I'm Taking Commissions

Wow, okay, it's been more than a year since I've posted here. I've been going through some interesting artistic rethinking/reshuffling/reimaginings I guess, though I'm not in any place to talk about it yet; it's still at the chrysalis stage and needs some time in the dark still. Though if you're interested in peeking at what I've been up to, the link to my deviantArt page is to the left.

And apologies for breaking the silence with shilling, but I need to raise a bit of fast cash right now. Which means I am going to do something I pretty much never do: I’m going to take some commissions. Generally I don’t work well within the kind of structure making art on commission requires, as drawing Deities is a genuinely religious experience for me and I must be inspired, but I think with some limitations I’ll be able to make it work. So here’s how it’s going to go:

—The art will be in the style of my World Goddess Oracle cards, i.e. pen and ink on paper with full color watercolor. They won’t be actual cards, like with the name underneath, but they’ll be in that artistic style with the heavy outlines and the flat color (scroll down this page for some handy examples).

—Any (female) Goddess of your choosing. No male Gods or fictional characters for now, just Goddesses, from any culture you prefer. I may take some limited direction on your preferences (like if you want a dark-haired Bridget) but a lot of that isn’t really up to me and the art is going to do what it wants to do. I also reserve the right to decline a commission if I’m just not feeling it for whatever reason.

—I tend to naturally work pretty small, so the finished pieces will probably end up around fifteen square inches, for example three by five inches or four by four, though the exact proportions will of course depend on the dictates of the composition.

—I will send you the original physical art, not a digital copy; I may however use the image myself in the future in my portfolio or to sell on prints or t-shirts, &c. You may not take the image and profit from it yourself.

—Prices are $75.00 US (via paypal) plus shipping and handling, which in the US will probably run about another $5.00. I’m happy to ship internationally but I’ll need to look up postage and get back to you about it. Payment in full is required before I start work.

I have no idea how long I’ll be taking these commissions, so if you want something you should probably act pretty quickly! Get in touch with me at thalia@thaliatook.com if you’re interested.

Alchemy

This is the sort of thing I would usually talk about on my other blog, the one dealing with my father's hoarding and its aftermath. But of course one can't really separate one's life so neatly, and it is all related and intersecting. So I will make this observation here: what we are doing is in large part a spell.

I suppose I should give a bit of rough background. My father was a compulsive hoarder and a mechanic. Have you seen those TV shows? I haven't, actually, because I know I would find them triggering and enraging; but from what I have heard he may very likely be worse than the people on them. Because, no matter how bad they are, the very fact that they have agreed to be on those shows mean they recognize something is wrong with them. For my father? Not so much, no.

For forty years he filled this yard (and the garage, attic, breezeway, and two outbuildings) with junk like whole rusty cars, car parts, engines, tires, scrap metal, galvanized heater ducts, pipes, lumber, boards, milk crates of cedar shingles, cans and jars filled with nails and bolts and screws, refrigerator drawers, wooden drawers salvaged from old bureaus, broken furniture, and on and on and on. At one point there were seventy-eight cars on this acre and a half lot. I wonder, quite seriously, if we have actually had a million bolts, screws, and nails here. I am in no way kidding. How many nails fit in a gallon tin can? And how many of those have we found, and gotten rid of?

So, anyway. What my sibling and I have been doing in whatever time we can spare is to clean this up. (This is only possible, I should say, because my father is now in a nursing home and no longer lives here.) We have already taken a huge amount of stuff off the property. We have made (according to the receipts) twenty-six trips to the scrap yard to get rid of iron, so far (that number is probably a little low, actually, since I don't think we have all the receipts), and taken more than eleven tons.

Yes. Eleven tons. And it has barely made a dent, honestly. It doesn't look very much different.

