JillWrites [the original blog]

I am the superhero-est selfie artist there ever was. ✔️💯👩‍🎨🦸‍♀️

in the now: fun with Contour Light today. (iPhone camera Portrait mode: Contour Light.) I don’t want to leave that as the only thing I’m writing for today—though talking about quick iPhone feature experiments is definitely a notable literal remix on the concept of ‘phoning it in’.  Can’t even get to explain right now how many variations on comedically literally phoning it in I’ve gotten to come across while specializing in iPhone photography. 💁‍♀️ Obvs that cliché had to come from literal roots, but. 😂 ok, gtg, it’s Halloween weekend, and zombie vampires are trying to suck my blood and steal my brain. 

Busy killing (with a beach umbrella) Ringwraiths (dressed in dark fleece hooded jacket) & improvising various projects (in my basement studio area, with my running sneakers on).  “I am no man.” - Eowyn 

#damnhellbathroom self-portrait: The Container Store. Puddlejumper bag, Under Armor sweatshirt (team Italy blue color), All Saints knit hat, West Loop joggers. (Black t-shirt underneath is Jurassic World—Save the Dinosaurs. Not seen: Puma slip-on sneakers.) 

Revisiting today: Botticelli, Vasari, iPhone camera tricks (play around with Portrait mode: Stage Light), and—of course—more iPhone apps (see processed photo, further down in the post).  Re: writing: Piles of notebooks to maybe revisit.  No Nutritional Value project recommendation: Panera. 

Ate my protein pancake cup, got the Good Culture cottage cheese fairy on my shoulder, checking out the fog, & utilizing the diffuse foggy sunrise light to take few shots with the iPhone Natural Light setting in Portrait mode (unprocessed). Also, I need to get my bangs trimmed. 

Working on a bunch of things, but— For today’s self-portrait, I made a collage in the style I first began using in 2012. Much to say on all the apps I’ve utilized on iPhones this past decade, and I always like finding new ones. This piece was shot in the iPhone, & utilizes: A Color Story, BeFunky, Diptic, Pixlromatic, & Dazz Cam. Got in a little more writing on the book yesterday (the most difficult part of which was just picking up the pen again), and am now thinking about my 2012-4 writing processes (while I was working on my MFAW at SAIC). I took some very specific approaches, and have a lot to say.

Just me in my Spider-Man hat revisiting the 2006 activist essay anthology “Artistic Citizenship: A Public for the Arts”* (which I didn’t acquire until a few years later). Trying to write up / revise some stuff that contextualizes my 2008-2011 work. Bonus points if I get in the section that addresses my car studio traveling driving arts practice. The human body sure is a wacky animal. And that includes the “Werewolf Anecdotes” content, so: dive into my fiction writing theory, too.  * Edited by Mary Schmidt Campbell and Randy A. Martin. Routledge. Taylor and Francis Group, LLC. New York. 2006.

Ceiling vent time. 

I need a big change; I feel reallyreally stuck.  Also:  And today’s song:  I’m a Believer (2006 Remaster) - The Monkees

Brain exhausted tonite. (Processed & posted this photo a few hours ago, but couldn’t decide what to write.) I’ve read this book before, revisited it on occasion. I had a page turned down for myself in which Dillard is very encouraging about getting a book written.  I had some ideas about which content I wanted to start tackling for blog writing, and I haven’t developed into them yet. Sure, it’s only the first week of this new writing practice—but, also: sure, my body had other plans to show myself all day, and does it seem effing likely that I don’t have ten minutes a day to point out a few paragraphs I normally enjoyed to try to type up? Hate it, fucking hate it. Can’t wait to get my new approach to output and productivity.  …aaaaaaand so, I’ll be back tomorrow. 

Thinking about my lengthy utilization of twitter today.  Got an ice cream today. (Shot on iPhone. Processed with Viewfinder 7 filter & Fit to Square frame in BeFunky.)

Told myself I’d be blogging every day; I’ve got to fit in some sentences somehow. Free writing ever was a thing I practiced, and I taught it all the time: it’s important to get into the practice of generating writing.

I feel like I am excavating each sentence out of a big silent field in my brain; nothing is arising like it’s supposed to be a flow in a content of recognize-it’s-writing-in-here-,self. Remember some faves from when I was on a roll with blogging fluidly in 2006–I’ve been hoping to do this, and then dig up those kinks out of the archive here and make them public again.  I can here my mentor from FringeNYC, Elena K. Holy, saying “It’s hard, y’all.” She’s talking about the difficulties of theater producing, but right now in my writing brain, sagely agreeing. Yes. It’s hard, y’all. And it didn’t used to be, before. I used to love writing. Update, an hour or two later: I’ve scavenged around the many locations in my house I have my piles and/or shelves of books, seeking out one book in particular (not the one pictured, duh), and picking up a few more as the ideas came back to me. I’ve had a particular book concept (about reading books!) in me for almost a dozen years, and I’m introducing it

For my 47th birthday, my brain decided to wake up extremelynotatall depressed. Forty-six had been depressy—more than halfway to 50 with a number of existential questions about my life; and in the pandemic, finding dating difficult—if not just completely batshit inadvisable, according to my regular obsessively-survivalist psyche. And I woke up with all new moving mental parts to momentum my online lifestyle back. Self-Portrait 2/365: (I’ll write about the unopened package of Pixy Stix another time.)

Sunday, October 16, 2022: Before 7am: It’s my birthday, and I’m waking up to a totally new momentum to my entire enterprise.  Got a lot to say here, so I’m going to fill it in throughout the day. I’ll do this until the correct blogging momentum comes back—which is a big part of the resolution. But I’m also starting a different 365 Days Self-Portrait Project. This year’s current project took a different direction than how much I had wanted to get back to my original take on 365–and I like some of what was developing, especially the Social Media Art posts that crop up—but I want to get back  the  original wanderlust & city adventures take I had way back in my 2006-2007 process. It was a joint effort that added self-portrait art to my blog writing.  8am: Spotify playlist (1 song per day) to celebrate JillWrites Relaunch Year. …and birthday playlist for myself: [Grabs Morphe lip gloss trio that I haven’t utilized yet & heads out] 9: Totes did accept birthday drink from Starbucks. A