Oh darling ones,

It has been a week, and it’s only Wednesday. I packed so many thing into Monday that I had to spend all day yesterday recuperating.

Monday was the deadline to submit my afghan to the State Fair Creative Arts competition. It did not go well. At the very last minute, literally hours before the 7 p.m. deadline, I ruined my submission. In my sleep-deprived, procrastinatory panic I decided I could just paint names on the blanket freehand style.

I could not.

Apparently in that moment I forgot about my Floppy Scoop and distorted vision. So I did what any logical person would do. I texted the Sister Club, cried, and rage barfed.

Sister #2 encouraged me to submit if only for feedback/learning purposes and Sister #4 came over to help me fix it.

With all my anxiety focused on fixing the blanket, I jumped in my janky ass wheelchair and Sister #4 hauled me to Michaels.

YES! I went out “in the community” in my wheelchair for the very first time. I’m pretty sure this was the first time I was in a store since COVID, for sure it was the first time since my stroke. Thanks, Michaels, for taking my shopping in a store in a wheelchair virginity. It’d be really nice if you made your stores a little more wheelchair friendly. I got stuck in a bunch of portfolios and my sister had to rescue me.

With some mineral spirits and some gold paint we raced back to Supergenuis H.Q. to perform some sort of artistic first aid.

Sadly, it did not work, but I submitted my fucked up afghan anyway and holy buckets am I proud of myself for doing thing I said I was gonna do. I expect nothing but feedback, but I’m already winner. I learned so much from this process.

1. It’s almost impossible to elegantly turn crocheted pentagons into squares
2. Trial & Error involves a lot of error. And time.
3. My hubris knows no bounds.
4. Procrastination will bite me in the ass.

The post Pride & Imperfection appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hi Darling Ones,

I almost started this letter with a giant lie. It was how I hate mottos, self-help aphorisms, maxims, and the like. But then I remembered I had three and soon-to-be four mottos that I generally live by.

1. You can go ahead and shut the fuck up.
This is something I say to myself about 8365 times a day. I frequently want to be the kind of asshole who is shitty about things a lot of people like that I do not. Or I just want to be a dick for fun. Do you know how hard it is to resist making fun of all the dudes whose entire personality is arguing about how “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie? DO YOU? Along with impatience and dying on all the hills, this is one of my worst traits.

2. People are not required to use social media/conduct their lives the way you want them to.
BUT THEY FUCKING SHOULD. Kidding. But only a little.

3. To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
This is legit the guiding light of my life. I found this ee cummings quote in like 1991, during a very bad time in my life. It has been scrawled inside the cover of every journal/planner I’ve had since then. In fact, I still have the small piece of paper I first wrote it on. That’s a thirty-year-old piece of paper that probably about to crumble into dust, like me, because we are old.

4. No zero days.
This is a concept my friend EM shared with me a few months ago. She couldn’t remember where she first heard it, so I googled it. I guess it was a big thing on Reddit a bunch of years ago. Now it’s an app and a book and the exact kind of #girlboss kind of self-help life coaching guru bullshit aphorism I despise. And yet, I like the idea.

For me, no zero days means I will put effort into making something that didn’t exist in the world before. Some days that is soup. Some days it’s one granny square on a blanket I’m making. Some days it’s a sentence on this website. If I’m really feeling rule-bendy I’ll let something I create for a client count, but I try not to because I don’t want commerce to get all over my creative pursuits. That is, of course, until I’m ready to sell The Beast and then I want commerce to get all up in this hizzy.

Do we still say hizzy?
Jodi

The post No Zero Days appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hi Darling Ones,

One of my Tea Lady friends is taking a class at The Loft, which means I got to share with them my all-time favorite piece of criticism I ever got.

It’s not the note pictured above. I’ll get to that in a second. I don’t think theres photographic evidence of my favorite thing ever written on one of my short stories. Instead, I just carry the memory of those scrawled words in my heart and pull them out whenever the opportunity arises.

The words were scrawled on my story by a kid I called Johnny the Greek because his name was John and he was of Greek descent. He was a young ad agency copywriter who took the same short story workshop I did some summer in the aughts. Johnny was not my biggest fan from the get go. I’m not entirely sure why he didn’t like me. Maybe because I’m a fat, big mouth know-it-all and he did not like those kinds of women. Eventually, I won him over to #TeamJodi because I can be really charming when I try. Plus, he was an attractive man from Chicago. Even though he was not my type at all I still enjoy charming attractive men from Chicago. Man, it makes me feel like a woman. I don’t know, I’m reading a (kinda boring) book about the history of popular music and I just finished a section about Shania Twain.