So back to the Witchy aspect of all of this. Besides the obvious ways in which this clean-up is honoring the Earth (or really, just being decent to the Earth), and the ways in which it is making this bit of land more hospitable to faeries (what are faeries famous for hating? Iron) or the way in which it is more personally connected to my own growth and feeling of freedom, not to mention the whole working out of issues thing, it is also in some very real ways a magical process.

Because it is alchemy. We have been gathering up base metal, copper, brass, iron, and yes, literally lead, and transforming it into gold, or rather, cash. And that is a magical process.

And so I recently took some of that money and bought myself something which really seems quite appropriate, given the author's interest in alchemy and transformation. Can you guess what it is?

Here's the package which arrived today. It was quite large, and very heavy.



Yes. It's a book. Can you guess what color?



Why yes. Red.

O happy happy. I have only had time so far to page through the illuminated part and read most of the introduction (I had to put it down to help take several stacks of tires to the tire place), but I can already tell it is going to change the way I make art.

Good.

AEDM November 7th

Another confession. I fucking hate the artistic process. I really, really, really do. The phrase I always, always come up with is that it is like pulling my own teeth. For all that I don't want to know what I'm doing, well, maybe that has nothing to do with it after all, I don't know. But I only do it for the results, honestly. I hate the process. I really do.

Painting doesn't send me to some lovely zen-state where time no longer exists; always it is simply a chance for the monkey mind to rant (and rant) about awful things while the rest of my brain is occupied, and every millisecond is filled with rants and the petty stupidity of thought, even as whatever it is I'm making is being made (or making itself, maybe. I don't know).

And I get frustrated so easily. I mean, it's ridiculous, and has been proved over and over again, but when drawing, like, say, trying to get that hand right, I always, always despair that it will never work. Every single time. It always does, but that knowledge, that experience, never seems to take.

It's the same old block, I suppose, one that I've been trying to get around for several years now. One that I have in general left off fighting, because fighting it, rebelling against it, has not only proved to be useless but I swear only makes it stronger. So maybe this making art every day thing, on schedule, and with the intent to check in daily and show others, is just not a good idea for me. I can never tell. I'm not the type to force myself through something; I have found that it inevitably harms me in the process.

So, this is what I tried to paint today. I went at it not knowing what it was going to be, and not caring, either, or so I thought. But it got to a point where trying to decide what to do with it, or trying to judge what was the appropriate next step just met with all this, not resistance, I don't quite think, but all this stupid other stuff coming up, to the point where I was nearly in tears and just said fuck it. Fuck all of this. Now.



So I left off.

I swear, the only reason I paint is for the end result. Now, it's true, I don't really want to know everything about what it will be, and I want it to be its own thing—like a spell, where you say, I want this result, or better. It's that or better part that seems to fill itself in. Divinely? Maybe. Probably. And that's good.

I'm beginning to see it a bit now I think, this block, and what it is constructed out of. It all comes back to the hoarding, my father's hoarding, and the resulting neglect that was all a piece of it, and of being told, and shown, that my needs (really, anyone's needs but my father's) were not just unimportant but completely and quite impartially irrelevant. Personality disorder on my father's part, you see. I don't really want to get into any of it here, and I certainly hadn't planned to (that is what the hoarding blog is for), but, it is kind of the big issue I'm dealing with right now. And if there's one thing I've learned about myself is that things that are important to me permeate my entire life. I don't see how they can't, really.

So I think really this comes down to some part of me having been taught that I am simply not allowed to do what I want, to have what I desire, to behave as I like. And when I try to do any of those things, I am still coming up against the idea that I shouldn't, and I am bad. I know, that is the language of a child there, isn't it. Well yeah.

AEDM November 6th

So I designed that bookcase which will hold the fat quarters and which will go under my Muse pictures. Now, I'm not really much of a woodworker, not yet, anyway, though I'm a little further along than being confined to building birdhouses; but I'm no cabinet-maker, certainly. So I kept it simple. Simple, but with some design to it; and I figured I could probably make something simple but with a bit of an Arts and Crafts sensibility in the proportions. That I can do.

