Latest from the Creator
The shipping is more than the book. It is always terrifically disappointing when this happens. Sending a paperback from the USA to the UK does not cost $25. Please either reassess the shipping or refund my pledge. Many thanks, Joe
PROJECT UPDATE
Project Update: Surveys Coming, Sticker Designs, & Revision progress
Greetings Backers!
TL:DR:
Expect an email with your survey in the next week. Filling out is important to get me counts for ordering. Revision is progressing nicely: 15 out of 24 chapters are revised. You can see a chapter-by-chapter report down below. You can also read the full chapter on Identifying Your Pillars by clicking over to read this update on Backerkit and making sure you're logged in. Your next update will be the week of November 25-29.
Details:
I'll be sending out surveys sometime in the next week. This will be your chance to double check your order, check your shipping cost, and add any items you might want. Filling out your survey promptly will really help me out as I need to get counts of how many of each item I need to order. I won't be locking orders or charging cards until sometime in early 2025 when I'm placing orders for books and prepping for shipping.
I love the way the bookmarks and stickers turned out, I hope you do too.
If you have a notebook as part of your order, you'll have the option to upgrade to the custom designed notebook. So here are some details on both.
The regular notebook will have a bookmark ribbon, an elastic, and a pocket in the back. You can have your choice of blank, dot grid, or lined pages in your notebook. This is the design for the cover.
The custom designed notebook will have the same artwork on the cover, but will be a slightly larger format and the interior pages will be designed specifically for the activities found in the SLSC book.
Revisions on the book are going well. I love the moment when I feel the whole chapter click together. For the second pass edit I've found an editor who is working with me to edit chapters as I finish them. This is going to save me a lot of time since I can immediately dive into a second editing pass as soon as I complete this one instead of pausing for a month. I'm hopeful that I can find a copy editor willing to work in the same way. Then I could have the whole book ready for layout by either the end of December or early January.
Here is a chapter by chapter list of what's done and what I have left to do. Last week I posted the chapter Weight of the World to my Patreon. It seemed like a thing people might need at the time. You can read it here. I've also included the chapter Identify Your Pillars here for backers only. (In order to read it, you need to click over to the Backerkit website and login)
Intro (I'll write this last)
Creativity and Dreams
1 Creative work of our lives (Also write this last)
2 Landscape of dreams DONE!
Prioritizing
3 Priorities DONE!
4 Identifying your Pillars DONE!
5 The community you need DONE!
6 The boundaries you need DONE!
Energy
7 Managing Mental Load DONE!
8 Ebbs and flows of Energy Levels DONE!
9 Replenishment and Depletion DONE! (10/28/24)
Productivity
10 Curating Your Commitments DONE! (10/30/24)
11 Your Physical Space DONE! (10/27/24)
12 Fragmentation of Creative Time DONE! (10/28/24)
13 Time Scheduling and Project Management DONE! (10/30/24)
14 The Motivation Problem DONE! (11/8/24)
15 Managing Your Motion DONE! (11/12/24)
Making Changes
16 Structuring Changes In progress
17 Goals In Progress
Special Cases to Consider
18 Believing in your work
19 Your access needs
20 Emotional processing and grief
21 Caregiving and creativity
22 Health challenges
23 When things go sour
24 Weight of the World DONE! (11/1/24)
Conclusion
I'm hoping to get some of the presentations recorded and available soon.
Thank you so much for backing this project! If you have any questions about this update, please feel free to ask!
Sandra
TL:DR:
Expect an email with your survey in the next week. Filling out is important to get me counts for ordering. Revision is progressing nicely: 15 out of 24 chapters are revised. You can see a chapter-by-chapter report down below. You can also read the full chapter on Identifying Your Pillars by clicking over to read this update on Backerkit and making sure you're logged in. Your next update will be the week of November 25-29.
Details:
I'll be sending out surveys sometime in the next week. This will be your chance to double check your order, check your shipping cost, and add any items you might want. Filling out your survey promptly will really help me out as I need to get counts of how many of each item I need to order. I won't be locking orders or charging cards until sometime in early 2025 when I'm placing orders for books and prepping for shipping.
I love the way the bookmarks and stickers turned out, I hope you do too.
If you have a notebook as part of your order, you'll have the option to upgrade to the custom designed notebook. So here are some details on both.
