I haven’t actually mentioned this on the blog yet, but after many many years of thinking about it I actually created a photo book featuring my photographs. It is a 20 page book and features many of my favourite photographs from recent years. I was really happy with how it turned out too, how vibrant and clear the printed photographs looked and how nicely bound the hard covered book is.

John Lacey Photography Photo Book Cover

Moody Sky

Pelican

Chinese Lion

Related Posts:

• Closeup: Photographers At Work

I don’t know about you, but I love books and I love free things… so the idea of free books sounds like a perfectly wonderful prospect. Here I have collected a bunch of free Kindle books about writing and publishing. If you know of any others, let me know in the comments!

All Kindle books were available freely at the time of publishing of this blog post, however this may change. Please check this information before ordering.

Please note that the following titles from Reader’s Digest are only available for a very limited time (ending 12th November, USA time): Write That Book Already!; Getting the Words Right; Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers At Page One; How to Be a Writer; Story Structure Architect; The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing and The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing. So grab them while they’re available!

Writing and Publishing

Visually

Complete Titles

Meet a Jerk, Get to Work, How to Write Villains and the Occasional Hero

Getting The Words Right (No Longer Free)

Story Structure Architect (No Longer Free)

The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing: Everything You Need to Know to Write, Publish, Promote and Sell Your Own Book (No Longer Free)

Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go (No Longer Free)

How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play (No Longer Free)

The Complete Handbook Of Novel Writing: Everything You Need to Know About Creating & Selling Your Work (Writers Digest) (No Longer Free)

Write That Book Already!: The Tough Love You Need To Get Published Now

Secrets Uncovered – Blogs, hints and the inside scoop from Mills & Boon editors and authors

Writing Critique: A Horror Short Story

Publish on Amazon Kindle with Kindle Direct Publishing

Smashwords Style Guide – How to Format Your Ebook

Smashwords Book Marketing Guide – How to Market any Book for Free

Write Good Or Die

How I Wrote My First Book: the story behind the story

Get Published

The Writing of the Short Story

Essays In The Art Of Writing

Telling Details, 2nd Edition

Writing a Novel, Sydney March 2011-August 2011

Ask the Page, Three stories for frustrated writers

And good luck to everyone attempting NaNoWriMo this year!

Don’t own a Kindle?

Happy reading!

Related Posts:

• NaNoWriMo 2009: Week 2
• NaNoWriMo 2009: Week 1
• NaNoWriMo 2009: Motivations

I haven’t really felt a great pull to abstraction. I’ve always wanted to do figurative work, typically people and portraits. Though lately I’ve been thinking geometrically – in shapes, and lines, and spaces. (I’ve been watching documentaries about Mondrian and browsing books about Rothko.) It was a very different way to approach a painting. I wasn’t trying to capture anything particularly, I was just experimenting. I was spurred on by curiosity rather than likeness. Textures and lines. And my ever trusty 3M Blue Tape.

Abstract Shield
Acrylic and Oil Paint
On 16×20″ Canvas

Related Posts:

• Painting Rage (Digitally Enhanced)
• Painting Rage
• Painting: Abstract (Tetris)
• Walking In Her Blue Jeans
• Acrylics: Possum Magic

Some of my writings were included in a book. Here’s a video of me opening and holding said book for the first time! [This video was recorded on an iPod Touch.]

Bound By The Secrets We Trust is the third book in Scott Faithfull’s Bound By The Secrets anthology series with each book benefiting a different charity. This book features the poetry of Felino A. Soriano, Michael Mc Aloran, Nahshon Cook, Peycho Kanev, Stephen Coltin, Tina Barton, Zhivka Baltadzhieva, Cristina Umpfenbach-Smyth, Tyler Malone, Henry Lui, Petar Yanev, Glenn Flintrop, Chris Cole, John Lacey, Lisa Marie MacClellan Kay, Keith Landrum and Frank A. Bella.

For more information and links to buy the book see the the official Desperanto page.

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• Bound By The Shame You Won’t Admit To
• Much Ado About… Something
• Impromptu Twitter Poetry
• Clarity Through Creation
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When I was a kid it seemed that the worst thing that could befall an individual was not to know something. You were ignorant, excluded. The sheer number of times I or someone I knew would claim to know about something someone else was talking about (but not be able to explain it to anyone else) was truly amazing. There was a pain to be associated with not knowing, it was a social pain, a stigma and as a kid I felt it intensely.

