AAARGH, must fight off procrastination urges
Yes, it's a carnivorous monster fish lamp. Yes, my children actually are scared of it.
You know, that might actually be a little dramatic – I DID spend a total of about an hour today working on the manuscript for GEEKS, GIRLS & SECRET IDENTITIES, after all, and with everybody back at work and the baby still doing his thing that feels pretty good for a weekday. Still, I've been having these urges to do other non-revising things, as I periodically do. What, Mike, do you mean like writing a blog post? Oh HAR DE HAR HAR, you're really funny. No, I mean making tangible, 3-dimensional stuff with my hands, like I used to do back in my art student days, or even in my pre-parenthood days.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Not being able to make frightening sculptural objects that frighten the children because I'm putting all my creative energies into the book that I have under contract is the situation I actually want to be in! OBVIOUSLY, duh, why go to all the trouble of pursuing the book deal otherwise? But I do like engaging in more than one kind of creative activity when it's possible – it's like cross-training, right? Or taking a multidisciplinary approach to things, if you prefer vaguely organizational-sounding verbiage to vaguely athletic-sounding verbiage. I think this line of thought may have been spurred by this post Adam Rex made on Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast, which I dimly remembered and decided to go hunting for after THE TRUE MEANING OF SMEKDAY recently won the Odyssey Award. Cool, huh? The post about the image for the Headless Horseman's Blog, that is, although it's also very cool about the Odyssey Award too. There's a real and huge benefit to being an author/illustrator, I guess – you really are required to do the two different art forms. It's not quite so necessary when you're crafting the prose all by its lonesome, although that doesn't stop Maggie Stiefvater from making awesome book trailers or whipping up Sharpie guitars to give away in contests.
I should be able to come up with some cross-creative thing as my very own shtick, don't you think? Giant fish-shaped floor lamps aren't really in the cards right now, partly because of space issues, and partly because the one pictured above actually does scare the crap out of my children (I gave it to a friend). Maybe I should start practicing the ukulele again? But that's a performance-oriented thing. I guess I could write a new song and play it on the ukulele and record a video of myself playing it and edit the video with some still photos and b-roll footage and get the old band back together to play along and borrow a friend's ProTools setup to record the song and…aw forget it. If I did all that stuff I wouldn't have time to shirk my revising obligations via this blog…
m.
