I’ve been spending the past few days trying to organize posts by category on this blog. Apparently that helps with SEO, and I definitely want to be more discoverable online. Most importantly, I want people to be able to find my books, because readers tend to love my books, but not enough people actually know about them.
So yes, I want to be more organized. But order is not an easy task when you are really creative with a penchant for chaos. If you ask me what this blog is really about, I might give you a vague answer: creativity, inspiration, things I like, making art daily, advertising my books, selling paintings, talking about birds and the moon… I mean, why do I even have to pick something? Also, have I mentioned horses? And my little house in Galveston? The blog is sometimes about horses, sometimes about the house, and sometimes about things so random, they surprise even me.
But, let’s try to backtrack a little, because what all these seemingly random things have in common is a why. To get to it, I might have to tell you how this all started, the painting, the blogging, the everything.
I Had a Bad Time in Ibiza
I’m not sure that particular headline will do much for SEO, but I couldn’t resist it. I like the sound of it. And it is true. In the summer of 2013, I went on a trip to Ibiza with a group of young women who all had a lot in common and who I didn’t really vibe with. I ended up spending a considerable amount of time in my room, and I started painting a small watercolor each day and posting it to Facebook. It was a small daily exercise but I realized I derived a lot of joy from it, both from the painting and from the sharing. I kept up this daily habit, and I noticed it was helping me a lot, even after the trip that didn’t go as planned. The truth was, that trip was not the only thing in my life at that time that was a source of disappointment. A lot of things were going kinda meh and I needed an outlet. A daily ritual. Something that would help me see things in a different way, force my mind to focus for at least a few minutes on something positive and restful. I needed a small daily dose of creativity. Because no matter how things are going, creativity is going to improve your life.
Daily Creativity Requires Observation
My little daily exercise of painting something, anything, got me to change the way I was looking at the world. If you are looking around constantly in order to identify something you think you might be able to paint, something you think you might enjoy painting, then you are basically on a perpetual treasure hunt and treasure hunts are fun therefore your life will be more fun. You will also train yourself to pay attention and that is good for one’s overall level of happiness.
Anyway, long story short, this blog started 13 years ago as a chronicle of my efforts to find daily inspiration and share this with others. It is all over the place, because inspiration tends to be all over the place too. Still, there are some themes that I keep going back to, and while I have no intention of narrowing things down and limiting myself to certain topics, here are some of the things that tend to reoccur:
Galveston Island
The island is a primary source of inspiration for me. After years of loitering around its streets, beaches, I now have a little Galveston cottage to call my own, so obviously I spend a lot of time there, blog about the Island and paint things I see there. I also am the author of several novels set in Galveston, so I talk about them on this blog too.
Other Travel
I tend to go to many other places and am occasionally confused about where I belong. So that is a recurring theme on this blog too.
Horses
Duh! I am, after all, the creator of Horse Week and some people refer to me as the Horse Girl. The fact that I have, actually, to this day, never actually been on a horse, is a small insignificant detail I prefer to ignore.
Birds
Especially Yellow Crowned Night Herons, but again, why limit myself?
Food, Fashion, Architecture, Seriously, the Sky’s the Limit
And while I do plan to be a little more organized and strategic on here so I can hopefully rank higher in search engines and such, this blog has been my outlet for all kinds of randomness for years now, and I have no intention of making it into something it’s not.
Basically this blog is the equivalent of me walking through the world, pointing them out to you as I go. In doing so, I’m hoping I can use the thing that tends to make my life better, the art of observation, to make your life better too.
