Last month I finally got out of here. I took off with the family and we took our first real vacation in what amounts to just over 2 years. A week on the beach, a slow pace and lots of time for breathing both as a family, and alone. It was a great time of renewal and recharge. Head clearing and soul scrubbing at its finest.

Now its back to work, and in the resulting catch-up and the opportunity to take on a few new projects, things have been necessarily slow with the website and the blog.  This is of course does not mean I haven”t been working. Cause, oh, but I have been working quite a bit. All hours and in all facets.

I have been re-focusing and in a word, things are all about projects. I have illustration projects, coloring projects, computer-work projects and a number of others rolling around.  The nature of these projects has really revealed a bit of how I can work better when I am pulled in so many varying directions. I’m working on staying focused one-by-one, keeping pace with my own gravity and continually moving forward.

I have previously been the kind of person who took on numerous things, and then tried to work on them all simultaneously, biting off a bit here and there as I went along. This unfortunately left me continually  exhausted and overloaded with little to show for it. So, try to focus my energies on individual projects, throw myself into completing them and stay clear on where I am heading.

On the one hand, this sounds kind of obvious. Finish one thing and then move on to the next, I think my mother drilled this idea into my pre-teen mind. Yet, its a bit of a revelation when you are constantly in a spiral of workaholism.  The focus though is wonderful, and it allows me to truly create a kind of snowballing pattern of getting things done.

Focus, who knew?

This is paying dividends in dealing with the stress of continuing to get our home together. I am always more than a bit overwhelmed by the endless list of projects that make it on our ‘need to’ list. Now though I feel I am making headway and simply weeding out our home like its a garden.

Of course this is helping with my art-making quite a bit as well. I feel more clear about my schedule for the rest of the year, and am able to lay out all my ideas in a kind of  map forward. I say map, because I am hesitant to say its as structured as a schedule. Its still a landscape of ideas and I still want to feel free to veer toward another course, or if need be, turn around completely. It is a series of locations to be traversed while pursuing a definite trajectory.

I’ve talked before about how its important to me to define a vision of what I am doing to help me work and stay focused. I imagine laying out projects like they are on a map is just another facet of this.

I am definitely feeling the landscape spread in front of me. All kinds of ideas to be worked on and developed. Unfortunately, not all of them are my own. There are deadlines to be made, daily work to be done, and projects specifically for earning some cash to keep the whole operation rolling forward. But there will be a fair amount of my own work mixed in.  I’ll be showing off some of this work here in the next few months, and that should lead to larger announcements in Fall and the new year.

But everything is in accordance with gravity now. One step after the other.

More as always to come.