Frrrrriday Rrrrroundup! #68: 50-for-50 edition

This post is #46 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

The Reverend Molly, who found her way to 50-for-50 via Sugar, shared this absolutely beautiful (and also, very interesting and helpful) piece on what it's like to live outside the cultural norm—in her case, sans hair.

Not only was Sugar stunningly generous in devoting her entire weekly column to 50-for-50, she specifically articulated what was so meaningful about this whole project for all of us in a way none of us, myself included, have been able to.

A beautiful (what else?) story from interviewee Leah Reich about her experiences growing up in a small Colorado town, and what it means to have someone believe in you.

A gorgeous tribute by interviewee, client, and good friend Judy Herrman about why we undertake bits of certifiable insanity like 50-for-50. And living.

This piece mistakenly says I've already shaved, but let's not hold this against them. Because an awesome plug is an awesome plug, and hey, Donna Barger did do a bang-up job with the Photoshopping!

Finally, I love the support from the gentlemens, too.

Image inside the frame by Spencer Cross, awesome designer, dog-owner, human being, and founder of kernspiracy designers' group. You can get it in a luxurious, desktop-sized image of inspiration with a $15 contribution to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo, through September 13, 2011.

Poetry Thursday: Focus

This post is #25 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

One foot in front of the other.

This is how everything moves
from one place to the next.

From chaos to clarity.
From fear to love.
(And back. And back.)
From nothing to something.
(And back. And back.)
From empty to full,
from birth to death,
from blank to fin,
from impossible to done.

And the doubt
that pools around you
as you pause
to catch your breath

And the voices
that whisper
of hazards ahead

And the fear
that seems to color the air
a sickly shade of gray

All vanish
when you focus
on putting one foot
in front of the other.

xxx
c

Image inside the frame by Alissa Walker, from a photograph she took on one of the many trips she's taken doing just that. You can get it in a luxurious, desktop-sized image of inspiration with a $15 contribution to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo, through September 13, 2011.

Writing had better be its own reward

This post is #23 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

Writing pays, but not in the ways most people think it does.

You can be paid well to write commercially, for example, ads, screenplays, gossip, but what you are really being paid for in most of these cases is your ability to provide infrastructure. You give good meetings, good ferreting, good deadline. You excel at a particular type of traveling, of winnowing, of synthesis. You can produce on demand, at a certain speed. You mimic voices well, you correct the off-key sounds of others even better. When I wrote ads, most of my time was spent doing things peripheral to writing itself (and most of what I wrote felt like a poor payout for the time invested, but that's another story for another blog post.)

Writing with no immediately commercial prospects requires just as much non-writing time. Because on top of the reading and walking and thinking and processing (not to mention editing and re-writing) required for all writing in some amounts, non-commercial writing requires that you put some energy into finding the means to support yourself outside of your writing. Also, the payout is different. It's continuous, and (I think) considerable, but in no way does it look like "winning" to most of the go-go world. It will not make you rich. It may not even earn you accolades.

I will be 50 very, very soon. If history is any indication, I will be 60, 75, 90 even sooner. Age is the only thing about me that moves quickly; the rest of me is slow. I am not a hare, and it was exhausting strapping that fluffy-tailed jet pack to my crusty tortoise body and pretending to be one.

I am also not better than a hare. Apples and oranges, although some of those oranges have some pretty juicy swimming pools and vacation homes. Which, I might add, they're generous enough to share with this here apple.

Years after I retired my jet pack but decades before I am (hopefully) done living, I have had to make my peace with my pace. I have had to learn to love the rewards of my path, and to examine my envious longings for those paths, over there.

Whatever path you are on, get down with it. There is reward enough to be had, even if it is not what you first see as such.

xxx c

Image inside the frame by Heather Parlato, from a photograph she took on a recent trip to paradise, aka the Central Coast of California. You can get it in a luxurious, desktop-sized image of inspiration with a $15 contribution to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo, through September 13, 2011.

The writer's motto

This post is #15 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

Joy is all well and good in its way, but there are plenty of days when life is just a piece of shit.

The client rejects your proposal. The hard drive crashes. The post you worked on for days languishes unnoticed.

The check bounces, the sentences won't come together, the dog rips out the neighbor's flower bed. The letter comes back unopened. The mammogram comes back with a shadow. The migraine comes back, period.

Or, you know, the bottom drops out of the economy. Again.

