A few years ago I started working through Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.  I didn’t get all the way through it but I did enjoy a particular exercise she called “Morning Pages”.  The goal of morning pages is to write 3 pages.  It doesn’t have to be intelligent, and it doesn’t have to be sentences.  It just has to be 3 pages.  She found that through this process, you start to leave all of the “I can’ts” and “I should be doings” on the page, freeing you to be a bit more creative in your life.   The book, intended for artists who are suffering from a block, is also good for those who simply want to live more creative lives.  Creative problem solving is in fact an act of creativity and permeates into all aspects of our lives, from working through how to talk to your child about sensitive issues, to tending to your partners needs.

I did this for a while and enjoyed it.   Writing allowed me to look at certain aspects of my life and work through some fairly heavy things I was going through a few years ago.  I am delighted to have found http://www.750words.com now.  The website derives from the concept of morning pages. (750 words = approx 3 pages).  It is not blogging but it does show you meta information about your writing, with statistics on frequently used words, what kind of things you are writing about etc.  Kudos to the author of the website!  I believe he runs it out of a coffee house somewhere in Seattle, WA.

The October Challenge is simply, write 750 words everyday for the month of October.  If you succeed, then you get to be placed on the wall off awesomeness.  If you fail your name gets placed on the wall of shame.   You can also agree to either treat yourself to something nice if you succeed and do something (possibly donate to the site) if you fail.  I’ve signed up and so far, I’m 2 for 2 with 29 days to go.

So, that’s what I’ve been doing lately to keep the creative juices flowing.  Oh, that and I just upgraded my mac to the latest OS, Snow Leopard.  I’m interested in learning some programming for the iPhone and been really enjoying the latest version of Garage Band.