The regular notebook will have a bookmark ribbon, an elastic, and a pocket in the back. You can have your choice of blank, dot grid, or lined pages in your notebook. This is the design for the cover.
The custom designed notebook will have the same artwork on the cover, but will be a slightly larger format and the interior pages will be designed specifically for the activities found in the SLSC book.
Revisions on the book are going well. I love the moment when I feel the whole chapter click together. For the second pass edit I've found an editor who is working with me to edit chapters as I finish them. This is going to save me a lot of time since I can immediately dive into a second editing pass as soon as I complete this one instead of pausing for a month. I'm hopeful that I can find a copy editor willing to work in the same way. Then I could have the whole book ready for layout by either the end of December or early January.
Here is a chapter by chapter list of what's done and what I have left to do. Last week I posted the chapter Weight of the World to my Patreon. It seemed like a thing people might need at the time. You can read it here. I've also included the chapter Identify Your Pillars here for backers only. (In order to read it, you need to click over to the Backerkit website and login)
Intro (I'll write this last)
Creativity and Dreams
1 Creative work of our lives (Also write this last)
2 Landscape of dreams DONE!
Prioritizing
3 Priorities DONE!
4 Identifying your Pillars DONE!
5 The community you need DONE!
6 The boundaries you need DONE!
Energy
7 Managing Mental Load DONE!
8 Ebbs and flows of Energy Levels DONE!
9 Replenishment and Depletion DONE! (10/28/24)
Productivity
10 Curating Your Commitments DONE! (10/30/24)
11 Your Physical Space DONE! (10/27/24)
12 Fragmentation of Creative Time DONE! (10/28/24)
13 Time Scheduling and Project Management DONE! (10/30/24)
14 The Motivation Problem DONE! (11/8/24)
15 Managing Your Motion DONE! (11/12/24)
Making Changes
16 Structuring Changes In progress
17 Goals In Progress
Special Cases to Consider
18 Believing in your work
19 Your access needs
20 Emotional processing and grief
21 Caregiving and creativity
22 Health challenges
23 When things go sour
24 Weight of the World DONE! (11/1/24)
Conclusion
I'm hoping to get some of the presentations recorded and available soon.
Thank you so much for backing this project! If you have any questions about this update, please feel free to ask!
Sandra
Includes Backer-Exclusive Content
PROJECT UPDATE
Project Update: Revision Progress
Greetings Backers!
TL:DR:
Revision is progressing nicely! I'm about 1/3 done, but I expect the middle 1/3 to take less time. You can see a chapter-by-chapter report down below. You can also read the full chapter on Priorities by clicking over to read this update on Backerkit and making sure you're logged in. Your next update will be the week of November 11-15
Details:
Going by wordcount, I'm about a third of the way done with this revision pass. I expect this middle third to go much faster than the first third did because I won't need to completely deconstruct and re-make all of the chapters the way I had to for the early ones. There are some chapters at the end which might be more work, I'll have to see when I get there.
I reached out to my editor and I'm getting a bid on a "Substantive Edit" which will dig in chapter by chapter to make sure each one is fully formed. I'll have to do a cost / benefit analysis based on the bid and the sample edit that she supplies. Such is always the case when creating projects, we have to decided how much is enough. As much as I might wish for infinite resources of time, energy, and money, I have to make do with what is actually available. The chapters I've revised are already so much better than they were before. I'm going to let all you backers read the chapter on Priorities in full. You can access it by clicking over to Backerkit and making sure you're logged in when you read this update.
Here is where things stand based on the table of contents:
Intro (I'll write this last)
Creativity and Dreams
TL:DR:
Revision is progressing nicely! I'm about 1/3 done, but I expect the middle 1/3 to take less time. You can see a chapter-by-chapter report down below. You can also read the full chapter on Priorities by clicking over to read this update on Backerkit and making sure you're logged in. Your next update will be the week of November 11-15
Details:
Going by wordcount, I'm about a third of the way done with this revision pass. I expect this middle third to go much faster than the first third did because I won't need to completely deconstruct and re-make all of the chapters the way I had to for the early ones. There are some chapters at the end which might be more work, I'll have to see when I get there.