I came to realise that my teachers were much better than my peers at explaining what they wanted from me. They gave me detailed descriptions of what they wanted and (for the most part) I complied. It is as true of TAFE (where I’m currently studying Business and Information Technology courses) as it was of high school. University was another beast entirely – sure they gave you strict formatting and referencing guidelines and frameworks within which to consider things, but ultimately your conclusions and your prose were your own. Sometimes this freedom seemed empowering – I could follow my whims, like the time I used a communications subject as an excuse to wax lyrical about soap operas – but other times it seemed too much freedom and I didn’t know where to start.

There’s a huge difference between knowing you could do anything and actually doing something. Doing something is grounded in specifics – specific ideas, specific actions. We have a word for this and I’m sure you’ve heard me use a lot. They’re called constraints. You might know them as guidelines or parameters. They nudge you in a direction and you can follow the flow of that direction or fight against, but either way you have a starting point.

Like that Robert Frost poem, we have to realise that some actions and directions preclude other actions and directions. By deciding to turn left, we – consciously or unconsciously – decided not to turn right. It gives us a direction and an identity, we choose certain mediums and certain modes of expression. We become known as a poet or a portrait painter or a blogger or… whatever.

The alternative is to be overwhelmed by choice and stalled by inaction.

The thing I learnt as an adult which escaped me as a kid is that there actually isn’t much to be gained by pretending to know things. All you really know is what you don’t know and even then it’s usually only the tip of some larger iceberg. So learn, try, play.

It is my hope to adopt a two prolonged approach to my creativity. Firstly to actively work on the creation of creative works. But secondly – and perhaps even more importantly – to practice, to play, to experiment. To practice making marks with a brush or pencil or a stick of charcoal just to better understand the medium, to better understand my own preferences as an artist and my personal visual language. To take some prose and rewrite it – perhaps without the letter ‘e’, or by using a thesaurus to change every third word. Just to see how it reads, how it sounds. Just to get a sense of what else is possible.

Related Posts:

• Painter’s Remorse

So this book of poetry I’m featured in is an actual book somewhere. It exists as a tangible object. It went from an idea to a thing… I guess that is what creation is. I get a bit of a buzz out of it to be honest.

I was approached about submitting stuff for an earlier book. And I stumbled. I hadn’t written anything in ages and it just all seemed too hard. Plus even though I was contacted there was no guarantee that I would be accepted. It felt like I was setting myself up to be rejected and my skin was much too thin.

But there was another opportunity and I wrote a few things and I raided my archives for the rest. I was surprised then too because writing was an alchemy I thought I had long lost the secret to.

The muse stopped showing up, and I stopped showing up and over time it just seemed easier. Easier to not show up. Easier to not write. Easier to watch TV. Easier to fill my days with minutiae and pretend writing was never something I was interested in.

There are few things as truly soul destroying as pretending to be “fine” when you’re not, as pretending that something (or someone) important to you actually isn’t. It is a betrayal of the self and you probably won’t even realise why you feel so crummy because you haven’t admitted there’s a problem (you’re a blocked writer). And as the old adage goes admitting you have a problem is the first step in solving it. Perhaps writing about it is the second.

Related Posts:

• Bound By The Secrets We Trust
• Quality/Quantity
• Happy Birthday To Me
• Fear Of Abandoment
• Moving Beyond ‘The Talent Quest’

Sophie B. Hawkins has always been a great personal inspiration to me. I came across her music during a time when nothing in my life made sense to me, but she made sense to me. Her music touched me and inspired me.

Walking In Her Blue Jeans
Acrylic Painting On Canvas Board

“I hardly recognize myself it’s such a strange thing
To find another woman walking in my blue jeans
I’ve come so far and I’ve been so long away from home
I’m like a photograph who’s image is still changing
The letter that I never sent to you explaining
All I want is a place for my heart to belong”
- Sophie B. Hawkins, Walking In My Blue Jeans

Related Posts:

• Painting: Annabel
• Painting: The Badlands
• Palette Knife Figure
• Painting Rage (Digitally Enhanced)
• Painting: Self-Portrait (Eyes Closed)

My friend Michael Meloni started a personal blog recently. I actually read one of his blog entries and found myself thinking, “Oh it would be so cool to have a blog…” And then – of course – it dawned on me that I did have a (much neglected) blog. So yes, here I am.

