You Say Fixation, I Say Project

I am always working on some sort of project. I think it runs in my family. Mom is always sewing pajamas for the grandkids or mending costumes for a neighbor. Dad is constantly gulping down the facts from his latest book in the dead of the night in his study. My sister Laurel has the Gardner Gazettes family newsletter, my other sister Care has quilts, and so on. Projects everywhere.

I’ve found that my projects rotate. For some reason I can only work on them one at a time. And I get obsessed. I want to put in as much time as possible. On my latest road trip, I took a laptop with me and typed away a short story while everyone slept around me. When I started my job at Melaleuca, I would take pages of my screenplay with me to the gym and edit them while I bobbed up and down on the treadmill.

My usual projects—or fixations, the term changes depending on how much I let them get in the way of other responsibilities I attend to—currently rotate among screenwriting, cartooning, making music, writing fiction, and ghostwriting for Philip J. Harpman (who has been working on a new and exciting project off and on for the last year or two). A rotation can last anywhere between a few weeks to several months. My latest was my comic strip, “Learning to Fly,” which I recently submitted for syndication. The last few weeks I’ve been working on a couple of short stories starring Murphy “Wheels” Tomlison, a paraplegic private detective, and his hippie homeopathic nurse assistant Nikki.

I thrive on my creative projects. I love being able to create art rather than mindlessly soak in the treacherous tripe that is sloshed across checkout counter magazines and television screens. I hope you all have projects you can turn to as well. If you don’t, or have always thought about doing something but have been afraid to, now is the time. Unless a DVD boxed set of “Charles in Charge” sounds more interesting. Your choice.