Hi Creativity folks!

Last week was busy because my four kids had spring break and my work, sadly, does not have spring break. Because I'm saving my vacation days for summer fun and sun, I was working and my kids were off. Luckily, my sister-in-law volunteered to entertain the kids for a few days.

All of a sudden, our house was eerily quiet and I had more time than usual to work on my own personal stuff. And nap. I did a lot of napping.

Creative Leaps Forward

I got a chance to do oodles of collaborative digital design with my collaborative partner for my creativity journal project. (More on that below) I got a chance to work on drafting my novel in long stretches without interruption. It was heavenly.

The thing is, by the end of the week, I found myself in a funk. Our book went live on Amazon and after a big creative surge I was left with a sense of creative nervousness. Let down. Anxiety. A stuck sensation.

Creative ebbs and flows are a natural part of the process. For me, the key to getting unstuck was to allow myself to rest, but to keep showing up in small ways to my creative practice. Ten minutes here. Ten minutes there.

Sometimes, when we make great breakthroughs, our natural inclination is to reset ourselves to our previous normal. A better idea is to sit in the discomfort of the new place, look around a bit, and then press on.

Gay Hendricks, in his book The Big Leap, talks about the Upper Limit Problem, and I think this is part of the strange feeling we get when we take things to the next level. Here's one of my favorite quotes from that book:

It takes time to adjust after breakthroughs in life. Resting and following our habits allows us to keep showing up for the next phase, instead of dropping back down to the old normal.

Enough Deep thoughts: What did we make?

My collaboration partner and I met at a writing and creativity conference in October and we've been working together to self-publish a creativity journal. It has her beautiful artwork and our writing prompts and pretty lined pages to write or draw on. Here's me and Comet opening the proof copy from Amazon:

Audette's multimedia creations look even prettier in the book. We used the free program Canva to format it, and after fighting with the bleeds and gutters for a long while, we've got it live on Amazon. Click here to check it out.

Creators I Love

I have been following Amy at Mindful Art Studio for a while. She combines several things I love--watercolors, drawing and mindfulness--all together in one thing. She streams Slow Drawing meditations online frequently. She also has many videos on YouTube that are good. Here's a good one if you want to check her out. Her art is simple to follow and soothing to create.

One Last Thing

Many of you know, I am working on fiction writing a lot recently. I don't talk much about my elf books in this creativity newsletter, but if you want to learn more about what's up with them, I do have a Valley Glen Elves tab on my website. The elf books have a separate newsletter. You can sign up on the Valley Glen page or just reply to this and tell me and I'll add you. I am looking for people to read and review early copies of my books, so just let me know if you're interested. The cover art is beautiful and created by the team at JV Arts.

Hope your creating is going well. Have a wonderful rest of your week! As always, I'd love to hear what you think about the ideas I talked about above or getting unstuck. Feel free to reply and start a conversation with me. We're kind of a small group here. I won't get inundated.

Mary