Colorful Morning in Brighton Beach

As I told you my new habitat is Brighton Beach, just a stretch of boardwalk down from Coney Island (home of the infamous 4th of July hot dog eating contest). To take advantage of my new surroundings, and because I feel compelled to do uncomfortable things that are good for me, I have started jogging.

Howl says the circus poster. I felt like howling myself, if I had the breath to, but luckily it's an interesting stretch of boardwalk to torture yourself on: full of joggers and sunbathers and swimmers. Even at 7 AM on a Saturday morning, the old people had made their way down to the shore line for sunbathing and calisthenics.

Barnum and Bailey circus has set up their tents just past Coney Island and before a gorgeous old landmark that is now a roller rink. The man in front was sporting a very chipper boating outfit complete with ship's captain hat.

Then, just as I was starting to feel really proud of my panting and puffing, I came across what appeared to be hundreds of  penguins. It turns out they were triathletes in wetsuits. It was a little demoralizing, but not as much as seeing people three times my age jogging past me.

At this point you might be wondering whatever happened to that art blog I had been writing--me too. I can't think why I'm dribbling on about my morning run except that all my mental space is currently occupied by my new job. Yesterday was my first day, and I left quite excited about some of the projects I will be working on. If you'll bear with me a bit though, I have some lovely interesting art posts that I'm working on as well.

Whew...blog posts to date=

Now that's a lot of posts. I think I'll rest on my laurels today, and by resting on my laurels I mean work really hard to wrap things up at my old job before moving on to the new. I came across a great opportunity to do marketing for a publisher and I'm happy to say I accepted a job offer last week!  I'm very excited for some of the changes in store, but in the meantime I need to roll up my sleeves a bit.

Happy Monday!

The Jig is Up

I've had an amazing five months, been to some beautiful places, and seen some amazing things, but for better or worse the jig is up. I'm moving back to New York city next month.

I am ambivalent about the move. On one hand, it will be great to back in a city I know and love, but on the other I will miss the itinerant lifestyle. Also, while I'm excited by the prospect of finding a new job and working on new projects (somewhere besides my kitchen table), I'm going to miss the luxury of waking up whenever my body tells me to to do some writing.
What all this boils down to is that my last few weeks in Playa del Carmen will be spent job hunting-- never the most fun task. I crawl through the job boards, craft up cover letters, and then send them off with little expectation of hearing back. I'm off to the job boards now in fact. At least hiring seems to be on the upswing and I have had a pretty encouraging response from the past week of applying. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Jealousy Strikes Over Writer's Rooms

A creative space, exactly as you like it, and a routine, undisturbed, can make a day or, in the case of some people, a work of art. Balancing work and writing is something I've thought about lately, but more than that I'm curious about other people. How do they write best? So to fill that curiosity, we have creatives spaces and routines...(ahh, the wonders of the internet.)

Rooms:

The Guardian has a great page dedicated to writer's rooms...literally a series of photographic "portraits" of the rooms the writers work in by Eamonn McCabe. Coincidentally, McCabe has an exhibit that just opened that runs through January 17 at Madison Contemporary Art if you are in London.

They're gorgeous and interesting shots that give you an intimate look of the creative spaces of various authors. They tend to have a desk and a computer...but other than that, these spaces are as varied as can be. Some are bare spaces with merely a desk, but most tend toward a messy, comfortably chaotic appeal. I wish they would do a series of artist's studios next.

These are clearly all successful, middle-aged writers because they have rooms they can devote to writing. I live in New York city, and have a compact desk in my bedroom that I can devote to writing. There is just room for it between the door and the bed. It's usually crowded with papers that I once meant to look at. The chair hurts my shoulders after a while. A certain someone likes to sit at it with his computer. And so, my workspace has become wherever there is a computer. A helpful versatility, no doubt, but I envy the luxury of a room of one's own and the flourish of a quill pen, like in Jane Austen's room, right.

Routine:

It isn't mere space I pine for, but the lives that could be led in them. Similar to these room portraits, blog Daily Routines gives a brief summary of how artists, writers, and other 'interesting people' organize their day in all its intimate detail. The writer Murakami runs marathons to get into a zenlike state, much like his dreamy novels. Kafka's is bizzare. Truman Capote is a "horizontal" author.

My routine involves a lot of 'sometimes'. I go to an office sometime. Sometimes I have been up writing or reading for an hour. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I'll polish something up during the day, sometimes I'll write at night. Today, I'll cook up a nice breakfast and lay in bed typing while trying to plan the most productive possible day.

I'm still settling into a quasi-writing life, but I have dreams of what it would be like. They run along the lines Oscar Wilde's perscriptum of life as art. In which case, I have a lot of work to do. Christmas angels and huge koi decals are competing for decorative space to ill effect in this writer's rooms. Yet based on the differences I found in rooms and routines, I'd have to say to each his own.

Art of War

Balancing work and writing has been difficult lately--Eek! Not a boring article of work and writing? Hardly, gentle Reader: this is a war.

My writing and my job are at odds with each other, and lately my job has been winning. People always speak about a work/life balance, but my problem is a work/work balance. Perhaps someday I'll have an official writing job (perhaps you readers could mail me some checks...) but until then, I work a normal work week and try and squeeze in writing.

Time, in itself, is not the problem. I could work, and then have enough time to write a blog post on a normal workday. But the real difficulty with writing, besides saying things well, is having something to say. When I become consumed with my paying job, I loose the creative bit of my brain. I'm out of the loop on interesting news as well, and can't process it enough to form an opinion of my own. (Opinions being crucial in this blogging business.) Of course, right now I'm talking about working and blogging, not even working and blogging and sleeping and interacting with humans... which are getting squeezed these days.

Today as I was dealing with drudgery of the day job, I stopped what I was doing and brainstormed. Slow at first, but soon I felt all juiced up and full of ideas and happier. It's easy to forget the passions that make you happy sometimes. And then I felt inspired to write about the delicate art of balancing work and writing. I myself am not quite an artíste at this balancing act yet, but maybe someday.

Until then, Reader, I accept personal checks or cash or cookies. I am especially partial to holiday cheer in the form of sugar.

Novel Life

My employer told me he was giving me material for my book.
"How?" I ask.

"Black Monday, stocks tumbling, etc, etc, do this, do that, go get me a coffee..."
Erm, yes, this is brilliant material. The stuff of that dreams are made of.

Should I be blogging less, and finding a job with a future?