Here's the deal, as I see it: we are here to live our damned lives until we are not, with no idea of when "not" is coming. The bus that is 20 minutes late to get you to a job interview could be fifty years early for the cyclist who swerves to avoid hitting a pedestrian and ends up suddenly ending. So it is incumbent upon us to really and truly LIVE those damned days, every last one of them, even the shit ones.

This can be a tough slog. Some days, resignation is all I can muster. But most days, I choose also to laugh at something, even if I'm the only thing handy. I choose to let things be messy and imperfect. (HIGHLY reluctantly, but whatever.) I choose to surround myself with things that comfort and soothe and amuse and bolster.

You have to have a calendar; why not have one by an amazing artist, or three, for that matter, so that whenever you look up to find a date, you're reminded of the beauty in the world?

You have to have walls; why not have art hanging there that inspires you?

You have to have a motto, well, actually, you don't. But if you were casting about for a good one, and you had a slightly black and perverse sense of humor, you could do worse than "Push the cocksucking boulder up the motherfucking hill." It's catchy. It works in march-like, 2/4 time. It has swears.

Which is why, when I approached the legendary Bee Franck to ask whether she would kindly contribute a desktop wallpaper to the 50-for-50 Project to benefit WriteGirl, I suggested she illustrate this sturdy and useful motto. And I guess it must have resonated with her, because immediately, she offered not only to do that, but:

1. to create a cross-stitch pattern for the crafters (see illustration at the top of this post)
2. to stitch one up herself with her own two hands
3. to donate it, framed and shipped, to the cause!

Bee finished it this weekend and now one lucky bidder can be the owner of this magnificent work of inspirational art:

So. Let's recap. Need some personal bolstering in a world falling to pieces? You can...

• Contribute $10 and receive Bee Franck's custom "The Boulder" cross-stitch pattern, to make your own
• Contribute $15 and receive Bee Franck's "The Boulder" digital wallpaper, along with similar (yet completely different!) works of digital desktop art by some of my favorite artists and designers
• Bid on the ONE-OF-A-KIND original, lovingly stitched and framed by Bee herself

(And of course, you can sing along with the song anytime you want for FREE!)

Remember, as bad as the world you're dealing with is right now, the one we're handing off to the next generation is probably going to be worse. Just sayin'! WriteGirl is helping turn amazing high school girls into the strong, confident, awesome women leaders we're all going to need tomorrow. Give what you can to help them and we'll all be better off for it.

Excelsior!

xxx c

Telling envy where to get off

This post is #13 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

One of the fledgling writer's least favorite and most persistent sidekicks is envy.

Oh, hell, forget "fledgling"; try "living".

I'd like to think it's a necessary artistic tool to keep me humble or even to spur me onward to greater heights, but the reality is that for most of my productive life, envy did neither, it just hung around like a stale funk, stinking up the joint.

Which is why I first met the worldview of one Bonnie Gillespie, a prolific and excellent writer (who, in my opinion, is nowhere near as well-recognized as she should be), with more than a little skepticism. How could you write so much and so well and for so long and for not nearly enough and not hate someone's guts?

But she doesn't. Trust me, I've tested and prodded and snuck up on her from all kinds of angles. Ladyfriend may have her other demons, but she is seriously, genuinely envy-free. As is her husband. Who is an actor.

Here are Bonnie's words on the subject, which sometimes accompany her delightful, helpful emails courtesy of a magical rotating signature:

Any time I see someone succeed I am happy, for it affirms my belief that I live in a world where success is possible.

How great is that? Pretty great! So great that it resides in my permanent quote file. And now, thanks to Bonnie and my friend Dave Seah, who came out of illustration retirement to render it as a desktop wallpaper, it also resides on my desktop. Just adjacent to my other, smaller desktop, which holds Tsilli Pines' gorgeous rendering of my personal-mantra quote by Beverly Sills.

You can own them both, along with this by Austin Kleon (and more to come!) for a modest donation to the 50-for-50 Project of just $15. Only until September 13th, 2011. After which you will have to deal with your envy and your impatience and all of your other demons on your own.

xxx c

Image inside the frame by Dave Seah, illustrating a quote by Bonnie Gillespie. You can get it in a luxurious, desktop-sized image of inspiration with a $15 contribution to the 50-for-50 project on IndieGoGo, through September 13, 2011.

