A bit longer answer can be summed up by this awesome infographic (click on the graphic to make it readable and don’t look at the comments if you’re sensitive).

The real answer is a lot longer and would make me cry if I went on and on about all the reasons. Basically, I love the world and life. I can’t understand why I would want to hurt another being for a reason so selfish as “it tastes good”.

Our world is beautiful, but it’s getting uglier by the day. Animal agriculture is one of the major things trashing our planet. No, the world isn’t going to end if everyone keeps eating meat. But we might.

And even if we move to Mars or find some other high-tech way to survive on a depleted planet, I know I’ll miss the trees. Grazing by “food” animals is a major cause of deforestation. And we’ll all miss clean water when it’s gone. One of the biggest pollutants is run-off (i.e. shit) from factory farms. I like being able to breathe, and though cow farts sound funny, the impact of methane on our atmosphere is real. And that’s not counting the air pollution from the massive amounts of transport the animal agriculture industry requires.

I just don’t understand why these things don’t matter to more people.

Maybe you think I’m too sensitive, but I like to look at the world with my eyes open, to enjoy the beauty before it’s gone.

To get to the point where the object starts to take shape, somewhere along the way I have to recognize my mistakes and figure out how to fix them. I took a picture of this hat for posterity right after I ripped out half a row three times trying to figure out where I’d picked up two extra stitches and gotten off pattern. And then I didn’t know how to fix it in circular knitting, which is a bit different than working on straight needles. But I figured it out, and I know for next time. And that was just as exciting as seeing the hat start to look like a hat..

Of course, some things can’t be fixed without doing a little damage. If I cut a piece of silver too short when making a wire-frame pendant, there’s no way to stretch it out again without changing the diameter. But that’s another valuable skill: knowing what to keep from my mistakes instead of trashing the whole thing and starting over out of frustration, which I’ll admit has too often been my solution.  So I have a scrap box where I put odd bits of silver that might come in handy later. I also save all kinds of things from my writing, like when I’m forced to admit that though this line of dialog is brilliant, this character really wouldn’t say it. I have a separate “book” in SuperNotecard just for these bits and pieces, and I dip into it when I’m looking for inspiration.

I guess I was inspired to write today to say that our creative pursuits, whether writing or crafting or cooking, should be enjoyable, even when we screw up and have to fix things. Maybe especially when we screw up, because then we have the greatest opportunity to learn.

I can only focus on one creative endeavor at a time. I haven’t been writing lately; I didn’t even do NaNoWriMo this year. I started the sequel to Sword and Knife and realized I was in over my head. I hadn’t, of course, revised hardly any of the first book. I hadn’t even resolved all the loose plot threads. And I had other things I wanted to do that month. So I dropped it. In the past, this is the kind of failure that would crush me, but now I don’t perceive it as a failure. I just put other priorities first. I’ll get back to the writing. I always do.

Now to the exciting part! I’m knitting! I know not everyone finds that exciting, but I need something creative to do, always, or I get antsy. Sometimes creating stuff with my hands is the best way to exercise my brain. Knitting is very process oriented with lots of specific directions to follow, so in that sense it’s easy. But it involves training my hands to do what my mind tells them to do. And wrapping my brain around diagrams and abbreviations. I love it.

I’m still doing simple stuff, but I have a list of favorited projects a mile long in my Ravelry account (you have to get your own account to look). I took a beginning knitting class, which was wonderful when I had questions like, “what the hell did I do now?” I finished a cute little blue baby hat the other day, which was rather thrilling, even after I realized that I’d been knitting through the back loop instead of the front. So it’s a twisted stockinette stitch instead of the regular one. Works just fine. Next, I’m working on a hat for me and a dishcloth (pictures and progress in the sidebar). I’m using circular needles for my hat, but the pattern is otherwise easy. The dishcloth has a lot of counting but simple stitches. I like the balance of something new, something a bit challenging, and yet projects that are do-able, even for a beginner. No pressure. I like it.

I also like the social aspects of knitting. My Saturday morning class is a great group of people, and many of us go to a Thursday night knitting group as well. A few of my coworkers are also interested in knitting, and it’s fun to hang out with them outside of work.

So I’ve put my writing aside for the moment because my mind is set on “knitting mode”. My stories peek in from time to time to see if there is any room for them, but there doesn’t seem to be for now. And that’s ok. I’m having fun, and I’m creating. That’s all I ask.

Now that I’m an adult, I have to bow a bit to my parents’ ideas of priorities. No one else is going to make me get to work on time or buy groceries so I don’t starve. When I graduated from college, all these adult responsibilities descended on me like some flying nightmare. And I’ve been struggling to identify my true priorities ever since.

I suppose it has something to do with self-actualization and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (which has always made sense to me, though I’m aware that it has been criticized). As little as I like to admit it, the basic necessities (food, shelter, sleep) do have to come first. And next, according to Maslow, is security, like employment. And then love and self-esteem. And only when someone has achieved all these things is there room in life for creativity. Practically, I recognize that this is true. If I spent all my time worrying about being unemployed or unable to keep my little family going, I’d have no energy for creativity. But if I were making my own hierarchy, I think I’d put creativity right after food. Because if I don’t have the opportunity to create, I’m still hungry no matter how full my belly is.

All this is very poetic, but like everything else, it comes down to day to day, moment to moment decisions. What should I do with myself today? What am I going to do in this very next moment? Can I write for another fifteen minutes and risk being late to work? Can I read for another hour or two at bedtime and be completely exhausted tomorrow? What are my real priorities? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for that. Not yet.

I’m stuck on some aspect of four different stories. I’m overwhelmed by the revising I need to do on Sword and Knife so I thought, ok, I’ll work on something else for a while. And that worked for revising and submitting a draft of Devil, a short story. But now I’m stuck again. I went back to Nyx with the hope that being away from it for six months or so would help me figure out what’s wrong with it. And maybe I have, but I still don’t know how to fix it. So I skipped to another short story, about vampires. And remembered it has no plot, as well as a host of other problems. I gave it a plot, but now I’m overwhelmed with worldbuilding. So I turned to a newer idea I had a couple of months ago, nicknamed Nightwalker. And I’m thrashing around with that too.

It hasn’t been that long since I wrote something from scratch. Just November, in fact. But it’s like I’ve forgotten how to build a story from the bottom up. And it’s driving me crazy.

This is one of those times I have to remind myself that I’m writing because I like it, not because I expect it to bring me fame and fortune. I don’t even want fame, though I wouldn’t mind the fortune. But sometimes I’m disappointed when it seems like I haven’t gained any ground, like this newest story is just as hard to write as the last.

I have to slow down, take a deep breath, and remind myself that I’m learning, and it’s ok if I don’t learn each new skill at the same rate. All stories are different and they all take different skills to write. So I’m in a phase right now where I’m learning a lot. It’s not that I’m stagnating, it’s that I’m working away at the problems in the back of my head and thrashing them out on a computer screen.

Instead of expecting perfection or even readability with each new project, I need to slow down, breathe, and just write.

I know this, and yet I resent that I have to chant those words like a mantra every time I hit a new plateau.

Breathe. Write. Breathe.