You know, because editing two novels and preparing them for self-publication, designing covers for the books, beginning work on a new novel, getting a kid ready to go away to college, working two part-time jobs,  all while trying to send off samples of my books to literary agents in the hopes that I get picked up by an actual publisher… oh, and having the transmission in my car crap out… wasn’t keeping me busy enough.

The thing is… (hey, a thing, we haven’t had a thing for a long time)… I do my art, whether writing a song, or painting or drawing, or doing a book, or even a blog post, only when I feel the art calling me. I am all-art-side-of-the-brain. Besides making it hard for me to market my stuff, it means that I am at the whim of my muses.

Like most tikis, this one started off looking more like a log than a work of art. But inside every log is a person, waiting to come out.

My original plan was to make the new tiki look like this one, the very first one I ever did… which is now rotting and being eaten by bugs. Unfortunately, art does not work to plans, not for me, and that isn’t the face I found inside this particular log.

That’s okay. You can’t make a log be somebody different than it is, any more than you can a person. On an interesting note, this is the first time I am using an actual log that is often used by actual tiki-carvers. Long story short: One of my part-time jobs is managing four little bungalow apartments down at the beach, here in San Diego. And I met a guy down at the beach who carves tikis. He had a couple of big palm logs on the side of his house and gave them to me. I think they are Mexican Queen palms, but I might be wrong about that. Either way, it is a kind of wood used for some tikis. Most of the logs I get are just discarded firewood or trimmed-tree parts. I never do anything the normal way. That would be too easy. This wood is sort of fibrous, which is a challenge, but at least it is soft.

But we will see where this new tiki takes us. I need to work on the tiki that looks like me, too. I really should finish that one.