So here's the sketch. I should probably redraw it on graph paper, since the proportions of the thickness of the wood are a little off (since 1" wood is actually 3/4"), and I want to make sure it won't look anemic; still, I'm pretty happy with it.



Again, I don't have a scanner right now so I had to take a photo, which I played around with to get some kind of readable contrast. I like the effect, though; it makes it look like one of Leonardo's sketches, don't you think?

Although, really, for the full Leonardo effect it should look like this:



I don't know yet quite how I'm going to do that thick top, or the moulding on the thick top, but I'll figure it out.

And oh yes, that's a sketch of Sir Isaac Mewton's head over there on the side. He moved, of course.

AEDM November 5th

Art Every Day Month is always (well, okay, this is only my second time at it) kind of a mindfuck, honestly. Or at least it is given the way my mind works. I am a recovering insomniac and my productivity generally takes place in the wee hours. Which means I'm usually one of the last ones checking in at Leah's site and I feel like I've missed out on the discussion, or that I'm hopelessly behind and a disorganized loser or something.

I know. I'm just stating it. I do recognize that that's pretty silly. Also, dammit, I'm just not good with the pressure. Not, mind you, that I'm giving up on this already or anything; just that, as usual, I have to adapt the 'normal' way of doing things to my own deeply, deeply idiosyncratic brain.

I am finding the same thing happening that I did with the Goddess of the Week posts; that having an audience means I censor myself and am unwilling to, well, even start. I suspect I will just have to ignore that. I'm not sure what to do about it but the word 'freestyle' is coming to mind.

So with at least the scheduling issues in mind, I'm going to try something. It is ridiculously early by my usual schedule (it's not even 10pm here!), and I've already made something, which I will post below. I will try, also, however, to do something else, and post that tonight as well. But it will be after midnight and so will actually be tomorrow's entry. So that will put me a day ahead, which sounds (from here) to be lovely and relaxing, and should help relieve that feeling of pressure which is making me crazy. (Well, marginally more so than usual, ha.)

So. This is what I did today, for Art Every Day Month:

I still don't really have a lot to show. But I cut out some more grey squares for my Hallowe'enish nine patch quilt. Then I laid them down, and put my glasses on (that last part is important). Because once I could see them I was no longer so sure about the colors. So I cut out some of the plain grey cloth I had, and laid them down too. I think they are too dark. The effect is not what I want, really. Here's a look:



I corrected for color in Photoshop, but it's still a little on the magenta side, especially on the left.

The thing with grey, I am finding out, is that it has to be dead-on neutral (or ever-so slightly brownish warm) to read as grey. Even a little bit of blue in that grey means it's reading just as blue, especially in contrast to the orange, which is complementary and so tends to push it over. So I think I am going to have to just go with a solid ash grey, and one that is lighter than the solid I already have. Probably; this project is now in a stage where some mulling needs to be given space to happen.

You know, once in a while when I tell an artist acquaintance that I make quilts, I get a mocking response (honestly, usually from a dude artist). So I tell them what I have found to be absolutely true—that I used to think I knew a thing or two about color, and then I tried to make a quilt.

Because you are not only using other people's color choices and are not mixing any colors yourself, but you are also using patterns, which 1) do incredibly unpredictable things when placed next to each other, and 2) look entirely different whether viewed up close or from a distance. It is baffling and marvelous both.

So anyway, I'm going to put this particular quilt aside for the moment (at least until I can get some of the right color grey cloth). I don't know what I'm working on instead though. I'm sure I'll figure it out, though.

AEDM November 3rd

I have a confession to make.

I don't like messy art.

No, that's not true.

I HATE messy art.

Still, when I was lying in bed last night trying to figure out what I wanted to do today for Art Every Day Month, I remembered I had the stuff to make monoprints.

