An Aside

The Artist's Way group I'm in after some discussion has decided to attempt "The Vein of Gold."  I wanted to set up this blog to report on the journey.  However, we don't really start until October of this year 2009.  So I will share the history of my association with The Artist's Way and the group until then.  Background seems important as I hope you will see. So if you are impatient for us to get started with the actual book, and don't care about my history, tune back in in October. Also I hope you are noticing that I'm doing the blog set up in baby steps.  A little at a time. Inch by inch.

History Part One

"The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron has been around since 1992.  It came into my hands in 1994. I was at work on a Saturday at The Boise Weekly and I was in the alley beside our offices on 8th Street on my way to the post office box, when a woman came up to me and said that she knew me.  I didn't remember her, but apparently we had both been at an art opening at Richard Reyes' studio in the basement of the Belgravia building.  But that wasn't the point, I don't even remember her name, but she was so excited about a book she'd just found and she told me that I should get it.  Here she was in a downtown alley raving about a book to someone she barely knew.  I had recently been introduced to the term synchronicity which I wasn't sure I completely believed in, but when something happens like what had just happened in the alley, you have to pay attention.  I did.  After I finished up, I went to a book store in the strip mall on 17th and State. I think it was called Coyote and Twain and it was back in the days before the big box book stores took over Boise.  And I asked for the book and they found it, I looked through it and bought it.  Just looking through it, I was really excited and I could see why the woman in the alley had been so enthusiastic.  The author of "The Artist's Way," Julia Cameron, believed that everyone was creative and her book was out to help all of us reclaim our creativity.  Wow. And it wasn't just a lot of ideas. There were exercises to do. I had read a couple of self help books before, and while I had liked their ideas, they never gave me a program on how to implement any of the ideas, so they were all theory and no concrete course of action.  This one was different and I couldn't wait to get started.

Setting Up The Blog

Bear with me.  I've been trying to upload a new template, but the website tells me that it's not parsed right - whatever that means, so I'm going with a standard template for now and trying to get the elements in that I want and doing it Kaizen style.  More to come.