"Buy the Fanciful Ones: A Tale of New Shoes" Published!

Excellent news! A light-hearted CNF flash memoir piece I wrote a few months ago about new shoes was just published at The Bluebird Word.

Read the piece here: “Buy the Fanciful Ones: A Tale of New Shoes” [clickety-click].

This has been a wild and wonderful week so far: I got a rejection letter this morning for some poetry, then I got word this afternoon that my shoe piece was published, and I have another piece that was accepted a few weeks ago which will be published this week as well. Stay tuned, and thanks for all of your continued support!

Write on through all the lows and highs of this writing life—you just never know what’s next. 🎉

P.S. Here are the mentioned shoes. 😁

Reach 🤩

Reach

Sketch in colored pencils & black felt-tip pen.

I haven’t shared a doodle in a while, so I figured it was about time to break out my sketchbook and play a bit.  

I was thinking yesterday, too, about swing-arm lamps. The kind architects often have on their desks, but sometimes also students and offices. I didn’t know that they were referred to as “swing-arm” lamps until a quick search-engine search delivered that little golden nugget into my life, which I now share with you. 😉

Speaking of innovation and knowledge, I read a book two or three years ago about the Bauhaus, a German school of design, arts (including theater, sculpture, pottery, stained glass, wooden toys, and poster design), and architecture in 1919-the early 1930s. Fine arts and crafts and some very sharp-looking designs were created by young students and their professors which continue to inspire designers of furniture and architecture. They made innumerable creations in their carpentry and metal-working workshops, from chairs and swivel lamps and photography and arts posters for theater performances given at the school to coffee-and-tea sets and glassworks and weaving and you name it. If the design was geometric, spare, innovative, and functional during that time period, it was probably cooked up and refined at the Bauhaus.  

I’ve never owned a swing-arm lamp, nor a gooseneck lamp (which I think of as their fanciful second cousin), but I’ve often admired both. There’s something very appealing about the way they’re designed—form and function working hand-in-glove. They don’t just sit there stationary, but offer instant flexibility for the user. Wherever the light is needed, le voilà! Here we go; instant warm spotlight. Then, economically pushed back when not in use—until the next time.

Continued growth as a writer often requires a reaching process that combines a hearty blending of the initial sizzle of the imagination intermingled with the stability and support of consistent application, mixing the heat of creating with the cooler temperatures of refining and editing the vision into new forms for sharing.

This end-of-year time gets all of our gears turning with goals we’ve finished and those we haven’t and those we’d like to dream up for next year. Without putting pressure on ourselves (because nobody needs more of that!), it’s a good season for this kind of if-you-can-imagine-it-you-can-make-it-happen reflection.

It’s a good time for downshifting, daydreaming, and putting some plans into action for the coming months.  I have the kind of mind that needs no encouragement to cook up a project or ten and imagine the endless permutations and exciting possibilities. I also have the kind of mind (and enough experience as a writer and creative) to know it takes time, organization, trial-and-error patience, and planning to see a project to its conclusion so that it’s ready to share. I try to give my imagination free reign for a while, and then I begin to organize that wide expanse into a series of steps (accounting for setbacks and a learning curve along the way).

I’m cooking up some fun projects for 2024 that I can’t wait to share. At the moment, one project in particular is very new, wobbly, interesting ground for me, stretching what I already know with the many, many things I don’t. It includes a-million-and-one steps that I’m learning (and reading about and trial-and-erroring and trying-again-and-againing).  Stay tuned!

I am delighted to share that I have three online classes that I hope will inspire fellow creative writers and artists to invest in their own dreams and goals and talents as well as to try new creative goals that will inspire reaching into new territory as well.

If you have a friend you haven’t purchased a gift for yet or would like to invest in your own artistic process, I’d love to work with you and a friend! Mark your calendars. All three courses accepting sign-ups now 😊:

*In Tune: Writing about Music in Fiction (starting Friday, February 2, 2024; 4-week class; NEW!):

https://wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_Music.php

*An Inside Look at Launching as a Freelance Editor (one-afternoon webinar; 1-2 pm ET; Friday, April 12, 2024)

https://wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_FreelanceEditorWebinar.php

*Art Making for Authors (starting Friday, August 2, 2024; 4-week class; NEW!)

https://wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_ArtMaking.php

I also have craft books aplenty that make excellent gifts, such as: From Promising to Published:

Here’s to reaching into our imaginations and cooking up the projects that will interest and sustain our creative growth both now and throughout 2024!

Write on!

