Quinn McDonald's Blog, page 17

DIY Giveaway

DIY isn’t just updating a kitchen. I’m a fan of making journals, too. You can use the paper you like, whether you sketch, write, or paint. You can mix paper types, include pages of interesting looking books, or maps.

Handcrafted Journals, Albums, Scrapbooks and More by Marie Browning is a how-to books for updating your studio–with some handmade books. This is not a new book–it’s a 2000 edition, but it is a useful one. It’s packed with information, color photos and templates.

You don’t have to have prior knowledge, the first three chapters discuss materials, bookbinding terms and techniques. Chapter 4 is a basic procedure for making your own album or journal. Brave creatives can take off from there.

Examples of how-to: different surface decorations techniques.

Need more help? There are chapters for folded books, paperback journals, wood covered books, closed- and open-spine books and novelty books.

Bookplate or decorative templates you can print out of the book.

There are terrific photos and ideas in this 128-page paperback book. And a binding guide, complete with measurements and templates for miniature books as well, too.

Miniature books are fun to make and give as gifts.

Giveaway: I’m giving away the book. Leave a comment and check in again on Saturday to see if it’s yours!

–Quinn McDonald has made a lot of books and knows the creative satisfaction of seeing a book completed.

 

Filed under: Book Reviews, Giveaway, Links, resources, idea boosts Tagged: handmade books, how-to books

Knowing When to Quit

There’s a mistake I make over and over again—I just don’t know when to quit. I’ll press on with a project even though I’m tired, cranky, and no longer paying close attention.�� It’s the road to perdition, clearly marked, and I’m driving the express train. But I won’t quit. I keep thinking that in the next minute, I will finish the project, solve the problem, complete the task and be a hero. So wrong.

It doesn’t work that way. Right at the moment when the glorious completion is brushing my fingertips, almost in my grasp,�� something goes wrong. Tonight the just-repaired part on the sewing machine failed again. I was stitching the last piece of a card I had promised to get in the mail tomorrow, and the needle flew out of the holder, followed by the thread manager and the entire chunk of sewing machine that holds the needle and the thread tender.�� The cats ran out of the studio as if pursued. They were. By a large chunk of sewing machine.

Mechanically separated. . . .something. Probably mammal.

The card. Oh, the poor card. The one I’d been working on for two hours. The one you are not seeing a picture of because it looks pre-digested. Mechanically separated.

I could give you a hundred other examples. When I am close to completing a workbook for a training class, I start to make formatting mistakes. Suddenly the Table of Contents is on page 56. I have no idea how it got there. Page numbers sprout letters behind them. I have done this more than once, more than a dozen times. I’d recognize the situation and think, “it will be different this time.” It never is.

Cut it into tiny pieces to set it free. Then throw it out.

It’s a combination of wanting to complete something ahead of deadline, the need to be done with a project I’ve been working on too long, and the bad decisions made when I’m overtired. It’s rooted in the idea that if I push harder I will do more than if I go to bed. It’s the nasty Catholic-school idea that you don’t rest until your work is done, no matter how tired you are. And I’m not even Catholic.

I want to find that moment I need to quit. Because I keep overshooting it, wasting too much time doing over what I should have quit doing while I was ahead.

Tonight, I think I found the answer. The time to quit is long before I make the mistake. I keep thinking I need to stop right before the mistake. But that’s not it. The time to stop is while everything is still going well. Before tired becomes exhaustion. It’s so counter-intuitive. We don’t go to bed when we are tired, we fall asleep in front of the TV and get up at 2 in the morning, drag ourselves to bed and find our eyes open and our weariness gone. The next day, our eyes feel like they’ve been rolled in panko crumbs and placed on the grill.

The time to quit a project is while it’s still appealing, before it becomes a chore. Yes, there are times to press ahead, but when you grimly fixate on getting it over and done with, you have jumped the shark. (Another example of not knowing when to quit.)

And instead of finding the perfect ending here, I’m going to bed. Before I wreck it. Feel free to give an example of your own.

–Quinn McDonald is slowly learning when she’s had enough and needs to quit for the night. Slowly.

 

Filed under: idea boosts, The Writing Life Tagged: knowing when to quit, quit while you are ahead

Numbers, Up and Down

The week of Christmas, my blog stats shot up. And they didn’t stop. Readership increased 78 percent, and I finished December with the biggest month in two years. It’s hard not to think about writing skills, choice of topics. I’ve had this happen before, so I kept my head from swelling too much.

