working weekends

Posted by on May 11th, 2013  •  0 Comments

My web design textbook is up to158 pages of original content. I need to write another 15 pages this weekend. I was able to plug in a  lesson from an old textbook for a week, which allowed me to  climb last weekend at Leavenworth with Sue, Alex, Kristi and their two kids. That was an awesome break.

But now I’m back at the typewriter, trying to pound out some more pages. I read some interesting prose recently (might have been on Slate) from another writer. She was describing how hard it was to write.

“I write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.” George Balanchine: “My muse must come to me on union time.” Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” John Updike: “I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.” George Gershwin said that if he waited for inspiration, he would compose at most three songs a year.

That rings very true for me. Writing is painful, especially at first. But once the words and ideas start to flow, I can go for days. While this all sounds wonderful, it’s taking quite a toll on me. Of the last 6 weekends, I’ve taken 3 days off. The rest have been spent at my typewriter. More specifically, Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, HTML 5 and CSS 3. My topic is Responsive Web Design, but more specifically, how to teach Responsive Design to college students. My approach is to build a beautiful website step by step, explaining each step as we go. We bake our cookies from scratch in this program.

I’m considering cutting back my hours summer quarter. I’d love to teach all 4 classes, it’s really cool stuff…but the way I’m feeling after 6 weeks of this quarter, I don’t think I can do it.

I need to stop whining and get to work. Complaining about my workload on the internet is solving nothing.

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