the problem with being trans is cis people. The problem with being queer is straight people. The problem with being disabled is abled people. The problem with being Black is white people. In other words, prejudice.
painting by Eaton Hamilton, 1918, oil sticks 6′ x4′
Painting shows an impressionistic look at spring with explosions of colour.
It’s been lovely where I live the last couple weeks. The perfect moment in the garden, where spring is poised on the edge of finishing and summer has not yet taken up. Alliums, roses, lilacs all blooming together. The scent is amazing. The brilliant mason bees are completing their last nests.
I haven’t been able to either write or paint this week, alas, because I have had more earth-bound matters to deal with. I’m itching to get back to my memoir, though, and holding myself off.
Painting by Eaton Hamilton, oil on stretched canvas, 16″ x20″.
ID: Yt woman from the 40s walking across a street with baby carriage, yellow balloon and small brown dog. She wears a red hat, dress, shoes.
I don’t want to say Happy Mothers’ Day while there is no Parenting Day to encompass the people left out by the word “mother,” but who are still parenting. I hope you also think of them today on what for many is a very fraught “holiday.” There are a lot of permutations on what today can mean when you never had a mother worthy of the name, had a mother who disliked you, had a mother with addiction issues, didn’t want to be a mother, wanted to be a mother and lost pregnancies, wanted to be a mother and never could, or lost your child/ren, are a trans parent, are a non-binary parent, and so on. Whether you’re an auntie or a gramma or a teacher or someone else, if you make a difference in the life of kids, I salute your unpaid efforts.
Hello to all of you, and to those who were parented well, and those who weren’t but now parent their own kids well. I hope you have a gentle day.
The Danish Girl, portrait of Eddie Redmayne playing Lili Elbe
What a week! I find it beyond exhausting to go to Victoria for medical tests. For me it eats up the entire week what with an 8-hour trip followed by days of PEM.
I painted this a couple weeks back, I think, drawn again to portraits after some time painting from old photographs.
Happily, this week I submitted my novel that has been in-progress 12 years!
Mine was sort of a wreck. The weather is still wintery and cold here and I feel like I’m hanging on by my thumbs. The garden’s growing anyway, and the daffodils are out, lasting forever because it’s so brisk. The clematis armandii is starting to bloom, its evening scent mesmeric. When I take the dog out at night, the frogs in the pond croak, the crickets saw, and it smells divine. If only it would warm up. I’m still wearing my winter gloves to go for daytime walks. I couldn’t get it up for anything this week. Doesn’t matter how perpetually behind I am with everything. Doesn’t matter that some things are urgent. Doesn’t matter that I have upcoming things that will take me away from my desk. I just … couldn’t.
I cope with isolation by working seven days a week. I’m glad Tamara Taggart called what I and other vulnerable citizens are experiencing eugenics this week. It helps to have a celebrity voice telling it like it is when most are gaslighting themselves, their families and their communities.
Those “Festival Flus,” those “Coachella Colds?” All covid. Covid is raging out there, and in hospitals too, where many covid negative patients catch it, ten percent of them dying because of it without anyone standing accountable. There’s no such thing as hybrid immunity with a virus so rapidly changing. That’s why even with flu we need a vaccine once a year–because it’s not the same flu we had before. Covid does this five times as fast. It’s new every few months and we’re learning about the damage of repeated infections. There’s not one part of your body they don’t harm in perhaps permanent ways.
It still could be a game-changer for humanity if we don’t smarten up and fast. Wear respirators and elastomerics. Buy HEPA filters or make CR boxes at home (instructions on You Tube). Keep windows cracked. The best thing is to never catch this bastard.
It wrecks everything, but one of the everythings is that it wrecks your autoimmune system. This leaves you unprotected against things like pneumonias and strep A, and also to age-old infections we thought we’d never see again.
We know how to stop it. We stop it by cleaning the air.
Nobody wants it here. Nobody longs to put on masks. Nobody wants to spend money on protections.
