Time Management and Sacrifice

Jun 27, 20165 min read

If this your first time on my website, you might notice that it's highly geared towards photography. I have pages of fine art shoots, fashion, editorial stuff, there's even a wedding thrown in there. I love photography, especially fine art photography. I have so many ideas swirling around in my head for visual stories and concepts that I want to delve in to, but lately photography's sort of taken a back seat to everything.

I went to school for photography, I graduated last year from a two-year photography program. And I went in knowing absolutely nothing about a camera or photoshop, and somewhere along the way I picked it up pretty easily and fell in love with fine art images. I surrounded myself with an amazing group of fellow photographers who shoot a range of work, from event photography, landscapes, portraits, and some other fine art photographers like myself (and hopefully you'll get to know some of them through my Artist To Artist series). Surrounding myself with fellow artists really kept me motivated, and then we all graduated and went our separate ways.

My final project for my program turned into my Transcendence series, and the summer following graduation (last summer) I spent it piecing together the poem and the images and creating a book from it, as well as editing my first two novels of A Chronicle of Crowns, and formatting that into books. I was a little lazy, and didn't shoot as often as I should have, but Transcendence took a lot out of me. I created thirty-five highly photoshopped images within a month's time, and I was rushed by the end to get it all done along with my other school work, so I thought I'd take the summer off from any big photography projects and work on piecing together my novel.

Then winter came along. I'm not a fan of winter. I never have been, I never will be. It's cold, there's snow, and it might be pretty for a day or two, but then it's just a nuisance. And without the use of the school's studio, there isn't much to shoot in the winter months. So, I decided in the winter I'd work on my writing, and the summer's would be for photography. Sounds like a solid plan, right? That's what I thought. But it turns out you need to do more than publish a novel and release it to the public to get sales. Weird, right? There's promotion, and constant social media use, networking, editing, blogging, video-blogging, and soon it consumes your entire life. And to be honest, I'm used to the hustle and bustle. I do tend to overwork myself by taking on large projects and often more than one at a time. But unfortunately, something had to give.

I love photography, but if I'm honest, I love writing more. This fantasy novel, A Chronicle of Crowns, is my baby. I think about it constantly, I'm working on new books, planing out storylines, and talking about it with every waking moment. Photography is an amazing creative outlet, but nothing beats holding your own physical book, that you spent months, years even, labouring over, in your hands.

Now, I've always been an organized person. I need to schedule my time wisely to get things done, and in school I was in charge of the group calendar, sending out due dates and reminders to everyone in our little group. I've always been organized, and I think it's an important trait. So when I sat down to create a schedule to properly fit in book promotion, video-blogging, blogging, artist interviews, writing, editing, and photography. There wasn't much room left to squeeze photography in. And that's the reality of life and organization, sometimes things won't fit in and have to be left on the back burner for now. I had a huge series planned for this summer, one that I hope to elaborate on in future posts. But for now, at least, it looks like it'll be pushed back to later this summer, and in to the next.

I know a lot of people who struggle with organization. And a lot of them seem to be "creative types". They have all these ideas swirling around in their head, and want to get them out and do them, but feel overwhelmed by them all. But I think sitting down and scheduling out your week is a must. You have to lay everything out before you, look at it and decide what's essential and what isn't. And yes, it might been suppressing one passion for another, but it's not for forever. As an example, below I've written up my typical weekly schedule:

Monday:

- Writing book 3 of A Chronicle of Crowns or digital art drawing of characters for A Chronicle of Crowns character cards (in which case, I try to squeeze some writing in on Wednesdays)

- editing for client books