Charlene Teglia

There's a black stray cat that lives around here. It's far too wild to come near us, but it likes to hang out in our yard. I used to see it just hiding in the hostas. Then after one storm I saw it come out from under our deck, where it had taken shelter. Another time it took shelter from a thunderstorm in the gazebo under the table.

It drinks out of the birdbath, which I didn't realize until my husband saw it go to get a drink, find it empty, and slink off. (Yes, I immediately went out and refilled it. As much as it's rained lately, it's still so hot that the water evaporates quickly.)

From hiding in the hostas and under the deck, Basement Cat has graduated to laying on the deck when we're inside, and last night when I locked up for the night, I saw the now-familiar black cat curled up on the front porch.

I don't know where the cat came from, how long it's been wild, but it seems to feel like it has a safe place to rest around our house.

Creative people and cats have a lot in common. We all need a place to take shelter and a safe place to rest. A safe space is essential, even Basement Cat knows. It's not possible to keep creating without support. Do you have a trusted safe place for your creativity? If not, find one! It might be right in your neighborhood.

It was a busy weekend. There was the usual mundane stuff like yard care, laundry, grocery shopping. There was the realization that kids have grown and shoes have not since the beginning of summer. So we took them to The Big City to get their feets measured, and lo, it was time for the next size up. They now have bigger shoes and no pinchy toes. We have to watch that like a hawk because they never volunteer the "shoes getting tight" information.

The husband and I also needed shoes; mine filled with dirt from the open holes in the sides on my last trip into the garden, which is when I realized that it was perhaps time to stop putting off that "someday I need to replace these" thought. If you've ever shopped for clothes or shoes for yourself with kids in tow, you understand why I put these things off, but with kids bribed to cooperate we both managed to get everybody happily shod. I'd link to my new shoes but they seem to be the color combination Fila is embarrassed to admit to. I love them for their eye-blinding cheer. And the shoelaces glow in the dark, so I will always be able to find them.

And then we went to fill in other wardrobe gaps for fall, seeking long sleeved tees and sweaters and jeans for small people that had intact knees, and we discovered the wonders of Gymboree. This store is my new favorite for kids' clothes. The styles and quality are wonderful and the sale prices are amazing. Even at full price, not too bad. If you're trying to shop for little girls and asking "where are the nice clothes, the ones that don't make my five year old look like Hannah Montana", I highly recommend Gymboree. I wanted to buy the place out. I know I will be hitting their website when I need to fill future wardrobe gaps.

And then on the way home, on the very busy highway that runs from Chicago to Detroit, the car in front of the car in front of us blew out a tire, spun, and came to a stop facing the oncoming traffic in our lane. It was an absolute miracle of Everybody Reacting Correctly at the same time, as every single car avoided the inevitable collision that never came. Nobody hit the blowout car or the cars surrounding it that had to stop to avoid an accident. The people in the car got out and pushed it off to the side quickly, traffic moved over to the next lane and we all continued on our way. Alive. With our faith in our fellow driving man at a new height. It was miraculous. I want to burst into a rendition of Amazing Grace just thinking about it.

How was your weekend?

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do I, which is why I leave mine in the closet. But if success doesn't form in a vacuum, where does it come from?

Success and failure are part of the same process and it's called growth. Lots of failure happens on the way to success. Success might be the end result, but it only happened after trying lots of things that didn't work, or didn't work quite right. 

Right now there's a big conference going on with lots of advice on how to be a success. Everybody wants to be a success. We're even advised very strongly as writers to only talk about our successes because we wouldn't want to give anybody the impression that we ever *gasp* fail. Because then we would be FAILURES and LOSERS and nobody would ever publish us again. Nobody will ever love us again, either, and we'll die friendless and alone in our unvacuumed hovels.

