What’s the worst advice you’ve ever got?

That’s the topic for this week’s Blog Gang meme, and you can bet your crazy old auntie I’m going to wade in on this one!

Come to think of it, there’s been one heck of a lot of bad advice in my life – and that’s only counting the pieces of advice I didn’t have quite enough sense (or enough self-confidence?) to ignore.

In rough chronological order, here’s some Really Bad Advice that leaps to memory:

• “Eat this!” ~ my older sister, more than once, when we were kids;
• “When you go over that pommel horse next time, you should try to land in a shoulder roll.” ~ Janet the Jock, in grade 4 gym class;
• “Just shave off the parts of your eyebrows that are outside the arc.” ~ Penny the Prom Queen in Training, when we were about twelve years old;
• “Don’t marry this guy. You’ll be bored to death in a year” ~ an ex-boyfriend, speaking of He Who Hogs The Power Tools, with whom I’ve been happily pulling in double harness for more than 15 years now…

You get the idea.

But then there’s also all the bits of advice that, while not actually totally bad, are not necessarily helpful at all times.

Example: as I’ve mentioned before, my mother’s advice in case of any kind of heartbreak and distress – from a misplaced phone bill to the break-up of a relationship – was always the same:

“Take a deep breath and have a nice cup of tea. You’ll feel better.”

Okay, there’s good sense in Mother’s standard advice: deep breathing does help to chill out the flight-or-flight instinct that’s our human response to stress, and the routine of brewing and sipping that comforting hot beverage is, well, a comfort as well as a distraction. However, there are just some things in life that can’t be fixed so easily – and no, a meditative cuppa doesn’t always make you “feel better” about a crisis in progress.

But I digress.

The very worst piece of advice I’ve ever been given?
This:

“You can’t be a writer – unless you go into journalism, of course. There’s just no way to make a steady living at any other kind of writing. Train for a real job, instead, and you can write for pleasure on the side – or do your writing when you retire.”

Wrong-oh,  Mr. High School Guidance Counsellor!

And if you consider all the monumentally stupid things I’ve done in my life – following bits of advice that my Inner Voice and Common Sense reared up against in horror (to no avail) –  I’m eternally grateful for managing to get up the gumption to ignore that particular piece of career advice, doled out by an unimaginative polyester-clad dillweed drone in horn-rimmed specs, and pursue a freelance writing career.   Because you just know that a “real job” would’ve killed me!  :)

So, it’s your turn now –

What’s the worst advice you’ve ever been given?
(And did you follow it?)

Blog Gang

Writing the “interpretive text” for an art museum’s exhibition is nowhere near as glamorous and creative a job as you might think. And whenever that’s my job du jour, the thesaurus gets a total workout.

Oh, sure, the dictionary sees a good bit of action, too —

Photo credt: nugun

• Should we capitalize Raku?
• How do you spell trompe… tromp l’o… trompe l’oeil?
• Is hand blown (as in glass art objects) properly set as one word, or two? Maybe it needs a hyphen.

But it’s the thesaurus that is begging for mercy by the end of the project.

Consider this:

Where do you go, to avoid repetition, when you’ve written at length about an artist’s body of work, and the particular pieces and works in this exhibit? Without getting all specific about the medium or form, I mean.

Sure, one can ramble on endlessly about sculptures, weavings, hangings, paintings and portraits, pots and bowls, quilts and collages and found-object art… But put them all together and what have we got?

Works of art.

It’s that same darned collective noun, again.

We need to have more words for work in this language, that’s all I’m saying.

If you haven’t already met Claudia through her crystal-wit comments scattered about on Domestik Goddess, you might want to do yourself the favour of going to Dragonfly Dreaming to meet her now.

Why?
Here’s why:

I am a wild hippie woman. Natural, loving, instinctual, endangered, untamed, playful, fierce, inquisitive, artistic, intellectual, spirited, nurturing, unconquerable, melodramatic, universal and just a little bit insane. ~ Claudia

The proof is in the writing.

Baby Steps:
My need for love is devastatingly honest and utterly ugly in its completeness. My inability to accept it once given, harrowing. I have spent my life outsourcing and squeezing love from every nook, every shadow, every person. Demanding more, even when more was not available. Rejecting it once received.

Who among us would have the sheer gumption to put this kind of vullnerability right out there for our nearest-and-dearest, let along for all the world to see?

But then, on an entirely different note:

Field Day for Freud:
In my dream, I went to the library (god, am I REALLY such a book nerd that I’m even checking them out in my dreams??!) where I found… Gary [Dourdan] behind the desk. Apparently, as punishment for his crime, he was relegated to local librarian duties. His loss, my gain.

And in a moment of true civic duty, I found out what time he was getting off work and then slept with him in the backseat of his BMW.

If you’re offended by flagellant personal honesty, the occasional string of epithets, and art photography not suitable for schoolyard display, our Claudia’s blog may not be your cup of tea. But if you take an occasional splash of gin in your ladylike china cup — then by all means, wade on in!

Indiscriminate Sobriquet:
And while we are on the subject of aging, WTF is up with the Morticia like band of white that is growing out from my skull? If you’re over 5’10, skinny and a dark beauty who wears long flowing black velvet gowns 24-7 you can pull it off. When you’re me, you can’t. The End.

If you’ve ever been owned by a cat, you’ll know what a charming pest a cat can be. Bored cats and the desks of busy people are (a) inevitably going to come together at some point, if there’s a cat in the house, and (b) not always a wonderful thing for productivity.