But the trend continued. In the next week, the numbers went up again. A lot. And then, today. Sigh. Monday was the least-read day. Ever. I have no idea what happened to the readers, or what caused the wave to crest and then crash.

Chinese seal with ancient script. Translation to right.

I do know that many people weed out their reading list in the new year. I can make up lots of stuff, the opposite of what I could have made up when the readers boosted the numbers.

The truth of writing, whether it’s a blog or as a freelancer, or writing workbooks, is that there are good times and there are bad times, and often you don’t know why. Can’t predict the dip or the swell. Just ride it out, good or bad.

What to do? Keep the value up. Don’t worry about the quantity, worry about the quality. Fans, audiences, followers will come and go. Keep making art. Keep writing. Keep singing, dancing and making meaning. Your audience may take a break, but your work continues. “Do not become complacent with victory, do not become frustrated with defeat. “–Chinese proverb.

-–Quinn McDonald is riding the wave. Down. Because it will come back up again.

Filed under: Creativity, The Writing Life Tagged: doing your work, Facebook "likes", numbers, results

Milking the Word

The first week of January has stumbled off and here we are, in what becomes mid-January in a few days. Now that the decorations are packed away, school is back in session, and work is swinging along, it’s time to unwrap that Word you chose for 2015 and take a closer look.

From http://elifestudentblog.blog

It’s probably written in your journal a few pages back. Take a look at it, and spend some time with it.

What called you to that word?

What would you like the word help you do this week?

How can that special word help you make 2015 remarkable?

How will this word help you change?

It’s fun to ask different questions about the word and invite it into your life and journal in different ways. Writing about it helps clear away the “just a word” aspect and brings in into your lap, where you can make it come alive.

—Quinn McDonald is seeing her word show up around every corner.

Filed under: Journal Pages, The Writing Life Tagged: keeping a journal, word of 2015, Word of the Year, writing practice

Stop, Thief!

Somewhere in your life there is a thief. It’s probably a friend, a relative, or one of your online friends. The goal is to take something so valuable, you can’t buy it: time.

The time thieves in your life are subtle. Sly. And you fall for them in big and small increments. It’s time you’ll never get back.

The friend who asks you to go shopping with her. You don’t need anything, and you went to lunch with her earlier in the week. You know this friend wants to bend your ear with gossip, problems, and long whines. Substitute a phone call and you will have 90 minutes you get to spend more wisely.

You just want to check in on your friends on Facebook, and after a few minutes, you look at the clock and notice two hours have vanished. You’ll never get them back. Set a timer to limit screen time.

You also give away your time as if you had endless amounts. You volunteer for projects at work that no one else wants. You want to be a team player. Laudable goal, but take on extra, unrelated-to-your-goals  projects only if you can easily complete it and it teaches you something.

You spend hours “keeping in touch” with friends by texting. You text at meals, while you are talking to other friends. You aren’t giving of yourself, you are simply filling time that could be better spent having real conversations.

Time seems limitless until it is not. It’s smart to budget your time, use it to make meaning and not let others steal it. Give it freely, spend it happily, but don’t let anyone take it without your permission.

—Quinn McDonald wishes she could save up time and use it on days that speed by too quickly.

Filed under: Links, resources, idea boosts Tagged: saving time, time, wasting time

Unhappy? Re-Think

Happiness and unhappiness are largely based on your point of view and your mindset. About 10 years ago, the roofers set my house on fire and the roof collapsed through the studio. The day of the fire, I thought it was the worst thing

Unhappy cat, probably related to grumpy cat.

that had ever happened to me. The next day, I felt relief. Yes. Relief that the fire fighters showed up in under two minutes. The same fire department I had muttered against because we lived so close and their sirens woke us from time to time. A burning row house in a crowded town can do a lot of damage,  and no one else’s house got damaged. I felt happier than I had the day before the fire, when I was grousing about something at work.

Can you re-set your idea of happy? You can.

Don’t think life is automatically hard. Sure there are hard times. Yes, your job is not fair. But in the movie of your life, stop seeing yourself as the victim, the poor picked-on underdog who deserves sympathy from everyone else in the world. Try backing up and seeing a slightly bigger picture. One of the joys in life is solving problems. Put your problems in perspective and you’ll feel better.

