Pick Your Size Well Refilling

Refilling the creative well is like drink sizes at one of those massive gas station / truck-stop arrangements. You can get the kiddie cup, something approaching medium, or the ridiculous, last-for-days and have-to-pee-every-hour grand gesture hydration solutions. Filling the creative well comes in all those sizes, too. If it doesn’t for you, I argue it should.

Kiddie cups: These little sips are daily practices. Work out, maybe. Meditation. Breathing exercises. Yoga nidra/NSDR. That twenty minutes after work and before the dinner rush wherein you sneak- read a few pages of a book. Journaling. Singing when you’re alone in the car. Spending ten minutes outside in the early morning sunshine admiring the trees and plants and flowers. The daily kiddie cups may be small, but they keep the well topped up and the workings clear of debris. There’s a saying among hikers: It’s the water in your body that keeps you alive, not the water in your canteen. Refilling the creative well feels very much the same. In the throes of stressful daily live, whether there’s a deadline or other pressures, most of us can’t afford anything more than a few short, stolen moments to pour a few ounces back into ourselves. A few ounces at a time won’t keep us topped up, but they will sure slow the draw down.

Medium-ish: These rehydration investments are bigger investments, whether in time, effort, or cash. A class. An entire day alone with no one else setting the agenda. A solo trip to an art gallery or a museum or a bookstore. A day of enjoyable outdoor activities. Sailing, hiking, biking, exploring, whatever. It can be short writing retreats or a local conference. The point of the medium-ish creative well refill project is to tip a lot more into the well to bring the levels markedly up. If you’ve watched any ancient Egyptian archeology shows in the past decade, picture the Nile measuring systems the Egyptians built to keep track of flooding. They knew that if the Nile floods didn’t hit a certain height, it meant famine and they could plan. We’re using our medium drinks to bring up the level of the Nile. We don’t want creative famine. So, we need a cadence of regular pours to inch that level back up above the uh oh mark.

Grand gesture: These are huge, major investments in well refilling. They’re great emergency measures akin to getting an IV in the ED. The grand gesture can be life and soul saving after major burn out. Everyone’s grand gestures will look different. It could be a major conference (San Diego Comicon, DragonCon, etc.) It could be a longer-term writing retreat or even an artist-in-residence situation. The grand gesture is meant to be a big adventure, preferably undertaken solo. You shouldn’t have to share your Big Gulp. Not when you need it. It’s supposed to shake you up. It’s supposed to be faintly scary. Refilling the well like this should feel a little wild and uncontrollable as if you might be swept out to sea by the force of the flood. I mean, okay. My analogies are breaking down and getting tangled up. In my case, it was a ten-day trip to Ireland. Ten days of beginner mind because everything was new and bright and shiny and well-filling. Your grand gesture may, like mine, be a once in a lifetime event. That’s fine. I just hold that everyone trying to refill a creative well should indulge in a grand gesture at least once in life, understanding that grand gestures may need to be scaled to accommodate budgets, schedules, and envious spouses.

 

Three Places I Find Inspiration

 Happy New Year!

On this New Year's Eve day, I'm busy crunching year-end financials in preparation to go to quarterly tax-reporting. Author finances, however, are not the topic of the week at the SFF Seven. Instead we're discussing a much happier topic: sources of inspiration.

The two are somewhat tied together for me as I've spent the last two weeks refilling my creative well. I finished my revision of ONEIRA (final title to come) on December 15 and sent it off to my editor. Since then, I've taken a break from writing work - very unusual for me. The time has been consumed largely by Christmas prep, travel, visiting family, and doing business like the above crunching of year-end financials. Looking at this, I've realized that I've been relying on passive well-refilling: hoping that if I simply leave the creative well alone, that the vast water table of the universe will seep in and top that puppy off for me. 

And, to some extent, that's true.

However, I'm realizing I haven't been following my new tenet of aggressively refilling the well. That would mean finding ways to actively pour juice into that well. And that's where inspiration comes in. What are my top three?

