Finding Happiness Through Art

October 20, 2019October 20, 2019Leave a comment

I am a creative. That’s the best way to describe me. The things that make me the happiest are all in the creative fields. Music. Film. Photography. Writing. And at one point in time, I thought that if I could do the things I loved for a living, I would never feel like I was working. Thus, beating the system and living a happy and fulfilling life. But over the past year, that belief has changed. I still enjoy freelance photography although I now know that it’s not as easy as I thought it would be. Just because I take nice photos doesn’t mean I’ll have people lining up for me to take their family portraits or covering their small business opening. It takes time to build clientele and you have to know how to market yourself and your business.

Earlier in the year, I did some freelance writing. I found a client and stuck with them for a few months. At the height of the writing, I was turning out three pieces a week while also working fulltime. I was supposed to be working on my own book as well but all that other writing stalled everything else. And after coming home from work and working on someone else’s stuff, I was too burned out to work on my own labor of love. And so, even though I was very excited and proud that my writing was paying some bills, I realized that if I transitioned into full-time freelance work, I wouldn’t be able to write for myself. Yes, the writing did pay the bills but I also had another income that bought food and also paid bills. If I took away that other income and had to force myself to write for others instead of myself. I know that would have sucked the joy out of it. The thrill of making money would have worn off and I would have hated writing. That sounds horrible to me. Writing has been my stress reliever for as long as I can remember.

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But when I was younger, I used to have another stress reliever. Drawing. I’ve been writing stories ever since I could pick up a crayon. I’m serious. One of my earliest memories was of me scribbling across my freshly painted white bedroom walls and rushing up to my less than thrilled parents to show them my story. And soon after the stories started, artwork followed. I would create posters, book covers, and character art for my stories. And I enjoyed it, deeply. I would spend hours in my room on my bed or laying on the floor, drawing and coloring. But the joy started to fade around middle school when I realized my art style was stuck at a certain stage. And although the writing continued into high school, my art pieces became few and in-between. My high school offered four years of art and so I drifted away from drawing and moved into pottery and then around my senior year in high school, my father taught an art class at my high school for a day. It sparked my interest in it again but after becoming frustrated once more, because I couldn’t progress… I gave up, until recently.

This resurgence in my art was sparked by my nephew and mother. My oldest nephew seems to be a promising artist and he draws for me often. And then my mother started buying adult coloring books to pass the time. I’d colored in adult coloring books in college but it was refreshing to see someone like my mother really enjoying the process of coloring. And when times became stressful, we’d all pull out her coloring books and take turns coloring a page. All of these things together made me open up to the idea of starting to draw again and maybe even try to learn the skills I didn’t have as a kid.

8/11/19

9/27/19

I’m not going to say I’ll never monetize my art but I know that in order to keep it as a stress reliever, I shouldn’t lean on it for extra cash and definitely never try to make it a career.

Beyond the First Draft

July 1, 2019Leave a comment

It was September. I was unemployed, living in the bottom half of my cousin’s house in Houston, Texas because I moved from Missouri to Texas with hopes of landing my first big corporate job after college. I didn’t get the job and I moved for nothing. I was also having a major health scare—breast cancer. Two of my aunts had it; one living and one not. My father died from pancreatic cancer and my mother was in remission from leukemia. I was freaking out and the only thing that held me together was my imagination and my need to tell a story.

By October, life was looking up. I didn’t have breast cancer but I did have a tumor. I booked a flight back to St. Louis because the whole breast cancer scenario scared me back into wanting my mom close enough to hug. Plus, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome with my cousin. Our relationship was on good terms and I didn’t want that to change but before I left Houston, I took three days to outline a book. Well, really it was four but one of the days was a none writing day.

I’d been trying to write a book for nearly a year before then but could never get it together. It’s funny how functional you can become when you think you’re dying at 23.

Anyway, by the time I landed in St. Louis, it was October and chilly. I started writing the first draft and hammered out 27,000 words. I got a job and attempted to take part in NaNoWriMo. Everything was going well with my word count until it wasn’t. My body and mind were freaking out over all the long hours. I’d come home from working eight and a half to nine hours and then I’d write for three hours. I needed to slow everything down. By the end of November, I had 50,000 words although I didn’t win NaNoWriMo. After a few days of rest, I felt energized again and decided to push forward with the story. I stopped at 65,000 words.