But we don’t have a choice. The only way out of the humongous mess we’ve made is to stop it infecting us.
painting by: Eaton Hamilton, oil sticks on stretched canvas, unsure of size
ID: Non-binary person sitting in green chair wearing black t-shirt and blue pants, orange wall. Short hair.
I’m so tired from the demands of my week, trying to do the work of three people at once, that I ended up with a bad episode of PEM from overexertion. This is hardly new. I’ve had PEM for nearly 40 years. I don’t usually have to go back to bed with it, though, just sit quietly with few demands on my attention. So that’s all for this week, I’m afraid.
Painting by: Eaton Hamilton 2021? pastel on pastel paper, Shirley poppies
ID: Red poppies in a green garden
Has the literary world has shifted to the right over, say, the length of the pandemic? If pressed, I’d say yes.
I’ve been hoping to see more work from marginalized authors–racialized, yes, and also from non-binary, autistic, disabled, older authors–but is publishing becoming more conservative, less likely to take chances on books they would have to develop or tap into unused markets for? Perhaps in part it’s book bannings having a spillover effect; perhaps the anti-drag-queen/trans propaganda is becoming convincing to some; perhaps MAiD turns people away from disabled lives? Perhaps it’s simply the economy.
Somebody was asking my favourite presses. My knowledge of US publishers is not vast, but I’m especially fond of books coming out of Riverhead (Penguin Random) and Counterpoint. In Canada, we are spoiled for small-press choice. I’m hooked on books from Book*Hug, Coach House, Wolsak and Wynn, House of Anansi and Biblioasis. Hardly an exhaustive list. Near me, Arsenal Pulp Press who brought out my last book, the novel “Weekend,” and Caitlin Press, who brought out my last book of poetry. It’s poetry month, so please consider Brick Books in Canada.
I had a good, if grinding, writing week. I’m editing 10 pages of the current novel per day, which I sometimes don’t manage to finish until after midnight. This week was hard because I’m toward the end of the book and have changed some plot lines as I’ve gone along, so there’s a lot of deleting text and new composition, and, when I’m through, a new set of scenes to write. Draft 9 and eleven years in!
These days, I generally set aside time in chunks to work on the house, paint and work on writing but my schedule sort of fell apart when I looked after grandkids for half of their spring break. Hopefully I can force myself back on track, because I count on studio time to force my over-active brain to chill out. I already sit to paint, and because of my disabilities I can only last about an hour, physically. What do other disabled painters do to manage the challenges and limitations of their bodies?
Writing and painting are similar. For both, you require discipline, creativity and the ability to translate nebulous ideas into reality. They also involve a lot of drafts. Most painters don’t refer to “drafts” of paintings, but I do. I would love to be able to paint alla prima (finishing a painting in one sitting) because my disabilities are made for it, but in actual fact I can’t stay at it long enough.
I’ve learned that my brain will switch off at a certain point when it’s unable to pay true attention any longer. That’s a better cue to vacate than waiting for my bodily cues, which often come too late to stop a day of pain.
If you’ve ever been inclined to buy a .painting, now is a most excellent time. 10% off to anyone in April who mentions this post. I mail throughout continguous N America.
Hello authors, painters, lit lovers and collectors!
It’s ruddy cold where I live and it’s been below seasonal all March. Hard to believe it will ever let up its hold. There are not many public-facing gardens in this rural area, but my own is lovely, and starting its colour parade already with crocuses, early daffs and the first heavenly, scented hyacinths. While I’ve seen other forsythias in bloom, mine is not, and at this point it looks like the lilacs will beat it. Somehow even so, we’re just at the cusp of needing the grass cut.
Got three climbing roses back up on their trellises. One of them is my favourite, Ilse Krohn. Another is Westerland.
How does your garden grow? Do you grow native plants or are you part of the water brigade all summer long?
