The Artist's Way month one?

The Artist's Way is a self-directed program developed by Julia Cameron to help artist's find their voice when they've become creatively blocked. It's a 12 week program that I've gone through about once a year over the last five years. Usually, I pick up my copy of the workbook and start working on the exercises and such around the middle of summer. By the end of summer, I have completed the program and feel a touch more confident about my writing.

I have come to the conclusion that 12 weeks isn't quite what I need to get past the impact that the last few years of successive major depressive episodes have had on me. I decided to dedicate one month to each week's worth of work. One whole month. A month is a very long time to do the same exercises over and over.

I am not entirely sure if this was the best idea right now. I've spent the last two weeks doing everything but working on those exercises. I have also been doing a lot of therapy oriented writing to handle my complex post-traumatic stress disorder stuff and related matters. I get to the end of the day and I find that I haven't done the workbook stuff that I planned on doing aside from the morning pages.

I have been doing the morning pages religiously. They are journal entries instead of short stories or things written on the basis of prompts out of my prompt box. (I officially broke 300 prompts in the prompt box last week. I'm still adding to it.) I feel like I'm doing the morning pages the wrong way. I write about my insane neighbors. I write about the weather. I write about my arthritis and the fact that my back acts up now when the weather gets funny. In my morning pages I write about everything except for my writing. They are not creative. They are just rambling monologues of what ever is going through my brain after I put the kids on the bus to school.

I had this wild idea that I was going to make a big creative turn around this year and be super productive. I thought that doing the Artist's Way with each week's focus for a full month would make me a better writer or at least help me articulate this vague thing I feel I must write. Maybe even get me back to writing poetry. So far, it's not working like how I thought it was going to.

Rambling preface made, I am going to start posting some of the writing I do for the Artist's Way exercises (with names redacted and such to protect the identity of the guilty) in an effort to get back to posting more on this blog. They'll be tagged AW:M[number]EX[number] in the subject line and labeled AW. I'll be honest, some of this stuff is going to be ugly and raw. My history isn't pretty and some of it is going to be getting spilled on the page here. But, I think that sharing my journey forward may help some other writers and artists in their efforts to recover their voice and sense of vision.

I will still be doing my best to post the usual content that I had planned for the day as well. (After all, Halthor still has his adventure with the mountain troll to sort out and Al-Uzza needs to figure out if she's going to be a proper Lady or not.)