Or maybe we could just put aside the drama around success and failure and look at it as a process. When a book has a false start, stalls, takes a wrong turn, that's called writing a book. It happens. If it was easy, everybody would do it. The way to get to a successfully completed book is to not give up and keep trying different things until you get to the end.

Careers have false starts, stalls, and wrong turns, too. If you quit there it might be called failure. Or it might be what you needed to push you into discovering your real strengths and going on to greater success. Let's face it, most of us wouldn't ever change if we didn't have to. If something works, we keep doing it. Failure tells us we need to try something else. Failure leads to experimentation, discovery, exploration. You can learn a lot from failure, a lot more than you can by accidentally stumbling on success and then having no idea how to recreate it.

1. I need to start putting out the trash the night before. Because sprinting to the curb while rolling a full can in 97% humidity is more of a workout than I need early in the morning.

2. I'm guesting over at Genreality today on
The Write Stuff. I was also there Monday talking about storytelling with Tarot. I'll be there next Thursday, too. This time of year the alternate gets a workout while Genreality regulars travel.

3. I'd like to be traveling. I plan to in August.

4. I'm cleaning out and organizing the kids' room. This is not a task for the faint-hearted. It is time to sort out the outgrown clothes/shoes/coats/toys and fill a donation box so they actually have room for the clothes/shoes/toys they use now.

5. And lastly, I am doing some online shopping because my appearance is boring me. I found some fun shirts, like
this one. Or
this one. Also, my 7 yr old may have convinced me to go back to coloring my hair. I think the white streaks are scaring her into thinking I'm old and about to die instead of just prematurely white.

What about you? Organizing, traveling, updating your look?

If you're playing along, this is the beginning of week 2 of The Artist's Way. A couple of things really struck me as I read Chapter Two this time around, three ways that it's easy for a pro to unintentionally create blocks. You learn these lessons in layers as you grow and advance through your career, so I wanted to talk a little about pro pitfalls vs how the same points appear before that first sale.

Page 55 lists the "Rules of the Road". Out of these 10 rules, 2 really jumped out at me. They are: Fill the well, and set gentle goals and reach them.

As a beginner, you might deal with filling the well pretty easily. You're making time to write on top of your other responsibilities, but you haven't yet added publishing's workload. Life balance is workable. But after that first sale, you're still writing the next book. And you're also doing revisions, copyediting, proof-reading, dealing with cover art, a million website updates and promotional issues.

Chances are the first sale didn't allow you to quit your day job. So your time just got a lot tighter. To compensate, maybe you stop spending time on your hobbies, going to movies, reading for fun. This seems like the logical place to trim time, but it's a terrible move for your creative longevity. Those "time-wasting" activities are the very things that fill your well and allow you to keep writing the next book plus juggling everything else. So your very first move as a pro is to unintentionally set yourself up to get blocked.

Our next pitfall is setting gentle goals. You do this long before that first sale, so it seems like something you've got down. Until you sell, and the editor wants your next proposal in a week. Or the full in six weeks. Or a novella for an anthology that will really help expose you to a broader readership and gain more interest in the connected novel but you'll have to squeeze it in with all your other commitments. Or your agent really wants Hot Idea in Hot Genre right now so it can be shopped at Current Big Industry Event.

You say yes, because you want to impress Agent and Editor, you want to take advantage of Better Time Slot or Excellent Anthology Opportunity, you desperately want to sell in Hot Genre. You're already worried about career longevity because you're not stupid and you know most first novelists never sell a second book. You don't want to say no to anything. But if the time frames for delivery aren't reasonable, you're better off saying no than setting yourself up for burnout and ultimately becoming blocked.

Which leads us to the next issue. "Often our creativity is blocked by falling into other people's plans for us." Again, pretty easy to cope with as a beginner. You catch on to the critique partner who hates your genre and keeps trying to get you to write like a literary novelist. You learn to say no to the friend or family member who always needs you to take on some responsibility to fill up the time you've set aside to write.