Anyway, we workshopped my story before my charm attack on Johnny the Greek. I’m sure you can guess what he wrote in the margins of my story about a bowling alley:

“This story would be better if you were funnier.”

Gee, thanks for the help, Johnny. Would it really be better if I were funnier? Would it be better if I were a good writer? Would it be better if it were written by someone who was not me?

In my memory I laughed off this little bit of critical vomit right from the get go. However, I know what I’m about and I bet I sulked about it for at least a fortnight. Hell, I’m still kind of sulking over that shitty comment the mean lady left on I Will Dare back in August.

Eventually, I got over it, charmed Johnny into going to Grumpy’s with us and we all lived happily ever after. Or we all lived. I have no idea what happened to Johnny the Greek after that class. We might be connected on LinkedIn or were at some point. LinkedIn is creepy and I’m unwilling to go check. I would do anything for love, Darling Ones, but I won’t do that. No. I won’t do that.

So, let’s get to the picture at the top of this post. It’s the first paragraph of a critique I received from Dale Gregory Anderson, someone who taught me a great deal about writing. I keep this image (sans frame) in the writing folder where I store my myriad drafts, false starts, and things I mean to finish.

I don’t usually gaze at the picture that often. I know it’s there. I know what it says. Usually that’s enough. But lately, Darling Ones, lately all I do is look at the picture. I look at it instead of writing. Looking at the picture is basically one step above laying on the couch watching the ceiling fan when it comes to my “in a funk” activities.

I’m floundering right now and feeling super insecure re: writing. I have convinced myself that my ice robot heart is incapable of the emotional capacity to write fiction. Who wants to read fiction written by an ice robot hearted spinster?

Bleh,
Jodi

The post ‘This Story Would be Better if You Were Funnier’ appeared first on I Will Dare.

Anyway, it’s 10:30 here at Supergenius HQ and aside from the writing I did for work I got bupkis done today. I’m having a hard time with the adjustment. I come home from work and the most that I can do is kick ass at WordTwist and stare at the wall until I go to bed. I’ve been meaning to write a review of The fan-fucking-tastic Gargoyle for about a fortnight and have I? No. Same goes for a short story I owe Dale.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot people? This blows! I didn’t have this problem when I was at Hell, Inc. I keep trying to tell myself that my brain is just gonna need a little time to get used to the new situation. It’s kind of used to having a leisure time and now it doesn’t have that kind of time. The brain’s a muscle, right? Perhaps mine has gotten incredibly lethargic over my 10-months of total slack.

I keep dancing around the idea that maybe I need to become a morning person. Because if I get up early, I could write before work. But I’ve just never been much of a morning person. I seem to do better, at least creatively, between the hours of like 9:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. However, that schedule is not conducive to me being present and attentive at my daily 8:45 a.m. stand-up meeting.

A lot of times I just chalk that up my nocturnal nature to being undisciplined. A disciplined person could make themselves a morning person, right? Or is that total bullshit?

P.S. If I had more capacity right now, I’d have totally made that whole Eurydice-battery-replacement hooha some sort of metaphor for my problem. But I didn’t.

The post Can you rewire a night person? appeared first on I Will Dare.

I am on my knees thanking the heavens and the Earth that the breakthrough finally came. I’ve been stuck for way longer than I care to admit and it’s made me quite dreadful — crabby, irrational, angry, like having PMS for the last month and a half. It’s really been bad and I can see why these kinds of blocks can drive artists to quit passing the open window. You get to a point where you’re sure you will never create anything again, at least anything that doesn’t suck ass. The inside of my head has not been pretty, but now it’s totally rainbows and Care Bears.

I’m so giddy that I want to kiss everyone and smile, rather than punch them in the neck like I usually want to do. Now that I’ve made my breakthrough, and have been creatively unleashed, I’m hoping to be able to write something remotely interesting again.

*Holy shit did I just quote a fucking Doors’ song? I hate the Doors and, well, I’m surprised because really all I can seem to sing lately is “Devil Raised a Good Boy.”

The post Breaking on through to the other side* appeared first on I Will Dare.