We did them in art school. As you may have guessed by the name, unlike most prints, which are designed to be made in some kind of quantity, you only make one of these. What you do is ink up a sheet of glass with your ink and a roller, then put the paper (rice paper works well) face down on top. Then you draw on the back with a pencil or whatever, or, you can simply trace with a finger or fingernail. You can get some unbelievably black blacks with this, and they can be quite yummy.

So I set it all up, having first set the portable heater in the room to Quite Toasty; and sure enough, the cats could smell it and were soon scratching at the door to come in. They then promptly curled up and went to sleep in the lovely warm room, and I had my models. I am so clever.

I also did some sketches of hands and some drawings after some photos of trees I had.

I took a photo of the ones I liked since they aren't exactly scan-in-able all wet and sticky like that.



They are kind of fun, I guess, though not really my thing, like I said. And I got all paranoid about washing up afterwards, since the ink was oil-based. My studio room is also my sewing room, and black smudgy ink + nice clean cloth is not a happy thing. So, hmmm. Usually I do water-based paintings that have far less potential to get everywhere, but I've been wanting to do some oil painting, too. I don't know if it's going to be able to work in that room after all.

Funny

I suppose I should say that I've no intention of shutting down or abandoning this blog; I fully intend to continue to write about Paganism, Goddesses, the numinous, &c. Just that right now I'm not sure what I want to write about, or if I wish to give the place a more precise focus. Probably not. I am a big fan of the organic, and forging ahead without anything but the roughest idea. I find that with that method what needs to come up, will. I have found it much more rewarding.

In art school we were taught to plan it all out thoroughly. Before brush hit canvas (or colored pencil Stonehenge paper) we were to have sketched it all out to a precise level of detail, rearranged all the elements to perfection, and have it all thought out intellectually.

This method is a sure-fire way to drain all vitality out of a piece of art. You want to lose that spark? Draw it once perfectly, then trace that onto the final piece and try to recreate what you just did. Or have it all thought out beforehand, so that anything that wishes to spontaneously arise can't.

I abandoned this long ago. I realize I am lucky in being able to do that. I am technically proficient enough that I can lean on that proficiency and know it will support me. I can wing it, as I go.

It is so much better to do it that way. I don't want to know what I am doing when I create. I want to look back on the process, this organic creation, this birth which involves a living creature, a living creation, a living work of art that is not me, and see what has come up. I want to see what it wants.

It's like sitting down to write when you don't know what you want to say. It is so much better, and you find out so much more, when you do that. Oh sure, sometimes it won't come, and you can't force it if it isn't ready; but if you ever find yourself thinking that you don't know what to say, then write. You will find out.

So then I guess I have answered my own question, the one I posed at the top of this as I just write this out straight and let it come: this blog, then, will likely focus on the creative process, from a Pagan, Divine, spiritual, numinous point of view.

Funny how that works.

Creative Every Day Update

I have been doing lots of creative things this last week, including some art, though I can't really show it right now as I don't have access to a scanner (my sister is "borrowing" it; "borrowing" in quotes since, after all, it is hers).

Those inertial blocks I started got hung up for a time, stymied by the ridiculous fact that I didn't actually have any newspapers for papier-mache; that has been fixed, courtesy of a stack of free car-advertisement papers swiped from the local grocery store.

I have been keeping track, quite faithfully, and I have to say keeping a Creativity Log has been one of the most phenomenally helpful things ever, for it is making me confront, and see, all the myriad creative things I do.

One of the things I did this week was play around a bit with intuitive drawing, though I'm not sure I like the results.

The main piece I did, though, was something I'm quite pleased with, though I feel sort of vaguely guilty about it too, which is ridiculous. After picking Al-Uzza for Goddess of the Week a couple of weeks ago, and realizing just how dissatisfied I was with the original art, I succumbed to temptation, and did another version. This is something I've been trying to avoid, because I most decidedly suffer from the Tolkienesque affliction of never being able to leave well enough alone, as far as my creations go. If I let myself, I know I would be forever going back into things and reworking and rethinking them; so, for the sake of being able to call something "done" and "finished" I have had to train myself to be quite ruthless about Letting Things Be.

