Small Thoughts about Big Projects

Belly is full of hearty Josh-cooked dinner (meatloaf and veg), brain is drained of anything but the most rudimentary of creative impulses (such as, the impulse to post something, anything, in the blog every night. Looks like the habit has been integrated into the system.) Thus, only a few small thoughts before bed, mostly to do with some of the creative urges and projects that have been percolating in my brain lately.

I've spent a lot of time over this last week thinking about story dilemmas in my novel. I've taken pages of notes. I think I'm finally almost worked through the tangles enough to begin the actual writing again. I am going to try to get up early tomorrow and actually string sentences together. I'm feeling pretty good about the story, it's time to get it moving forward again.

I've also been thinking a lot about our family photos, and about organizing and scrapbooking them. Today I ordered approximately 100 prints of pictures from Eli's first 8 weeks of life from Ofoto, and really my intention is to begin putting together the Baby Book for Eli before the new baby comes along. Of course I also want to finish posting all the other digipix I have archived on my computer to my family photos website, and then get the missing year's worth of images from August 2002 through October 2003 from Josh's computer onto mine (or at least onto CD and from there up onto the web). And then of course there's my parents' 60th birthday scrapbook which I promised them would be done over a year ago and I'm still only like 5 pages into (guilt!!). Not to mention my own sadly abandoned scrapbook which is still languishing somewhere around Christmas 1999.

I've also been experiencing the urge to get back into painting. I love the writing and have definitely been prioritizing it (and intend to keep doing so until this damn book is finished, which at this rate could be another few years) but I am also feeling the need for pure color and form, for texture and the actual act of putting brush or brayer to canvas. I swear I am going to set up my paints (and my photo/scrapbooking stuff) in our garage one of these weekends soon. If it was out, I'd be much more apt to use it.

Ack. Too many creative projects, too little time. I need like a 3 month sabbatical (which sadly, a maternity leave is just NOT).