While on vacation, I got a really good sense of the work ethic I’ve built up for myself for writing and drawing. I’ve written about creative methods and discipline before (see my Etsy store for the zine about it), but I have a better sense of the long game now. I want to write about that, but I’ve also been meaning to come at it from another way: what I wish college had taught me about practical, everyday creativity.

At my parents’ high school, everyone was required to take a class that was basically Everyday Life Skills. Checkbook balancing, banking, budgeting, getting licenses, owning things: this class wasn’t home ec, but it did teach basic everyday skills that one might not learn at home. It’s the class my mom remembers most fondly, the one she felt proved more useful more often than anything else.

I wish my college had a similar class, a kind of cap for four years of sheltered life and abundant time. My last semester, I did a creative thesis, wherein I wrote a 75-odd page draft of a novel.* It was an incredibly fruitful time for me – I met my advisor once a fortnight, and in between visits, I wrote my little 20-year-old ass off. A friend said she had a hard time getting two or three pages done every two weeks; I was handing in 10 or 14 pages at a go. I had a beautiful room on Beacon Street in Boston with a picture window as long as my bed and taller than me (I’m not short) that overlooked the frozen waves of the Charles River. I miss that room. I sat at my computer, spent most of my days alone, and wrote and wrote. I’m not sure I’ve come close to being that generally satisfied since then, which is both sad and heartening.

That winter, I graduated, and after that… nothing. Almost nothing at all for several years; it’s taken some shaking up in the last 12-18 months to get me to a place where I consider myself creatively worthwhile, to shake that underpinning of self-loathing for not doing what I’m designed to do.

I’ve given some thought about what I would have liked to know. What should they have told me about bringing that hothoused college-based creativity into daily life? What hot tip might have kept me from being mostly creatively dormant for the better part of three years? What could the academic establishment have told me about matching a day job with your creative dreams and needs?

In the meantime, I put it to you, internets: what would you have liked to learn in your last formal education that might have brought you closer to what you actually wanted to do, and more quickly? A class, a suggestion, a mantra? What would have sorted you out earlier? Or if you’re one of those lucky people who managed to do it right, what were you told? How did you approach it?

*This novel has suddenly been showing up prominently in my thoughts, which is weird. Maybe I’ll finish it properly one day after all.

I learned to knit back in twenty-ought-four, following a night of patient teaching from my friend Leah. I’m not an expert knitter now, but I’ve knit a few sweaters, endless dishcloths, and a menagerie of other things. (I’m on Ravelry, if you’re so inclined.)

Before I learned to knit, I didn’t get cables and bobbles, and I found overly complicated colorwork to be more distracting than impressive. After knitting for a few years, I realized why these things are attractive to a certain sector of knitters: it keeps things interesting.

Now that I can knit-purl-knit-purl with no problem, slip stitches and twist cables and make lovely seamless hats with robotically perfect ribbed brims, I find myself looking at patterns with an eye for a challenge. I find myself looking at things that might be considered grandma-esque sweater patterns by the average observer. (No link for that one, as I’m not going to be a dink and link even to an anonymous online sweater picture for ridicule. Picture sailboats and ducks and crazy stitches; you know what I mean.)

It was a crazy realization, made somewhere in my interminable knitting of dishcloths with more and more garish colorways. The weirder, the better. Leaves? Bats? Boobs? Owls made of cables? Yarn that goes green-orange-blue-yellow-grey-green? Bring it on. If you just knit basic top-down stockinette sweaters for the rest of your life… well, I don’t think you could, really. I can’t. And it is, of course, enormously satisfying to feel like you’ve tamed one of these deliberately difficult patterns. Fortunately, even sweaters are relatively small mountains to climb.