But it was really nice, and in doing it I realized that, even though the rest of the Goddess Oracle Deck cards are a good ten years old now, I could still find plenty to explore within that format and that premise and that artistic style; and they're quick to make, too, unlike most of my other work, and the instant gratification aspect of it is a very good thing. So I'm conflicted. You know.

Mostly what I've been doing this past week, though, is working on getting a Sims 1 site together. I have surprised myself by being consistent at it; this last year I've been feeling so rootless and in-between with Things Artistic that I have had to resort to telling myself to just do something for half an hour, after which I can go do something else if I want to. But I remembered something I learned in college about using my time.

Some semesters, because of the schedule, I would end up having these little blocks of time, like an hour and a half, between classes. Time enough to go home and hang out, but not, I thought, time enough to actually get anything done. Which turned out to be not at all true, and once I started using those bits of time I found I got far more done than I ever would have thought, as it spilled out into the rest of my time. So, I'm relearning how to be productive, I guess. Perhaps I can smell spring on its way.

Anyway, here are a couple more examples of the little Sims dresses I've been making:

It occurred to me last night that, though I chose to make One Hundred Toys, I am in fact participating quite literally in the One Hundred Dresses Project too, with all the little virtual dresses I've been doing. Interesting.

Inertia

I've started another set of blocks, this time to be in papier-maché; seven of them all told, to spell the word inertia.

It's a funny thing, inertia. It can mean both being stuck, and moving. To quote Mewton's, er, sorry, Newton's First Law: an object at rest will remain at rest; an object in motion will remain in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force.

I feel I am right now stuck in the remaining at rest part of the Law; and trying to get myself to work on Something today, like these blocks, meant talking myself through it, the way a very depressed person has to carve up the day into tiny, manageable baby steps. Instead of looking at the whole project, which felt overwhelming, I told myself, Okay, now I'm just going to get the wallpaper paste out of the drawer of the art caddy. Just that, and nothing beyond that, right now. Turns out, though, I don't actually have any wallpaper paste, I just thought I did; but still, I did work on the blocks a little. And that counts.

Partially I'm sure it's the fact that it's winter, and all I want to do is hibernate; a little tricky, really, to get moving when Nature is telling me to remain at rest. But, also, it's that I have really gotten out of the habit of making things, and there is a lot of stuff to get moving, psychic, mental, and physical. So there's rather more to it than I'm assuming.

But, here are my blocks, so far:

Pardon the unphotogenic background; my drawing table does double duty as my sewing table. I hope to get that rectified soon, as I'm working on refinishing the spare room to be a proper studio space; right now my drawing table is set up in a corner of my bedroom, not the best way to go about things, if one has a choice.

Now, in the interests of showing myself (and the rest of y'all) that I have been doing plenty in the name of being creative every day, here's what I've put in my creativity log so far (I won't, probably, post in this much detail all the time; I just need to see it and make it real out in public today):

1/1/09: Danced a little to "Brain Damage Situation" by They Might Be Giants, which has a great groove; got doll's skirt attached and apron made; sketched a little; finished off the first set of Artist's Blocks; wrote a blog post.

1/2/09: Researched/wrote about Benzaiten for several hours (and let me tell you, Her history is unbelievably complicated!); and, oh, I'm gritting my teeth and making myself include this, I played The Sims for a while. Mostly I made the little houses, this lovely terraced neighborhood of Minoan houses with nice little gardens, &c. which, yes, technically, is creating something. (I will learn not to judge this one, dammit!)

1/3/09: Wrote Goddess of the Week entry; played more Sims and worked on the little houses some more (if interior decorating in reality is creative, so is this--yes, yes, I'm trying very hard to convince myself!); sketched some toy ideas.

