In Mid June my boys and I made a major life change. The change involved us moving to Portland Maine.
There was a lot of back story and planning that went into the move but the end result is that I now have tremendously more time and mental space to work on my creative pursuits.
As a result I am truly embracing creativity at last.
It’s now been about three weeks since we’ve made the move, we are settled, we are developing our routines, and I’ve been catching up at work in a big way.
As part of this embracing of creativity I’ve started:
- Making a video every day related to my specific field of instructional design and sharing that on LinkedIn with great reception and feedback.
- Writing my courses for work and catching up on the administrative tasks associated with my day job.
- Begun working on my digital illustration practice.
- Working on cleaning up my professional portfolio, which was especially embarrassing since I teach the portfolio development course in the Master’s program for new Instructional Designers
Most of the time truly has been spent on catching up at work since many of the items which prompted our move were interfering with my work as well as my creativity.
I’m also starting a number of initiatives, some of them like this blog are “restarts” since while I had every intention of doing them in the past without the bandwidth to put the time in they just floundered. Before the end of the month I will have started in earnest:
- Science with Dr. Chris, a series of picture books that are aligned to the K-3 science standards in the US. The goal is to eventually add in lesson plans, activities, and other teacher resources but first is to write and illustrate the books.
- Creativity Jumpstart Workshop, while I’ve cleaned the workshop up so it’s presentable I have a full set of revisions to do to the workshop.
- From The Galley, the once conceived as an example site for students, then transformed into a failed to launch food blog, the site is going to be reborn as a lifestyle blog/podcast that focuses on my journey to buy a sailboat and transition to not only the location independent creative work that I do now but to what I’m calling “Asynchronous location independent creative work” which I define as creative work that offers the flexibility to “disappear” for a week or six at a time without notice or consequence.
- Four separate digital illustration collection. 1. “Maine Iconography” things like anchors, lobsters, blueberries, pine trees, skis, etc. 2. Bookstores of Portland (an excuse to visit every bookstore in the city or at least on the peninsula. 3. Coffee Shops & Digital Nomad Workspaces of Portland (again an excuse to visit them all since I’ve mostly been working from the closest coffee shop to our place). 4. Lighthouses of Maine, I’ve done an illustration of three or four but want to draw each of them.
Not to mention all of the tiny projects I have in the day to day. Hopefully this blog is finally able to launch and develop properly.