Hello again! I am here to report all my busy-doings and update you on the 4 C’s of my creative life.
How are your 4 C’s going? Any updates on that front? Feel free to reply to me with your updates.
Creativity
Fellow writers, do you have a Spotify playlist for your WIP’s? I have a few.
This is the playlist I had going for the months I was finishing Five Doors.
As it accumulated songs, you can see how much it grew, I ended up with 6 hours of creativity fodder.
Since I tend to visualize scenes, music helps me get there.
I suggest you try it at least to help you when you get stuck. Making the list is half the fun!
Craft
We talked about writing tools, focusing on the one that works and how you can switch it up sometimes when you get stuck.
What about how we craft other things in our creative life. Do you make anything? Do you knit, sew, build? One of the characters in my new WIP Pinwheel Thief builds furniture. I’ve seen custom-built furniture made and I always marvel at it.
If you have a craft that isn’t writing, share it with me!
I would love to feature it here and gush about how talented you are, and we can talk a bit more about how other projects fuel our creative minds and help us be better writers!
Comedy
One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic is SoulJoel’s Comedy Club and Lounge, which was our local answer to missing comedy enough to bundle up in blankets and sit on a lawn chair so we could continue to see it live. I did it in the summer mostly, but in the cold too and I don’t care, it was one of the few things that kept me saying during this endless year of insanity. But I digress.
Did they do something like this where you are in the world?
So I have something in the works, that I so excited about, but I can’t report back about it though until it goes well and I can talk about how well it’s going. I will give you a hint, though:
Community
So this section won’t be self-promotion, but more some musings on community as a whole. Awhile back, I didn’t have a newsletter, my website was mostly for show and when I was on social media, I was just kickin’ it.
Somewhere along the line I dove head first into a shark tank, thinking I was swimming with fellow fishes. That’s hard. Do you ever feel that way on the job or when you are building community? Everything is fun and delightful and collaborative and then someone takes a chomp out of you?
I continue to advocate for collaboration over competition. It’s why I’m a fan of Improv. It’s why I’m a fan of most things that don’t require cutthroat tactics and bullying. My first book was about that. It’s basically what I’m all about, honestly. So this newsletter is not an effort to be showy, if I share something with you it’s because I want you to learn and do things WITH ME.
I was INCREDIBLY honored to speak at the SasCon panel a few weekends ago. But it was fun because of the people involved. They were helpful and knowledgeable and open. I was able to just TALK to people about things that interest me, and not sweat and choke on pretense. And because of that it felt easy but also like something to be proud of. I hope if you don’t have something like that, that you find it soon. To be honest, I know I still have a long way to go!
Do you ever feel like you need a boost? Do you ever feel like once boosted people resent you for it? How do we maintain community where we are cheering each other on if we all feel inherently competitive with each other?
I’m just me. I’m just a person who sure, wants to create art and “succeed” at it, whatever that means, but I don’t like watching others suffer. And I can’t be perfect and never make mistakes just because I appear to be further along into the process or “better” at something. That’s not how it works. Life shouldn’t revolve around impressing other people with appearances, numbers, dollar signs. You should be busy doing the work and feeling good about it.
I think people remembered that when the world was ending, but then they forgot as soon as there is light at the end of the tunnel.
I didn’t forget.
I don’t like watching people push each other down, or walk on each other. And I will avoid situations where I see that happening.
That’s the community I want to foster, so if you’re like me, stick around and I hope you know I will live up to my promise.
(If you want you can access to the talk I gave at SAS Con: Why and How You Should Write Across Genres)
That’s all for now. Keep on writing on!