I’ve had a good writing week. I rounded page 200 on my ever-so-agonizingly-slow novel edits, which felt like an achievement of a small sort. I’m at the interrogation of sentences part, which for me on this draft is cutting those flabby sentences down. So happy every time I see words go for being repetitious or adding nothing. I have a lot of scene work to do coming up, but it’s nice to have some basic stuff to go through as well as a break. I kept up with painting every day, though sometimes only for ten minutes or so, and the dog got fed and walked. I did not continue with taxes, woe is me, which means that pressure ahead. Accounting is organized and finished. Phew. That’s the truly time consuming part of things.
I actually went out to pick something up from the neighbourhood sales thing and forgot my mask! Never happened before. Thankfully I found an N95 in the car, never used. Phew. I prefer my elastomeric any day, but I’ve never been so relieved.
Happy equinox, and I wish you successful and good weeks upcoming.
painting by Eaton Hamilton, 2022, oil stick on stretched canvas, 20×30″
ID: Non-binary yt person with short orange hair and black shirt and pants sitting in yellow chair. Green wall. Three-quarter view.
Do you have dreams of your mother or guardian?
Last night I dreamed a short story. I was writing it, but also characters were acting it out. The protagonists were a male and female aging couple, I recall, but what the story was is gone. At the end of the dream, my (long-dead) mother was sitting in a car with me. I was aware that I was editing my story, attempting to deepen it, and I introduced my mother to the characters, which regrettably woke me in such a way I forgot the short story.
I had a decades-long series of nightmares that I was responsible for the horses I grew up with, only no one had told me, and when I got back home, and back to the barn, they were all bone wracks on the brink of starvation. I’d run for water and food, but of course it was going to be too late. More recently, I dreamed of the same situation, that I was feeding starving horses, but this time they were inside the barn in stalls. I ran from empty stall to empty stall. There was one bale of hay and it was soon gone. I used the last of it to feed a mare and then I scrambled around again to find food for her filly. It never occurred to me in the dream that the filly could nurse. All I could find was a pen, one of those ones with four colours, black, blue, red and for some reason green. The pens were cheap and subject to breaking, and in the dream I remembered this, and I was worried about feeding the filly because the pen was likely to break into plastic shards.
It was easy to see when I woke up that the mother was the last horse I fed (true in life, too. I barely knew her in adulthood) and that I was feeding myself the gift of writing. A precarious gift, but a gift nevertheless.
As for last night’s dream? I have no idea. I just wish I could get back the short story and submit it.
Update: Another dream of my mother last night. We were in my childhood living room and I was urging her up out of her chair to dance with me outside under the birch tree. I was saying was a pity it was that the window between chairs was painted shut, and saying I should fix that. She reached out and opened it, when it had never been opened in all my childhood. My idea was that we could play music in the den and it would reach us outside. We both seemed happy. I have no idea what it means. I’m airing out our relationship? Things are magically fixing themselves? I just watched a Holly Near concert?
I have a lot of profound animal dreams. I often dream of seeing whales, though usually from either a beach or a ship. They are generally much larger than they are in reality. Last night I dreamed my ex-wife and I, still together, were swimming in what seemed like Deep Cove, at night, far far out. I turned around and looked back at the shoreline and saw it was far, and thought I should start swimming back regardless of what my ex wanted to do. At once I was surrounded by J-pod of orcas. One spy-hopped, facing me, and suddenly my body got hit with what I knew was her echolocation. I felt it on my right side, particularly in my torso. It was not a feeling I’ve ever actually felt in real life, but in the dream it was a cross between an adrenalin hit and electricity. Without words, the whale said, “Do you speak orca?” and I answered, also without words, “Only a little. A bit.” I said, “Well hello. You’re beautiful,” out loud. I wondered if I should be scared because they were so large and so many, but I was not. Being taken out by an orca, being slammed out of my skin–can’t imagine a better way to go. I could still see whale backs and blowhole breath as they surfaced around me. The spy-hopper submerged. I turned around and watched my ex treading water as the largest whale of the pod (I don’t actually know which one that is) spy-hopped all the way up to her tail flukes, an enormous tower of whale flesh. The next thing I knew my ex and I were swimming beside each other back to shore, and I asked her if she was scared. She said she was. I said her whale had reminded me of a croc that had stood upright on its hind legs once when we were in Namibia.
