Tuesday and Queen City Creatives Recap

Tuesday started out in a fog - literally.  A freezing fog.  Which produces some really interesting effects.  Huge snow crystals on everything.  It made the world 'fuzzy'.

waiting in the Starbucks drive through

And the day only got better.  My cast was removed and I am now in a splint which is removable.  LOTION! For all that dead, yucky skin.  And much more finger movement.

But the best part of the day came at the end and boy was it great.  We had a meeting of the "Queen City Creatives", my newly formed writing group.  It was hosted at one of the member's studio which makes me want to move in and take it over.  Room to do things.  Tim's brain will be picked in the coming weeks for all things artistic as far as my homework is concerned.  Curtis, Greg and Lisa also were in attendance and Tim had invited a couple of friends, Steve and Dale.  Hopefully, they will continue to join us because they both really added to the whole evening.  

I had gone in with the 'plan' of taking about how people organize their writing, if they organized their writing, did they keep a writer's notebook, that sort of thing.  Tim added to the conversation in asking what people's creative times during the day were and had it changed over time.  We went around the table answering those questions and found we had a lot of similarities, but also some differences.

Basically, we were all morning people.  And we all had sleep issues, often waking up and at least taking notes on what we were laying there, thinking about.  We also had to try and fit in our 'creativity' around other things going on in our lives - like work.  But a big surprise to me, and I had thought it would be the other way around, Lisa and I were focused on being organized and having some kind of system.  Lisa deals in words per day (which I have been tracking since the first of the year for myself).  I made a commitment to get my Dragon Earth notebook organized in the next month.  I realized I had bits in pieces on the computer, handwritten and all mashed up.  The men in the group were more of going with the flow and less on systems.  Dale asked some really insightful questions of everyone as we were going around the table, talking about ourselves, our creative times, how we work.  

Tim did recommend "The Brain" as a tool he uses to map out connections between projects and his only real organizational tool.  I'm checking it out in the next few days.

But the real highlight of the meeting was a reading by Steve of a play he had written many years ago and, for various reasons, was revisiting.  It is a modern day MacBeth-ish play and was it fantastic!  The excerpts he read to us were riveting.  His delivery of playing the different parts transported you to the scenes.  His language was something I can only drool over.  

The meeting ran over our 9pm time by about 30 minutes, but it was worth every minute.  I did drive away a bit in awe of the reading and a little downcast because I know I will never write that eloquently.  But then I remembered, I don't write that kind of material.  That's not me.  Then my only disappointment was that Savvy wasn't there.  She is so into Shakespeare and acting and theater, she would have been at Steve's feet in adoration.  I'm hoping she has a chance at some point in time to hear at least bits and pieces, if not the whole play.

If this is a taste of how the group is going to be, then we are in for a banquet.