Whoa, whoa, whoa! What happened there? One minute it's Sept. 16 (my last post), the next it's Oct. 1? Time flies when you're frantically trying to do the final edits on your latest book and you've got a deadline of Sept. 30. Sounds like an excuse, but it's just a reason. However, I have to admit, my creativity experiment suffered a little. So, I'm going to sum up how things went during week 3 and then I'm going to restart week 4. Before I do that, I'd like to share that the last two or three times I've tried to stick with The Artist's Way the wheels have fallen off thanks to writing deadlines and I've always told myself that it's okay to quit The Program since I'm already a published author and already have real "art" that needs working on. This time, though, I'm not going to walk away in a pretentious snit, thinking I don't need this because I'm already creative enough. The fact is, I want to become more creative and I do feel like Cameron's book is helping. So, without further adieu...
...Week 3 started off dealing with Anger. Cameron contends that if we're angry about something it means we'd like to change it and that we should use anger as a map to show us where we want to go. I think that's brilliant! I'm a serial people pleaser who likes to brush off anger as much as possible, but I can't pretend that it's not present in my life and Cameron is saying, "Hoorah! Let that anger show you the way to a more satisfying life." Awesome advice, thank you Julia Cameron.
The other main focus of Week 3 was Synchronicity, which is the coincidental occurrence of meaningful events that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality. Cameron relates this idea to answered prayers and says that what scares people is that there may actually be a God (she doesn't necessarily mean a "single-pointed Christian concept but an all powerful and all-knowing force") who is out there and is actually interested in our affairs. She says that concept is more frightening to people than if there is no God. I'm not getting into theological arguments here, but I will say that I have had a weird series of events happen in my life that have gotten me to this point, where I've had two books published and a third one is on the way. Not only that, but I've talked with two or three other writers who have said the same thing about their own journey toward publication. It's like the right thing happened at just the right time for things to work out. So, I'm on board with Cameron on Synchronicity. I've had too many meaningful events happen over the years to ignore them.
One of my favourite things about The Artist's Way is all the lists I get to make. Here's a portion of one from Week 3:
My favourite childhood toy was my bike.
My favourite childhood game was "guns". (Like tag but with toy guns. Not a politically correct game anymore)
The best movie I ever saw as a kid was Star Wars. (Episode 4 - the first three didn't exist when I was a kid)
That's just a snippet of one of the lists.
Now on to my re-do of Week 4.
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