Drumlin Country

Irish. She/her. About page is kinda out of date so you may as well ask. I'm a lesbian now.

[valtsv]

maybe gollum didn’t betray frodo and sam because of the ring like maybe he was just homophobic

[valtsv]

gollum watching frodo and sam take turns sighing longingly at the other’s back as they walk behind them at regular intervals and steal admiring glances at each other when the other isn’t looking and holding hands constantly during their travels

[valtsv]

not 100% sure but im pretty certain that implying gollum was gay counts as. a hate crime

[lotr-shitposts]

[dyketrinitysantos]

gtkm ♡ favourite female characters [6/15] » steph (pride)

» I’ve never met a lesbian before. Really? I’ve never met someone who irons their jeans.

[gowns]

this is for all the people who dabble in a bit of everything and want to pursue creative work but just aren’t sure what to prioritize

i just read a blog post from jessica abel, a comic book artist and writer who has an ongoing podcast/blog about breaking creative work down into useful work patterns. it’s a bit like julia cameron meets tony robbins: dream, create, then map out your desired results and work flow continually.

i’ve been looking into this stuff more often in the past year because i have a terrible terrible sense of priorities and what i need to be pouring my time and energy into. i’ve managed to eke out an income on several ongoing creative projects, but i’m at a precipice right now where my work in any field could topple either way. i keep a ton of lists and schedules up and my physical day planner is my foundation, but i still get distracted constantly from doing the real work that i need to be doing. what do i need to prioritize?

here is a link to jessica abel’s latest post, where she discusses the difference between hobbyists, passionate amateurs, and professionals. here is the grid that she uses:

great. well, almost. she explains it a bit more in the blog post, and i needed to have that explanation embedded in the graphic itself, so i added markers along the x and y axis:

this made a lot more sense to me.

the issue of communication is really a more troubling concept to me than the act of creation. i have been working with the act of creation for the past few years in several fields: acting, photography, writing, film crew work, and most recently, the one that i’ve wanted to do all along, which is film directing.

in each pursuit, i’ve run up against a problem – how many people do i want to share my stuff with? how private do i want to keep things? how public do i want to make things? the question of private vs. public is also entwined with money. how much time do i want to be spending making things vs. how much do i expect to be compensated for that time? what are the things that i like doing just for the sake of doing, and what are the things that i want to be shared as widely as possible to get as many clients as possible?

here’s my graph that i doodled on with my current creative work:

there’s some things that i just like to do for the heck of doing them. this includes music and dance, way over on the left side of the graph. (what surprised me in graphing this out, was finding out that i would really like to spend more time per week dancing than playing music! when i’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years playing guitar and singing. (maybe i just need a change of pace in hobbies.))

another thing that really stuck out to me was that, out of all my pursuits, the one that i wouldn’t mind spending 24/7 doing, and the one that i wouldn’t mind if the entire world witnessed, was… filmmaking.

this is quite the revelation, as i’ve spent a huuuuge amount of time pursuing acting, when – quite frankly – i like doing it, but i would never want to be in a “big” movie, or a “big” role. i would not want my highest paying jobs to be acting jobs (although that would be nice, just for the pleasure of seeing that mystical paycheck).

if i got a big check one day, i would want that big check to say: “to rebecca gowns, filmmaker.” if i was in the news, i would want that article to say “rebecca gowns, filmmaker.” (it is yet to be determined in what exact capacity – director, screenwriter, producer, even assistant directing – but i do know that i work very well leading groups of people towards one creative vision, especially in film work.)

now my priorities are a little more clear: spend less time doing things that you don’t want to share and won’t get paid for (but keep doing them occasionally for an outlet and the sake of general joy). what i should be doing is figuring out how to spend as much time as humanly possible directing. i’ve already got a start – i’ve directed two sketches this month, a short film the previous month, and have been asked to come on board a documentary as a filmmaker. i’ve got my work cut out for me.

now i know exactly what i should be prioritizing, and to what ends i’d like to work in each of my fields. i won’t drop any of them! but now i have a better idea of how to divide my time.

–

feel free to download any of these images, save/bookmark or reblog this post if this visualization helps you in any way. of course all credit goes to jessica abel for the graph + concepts

[gowns]

this post was from 3 years ago! here’s what’s changed since then:

- being a mom takes up a lot of my time and mental energy so that’s where a lot of my creative energy is being siphoned off. it’s important to acknowledge that!

- dance is totally off the chart; i took more dance classes and decided i didn’t really want to pursue it enough to spend the time and money on it. i still like to do my clumsy elaine benes style dancing when i hear music at a party or a wedding and that’s good enough for me. however i am now more committed to my health and i’ve been doing yoga/pilates 2-3 times a week.

- i spend absolutely zero effort acting and absolutely zero time pursuing it. yet i still find myself doing it sometimes! so it’s not completely off the chart. (sometimes when you stop chasing something, it’ll find its way back into your life in small delightful ways.)

