In The Garden Living an RPG Life

That is the name of the comic book text book.  It is also what I think I’ll be doing this year for NaNoWriMo.  I seem to have let go of everything that keeps me from being happy with a coloring tool in my hand.  Spent a while today coloring in a friend’s coloring book. Working out the shading for the princess’ dress.  Getting the shadows on the faces right.  Choosing the right colors.  Checking out what the mark-making effects of crayons are when I use the drawing signature of DaVinci and Gorey.

What does this have to do with novel writing?  Well, the main characters keep drawing journals as part of their work practice.  A lot of my character creation has been through illustrations in old children’s story books.  I’m just realizing how much keeping a journal figures in my novels.

In the first novel, the journal full of visual ideas, sparks the consequences, literally.  In the second novel, it’s both journals (the ones belonging to the same person as in the first) and children’s books.  In the third, hmmm.  I don’t remember having journals but now that I think of it, why not?  The fields of music and knitting both have journal keeping as their practice, if not exactly as we think of them.  In the fourth book, its those journals again plus another person whose work requires them.

Whew!   I thought the retrospective didn’t occur till after one was dead, and then not for a long time!

I don’t know if I will be making pictures while I’m writing. I will wait and see what happens.   The one thing I’ve learned from my own renewed attraction to drawing is to not push it.  Most of the re-acquaintance came from my conversations with Gretchen about her own relationship with drawing.  I got to feel lonely for drawing.  Mind you, I haven’t let it go completely.  My journals are organized around making some kind of pictorial mark.  I make a rectangle on the top right corner of each new page and put a nice border around it.  Only after I write the date next to the frame do I start my entry for the day.  There are still blank frames on some pages.  I’m not committed to filling them up.  I just acknowledge that there is a place for drawing in my writing life.

Between my Catrina figure and my desire to build a fabric design practice, I’m realizing the perhaps I have really only thought of drawing as a tool and not something to do just for the heck of it.  I am not, even though I might like to be, someone who loves drawing.  Just as I am not a musician.  Or an electronic technician.  I may not even be a writer, for all that I write.  I am a person who can do all of these things toward some other end.  Or because of some other inspiration.  I don’t know how to talk about it any better than that.  I am expecting things to come together though, as I age a little more.

Something about how the spirit moves or can be perceived to move through all my interests and endeavors, seems to bring me peace.   There are people for whom all those activities are roads to spirit.  For many practitioners, art, electronics, music and the like are their path to something much larger than themselves.  This something gives them comfort when their Adventures take them deep into dungeons where they need to find their way past familiar and unfamiliar monsters.  I think, for me, writing is the Way.  The other activities seem to be just a way to see into the Mystery through eyes that are only partially focused through music, electronics, drawing and the like.

Fine.  Now I’ve gone and got deep.  Not to worry.  It’s Day of the Dead eve and these are perfectly good thoughts to have tonight.  The souls of those who know more about these things are about to be let loose to visit in our dreams and desires.  Might as well get things properly lined up.  Who knows what gifts of insight my Mae might bring me, what experiences of the other side I might receive from Ricky or Darryl.  And mom and dad and all the others behind them might have stories I can use to clarify my purpose.  Sam, dear Sam, might even bring me closer to the forge and show me how the center of the earth creates, what the Earth Dragon dreams about.  I can use that in my story tomorrow night.

Night all.

Blessings on us all.

I lost the post I had just written.  It was a lovely post about my adventure with my local art supply store and how I flowed into mentioning my involvement in drawing.

Gone, is the visual poetry.  Gone now, is all the reference to anything significant.  That’s what I get for not saving the text when I create it. So, now what do I say?

It was a bright, sunny day in Sacramento.  I was waiting for the local library to open so that I could get some documents created to allow me to renew a professional license.  Yeah, that’s it.  And this is the part where I enter the art supply store.  It is a different branch from my usual haunt.  My local supplier is within a few walking blocks of my flat.  And very familiar. But today, I feel adventurous and explore the more distant University Arts store.
This is a new shape and a new encounter with old supplies.  As I was checking out I mentioned that I was “coaching” a friend in drawing.  This led to a blather about Comic Kazes, my under sedation blog about visual narrative or graphic novels.