My first draft was finished, the new year was coming and I was ecstatic. I wrote my first draft in 3 months and although I was excited, I knew the second draft was going to be a beast. I loved my story, truly, but I also knew it could be better. Just by simply shifting the book from a plot-driven story to a character-driven narrative, I could tell a better story. I started thinking about all the things that needed to change and I began to feel overwhelmed by my own creation. And just like that, I was given a reason to procrastinate when I should have been striking while the iron was hot.

Someone I knew needed a ghostwriter for some articles so I volunteered my time and they volunteered their money or however that normally works. Before I knew it, I was also helping with papers and other things. Don’t judge me. The money was nice and it’s not like I was working on medical papers or any important skills. Plus, I never did it while I was in school because I had a stricter sense of morals back then, I guess. At first, I put the money in my savings account and then I decided to use it to pay off bills. Mainly, the money went towards the credit card debt I’d racked up during my summer of unemployment, interstate moves, and breast cancer examinations and screenings…because “America!”.

The plan was to start the second draft in February but the months seemed to slip through my fists like sand. Before I knew it, it was May and my first draft was still sitting in my closet on the top shelf in a dusty black binder with notes crowded onto the margins, sticky notes hanging from the sides and multicolored highlights illuminating my favorite passages. It was waiting for me to finish it—to fix it. To make it presentable. It was waiting for me to stop letting other things distract me and keep me from what I really wanted. It was waiting for me to overcome my own subconscious fears of not being good enough. It was waiting for me to open it again and finish what I started.

2018 Was…

January 2, 20191 Comment

2018 was a very memorable experience for me. I woke up to posts talking about all the negativity in 2018 and yet I don’t remember it. Sure, I’m very aware of the social and political issues of 2018 but in our individual lives, outside of those issues that may affect you personally, 2018 was not a bad year, in my experience.

From my point of view, 2018 was a year of hope and resilience. 2018 was the year that we conquered our fears, we stood up to bullies, and stood our grounds in support of the things we believed in. 2018 was a year of great losses but also a year of great victories. After every shadow that threatened to swallow us in sorrow, came a dawn of warm sunlight and positivity that made us believe in humanity again. Behind every viral video of injustice, there was a video of inspiration and love that helped remind me that the world isn’t so black and white. I was reminded that people are good and can do good when given the chance and the tools to change someone’s life.

2018 was the year that one of my aunts who is in her late 50s and a young lady I knew from high school, who is in her mid 20s, both beat breast cancer. 2018 was also the year I fold out I have a lump in my own breast and although it isn’t cancerous right now, my doctors want to monitor it for the next two years due to my family’s history with cancers. 2018 was the year I thought I had breast cancer. 2018 was the year that I realized that my life could end at the age of 23 and I was forced to ask myself if I was happy with myself, my achievements, and where I was in life.

2018 was the year I dared to have dreams and hopes for the future.

2018 was the year I lost weight but gained a love and appreciation for myself that I thought I’d already had. 2018 was the year that I vowed to take my health more seriously because the thought of death by preventable diseases scared me.

2018 was the year I moved to a different state only to move back home three months later after the job fell apart and I’d nearly maxed out all of my credit cards.

2018 was the year I made the first move, romantically, even when I’ve been told that women should not.

2018 was the year I learned a new skill: photography and tried (and failed) to start a photography business. But from this failure, I eased my foot into a different door of opportunity.

2018 was the year I finally got an “adult” job and although I’m still settling in, I can finally see how good it feels to be able to take care of myself financially.

2018 was the year that I told myself I was going to write a book and so therefore I did. I wrote the first draft of a 257 page novel over the course of three months and realized the only thing standing between me and the things I desire is…me.

2018 wasn’t a horrible year for me. It was a memorable one. A year that taught me lessons I will take into 2019.

What did your 2018 teach you?

Lazy Natural Hair Routine

March 8, 201814 Comments

It’s no secret that I’m a lazy natural. I have a certain philosophy about my hair that I adopted from my journalism courses: KISS.