Then comes that first sale and everything changes. When the person who has plans for you is your editor or your agent, it's a much more subtle issue. Are they really helping you grow creatively and build your career? Or are they pushing you in the wrong direction? You don't want to disagree and risk losing your agent, your publisher, your fledgling career. But if you only have a career by saying yes to everything no matter how you feel about it deep inside, you're not building a stable career anyway. Or not one you're going to want once you've built it, even if you don't end up catastrophically blocked in the process. It's easy to believe experts know more, but now more than ever, it's just not true. Nobody knows where things are going, but you can at least know how to be true to yourself. 

The way circumstances and the guises common pitfalls will appear in change so much through your creative life that you'll always be learning these same lessons in new layers. Which is why after 18 titles in print and 10 years since my first time through it, I'm still learning something from The Artist's Way.

Since Alison Kent started up another round of The Artist's Way and reminded me that it's a good thing to do once in a while, it seems like a good time to talk about why to do it, how to do it, etc.

First you get the book by Julia Cameron. But you don't just read it. It's an activity book. Read the introductory pages that give background information and explain what it's about, then chapter one. The end of each chapter has a list of tasks to do for that week. Every week you do morning pages (daily writing about whatever is on your mind) and artist dates (any activity that feeds your senses) in addition to the weekly tasks. It takes 12 weeks to work through, at the end of which you have built some good creative habits and learned a few things about your creativity.

The hardest habit to build, I think, is the artist date. It's essential for continually gaining new input and feeding the senses so that you have a stock of inspiration to create from. If you are a busy working parent, you might have to do what I do, which is resort to mini artist dates. I try to do this daily for five minutes. I listen to music that inspires me, or go take a picture, or sketch out something I want to paint, or sit on the garden bench and just look and listen and feel. Artist dates don't have to cost anything, or even go anywhere. Your own backyard can be full of things to discover with new eyes.

Morning pages aren't hard for me, but I've been writing daily in a journal since I was 12. The habit is pretty ingrained. I don't write 3 pages longhand since I lost the ability to write longhand years ago to tendonitis. I don't believe there is any magic to longhand vs. typing, but your mileage may vary. Try it both ways and see which you like.

The important thing with The Artist's Way, like any creative tool or "rule", is to use it in a way that works for you. If you can't go off by yourself for an hour to do a formal artist date, take 5 minutes and be informal. If you can't handwrite, type. Or dictate.

If you're an author, the ability to write in a way that isn't a. for sale or b. a performance is really liberating. And you can take the freedom you experience in your journal back to your for pay/for public work. Try it and see.

If you're checking in with a group weekly, it can be interesting to hear about other people's experiences. You can also do it quietly alone. However you do it, if you actually work through the book you will be in a better creative place at the end of 12 weeks. And if you are like me and considering doing it for the 3rd or 5th time (I've lost track), you still have new things to learn about your creative process and how to work with it now.

1. Alison Kent is coordinating a trip through The Artist's Way. If you want to play along, watch her blog!

2. I downloaded Amanda Palmer's ukelele Radiohead cover album yesterday. Love it. And the music is oddly perfect for a certain project of mine.

3. It rained last night, and now it's in the 60s and overcast with a breeze, and why can't it be like this all the time?

4. Bought a salad bowl from the farmer's market this week, ingenius. It's a planting bowl full of salad greens you keep harvesting as it regrows. I planted 3 kinds of greens in the garden and wasn't happy with any of them. Next year I might just do a salad bowl.

5. From TED, the
politics of fiction.

I've been reading a lot on the above topics for some time, studying artists who are successfully doing it. By success, I mean they're finding an audience, doing good and fulfilling work, and making enough money to be worthwhile.

The main conclusion I've drawn from all this thinking and research is that change is happening regardless of what anybody thinks of that, and that those sweeping changes present creative people with opportunity. Just not the opportunity you might have been led to expect.

