get it out, somehow.

Earlier this year, I took a fabulous art journal class. The instructor told us that the most important part of art journaling is to get your message out of your head and into your journal. You have to be one with the journal. She gave us tons of examples of how to do this. One that struck me as really goofy at the time was to put your words down and then paint over them. I could not imagine ever wanting to do that. Well, I'm here to tell you that it's SO liberating. I have been through a lot this year, personally, not things I want to share here (or apparently anywhere else!) and I have been writing in my art journal and painting right over those pages! It feels great to get the events out of my head and gone. The act of painting over them seems to be cathartic, as well. By the time I'm done, I find myself smiling. Yay! I love happy endings.

In other news, I am apparently participating in nanowrimo this year. I had not planned to participate, but when I started doing all this writing, I realized that I was on a roll. It may or may not be useful material, but if I can get 50,000 words out of me this month, that works for me, because it's 50,000 words that are no longer clamoring for attention in my head! The rules of nanowrimo, to me, are pretty simple: 50,000 words in 30 days of November. Nowhere does it say they have to be coherent or shared or make a complete story. I'm spilling words onto the page, incident by incident, and figuring that it will all come together somehow in the end, and if it doesn't? Oh well. At least, again, the words are out there, and not inside my little head. Some of it is really hard to write, and some of it, which I expected to be hard to write, is surprisingly easy to write. It's an interesting process, and yes, it's definitely a process. You need to have discipline to succeed at Nanowrimo, because 50,000 words is a whole lot of words. I should have close to 10,000 words done by the end of today and I'm at roughly 2500... I may not make it to 50,000 words this year and "win" but maybe I will. Life goes on, either way.

And that's the best news of all. Life. Goes. On.   Yea, Baby!