Keep

Simple

Stupid

And that is exactly what I do with my hair. People always ask me what do I do to my hair to get it to grow and I always tell them “nothing”, because I’m being honest. I do the least amount of work on my hair and it flourishes because my hair (like a lot of people’s hair) benefits from low manipulation. And low manipulation isn’t just about styling, it’s also about how you take care of your hair. So, in this post, I’m going to “keep it simple, stupid” and tell you all about my lazy hair routine.

So I start by sectioning off my hair into four sections. My hair is thick and it shrinks a lot so working in sections has been my way of not overwhelming myself. And it also makes it easier to distribute product evenly throughout my hair.

I soak each section with water first, before applying my shampoo to my roots/scalp. I massage my scalp and then rinse the shampoo out and put the hair back into its ponytail. I do that to the remaining 3 sections and then I add conditioner to my hair and I let it sit for about 10 minutes. I rinse the conditioner out of my hair and place the hair back into the ponytails and then I towel dry my hair with a microfiber towel. I pat the hair that’s laying on my scalp and I squeeze the hair that’s hanging from the ponytail.

The next step is to detangle and style. I start with one section, add a leave-in conditioner to my hair and detangle with a wide-tooth comb. I then add olive oil to that section and start to style it. My go-to style is a twist out. So I normally just twist up that section and then move on to the next section and let it air dry. The next morning, I untwist and rock.

Every 3 weeks I do a deep conditioning treatment but the process is pretty similar. Instead of conditioning my hair, I do the deep conditioning treatment and leave it in for 15 minutes after I finish putting it all in my hair. I rinse it out and then proceed with the rest of the wash day routine.

Voila! It’s so simple, anyone can do it.

Crafting The Look And Feel Of My World

August 20, 2017October 1, 20171 Comment

If you haven’t noticed already, I took a little hiatus earlier in the month so my posting slowed down a bit but never fear, I’m back and in popular demand. I actually stopped posting because I was down in Texas for two weeks being a live-in nanny and I thought that the child I was taking care of deserved my undivided attention. I’ll do a post about that soon because it was actually a pretty cool and enlightening experience.

I would also like to note that any posts I do about the book I’m writing would be tagged as TWE. It’s the shortened title of the book I’m working on, so just in case you’re not subscribed to/following my blog or Facebook page but still want to check in on the progress of the book, you can always come to this website, go to my tag cloud, and click on TWE.

Today I’m going to explain how I came up with the environmental concepts for the book I’m working on and you’ll get to see how I worldbuild.

What I Did Wrong

For the book I’m working on now, the idea for my story started nearly four years ago when I was a freshman and college and was too overwhelmed with my school-related writing projects to even think about working on something for fun. So I just let it sit on the back burner of my brain until I had the free time, which wasn’t until I graduated from college. Over the years, the idea of the story shifted and with each new shift, the world changed a little bit. But it wasn’t until I sat down to write out the story that the world truly started to form. That’s how I worldbuild. I build the world around the story that I have in mind and if the story changes, the world changes.

That happened to me while I was in Texas. Earlier in this month or at the end of last month, I announced that I was writing a book. I knew I was going to write the book way back in January but the announcement was a way to force myself to start writing. I wanted the Internet to hold me accountable if I didn’t deliver the goods. I was struggling with my outline and I knew I couldn’t write without my outline because I had no idea where the story was headed. I didn’t have a middle or an end. I just had a killer start and some basic (and somewhat vague) plots/storylines for my three central characters which I have now fixed. That’s part of the reason that the summary of my book that I posted read so poorly (in my opinion). It’s because I still hadn’t figured out what I was doing.

I’d spent so much time world building that I’d lost my actual story. Yes, world building is that addictive to me. It’s crazy how wrapped up I get in it. So while the child that I was taking care of was napping, I would sit and try to think up ways to fix my problem. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t having problems with my outline. I was having problems with my world. I’d designed a beautiful world that had one huge flaw. It was set in the future but it had no guns. I omitted guns from my world because guns could solve so many problems so quickly and I just didn’t want to have gigantic plot holes. Sorry, not sorry. But by doing that, the story couldn’t function because it just didn’t make sense. Why didn’t they have guns? And if they didn’t have guns, what type of weapons did they have? Once I started looking at older weapons, the idea of them running around with swords (even if they were fancy futuristic swords) just seemed so wrong in a world that also had hover cars. So I scrapped it all.