I don’t, now, remember all that I was intending to remark about either the blog or the concept of visual narrative.  It’s important to me to only remember that I am intending to continue the work.  Drawing is still important to me.  It represents a way of thinking that words …. fill in the blank.

By filling in the blank you are participating in the non-verbal process that visual narrative draws up and into consciousness.

I bought a bunch of drawing supplies at University Art, today.  Mostly supports for receiving the marks that make images.  Big books of pages to hold a large scale of imagery.  I don’t know what I will be doing with this  collection of tool marks. That’s the beauty of the practice!  The not knowing part!  As for the visual narrative… There are new bits coming into the blog.  For instance…

Did you know the Old Masters used a kind of visual “Fake Book”?  A fake book is a collection of tunes with chords that musicians use.  They apply their personal knowledge of the appropriate style to the chords and melodies in the books and, when you hear them, you are entranced.  The old masters of painting did the same thing.  They had books of freguently used images that they could copy, in their own style of course, and fill in the blank spaces of their paintings.

How might we use that kind of drawing jazz in our own stories, I will be asking in Comic Kazes.  My partner in the endeavor is off doing her own thing, so I have to regroup and proceed on my own.  No problem.  Unless I drop my own drawing intentions.

Guess not if you are a hibernating bear!  And I’m not so sure I am not.

So… where have I been?  Writing actually.  And making my mind up that I am a writer and not a knitter.  All that means is that the needles get dropped and left behind for the pen more than the other way around.  It also means that the pen gets picked up for other things that the needles don’t.  Like drawing.  I think.

I had high hopes of making a writerly space there, but something else got in the way.  Yet another writing pursuit in the form of an online technical writing class.  That has been more troublesome than I thought it would be.  I think it’s because the universe of technical writing has nothing to do with what I actually might right about.  OK, so that’s a bit of exaggeration, but still.  I don’t work in a field where office memos are part of my everyday speech pattern.  As it is I had to create a Second Life project for one assignment.  I also ended up using the Comic Kazes blog for another.  And somewhere along the line I discovered that it might do me well to learn Adobe Acrobat for real.  Something about on-demand publishing.

Which of course sent me running back to my NaNo-novels to see how ready they might be for publishing.

Only if by publishing you mean getting someone to put them into print for me so that I can use them like I would any novel I would want to analyse.  Only this time I would be quite critical and tell the author how she might improve the story and the obvious typos.  I think that would be quite satisfying since I know the author would listen to me.  Nothing like talking back to an author knowing you will be heard!  Gives reading with a pencil much more impact.  More power.

Now, I want to shift the blog to where it was heading anyway. Shift it visually away from knitting.  And I just got something.

I wrote a couple of comments in response to a couple of my grandmother’s fans.  In one of them I was remembering reading Mae’s book of poetry and I wrote that I was sitting in her mother’s chair and my mother was sitting nearby knitting.  That’s the connection and I never saw it till now.  My mother didn’t write. Neither did my great-grandmother.  Granny crocheted and Mommy knitted.  I suspect, though, that Mommy knitted instead of writing.  I suspect a lot of women did needle work instead of something else they wanted to do more.  Which makes Mae’s book even more remarkable.  I know that my mother had the desire to write and to make other kinds of art.  For one reason or another, she didn’t.

So much for returns and revelations.

Why do we keep turning away from home to feed our desires?  Perhaps because they get buried at home.  More revelation.   I am looking outside myself for source and sustenance.  At the moment, I am also looking at what appears to be some Granny wrapped in a lace shawl. It’s just photos of my first lace piece draped over a chair.

Proof that I can follow directions as well as finish a complex task.

I think I’m doing battle with ghosts here.  Letting them out so they can go home and leave me to play.  I know this lace thing is good.  I also like the practical stuff, like sweaters and socks.  I just don’t know how to put it all together with the writing and drawing and the rest of my life’s tasks.

Oh well.  That’s what Second Life is for!  Taking me away from all this.  You can’t really knit in SL.  And besides, I get to be a Shaman Bunny.  Can’t do that in Real Life, and while a bunny

can write in Second Life, it can’t in Real Life….

So there!

OK… done venting.  Will be back with more about the Shaman Bunny or another story.  Meanwhile, I’ll be changing things around a bit.