Not everyone is out to get you. The guy who cuts you off in traffic doesn’t

From badpeach.com blog

know you. He is not out to make you furious. He is late for work. The grocery packer who drops the melon on the raspberries is not deliberately trying to ruin your groceries; she wasn’t paying attention. Both of those situations are aggravating, but the more we think that it’s deliberate, the angrier we get. Then we start to pretend to know how much other people are out to get us. Stop. No one is out to get you. They might be selfish, but it’s not about you.

Give up control. Keep your eye on the goal, work to make it happen, but when something goes wrong, do not live the rest of your life as if micromanaging will save you from disappointment. It won’t. Micromanaging your life (or other people’s lives) will just make you unhappy more often. Most of life can’t be controlled. And punishing new friends for what ex-friends did to you will limit your circle of friends to your own reflection in the mirror.

Happiness is like a houseplant. It needs tending, feeding and care. And admiration. If you work at it, you’ll need a bigger pot for your unhappiness, because it has outgrown the small one it started in. The same is true for happiness–it thrives with attention.

-–Quinn McDonald reminds herself that she wants to be happy.

Filed under: In My Life, Links, resources, idea boosts Tagged: being unhappy, choose happy, tips to give up unhappiness

In Unity with Charlie Hebdo

Cartoonists make us laugh. Cartoonists point out our foibles and shortcomings and make us feel OK to be the frail humans that we are. Sometimes they make us think, or tell a story that fascinates us.

Artwork © Loïc Sécheresse, 2014.

So it is shocking, painful, and enraging when terrorists attacked the French office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and shot 10 journalist-artists  who worked there and two police officers who came to the Paris magazine offices.

Charlie Hebdo published cartoons of Mohammend in an issue called “Sharia Hebdo,”  and the office was firebombed in 2011. Today, two men with guns entered the magazine offices and shot down people whose “crime” was free speech. The shooters didn’t like what the magazine did, so in their heads, it was just fine to take revenge by shooting people as they worked.

It’s easy to hate these criminals. It’s easy to want them dead. It is also easy to know that the murderers were Islamic, and to fume, “I’ve been patient long enough, but Islam has to be stopped.” And that’s exactly what we can’t do. Terrorists, murderers, and extremists are not the sole representatives of a religion. They do damage, yes, but the rest of Islam and the people who practice it, are not villains, evil or dangerous. As so often happens, the extremists damage the reputation of the innocent.

The extremists make us angry and we want someone to suffer for the damage they do. You’ve often heard me say, “Look where you want to go.” Looking to make people suffer is not a good direction for us to travel. Making others suffer will create an endless loop of anger, hate, and violence.

What can we do? We can draw, we can write, we can use our creative strength to improve the small part of the world we inhabit. And we can work to reduce our own biases. The judgement we pass to people not like us. The groups we throw together–older people, fat people, handicapped people, people who are not your religion, immigrants, the mentally ill, people who have ideas that are different from yours–are people. Not particularly different from you. Biases start small and grow when fed with anger and hatred. Stop feeding yours.

Your emotions may not be in your control, but your actions are. Just for today, we can move away from thinking small and choose the bigger view of freedom.

You can see other reactions from cartoonists here.

And you can read a great reply from Betsy Phillips writing in her blog, Pith in the Wind. Here’s an excerpt: “A lot of us — women, minorities, GLBT people — are already well-aware of how the totalitarians in our midst use terror tactics to shut us up. Radical Muslims aren’t the problem. They’re A problem. And as terrible as the Charlie Hedbo attack is, I’m less afraid of being killed by radical Muslims than I am that we will find it easier to make ourselves smaller and less controversial in order to feel safer, not just from radical Muslims, but from whoever is willing to make themselves terrifying.”

–Quinn McDonald worked at a newspaper and learned to value freedom of speech.

 

Filed under: Creativity, Links, resources, idea boosts Tagged: Charlie Hebdo, rerpair the world, terrorists in France

Make Something

Once you learn how to make something–a pot, a story, a song, a video game–it changes how you see things forever. Once you write a story, you hear pieces of dialogue in conversations, plot lines while walking down a busy street.

This parabolic curve is made of nothing but straight lines. Your eyes don’t lie, but your brain does.

Making something allows you to fail while learning, build something better, and not be at the mercy of a boss who doesn’t understand you and work you never liked.

When I worked in advertising agencies, I learned how to set type. This is a skill no one needs anymore because computers do it. Although it has been decades since I spec’d type, I have a deep appreciation for typefaces, their subtle differences, and the shape of letters. Still. It makes a difference on my taste, my judgment and my idea of what matters. Just because I learned that skill.

