Category Archives: creative

writing Leave a comment

Write Until You Feel Like Writing

Instead of having a New Year’s Resolution for 2015, I opted to set myself a few goals for each month. They changed over time, depending on what I felt like I needed to work on. They’ve mostly been centered about writing, photographing, working out, and sleeping — all things I would like to do more of.

This month, instead of a weekly word count goal, I decided to set myself more of a process-related goal: write for at least 10 minutes at a stretch, three times a week. It’s not much time, really — a half hour total is hardly enough to get a proper writing groove on — but it was the three times a week that I really wanted to focus on. Instead of going on one big writing binge during a lunch break or two at work, then saving my work in Google Docs and pasting it into my blog later, I decided I would like to take some time a few nights a week to sit down with my laptop after my son goes to bed and spin out some of the stuff that’s in my head.

I really haven’t been feeling it. I find myself going down the smartphone rabbit hole, instead: Let’s read Twitter. Let’s check Facebook. Wonder what the weather will be like this week. Let’s play Two Dots. Oh, look, it’s my turn in Words With Friends. Let’s play SimCity. Let’s check Instagram. Wait, it’s an hour later already? How did that happen? Guess I’ll go load the dishwasher and head up to bed — where I’ll play one last turn in Words With Friends and check my SimCity again before lights out.

I’ve had some ideas bouncing around in my head lately that I want to get out, though, old-school blogging style. Ideas about friendship, and family, and relationships in general. But I’m not always (OK, not ever) in the right headspace to really dive into that at 8:00 at night. But that’s when I have time to write, so I need to figure it out.

This brain dump here really falls under the category of Write Until You Feel Like Writing. This brain dump here got me my ten minute goal plus some. This brain dump here made me realize that I do feel better when I sit down and write.

I feel more connected when I write than I do when I parse through my Twitter feed, or even when I write a 140-character missive in the hopes that someone will give a shit. Sometimes that feels like spitting into the wind, or sending a message in a bottle, or talking to no one particular at a party and hoping someone will engage me back. If it weren’t for the fact that those Tweets make it back to my blog as microblog posts, I would Tweet much more rarely than I do. As it is, it’s a way for me to basically blog one-liners and photos quickly.

Which brings us back around to me not writing as much as I would like, or as much as I used to.

Well, this is a step in the right direction.

randomness, writing Leave a comment

Backblogged Again

I have this tendency, when I have specific events to cover in my writing queue, to avoid writing about anything else until I have those entries finished and polished and posted. Unfortunately, this means I sometimes leave these entries unwritten due to a lack of time or energy or other resources, until I finally declare blog bankruptcy and relegate these half-finished entries to a digital file of Stuff That Will Never Get Blogged.

I’m hoping to avoid that this time, even though I have things to say about Mom’s visit nearly a month ago, and Halloween, and my Physical Therapy regimen (which is about half over now), and my braces adjustment from a week and a half ago, and pictures from Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day last weekend, and a few non-time-sensitive things I have shaking around in my brain, too. There’s also some stuff I want to say about Connor — and that’s always time-sensitive, since he’s always growing and changing.

Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up a bit over the Thanksgiving holiday — if I apply myself, that is. Just because I have a few days off doesn’t mean that writing time will spontaneously become available to me if I don’t plan for it. Especially since I’d also like to spend some time with my family.

Writing is important to me. It’s so easy to forget the day-to-day things, to get wrapped up in stuff, and I love being able to look back on days past and remember the details I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten.

family, photography Leave a comment

Planning the Annual Schnuth Family Christmas Self-Portrait

Yeah, it’s not even Halloween yet and I’m already thinking about Christmas. Our annual family self-portrait, anyway.

It’s fun for me, yet it’s also a source of stress. Every year I want it to look perfect, and I plan for weeks to figure out the right seating, posing, lighting, framing. Inevitably, even with all that planning, something goes awry. Even so, just the fact that it’s a family self-portrait in our own home makes it that much more perfect: a slice of life.

Last year’s portrait session involved a tantruming toddler and a grumpy Daddy. I had to merge two versions of the portrait in Photoshop to get the end result (which still wasn’t awesome, for various reasons).

Christmas Portrait 2013

The year before (shown above) was one of the best, actually — Connor had these fantastically rosy cheeks, the cat laid down calmly on Aaron’s lap, and everybody was in focus at f/6.3 with off-camera flash. We had our moments of Are We Done Yet? — but we have those every year, just about.

I wished I’d remembered to comb Connor’s hair for our 2012 photo, and I wish he were sitting up straighter, and I wish the cat weren’t trying to escape (as usual), but otherwise it actually turned out pretty decent.

Connor’s first Christmas portrait was one of those awesome slice-of-life moments, where he cried his fool head off while we took the actual photo, plus Aaron and the cat looked like they were photobombing Connor and me, thanks to a narrower depth-of-field than I’d intended.

Before that, it was just a matter of keeping everybody in focus and happy — which I still had issues with, even without a kid in the mix.

Continue reading →