This quotation came through on Twitter not too long ago and I wanted to share it with you. I know a lot of people don’t believe in “that positive attitude mumbo jumbo.” But do re-read that quotation.

Do you see that “self-imposed?” If one researches the word “imposed,” one finds that it means something that must be endured or obeyed. It is like a hardship that must be put up with. Self-imposed, of course, means that you place this hardship upon yourself to obey and endure it. So, expanding even more, positive attitude is something you must place upon yourself to endure. Not only does this sound painful, but it sounds hard to deal with. You can’t be a victim when you choose to have a positive attitude.

Oh, there, even more. One must choose to have positive attitude and that also means accepting responsibility and believing in it. I feel that naysayers of positive attitude don’t want to make this journey. It’s far easier to stay negative and continue to blame circumstances and other people for the way life is treating them. Therein lies the truth and the blessing of which Jeff speaks. But you’ve got to make the trip. You’ve got to be like The Fool in the tarot and set out without any preconceived notions or so-called learned responses.

So, better get started, shall we?

January is always a busy month for me at my bookkeeping work. Some would even say that I’m a little cranky! I’m definitely more like a belladonna flower than a rose. This January has been an odd one too. Needless to say, I’m a little behind on my art. My writing has been ongoing with changes too, but I do admit that’s where I’ve been putting a majority of my free time.

Now that things will soon start settling down back to routine, I look forward to getting back to painting. I still have a lot of ideas I want to try out. I also a few pieces I did in early January that I just need to get around to “processing.” Also, I hope to have some new ACEO’s at The Mail Room soon — I may swap some out, so if you’re in the Twin Falls area, you better get down there and check out the ones currently there before I take them back. You’d hate for the piece you like to go to someone in another part of the world!

So, a lesson learned from all this? Sometimes life does step on the things we’d like to be doing and for awhile we might need to allow it. Just keep working at your dreams to the extent that you can. Movement forward is still movement, even if it’s in those 15 minute increments. Enjoy the change of pace. And most of all, the answer to unraveling your frustration lies in that which fills the many cups of your soul.

Anyway, without further delay, here’s the post that should have come before the last one.

Do you hope that your dreams come true, or you do you intend to make them come true? Does this seem like the same question, or do you see the difference?

Hope is a wish waiting for the fairy godmother to grant it. Intent is the decision to do it. You can either want to be an artist (hope) or you can be an artist (intent). You can either want to write a book, paint a picture, make a clay scultpture, lose the weight, whatever, or you can go forth and write, paint, sculpt, exercise, whatever.

The fear that comes from that boundary between “want to be” and “doing” seems like a 100 foot drop off a cliff. I am hear to tell you that it isn’t. There is a glass floor that you can’t see. The drop is only 2 inches. But you have to make that leap of faith forward and go from hope to intent.

Seth Godin recently wrote a blog about commitment. Very insightful, so I thought I’d share it. Especially following my last blog about intent (update: due to issues, this did actually come out on schedule- it will be released tomorrow, I hope!). My “intent” is his “commit.” I especially liked his last line.

To me, this makes a lot of sense. In fact, I’m currently listening to Chris Oatley’s ArtCast where he talks about goal setting (or not) in the new year. He talks about not setting goals, but rather deciding on what projects to finish.

I’m joining the band wagon. Don’t just make a plan to get more done (and this isn’t a once a year kind of thing either – I believe this to be ongoing). Don’t weight yourself down with guilt you don’t need. Don’t stress because you want to be better and therefore you get nothing done while waiting to be better. Set up a project, something you’ve really wanted to get done and commit to doing it. Have a deadline if you really want to push yourself. I have a publication date in mind for Sacred Knight book 2. I even have a schedule of milestone completion dates that I’d like to hit. I’m afraid I’m going to miss the first milestone date because it’s coming up far too quickly! Am I worried? No, not really. I will have to make it up somewhere, but I know my main commitment is to the publication date. I see the steady progress I’m making. Even I’d I took some time off to work on another project or because life happened, I wouldn’t panic. I am committed to making the project. It is, as Seth Godin would put it, my project I’m going to ship. I don’t need more of a plan. I don’t need to write 10 pages a day or bust. I just need to commit to ship!

So what projects are you going to commit to this year? What will you ship?

One talent I don’t have is for juggling. Sigh. This is me picking up wrapped Christmas candy off the floor. Nope, no talent for juggling.

I guess I can live with that.

Something interesting that has caught my eye is the Editors’s Letter. Editor Claire Howlett writes about doing what you love in this issue. She also mentions to readers that might find themselves letting lack of confidence or life get in the way. Of them creating art that they should pick their art tool and start creating, allowing themselves to learn from their mistakes and refers to the old proverb of needing to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

It gave me pause to wonder if I’ve been making an omelette this year or allowing myself to fall back on easy habits because it’s easier than expanding myself.

