It’s getting there. I haven’t been working on it every day like I would want to. I’ve had other things coming onto the front burners now.

I’ve been rearranging the way I’ve been working on my literary book and am almost writing in it again with some enthusiasm, now that the last of the traumatic incidents have been recorded. I’m all about discussing the reorganization and how I’m laying out the first draft, not so much the content, but I am very excited about how I am putting it together.

Secondly, I finally pulled Arctic Memory out and have been making the changes on it I want in a hurry now for a couple of studio visit reasons: I have people coming on August 1st and on August 6th. I will be participating in a group show at USC Hillel that will be curated by Sara Cannon (Director of the Museum Education and Tours Program at the Municipal Art Gallery and Hollyhock House). The other visit is a gallery I’ve been talking to for the last several months.

As for Houses, I finally found those see-through plastic envelopes with the string-tie closure that will actually fit a 6 x 9 inch document – I just don’t know how well it’s going to fit until I bind one and slip it in there. If it’s perfect, this can keep the price down. I had all kinds of ideas about having a custom-made box created for these, which would cost me no less than $45 each plus shipping. Plus, they wouldn’t have hinges. They would be a box you would lay down on a coffee table or something like that. I wouldn’t want you to shelve it, now would I? But we’ll see how it turns out.

I have three pages of eight left to do, and some are already done. Here is the checklist. Some pages have a few steps to them.

Dishes Page: 

Draw: 1-8 Done

Holes: 1-8 Done

Linen/Fixatives: 1-8 Done

Sew 1: 1-3 Done

Sew 2: 1-3 Done

First Watercolor Page:

Draw 1-8: Done

Painted: 1-2 Done

Inked: 1 Done

Gouache Page:

Drawn: 1-8 Done

Painted: 1-2 Done

What does all this mean? It means I have 18 pages to do before I start to bind them all together. Time wise, (for the pages), that’s about 106 hours of work left to go. I still plan to release it at the beginning of the fall.

As I have endorsed and promoted before, I have been using Scrivener to organize and write my book in. I can not recommend it with more of my being if you are about to embark on writing anything long. It will make your life so much easier and you will thank me. And no, I don’t work for them.

I am still using the program, but because of the many subjects I was writing about, I was starting to get really bummed out and all but ceased to work on it. I knew I had to write about the troubled stuff in my life, and because I was writing in chronological order, I would begin to dread some of the things that were coming up. I would sometimes pick other areas, since the folders were already laid out before and after, but truly, that wasn’t working for me since my mindset during those times just after was changed substantially.

I began to think about this, and the thoughts I have about myself – just in the last couple of years. I don’t see myself as a victim. I never did, especially the more I grew and the more I became self-aware. Bad things that have happened to me, to us, do not define us as people. And so this chronological list of folders with sub-folders (much like the way your computer files work) seemed so one-dimensional to me. And Scrivener is capable of so much more – like Photoshop!

I have said, as many other people have too, Photoshop is like an onion. You can keep digging and digging into that program and find so many more things that it is capable of doing. If Photoshop can have all those layers, what about a person’s life? And how would you record and organize those layers into a program? It’s quite like a database, which is essentially what Scrivener is: a database program!  So I got this idea to assign layers to my life, with the “ID#” or the main layer being Carol the person. That is the constant. What I think. That’s the main layer. Then all the other layers can be built around it and I can move them in and out, and all around the timeline as much as I feel like it.

In essence, this will not so much be a first pass, but more like a true first draft, but I am much further away from being done with it. So that’s the trade off.