Developing New Ways to Express Creativity:

I am all about creativity.  At work there are often restrictions on how far you can take that creativity, even if you’re in a creative job like mine.  I always tell people, “they pay me to write and take pictures, and it doesn’t get much better than that.”  However, when you work in Law Enforcement, you can only take that creativity so far.  Choosing the right word, and taking the best picture you can while dealing with topics where it is critical that truth and formality is maintained most of the time can sometimes feel a bit limiting at times when you’re like me and like to make things up.  
This week, on the other hand, I’ve been developing a new skill that while you are still seeking the truth of your best interpretation, you still expend more creativity in the creation of what you hope is a good likeness, composite drawing.  You are working from a description, and possibly pictures of facial features, to help get an accurate impression of a person’s face.  I’ve always enjoyed drawing, but since I’ve never had any classes, it generally takes me longer than I have time for to get a drawing to a point where I’m even remotely happy with it.  This class cut down on that time considerably while giving me focused skills for drawing composites.  
I also feel like you just can’t have enough skills, and you should never stop learning, so this class filled both those criteria, and took me out of my comfort zone it an excellent direction.  I am now a composite artist, albeit a new one, who is still perfecting her skills, but I believe that all forms of creativity merge, and the more you exercise your creative muscles, the better honed they become, just like your physical muscles.  I’m hoping this will also speed up my progress on book two of the Tales from Atlantis.  It’s in revisions, but there’s something, I just can’t put my finger on yet, that I need to change, and I will not put it out until I figure it out.  I want you to have only the best of me and my work.  I will include an excerpt that I’m good with for a bit of a teaser. 

Excerpt: Reaching for Beyond
Even when I pushed past the emotions permeating the room, the blood and the darkness were still there. Blood had soaked in to every visible surface in the bedroom, and darkness flooded the place, reaching for me, trying to soak me in its slimy energy. More blood stood in puddles where the floor and furniture had absorbed all they could. What was left of the body was lying on the bed in another pool of blood, and that increased my anger. It was hard to tell, but I thought it had been a young woman. She didn’t look much more than twenty, but it was hard to tell with her face distorted by her screams.
The fact that the body was in pieces made it more difficult to tell for sure the victim’s gender or age, but her head had fallen back when her throat was torn out, and even though the killer had eventually severed it from the body, the head, still seemed to be leaning back, screaming. Somehow, the killer affixed the head to the headboard.  Her torso was lying in the center of the bed.  I couldn’t really tell what color the spread had been.  It was all dark red now.  Her stomach was ripped open, intestines, and internal organs spilling from it like so much spaghetti.  It was almost a warped parody of the human form.  The heart had been extracted from the torso and placed on top of it. The heart and torso, lying on the bed in the center of the room, looked more like a gruesome centerpiece than something that had recently been part of a human being. The arms and legs were almost shredded, but you didn’t notice at first because they were separated from the rest of the body.  At first it looked like the victim had been pulled apart because of the way all the pieces were separated.  Body parts lay on the bed, on the dresser, in the corners of the room, and under the window.  As I focused on the heart, a pattern began to force its way through my appalled senses and into my consciousness. The body hadn’t just been pulled apart.  There was method in this destruction.