The Portfolio Project

I spend a lot of energy managing the mind game in this line of work.  There are so many things to get snagged along the way and slow us down--performance issues, perfectionism, the complex relationship between art and commerce and the way you can read that sales sheet like it's measuring your whole worth.  One thing that helps me keep things light and not too significant is to frame things in terms of a game that I'm currently playing.  When Jen Lemen came to visit last week, we were both at the end of the games we'd been playing for the end of the year, and ready for something new.  We came up with a 12-week action burst that would focus on daily production goals that will dramatically expand our body of work.  This is a big game.  What would your landscape look like, if 12 weeks from now you had 50 new paintings, or 100?  If you had 50 new poems and short stories?  What if they weren't all amazing--don't you think the odds are that plenty of them would be?  That it would feel good to fish for the best from a vast ocean instead of a puddle of projects? Here's an excerpt of our conversation in which The Portfolio Project was born.  (Watch my moves here--I'm just throwing this up here, even though it isn't perfect and even though I was fumbling through new software and couldn't get it 'just so'.) Anyone can play this game, at any time.  But we're playing it now, and we're both "The More, The Merrier" kind of gals.  Let us know if you're up for playing along.