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When You Abhor Your Creative Work...

2/1/2016

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It's not enough. It's not good enough. There isn't enough. I'm not good enough. Not fast enough. Enough people didn't see it. I've had enough.

I've been going through my submission deadline database with dread, looking at the files that have not yet been published by any lit mag, of all sorts--poetry, high-resolution jpegs, prose, photographs of my paintings. It seems like a tiny, amateurish body of work...because the negativity muse has come. She's the antithesis of your creative muse. Her voice grates on you and she does nothing but complain, but whenever she comes around again, your reasons for not dropping her as a friend seem feeble and unprincipled, so you make polite sounds in between her monologues of bitchery.

That's how I feel, sitting here with that annoying harpy, who wants me to trash my work and retire from having any creative impulses. But I know I don't want that, so I'm trying to stay positive.

Today I plan on retiring some of my work that hasn't been successful in the submission rounds, beginning the long process of putting art on DeviantArt in my portfolio or putting writing in my proverbial scrap folder (but not the trash). The fact that I've outgrown or stopped advocating for certain work should be a sign that I've learned, progressed, and developed, not that I suck.

​Take that, negativity muse!

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Loveliest Magazine Issue 2

1/7/2016

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Loveliest Magazine published their second issue ever yesterday, and featured these four photographs of mine.

I can't explain how charismatic my photos of the Coogee-Bondi coastal path have been. Shot with my old Powershot SD1400, an exceptionally slim camera with good quality standards for a non-fully manual point and shoot, these photos have compelled publishers to put them in their magazines--Halcyon Magazine, Window Cat Zine Press, Magnolia Review, Beechwood Review, and now Loveliest. I shot them on a two-hour walk on a very sunny day, and used my (at the time) very basic editing skills to polish them. They were shot in jpeg as my camera didn't do RAW, and with a lot of limitations.

I've run out of photographs from that shoot sooner than I've run out of places to send them to. I think a lot of the appeal is the carefree, saturated, colorful feel, especially to a bunch of miserable people in the middle of winter. There's an energy to a summer day--December in Australia--that I love to shoot. It's funny to look back and reflect on them, because the camera's limitations are in full view, especially in the high-res, TIFF format that Loveliest requested. The lens distorts some corner edges. Some sharpening issues that post-processing can't solve. Yet the beauty, I think, shines through.

I have some photographs from a Maine summer that I hope will do as well, taken in a location that's more familiar and intimate to me. The new camera I have is better than the old one, but I'm still coming up against some frustrating limitations. 

Now that I've retired the collection, I can post the remaining photographs on DeviantArt. Some of them are already online in this gallery.
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