The Artist's Way - first Artist Date

I joined a group on Facebook going through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron over the course of a year. The book is written as a 12 week course on creativity. Two of the practices introduced in the first chapter are the Artist Date, and Morning Pages. For my first Artist Date I went looking for blocks of colour and found these:

Sunrise and pylons
Lemon yellow
Mango green and red
Light through honey

Morning Pages is something I didn't expect to like, three pages of handwritten text first thing in the morning, all output and no input. It was drilled into me at school that I have horrible handwriting and the morning pages are fast, trying to make the hand keep up with the mind. I started out as an ambidextrous child, and my primary school teacher decided I had to stop using my left hand. Didn't get a choice in that one, I was maybe 5 years old. I think if I'd been allowed to use both hands, I would have favoured the left.

So far I have 54 pages of scrawl written in my green notebook and I'm not letting myself think about the quality of the handwriting. Morning Pages are a lot like Natalie Goldberg's writing practice from Writing Down The Bones, keep your hand moving, don't edit, don't think. I've seen nuggets from stories go past in the morning pages, odd descriptions, some rants, lots of to-do lists, and what I can hear in the house first thing and see out of the window. I haven't gone back to read any of what I've written yet, I'm thinking I may when I've filled the notebook, I have 190 pages to go and I should get there in 63 days on 23rd March. Plenty of time to find a second notebook to fill.

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