What Helped Me Most This Week

I’m trying to do something creative every day. I’m documenting it here.

This week, I didn’t post as much as I would have liked, but I still managed to document a few things. I worked some on my literary magazine, I wrote a new micro, “What’s the Occasion?” and revised “Plant Food,” I watched the movie Uptown Girls, and I worked on learning .html. Of all of those things, I actually found working on .html to be the most creatively stimulating thing I did.

In some ways, this also ties in a bit to the literary magazine. I’m in the throws of trying to format poetry, and while I don’t know enough about coding to really fix the issue, it is weirdly comforting to look at the code and at least know I have the line breaks in the right spot.

I’ve messed around with coding before, but for grad school, I’m actually taking a full course on .HTML and web design. By the end of the semester, I should have a fully designed website (that I may or may not share with folks, we’ll see how I feel!). I really think of this as a creative practice because you’re building something completely from scratch. Admittedly, I haven’t had the chance to get into all the fun colors and fonts yet, but I’m sure that will add a whole different ‘creative’ element to the process. It’s also weirdly comforting because it’s so formulaic, and everything has to be written in an exact way. I can see how people who do this for a living get into that ‘flow’ state, it can feel weirdly meditative. I’m excited to keep playing around with it, and hopefully it’ll let me spruce up my various websites if I need to.

So, that’s what actually helped my creativity, and also helped me generally, the most this week.

Love and gratitude, as always.