My take on fine art may be different as I’ve dicked around and through at least three, with each bringing some milestones or returns. The creative writing ambition returned $20 from The North American Review. 🙂 In photography, I have one $35 per hour customer, which is continuing. In music, I’ve stalled, as usual, but saw a couple thousand in 2012 from a bar gig. In all, I believe there is a span from doodling, drafting, sketching, shooting-playing-writing freely and then fashioning off of that creativity more demanding (artisanal) manufacture. The character of the demand on mind and behavior varies across and within each endeavor, but in that comes the excitement or stimulation that makes process rewarding.

What I’ve found most difficult is focusing on thin funding and absent of institutional integration — but in that is the definition of a freelance or independent writer, photographer, and musician.

I know I have been quiet for a while, but I’ve had to wrench around some habits and relationships for sanity — and, always on my mind, creative writing.

“FTAC” on another of my blogs stands for “From The Awesome Conversation”, which term I invented to represent the “chatyping” taking place in my main Facebook community (https://www.facebook.com/jsoppenheim).

The inspiration for the conversation was a “meme” passed along from The Writer’s Circle by Qanta Ahmed, a fabulous creative writer, essayist, and reporter: it was Anaïs Nin’s observation, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

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As I’ve been at this a while (and have a related M.A. in “English Language and Literature”) and have been able to indulge in distinctly different arts, I’ve come to regard each as its own space, largely, rather than purely analogic: nothing requires that one transit experiences, ideas, or inventions created in one medium into another although that might suit more coherent myth building.

Does the “jazz guy” on stage have to be that too at the easel?

I don’t think so, but some might disagree.

A creative “vehicle” that takes off, of course, might inspire its one design — the content of the artifact — to be interpreted and represented in each field for medium, but I haven’t developed that “vehicle” — that thing that makes a million dollars and produces the book, the movie, the opera, the dance, the mural, the statue, the jazz piece, and the restaurant franchise frenzy — so I don’t know.

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