I went to the Grand Canyon today for the first time with Kimberly, one of my nearest and dearest. We drove through south central, central, and northern Arizona on the way. The terrain varied so much I felt like I drove across three separate planets: saguaro cactus-laden Scottsdale, striped mesa-filled Sedona, and finally the scrubby plains and hills of northern Arizona, so abrasive they look like they’d bring the shine out of anyone if given long enough. It’s the mesas that got to me, and the canyon itself. There were infinite stripes of infinitely subtle colors that have been brought to the surface by the Colorado River and rain and tectonic movement, so many that my meager rods and cones weren’t quite up to the challenge. My circa-2004 digital camera sure as hell wasn’t. I took a few pictures, but mostly I just stared, amazed that my depth perception seemed to stop – I knew I wasn’t taking in true distances after a point.

And suddenly, I understood something. I’ve long wondered why artists would paint what I’ve considered boring-ass landscapes – amateurish (or not) oils trying to capture Southwestern vistas but forever falling far short, usually ending up in the bland, revoltingly neutral realm of motel art. And yes, probably that’s why a lot of it exists: the world has a sad, unquenchable need for inoffensive art. However, I think many artists make these places into their white whales. Most photographs will never capture it; instead, they tilt at their canvases, trying to reproduce it.

The paintings are still, in my opinion, heinous, and will forever remind me of those ORIGINAL ART BLOWOUT SALE WHOA ads I see on TV when I visit my grandma in St. Louis. But I’ll be a little more understanding about them now.

See? Hopeless.

“Breanne, did you really just list a bunch of podcasts you listen to?”

“‘Shit yes I did, Breanne. I’m on vacation this week, and watching my podcasts accumulate in iTunes while I’m away from my desk has reminded me just how very very very much I listen to these things.”

“Still… really?”

“Yes! They’ve actually become a very accurate mirror of how much I’m drawing. No drawing? Podcast backup. Net result: tragedy.”

“You’re not just showing off your excellent taste in free online shows, you scavenger you?”

“No! Well… no, no. It’s more that I’m reminded of how important this stuff is, and how much I looooove giving people recommendations. This isn’t the extent of my subscriptions, but it’s a good slice, once I took out the video ones. Furthermore, it reminds me of how much I love receiving them. So, world, send away.”

1. My first thought on unpacking yesterday, upon arriving here in Vacationland, was, “Oh, thank goodness, my bottle of ink didn’t leak.”

2. I had a dream before I left that something ended up broken in my luggage. That thing? My nib.

3. One of the things I was most looking forward to (aside from four days with one of my best friends, which is number one) was time to sit and draw and write. I’m very much in that mode right now; I love it.

4. I’m thinking about the rigorous drawing schedule I need to get on when I get home, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

5. What did my friend present me with, once we were finished unpacking? Notes on Furlough.

6. What did I do tonight, once we got home from eating out (Italian and – mysteriously, in Arizona – Tasti D-Lite) and shopping (Nordstrom Rack)? I inked.

That’s Escape Pod coming in through those headphones.

I had two penciled drawings I did at work this week, and I finally got to work on them some more. I probably won’t paint them until I get back, though… although I did bring watercolors, it was just my dry palette, not my tubes. I’m not sure I trust them for work I consider more detailed – and certainly not for flesh tones.

Being in this area of Arizona is odd; in any given room, my friend and I are usually the only people under 50, and possibly the only ones under 70. I got here yesterday and I’ve been carded three times. That’s more than usually happens in three months. I think it’s a good antidote for us, though – we both suffer from the malady of feeling and acting like we’re a million years old, when we’re still pretty young, by the scale of our day. Feeling past your prime, acting like your useful years are behind you? Have I got the tonic for you: visit a town in the southern US in snowbird season! You’ll feel spry and nubile again in no time.

Today, by the grace of craigslist and a man named Mark, John and I managed to score tickets to the sold-out Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival. I’ve gone for three years now, and it’s been interesting to see their submissions evolve. A good third of the first one was just about full-on terrible, because a new festival didn’t attract the best-quality filmmakers. It was worthwhile even then, though, and it’s gotten markedly better year after year.

Still, I found myself more critical this year, and I think I really enjoyed fewer than I usually do. However, being in a script-writing state of mind, I found myself pulling lessons from them. Such as:

I hate fanboy humor to the point that watching it for more than a minute makes me physically uncomfortable. This is my problem, based on a past relationship, but that knowledge doesn’t make my reactions less potent.