ID: Woman with blue hair rests head on hand. She wears a white dress with blue polka-dots
Good luck to the nominated tonight and a good week to all.
It was a good writing week of editing. I’m working on rounding characters now, mostly, humanizing the inhumane and making the goody-two-shoes protagonist a bit less virtuous.
Art was not so beneficent this week so I’ve been taking a few days off in the studio.
Moving along on accounting. Just about to catch up on this year, after which I’ll draw closer to actually doing taxes.
Taking today off, and off from taking the dog for a walk, too, because the rain is sluicing down. I think it’s only the second day we’ve missed in the six months since I adopted her and the first was because of ice.
Painting by Eaton Hamilton 2023 16×20″ oil on stretched canvas
An older yt man dances in a circle with his young yt grandchild. Both kick up their heels. He wears a suit, brown jacket, white tie, grey shirt and pants. She wears a dress, sweater and tights in scarlet. Around them is grass.
A lot to ruminate about this week. My mother’s been on my mind because today is twenty years since her death. I missed her dreadfully one day last week, and also missed the town where I grew up and being a child–the latter a first ever for me. It is not always a simple matter to think of her, as the experience is wrought with considerations of abuses mixed with the charm and incandescence of her good moments.
This week in the work front, I added a daily extra hour’s work a day of accounting. Wish I’d done it months ago because it is a good way to attack a stack of papers without becoming overwhelmed and resentful.
It’s been an excellent week in the office/studio, too, because I began to paint again after a week off to write, and the week writing, trying to break through a block, was fruitful. I’ve been working on the novel this stint, with periodic breaks for the memoir, since November. Lately I’ve been working on it in the evenings after I’ve cleared the deck of other necessities, which makes for late nights.
Yesterday I switched the first bit of the novel ms into single space which I always do if I’m trying to read it as a reader might. Of course I continue to edit, so it’s not entirely successful, but it’s the closest I’ve ever managed to come to being a reader of my own work unless years have passed. I think it reads well. For the first time, I’m not having to wince at awkward sentences or repetitions. The thing I adore about editing is that every time through you see new problems–and can fix them. My brain can’t or won’t consider all the problems at once. Sometimes they were only glimmering in the recesses. Sometimes the other, bigger work exposed them. Whatever–I feel so lucky to get to do the repairs and watch a manuscript improve. And then of course, the real magic begins, with one’s editor, when they add their fresh and perspicacious eye. That’s the stage that makes all the grueling years worth it.
I hope your weeks are good. I’m heartened, my burdens just ever so slightly lifted. May this happen to you as well.
ID: Yt woman walking whippet. She wears a tan dress with a red belt and a tan hat. Oil, 16×20″ stretched canvas
Every day I walk my dog, who isn’t a whippet, but a mix of who-knows-what, a rescue who was quite traumatized. When I lived in Phoenix, though, I did have a whippet who looked a fair bit like the dog in this painting. His name was Clint. It was like he was made of springs; if people clapped, he’d leap into their arms. The dog I have now is smaller, but I think dogs are bigger, somehow, when they’re smaller. Her hair grows and grows. It was getting long when the other day I used scissors to trim her over putting her through the agony of a grooming. I needed her hair shorter because I could no longer control her matting. Since I trimmed her–what a mess!–I’ve been brushing and combing her to get out the pre-mats, which leaves her with all the hairs involved in the snag now straight and frothing. Lots of clipping still to come. After five months we’re definitely getting used to one another and she securely feels this is her longterm home.
I haven’t painted this week because I’ve been head down with lit work. I like editorial work, generally, especially when it’s spurred by an exciting idea/direction.