I look at the art in the issue and see these artists on a totally higher level than I am. I wonder if I didn’t get my children’s book finished this year because I’m scared the art won’t come out as well as I want. Have I expanded my painting? Okay, I can answer this question easily enough! No, I haven’t. I know what I’d like to paint, but I haven’t allowed myself to grow and make the mistakes that I need to in order to take my art in the direction I want to go. I talk and I think and I talk some more about it, but in the end I don’t actually sit down and allow myself to make composition pieces or studies for this direction. It’s easier to sit down and write. After all, I have a book due out next year that I need to get done. Writing is easy. Even when I’m neck deep in getting myself out of a plot issue, the writing is still easier than trying to do something new with my art. Not only have I not broken eggs this year with my art, but they’ve been rotting on the stove.

Am I being too hard on myself? Possibly. But if I don’t push myself to work, no one else will. Trust me. It’s one point the editor forgot to mention — you can let yourself be a victim of life’s circumstances and call it lack of confidence or the trials of life, but in the end if you don’t take 100% responsibility for your life and the time you’ve been given, then you are allowing yourself to live a life that doesn’t matter to you. Is that really what you want? Is that really what I want?

Go break a few eggs.

Sometimes I wonder if this blog is a pep talk for you or if it’s really for me. Hmmm…

Sometimes we don’t know what we’re still holding onto.

What are you holding onto that you should be releasing?

I heard this quote the other day and marked it to save. It’s more often said that everyone gets 15 minutes of fame. Yes, people do seem to come and go from the spotlight, but if you’ve achieved some project that you set out to do, that is something no one can ever take away from you.

It would be nice sometimes for the sudden fame we see from celebrities of reality television shows, but ten years from now would you rather have people remember your dirty laundry everyone in the world got to see or for your art you released to the world?

We need your forward action and your reflections off the world.

Artists are no exception and may have even more valleys and peaks than others. But sometimes, you just have to wonder if some power in the universe is conspiring with the artist to help out. Let me tell you what happened last week.

I was in one of the valleys, not all the way down the hill, but probably, definitely needing more sleep. Sacred Knight was feeling impossibly huge, I wanted to paint more than I was, and I wanted to get going on Weblinks but was having issues that had me at a stand-still. Nothing was coming together.

Then I sat down and read my emails. I saw an RSS feed from my blog – not a big surprise since I’ve been blogging lately — at that point it felt like the only thing I’d gotten done. Then I realized that the title was wrong. I hadn’t written that!

A million things zapped through my head. I previewed the email and saw an article I hadn’t written. Oh crap! I’m really imagining the worst now, except that the post was about passion in art. If I’d been hacked, shouldn’t it have been pornographic or something? Why art and passion? Guest blog? When had I allowed that? Hmmmm.

Then I looked at the date. It was from July 2011. Isn’t it December now? Why? What? I’m confused!

So I read the post. There was so much energy and passion I couldn’t believe it. I sat there thinking that there was no way I had written that, but I had no other explanation. None. It took me a couple times in reading to realize that I had written it and boy I had been on some peak that day, one above the clouds.

I then realized I had been in a funk, or sliding into one at least. This post with the delayed RSS feed couldn’t have come at a better time. It made me refocus and regroup. Technology is great, even when you think it might not be working so well. It might just be that higher power looking out for your artistic soul.

In all fairness, I’ve been working on a schedule to simplify my mind and get more done. It’s hard when you’re torn between all the projects you want to work on and things that need to get done. Unfortunately, scheduling myself to work on certain projects at certain times doesn’t work real well for me. I have to have project deadlines, with milestone deadlines, then schedules times to work and in this time allow myself to work on what I wish. Or at least that’s what I’m trying right now that seems to be working the best. I’ve also put the brakes on a lot of projects that I really wanted to do just to help me focus on the ones I’m doing. As I saw on a poster yesterday: winning the race doesn’t always go to the swiftest; it goes to those who keep running. But running in circles isn’t good for me either. Therefore I had to quit chasing moths and focus on just a couple at a time. Once I’ve got some projects kicked out and moving forward, then I can move onto other projects.

In case you’re curious, and I know some of you really are, Weblinks is one of the projects that is resuming very soon with my new scheduling. I have a massive undertaking with Weblinks that unfortunately has brought my pages to a halt, but I’m working on that in some of my scheduled time and it’s coming together.

My other project of course is book 2 for Sacred Knight. Once again I feel like this story is bigger than me. Oh the fun side, right now on the Sacred Knight blog I’m talking about the discovery of a character, and tomorrow I’ll be posting about the birth of the character mentioned in the linked blog and next Tuesday I’ll post about the evolution of this character.

Have you noticed the other thing? Yep, regularly scheduled blogs for both this one and Sacred Knight. So far, so good.

Overall, yes I feel my schedule is making me more focused and productive. I’ve spent more time with my family, gotten more done around the house, felt less stressed, and gotten more done. Most importantly, I don’t feel like I’m working all the time with nothing to show for it. Of course, there are more projects, like painting time, that I need to add into the schedule. Plus I have other side projects going on for Morning Sky Studios (more details on this soon) that will culminate shortly and free up time — like I said, schedule and work on a project until it ships and move onto the next.

Just remember what I said about the race and keep running.