leahbobet | Oct. 10th, 2004

Home from running a few lazy errands (patterns at Fabricland, a new book, cleaning supplies) and trying to decide what to do with the rest of my day. The draft is out to several kind people (thanks, guys!) and I can't futz with it until it's read and commented upon. I have three short stories that I've started and not finished this week -- the Tower story, Sold Down the River (which had no plot), and a 700 words of a new one last night -- and I should probably poke one of them tonight, but not quite in a writing mood. Yet I'm still in a making-stuff mood: I kind of want to sew. I kind of want to paint (yes, I paint, but not well). I'm vaguely thinking about taking my guitar out of the closet. The one thing I'm not thinking of doing is cooking, because tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I know the boy will be putting me to work in the kitchen.

I blame this mood on Charles de Lint and his Everyone's An Artist! Newford books. They bring out the dabbler in me.

They've put in mind an interesting question, though:

Writing was not always what I wanted to do with my life. I took a great many art classes when I was a kid. During high school, I was out-and-out a musician, and I pursued that in much the same way I'm pursuing this (obviously, with less success). There came a point when I realized that I simply didn't have the chops to make it as a professional on any of my instruments (including voice), and I let it go. About six months later, fiction came knocking at my door for the first time in five years, and it's been downhill ever since. *g*

Having talked to a few of the other writer people, I've noticed a lot of us have a similar "secondary":

dlandon dances,

sosostris2012 and

cpolk draw,

porphyrin makes jewelery and

witchycanuck knits and

jaimevoss sews and so on. A lot of us came here from somewhere else. A lot of us keep one foot in writing and another foot in another discipline.

This is interesting. I wonder why it is, and how it relates to the whole input/output idea: do "creative" hobbies drain the well the same way writing does? I don't think they do, but I can't quite figure out why. It makes me think there actually is such thing as an artistic temprament, although not the cranky bitchy primadonna airs that's come to mean. I think it might have something more to do with the need to make something from nothing, or something that is more than the sum of its parts. I'm thinking on it.

Hmmm...