1/4/09: Started more blocks; photographed doll; made a couple Minoan heads (these little bitmaps in Photoshop) for The Sims. (All right, Brain, listen up: this month's theme is Play; combine that with my word for the year, Permission, and it means I have permission to play. You know, like a game. Like, oh I don't know, maybe, just perhaps, The Sims! Oh, Brain, when will you learn?)

Here's that photo of the doll I've been working on. Right now she looks a little Amish (by which I mean the no face part; that's one way they reconcile the "no graven images" thing in the Bible). I have a vague idea what I want to do with her face and hair, but haven't liked any of the sketches I've done so far, so I've put her aside for now while I mull.

Well Would You Look At That?

Here's a little something else on the nature of inspiration.

I did this set of little bitty paintings a couple months ago, just for myself, and purely for fun. They are, in fact, meant to be used in a game--The Sims, that game where you play God/dess and make little people with little lives, though the part I like best is making the little houses with the little furniture. See, I have this dream of making a completely furnished Labyrinth, with frescoes and Horns of Consecration and chairs and dining room tables all in the ancient style. (Oh, what fun!)

But I had just thought of it all as fluff, though it did look nice in the game (though I'm still having problems converting my watercolors to wallpapers):

And this led me to do the Minoan series of little artworks, in the same style, and really, the same color scheme and technique. See how that works?

It is all important. It is all art.

Labyrinth Four

I've been on a bit of a Minoan/Mykenaean kick lately, and have been working my way through my local library's copies of Arthur Evan's The Palace of Minos at Knossos, which is in like a million volumes; I'm on the second one (part two). So I have been looking at these really lovely, crisp pen-and-ink drawings of artifacts, as well as the artifacts themselves a lot lately. This design, the bull's head and double axe, is straight from a Late Minoan jar. I rather like it, and the colors, which I chose in imitation of Minoan frescoes; though next time I think I'll use different paper. It's this matboard I have that is fine for watercolor or colored pencil, but a little too fibrous and linty for pen and ink, which scratches up the surface a bit too much.

In the process of doing this I had to clean out my pens, and for a while there could not find the special ink that goes in them; but in looking, I found a whole bunch of little teeny canvases I bought once upon a time, and pulled them out. Seriously, they're itty-bitty, four by five inches (though not as small as that drawing above, the original of which is two by three inches).

But I'm not that happy with what I came up with:

I think the proper word is meh. It started out quite promising, but the more I worked on it the less I liked it, and ended up painting over it with some white.

So though I liked that first one, altogether I'd say it was kind of a frustrating experience. I'm in some kind of transitional phase, art-wise, I think right now; and though I know the old way of doing things isn't really serving me anymore, I've no idea what the new way will be like, and I really feel like I am blundering about in the dark. More reason, I suppose, to keep at the Labyrinth imagery.

Also, and I hadn't applied this to my situation, both labrys (double axe) and bull's head are symbols of rebirth.

Art Every Day Month

Puttering about the internet last night I happened upon a blog by Leah Piken Kolidas, Creative Every Day, via Sacred Circle Mandalas. And there I got the details on Art Every Day Month, an idea Leah came up with which is now in its fifth year.

The basics are that participants do some art every day, and then post the results on their blog. Now, I know it's already the ninth, but it's never too late to join in, and so I thought I might just.

But then I couldn't decide what, or how, to do it. At first I thought it would be a great way to get me back into drawing and painting (as I have not done a Goddess painting in more than a year), but then I wasn't sure that would work, making myself draw every day. Because I know that that's probably the surest fastest way to get me to hate (and I mean hate) something, by forcing myself to do it.

So I hemmed and hawed about joining in, figuring it was probably too good for me to be fun.

But then I remembered when I was a kid.

I learned to sew at the age of five. The first thing I ever sewed was, unbelievably, a stuffed toy cat, of a design and pattern (if you can call it that) I made myself. He was made of bright blue fur (since that's what we had around) and his name was (is, actually, as he's still around somewhere) Scottie. Unbelievably, I say, because said design actually made use of a gusset for his belly and the inside of his legs. He was no flat pillow-type silhouette of a cat, oh no--Scottie was a four-legged thing with a separate tail and head.

