Monday, October 19, 2009

’Musing Monday - A Creative Boost for the Week

Congratulations, Semi-Organized Mom. You’ve won “Everything is Fine” by Ann Dee Ellis. Send me your mailing address via email and I’ll wrap the book up and send it to you.



It’s a new week and I’m feeling better. I’m actually looking forward to proving to myself that I can accomplish my goals. I have a bookmark to illustrate and a book to finish before the end of the month. I know I can do it. I just have to remember not to be distracted and stay away from illness. Easy!

One way I’m going to meet my goals is by rethinking how I manage my todos. I hope to share with you what I discover soon, but first I have a confession to make.

I’m getting bored writing about fighting off Depression and AD/HD with cheek and pluck. I know. The entire blog is based on the subject, but I’ve been writing about it for almost five years now. I need to branch out. Find new things.

Miley Cyrus moons her friends in this leaked photoInitially, I thought I could build on the phenomenal popularity of my Miley Cyrus post. I’m not deluded. I know that it’s not the most popular article on my site because I was the one who wrote it. People aren’t visiting to read me. They just can’t get enough of Miley Cyrus in her underwear. Why not write about that all the time? I could call my blog “A Slinky Mind” and be all Miley Cyrus & underwear all the time. It would be a ratings jackpot!



Or maybe I could do something creative every Monday to lure in writers—a more neurological group of people you won’t find outside of a vacuum lovers speed dating convention. I could call it ’Musing Monday and post a picture like the one above (No, not the picture of Miley) and ask a simple question about it.

Something like, “Where do the stairs go?”

Then I could offer my own answer to encourage you to add your own.

It’ll be wildly popular. All the Miley Cyrus fans will write “to Miley’s underwear shed?”, the new writer audience will write “to an agent’s house?”, my regular readers will lurk in the background, be amused, and not write anything, and everyone will be happy.

I’ll start:

If Barry Graven saw one more amateur Minuteman in costume, he swore he would kill somebody. In fact, he already knew who that somebody would be.

Barry sipped at his bland tea and chewed on a glazed donut without tasting it. He looked around. Concord, Massachusetts was once known for its colorful history. Bright reds, whites, and blues used to be splattered everywhere, but that was all in the past. Now Concord was home to the corporate headquarters of Polaroid, the inventors of instant film.

Polaroid had come on hard times when their instant cameras had lost favor with the public, but recently Polaroid released a new digital camera with instant printing to great fanfare. They had risen from the ashes. Barry’s investor told him this was good news, but it was small comfort to him. What good were all those greenbacks when they had lost their color? What good was anything in an increasingly faded world?

Barry knew how to get the color back.

Out past the Old North Bridge and across the fields and trees was a hill with old, wooden steps almost reclaimed by the forest. At the top of the hill lived the CEO of Polaroid and the man Barry was certain had made a deal with the devil to trap the color of the world into tiny, little squares. Barry could set all the color free, starting with bright, flowing red.

Barry grabbed his old Polaroid Spectra and felt its weight in his hand. It had just enough heft to be perfect for his needs. He gave it a dangerous swing and sent some papers flying, then he headed out with splatters of color in his mind.