I don’t want to gush too much but I’ve been going to art lessons for a few months now and I have to say it is one of the best things I’ve ever done. I want to try to unpack some of the benefits I’ve experienced from having a great art teacher.

The Obvious – Technique
A good art teacher will provide you with specific technique relating to your medium. Perhaps it’s about improving what you do already, perhaps it’s about introducing a whole new skill set. You may be surprised at what you can do even with a medium you’ve practiced with for some time. Sometimes it’s just about getting a new perspective.

Philosophies
It’s not just technique that your teacher passes onto you as a student, it is also their philosophies. One of teacher’s favourite sayings is, “The only difference between a good painting and a bad painting is more work.”

The Stuff That’s Not Written In The Books
And then there are those tips and tricks that are garnered through a life time of creating and shared with you the student. Whether it’s cost effective ways of reusing old objects (a stay wet palette made out of a sponge, an icecream lid and some cling wrap?) or when to use industrial hardware over “artist supplies.”

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• A Creative Catalyst
• Sister Wendy: Art Changes But It Doesn’t Get Better
• 2010: Back To Work
• Felicia Day: Celebrate People Not Waiting For Permission To Make Their Art
• Do You Suffer For Your Art?

Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken is familiar to many of us. While I’ve mused over the meaning of this poem elsewhere, today I want to really focus on the part that stays with me. Specifically the last stanza.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What interests me here isn’t the final line, not even the final three lines, but rather the first two. Frost will share his adventures with someone, he is so matter-of-fact on this point, there’s no doubt in his mind. Perhaps he did this conversationally, certainly he uses a poetic form to share it with his readers. He has such a profound sense of audience.

People need people. Artists need an audience. Sometimes even the whispered possibility of an audience. It is the reason that videos are uploaded to YouTube channels with no subscribers. It is the reason that poetry gets taken from a journal in a bottom drawer and transcribed into blog form. If it’s out there, perhaps someone will find it. Perhaps someone will see it or read it or watch it. Julia Cameron refers to it as being witnessed. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it does it make a sound; moreover, if nobody notices we were here did we actually exist at all?

It’s the reason too when we don’t have someone to talk to face-to-face we blurt things out online.

I was taken aback by how succinctly a handful of tweets summed up so much of my life, how much they embodied things I hadn’t said or was reluctant to say.

*********

I became a writer because I was a frustrated musician. And then I became a visual artist because I was a frustrated writer.

I’ve always loved music but even as a seven year old a part of me genuinely thought, “If I’m a rock star maybe people will love me then.”

But I couldn’t play an instrument, or sing. I studied audio engineering and music business management. I figured I’d be a producer.

Somehow on completing uni it became apparent there were no opportunities for me. I came home to live with my parents and get a dayjob.

And I kept that dayjob for about five years until I was so driven by despair (with a broken heart) that I gave it all away.

And that’s basically the John Lacey story in a nutshell.

*********

Nobody replied, I don’t know if anybody read those tweets. But still I share them there – and here – in the hope that someone bear witness.

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• ISBW Does The Artist’s Way
• 2010: Back To Work
• When You Use Your Imagination You Literally Empty Your Mind
• Doubt, My Old Friend
• The Conditions For Creativity

I started going to art classes four weeks ago. And as much as I enjoy them, I often find them frustrating because even after having something explained to me I’ll still be clueless and lost. After three sessions of working on this possum I was so sick of it. But after a couple of days I am looking at it again and it seems to be better than I remembered.

Possum Magic
Acrylics on 8×10″ Canvas Board

I guess what I find helpful is the instruction… what to do, or what you might do differently next time. But more than anything I think I need to stand back and get a sense of the painting as a whole rather than obsess over individual details.

Related Posts:

• Abstract Shield
• Walking In Her Blue Jeans
• Painting: Annabel
• Painting: The Badlands
• Palette Knife Figure