I hold the volleyball in my right hand, arm extended out and angled slightly down. My left thumb tucks into the fingers of my fist. The opposing team smirks, creeps forward, relaxes their stance. The whistle blows. I serve, underhand.

Don't worry, Mom.

Back in the day (think 1400-1600), artists were hired by patrons to make stuff for them, either by commission or by salary. Your patron might pay you month to month and then ask you to make specific pieces, or you might work on a case-by-case basis (the Sistine Chapel's ceiling was one such commissioned work). In every version, patrons had a lot of control of what got made because (in most cases) they were the sole patron. With Patreon, the system is flipped: you can support artists and creators for as little as a $1 a month, and we the creators can keep making stuff and growing as individuals and artists. 

This is a guest post by my dear friend Bailey Brown.

This blog was suggested by a student of mine. I obliged. 

I wrote this to myself, but I hope its an encouragement to you. A lot of this is my distillations of C.S. Lewis, Brene Brown, Anne Lamott, and others. 

My fiction isn't about pretty people doing pretty things, and even more rarely is it about Christian people doing Christian things-- usually, it tackles questionable characters making questionable decisions (either objectively, as in "Synesthesia", or by getting caught up in really terrible situations, as in "Thorn"). Sometimes, there's an element of horror, or mystery, or the toss-up between inevitability and agency. A lot of well-meaning Christians in my life have asked why: why write messy work? Why muddy the waters? Why not inspire? 

I have a Patreon now!

It's a tired cliche: success is hard to define. It's also a truth universally acknowledged that everyone has an idea of what success means. Money, relationships, personal fulfillment, product, promotion, and a host of other things usually go into it. Generally, growth is tied up in success as well-- "getting a boyfriend" becomes "getting a husband" becomes "having kids" becomes "sending them to college;" promotions never stop; there's never too much money (for most of us).

Have mentors. Be a mentor. 

This year has seen hope die a hundred times. The whole world agreed on one thing: January felt about one hundred days too long.

One of the parts of being out of college (and not having returned to one as a teacher) is that I no longer have a summer. Sure, I will be returning to teaching at an annual theatre summer camp, but it's not the same thing as having months off, dedicated to doing something different than what I do nine months out of the year. There are summers I wasted and summers I didn't, and so I've put together this blog post of ways I'm glad I spent summers, with notes on things that might not apply to everyone. No one actually thinks doing nothing is the right idea unless they really, really need to. 

When it comes to community and societal solutions to problems, there's an impulse to find the Answer™. There's a notion that, if only we can find the right fix to the problem, it will go away, permanently. The other side (and, frankly, it doesn't matter what side) doesn't have actual solutions -- they have "band-aids," tiny, meaningless fixes that aren't going to cause real change. 

Guest post written by Nicolas Chera. 

In which I cannot avoid my faith.

Today, I'm going to try to write the three to five hundred words I promised myself (and my website) I would produce every Friday, including the bad ones. They will exist, even if they aren't what anyone else wanted me to write about, even if no one reads them. I can only show up and do the work, press "save and publish," and be content in the showing up part. There's no making plants grow once they're in the ground, there's just tending the land and letting God do the thing. Writing, especially in the world we live in, works much the same way. 

There’s a house in all of us, a bedroom voice, a forward-facing foyer that is at once welcoming and utterly staged. There's a kitchen, a radio (on that seems determined to play Hamilton and the Freecreditreport.com jingle on repeat), photos, memories. And there is a basement. 

One thing I did not expect about my twenties is how many times I would have to break up with versions of myself. The fantasies of the future that are only possible to paint on the walls of Plato's cave, that evaporate when the light shifts, keep dissolving. From what I understand, this process is not going to stop any time soon.  

In my thesis presentation, I mentioned that I loved Marvel Comics, and that there is nothing too stupid to love. A professor challenged me on it (read: said "that's not true but it's a nice sentiment"). I think I'm writing this in response to that moment. See, nothing is a strong word, but there really isn't very much that's too stupid to love, even if for the moment. What Marvel taught me (however clumsily) was how to build a universe out of separate stories -- yes, there are better versions of that, but I learned the language I needed to love them through Thor/Wolverine crossovers. Sure, there are better books about fate/will... but for a lot of kids, The Fault in our Stars did the trick. 

My former thesis mentor and now regular part-time mentor met for coffee. I think I looked less tired than I did during my thesis (I am hoping to always look less tired than I did during my thesis). He advised me, as he did during my last meeting as his official master's candidate, to read more, to spend time breathing and doing what made my soul feel rested. Unlike the last time I got this advice, I've been trying to take it. Instead of writing everything, all the time, forever, I'm working on one project every month. If I want to do the same one for two months, I can, but at the moment I have the freedom to work on one project at a time, rather than keeping twenty thousand (okay, maybe five) spinning plates in the air. And I have to fundamentally change the way I look at productivity.