Ah, the old conundrum... I feel like blogging but have nothing to type about. I have spent all day working on tour press outreach (from places as far-flung as Boston, Salt Lake City, Fullerton, CA, Charlotte, NC, and Peoria, IL -- that's just a mere sampling -- I felt like I was atlas-hopping all day long). I try to get people to write about my bands' upcoming shows. Or have them on their local morning TV show. Or get them out to review the show. It's not as easy as it would seem -- you'd think it would be a given that they'd want to write about a band coming to town, right? Not so much. 'Cause there are SO MANY OTHER bands on tour at any given time that my bands are competing with other touring bands in the same markets. So I try to start a month before the show -- any earlier and it gets lost in the shuffle, any later, and the editorial space may already be allocated to something else (yes, even in daily papers it can happen well in advance). So I literally spent all day working on that. I feel like I've been all over the country. In a manner of speaking, anyway...

Aside from that, I've been doing a little bit of introspection lately (perhaps fueled by PMS, and I can't decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing... ). Evaluating. Trying to figure some things out. Mentally organizing myself and my priorities. It's hard trying to run two businesses. I probably spend way too much time working, and I'm not sure how healthy that is. I am happy doing it, so I have to think it's good. The scrap stuff especially makes me really happy. I get frustrated by my lack of time off sometimes. With that being said, I have no plans to throttle back on anything. I've just been doing some thinking about workload and is it working for me. I've come to the conclusion that it is.

I need to get busy with some designing soon.... no two ways about it. BUT I have to say that working on that book I was hired to do made me really want to just sit and scrap in my allotted scrap time, as opposed to designing or working on site admin stuff, or whatever things I have on my plate. Maybe I just have to step back and scrap more. Create more just for me. When I design, yes, it's for me. But it's for everyone else too because I do design with an eye toward what people might find useful and practical and nice to look at. Layouts that I do of my own accord are really very self-centered things if you think about it (unless you are scrapping for someone else, but we usually aren't doing that when we scrap). I don't use the term 'self-centered' in a bad way, either. The act of creating a layout will cause you to look inward, reflect, and express yourself in a visual fashion. What comes out can be very personal in a lot of ways, even if it's just what you would consider a garden-variety layout. Think of where your brain goes when you scrap. Why you do it. How it makes you feel. It's a very personal thing, isn't it? I think I need to explore more of that "me" art sometime soon. Stuff that is just for me, or just for my family. Not for anyone else. I think it will be good for me. Heaven only knows the stuff I did and posted at DAQ last year totally stoked my creative fire in so many awesome ways. Maybe I'll make some ATC's. Just because I want to. Not because I have to for a deadline or because somebody else said I had to.

Gosh, I'm getting very deep and philosophical here. I didn't intend to. I sat down with nothing much to say, yet I still managed to write a few paragraphs. The writer in me can never be quelled for very long, I guess; or I just have an endless stream of words looking to find their way out somehow.

So, today's question is multi-pronged: do you find the art of making layouts a very personal exercise? Who do you scrap for? How does it make you feel? What drives you to create layouts? What inspires you?