Excuses, excuses

Unfortunately, my writing and creativity has been down for a couple of weeks. I, like many creatives, have a day job as well that pays the bills (for now?) and I recently switched that day job to a new locale. New job is going great. New locale is even better as I now reside in a beach town in NC which is something I have always wanted. Been moving gradually closer my whole life. To get any closer now, I will have to get on a boat!
So, with all of the upheaval, my writing has taken a nose dive. Temporary, to be sure, but it is frustrating me nonetheless. When my blog posting is down, that is indicative that all creative endeavors are temporarily suspended. I don't like that, but it has been tough lately.
So, last night, I felt the creative beast stirring a bit so I know we will be rocking and rolling again soon. I have managed to creep forward with some blog posts, some FB and tweets and a couple of submissions (one of which got rejected today...boo, hiss!).
So now, I am hoping to press the metaphorical foot back to the metaphorical accelerator and get back up to speed. I need to stop using "life" as an excuse. If I get in that habit, then I am sure I will always find a convenient excuse readily available.

Oh...on a side note, I recently began re-reading "The Eye of the World" by Robert Jordan (The Kindle is great for reading giant books). I originally read the series as they were released up through book 5, but never finished the series. It seems like it might be a lifelong commitment to try and get through that magnum opus, but it is a very inspiring read and full of great characters, images and lands. People always knock his writing as crrrrrrap (scottish brogue) but personally, I like it a lot. It has been really fun to return to Emond's Field and find the charaters waiting like old friends.

No excuses!!!

As I did my daily read of Seth's Blog, in which he discussed excuses, I was reminded of one of Green's quotes. "The effective range of an excuse is zero meters" (Green was an Ranger in the 82nd Airborne).
If we aren't getting the results we want, do we look for an excuse?

• The market isn't right?
• I just need a big break?
• I just need better marketing?
• I don't have the funds to do this right?

All excuses. Some of which I have used myself. There are, literally, thousands of examples of people who ignored these excuses, and in some cases had far better excuses, and succeeded anyway.
Let's give up on the excuses. Let's pretend that they don't exist! Let's see how far we can go.

Getting your art out there

I had an interesting conversation with a friend a few days ago about getting out "out there". We discussed how difficult it is to pick a medium and how difficult it is to bring all the pieces together. My own thinking was, at the time, a bit defeatist. I had the following fallacies in my thinking:

• My first fallacy was that to get a novel out there you have to attract a New york publisher (my friend corrected me by reminding me of small press and self publishing)
• My second fallacy was that Self publishing has too much of a stigma to overcome because people are accustomed to low quality self published work (my friend responded that you have to overcome this stigma by first producing a high quality work and then by working to tell people that you have)
• My third fallacy was that you cannot produce a graphic work (comic or even motion graphics) you have to have an artist onboard (My friend points out that there are programs to help people with this and an even more extreme example is Southpark where the artwork is secondary to the storytelling. We could debate the quality of Southpark storytelling, but it resonated with an audience, clearly, and by that measure is very successful depite low-quality artwork)
• My fourth fallacy was that I needed to pick a single creative area and focus there so my attention was not divided (My friend reminded me that most all creative folk out there are working on a huge variety of art. Some hits and some misses, but they produce and that what counts. They only adopt a single minded focus after something hits and they have an audience, and most of the time, even then, they keep working in other areas (George Lucas could have made a career of Star Wars only, but he didn't).
• My fifth fallacy was that I could not write a screenplay because I don't have the training (my friend reminded me that I could write a story in any form and then hire someone to make it into a screenplay, or even better use an automated program to help me turn a story into a screenplay)

It was interesting, frightening and liberating to have my excuses systematically dismantled. I can now see there are always ways to get the art out there. That's a new realization for me and one upon which I intend to capitalize. 

Football season is over! Now I can get to work!

Actually, I get to work even during football season. The thing is, any event can be an interruption if you let it. Why didn't I write today? Why didn't I exercise? Why didn't I start back on my degree? Well, I'm waiting on a less hectic time, or a time when I have more money or when the kids are grown or the house is paid for.
The thing is...whatever time you are waiting on, it's never going to get here. If you get in the habit of making (and accepting) excuses from yourself, you will always have one ready.
It doesn't even matter what the excuse is! Any excuse will do because you are going to rationalize it and accept it and in the end...do nothing. As my Mother says, "I didn't do it because I was out of peanut butter".
May as well say you were out of peanut butter. It's as good an excuse as any.
So let's try and force ourselves to give up our excuses or at least not accept so many.