It's time to start reading week 2 of "The Artist's Way" and sharing your insights! Don't forget to keep doing your morning pages and to take yourself on another artist's date.
 

Time hogs for me:
>Work
>House chores
>Entertaining (and not) distractions--reading, watching t.v., surfing the web.

That's pretty much it. Maybe I need to be more specific?

Edited to add:
>doing stuff for others. Particularly critiquing stuff. I love to do it, but too often I find I do it either to escape having to revise my own stuff or simply because I've been raised to put other people's needs before mine.

Edited further to add: I suppose this goes back to feeling like creativity and writing is a selfish pursuit. I try to get around that, and still feel creative, by helping others out. I think she goes on at length about this, how a blocked artist will actually help others in their artistic careers before she helps herself.
[This message has been edited by annepin (edited June 13, 2008).]

[This message has been edited by annepin (edited June 13, 2008).]
 

Time is going by too quickly! I'm still finding a lot of worthwhile insights from the Week 1 material. Luckily, there is some overlap.

The "basic principles": I still find myself skeptical of most of them. To me it seems that in them, creativity is exhalted above what I am comfortable with.

Affirmations - I'm still to good of a blurter, and the turned-around blurts as affirmations haven't inspired me too much. In general, I suffer from a substantial lack of faith in my inherent abilities.

Time consumers. What this pointed out to me (reaffirmed from last week) that I can't take a victim's attitude in this. I have the time, I'm just not using it well. I'm not spending hours-and-hours-and-hours doing things for other's benefit. I'm pursuing little amusements for myself, likely the Censor distracting me... So I guess I'm a victim of myself.

My pie: Well other than my job/work, I didn't give myself very high marks. Next best was friends, the other's were all a little barren.

I actually found that I've participated in most of my favorite activities fairly recently, and I have plans for the weekend for a couple I've been neglecting. Along the same lines, most of my "alternate lives" connect surprisingly closely to recent activities and/or active hobbies.

Got my morning pages every day, starting to become a habit. I do think I'm struggling with the stream-of-consciousness idea. As soon as I pick up a pen my thoughts become somewhat structured. The only nod to being free-form about it is that I let myself start on whatever topic fits my fancy, and allow things to meander if my mind does. I'm not complaining about things so much in the pages, and often I fall into speaking to myself in the second person and giving myself lectures. Not a lot of page space being consumed by thinking about creativity.

Got my artist date in. Took myself to a nice restaurant to eat, then spent some time listening to a street musician in a shopping plaza. Haven't done something like that since I was a kid.

That's about as far as I've got so far. What is bothering me is I don't really seem to have the identifiable external source for my "block" that she seems to be getting us to search out. I think whatever is going on with me is more internal, and whatever external connections there may be are faint, well-hidden, or non-existent.
 

I can't honestly say I am surrounded by blocked creatives trying to stifle my creativity. Writing isn't a social thing for me.

I also found that I did many of my favorite things recently, although when I went through my alternate lives I hit upon star gazing (part of my desire to be an astronaut). I used to do that when I was a kid and haven't in ages. I want to make that my artist's date this week, but can't seem to stay up late enough!! Maybe I should find something else and hold off on starts until the winter when it gets dark sooner.

I'm not convinced by the basic principles either. I'm trying to reinterpret them in my mind to fit more closely with my own view of God and I think that may help. Some of them seem a bit heavy handed to me.
 

My daughter who lives with me fills a bit of the crazymaker role as well, but it's nothing she's doing deliberately. She's just a typical 15-year-old whose every waking moment is filled with some sort of drama or another. Lately, aside from breaking her back in a horse-riding accident, she's had a rash of her friends moving out of the state, so emotionally she's pretty stressed out. The one good thing about cell phones, text messages, and the internet is that she can keep about 80% of her interaction with these kids even though they live a few hundred miles away.
 

The other thing that stirred me this week was the part on attention. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it was the most useful thing I have read so far. I realized that I spend so much time thinking and planning and dreaming that I don't take time to live in the moment -- breathing in, breathing out, noticing the late spring flowers or the smell of the rain or the feel of the heat. I took a walk on Wednesday (it's my son's kid's day out so it's really the only day I have to walk and think) and I just noticed things...an ugly purple paint job (who would pick that color on purpose?)...a lovely stone retaining wall and garden (how do people find the time to get their yards looking so nice?)...oh, and trees! I don't know the names of any of the trees, I realized. They're all just trees. Maybe one is tall, one is short, one is fat...but they have names, right? There are oaks and sycamores and I don't know which are which.

It's hard. I have to force my mind not to wander off to its usual stressful pursuits, but the more I pay attention, the more I know that this is where the stories are and this is where the details within those stories are.