It's a long, long way to 50

This post is #8 in a series of 50 dedicated to the art and life of writing, in support of the 50 for 50 Project to benefit WriteGirl. If you like it, or if you think it could have been improved by a better writing education for its author, please give generously. And pass it on.

The first thing I thought when I shut down this shindig for that first night, almost a week ago, was, "WOW. If we can raise almost five thousand dollars in one day, what can't we do?"

The second thing I thought was, "SHIT. We've still got over 45 thousand left to raise. What the hell was I thinking?!"

So you see, I have some work to do in more than one area.

* * * * *

Boy, do I wish there were shortcuts. My dirty little secret is that I wanted to wake up last Monday, the very first day of the campaign, and see that we'd done it. That somehow, in the middle of the night before we'd even officially started, some mysterious Generous Benefactor had stumbled on this little project and found it in her rich little heart to kick in the full $50K.¹

In other words, some 25-odd years later, I'm still a sucker for fairy tales, for lottery tickets, for the urban working-girl myth of the Unidentified Limo Encounter. (Well, okay, maybe not the lottery tickets.)

But it is not true. There is no limo. There is no mysterious, wealthy deus ex machina who will come to rescue us. This is both the good news and the bad, naturally: we may find ourselves mired in whatever, but we have the wherewithal to dig ourselves out. Even if someone else did the miring, we can dig ourselves out. If you don't believe me, I'll see your skepticism and raise you one WWII vet who did a looong stretch in a Japanese POW camp. After he floated across the Pacific in a raft, fighting off sharks.

Besides, if there is one thing I have learned in my almost-50 years, especially those 11 days of it back in 2002, in the IBD ward of the Cedars Sinai Hilton, it is to never, ever wish away time. If you dread that exam on Thursday, remember: dreading is your privilege. There are a few people somewhere who are grabbing at their last breaths, just wishing they had some horrible Organic Chem exam to dread. They'd give that Jell-O on the tray, there, and the butterscotch pudding next to it, for the privilege of worrying about your Organic Chem exam for just a few hours.

* * * * *

In selecting the "perks" for the 50-for-50 campaign, I had to make some hard choices. The fundraising platform for this project only allows for 12 levels of giveaways. Which is widly frustrating. I can come up with 12 giveaways between the moka pot and the toilet.²

I finally decided that while it would be incredible to have a few Deus Ex Moneybags come out of the highly-polished, burled woodwork to give me and my churning bowels a rest with some gigantic pledges, it would be even more incredible if we raised this money by ones and twos. For the coffers to fill up with requests for $5 MP3 packs and $10 cross-stitchery and $15 wallpapers made by all of my wonderful friends, like the Tsilli Pines creation illustrating my favorite quote (by Beverly Sills!) you see just above these messy, heartfelt words.

Which is why there is a small and finite number of high-end perks and a pretty much infinite number of low-end ones. The gift we give to WriteGirl will be huge; $50,000 is a not-insignificant chunk of their annual operating budget. But the gift we can give to the world is infinite by comparison. That $50,000 will be gone well before the end of the year, but showing those girls that they mean something will not. Leaving one more example of "nobodys" making a difference will not. Demonstrating how community bands together to pull the next ones up will not.

This will not work without widespread sharing. Even if it works, i.e., we manage to raise the whole $50K (which I happen to believe we will), the project doesn't really do its job unless the most people possible feel like they can make the most awesome things happen, too.

There's a lot of room in the world for this kind of hope right now. Let's get to work, shall we?

xxx c

¹Other things I wished for over that first weekend, in no particular order: for the humidity to dry up; for the liquid that bubbled up into my aunt's ground-floor rec room to be just water; for AT&T's sucktastic network to let up long enough to allow me to send and receive a text within 50 yards of the place I was staying; for my ride to the wedding to show up NOW, please; for French fries, oddly enough; and for the bride and groom to truly live happily ever after.

²BTW, if you're interested in helping out with the 50-for-50 Project by offering your own giveaway, we have a workaround: you can "sell" whatever it is on your own, via your website, email, etc., and then contribute the proceeds to the IndieGoGo campaign site on or before September 13. We'll help you promote everywhere else we can. To inquire about doing this, please contact me: colleen AT communicatrix (and so on).

Image © 2011 Tsilli Pines. Available in motivational desktop wallpaper size along with a gift-pack of other designer desktops for a mere $15 donation to the 50-for-50 project.