Bits & Baubles
The latest ~
I’m about to head out the door with the edited galleys of my book to FedEx them back to my editor. This has been an intense two weeks of edits, re-writes, and photo work ~ oodles of tiny details that I’ve loved giving my full attention to.
A new story is coming out tomorrow in Skirt! magazine ~ I’ll post a link right here in the morning.
Later this week I have the honor of welcoming my dear friends back to the U.S. after their nine-month around the world journey. Our home is their last stop before heading back to their home, and I’m so excited I can hardly stand it! Please head over to their blog and give them an inspired welcome back.
For everyone headed to Squam Art Workshops this week ~ I wish you a creative, inspiring time there. You will have plenty of extraordinary company, so soak it all in!!
There are a few more exciting projects in the works, but I can’t spill the beans just yet. In the meantime, head over to Scoutie Girl for the latest from Liz Kalloch.
Five Things
1. Performing Craft ~ Gestures of Resistance
2. Rachana Reddy ~ found over at ArtnLight.
3. Also from ArtnLight ~ I love the clean look and feel of this home.
4. Too busy to do yoga? It’s time for you to see what Marianne Elliott is up to.
5. Someone near and dear to my heart ~ Nita June Davanzo ~ is organizing The Wise Creative ~ a multi-dimensional workshop being taught at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado on Saturday, June 18, 2011. Email creativeaide@gmail.com for details!
Thoughts from the Windy City
I’m writing from high above the streets of Chicago, camped out in our hotel room while my husband does his wheeling and dealing around the city. We checked in on Tuesday evening, and I haven’t left the hotel once. While it was tempting to make plans to see the sights and perhaps visit a friend or two, I had to keep this visit on the down-low, and use these two days of uninterrupted time to wrap up the editing of my manuscript. I received the galleys just over a week ago, and they are due in less than a week. Tomorrow we head north to Detroit to visit family, so once we lift off out of O’Hare, my time to edit is over. We get back home Monday evening, and I’ll wrap up a few more loose ends on the book before sending it back to my editor Tuesday. All of which means my word for the week has been focus.
I’ve decided I love hotels ~ no dishes, no laundry, and everything I need under one shiny roof. There’s a great view at breakfast, the coffee is good, and I can get a cup to go before heading back to our room for the hours I’ve had to spend hunched over my book. I took advantage of the gym yesterday, running on the treadmill as everyone hustled along the Chicago River below me. It has been a gray, stormy week, so the weather has made the idea of staying in our room to work all day especially appealing.
I haven’t been to Chicago – at least to the city itself – in more than two decades, something I find astonishing for some reason. My last string of visits here was during college, and memories from that period of my life have been flooding in ever since we arrived. This initially took me by surprise, but it actually makes sense. It is as if I secured a string somewhere in Chicago the last time I left - in 1990 – and have returned with the other end of it. And this string now encircles all the experiences, journeys, and memories I’ve created during my time away. Because it has been so many years since I’ve been here, that string holds a lot, and has inspired me to think about who I was when I last strolled along Wacker Drive and who I am today.
The first time I came here, which wasn’t long before the last time I visited, was the first time I tried sushi. It was also the first time I’d heard of a crazy place called California Pizza Kitchen. It was a time when my luggage got lost, havoc ensued, and I was upgraded to first class on the flight home. It was one of my first visits to a real city – at least one outside of Washington, D.C. where I grew up – and I threw my bags in our hotel room and practically ran out the door to soak it all in. Looking out the window from our hotel and seeing Sears Tower in the distance, I realize I’d forgotten how alive visiting this city made me feel – how I felt like I was taking some of my first steps into adulthood, and into a life of adventure and energy and movement.
It would have been nice to have a more intimate visit with the city this week, but other priorities had to take center stage. I needed to clear off my editing to do list in order to keep all our time in Detroit wide open, and I’m just not wired to ask for a deadline extension. But I’ve been content with the few minutes I’ve stolen here and there to simply stare out the window, and think happy thoughts about a city that brought something alive in me when I was barely 21 years old – a flame that has only expanded, a passion that will never die out.
A Small Thought for Today
{Hipstamtic taken in Amsterdam in Spring 2010}
“There is no greater experience than honesty.” ~Rabbi Mayer Schmukler, heard at a talk I attended last week
In the Toolbox: “Making It”
Today’s topic: ”Making It”
I will never forget the day I received my first wholesale order for my handmade greeting cards. After sending a few mailers to stores around California, a completed order form arrived in my mailbox from a shop in Santa Cruz. When I think of that moment, and the tears that erupted at the sight of my very own order form filled out, I can still taste the sense of giddy disbelief that this meant I had made it, or was at least well on my way. By then I had shipped small purchases to friends and friends of friends, but an order from an actual store was something entirely different. It marked the crossover from small-time hobby/business to bona fide enterprise, perhaps not in size but in customer base and distribution. I still have that order, and will always think of it as one of the most pivotal moments in my experience as a professional artist.
