Creative is a Verb

This past week my sister-in-law came into town from Portland to see our new play and she brought this amazing book with her. I could tell right away how excited she was to share it with me. We stood in my mom's living room and she flipped through the pages telling me a little bit about the author who had illustrated the book entirely with artwork that had been submitted by readers of her very popular blog "37 days".

So I took the book home expecting to flip through some pages and maybe take in a few insights before I gave it back to her the next day. But it ended up not really being one of those books that I could just flip through. I got sucked in by the clear, but beautiful writing right from the introduction and I could see how this writer gained so many blog followers, and later, so many readers of her books. She seemed geniune and honest and so very excited by the prospect that creativity is for EVERYONE, not just those of us who proclaim ourselves to be "artists".

I only had time to read about half of the book before my sister-in-law had to return home, but I'm planning on going out today to buy my own copy so that I can finish reading it. It seems like a book that I'll be able to turn back to time and again for inspiration. And, let's face it, who doesn't need a good shot of inspiration every so often.

NaNoWriMo

NaNo what???

That's NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month and I just might be crazy enough to attempt it. Yes, this is an obsurdly busy month to begin with. I've got my play opening tomorrow and I'm supposed to be madly making my new art dolls for an upcoming show next month, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't also be writing.

If you've ever wanted to try writing a novel, November is the month for you to throw yourself full force into the crazy whirlwind of it all. Pop on over to the NaNoWriMo website and enter yourself in all the insanity. In 30 days you could be 50,000 words closer to your dream.

A New Obsession

No time to write. No time to do laundry. No time to take a shower or write a post for the blog. I'm busy with my new obsession... Making these crazy sculptures.

Winner

The winner in the "Back to School Giveaway" is...

Amber Clites

Amber, will you please send me your email address to kebirch (at) hotmail.com and I'll send your gift card right over.

Back to School Giveaway

School has started and I'm feeling productive. Today when the kids marched off to school I mowed my lawn (and the neighbor's too for good measure), made revisions to our play (a man enters), finished reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson and cleaned out my closet, which resulted in six bulging garbage bags full of clothes in the back of my van.

You'd think I'd be exhausted, but there's one last thing to do today. It's time for another giveaway. So in celebration of back to school, which was always my favorite time of year as a kid (second only to the first day of summer), I decided that it's time to give you lovely readers a chance to win something to enrich your minds: a $15 Amazon gift certificate. Because what good is it to have the kids back in school if you don't have anything good to read, right?

To enter all you have to do is leave a comment telling me what your favorite subject was in school. Of course I love new followers, so if you're new don't forget to mention it in your comment and I'll throw in an extra entry for you.

The giveaway ends August 31st and I'll announce the winner on September 1st.

Kate's Free Write

So last night I was up until nearly two designing the banner for my new blog. Okay, so maybe I don't really have time for another blog, but in my defense, this isn't so much a blog as a different form of creative writing journal.

The idea is this: each day (yes, I realize that it probably won't happen every day, but this is the "idea" not reality) I'll pick a new prompt with which to base a fifteen minute free writing exercise. The prompt might get drawn out of my bag of random words or it might be a line from a poem I love. It might be one of the many amazing images that I've found on the internet and have been hording on my hard drive for this very reason.

The prompt could be anything and most likely won't be related to anything that I'm currently writing, but the point isn't to create work that will get used. It's just to get those yummy juices flowing. Mmmm, I can already taste the words now.

And if you want to join along in my daily word romp, please, feel free to share my prompt or come up with your own. I'd love to read what you come up with.

Click here if you'd like to visit Kate's Free Write. 

No Bake Poetry

I'm back from vacation and even though I didn't write much (my aspirations for writing 1000 words a day flew right out the window and got lost in the tumbleweed somewhere in the Nevada desert), I did do a really interesting writing exercise while visiting my brother in Portland.

Here's the general gist: It's a collaborative effort, so you'll need at least a couple other writing folks to make it work.

1. First, the group of you will do a 15 minute free write based off of a prompt. My sister in law came up with our prompt, "With the rocks whirling in the flat lands, the daffodils..."

2. Next we passed our notebooks clockwise and read through our neighbor's free write, underlining words and phrases that really jumped out at us.

3. Finally we passed the notebooks one final time and, using the the underlined words and passages, rearranged them into a poem.

Here's the poem that my brother created from my free write:

Abandoned behind the peach
the sun makes past loves or even current
into warm squash, the core that held the food.
Someone they once knew
made excuses but then forgot,
lolled about, snapped,
dressed a table beside meshy bulbs
and thin crystal with thin green necks,
as if to strip themselves,
snipped by silver,
wrought by a sweating palm.

It was astounding not only how varied each of our poems turned out, but how each of us approached the free write from such vastly different perspectives. If you're curious to read the other poems, visit Fauxy's Lucky Scramble, my sister-in-law's new writing blog.