Anti-Slump Artist Date

Today I went on a trip to the beach. Just a little, half-hour excursion, just me & my camera.

I've been in a slump the last two weeks - emotionally, creatively, spiritually. The Artist's Way talks a lot about slumps, creative set backs, and generally not feeling up to creating. The advice that is given, over and over, is that creating things, despite how you're feeling, will bring you out of the slump. Having read this advice (over and over) I thought, "Obviously! How many times have you told me? I will SO remember this when I hit a slump."

...I didn't. Until today.

I've been trying to feel better by "relaxing" - watching tv, lounging around - or by trying to "be creative" by working on homework and my show. But, the thing I was missing in all that "relaxing" and "creativy" was PLAY. I wasn't letting myself play around and really enjoy the things I was doing.

When my rehearsal for this evening was cancelled, I went home and started doing the usual, but then I was struck by a whim to get in my car and hit the beach. So I did.

A selection of the fruits of my labor today:

Taken from inside my car, at the stoplight.

I didn't realize as I was taking it, but it almost looks like the foreground is in black and white.

I love silhouettes against sunsets.

Really love them.

And then...I started playing with the functions on my camera. Longer exposure and a receding tide equals moooving pictures:

I had to include this, even though it's so close to the other shots I took (there are so many more versions of this shot in my album from today). The wave is just slightly blurred. Yay movement in still photos.

And one last one, also taken from my car. Sort of a Hail Mary shot. Stuck the camera over my shoulder and pressed the button. I just wanted to colors! I love blue and orange together.

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I also spent some anti-slump time playing around on Pinterest. I think that's what made me want to take my camera out. It's so great for vision boards and discovering new images that inspire you! It also made me realize that I've been avoiding writing, so it was good to allow myself to be creative in a few different visual ways so that I felt unblocked enough to write again.

What's in a Name?

To address the name of the blog -

I wanted to come up with something that included creativity or imagination, as that's the extremely general topic that I'm going to be writing about. My first thought was CreativitINK, but I figured it was taken, and it sound more like someone writing about the types of pens they like to use when they write (an extremely valid topic for posting on this blog, but not what the whole blog's about). I tried a few more things in my head, but nothing jumped out at me.

Then, I hit the interwebs. "Blog Naming" and "How to Start a Blog" were big hits. After a few tries, I ended up on Wordoid.com, which is a name generator which also conveniently tells you if the made-up word it's just created has already been used as a .com or a .net, and how many times it appears in search engines. I popped in "creat" to see what things it would come up with, but after discarding DISCREATY, INCREATED, and SACREAT, among other equally-anti-creativity-sounding words, I went back to playing with words in my head.

Then I thought, CreativiTEA! That's it! I LOVE tea!

Apparently so does everyone else.

Google came back with about 87,000 results for that particular word, reminding me that original ideas are never original, particularly when it comes to homophones.

Tea Talk Teacup by Partea at Wrapables.com

But then I thought, wait, thanks to grad school, I now know the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so I changed the spelling to Creativətea. That upside-down e in the middle? It's called a schwa. It's a phonetic symbol that represents the relaxed vowel sound usually used in unstressed syllables of words - believe, photograph, indescribable - as long as you say the words the way you would in regular conversation, assuming that you are not a person that over-articulates every word in every conversation.

So, the name, so far, includes creativity, linguistics, and tea. Great. However, I'm not writing about creativity in general, or how to be creative with tea, or how to be creative about combining linguistics with tea. I'm writing about my personal journey as a creative person.

I found another blog-naming page on GZZT.com (now THAT'S a unique name), which was mostly unhelpful but led me to chronicles. I like it. It reminds me of the Chronicles of Narnia, which I haven't read (surprisingly, to me, because they're definitely in my genre of choice), but makes me think of books. Oh, and this.

So, there you have it. Creativətea Chronicles. The chronicles of one girl, examining creativity, linguistics, tea, you name it.

Beginnings...

A new day, a new blog.

I've never written a blog before. I've toyed with the idea, but I always thought my inclinations for writing were to varied and vague to be distilled into one concise theme. Creativity, however, includes whatever the hell I want it to - so here we are.

I hope to write about things that inspire me, enrage me, spur me to create, to work, to change.

This blog was inspired by my second round of working through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it is a sort of 12-step program for your artistic self. I love that it's just structured enough to inspire and not bog you down. I'm currently at the beginning of week 5, and will surely post about how the process is working this time around.

Please peruse, enjoy, create.