Procrastination- I'll get to it later

I was glad to see that more people are signing up for my blog.

But then I realized that I hadn’t written my post for this week.

So for some reason, procrastination seemed like a good blog topic.

One way to procrastinate is reading. Neil Gaiman’s book about creativity, Art Matters, is a great read. I also recommend Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances. This entertaining book of short stories starts with a poem about putting together a chair. I remember reading it and thinking what is this?

Actually it is brilliant.

The poem is about doing other things instead of the project at hand. In this case, it’s about putting a chair together instead of working on the short stories for your next book.

That is often the way of creative projects.

Phillip Pullman, the author of the Golden Compass, was a speaker at a conference I attended. He was asked about his process of writing. His response was a detailed description of the point system of an elaborate paper clip game he invented. I remember some of the crowd being a bit confused. But I understood. That time for procrastination is an important part of the creative process. That creative play frees room for concentration for the next block of work.

I have a show coming up. I should be in the studio creating and painting.

But I found myself spending time designing labels for beer.

It’s like you just walked into the local small-town coffee shop and everyone gives you that prairie salute by looking you up and down. He’s got the Western Hospitality look, doesn’t he?

This was one of them. These groundhogs remind me of the stuffed Gophers at the Gopher Museum in Torrington, Alberta. There is something a bit perverse about dressing gophers up in costumes. So I spend a few evenings painting through thunderstorms, listening to Netflix, and painting.

I could have painted one label to give the company an idea of what I had in mind, but instead ended up with a few.

The artist’s call fell through in the end. But they liked them, and there is a possibility of future partnerships.

Some advice that Gaiman gives in regard to writing is to think of projects like dandelion seeds. Dozens will go out into the world, but for every five failures that float on the wind, perhaps one will find some success. The more you send out, the more success you will have. The more types of things you try, the greater the chance of finding that success.

So these Gophers are just one of my Dandelion seeds. I am trying new things and casting seeds often.