Daily Log

I have made zero progress on The Artist's Way in the last, hmm, three? weeks (maybe four, maybe more? I have stopped tracking). I do intend to keep working through it, but I've been doing the cycle of find the book, put it somewhere to progress later, forget, lose the book. My general thoughts

• the morning pages are working. I'm doing them in 750words, and that makes it easier in some ways and harder in others. The later in the day I do them the more grumpy I am about doing them, because they really do work for me if I can clear my mind in the morning.
• the artist's date idea doesn't work for me. I suspect if I didn't already have space carved out in my life for me to just do my thing, it would make a huge difference, but as it is there is more stress in trying to Do The Thing.
• I hate the principles, I stopped reading them daily because I kept wanting to argue with them. Too culturally Christian, and too USian alien mind set (I have the same reaction to a lot of self-help type books out of the USA).
• I understand the point of the affirmations, and I have a document of them I can read whenever (I just keep it open, but I should do something more accessible with it), but I find doing that daily beyond tedious. I had it in my daily to do list; I'm taking it out as part of my going-back-to-study paring down (post pending, still making the choices on that)
• In the bits I've read, I've felt quite othered, because I don't have a strong feel of myself as a blocked creative.

Long term, I intend to at least read the rest of it. I don't think I want to try and do as many of the exercises. I did a decent job of the week 1, and I might have of the week 2, and I have a log document that I'll leave open. But I think that reading the book and ignoring the exercises might be the best way for me to get anything out of it now. Possibly stopping at the end of each chapter, looking at each question, and allowing max 5 minutes on each writing task (if I feel like writing at all) and then not trying to do a bit every day.

the tl;dr: I didn't like this enough to try and work on it daily.

I've not been posting, because life has been exhausting. Some paperwork, some attempting to get the house under control with a different deadline than previous, some house-guest G, visiting from Canberra. They arrived Tuesday. Wednesday they had sorted to go out with a friend, and I spent much of the afternoon scanning SwanCon history stuff. Thursday we went to the Shipwrecks Museum and talked about what I know of Fremantle history; had a very mediocre lunch at a cafe that wasn't as good as I remembered from a couple of years ago; failed to go to the library; and went and watched Thunderbolts (I have opinions, but I haven't attempted to articulate them much). Today, we did a potted tour of the hills, going up Crystal Brook Road, stopping at the lookout at the junction of that and Welshpool Road; lunch at the Kalamunda Dome; G learning that gum nut babies (of May Gibbs fame) are actually based on real gum nuts and that May Gibbs is claimed as a local; a detour to the car park at Lesmurdie Falls and discovering that the path is short but too many stairs for G to see the Falls; wandering out to Mundaring Weir; taking a random set of roads that seem like home to me and meant that we could see the cut of the ZigZag down the hill; not doing a stack of things that would have been good due to limited time and energy. And then a small dinner party where we half arsed a range of things, but the food was tasty and the friends were fabulous.

and having written that out, I don't have the oomph to edit into more coherent and less run on sentences.