New Doodles and Reflections 🎉

I felt like doodling some teapots yesterday, and then I sat down and wrote a few reflections that fell out of my head in essay form on the theme. Just fun to share. 🌞

For a few years, I bought a lot of tea kettles. I wasn’t starting a collection; I was gifting them.

If you had invited me to your wedding or to your housewarming party or to a similar occasion in that stretch of time you likely received one of these beauties wrapped in a roll of polka-dot or confetti-print paper. I bought them one at a time, brand new, and with the individual receiver(s) in mind. They were, in that way, personalized.

Sometimes, I picked enamel ones with a spate of blue, green, or red geometric designs or tiny, hearty yellow flowers across the belly; other times, I picked a plain kettle of shiny russet or a penny color; or a glass or porcelain teapot. It depended on the store’s stock and sometimes on my mood or the color combos that seemed to match the friend or cousin or coworker I was shopping for. Some of the kettles came in printed cardboard boxes and some did not. Regardless, I hand-selected and filled-in a personalized message for each kettle.

I always added a box or two of the sachets filled with pocket-square sized, often-flavored tea (orange pekoe, black tea, green tea with mint, English breakfast tea, lemon or another fruity flavor with fun, often alliterative product names) to go along with the gift so that it was immediately useful, immediately (I hoped) a part of the recipient’s daily life.

In my enthusiasm to gift, I could have planned better. Thinking back on it now, I guess I could have/should have asked if they even liked tea. I could have just gone with something on a registry, to ensure they didn’t get doubles and have to return it. I didn’t know if any of my recipients already had kettles. I loved tea, still do, and what I wanted to gift most was what I loved most: the ritual of starting with something basic and elemental and fortifying—water that would also become some steam, herbs—and within just a small amount of time (usually less than 5 minutes) a whole experience: a break, or a companion for the morning, or afternoon, or evening when sleep was futile, was created. Over and over, this comforting surety of rest and fortification.

Most tea is made now (mine included) in a small microwave that gives a tiny chirrup of beeps and then stops. Sometimes, I wait with my eager spoon a few feet from the muted window as my mug spins and spins inside the machine, and sometimes I use that time to fish through my many boxes to find the flavor of the day. It never gets old—selecting the flavor.

I don’t have a kettle at the moment and haven’t gifted anybody one in years, but I still love everything about these simple beauties: their hollowness and their heft; their handle like a purse a great aunt handmade for me when I was a kid that lifts up or can be tucked back, out of sight when not in use; the elephant-trunk curve of the little spout; the dainty lid with its knob that makes an easy lift-and-remove or fit-into-the-groove possible.  They do not require an app to operate; they run on the thought to use them, time, and patience.

Those minutes waiting for the water to bubble are a handbrake—Slow it down, down, and down again. The additional moments of the sachet simmering fragrance also speaks a similar language—Don’t leap ten steps ahead; be here. 

One day soon, I may likely find the perfect one to gift myself. But even if that time is a ways off, there is the ritual of the cup, the water turned to curlicue steam, the flavor. There is the everyday transformation to stillness and reflection: much like words, available for combination, creation, consumption, and recreation. A small part of the day, but one that betters in its own steadfastness, in its own pleasing way. 

Purple gel pen, colored pencils.

Some kettle practice. 😉

My first kettle that somehow ended up in proportions looking rather like a genie lamp! 🤣

New Notebook, New Season, New Doodle📝

Starting a new notebook—this little 5 x 7 beauty was a whole $1.25—is always a good feeling for me. Potentiality on each page. I’ve been experimenting with different types and sizes of paper for my doodles.

Last night, right before sleep, I broke out my new notebook, my 0.7 mm lead pencil, and my colored pencils and made an outlined sketch of a photographer. It was a peaceful, simmering hour as I drew a preliminary/reference sketch on scrap paper, opened the second page of the notebook (I often skip the first, as it sits a bit askew in the binding), and then started this drawing.

Filling in the figure was a particularly pleasant part of the process as well—colored pencils force a kind of quiet contemplation and over-and-over-and-over patience that slows my thinking and flashes me back to childhood hours quietly coloring or writing.

It’s probably not surprising that I would choose to draw a photographer in motion. One of my other happy places is photography (a few years ago, I wrote a book that combined my writing with my photography practice and tips, Photography for Writers).

Much like when writing, when I’m behind the lens, the daily drops away. I like the challenge of making what I see and how I see it into a composition. I like that it’s not an easy process nor a process I can take for granted or even a process that I fully steer, but that there are many do-overs available—as many as I have time and inclination to make.

Mostly, photography is a place of rare transcendence where the world slows and I make my thinking and my seeing into something at once me and not me. It’s a good space.

