Today, we are excited to feature Clennell Anthony, a paranormal romance and fantasy author. She is a founding member of the Writers’ Mastermind and has been the host of our Wednesday and Saturday write-ins.
Dark Brilliance is a book of short stories. Each story has its moment that shines, though there is a darkness that persists, light shines through the flame of somber sadness, tortured occurrences, and hope threads through that lifts the darkness and turns it to brilliance. The stories are grouped by the moment captured by the author. For example, “Endurance” focuses on the life of a home: the wars that were fought around it, the neglect it withstood, and how it waits for someone to come along and rebuild its grandeur. Dark Brilliance contains stories that exhibit moments of love, life, sensuality, power, hope, and fulfillment. Come join in the journey this book of short stories will take you on.
This year, we did The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron in the Writers’ Mastermind.
In the fourth part of the process, we worked on recovering our sense of integrity. Integrity means living according to your truth. Today, we talk about making changes in our lives that align with our innermost beliefs.
In this section, Julia Cameron goes into depth about the importance of morning pages. Morning pages are three pages of stream of consciousness writing before doing anything else. In them, we articulate feelings we weren’t aware we had. Anyone who’s journaled knows this.
Even in writing fiction, a writer discovers things about themselves they never knew. Desires, fantasies, dreams, rants, and even past trauma can bubble up through our characters.
It’s often when hard truths come to light that we avoid writing. We don’t want to be faced with the fact that we need to make hard changes.
Once we discover what we are not really “okay” about certain aspects of our lives, it’s up to us to then change them.
We must throw away the old relationships, possessions, ideas, and habits that are keeping us stuck.
Once you free yourself, you free your creativity.
You make room for the things that make you excited to be alive.
The end of the year is the perfect time to think about the changes we need to make.
What’s holding you back from being your freest, most creative self?
We are pleased to invite all fiction authors (published or unpublished) to our annual Author Year End Review for 2022.
Now that we’re about to close out 2022, it’s important to process all that happened (or didn’t happen) for us as writers this year.
We need to find out what worked and what didn’t, so that we can double down on the things that brought us results and eliminate whatever is draining our time, energy, and creativity.
Author Year-End Review
What worked for you? What didn’t?
What reasons do you have to celebrate?
What helped or hindered your creativity?
How close were you to your writing, publishing, and sales goals?
What daily habits and mindsets are holding you back?
If you want to make 2023 your best year ever as a writer, then the Author’s Year-End Review will help you 100%.
Growth is uncomfortable. It’s messy. It hurts. Sometimes it feels like everything is falling apart. We are losing grip on who we are. The ground is caving beneath us.
This is a good sign. Nothing is worse for creativity than being stagnant.
Growing pains mean that you are changing. Transformation means inspiration.
Be patient with yourself. Don’t try to run away.
Wait to see what happens and who you will become through your experience.
May the muses be with you,
—Christa
*****
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
MARTHA GRAHAM
WHAT’S INSIDE
Crystalize your vision of what it means a successful author
Develop your own Writer Manifesto
Reverse engineer a step-by-step plan to your career as a writer
This year, I published my first full-length novel called Oblivion Black. Members of the Writers’ Mastermind witnessed me slaving over this manuscript in our weekly co-writing sessions since our virtual writing group began two years ago. They also know that I have been “working on” this story since 2012.
Yes. TEN years.
It seems like an impossible amount of time to be sitting on a book. And yet, here I am in 2022 just releasing it. It staggers the mind (and also makes me feel old to have been an adult long enough to say that I spent a decade with the same damn novel).
I say “sitting” on a book, because most of time I spent changing things, and changing them back, overthinking and overworking everything instead of moving forward in the process of actually publishing a book. It was ten years wasted second guessing, self-doubt, and perfectionism.
So sadly as you can see, I am more than qualified to speak about today’s topic.
FROM THE ARTIST’S WAY by Julia Cameron
Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead.
It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.
The Flip Side
On the other side of perfectionism is sloppiness, carelessness, and recklessness. Equally harmful, this is when we don’t take the time and energy to learn what we need to do and how to do it. The artistic wave is so exhilarating, we don’t think about whether or not our boat has any holes in it, and we sink before we reach the shore.
This comes in the form of impatience, self-importance, idealism, and ignorance. But some of this energy is needed to produce compelling work. We must find a balance. We can’t be be blindly confident or overly cautious.
So how do we strike this balance?
As a writer who struggled with crippling perfectionism, here are a few signs you have a problem.
7 Signs Perfectionism is Ruining Your Writing
1. You revisit the same material more than a reasonable amount of times.
2. The things you’ve changed, you change back to their original state, sometimes more than once (second-guessing).
3. You ask for feedback over and over again and shape your story to everyone else’s opinions
4. You don’t believe anyone when they say it’s good or great.
5. The story has lost its original urgency and rawness because of overediting.
6. It has taken you more than a few years to finish (I’ll give you one to three years for a novel, excluding those who have a demanding job or personal live. NOT 10 YEARS, unless you’re Proust!).
7. Your WIP has become such a burden, you struggle to breathe (either metaphorically or literally).
Be mindful and watch yourself for the neuroses of perfectionism.
At some point, have faith, be decisive, and move on.
*****
Do you struggle with perfectionism in your writing?
Or have you rushed into things and released them before they were ready?
Please reply/comment below.
And, may the muses be with you,
—Christa
WHAT’S INSIDE
Crystalize your vision of what it means a successful author
Develop your own Writer Manifesto
Reverse engineer a step-by-step plan to your career as a writer
