At that point I shifted to projects that could be carried in a backpack on trips to the park, etc., and kept doing that sort of work through her gradeschool years. Over Christmas one of the treasures she retrieved from her stuff still here was something I made then. Pretty sweet.

It’s been years since I thought about reviving the work wall. My life simply took another direction.

When I started blogging more creatively here all sorts of memories and curiosities flooded to the surface – too much to live happily in a drafts folder. However (!) I do have a lovely garage that will be warm enough to re-invent as an art space, once Spring hits. If I go that route I’ll post pictures.

As you know, I worked for a number of years as a fine artist before getting into the whole SEM thing. Working as an artist also coincided with being more-or-less bed ridden with an auto immune condition for about 6 years. During that time, I lived like a monk, painting, painting, painting.

Several times a year, I’d reach out to the public and manage to do a show or enter a competition. I’d pull myself together, dress up and be ‘public’, trying not to look like I was about to fall over. I’d sell my work, win some awards and then head happily back to the ‘cloister’.

Happily, I’m in much better health now, in my 30s, and can have a somewhat more active public life, but your question made me think about how blogging has provided an extremely easy way for me to to pursue the create-connect experience.

Much as I did as an artist, I hunker down over my private work, not ready to show it to anyone until I hit publish. Not even my husband sees what I’m writing until then.

But…there’s an exception to this. I always let my nephews and nieces come into my work space when I was painting. They would sit beside me, and it added joy, not nervousness, to the process. Children are non-judgmental. They just want to be with you.

I think about you sitting there with 30 posts in hiding, not ready to come out, and my thought for you would be to be more forgiving of yourself. If you publish something that isn’t the best post ever, that’s okay. If you get too hung up in the details, the joy of the experience of creation gets lost.

This doesn’t mean you have to show your hand before your ready. It means don’t worry too much about your hand.

Miriam

Raw ideas get “noted” in Outlook and I refer to them from time to time to see if there’s anything I can use. Sometimes I’ll flesh them out a bit more and let them incubate in my drafts folder in Word. Other times I’ll copy and paste directly into whatever I’m working on.

I agree with you that the WordPress drafts folder is just about useless for holding in-progress writing. It has too many limitations. Instead, I like to work between documents on my computer much like you spoke of working on your art wall. I can have as many documents open as necessary, copy / pasting / rewording as needed from one document to the next.

BTW, do you have any photos of your art wall? It sounds beautiful and quite interesting!

For yesterday I had two half-finished posts that felt like they weighed ten thousand pounds a piece. It should not have been that hard. I’m sleep on it and will give them another go tomorrow.

I think that *some* kinds of posts should be fairly simple to produce, while some will require more incubation and (LOL) thrashing. Maybe getting them away from each other, out of the drafts folder(s) and on to a work wall will help move out what is at the “fairly simple” phase.

In my mind’s eye there is a manila folder labeled “procrastination burqa” or “stewing” on one side of the wall, separate from what I’m really hot to get finished at the time. Active incubation/research is different from “not ready yet.”