Living a creative life
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. My wife and I recently watched Julian Schnabel's 2018 film At Eternity's Gate. In the movie, Willem Dafoe plays Vincent Van Gogh during the years he lived in the south of France. During a brief scene of Van Gogh arranging the space where he lived and worked, I…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. Even if, like me, you don't have children, you probably have some awareness of the ongoing debate about school start times. Teenagers tend to stay up late - sometimes it's so they can text with friends or play video games, but many times it's also because of homework,…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I recently self-published a novella that I started writing in 2017. It was inspired by the life (and death, in early 2017) of a dog that I adopted from a shelter in 2002. It's called Buddy and Thomas, and it's about a stubborn dog that disrupts the life…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. As a lifelong insomniac, I looked forward to reading Benjamin Reiss' 2017 book Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. I wasn't disappointed. Wild Nights is not a book about how to get a better night's sleep. Instead, it's a cultural study of the history of…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure We've all heard the phrase “Dance like nobody's watching.” It shows up in Facebook memes and on motivational posters. It has been credited to a variety of sources, including Mark Twain (it doesn't sound to me like something Twain would have said). The website Quote Investigator has an…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. This post is basically a rant, and doesn't apply to the majority of readers, so my apologies up front. While browsing Twitter recently, I saw a retweet from a writer who included a photograph with her post. Since I'm involved with both writing and photography, I'm always interested…
Welcome back to the Creative Life Adventure. I've been reading Dr. Maxwell Maltz's 1960 book Psycho-Cybernetics. While the book occasionally strays into the neighborhood I call "crackpottery," there is a lot of useful information. I'm not a fan of the term "self-help," but it's the term that's commonly accepted, so we'll go with that. If…
