This Song Has No Title

There is a song titled such on Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I love that song, as I do most little ditties that clock in just over 2:00 on my favorite artists’ albums (hello, “Nightingale Song”), songs that say something interesting but aren’t full-fledged anthems and yet were fun enough to include on the album.

Titles stump me, more so than writing itself. The big blank space before all that other blank space. The hardest thing in J-school for me was coming up with something to write about. If someone gave me an assignment, no problem, but sniffing out the story just wasn’t my thing. So I’ve been working on trying to ignore that space at the beginning, to leave it there to breathe a little and just start in on the guts, to let it flow and see what happens.

I haven’t been doing that here much — waah-waah, bad posting habits, self-flagellationcakes, zzzzzzz — it seems like everything has been flowing better on paper lately, in those few spare moments there have been to focus on mental output rather than input. And it’s been all about developing projects and classes and brainstorming for the next book, nothing yet share-worthy.

It’s been a busy summer. Despite my vow to schedule myself lightly this summer and not let another pass by without fully embracing it, I found myself in June with a mountain of projects on my desk and a major event to coordinate and a case full of nothing new for my summer shows. I haven’t really taken much of a break since spring, and even back then it wasn’t enough. So, hello, August, with your leisurely pace and minimal must-dos and very few standing obligations.

Last weekend was the Avon Lake Summer Market, always my best show of the year, but especially so this year. It was the first time they did a two-day show, Friday night and Saturday, and it was lovely. It seemed a little busier on Friday than on Saturday, but it was steady throughout, and I was able to move out much of the older stock I’ve been carrying around and am sick of looking at. The rest is getting disassembled and some of it reworked into new pieces.

And speaking of reworking, it’s time to get up to the studio, to clean up and put away the detritus from last weekend, to knock out a few special orders, and to start work on some new things that have been lolling about in the back of my head.