Mid-2022 Update

Hey, I’m back! Again… (did ya miss me?)

You know what’s funny in that weird-on-the-other-side sort of way? For the longest time, when following a blog, or a video channel, or some other creator’s content, if they took a hiatus for any reason and came back full of apologies, I would find it to be a bit awkward and unnecessary. Not in a judging them sort of way, just the premise behind the need to apologize for prioritizing their life over entertaining the online public. My thoughts would be along the lines of “hey, glad to see you’re back! I missed your content, but I understand. You don’t owe me anything. I’m happy to see you’re doing okay.” Now I find myself on the other side of this, and you know, I get it. I’m not sorry for the break that I took, but I am sorry for anyone I left hanging. I think you’ll find that the break was worth it, because I do have plans. And now that my ADHD is being properly treated, I’m much better at following through on them… I mean, I still screw up here and there, but things are significantly better in that department.

The hiatus that I took did give me a chance to examine how I plan to balance my work online going forward. I need to make things more efficient, but I also need to make things a habit. I did a bunch of decluttering on the home front (physically and mentally), which I’m still doing, but it’s amazing how much more space there is for clarity once you get to a certain point.

Still not interested in social media

Although you may see me pop on there from time to time, or automatically share content from my site to the socials, I am quite alright keeping my distance. I think it makes it easier for my readers too, because then they don’t have to figure out where to go to see what’s going on. I’m not interested in competition, be it competing for attention or competing with other creators for best content or competing to keep up with ever-changing algorithms. There’s something deeply flawed in how social media works that I just can’t make peace with. Before you skip ahead expecting the typical social-media-is-toxic rant, I mean it is, that’s not what I’m referring to. I’m pointing at the corporations, not the people on socials.

You know how circuses have fallen out of favor due to countless ethical issues? Artists and creators are the performers, those consuming the content are the public at large that is unaware, the ringmaster is the social media company, and the advertisers are the ones walking up and down the aisles selling popcorn, flashy fiber-optic wand things, balloons, and other things that you regret purchasing after the high of being in the seats wears off. Most of the performers get none of it. Like the animals, some might not be aware they’re even part of a show, they just know they have to do things. If they’re the star of the show, they get some payment. If they’re unlucky, the ringmaster might make a show of them at their expense, make them wear the clown suit. If they’re not liked, they might get thrown off the train car on the way to the next town. It’s shady as hell. The circus wouldn’t exist without the performers. You can’t sell tickets to an empty tent.

As a popular Polish saying goes, not my circus, not my monkeys. Thanks, but no thanks.

site updates

I did make a few more changes to the site recently. There’s a new blog section on watermedia, with two posts in there so far and more in the drafts. Initially I was just going to post any other art related things in Mental Orts, but I decided to keep that separate too. I am planning publishing self-helpish type posts in this blog section, more along the lines of what Struthless provides (in the sense of sharing things that have helped me and maybe they’ll help you too), less multi-billion-dollar-industry-self-help-guru-crap. I highly recommend checking him out and giving him a follow if you haven’t, because his content is awesome.

One thing I am mulling over in my head is daily microblog updates, which I’ll post on Mental Orts. They would be similar to those like Jude Hill’s, who has been keeping an online journal in the form of a blog since 2006, but sometimes her posts have just one or two sentences. I can do one or two sentences. Now that I discovered that I can post from my phone quite easily, which makes adding photos easier, this is totally doable. There were simply too many steps before to get a post up. So for a microblog, there would be some rules set in place. One, once I start, I will post every single day, no matter what, unless I am somehow indisposed, even if it is to post that I simply cannot focus on posting anything. There will be no pressure for fancy title cards or SEO stuff. This will not replace other blog posts, but the hope is that this practice will make it a habit enough that I am able to blog the long-form ones more frequently, and I’ll have even more ideas pop up for them. I will also give myself permission to re-evaluate at certain points to see if microblogging is a benefit or just another box to check off.

This is my actual orts jar, to help illustrate how I want to approach microblogging - little snippets of colorful thoughts at the end of my day, stored in this online container.

It will literally be like an online jar of orts, of mental orts, which, yeah, that was the idea behind naming this section on this site. I have a habit of sometimes having good ideas only to realize later on just how good it actually was. While you sometimes end up with longer threads in there, most of the time they’re tiny snippets. In case you’re wondering why I am not starting now, I have a few other drafts I’m finishing up at this moment but trying to pace myself, and I want to set a start date for myself. Right now, I have too many words. Bigger updates first, then microblog and maintain.

