Filling my tank as a creative person sustains me. The more commitments I take on, the more important it is to carve out moments to explore and play. This is a challenge for me, because I need to be known for meeting deadlines and my accountability to others.
Investing energy towards "personal projects" can feel selfish. I'm starting to realize that I show up better in everything else I do when I am showing up for myself.
In my first full year as a solopreneur, I embraced owning my own schedule by registering for "Art for the Curious," a six-week hands-on exploration. (I posted about it here.)
In 2024, I filled my creative cup in a couple of important ways:
Last March, I met up with my college roommate and close friend in Madrid. She had an extra bed in her conference hotel room and invited me to join her, admitting she would have very little time to hang out. A semi-solo vacation turned out to be the perfect trip for an overstimulated, overcommitted person like myself. Although I have extroverted behavior, my personal instruction manual indicates I need LOTS of alone time. I geeked out riding public transportation, went to art museums, ate lots of pastries, toured historic sights, and recharged my batteries drinking tea in the evening with a friend who 100 percent gets me.
On the flight home, I took advantage of 'airplane mode' and inspiration, typing the first few pages of a middle-grade novel that then remained untouched until the Okoboji Writers' Retreat in September. My goal for that conference (which is more "jamboree" than retreat, if you ask me!) was to take advantage of the fiction track and pick those novel pages back up. Workshops with bestselling Iowa author Nicole Baart, Ellen Won Steil, Grant Faulkner, and others were more encouraging than I could have imagined. Plus, I saw some familiar faces that made me feel like I was part of a community of writers.
I kept the momentum with OWR going by registering for Nicole's 8-week "Alchemy" intensive, a virtual class that covered some core elements of fiction writing and publishing industry expectations. This resulted in my first-ever outline for a work of fiction (recovering 'pantser,' here), more pages than I had when I started, and helpful feedback from Nicole and people like quilting legend Marianne Fons, who is also a wonderful writer.
To kick off my creative commitment to myself for 2025, I hosted a vision board workshop in the back room of Ephemera, the charming stationery store my friends own. My goal is to complete a novel draft by my 40th birthday in June, and then to begin querying agents. (The vision board up-top focuses on that goal.)
If you have great ideas for conferences or writing retreats you would recommend, send them my way! I need more milestones to build accountability to creativity.