How I Fixed It

I stopped fighting the enviable—I changed my genres. My story went from science fiction to fantasy. I set my world in a more pseudo-medieval world. Why was I fighting this so much? Because I’m tired of reading the same thing over and over again. When people talk about fantasy worlds, they’re normally talking about pseudo-medieval Europe and once they start talking like that, it opens the doors to arguments against people of color being in stories. This in its self just doesn’t make sense. People really try to act like trading wasn’t a thing back then. Or that Europeans were the only people who were exploring other countries/continents back then.

Following that same train of thought, I was suddenly hit with the best idea ever: when coming up with the look of the world, look at what the rest of the world looked like during the medieval period. So I did and it was amazing. The rest of the world was just as developed as the Roman Empire had been before its fall. Some places were even more developed. The reason why the medieval period/dark ages looked so dreary for Europeans was because they didn’t take care of all the infrastructure and architecture that the Romans had already laid out. As things fell apart, nature reclaimed most of what humans didn’t fight for. That combined with western Europe’s climate, religious superstitions and the dumbing down of forward-thinking lead to a lot of the darker parts of Medieval Europe. The rest of the world wasn’t dealing with that, so the medieval period looked very different for them.

When coming up with ideas to help shape my fantasy world I looked at what medieval life and architecture looked like in Africa and Asia. I can’t post any of the pictures because I don’t own them and don’t want to get hit with anything copyright related so I’ve linked some in the post.

Décor

While looking at some of these places, I tried to envision what the inside of my world would look like. Game of Thrones came to mind. It’s one of my favorite shows and I love how they blend modern touches of fashion and décor within medieval settings. So looking at the color pallets for their Southern settings (which are filmed in Spain and some other country that escapes my mind) I was able to locate a style that fits my story and the world I was building around it. I discovered Moroccan style/décor. Moroccan décor is a beautiful blend of bold and vibrant colors such as gold, brown, orange, blue, and green. The colors are linked to the environment. Moroccan décor also incorporates a lot of elaborate patterns stitched into textiles and carved into wooden furniture. There is a lot of fabric and metal that gives the sense of lushness and excess that fits well with my story. And the architectural style is beautiful because it is a fusion of Arab and Moor history.

Weapons and Clothing

When coming up with the weapons and transportation for the story I did return to Europe although I’m trying to incorporate more medieval weapons from Asia such as the sai. We have the standard long-swords, rapiers, crossbows, javelins, and so much more. When coming up with the clothing style for the world I wanted it to be something that was different but functional. As much as I love the steampunk aesthetic, I’ve never tried to write a steampunk novel because I don’t feel like it would be functional in the actual situations that I like to write about. So I went with something that is considered high fashion right now. I looked for the tattered and layered look. Earth-toned fabric with lots of belts to hold up clothing or to hold weapons. Since the first book takes place in a warmer climate, I haven’t played with what furs would look like in this world but a lot of the clothing is asymmetrical and extremely functional. I wanted the people to look almost nomadic—a fusion of past and future. I wanted to create something that was different. When coming up with ideas for how the people would dress, I looked at clothing that had been tagged: post-apocalyptic clothing, dystopian future clothing, dystopian future nomad, costumes from the show Vikings, and the Dorne costumes from Game of Thrones.

Religion and Political Systems

Here comes the fun part: politics and religion. I created my own religion for this project because religion and religious superstition were so important to the story that I decided to just create my own instead of perverting an already established religion to suit my needs. In my world, Church (I call it the Cloth) and State are separated but not by much. It’s one of those situations that if the Cloth pushed hard enough, the state would become a theocracy. Speaking of the State, the State in my story is a weird blend of an Absolute Monarchy and Authoritarianism and there is no feudalism. So although this story will probably fall into the genre of dark fantasy, it has plenty of dystopian appeals as well.

This is how my mind works. This is how I world build: one connection at a time until the world and the story work. And this version of my world works. The other day, I sat down and started a new outline and finished it within three hours. It felt great. The storylines for the three central characters changed a little bit, but the core is still there and I’m finally writing. Words have actually been typed into my document. The world is right again.