A few days ago, I signed up for a drawing class. I have to draw in ink. I hate it. I want to go back to drawing in pencil. In my homework, I thought about drawing in pencil, then going over it in ink. But what would that teach me? I signed up to learn something new, something hard.

It’s hard to follow the rules. But that’s the point of learning. How I drew before taught me something, this method will teach me something else. My eyes don’t lie, but my brain does. “What do you need this class for?” “Draw the way YOU want.” “You don’t need someone to force their way on you.”  That’s my brain, trying to get me to go back to what I know instead of stumbling along in something I don’t.

I won’t learn a thing by looking at someone else’s artwork and judging it. I need to try and fail drawing with ink, try and succeed, learn what works and what doesn’t. When I practice, I learn something. Something about drawing. Something about myself. Something about the creative process that my clients struggle through.

My coaching clients do important work. I cannot allow myself to do less.

—Quinn McDonald is struggling in a drawing class to be a better coach.

 

Filed under: Inner Hero/Inner Critic, Journal Pages Tagged: drawing in ink, learning to draw, why art is important

Brain Freeze

Three nights of freezing weather has done damage. The bougainvillea turned black at the top, then the middle, and finally the bottom–one section per day.  The top third of the lemon tree caught the cold air and the lemons at the top of the tree froze, then rapidly started disintegrating. Freeze cloth protected the pencil cactus and agaves, but the last night, when it was not supposed to freeze, caught me by surprise. Living in the desert prepares you for loss, but generally, it’s the summer heat that does a plant in.

The arborist was here the day after the last freeze. He was here to trim the cypress hedge, which is dormant and can take the trim right now.

I asked about the citrus trees–should they be trimmed now? “No,” he said, “Citrus trees will leaf out when cut, and that shouldn’t happen right now, or they will be badly damaged if there’s another freeze. And it’s early January.”

Similar to writing or drawing. There are times that my journal pages are trite and boring, and somehow the effort doesn’t show. I could rip out and discard the page, but that will just put a lot of pressure on me to make the next page “make up for the loss,” or to make the next idea the perfect one.

Like a killing frost requires me to leave the dead plants alone, it’s a good idea to leave a displeasing journal page in place. Give it time to teach me what I need to learn. Keep me from deserting the whole idea or branching out in a different direction too quickly.

Instead, I’ll become used to the imperfect page, and grow around it. The roots of the page will still be there, and new ideas will grow from them. And once I’ve learned what I have to learn, I can choose to cover the page with gesso and start out in a new direction. Just like the bougainvillea. Loss isn’t always a bad thing here in the desert. It can lead to a new, thriving, growth.

–-Quinn McDonald keeps a journal in all seasons.

Filed under: Journal Pages, Nature, Inside and Out, The Writing Life Tagged: a faild journal page, a journal page that failed, keeping a journal, life like nature

Getting Back to Work

If you took time off over the holidays, today is the first day back to work. Even if you don’t do resolutions, January feels like a fresh start. A fresh start always feels good. But as the year goes on, we make mistakes and get older and do some things over and over, and maybe get criticized, and the fresh feeling leaves and we abandon any hope of change because “what good is it anyway?”

Sometimes that’s good–we don’t have to re-invent ourselves every day. Much like getting over the first page in a journal, getting over “messing up” the first days of the new year can be a relief.

The assignment here was to draw with permanent ink on watercolor. No erasing, no second-guessing. Just looking at what you did.

To make sure I didn’t raise expectations too high, on January 1 and 2 I slept in, didn’t take my walk, and let the laundry go so I could draw. And wrote 5,000 words in the new book.

The important next step is to keep trying. Small things. I signed up for two online classes–both drawing/watercolor classes. And my decision was simple: I would post what I drew every day, even if it was awful. Even if I hated it. Even if everyone else posted gorgeous, advanced work (yep, they did). Because it doesn’t make sense to show only the good side. It’s just as useful to show the things that didn’t work out, because they are the ones you learn the most from.

The modern philosopher Alain de Botton reminds us to put success in perspective:

What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

You might like Bett ideas enough to watch his TED talk.

It’s Monday and you are ready to get back to your routine. Make it the routine you want. Know why you are choosing it. Because if it doesn’t make sense to you, it sure won’t help get you where you want to go.

–-Quinn McDonald is a writer and creativity coach. She’s not sure she’s ready for this Monday, but she is jumping right in.

 

 

 

Filed under: Art in Progress, Links, resources, idea boosts, The Writing Life Tagged: fresh starts with old hearts, starting over, success