Time Travel in the New Year

Happy New Year!

This morning when I wrote down the date in my journal -- my goodness, January 16th! -- I felt as if I'd time-travelled. The move from New Year's Day to the middle of the longest month of winter happened in the blink of an eye. (Hey, not a bad way to move through January in Minnesota.)

One of my favorite books ever is Madeleine L'Engle's Newbery Award winning, A WRINKLE IN TIME. I wish I'd read it when I was a kid (but of course it hadn't been written yet). Still, reading it in my late thirties was magical. How I wanted to be able to climb into that "wrinkle" and travel through time and space with Meg. And I loved Meg because she was so flawed (just like me), yet so lovable (just like . . . me?). I read the book over and over for a few years and then let it gather dust on the shelf. Recently I picked it up as I was clearing books for donation and sat down with it, and there was the magic all over again. A book written in the 1960s that was still so fresh and real and compelling in the 21st century that it could turn my 60-something self into a young teen again. If that isn't time travel what is?

I don't generally make New Year's resolutions, but this year I decided that my routine needed a little shaking up. The one piece of it that works for me (and has worked for me for many years) is my journal writing first thing every morning. So I asked myself -- couldn't I extend that writing time by clearing my morning slate of appointments, you know -- just in case? I'm happy to report that this is working and I am now making excellent progress on two of my young adult novels. Some mornings I go to the art table instead. Some mornings I end up doing both. But all mornings I'm doing something creative and those pesky appointments and tasks and errands can just wait until after lunch!

That's not time travel, but it does shift time in a way that puts my real work first. When I manage to do that, sometimes the whole day becomes one big creative project.

Writing Myself into the New Year

I'm sitting at my desk surrounded by notebooks -- my writing and art and life journals from 2008 -- and am in the middle right now of a process I do each year sometime between Christmas and the middle of January.  I go back through my writing notebooks of the past year, pulling out poem drafts, story ideas, character sketches, art ideas, notes about marketing, and drawings I want to save. As I work through the 20-25 notebooks, I'm also reading the year's story of my ups and downs -- as an artist and writer, of course, but mostly as a PERSON -- and thinking about the year in front of me.  

Now, I'm not big on resolutions. They go the way diets go for me.  Badly. Let's just say they stimulate a spirit of rebellion.  So, yeah, I'm thinking about the things I'd like to do differently. But what works better for me than making a resolution (or five or 20) is to look at how I want my day to go.  Do I want the balance to swing toward art or writing or both?  Do I want solitude?  To be inside or outside more? What keeps me from doing the creative work I love? What can I do (ya know -- TODAY) to change that?  In what ways do I want to share myself and my work with others? Where do family and friends fit in?  

Gradually, as I've taken this time at the end of one year and beginning of another to ask myself these questions, I've begun to experience each day as the gift that it is. Days that actually DO yield creative work -- like the 40 or so pretty rough poem drafts I pulled out of my journals today and the mixed media art quilt ("Mardi Gras Me-dusa") above, that this time last year was only a sketch or two in one of those notebooks.

So, here I am, answering a couple of this year's writing myself into the new year questions by starting another new notebook (of sorts) -- setting out to keep a blog! Hoping to connect with you here and wishing you a happy and creative new year!