Focus

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. Its a truism, but, well... it's TRUE.

I love blogging, but I've been thinking a LOT lately about priorities. What is most important for me to focus on right NOW? Where do I really want to go with my art? What do I do now to GET there?

You've heard this from me before, but... being the primary care giver to two toddlers takes a lot of ME. My time, focus, attention, and energy. The time and mental/emotional bandwidth left to me after mothering daily needs to be carefully portioned out. Since I enjoy blogging I *want* do do more with it, and I think a couple years down the road I WILL do more with it, but... the time isn't now.

The main reason I need to write this post is for me, really. I'm publicly giving myself permission to NOT immediately write those blog posts floating around in my head about critiquing, the artists cycle, why I don't like the word "talent", and all those other blog post ideas in my head. There will be a right time for them.

But even if things seem quiet here, don't think I'm not working. Quite the contrary. Like I said, I'm doubling down on my priorities. Right now, that means finishing my book dummy. Then researching agents, writing and sending queries. So, things have been a bit quiet here and will continue to be so, but that is because the more important work is being done behind the scenes... and one of these days will be the time for my blog to shine.

Right now, I have cute little toddlers to enjoy, and a dummy to make.

Off to work.

But, first...

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If you're curious about the other things I've been working on in the last couple months that weren't blogging, here are some summaries, with links:

In December I finished a project for Cricut that... I don't think has been released yet? I'll have to see when it goes live and post a link when it does.

In January I turned in my entry for the Folio Society/House of Illustration Book Illustration Competition. My entry did not make the longlist, let alone the shortlist. However, I really enjoyed doing the project, and I love having the pieces for my portfolio. What's more, while I didn't love every single entry chosen for the longlist, the winner of the competiton was one of my top three favorites and I absolutely love that it was chosen as the winner, so no disappointment there.

If that didn't make my January busy enough, I decided to apply for the Adobe Creative Residency. I first heard about the residency LAST January (2018) when I was--AHEM--9 months pregnant... so understandably I didn't jump to apply at that time. This time around, I was just a mom to a 12 month old and a 2.5 year old, so... why not? In all seriousness, though, I felt I had to at least apply and see what happens. You miss all the shots you don't make, right? I feel the exercise of just creating the application was incredibly useful, though. It forced me to get absolutely clear about what I want to do, what my best ideas are, make a case about why they're good ideas, outline how I can implement them, and show how they'll grow my career.

I turned in my application just a few days before attending the SCBWI conference in NY. I meant to write up a blog post about my experience there, which was AMAZING, but, well.. time. Sigh. A friend from SVS asked to do a quick interview about my experience as she prepares to go to her first SCBWI conference, though, so you can get a bit of an idea of my experience here.

Just a couple weeks after getting home from the conference, my Drawing Class started up again. Since this isn't my first time teaching it all the basic outlining and preparation is done, but it still gets some of my time and attention. I absolutely love doing it, by the way, and hope to expand to do more classes in the future... but one is enough for now.

Behind the scenes of all THAT, I've been slowly working my way through Jessica Abel's book Growing Gills, just one chapter/exercise per week. Its a book about making the time to do the creative work that is important to you, even when your life is really full already. I've been working through it with a few others on the SVS Forums. We're only a few chapters in, but its making me get EVEN CLEARER about what I want to be spending my time on, if the SCBWI conference and writing the Adobe Residency Application didn't do that enough already.

So, like I said before... this blog has been slow and sleepy for awhile. That is not going to change. The thing that IS going to change is, I'm not going to feel GUILTY about that. I am officially putting this blog (along with my newsletter, while I'm at it) into hibernation mode. I may poke it awake now and then if I have a new piece to share or some other bit of news, but other than that my time is going to be focused on other projects in the near future.

Thanks for reading! I hope to have many big creative projects to share here in the future.

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