Now that I’ve turned in final grades for this past semester, I should have more time over the next week to work on my bigger projects. Even though spring semester doesn’t start until the 25th of January, I will have some extra preparation to do for that, simply because I’ll be teaching two courses I’ve never taught before, as well as my first creative writing course in over a decade (which will require more work for me because it was originally scheduled for another instructor…
This past July marked twenty years since I started The Artist’s Way for the first time. One of the tools of The Artist’s Way is what author/creator Julia Cameron calls Morning Pages: Three longhand pages of stuff written every morning, without fail, shortly after waking up. When I first read through the book before starting the programme, I was incredibly reluctant to even try doing Morning Pages, not just because of the time commitment involved but also because they felt like they’d be pointless to…
This coming weekend will mark the first time I’ll get to teach Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, since I’m using it as the framework for the creativity workshop I get to run this summer. Appropriately enough, I’ll be doing this nearly twenty years to the day — the 8th of July, 2000 — when I first started reading The Artist’s Way myself. That book wound up changing the trajectory of my life in a major way over the following twenty weeks, and it’s hard…
The first video-intensive website I remember visiting is a special site that Norelco built to sell a new razor that was designed to capitalize on a new trend, one that’s called “manscaping” these days. Not only was the instantly-loading video kind of a shock to me at first (as was automatically-playing audio, which had become a no-no back when so many of us were loading our websites up with crappy MIDI sound files), but the website, shaveeverywhere.com (which is now owned by a domain hoarder,…
Last month was incredibly exhausting for me. In addition to all the weather-related problems I’ve been documenting online (perhaps too much, I know), and some challenges at work, I’ve been chin-deep in research for my next big book. An opportunity arose for me to go deep into one thread of my research, in order to write an article for a major academic journal, so I spent an awful lot of time tackling that, doing work that should definitely help when I get around to writing…