My own habit of obsessively hitting the Save button comes directly from an Important Life Lesson taught to me years ago by a fluffy grey tom named Jasper: A quick trip to the loo, then I stepped back into my home office to see Jasper bathing himself elegantly on my keyboard, one fluffy paw planted firmly on the Delete key. Amazing, how fast that cursor raced backwards and up the screen. And simple astounding, how quickly the screen went blank when the cat shifted round at my yell, successfully quitting the program before I could lunge across the room. Gone, the work of a hard three hours — all gone!

Ever since, and to this very day (although this is currently a dogs-only household, and the desk is my own once more) I save-save-save-save-save as if racking up high score on some Video Game of Life. So, a bad cat incident gave me a good habit, I guess… but something like this Cat Perch box (at The Refined Feline, via a comment at Matt Cutts‘ blog) would have come in handy. Apparently it works for chihuahuas and other tiny dogs (under 20 lbs.) too.

Of all the various freelance writing jobs I do in real life, my all-time least favourite task is to write the little blurb for the back cover of a book. Succinct is not my forte. I am a natural-born babbler, as those who move through my life will know (to the detriment of their ears and patience).

Another thing I really strongly dislike is to impose (or attempt to impose) my will upon others. I say please a lot, and thank you even more — the way more forthright souls might sprinkle their conversation with colourful expletives.

Colour me pathetic.

So of course I am vaguely appalled (and yet, truly, flattered) whenever I am tagged for a meme — especially since they do, by definition, tend to require tagging someone else…

I dither.
I procrastinate.
And eventually I fall back on the tried-and-true:

If this looks like a fun meme you’d like to give a try… you’ve been tagged!

And in this case, I save up a bunch of memes and tumble them all together into one big manic bowl of steaming mulligatawny –

1. The Six-Word Memoir

If this looks like a fun meme you’d like to give a try… you’ve been tagged!

Mitch challenged me to summarize my life story in a mere six words. Wow. That’s a tough one! See above, about my lack of self-restraint when it comes to spewing out words words words and more words… It took a long dog-walk and an even longer bubble bath (top two venues for Deep Thought) to come up with this:

But I forgive Mitch, because it was Pinhole who put him up to it.

And both of these fine gentlemen make it to the list of –

2.Five People Who Make My Day

If this looks like a fun meme you’d like to give a try… you’ve been tagged!

There are just too many to choose from, in all conscience, and who ever likes to play favourites? But beadinggem was kind enough to send me the award, and it would be simply churlish not to play on. Besides, I like her.

So…. hard choices… but right off the top of my head, and among the rich treasures of the internet and my subscriptions, I can refer you with confidence to these Day-Brightening Bloggers:

• the aforementioned Mitchell Allen;
• the aforementioned Pinhole O’Rourke;
• Mary Emma Allen (no relation to Mitch) who’s been giving sage advice to craft-business quilters on the LIfestyle Channel at b5media for the past 4 years, as well as blogging Alzheimers Notes from the caregiver’s viewpoint;
• Liz Strauss, who can rock an open mic night like nobody’s business; and
• Claudia, who cracks me up and makes me weep and spits diamonds whenever she feels like it.

But I’m not out of the woods here yet, oh no! On top of all, ever since January I’ve been deep in guilt and meme-debt to Pinhole (poor man) who slathered on the compliments in a shameless ploy to extract –

3. Three Writing Tips

If this looks like a fun meme you’d like to give a try… you’ve been tagged!

and, whew! Thank heavens, an easy meme!

Everything I know about writing, I learned it from my lifelong quest to become a half-decent visual artist. (Yeah, I know… don’t rub it in.)

Here we go, three writing tips:

1. Just because everyone else makes the sky blue and the grass green, that doesn’t mean you have to do it that way. Find your own voice and vision.

2. Sometimes, to get to the good stuff, you’ve got to colour outside the lines. Never mind how you originally planned the piece to go — if it wants to go somewhere different, at least take a moment to explore the possibilities.

3. If you don’t stop talking about it, roll up your sleeves, and get your hands dirty — art just ain’t gonna happen.

And there you go!

Oh and…

If this looks like a fun meme you’d like to give a try… you’ve been tagged!

:D

I did it!
It took me seven years of researching, writing, and expert procrastination, but I’ve finally finished writing that dratted book that’s been hanging over my head for all that time…

Sit down, have a glass of bubbly for me, while I tell how it got done:

One week ago…

Life coach Thea Westra challenged me to identify my most important life goals. I put on my thinking cap, and when the steam started coming out of my ears — on 06 April 2007 — I wrote this:

Around here, we call this state of petrification a case of “deer in the headlights” — a deer on the road will stand still, staring into the lights of on-coming traffic, rather than make a leap for safety. Do I want to be the literary equivalent of roadkill?Especially when the end is so very near…

The answer was clear.
So I wrote this:

I will finish writing this dratted book, and I will be ready to proofread the manuscript by this time next week!

That was last Friday.
Today is Friday, one week later…
Goal achieved! In fact, I finished last night at 8:37 p.m., believe it or not!

And here, from the few things I learned in this jam-packed, fun-filled, head-down, race-to-the-finish week of writing, are my tricks to help a blocked writer finish writing the book

There you have it:
I did it — you can do it! …whatever your goals may be!