I reached out to my editor and I'm getting a bid on a "Substantive Edit" which will dig in chapter by chapter to make sure each one is fully formed. I'll have to do a cost / benefit analysis based on the bid and the sample edit that she supplies. Such is always the case when creating projects, we have to decided how much is enough. As much as I might wish for infinite resources of time, energy, and money, I have to make do with what is actually available. The chapters I've revised are already so much better than they were before. I'm going to let all you backers read the chapter on Priorities in full. You can access it by clicking over to Backerkit and making sure you're logged in when you read this update.
Here is where things stand based on the table of contents:
Intro (I'll write this last)
Creativity and Dreams
- Creative work of our lives (Also write this last)
- Landscape of dreams DONE!
Prioritizing
- Priorities DONE!
- Identifying your Pillars DONE!
- The community you need DONE!
- The boundaries you need DONE!
Energy
- Managing Mental Load DONE!
- Ebbs and flows of Energy Levels DONE!
- Replenishment and Depletion DONE! (10/28/24)
Productivity
- Curating Your Commitments in progress
- Your Physical Space DONE! (10/27/24)
- Fragmentation of Creative Time in progress
- Time Scheduling and Project Management in progress
- Stopping and Starting
- The Motivation Problem
Making Changes
- Goals
- Structuring Changes
Personalization
- Believing in your work
- Your access needs
- Emotional processing and grief
- Caregiving and creativity
- Health challenges
- When things go sour
- Weight of the World
Conclusion
You may note that I've got three chapters "in progress." I've discovered that when I'm stuck on one chapter I can sometimes bounce to another one and make progress on that. Then when I bounce back to the first one sometimes I'm not stuck anymore.
I've put design work for stickers and notebooks on hold for right now. Trying push everything forward all at once was making me frazzled and wasn't actually getting things done faster. If I have brain for complex thinking, I'm spending it on revising instead of design work. I'll catch up on the design work when the manuscript is back in the hands of an editor. Thank you so much for making it possible to give this project so much of my focus. It is because of your support that I'm able to give it my first attention instead of my third or fourth.
All the best,
Sandra
You may note that I've got three chapters "in progress." I've discovered that when I'm stuck on one chapter I can sometimes bounce to another one and make progress on that. Then when I bounce back to the first one sometimes I'm not stuck anymore.
I've put design work for stickers and notebooks on hold for right now. Trying push everything forward all at once was making me frazzled and wasn't actually getting things done faster. If I have brain for complex thinking, I'm spending it on revising instead of design work. I'll catch up on the design work when the manuscript is back in the hands of an editor. Thank you so much for making it possible to give this project so much of my focus. It is because of your support that I'm able to give it my first attention instead of my third or fourth.
All the best,
Sandra
Includes Backer-Exclusive Content
PROJECT UPDATE
Project Update: Quick Update: Revision Progress
Greetings backers!
TL:DR: Revision is in progress. I'm going to focus down in October and get this revision pass done. I've given you a sample from the chapter about Dreams. Your next update will be the week of October 21-25.
I wanted to check in with all of you after my big trip to let you know where things are with this project. I rarely get any work done during the Writing Excuses workshops because I am too occupied with staff duties and care work. That was not the case this time, which makes me very happy. I worked on the book consistently through the whole trip.
One of my revision tasks was to take the giant chapter where I covered Dreams, Goals, and Priorities and turn it into separate chapters for each of those concepts. This required pulling apart ideas, deciding which ideas go where, building a new "spine" of thought for each chapter and then reassembling everything so it makes sense. The result is going to be far more comprehensible and useful for all of you backers to read, but it has been a lot of slow, thinky work.
Writing it out like that, helps me see why the process for these early chapters is taking so much longer than I wanted it to. I feel the clock ticking in my head and there is a near constant stream of thought about how I should be working faster. Yet it isn't the existence of other things in my life that is preventing me from working as fast as I want to, it is the fact that I have to walk away from the work and let the thoughts percolate before I can see how to fix them. So I push words around, then I let them sit, then I push them around, then I do something else, then I come back and have an aha moment. Slowly I get to a place where I'm confident that the words say what I need them to.
Fortunately most of the chapters won't need this level of deconstruction and reconstruction. I'm very hopeful that I'll be able to fly through revision on later chapters. In fact I'm starting to work ahead on easier chapters while the more complicated chapters are percolating.
The other thing I am doing is paying attention to activities which might use up the percolation space in my brain. I skipped sending out my monthly Newsletter in September, I've let my blog and Patreon sit in idle mode for now. I'm posting on social media less. All of which is the result of giving this project first crack at my available writing energy.
