Babette and the Balloon Flight, or Pace Yourself

Babette, dressed for Autumn balloon flying

repurposed menus, acrylic paint, pencil.

Lookie here! My Babette girl is wearing clothes. You can't see her underwear.

I drew an outfit inspired, actually, by Leah's aedm painting. It's not the first time her striped tights have reminded me how much I like striped tights.

But, I can see that I am just a beginning paper doll maker. I don't have the appropriate paper for this. I can't see through it to trace the doll and get a perfect shape, but I will admit that I made a pretty near guesstimate on the shape, making her only a few millimeters short. (At the bottom you can see her black pumps underneath the red mary janes.

ANYway, despite my flaws in the doll making, I think it's cute. She's got a green long sleeved undershirt, a light blue mini dress and a red/purple belt. All of this over the delightful green and blue striped tights, and the ruby mary jane slippers. I tossed in a pouch-purse, because it reminded me of the shape of balloons. What you don't see is the striped blue and green cap that I had to get rid of because my eyeballing it made it too dern small to fit over her head. Oh well.

As for Nanowrimo? I am slowing down. That's okay. I was going really fast before. Sometimes I set my goals too high, and then falling short makes me feel bad, so I have to recalibrate my expectations of myself. Another thing I have learned from nano years passed... if I set really high goals for myself and force myself to reach them (the first year I did 100k words, instead of the standard 50k) I end up burning out by the end of the month. Of course, I am more used to the intense pace of daily creative challenges, so I may be better able to manage them.

This whole creative life thing... it's a marathon, not a sprint. You may want to do intense fast sprints sometimes, but it's really hard to keep up that intensity in the long run.

Slow and steady wins the race, they say. Only you can define what that slow means. For me, I tend to make it be faster than other people write... but then I am a bit of a compulsive writer. I can't really stop myself from writing. I guess that's why I blog, too. And you should see my decades of journals.

All I can say is keep it up. You don't have to reach your goals all perfectly, but if you want to reach the end point, you do have to keep going. Pace yourself, figure out what works for you, but keep going.