazing at are not to be used for sleep or play.

I tried freelancing many years ago when the kids were little. Unlike the cat and dog they did not choose to sleep most of the day. I was torn between their needs and my deadlines. It didn't work out. I went back to an office job and hired childcare.

This time I'm ready and life is in alignment. The kids are now women attending college. I have more design tricks in my bag. Also Google is here, it's free, and it's good. I have set up a calendar, this blog, and plan to use their services to help me keep organized. Best of all, Jim is helping me to organize too.

I also recognize humans (me) are pack animals. I get that small talk and existing together in one room somehow soothes the lone beast. I plan to spend an hour a day at a local Starbucks with my laptop and do my writing (poetry, picture books, novel). I have invented the term "passive socialization" to describe the buzz you get just sitting near others who are also concentrating. I bet the term is already out there and I just nabbed it from the ether.

I really love working with my hands...of course my hands are connected to a keyboard, digital tablet and digital pen. It feels good to be back doing work I love best, designing.