Internet distribution is not the same as traditional Hollywood distribution for a movie, or mainstream TV distribution for a web series, there aren't traditional record or bookstores involved or publisher or label backing for musicians and writers. Which means the creative person has to be dedicated to and involved in the process of finding and building an audience. Without, as the motto of one of the first internet authors to go the indie route says, being a dick.

So who are some of the role models for independent artists on the internet? Wil Wheaton, blogger, author and actor. Amanda Palmer, musician and artist. Felicia Day, writer, actress and creator of the hit web series
The Guild. Group project Shadow Unit, written by award-winning SF/F authors. For visual art, you can find mind-blowing images on
Deviant Art, and Etsy features handmade items by artists in every medium imaginable.

No matter what your creative outlet is, there's an outlet for it on the internet. But just putting it on the web doesn't equate sales, audience, or any measure of success. You also need to go in knowing what your definition of success is. The common thread seems to be a drive for creative control, the opportunity to realize a creative vision that might not find a mainstream outlet but that has an audience, vast amounts of talent and dedication, and a willingness to step outside of the box without trying to turn the internet into the same old box by carrying along the wrong set of expectations.

The examples I listed have all gone the traditional route and all of them do traditional projects alongside their indie projects. I think it's important to note that choosing to do an indie project doesn't mean you despise all traditional routes or won't take them when they serve best. It means choosing the indie route when it makes sense. I mention this because JA Konrath's self-publishing venture on Kindle has led to this sort of polarized thinking among writers, that you are part of some brave new artistic order that spits on tradition or a hackish sellout to The Man.

I can think of many good reasons to go the indie route, but I won't do it with unrealistic expectations. For instance, nobody's going to give me an advance guaranteeing a certain level of earnings for the work I do. Putting a book out on the web doesn't mean readers around the world will all stand and cheer, or even that my current readers will all be interested enough to buy. It means that editing, proofing, formatting, cover art, distribution and countless business details will be up to me. So it has to be a project I strongly believe in and am committed to, one I believe has an audience. 

I think that those who are willing to work in both traditional and indie internet models have the most opportunity to fulfill creative vision and achieve success, and I think it's exciting to see what creative people do when they have autonomy. It buys artists something very important; the ability to choose projects very selectively and to say no when they should, because their indie projects mean they can afford to.

1. Trying to see if I can get the whole series in ebook, so I can carry it with me everywhere.

2. Writing Pro/Con lists over reading Dream Called Time the minute it comes out vs trying to read a page a day to put off the inevitable.

3. Dreaming up ways to entice the author to write just one more. These include winning the lottery in order to finance a book deal. Hey, it's called dreaming.

4. Writing Cherijo/Duncan fanfic.

5. Planning a Dream giveaway, to include a pocket pack of Kleenex because it's the LAST STARDOC.

It's a good thing I took pretty garden pictures yesterday, because last night a storm blew through and left a trail of wreckage behind. I went out and stood tomato cages back up, inspected the downed corn and decided it would probably stand up again on its own when it dries out, examined torn leaves.

This might seem discouraging, but here's the thing; if leaves get damaged, plants grow new ones. Uprooted corn can be replanted. Broken off branches get replaced by new growth. Any living thing is fairly resilient.

This is true of books, too. Sometimes a story takes a hit from damaging input from a critique partner or editor, but the roots are still there and it still has life. It can recover, even if that means it needs a little support to do it. Sometimes a beautiful story gets an ugly cover, sometimes it's marketed wrong and doesn't find an audience right away. The story still exists and has a life of its own. Time goes on and things change.

Work is always worthwhile. It endures, and when the garden comes to the end of the season or a book is remaindered, that's not the end. Plants produce the seeds of next year's garden. Books can be repackaged and resold or even utterly rewritten. And there's also the enduring benefit of the lessons learned in doing the work; what worked, what didn't, what might produce better results next time. Right now I'm thinking a windbreak is a good idea.