How do you feel about editing your work? To me, it’s the best part of writing. Especially if it’s via someone else’s eyes. They have distance from the work and see it anew–so their ideas are usually fresh and delicious.
painting: Eaton Hamilton, 2020, a couple at the beach. ID: Two peeps wearing bathing suits, one in a yellow scarf and the other in a yellow hat with blue ribbons, holding hands at the beach.
Over here at LitHub, you can find 33 writers to answer that.
ID: couple dancing in mid spin. One person wears a long dress that has flipped up with the momentum. Done in black and whites.
Hello, good people, how are you this week? Where does the time go? Seems to me the year begins to speed up at about this time. I add tax prep to my guilty procrastination along with garden clean-up round about now, so I’m certain that’s what changes the perception I have about time.
This week I’ve been looking after my strange rescue dog. She is a joy and delight and also a perplexing, sometimes saddening, mystery. In the joy department, she only pilfers used tissues and tears those to pieces, I think because she lived in a bathroom for some time. Oh one time recently she stole my Lypsyl and ate that as well. But the important thing is that my furniture and shoes etc seem to be safe. But this little dog has so much trouble eating. She has the desire, but her fear is stronger and she’ll leave food she wants sitting in her bowl or on her lick pad for hours. She also has genuine trouble going outside after being cornered by a racoon. I’m hoping once the weather is better and I’m outside more she’ll be motivated by that.
Not the best writing week here. For a hot minute I was encouraged by something I’d done and thought I could follow it, but the next day I despised it and jumped as far away as I could.
Meantime here is the link to the Paris Review, where writers with a sub can peruse seemingly endless interviews with writers, along with their stunning regular content.
Please join me at instagram at hamiltonart1000, and at Patreon at Hamilton Art. I’d just love to see you there!
It’s a Dismal Time to be Marginalized, Painting by: Eaton Hamilton 2018
I’m aware this week on twitter of how many lesbians are ganging up on trans women in the UK. Trans women in EU, I’ve got your back. May you soon see a friendlier, safer world.
In the US parents are teaching their kids to shoot, all the while trying to tell us that drag queens reading to toddlers in libraries are the ones grooming kids. Do gun enthusiasts want their kids to be mass murderers? Do they know how disaffected teens and young adults can grow to be? Do they understand how scary it might be to be the spouse of their little boy grown to a man?
Meantime, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, billionaires took control of covid and used all the safety protections at their disposal. From PCR tests at the door and your entry badge decommissioned if you were positive or refused, to masks, HEPA filters and good ventilation (everyone wore coats to stay warm).
Now everyone is saying no double standards! As Imani Barbarin says on TikTok, we were all played when govts and public health said there was nothing to worry about. #DavosSafe for all!
In the writing world? Well, 6 writers at Creative Nonfiction left due to poor working conditions. Many of us can identify. You can find the writers on twitter along with the winter courses they were planning to teach at CN, and join up to help them maintain income levels.
Here’s an essay by Lisa Russ Spaar about publishing your first novel in your sixties, something I did (though I had many books in other genres by then) with “Weekend,” my 7-month (including edits) baby. I don’t know how that happened given I started writing novels in the 80s and most of them have sucked years and years of my life away. All those uncooked books are sitting in drawers, on shelves, in file cabinets, on jump drives. Sound familiar?
painting by Eaton Hamilton, 2021, acrylic on paper, perhaps 11×14″
The weather has (happily) continued mild, and the dog seems finally to be more or less over her aversion to rain, which makes our walks infinitely more enjoyable. She has spied a couple deer and yesterday, a cat. She’s keen for the chase (but leashed).
In her past, I think she was forced to eat a lot of rotten food to stay alive, and so feeding her continues to be an issue. I’m sure she’d be happy with human fast food, somehow, but dog food is tricky for her. I have to make a “bread crumb” pathway for her to follow to her bowl, since once she sees it’s good, she’ll eat another and another little pile of it until she reaches her bowl where she’ll dig in. She does mean a lot of mopping; so much mopping that I just leave the mop and bucket out now.