You know what? How about this. I will set the start date for my microblogging experiment on July 1st, which will be exactly halfway through the year. I’ll spend the rest of June tying up loose ends, we have homeschool eval in the last week, then I have to get paperwork stuff, finish tidying, that sort of thing. No matter what, hard start on July 1st. I’m marking it in my planner now.

other changes

I can’t remember if I wrote about this or not, but I “lost” my art studio at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s not that something happened to it. It’s the room designated as a dining room in our house, except for the fact that we rarely hosted dinners, and that’s a lot of mortage to pay for a barely used space.

Then at the beginning of the pandemic, my husband needed a workspace that was separate from home life (so not using his home gaming computer and desk but have a separate one set up elsewhere to create that threshold transition between work and home life. The only possible location was the room formerly known as my fiber studio. That’s the solution I proposed to him, and that’s what we did - I moved some stuff out of the way and he got set up and that was that.

It’s been more than two years, and he’s still working from home. I don’t mind the arrangement. It’s far better than when I was feeling like a single parent with his long work hours. We actually eat family dinners now, which I was not expecting to happen, ever. However, I had to make peace with the fact that I no longer expect to get the room back, not that he kicked me out of it or asked me to move my stuff out. I am aware that tend to operate at a higher decibel than is appropriate for an office setting, so I was too self-conscious to be in there during “office hours.” I don’t like feeling self-conscious in my own home, and it’s too distracting for creative work, so I didn’t go in there.

I’m currently finishing up cleaning, decluttering, sorting, moving, and reorganizing all my supplies to other parts of the house. I was too overwhelmed to get to it before. To be honest, now that I got most of my things moved, I don’t think the new locations for my things feel like a downgrade.

New art things

I’m painting a lot more these days. It’s funny how seasons can just change on you like that. I stopped painting and engaging in more “traditional fine arts” when I became a mom, because it was too difficult for me to get into the flow with my painting when I could be interrupted at any given moment. Fiber arts (at least when it comes to things like needle felting or embroidery) are far more easily interruptable, in that I can put them down at a moment’s notice to go tend to a child.

Nowadays, my children aren’t babies anymore, and therefore quite a bit more independent. I am still on call, so to speak, in that I am fielding questions all day, every day, but I don’t have to drop what I’m doing at a moment’s notice. This means I can start picking back up where I left off. It wasn’t a temporary trade-off; I still very much love/enjoy fiber arts and plan to continue it. I am excited to dive back into something I had missed more than I realized at the time. Not that I couldn’t do a little quick painting or sketch here and there, which I did, but those paintings that easily take at minimum a few days, and countless washes, and long periods of drying time in between - projects like that weren’t possible at the time.

So, if you are so inclined, I am sharing my paintings and projects involving watermedia in the Watermedia section, where the latest post is on the main page, and you can get to this section as well as the others from the little hamburger icon menu in the top left corner of the site. I am also going to post guides related to that, because why not? I have experience with it, might as well share what I know from that as well.

last thing…

So, the newsletter. I sent out anything since I sent out the poll last year when I finally started sending them. I need to futz around with it a bit more, but I have been seeing more people signing up to it, which is cool. It’s the least-spammy email to drop your address in, right? LOL… ok, yeah, I’ll start sending those again soon as well, but still with the intention of keeping it at once a month. This is also all going to get planned out with rigid dates. I really need to get over my fear of scheduling hard dates on things like this.

I think I became a bit overzealous and overcomplicated things, which is where it went haywire, so I’ll just keep it to one whole email, no matter what you’re interested in, and there will be a little something for everyone in there. Otherwise, I’ll never get those out. People can always choose to unsubscribe from it if they decide they don’t like it - honestly, it’s really meant to be a simple way to keep people updated because I had been asked to create one by some of my readers. I was surprised about that too, because as someone who used to have to do the email marketing stuff for a paycheck, I didn’t think anyone actually liked getting them. I really have no intention of spamming anyone.

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me, because there are a handful of newsletters that I look forward to seeing in my inbox, such as those from A Field Guide to Needlework, Ann Wood, Austin Kleon and Nathaniel Drew. Newsletters that introduce me to something new, or send me something inspiring. I can only hope to live up to those standards with my own, but I guess that’s what’s also held me back… I don’t want to send something unless I think it’s worth sending.

So, if you signed up for my newsletter and are wondering why you haven’t gotten one, that’s why. I haven’t sent a new one since a year ago. If you were wondering what I’ve been up to… sorting my head mostly, and my home, and now diving back into creative work. I’ll get into more detail in the other sections. I hope this update gives you some idea of what I’m working on and what I plan to do next. Yeah, sure, there will be some needle felting too, I guess. *grins*