RITA ® Award-Winning Author of Fantasy Romance
//My strong – possibly unpopular – opinions on people out there selling classes, advice, and coaching to authors. How writing isn’t always fun when it’s your actual job. And happy news on the flip side of piracy.
//More on building focus and improving our ability to concentrate by making small changes in our environment, such as leaving the smart phone in the other room, and changing reading habits.
//Thoughts today on focus, how to rebuild concentration, and the alarming truth that every interruption costs us 23 minutes of time to regain previous focus. Also more data on trad publishers buying mostly full manuscripts.
//A slight divergence into thoughts on fashion and how the pandemic affected that. Also, being a hedonist. More on topic: why do book sales vary so much by platform? Some books sell only on certain retailers and I don’t know why.
//About my tumultuous week and how wonderful Mary Robinette Kowal is. Also, by request, an explanation of what AI is and isn’t, and what it has to do with writing stories and creating art.
//I’m talking about author finances today and the challenge of a variable income – particularly if you don’t have a salaried spouse – and how that works out for predicting taxes. Also why I don’t think advertising is the be all and end all for Indies.
//Great week for me! Talking about being up front with my new editor on how I *can’t* write an outline, a bit about knife-throwing and learning to relish failure as much as success, and the monsoon rains of autumn.
//Update on my super-exciting news! I’m still having to be circumspect, but I’m sharing broad strokes, what this means to me, how utterly thrilled I am, and what it means to persist and not set a deadline on goals.
//Some exciting (though vague for now) news for me! Also a roundup of the various platforms I use for my self-published books, since I’m wide. Also how “adult” seems to mean erotic now, and how annoying that is.
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This week at the SFF Seven, we’re talking how to find inspiration when the story won’t come to you.
Did you know the word “inspiration” comes from the Latin inspirare, which means “to breathe into”? Same root as the English word for respiration and other, similar, breathing-related words. It refers to the sense of the divine breathing life into us.
The way creatives use “inspiration,” we usually mean it the way this topic is phrased – that we’re waiting for that divine breath, waiting for that story to come to us.
Stop waiting.
As a creative, YOU are the divine and the story is your creation. Did the gods wait for lifeless clay creatures to somehow totter up to them, requesting the breath of life?
No.
Similarly, those stories are not going to come to you. You must reach out and seize the clay, shape it into what you want it to be, and then for YOU to be the inspiration, to breathe life into the new work.
I know this isn’t the advice you wanted to hear. This isn’t easy. But then, being a Creator never is.