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IWSG: Creative Activity that I Do Besides Writing

Logo of the Insecure Writer's Support Group with a light house in the background.

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop. In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. I apologise, but I'm going to have to keep this month's IWSG post short. It's been a hard three weeks because my mom died on October 18th and so I haven't been getting a lot of writing done. I have family from out of town for the funeral that comes up at the end of the week, and so I've been very busy helping in the preparations on top of my day job and getting done whatever writing I can  in between. It's a wonder that I got the newsletter out a few days before Halloween. Again, if you haven't signed up for my free author's newsletter, you can do so here.  

I think I'm just going to have to stick to the IWSG question of the month for this post. The question of the month is: What creative activity do you engage in when you're not writing? When I'm not writing, the creative activity I engage in most is drawing and painting. However, I get so little time to do that that I have to limit it to just simple sketches in my sketch book and concept drawings for my books' covers like what I did for my most recent book, "The Trespassers". I used to make the full illustrations for my book covers but I just haven't had time to do that for the last several years and so, as with "Trespassers", I've had to limit myself to doing the concept sketch and then sending that to an illustrator that I hire. 

I normally do holiday art around Halloween and Christmas, usually cartoon illustrations, and I was working on a concept sketch for this past Halloween but I never got around to making the full illustration. I guess I'll save that for next year. I'll try doing one for Christmas. 

At my job with the state of California, I guess you can call some of my computer coordinating tasks creative when I need to create spreadsheets and so have to come up with a layout, how to present the information and with what graphics. However, that's mostly technical. 

About a year ago, I started making my own home movies from my smartphone and so that's a creative activity I'll do every now and then. The most recent one I made was on Halloween. That was just a very simple video of some of the decorations I had put out in my living room for the holiday, and I narrate about them. 

I was trying to post the video here in case anyone wanted to look at it, but apparently the mp file is too big for Google. I tried emailing it to my Gmail account, and a message came on saying it was too big. Then I loaded it directly from my phone to my desktop and tried uploading it here, but Google (via Blogger) said it was too big. It's like, how damn small does a simple video file have to be to upload it to one of Google's products? It's no creature feature! Please, Google, don't tell me it's too big for YouTube! I guess that will be my next try.


Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts:  Diedre Knight, Lisa Buie Collard , Kim Lajevardi, and JQ Rose! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels! 

Until next time . . .


P.S.: For those who leave comments, I may not be able to get back to them right away. As I said, I have family from out of town for my my mom's funeral and so it's going to be a busier than usual couple of days. So, I'll get to them as soon as I possibly can. Thank you for understanding. 


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