Although the ten-year anniversary of the .org won’t come for another four months, in a lot of ways today is the anniversary of the start of what led to the .org. It was on this day in 2000 that I first began The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The life lessons I learned from it really got to me, and made me realize that I wasn’t happy with how my personal or artistic lives were going. Within four months I’d abandoned several projects I was working on, and launched the .org as a Web project to really showcase my personal and artistic lives, such as they were at the time. (I continue to resist the temptation to scrub the .org of my earlier immaturity.) Obviously a lot has happened since then, from the house fire and going back to college, to Dad’s death and now, at long last, mounting a serious and sustained effort that has seen me complete major stages of several large projects, including rough drafts of two books, a rough draft of one screenplay, and several drafts of another screenplay that I believe is close to being ready to shop around to agents and studios.
With big anniversaries like this, it’s hard not to reminisce, to look back at all that has happened these past ten years to me, as a person as an artist, and what all lies ahead for me if I stay on this current trajectory. I still have an annoying tendency to live my life with too many regrets, and given how much progress I’ve made with so many projects so far in 2010, it’s hard not to wish I’d been able to have that focus and discipline for my creative work earlier, to wonder where I might be now and what I might be doing if I’d started all this work sooner. I’m trying not to live in the past now; I can only change the present and the future, and continuing to work on these projects, and develop new ones, will be important not just for my artistic life, but for my personal life as well, as several aspects of my personal life have become easier to deal with knowing that I can accomplish so much when I put my mind to it.
Perhaps the most visible reminder of what I can when I put my mind to it is my collection of Morning Pages, the three daily written pages Cameron prescribes in The Artist’s Way to help clear one’s mind. Although my discipline has faltered in several other areas, in ten years I have yet to miss a single day’s Morning Pages, in spite of all the tragedies and difficulties around me. The manila envelopes I store my Morning Pages in now take up over two feet of space on the shelf in my closet, and I intend to keep adding to that collection every day for the rest of my life. Although Morning Pages alone cannot solve the big problems, they’ve been an invaluable tool for me these past ten years, and they also serve as a visual symbol of what I can do when I put my mind to it.
That being said, it’s been hard for me to put that discipline to work in other areas of my life, especially my artistic life. I guess there came a point last year when I just got sick and tired of telling myself that there would be opportunities for my art later, and now wasn’t a good time because Mom was sick or I was having personal problems or any number of other excuses I made. I’m still kind of bad when it comes to creating excuses for why I haven’t done X or Y thing, I admit, but for now, at least, I’m not having to make excuses for why I’m not working on my art because I’m working on my art. It’s not always easy to do so, there are times when I really have to push myself just to do anything, and yes, there have been a few days in there where I didn’t do any art, but I’ve gotten back up every time. I’ve written over 300,000 words this year just for my short stories, books, and screenplays (not counting blogging, Morning Pages, tweeting, or anything else), and even though I’m slowing that pace down because of all the editing I need to do on my books and screenplays, I’ve still got two big projects waiting in the wings to get started on, and I’ll probably get the first drafts of both of them done by the end of the year if I keep this focus on.
It hasn’t been an easy ten years, and in a lot of ways I feel like I’m only really beginning to see results from it now, but the important thing is that I’m producing results. I just hope I maintain this focus and work ethic so these next ten years are much more fruitful than the first ten.