I should dig him out and post a picture; he is quite hilarious to grown-up eyes.

And every day when I was a kid, just about, I would make something. Usually it was another toy or animal, or a doll or doll's clothes. Every day, nearly. And I wouldn't plan anything; I'd just do it. And finish it, too, that day. There were a lot of homemade critters kicking around the house when I was a kid (including a dozen or so corduroy rabbits--why corduroy? you ask. Because it was kind of fuzzy, sort of. No, it wasn't fur, but it had some pile to it. The first one was named, of course, Flopsy. She was turquoise blue!)

My mom (also an artist) even had a name for it, the mood we kids would get in when we were feeling creative: the Makey-Makey Feeling. "Do you have the Makey-Makey Feeling?" she would ask.

Anyhow, so I decided after all I would join in Art Every Day Month, or at least give it a shot. We'll see how I do. But I thought I'd start off, at least, with the emphasis on fun things, little things I could start and finish in a couple hours. I can't promise how well I'll do; I've never been much good with discipline, preferring to lean on inspiration more. But we shall see.

I figured, also, that since I'm starting late, on the ninth of November, that I'd go on till the eighth of December, you know, to get the full benefits of doing it for thirty days. Stay tuned!

Ravings of a Frustrated Wannabe Scholar

I was a scholar in a past life, I really think I was; but in this one I'm just an artist. I make no bones (I think) about not being a proper expert in any of this Goddess stuff, by which I mean, one with degrees and a dissertation behind her; really, I am just a (very) interested amateur when you come down to it.

So this week, in researching the Goddess Ceres for The Book To Go With The Goddess Oracle Deck (for which I really should attempt to come up with a catchier title), I came across Barbette Stanley Spaeth's book The Roman Goddess Ceres. Which book, alas, is not available at my famously crappy local university library (and, as I am not a student there I do not have access to inter-library loan); so I've been reading what I can of it on Google Books. And I only got to page two before I hit this passage:

Ceres’ name also links her with several ancient Italic divinities, such as Kerrí, Keri Arentikai, Regina Pia Cerria Iovia, and Anceta Ceria. These divinities were worshipped by the Osco-Umbrians or Sabellian-Umbrians, peoples of the central and southern regions of Italy.

And my head just about exploded. These are Goddesses, obscure Goddesses, about Whom I've only ever found a diabolically mysterious mention there and here; and I am fiercely, fiercely jealous of the access to material proper scholars have. I mean, it's true, I have to rely on others' work, and that in English to boot, as I can't read things for myself in Latin or Greek, or even French or the German that every freakin' work on the Etruscans seems to have been written in; so I have a few limitations. But damn. She just tosses these names around like it's the Red Sox lineup for the year.

Yeah, jealous, a bit.

But excited too, in a way I suppose only a fanatic, or a Goddess worshipper who leans towards the nerdy side of things can get; because, OhmyGod! more Obscure Goddesses for the collection, as it were. And I find myself in an odd state, one that I've been in a lot lately for some reason: a kind of blocked or unfocused inspiration.

It's very strange. I have been quite inspired, I mean on fire! about my various projects; yet the way it's playing out in me is that I am so inspired and so excited I can't actually sit still long enough to get anything done. I am full of plans and dreams and ideas but am having a terrible time just doing the damned stuff. I'm not usually like this; not, I mean, that I've ever been any good with discipline, I suppose.

It's not even quite a question of not knowing where to start; I've had that problem all my life and have some ways around that by now. It's that when I sit down to do one thing, I find myself passionately thinking about something else I'd like to do; but if I start on that something else comes up. It's like my inspiration is misfiring, or isn't timed correctly. I need the psychic equivalent of one of those strobe light thingies for your car engine.

Any ideas?