COVER REVEAL! + There'd better be blood or fire.

Guard what feeds your soul.

Don’t feel like reading? I got you, dawg—I recorded the whole newsletter in case you prefer listening.

To finally get my revisions in while catching up on seven or eight art commissions and also doing life, I found it essential to guard my time. I had to wrap it inside my trench coat like a street vendor hawking stolen rolexes, and not let anyone pilfer any of my valuable focused minutes with their grabby little hands. Any by anyone, I mostly mean my kids.

Some people can make use of fifteen-minute intervals here and there by writing while waiting for a doctor or a meeting or a lunch. Those people are not me. I can’t switch into a complicated manuscript fast enough to make any actual progress in fifteen minutes, so I schedule longer chunks of writing time. If those chunks are interrupted, I lose a lot of momentum. So I tell me kids I’m going to work for a specific amount of time, and to only come in or talk to me if it’s important.

I thought it was a great idea until the knocking started.

Knocking. “Mommy?” More knocking.

Grumbling from me. “Is this important?”

“Yes, can I come in?”

“Fine.”

“Okay, so I had a dream like, last year, or maybe when I was three, but I also had a dream just like it yesterday, or maybe two days ago. But not in the day. At night.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah and it was about a world where the sky was pink. PINK, Mommy!”

“Like a sunset, how nice.”

“Yeah so I was wondering, why isn’t our sky pink?”

The child literally interrupted me to ask why the sky is blue. Deep breath in. Stay calm. My fault, this is kid number three. I know very well by now that the matters they place on the scale of importance and where on the scale they might rank are in no way similar to my own.

So I made this flow chart, found a sticky hook, and hung it outside the office.

Basically, if it’s not human blood or active fire, it can wait. This chart was great for my older two, but my toddler-at-the-time couldn’t read. So I made the following chart for her, and told her what the words said:

I also had to clarify that if Daddy wasn’t home, she’d have to wait for him. The trick to either of these charts working is to actually stop and take it down, and go interact with the small humans waiting on me when my time is up. Otherwise, they learn to distrust the system and it all falls apart. More on guarding your creative time in the Unsolicited Advice section, now for the exciting part!

THE COVER IS HERE!!!!! Just look at this beauty!! I’m so in love!!!

Splinter Press knows I do art, and asked if I’d be interested in creating the cover art. I told them yes, but I’m not interested in designing it or coming up with the ideas. I’m no good at that part. But if they gave me the idea, I’d paint it. So I had a meeting where we looked at several covers and discussed what they had in mind. I submitted one piece, and it was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t right. So they refined the idea, and I made more artwork, and then handed it over to the cover designer to work her magic. She knocked it out of the park, IMO. She had me make a few more tweaks and the result is something I would absolutely be drawn to in a bookstore.

Preorders will be available soon, and it should be coming out at the end of Q3! Don’t miss the updates!

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I’m going to talk about why writing time is important, but this applies to any creative outlet you might have. Just substitute writing for your beloved skill or hobby or passtime.

Writing isn’t always fun, glamorous, or easy. Even the end product won’t necessarily fulfil or validate us. My books won’t change the world, and books generally doesn’t make (much) money. When we’re done with one book we’ll dive straight into the next one. It’s hard to justify taking time to write when I don’t have an ROI graph or a sales history or hit any of the business world’s time=money metrics. Writing novels is a little insane, I think. So why do you write?

At Keller Williams, we talked a lot about our big “why” in real estate. It’s a tool to help get to the core reason why we do what we do, even though it’s not always fun and takes a lot of self-discipline. It’s something we can think back on and remember when we need motivation. You might have to ask why a few levels deep to get to the heart of your need to write or create. In real estate, it’s often the money. But why do you want money? What is it that money gives you that you’re craving?

In art, even if money is a goal, there’s another reason we chose this difficult way to make a buck, let alone a living. Maybe writing keeps you sane. Maybe it’s therapy, and makes the rest of life that much bearable. Maybe it makes you happy to escape and play with words or pictures. Maybe, like a friend in my writing group, you read a terrible book and had to revenge-write a better one. Maybe it’s a compulsion and you have no idea why, but you must write.

If you have no specific “why” to justify pushing through the tough bits and keep on keeping on, ponder this:

How do you feel when you have written?

How do you feel when you haven’t written?

And then:

How does progress in your writing or the lack thereof affect the rest of your mental, emotional, and therefore physical wellbeing? How does your wellbeing affect your familiar relationships, your other tasks, etc? See where I’m going with this?

Writing (or other creative outlets/passions) is a light burning inside you that was placed there by God (picture whatever God means to you). It’s part of what feeds your very soul. Taking the time to nourish that light—taking care of yourself by exercising and growing the thing that fulfils you and feeds your spirit and helps keep you mentally, emotionally and physically healthy is NOT auxiliary to the rest of life. It is not selfish or secondary. It is essential. It is sacred time. Guard it.

I have a whole presentation on this subject, but probably the one thing I’d hope people got from it would be to make an actual plan and schedule. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, like Ben Franklin said. Or Ghandi, because one of those two said all the quotes, according to the interwebs. Writing time doesn’t have to be daily to be effective or consistent. Try expanding your schedule from daily to weekly, even monthly, and see if that helps you find places for things. Do yourself and everyone you love a huge favor, and don’t let yourself go too long without feeding your creative self.

I’m going to poke fun at myself this time and show you screenshots of my own writing from the revisions I did. First, I often find words I typed backwards or with the first two letters flipped, or with the second letter capitalized instead of the first. Here’s the latest:

And here, I invented a new idiom, which I might have to keep for future use.

Thanks for hanging out with me today! If you haven’t subscribed, go ahead and do that, because I have many more funny stories, and we all need a reason to smile here and there, right? I’ll see you next time!