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Category: Musings

This is too real.

This is too real.

Who’s got two thumb and is writing again? This gal! Why? The Toilet Paper Apocalypse of course! Silly. Why Am I blogging today. Because, today, of all days word came down that the stay at home shut down, is continuing until April 30th. April Fools, the month of April has been canceled. Rip In Pepperonis 4/20. Press F to play respect. I’m sorry my gamer is showing. There’s probably going to be a lot of that in this post. I’m going to be unabashedly ramble-ly. This truly is the dumbest time line. I need to rant and rave a bit, and my blog is a fine place to do it.

I’ve played a couple of games with a sanity meter, my favorite being Don’t Starve. Right now a feel like it’s good symbology. I feel like the sanity meter of the entire country has been down to three-quarters since 2016. Right now, I feel like the whole world is under half-full. Stuff is going down everywhere. There’s even a locust plague running around. It’s stupid on a macro level. There are plenty of people doing what they can. State governors are doing the right thing even if the country is paralyzed on a national level. Generally people are trying to be helpful. However there’s a few persistently stupid people who are stubborn and selfish who are going to literally going to get some people killed. I’m not okay with that. For me this is personally nerve racking and draining for reasons I won’t really go into. I want to say I’m tired, but tired isn’t the word for it. I guess it’s mental exhaustion.

Two weeks down 4 weeks to go.

I’ve actually been doing stuff!

I’ve actually been doing stuff!

So despite not posting here in over a year, I’ve actually been doing things.  Like actual creative things. I’ve started playing D&D again, this time as the dungeon master. DMing has a “Tale of Two Cities” vibe. It’s the best of times and it’s the worst of times. I should chronicle some of the more interesting bits here. I’ve been drawing. Of course I have. It’s my literal job. Hell, I’m even participating in Inktober2019. I haven’t done today’s drawing but I’ll get there.  I’ve been wrestling with the real world as well. Blizzard has betrayed it’s community… AGAIN. The U.S. President is still the president. Dungeon and Dragons has come with personal problems, that frankly, I was expecting, but I’ll still have to find a way to deal with them. All of this I could have been writing about. Why did I stop?

The REAL reason I stopped writing, is because writing has become part of the way I earn a living now, and that takes most of the fun out of it. I’ve said it before I didn’t exactly choose being a writer. I am a story teller and sequential artist.  Writing is just how I get stuck expressing myself because art is too slow usually.  I’ve got to get the junk out of my head SOME HOW!

Anyway, I’m back at it.  WordPress’ Gutenberg sucks eggs, so that might slow me down. I’ll see how it goes, but with any luck I should be back.

Oh the irony

Oh the irony

I’ve got new responsibilities at my job, which includes a little, very little, extra money.  I’m writing content for my boss’s multitude of web sites.  I’m getting paid to write. I guess that’s a good thing, but it’s not exactly fun stuff. It takes energy from creative writing. I’ll need to find a way to balance the two. In other news, I’ve made a huge breakthrough on the creative writing front. There’s a full story-arc, planned and ready. I just need to write it down.  In the mean while I still make my living drawing caricatures.  Here’s a recent one. 

Hopefully, I can get back to blogging and creative writing while still writing articles for my job. With a little luck I’ll write another post soonish.

Still doing.

Still doing.

Hey Interwebs,

It’s been a while. I mean we’ve been talking constantly but I haven’t updated my blog. I’ve been busy. Which is good and bad. I think I might have to give something up. Won’t be my blog though. ( The stuff I write needs to get published somewhere.) I know what I want to cut through.

I meant to get really into political cartooning, after all, there is plenty of material. Strangely enough, that ends up being the problem. There’s too much material.  In order for a political cartoon to have the most punch it needs to be relevant in the moment it’s read in my opinion. Relevance does not last long in the current climate. News that happened an hour ago will be overshadowed by something that happens an hour from now. Art on that kind of schedule is hard, so I think I can let it go and not feel too bad.  I won’t give up writing about politics it from time to time. I may draw a political idea, but I will focus on concepts that are important for more than a few moments.

I’m still learning, still drawing, still writing, still doing and that is the important thing.

We’ll talk gain soon,

C.P.

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash
Hammer and Tongs

Hammer and Tongs

There is a story in my head that wants out and if I don’t get it out it will make me a little crazy. To avoid insanity these past couple of weeks I found myself writing, or rather, trying to write. Writing is annoying and hard, but I still do it and I’ve discovered something.

I find my writing process has more in common with a blacksmith working with iron than anything else. My ideas collect and pool together, heating up in the fires of my brain. Purifying and distilling themselves. I pour off the impurities keeping the best parts of my idea. At least, I like to think that happens. I’m sure plenty of dross sticks around. I dump it out of my head and on to the page. Hoping to mold it into a general shape. And then beat the crap out of it and try shape it and sharpen it into something presentable, getting burned, banged and bruised in the process.

Someone should have warned me. My lit and writing teachers never mentioned this. I bet it’s easier wrestling metal into submission than my jumbled thoughts. At the very least I would get a useful object out of it, instead of a random piece of writing about writing.