I don’t think I really believed I had made it when I unfolded that order, but I certainly considered it an important milestone in the growth of my business – a business I began with a very specific (and grand) vision of where I wanted to take it. If one buyer liked my cards enough to display them in her store, then perhaps another buyer would too. And if stores were buying my cards, then sales reps would want to carry them. And if reps were presenting my cards to buyers all over the country, then there was the possibility that I could create a retail customer base in the tens of thousands. This meant I might pop up on the radar of potential licensees, and ultimately an agent, and I’d reach my goal of becoming a global licensed brand. And that is essentially how it went over the course of the next six years, step by step by step.
Which means I made it, right?
Yes. And no. Because “making it” isn’t about one particular thing. It isn’t about getting one magic order, contract, agent, or book deal. It is about all of those things and none of those things, about all the different ways any number of achievements make something feel real and solid and substantive. For example, I quickly learned that when I secured a rep in a new territory, that was great, but what I really needed to see was orders. And orders from new retail venues were also great, but I never got too excited until there was a re-order (because re-orders meant the cards were selling.) Then after a few re-orders, the reps were calling me to say the buyers wanted to see new cards, and could you try a new package design, and hey, how about creating some cute gift tags? And so on and so on. Ditto for a license contract – a number of steps had to be made before we knew whether or not we had a “hit”. Even then, any products or designs had a limited shelf life.
The point of all this? To acknowledge that it is easy to get an idea in my head about what it means to “make it”, and think that once a certain milestone is reached my place in the line of work I’ve chosen will be permanently secured. Instead, what I’ve learned is that “making it” is a vague, almost make-believe concept, because there isn’t really a place for it in the world of reality.
Reality is that no matter how many contracts, buyers, or customers I had, have, or might have in the future, I will still need to keep working, honing, creating, re-inventing, and dreaming. This does not take away from those moments when the big orders came in, my first license contract was signed, or, most recently, I secured a book deal. Those moments are big and worth celebrating, but they’ve never come with guarantees. More to the point, I’ve come to consider them not as any kind of confirmation that “I’ve made it” but instead as opportunities to do my work. I didn’t “make it” when I got my most recent book contract; I was offered an opportunity to create something meaningful, and that is the sweetest part of the deal. Every day that I get to do the work I love, I’m making it. It is the process of building a creative life, not the pursuit of an arbitrary goal.
For more on this topic, visit a recent entry by Summer Pierre.
Five Things
2. Robyn Love knitting installations
3. Walker Evans, be still my heart. An exhibit at the Getty not to be missed.
4. A + R, on Abbot Kinney in Venice.
5. Lee Maszaros Merit Badges. It’s time for me to get a new green sash, just like the one I had for Girl Scouts.
Spring Growth
Many seeds are being planted right now, a process that requires my nose to be buried in the galleys of my book yet also attentive to my email as possibilities are discussed and coordinated. As one slightly obsessed with details, I am in my element, excited to be putting so many things together with the utmost care and focus. The quiet, inward work I am doing now will take me back out into the world before too long, with new offerings, projects, and ideas.
Entries might be on the light side while I attend to all of these happy tasks, but I’ll still be checking in, and would love to know what is making your heart happy these days.
“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke
The Blaze of Today
It is gray outside, the house quiet. The only sounds breaking the spell of silence are the gentle hum of our fridge, Tilda’s soft snoring, the dance of my fingers across the keyboard, and my own breath. The sun is supposed to begin its slow peek through the uncharacteristic drizzly weather in a few hours, which will be marvelous indeed, but right now all I want to do is stay hidden in this cloak of muted light, a sleeping puppy, and nothing on my to do list except for the perfectly quiet work of editing my manuscript. Aside from the scratch of a pen across the page, today’s work won’t produce a sound. My best efforts will come out of silence.
The Great Wall of China
After hemming and hawing about what I should write about for my latest contribution to Gypsy Girl’s Guide, I finally sat down to work on it and ended up creating one of my favorite pieces of writing. Head here to read Fate ~ a story from my recent journey to The Great Wall of China.
Five Things
1. The USB Tulip Hub from Fred Flare. One word: Precious.
2. I just updated my Amazon Bookshop, and it includes a new book by my yoga instructor, Meagan McCrary and two co-authors. Check out The Little Black Book of Big Red Flags.
3. At the risk of sounding like a Name Dropper, I met Mariel Hemingway at an event that featured my artwork, her book, and a lovely line of jewelry, and she is one of the most stunning, centered women I’ve ever met. I just found out she has a blog, and I can attest to the fact that she lives by what she writes, shares, and teaches.
4. ColorSchemer for the iPhone ~ a rainbow everywhere you go.
5. PhotoPhilanthropy ~ Photography driven by social change. Social change drive by photography.
