Week 4 Writing Prompt, Part 3

3. List five childhood accomplishments. List five favorite childhood foods. Buy yourself one of them this week.
- Perfect Attendance
- National Honor Roll elementary school through high school
- performing with accomplished pianist David Benoit
- lots of top reader awards
- first place in photography at the county fair with the very first photo I ever took.

4.  Take a look at your habits. Many of them may interfere with your self-nurturing and cause shame. Some of the oddest things are self-destructive. List three obvious rotten habits. What's the payoff of continuing them? List three of your subtle foes. What use do these forms of sabotage have? Be specific.
- I do the internet loss of productivity loop way too often.
- I will opt out of gym night super easily.
- If anyone is around, I will refuse to write.
There's an instant gratification associated with all of these things. There's zero longterm benefits which I think is entirely the point.
-Twitter. If my phone goes off or I get an email, that will always be the priority over what I'm writing.
- Weirdly I think reading may be a subtle foe to my writing productivity. Because I see it as a positive activity, I feel okay about reading instead of writing.
- Family Public Relations. Finalizing the Christmas card list in mid-November is more important than writing!

5.  Make a list of friends who nurture you. Which of their traits, particularly, serve you well?
- Kelsey because she is a strong, ambitious, and creative woman who wants to see other women succeed.
- Chris because he loves that I write. He wants me to become more ambitious with my writing and try to be more daring.
- Angela because she is the creative person other creative people want to be. She supports herself on her creative work, has her own publication company. She creates often and gets lots of people involved with her work. She has a fiery determination.

6. List five people you admire. Now list five people you secretly admire. What traits do these people have that you can cultivate further in yourself?
- Amanda Palmer
- Neil Gaiman
- Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Marian Call
- JK Rowling

- Felicia Day
- Hannah Hart
- Sarah Silverman
- Anna Kendrick
- Chris Hardwick

These are all people who have managed to make a living doing something they absolutely love. They often have a somewhat niche audience but they have found that audience and that audience has decided to support them whole-heartedly. By making positive and healthy decisions for themselves about life, they have cultivated their best self. I need to find my best self. My best self needs to stop checking her goddamn email all the time.

7. List five people you wish you had met who are dead. Now, list five people who are dead whom you'd like to hang out with for a while in eternity. What traits do you find in these people that you can look for in your friends?
- Elliot Smith
- Kurt Cobain
- Anthony Burgess
- Douglas Adams
- Orson Welles

I don't really understand the whole "hang out in eternity" thing. Are they the dead people who I wish I could invite to dinner? It'd have to be the list above, probably.  Smith and Cobain are both highly creative, genius-like musicians who ended their own lives. I am interested in what it is like to be a "tortured artist," because that is not an experience I (thankfully) have. Burgess, Adams, and Welles were highly creative people who lived good long lives and had the opportunity to experience how the world reacted to their work. I am interested to know how hearing and seeing the reactions of fans and critics may have impacted their work and their lives. Was it a struggle to work again after a bad review? If something did well, did they try to make more like that thing?

I think it helps that I am friends with a lot of musicians and creative people. I think I need to have more discussions with my creative friends to see how their creative work impacts the rest of their life and how presenting their work in a public arena has impacted their work.