This is my first go-’round with sketching what I’m calling a silhouette portrait. Kindly ignore the erased shoulder and erased original feet, which I only realized after pondering them were pointing in the wrong direction from her body’s stance along with the smudge at the bottom of the page by the date. We’ll just call those markers of authenticity.😁

I have to say, though: I was a little surprised that one or two elements of this drawing felt to me like what it feels when I’m behind my camera: a liminal in-between space that just is what it is and unfolds as it should (if, frequently, not as I would have originally imagined).

Or maybe this is just my fancy-pants way of saying I couldn’t believe it actually sort of resembles a human and not a stick figure. 😆

The little notebook says “Plan” on the cover, but as we know, there are many things we simply cannot plan. Mostly, we can move, slowly, in a slightly new direction and see what happens, and then repeat the process as the happening unfolds. Drawings, photographs, writing, ourselves—all unfolding.

“Interior/Exterior: Reflections on Drawing a Scene” 🖼️

Happy March! I had so much fun writing a fresh flash essay about my doodle last month that I decided to create another one to share. 🤗

“Interior/Exterior: Reflections on Drawing a Scene”

I almost wrote this reflection yesterday afternoon, but I was hungry and promised myself that after eating I’d get right to it.  And then, I just needed to pay a bill quickly and I’d sit right down and write. And then, I remembered a time-sensitive email, and then…well, you know the rest.

Yesterday’s writing didn’t happen.  

Alas, I had the “perfect” hook pop into my head yesterday, but tonight is no longer yesterday. So, scrap that. My tone today is different, and my hook has evaporated like a cartoon bubble. So be it. This reflection won’t be about whatever that would have been, and that’s okay, too.

Earlier this week, I also promised myself some time to doodle during a break, and I did follow through on that intention. I decided to try to draw a scene—a whole interior SCENE!—which I haven’t attempted since…probably middle school. Yeah, it’s been a hot minute.

I usually doodle one thing at a time, or parts of a scene, or words/phrases paired with a mini doodle or two, but to fill a whole sheet with myriad elements kept my brain and my hand hopping.

I put on some music, broke out a coffee-table book filled with gorgeous photos, picked the one that called to me most as a reference photo that I then adjusted as I went.

I started my scene on a scrap piece of newsprint paper I bought online this summer in a jumbo, 500-sheet package.

There’s something about knowing that I’m not going to save the first drawing because it’s on the kind of paper that tears when an eraser hits it that frees up my creativity. Nobody will ever see this first sketch so, who cares? Onward!

Without contemplation first, hand motions of pencil on paper are often quite soothing.

I try to get that way about more things: that not skipping ahead to envision outcome. Sometimes, my creative process lands, and I don’t stop to examine or even to think about forming whatever I’m creating until I have a draft or five. Those are the best days.

More often, though, my mind loves nothing more than just to keep skipping ahead. Ahead, ahead, ahead!

I’m certainly not the only creative to find my process varies like this. Depending on my day, my mood, how tired I am, how hungry I am, fill-in-the-factor-here, the challenge of crafting something is either easier than imagined, or more frustrating than imagined, or (most frequently for me) somewhere in-between, but it’s rarely the same type of journey more than once.

Each piece needs something different of us, like every friend, like every life circumstance.

My original sketchbook scan in all of its uncropped glory, spirals and all.🤗

So, my interior scene (which I also drew in pencil first, free-hand, on the sketchpad page and then traced with felt-tipped marker and pops of color from watercolor pencils) has some walls that are certainly not architecturally sound, a baseboard that shouldn’t look like it’s cutting through one of the plant’s fronds, some picture frames that are crooked despite practicing perspective, and a chair that I’m pretty sure doesn’t even resemble a chair.

On the other hand, I got the happiest kick while drawing the arched doorway between the rooms that reminded me of more than one friend’s home, and drawing the little locks on the big bay window, and then having a light-bulb moment about adding in a pop of life-giving green on the plants, and attempting some splash of light across the floors, and making the one rug a sisal rug with squiggle motions, and then drawing lines for wooden floors, my favorite flooring—all, nothing but joy and in the flow. 

The floors!

The wooden floors. That’s right—I was going to write something about those yesterday.

There was also originally going to be something about the lemonade I tried recently and loved. But today’s reflection needed to be the way it turned out here—about the challenges (for me, anyway) of drawing whole scenes in scale and with perspective but doing it anyway, and something about the comfort of putting elements together that make an interior that becomes exterior, which is also, pretty much, what we do when we create, whether it’s a conversation, a painting, a poem, a dance, or a birthday party. So be it.

On the balance, not bad for a cozy interior. Not great or professional, but not shabby, either.  Onward!