Creative Writing Classes and an Update

My students are finding the Advanced Creative Writing Course quite a challenge and frankly, so am I, considering this is the first time I am presenting it. I thought (briefly and thankfully not seriously) that perhaps I should drop the advanced class in the next term, but I know that I need this challenge. It serves to stretch me both as a writer and as a teacher.

In the process of teaching my students, I am also recovering a sense of my own creativity, which Jen, Si and May reminded me about on Saturday. It's interesting to me how grief and loss packs all that creative energy up and sprints off with it. The soul uses that energy for healing. That's the only thing I can see.

Alan the Healer began a process of unlocking my pain for me on Saturday, and I am deeply grateful to him for that. I know that this is the right time to begin examining these things. I have locked my grief away in order to deal with more immediate issues. The grief is still there, trapped in my neck and shoulder. I've also begun to discover how other emotional pain manifests in my body: shoulder is grief and not feeling 'good enough'. Headaches are feeling overwhelmed. My feet and the problems I have with them are related to stepping on myself and putting myself down. Heal the pain, heal the body.

Comic Strips

I have begun some sketches of the Dangerdykes. Just to get me back into the flow of drawing them because it's been a while. I've made some changes to their costumes. I've written out a few storylines. It's going to come together.

I am being ambitious and planning a few other comic strips, which I will occasionally put out on this blog. They are in their infancy and I am not sure if they would work. One of them is titled Unhappily Ever After, the other is Spacemonkey. I am also working on developing a strip that has been incubating for about three years now titled Goth Kid. I hope to get some sketches up on the blog soon.

Thing is, with all this drawing my lovely art pen has dried up and I don't have the extra cash to spend on a new one. Yet. I haven't quite worked out yet how I am going to ink all these comic strips, but I'll make a plan. I think I still have a bottle of ink somewhere and a brush. That should be interesting.

Regardless of all that, I am still going to put up my rough pencil sketches later on today. Hooray!