Tag Archives: my new 52

Jan 22 2012

my new fifty-two, week three: a study in adaptation

Early this week I decided this week’s new-fifty-two entry would be a photograph. I’m not a photographer by any stretch of the imagination and the best camera I own is my iPhone.(1) The only way I know how to manipulate pictures is digitally. Nevertheless, I thought I’d be able to come up with something pretty good.

I set a couple of rules for myself, though:

  1. The image had to come from real life. No staging. No artificiality. Just something I saw that caught my imagination and my desire to preserve it.
  2. Digital adjustments were okay.
  3. But no filters.
  4. And I limited myself to only using my iPhone for any adjustments.

I took a lot of pictures of a lot of things, but it was something I saw whilst baking yesterday that really caught my eye. After spending some time trying to bring out a certain something in the picture through manipulation, I finally decided to make this week’s entry more of a study in adaptation.(2) I simply cannot decide which picture I like best, and they each say something different to me.

So here they are:

The original image.

An adaptation:

Another adaptation:

Like I said, I can’t decide, so I give you all three.

As I’ve mentioned previously, if you’d like to be part of this new-fifty-two thing, feel free. If you’d like to share your creations with others, let me know and I’ll post links if you like.

  1. Which is actually the best camera I’ve ever owned and the previous statement shouldn’t be taken in any way pejoratively against the iPhone. Or Apple. Which everyone knows by now I heart pretty hardcore.
  2. Even though the class I took on Adaptation Theory ended back in December I still think about it all the time. Like all the time all the time.
Jan 15 2012

my new fifty-two, week two

Last week I posted a challenge for the year: to create one new thing every week. This week it was going to be a bit rough to accomplish since this was the first week of the new semester and ergo every student ever actually wanted to use the library to they could save money at the bookstore. I knew I’d be pretty tired in the evenings and I’m also trying to post here every day. So it was a matter of finding the time and energy.

Which, of course, is always the case.

In the end I managed a good first draft of a short story. It’s less than 1,300 words, but it stands up on its own. There might be cause for another section – maybe two – as I revise, but what I have is a solid start.

I’ve noticed that you can really tell how close two people are to each other by the way they string their sentences together. By the words they chose and by how fractured and interwoven their topics can be. My goal was to replicate that, to make something that sounded like real, modern dialogue between two very close people. But not intimate dialogue. Or, I should say, their dialogue is intimate without being out intimate things.

I’m pretty satisfied with the start I’ve made. So I’m counting it for week two of my new fifty-two. Again, if you’d like to participate please feel free. If you’d like to share your creations or share posts about your creations, let me know and I’ll post the links here. But you’re not required to at all. The point is to convert yourself from a consumer to a creator, and you can do that without telling anyone about it. Just have fun!

NB: This isn’t one of my standard footnotes, exactly. It’s really more of an endnote, an addendum. Something lagniappe. I just wanted to mention once again how much I love Scrivener. It solves some of the most basic problems I’ve always had as a writer, vis, organization and reminders, and collecting pieces from the tornado of my s-o-c brain. If you’re a writer of any variety, head over there and avail yourself of the free 30-day trial. If you aren’t willing to drop the $45 on it(1) by the end of that, I’d be surprised.

  1. This is more like one of my standard footnotes that you’ve all come to know and love and ignore. The 45 clams is for the Mac version. The Windows version is $40. I’m not sure why, since I haven’t used the Windows version.
Jan 8 2012

my new fifty-two, week one

Over the past week, I’ve spent a fair amount of my time making a little movie. No, I haven’t been cast in a Kevin Smith bio-pic. I made a little one-minute video for an entry into a wedding contest. Here’s hoping we win, but honestly even if we don’t I’m totally okay. I really enjoyed the process of making it, and I feel an amazing sense of satisfaction that I made something last week. Because life feels better when I make stuff.

I also realized that I have all the tools I need to be able to create the kinds of things I’ve always wanted to create. With my MacBook I can create songs and videos. I can work on writing wherever I am, thanks to iCloud and Pages.

And Scrivener, an amazing writing program, makes working on long pieces easier by giving me one place to keep all the little character- and setting-sketches, all the notes and errata, all the summaries and to-do’s. This has always been my biggest stumbling-block(1) when I work on a novel, losing track of these details. I’m looking forward to reassigning that memory space to something else. Like grocery lists and wedding-planning.

On the iPad I can create 3D models and electronic beats. I can Moog my heart out. I can layer loops like a dubstep master.(2) And the iPhone is capable of amazing photography and video.

And so since I have all these tools, and obviously since all these tools weren’t cheap, I have a new challenge for myself: to create something new every week this year.

Last week’s creation was the video, which due to the contest rules I can’t share with you at this point, but here’s a frame just for fun. This week…I don’t know. I’m working on a novel chapter, but since work will be crazy this week I don’t know how much I’ll get done. So it might just be a terrible line-drawing on the iPad or my first foray into the realm of vector graphics. But that counts.

A character in one of Tom Robbins’s novels says that the point of art is simply to create something that didn’t exist before.(3) That’s what I intend to do, at least once per week, and to think of it in those terms lest I set the bar too high for myself. The point is to create, not create perfection.

If you want to join me, let me know. I’d be happy to link to your creations, if you want to share them. I’ll update you on mine as each week passes. This should be fun!

  1. Well, second-biggest. The first is actually sitting down to write.
  2. Not really clear what dubstep is, which is probably obvious from that statement.
  3. This character’s particular artistic endeavor was to turn an old Airstream RV into a giant, metal turkey on wheels.