This week, I’ve been painting in tones of black and white (and none of these are finished to show you). The black I concoct is very much like Payne’s Grey, so really tones of grey blues. It’s been fun to take on old family photos, but sometimes after all the monotone, I itch for colour. Still, there are things I’m trying to teach myself technically with my new water miscible paints, but also compositionally as my canvases go bigger.
Thanks to all my clients! I love and appreciate you all! I can say for certain there are more of my works on US walls than Canadian now. Funny that.
As for writing, I did get a handle on the first draft of an essay on a deadline I’ve been working to conceive. This week I’ll be banging at it to see if I can tap it into submittable shape. We’ll see. The gears feel like they need oil.
How are your artistic pursuits coming along? Are you making it through winter okay?
I notice here on the west coast that our bulbs are up, way up, and the O. poppies (orange) that were already here and that a “helper” tried to steal, whereupon shattering the dreadful roots into many plants, are already up and at ’em. They look tender as annuals at the moment. The robins are back! They’re such pests, re: berries, but I wish them well, because the barred owls are up in the tree limbs sharpening their nails (last September an owl killed a mother robin and three babies in one particularly bloodthirsty week).
Painting by Eaton Hamilton 2022/23 12×12″ on stretched canvas, oil, The Friendship (maybe they’re discussing Susan Meachen)
ID: Two yt women lying on a floatie at the edge of a swimming pool, holding hands, blue and white towel on side of pool
How desperate are you to succeed in the lit world? People have faked a lot of things in writing–faked their identities, faked being Indigenous or Black, passed other authors’ texts off as their own work, and now, have even pretended to commit suicide. Would you fake your own death to increase your sales? Well, romance writer Susan Meachen did, while having her”sister” continue to post on social media, until, finally this week, 2.5 years into it and wanting her old life back, she came clean. She apparently didn’t think she’d done anything wrong, but the moral injuries others feel are heightened.
Painting: Eaton Hamilton, 2022, oil and acrylic on stretched canvas, 30″x40″
ID: Women in red dress reclining on purple sofa with green wall behind. Orange/yellow cushions.
I seem to have broken out of what’s been my worst writer’s block in twenty years! I’ve written my way through it, but it was desultory, unhappy writing–and with ADHD procrastination that’s like pulling teeth–but, fingers crossed, I’m done with it now and moving back up to speed. My advice with writer’s block is to always have several projects on the go at once so that, when you encounter it, you can just move yourself to a new piece. It’s always worked–until it didn’t, these last couple months, because I refused, absolutely refused, to get engaged by a different work. I wanted to break through to the fiction under my fingers, not any other piece.
I don’t have a lot of insight at this particular moment. Just the relief. You know? I’ll be considering the plight I put myself into for the next while seeing if I can figure out the collision between my reticence and stubbornness.
How’s writing going for you? What are you working on? Drop a line and let me know how it’s going.
If you’re interested in hearing about the combo of writing and painting, join me, will you, on Patreon at Hamilton Art? https://www.patreon.com/hamiltonart
Disabled, trans, autistic authors maybe have to build support amongst ourselves? I’ve been left in the agonizing situation, since I’ve been unable to “work” due to disability for decades, of having pension/supplements under $1000/month, which doesn’t even cover housing.
I have to scramble. At the time I might want to consider retiring, I can’t. I won’t ever be able to. I don’t have a partner or inherited wealth. There’s a real plague of senior poverty in Canada–it’s an ungenerous, dangerous country for older disabled Cdns. It’s hard not to believe, between legislated poverty, ableism, MAiD and hospital triage (BC kicked 1/3 of patients, disabled all, out of hospital in Sept, and is continuing this eugenicist practice, even with kids) the actual agenda is our hastened deaths
So, please, if you can spare the cash, please help by joining me on Patreon. It’s an aspirational place I’d build into a site where I can discuss being a cross-disciplinary artist–writing and painting–and how the two intersect, but I need followers to engage by asking questions and leaving comments! I’d love to get to know you there!