- i still harbor secret dreams of directing. the fact is, filmmaking takes up a LOT of time. shortly after i made this post, i attended a workshop for young female filmmakers, and i was uncomfortable when they were talking about their working hours. it’s either feast or famine – which is true in a lot of creative industries – but if you’re a working director, and you’re hired to direct a film or tv project, you can expect 80 hour workweeks. and i know i wouldn’t be able to handle being away from my family and friends for that long. (same goes for tv writing; i’ve been under consideration for various programs for tv writing but i’m not totally sure i want to do it because of the work hours.) so the time/effort that i put in towards these pursuits has gone down completely to “every once in a while.” i still have my resume, i still have my scripts; if some kind of magical opportunity appears i’ll take it, but i’m not going to deplete my precious mental resources in pursuit of it.

the top priority winners at 30 years old: photography (my career) and writing (my most passionate “hobby”). 

1. when i was doing less writing, i felt shriveled up and useless, even when i was doing well in my professional work. so i have to keep that up. i’d like to have an audience for it one day, but for now i’m ok with an audience of approx. 100-200 dedicated readers. the most important thing for me here is keeping up the practice, and reading. i think writing is the one thing you can do that can sustain you throughout your lifetime. there’s no rush to be a young genius here. i’ll still be writing even when i’ve lost the ability to lose everything else – even if it becomes dictating, rambling. i have to continue it. it’s my soul work.

2. i took some photography courses the past couple years, and that combined with a bigger and bigger network has really upped my game in photography. i used to be more shy about my photography, but now i’ve been in a couple of art shows, had several big clients, and now i’m like yeah, let’s do this! let’s share my stuff with the world! let’s get paid more $$$$! 

i can divorce my interior life from my photography more than i can with my writing; there’s less to be shy about. “please check out my wedding photography!!!” i can exclaim it from the rooftops. but my tinyletter, my blog, my half-finished scripts… i am more protective of those. and i think that’s a good thing. but now i know where my priorities lie, and it’s very simple:

there’s 168 hours in a week

i sleep 40-45 hours a week (b/c my baby wakes up early)

i’m on “active mom duty” approx. 40-50 hours a week

i should be working on my main gig, photography, approx. 30 hours per week (this includes not just shooting, but also editing, emails, website work, research, etc)

i should be writing, actively and concentrated, at least one hour per day, which does not include reading and research, which is often scattered throughout the day in my little in-between moments.

(the extra hours are then allotted to eating, socializing, exercising, etc)

[having the passion planner has helped a lot with allocating my time.]

i feel pretty well sorted now!  of course, there’s the whole “what’s the point? what’s the meaning of all this?” question that bogs me down, but i’m gonna figure that out eventually! (maybe with a very advanced color-coded chart!)

[20aliens-deactivated20200625]

[20aliens-deactivated20200625]

Keith Haring, 1989

[podcastwizard]

hearing the john mulaney “do my friends hate me or do i just need to go to sleep” bit is the best thing to have happened for my mental health because every time i’m afraid my friends hate me it’s around the time i should be going the fuck to sleep

[bladesandstars]

I read somewhere “if you feel like everyone hates you you need to sleep and if you feel like you hate everyone else you need to eat” and it was honestly world-shattering and I wish I’d heard it years ago!

[caffstrink]

it’s a rainy day today

[saoirseronanswife]

she was so right about this

[by-grace-of-god]

The mystery of icon-preserving bees

For a decade, a beekeeper near Athens, has kept a tradition: every spring, he slips icons of Christ, the Holy Virgin and different saints in his beehives, in order to bless his bees and his yearly honey production. And every year, the very same mysterious phenomenon occurs: bees make their honeycomb cells around the pious images, meticulously avoiding covering them. 

[heartseeker]

[r00ib0s]

I’ve been waiting all my life for some angel memes u__u

[carrotflowerss]

I want to bake bread and make tea and hang dried lavender above my doorways

I want a cat following closely at my feet and hair that sways against my lower back as I walk

I want big windows that let in plenty of sun and happy plants that face them

I want a small garden and a chair beneath a tree

🌿

[weirdlandtv]

Artist/illustrator, Elina Grethen.

[possibdfmsds]

“The privatisation of stress has been normalised. The fact that young people are depressed, who gives a shit. See, this is the idea, young people are depressed, well that’s just part of life. It wasn’t part of life. It was not part of life. The increase of depression among young people is shocking and that ought to be the biggest possible indicator of condemnation of the world in which we now live in. It wasn’t normal for young people to be depressed in the 70s, let’s say. (…) You have been deprived of things and the things that you have been deprived of are being sold to you as benefits, as a great new world, you’ve got all this stuff, you’ve got all this capacity to do things, it just isn’t like that.” — Mark Fisher

[theremina]

“Miracle on the Mountain” by Clarence Schmidt. Clarence Schmidt was locally and nationally renowned outsider artist -  an iconic pioneer of monumental environmental sculpture. His ongoing life’s work, the “Miracle on the Mountain,” was constructed of found objects and recycled materials between the years 1940-1972, which evolved on the back slope of Ohayo Mountain, in Woodstock NY.

(via)

[hiatus-lc-blog]

“At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: “The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang.” In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over. Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra’s breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms. When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don’t you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don’t you dare.”

— Caitlin Moran 

[avril-circus]

Cat’s nap time ! :>

[triniwindowseat]

Don’t get distracted. Life is music and dancing in the kitchen and sweet watermelon in a yellow bowl and a dragonfly on your thigh and a faint sense that you’ve lived once or twice before and that breathing feels like a thing you’ve done for centuries.

Don’t forget these things. Everything else is details.