So, when not entertaining, at least educational. That’s good.

I’ve been painting and drawing a lot this week. Here’s one I finished last night.

Bring on the bizarre Google searches!

I’m looking into making art prints, so I’ll be posting far more pictures once I have a means of getting them to people.

It’s been watercolor week at Chateau Breanne. Mostly I’ve been doing painting/drawing hybrids, like the one in the last post. Last night, I was working on a painting for a swap (via Swap-Bot) called Little Works of Art. Whatever it was (sculpture, painting, fabric thing, what have you) had to be at least 4×4 inches and no more than 12×12. I settled on 4×6, as that’s the size of my beloved watercolor postcard paper.

Not based in reality at all, even the tiniest bit.

Usually I lean on the crutch that is my beloved bold black ink lines. I’m feeling steadier with a paintbrush, enough that I didn’t have that feeling of, “Oh, god, one more paint stroke will fuck it all up!” while I was finishing it. Nice.

The jellyfish will shortly be making its way to Australia, where it will promptly be destroyed and consumed by the region’s myriad and marvelous incredibly deadly native species.

It’s been a rough week for editing. I’m still uneasy about Furlough, and I go between thinking, “For once in your life, finish something, just make it and do it and look at it again later so you can learn what went wrong and fix it next time,” and quailing as I whinge, “But it’s my first big long comic ever and I want it to be PERFECT.” Neither of these are helpful.
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I’ve added two new projects to the About Me page. Both are zines. Both will be completed in the next few months. I’ll add details and previews about them as those things begin to exist.

It’s not usually a term I use, as it suggests that my cat is a child substitute. (He is not, as I want a cat, but very much do not want children. There are other distinctions, but that’s the only relevant one.)

However, Christmas has made the occasional cat/baby similarity hard to ignore. A friend’s blog about having a baby has had shown some eerie parallels to my life lately. Christina and I both spent the morning playing with our little friends in seas of wrapping paper. We both enjoy pestering our little friends until they make funny noises or faces, and then sometimes we take pictures of them. There’s that sense of seeing the world in a new way because of the way some other, smaller, less developed creature reacts to things.

This morning (aka 1-4 pm), boyfriend and I did Christmas at home with le chat; this evening was spent at a friend’s house, watching his pissed off, territorial cat interact with an invading Boston terrier in a red hoodie. Both of these things made me want to try drawing them. (White cat is mine; black cat is the friend’s.) I usually (um, obsessively) draw people; I should draw animals more often, because it’s fun. Secondary benefit: if I make the cat’s nose or ears too big, I’m not going to hear about it.

I’m working on a cat zine, and the preoccupation is clearly rearing its furry head.

*Edited December 26th to add a link to Christina’s blog, once I got her ok about referring people to a site about her kidlet.

I’ve officially asked two trusted readers to look over my wonktastic comic script. I should clarify, I suppose, that these aren’t scripts in the traditional way – the way I’ve found of writing out my comic scripts is regular fictional prose, but the text surrounding the dialogue isn’t done artfully. Instead, it’s done as transparently as possible, as they connect to a scattering of images in my head. Here, let me show you a bit:

Moira stands against the wall, uncommonly uneasy in her suit. She fiddles with her scarf. “What I say now has to be strictly between us. If I could produce some kind of confidentiality agreement for this, I would, but it’s off the record, and so…”

“Of course, Moira. I’m like my mom – we could’ve worked for the CIA.”

Moira smiles ruefully. “Yes, I know. That’s why I’m telling you this. That, and I’d hate to see you make a mistake when I could prevent it.”

Kate has an odd look on her face; she’s rarely unable to predict things at work. This is one of those times.

Usually, this is what you write when you don’t know how to say what you want to say – what they teach in screenwriting classes, to lay down the bones and then fancy them up with the usual oblique ways the human mind works. It’s just strange to send this kind of barebones, inelegant thing to actual people, ones I respect.

Sketches to come later this week.