Painting: Eaton Hamilton 2022 acrylic on paper 6.5×9″
Hello, folks. I see we are very close to the holidays, while I’m lost (as usual) many months back. The acceleration starts in the spring and keeps going the rest of the year. I can’t quite keep up.
I’m doing a fundraiser to cover housing for Jan, so these little paintings are only $100 USD, incl shipping continental N America. So many folks ask after work but can’t afford my prices, so these little pieces are for them. See Hamilton Art on FB for more.
Meantime, I’m writing. Are you writing this week? If you are, what are you working on? Me, I’m turning from project to project–whichever one I have energy for. Novel rewrite (again? Are you kidding me? This book has had ten years of rewrites) and memoir rewrite (which makes sense because only draft 3 and still looking for the shape). I try to keep more than one project on the go at a time because it helps against blocks.
I hope you’re keeping safe against the new omicron variants in this worsening SARS2 pandemic, and managing to keep away from RSV, influenza and the other viral/bacterial resurges. Here in BC the government behaviour is catacylsmic, and many adults and now children are losing their lives due to gov’t’s “let ‘er rip” policy. It’s heartbreaking. More still are feeling the sequelae to infection because covid presents as respiratory but its damage is deep and long-lasting, from mini-clots, sudden heart attacks, heart damage, brain damage, liver damage, kidney damage, vasculature damage and new study this week noting accelerating osteoporosis. It’s the anti-gift that keeps on giving. It’s worth doing everything in your power to NOT CATCH IT. People are going to have to be a lot more careful, and this means N95 or better masks, building CR boxes (google it; You Tube has instructions; dead simple), HEPA filters in all your spaces.
CLEAN THE AIR YOU BREATHE.
Be well this week. I know how stressful Dec is, especially for parents. Hang in there if you can. The shortest day will soon be upon us, and then every day will be longer again, thank goodness. Loads of my plants are loading up for spring already, in particular lilacs and magnolias. It’s going to be beautiful, and we’re going to need it.
Celebrate love. Celebrate your friends. Celebrate your animals. Find a thing of beauty to remark upon today if you can.
Painting: Eaton Hamilton 2022, acrylic and mixed media, 11×16″ archival paper ID: portrait of woman with brown, shoulder length hair wearing lime shirt, blue background
May your weeks be free from debt, acrimony, bitterness, hatred and deceit.
ID: yt woman with red hair and blue shirt, profile
painting by Eaton Hamilton, acrylic
How was your week? I had a troublesome one after one of my kids got hurt in an accident, but I think now that she’s okay, so I’m standing down with an ever-vigilant eye.
Happy to say I finally wrestled my procrastination to the ground and am back working on novel revisions at the same time as my memoir. It’s good for me. Usually November is a great writing month, but this time around after all the housing shenanigans (which must continue in the spring … do everything you can not to become a disabled senior without much of a pension, because Canada doesn’t have a safety net for disabled people, but, instead, programs of eugenics) I was too exhausted to stand up. I don’t get rid of any disabilities simply because there’s need for me to do extra things, and I don’t have more money to fund those things either.
But making stories is a good way to pass the time. I love that feeling of finding someone’s character. Well, hello! I say when they announce themselves. Hello and where have you been all my life? It doesn’t even have to be a person I have anything in common with, or even someone I like or admire–they just have to have some pop and sizzle and I’m all theirs. Character-driven work writes itself. Maybe that’s why cnf will always come second in my heart.
How about on your side?
Meantime, support my literary and visual art endeavors at Patreon at Hamilton Art. For as little as $5/month, you can join me as I talk through writing and art dilemmas, joys and techniques. You can ask me any questions you like, and, if we can get a big enough group together, I’ll be happy to do mini-classes too. Let’s make the site together. Join me!
Eaton Hamilton 