Best Writing Conditions? .........NOT
For several months, my plans for various blogs went well. I
had lots of fresh ideas, organized plans, motivation and discipline. These
plans were completed on a fairly regular schedule. I am thankful for the period
of time when these plans were met.
Then life intervened as it sometimes does. I had a series of
failures of many kinds of computer equipment. My scanner went down, and my
intention was to use my camera to put images into my blogs. This did not work
as well as I thought it might. It seemed that trying each new idea to work
around the barriers didn’t go as well as I hoped.
Meanwhile, I was
“blessed” with a bumper crop of apples in the back yard.
I tried to repair the scanner, and eventually got it to
work. Then getting my images from one older computer image format onto a newer
one failed to work. For a while I was moving images via CD discs, with
translating between program versions. I kept losing images using a thumb drive.
It seemed to lose and even release information into the biosphere. That
eventually seemed to have been caused by a faulty hub, but maybe not.
The next thing that emerged were problems with my newest
computer, and strange documents I had not created would appear on my desktop,
and finally the computer would freeze up altogether, and would not restart or
accept my password. I took that to be repaired, and it seems to be working
better now, and the repair place found 9 incidents of attempts to get
information off my computer. I don’t leave personal info for anyone to find,
other than art, email and internet-related material. The problems caused were
irritating but not devastating.
During this time, when I could not depend on my computer as
much, I tried to work more by hand. But the frustration took its toll in spite
of this. Personally I lost momentum and had much less energy for being
creative. I lost touch with the former projects I had started. I am not as
connected to the flow of information, and materially lost some documents I had
saved. At this point I still do not have all my digital imaging capabilities up
to speed. I will need to recover a lot of old art and reorganize the work to
make it accessible again.
What I have learned? I guess I must not assume I am in
control of everything. Another is to make records every day or so and to save
them both on CD and on paper, in the right order. I have learned to be grateful
when things do go right. Part of letting go of being in control is to enjoy
each part of the creative process. Maybe the last thing is to plan projects
that are more short term and spontaneous and that come in their own time rather
than on a specific schedule.
I just hope that any followers who keep track of my work
will understand and accept my more relaxed philosophy in regard to my blogging
schedule, as well as toward my art making.
© Ruth Zachary