Media

I'm putting a lot under this heading, much like my sibling-under-the-skin, Murderbot. One thing I have been doing is a full re-read of this excellent series by Martha Wells. Reading books - particularly brilliantly written ones by authors I admire - is a great source of inspiration for me. I also include listening to music under this heading. While road-tripping, I put my music library on All Songs Shuffle, which unearths interesting stuff I haven't listened to in ages. A Cat Stevens song - The Wind - turned up, so now I'm diving into a full Cat Stevens song shuffle. What an amazing songwriter, to communicate so much in so few words. Finally, I love watching movies for inspiration. I got a great idea just the other night from a movie and now I'm sizzling to write this series. Though it will have to wait, the sparkle of that excitement adds to my overall feeling of creative flow.

Nature

I'm fortunate to live in a beautiful place. My desk overlooks a spectacular view and my morning walk with the dog is replete with huge skies, distant mountains, and beauty of all kinds. I say I'm lucky to have this - and I am! - but I also sought out this place, because being outside in a beautiful place is super important to me. Just living here refills my well.

Silence

Longtime readers probably know that I'm an advocate of silence for creative flow. By this I don't necessarily mean the absence of ambient sound, though it sometimes means that for me. I'm talking primarily about the silence of the mind, the emptiness that allows creativity to flow in, that enables us to hear the voices scintillating through the veil, telling us their stories. Taking time off from the "noisier" parts of my life has been invaluable for that. 

Huh... Turns out I've been doing better at aggressively refilling the well than I thought!

Best wishes for an inspiring 2024 for us all!

Self-Care & Refilling the Well When Things Are on Fire

 

Exciting news!!! For all of you who have been waiting waiting waiting for the audiobook of ROGUE FAMILIAR, it is liiiivvveeee! Just on Audible for the next 3 months, then it will be wide. If you'd like to review, I do have some free downloads available. Comment here or email Assistant Carien via the website contact form.   

        

 

Amusingly enough, our topic at the SFF Seven this week is self-care and burnout. I say amusing because this has been a topic of discussion in Jeffe's Closet, my Patreon and Discord, these last couple of weeks. One thing I love about that space is that people can ask me questions and it gives me the opportunity to mull answers I hadn't previously given thought to.

One gal asked me about advice on getting through when you're faced with deadlines and your well is empty. I talked about this on Monday's podcast, too, but I'm going to reiterate here because I think our group mind hit on something really important.

We often think of refilling the creative well as something lovely, peaceful, and largely passive. Self-care often carries the sense of similar calm. We think of leisurely strolls, hot bubble baths, a glass of wine, gazing at the sunset with friends, lingering over moving art at museums and galleries. All of these things are lovely... And not terribly useful when you're facing deadlines, dealing with crises, and you're already short on time with a well so empty you've got nothing left to put out the fires, much less create something to meet those deadlines with.

So, what do we do then?

The thing is, burnout is something we must take very, very seriously. I've been there - and once you hit full burnout, the bottom of the well is dry as a bone, then it can takes months or years to recover. It's easy to put off our mental health, to decide that refilling the well can wait until this family member is doing better, or this deadline is met, or after some future date when we have time to deal with it. Except that mental health and burnout don't obey our schedules. Taking this approach is like deciding that an infection can wait until we've finished some other projects - by the time we're ready to deal with it, we could have blood poisoning or lose a limb.

What's the answer then? This was my advice to her: cut out everything that is not actually on fire and aggressively fill the well.

I was concerned that this was too vague, but it worked for her! Sometimes we need permission to ignore everything that is not a crisis - to ask ourselves "is it on fire?" and set it aside if not. As for aggressively filling the well - an image that seemed to amuse everyone - I can't tell you how to do that. We all have to find what refills our own wells. But as for going about it aggressively, that is the key. That means you're prioritizing those activities, going after them with gusto, rather than waiting for the water to seep in. Muster your army of brooms and aggressively fill that well!

Fantasia Brooms GIFfrom Fantasia GIFs