Recently I’ve been thinking about my creative output.  I mean, yeah, I write novels and all that, but that’s over at my other blog.  I’m talking about my music and my artwork.

I’ve been focusing on my writing for ages — mainly due to the Great Trilogy Completion and Edit Project Wot Took FAR Too Long — that my love of drawing and playing music fell by the wayside.  Ages ago I used to draw maps in my spare time, and I used to write songs for the few bands I’d started.  I even added both of them to my whiteboard schedule some years back.  But somewhere down the line I chose to focus solely on my writing, ultimately to get better at it and make something of it.

But now that the Trilogy is done and released, and now that I’m working on much smaller projects that aren’t eating up all my time, I find myself itching to return to those two loves.  I’ve been wanting to do so for a while (yes, I know I’ve blogged about it before), and now I have the time and the inclination.

So how do I go about it?

Well, I’m thinking that I should do the same thing that I’ve been doing for my writing: open up a playground for it somewhere.

For my writing, I use the 750 Words site to write outtakes and come up with new ideas.  I call it my word playground for that purpose; it’s there for me to hit a simple word count goal and try out a few things.  So I started thinking: maybe it’s time I do that for the music and the artwork again.  Select a few days a week, and dedicate some time — say, a half hour or so — to do nothing but draw or practice on one of my guitars.  And as an extra incentive, I can use the mp3 recorder app on my phone to record some of the song demos.  [For those playing along: it’s the Hi-Q mp3 recorder app available at the Google store.  The free version records up to 10 minutes, and the sound quality is pretty good considering.]  The aim is to either finish a completed song or piece of art, or make headway on a possible future project.

It’s not much to ask, and it’ll get me back into the habit of working on such things with more frequency, which is the whole point.