Currently Reading ...

Positively 4th Street, a book about Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez and Richard Farina. It's such a rare delight to find yourself in that place where you're aching to just get home and hear the whistle on the kettle that says it's done so you can get in bed with the book you're into. It hasn't happened to me enough lately, because i'm always 'working' in my head instead of relaxing.
And of course, even with this book, it's just research on the bohemian folk scene for my novels 'Hipster' and 'Gypsy.' Fortunately David Hajdu is an incredibly gifted researcher with a knack for verbosity that makes his detailed rendition of the emergence of the folk scene in Cambridge and Greenwich Village in the early sixties a visually evocative, psychologically profound reading experience.
Oh and the fact that the myers-brigg personality test I once took compared me most closely to Joan Baez makes it even more fun, especially since she was gorgeous, unique and iconically successful!

my horoscope this week

To extract enough gold to make a wedding ring, a mining company must process a ton of ore. In a similar way, many writers generate a swamp of unusable sentences on their way to distilling the precise message they really want to deliver. Please keep these examples in mind as you evaluate your own recent progress, Virgo. It may seem like you're moving at a crawl and producing little of worth. But according to my analysis of the omens, you're on your way to producing the equivalent of a gold ring.

Wow, and right on the heels of ellen page selling a show to HBO just like Strays, followed by an assignment to condense everything i'm working on into a tidy little writer's pitch package.

thanks on-ever-insightful-one at freewillastrology.com!

Thoreau Gets It

* I learned this, at least, by my experiment;
that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
from the "Conclusion" to Walden *


Just a lil' bit of a hoot 'n a holler of a hello...I've been missing in action on here lately. This is for more or less 2 reasons:
1. I've been doing 'The Artist's Way' a 12-week course of integrating 'morning pages', a freehand, free-form daily exercise in purging on the page, into my routine. This has taken most of my creative free time, but it has been highly worth it. I'm learning to be more disciplined and focused as well as more aware of my subconscious, which leads me to:
2. I'm learning that I need to complete what I start; even if the end result is crappy (the fear of which, I suppose, in addition to that of success, is what is holding me back), it will BE COMPLETED instead of remaining another secret arrow in the quiver I carry around like an invisible little secret. What I'm also realizing is that I've overestimated my ability to remember the specific details of a project and, upon return after alleged 'reflection,' the end result is not necessarily going to turn out any better for the wait.

So what I suppose I'm saying is that my artistic journey is intact, I have not abandoned ship, I have not succummbed to the quicksand, and I do see the clean, clear light of completion still sparkling, and ever-nearer.
Also, to hark back to an update on my New Year's reflections/resolutions on the power of Owl Medicine, I have seen, to date, three owls this year, and all in interesting and meaningful moments and ways.
This picture looks like the one (minus the snow) that flew past me in the dark a few months back.