Trying to do a little revising on NaNoWriMo and actually turned off the interwebs for awhile. As a reward for a nice long dint, I turned it back on and found none other than Felicia Day touting Amanda Palmer’s TED appearance this week. Not sure how this came to be on the web so quickly but I’m not complaining.

Those who come round here pretty regularly know I’m a big TED fan. I had watched Amanda Palmer’s kickstarter project with great interest and see crowd sourcing sort of rippling through the internet. A click and there she was, speaking to the darkened hall. This just happened, I thought, a day or so ago. That by itself is pretty amazing stuff.

I’ll let you watch and decide for yourself, but I’ll say that it gave me a good feeling about artists doing what artists do and being part of a bigger world. I loved that she brought in at the end the idea that artists were once part of their close community, not performing to massive anonymous crowds. She sees the internet bringing us back to that smaller feeling, face-to-face community where we can know each other. Shades of early web pages and community, Batman!

Several things brought February to an end. First off: March 1st arrived!

**rim shot**

But seriously folks, March means that World Poetry Day is a few weeks away, on March 21st. It’s unlikely I’ll be home this year to send forth haiku all day long but I’ll do my best.

Today’s web-universe brought this:

napowrimo2013: Greetings, poets! Sign-ups for @napowrimo2013 are underway: http://t.co/NwuFaemIC4

which means it’s time to be thinking about National Poetry Writing Month in April. Never too early to ponder themes or forms. Last year I found that having an over-arching theme ready to go helped me keep going. This year I might try a new form. Truthfully you don’t have to sign up for either of these events – they’re just out there and you can do or not do as you choose. Knowing they’re out there can open the way to finding other interesting folk who are out there doing their thing too, which makes it a fun month.

Yesterday, in a frenzy of pre-March-Madness, I threw caution to the wind and signed up for a class. My whole goal for the class is to mess around with supplies I’ve owned awhile and not used. So of course I went out and got the rest of the things on the supply list feeling virtuous that I already owned most of the needed things. Yes, even the fish, I already owned the fish. And the beautiful paint kit. And…

Let Loose the Kraken, no I mean paint!

somehow I didn’t post these each day but here you go:

the sky lays puddled
in gradient range of blues
splashes of grey foam.

I took art in school
the lumpy clay things we made
and took home to mom.

i’m on vacation
and each day I wonder why
i’m on vacation

my hands commit the squares
placing each to where each fits
’til the whole is formed.

The ground by the birch
grabbed my shoe today and held:
mud season is here.

This morning, my reading eye fell upon this recent blog post from Gwenn Seemel on a topic near and dear to my heart: “What artists should blog about”

Gwenn does a great job giving ideas on what you the blogger might pursue if you’re stumped one day while looking at the “blank screen”. In a way, I am taking her #4 advice:

4) Along the same lines, steal ideas from other artists’ blogs.

The easiest answer to the question of what artists should blog about is found daily on your peers’ platforms.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Having been blogging for many years, I’ve had my ups and downs. The worst down was in a period when my whole life wasn’t saying too much either. I felt bad about my quietness at the time but I was confident it would pass and it eventually did. Last year I set a goal to over-achieve in the blog post total and among other things, it really made me ponder blogging in general and my blog in specific.

Like many things, I find that one’s blog writing has to be written for your own sake, with a small glance to the audience. I don’t rant here about personal or work things or air dirty laundry. That’s outside my purpose of having a blog. Sometimes all you find here is something interesting I saw or a link that gave me something to think about. Sometimes it’s my own photography or own work or talking about the process I’m in while working. Whatever it is, it’s an ongoing conversation. I realize as I write this that it’s all the sorts of things you might discover in a flow of conversation over time:

“whatcha doing Mary Beth?”

“Not much, but I was just looking out the window and noticing how the tree tops seem to move in a kind of oval way against the sky when it’s really windy. And it’s mud season and I almost lost a Birkie in my front yard.”

“Interesting.”

OK, I hope someone somewhere thinks it’s interesting but even if there’s no comment back like that, the bottom line is that it has to be interesting enough to me to put it down in words for the day. I don’t post all of the links and videos I find interesting here, in part because I don’t want those to take over my own content. Plus, these days, there are other outlets aka Social Media that let me share those gems with my nearest and dearest.

Long way around to be saying that I hope other people with blogs will read Gwenn’s advice and ponder what they hope their blogs to be and then do that, whatever “that” is. If you’re only posting a picture of your latest work, just add it to your gallery and create the appropriate web page for it. If you’re not going to actually talk about it (or something), don’t be telling me you’ve a new blog entry about it. I’d like to know more about you and your work but that’s up to you to write and tell me.

Seen on the way to somewhere else:

I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral, but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.

Ptolemy in a A Private History of Happiness

Thank you web universe