A thing that is giving me hope relating to this project is the conversations I've had with people during consultations, group mentoring, or even at the in-person retreat I attended. Each of these conversations is a treasure. I keep wanting to shove chapters into the hands of people who those chapters might help. So the urgency I feel to get this project done isn't just guilt around not meeting the (ambitious) deadlines I said I would hit, it is that this book can't begin to be helpful until it exists. It can't exist until I do the work.
So that is what October is about for me. I'm not going on any trips and my other projects are mostly in resting phases. I get to spend October finishing the revision on Structuring Life to Support Creativity and I'm going to schedule my time around that as the central project. I'm also going to make time to record some of the presentations that I've promised.
Thank you so much for joining me on this adventure. Your next update will be the week of October 21-25. Down below I'm including a backers-only snippet from the beginning of the chapter on Dreams.
Hope you enjoy!
Sandra Tayler
TL:DR: Revision is in progress. I'm going to focus down in October and get this revision pass done. I've given you a sample from the chapter about Dreams. Your next update will be the week of October 21-25.
I wanted to check in with all of you after my big trip to let you know where things are with this project. I rarely get any work done during the Writing Excuses workshops because I am too occupied with staff duties and care work. That was not the case this time, which makes me very happy. I worked on the book consistently through the whole trip.
One of my revision tasks was to take the giant chapter where I covered Dreams, Goals, and Priorities and turn it into separate chapters for each of those concepts. This required pulling apart ideas, deciding which ideas go where, building a new "spine" of thought for each chapter and then reassembling everything so it makes sense. The result is going to be far more comprehensible and useful for all of you backers to read, but it has been a lot of slow, thinky work.
Writing it out like that, helps me see why the process for these early chapters is taking so much longer than I wanted it to. I feel the clock ticking in my head and there is a near constant stream of thought about how I should be working faster. Yet it isn't the existence of other things in my life that is preventing me from working as fast as I want to, it is the fact that I have to walk away from the work and let the thoughts percolate before I can see how to fix them. So I push words around, then I let them sit, then I push them around, then I do something else, then I come back and have an aha moment. Slowly I get to a place where I'm confident that the words say what I need them to.
Fortunately most of the chapters won't need this level of deconstruction and reconstruction. I'm very hopeful that I'll be able to fly through revision on later chapters. In fact I'm starting to work ahead on easier chapters while the more complicated chapters are percolating.
The other thing I am doing is paying attention to activities which might use up the percolation space in my brain. I skipped sending out my monthly Newsletter in September, I've let my blog and Patreon sit in idle mode for now. I'm posting on social media less. All of which is the result of giving this project first crack at my available writing energy.
A thing that is giving me hope relating to this project is the conversations I've had with people during consultations, group mentoring, or even at the in-person retreat I attended. Each of these conversations is a treasure. I keep wanting to shove chapters into the hands of people who those chapters might help. So the urgency I feel to get this project done isn't just guilt around not meeting the (ambitious) deadlines I said I would hit, it is that this book can't begin to be helpful until it exists. It can't exist until I do the work.
So that is what October is about for me. I'm not going on any trips and my other projects are mostly in resting phases. I get to spend October finishing the revision on Structuring Life to Support Creativity and I'm going to schedule my time around that as the central project. I'm also going to make time to record some of the presentations that I've promised.
Thank you so much for joining me on this adventure. Your next update will be the week of October 21-25. Down below I'm including a backers-only snippet from the beginning of the chapter on Dreams.
Hope you enjoy!
Sandra Tayler
Includes Backer-Exclusive Content
PROJECT UPDATE
Project Update: Quick Update: Trying Again Next Week
Greetings!
I had an ambitious plan for two weeks of productive work on SLSC. I failed at all of it. I did not finish a single item on my SLSC to do list because all of my efforts were pulled into work on the Schlock Mercenary book my husband and I are sending to print soon, also into extra babysitting for my daughter whose house had a plumbing adventure, also there was a bunch of medical stuff which I'm going to be non-specific about in this update except to say chronic conditions are hard, also there was emotional processing around that medical stuff, also I'm just tired. But even if I can't report piles of progress, I can make sure to report instead of giving you silence. Sometimes we don't get to be the creative people we want to be.
I love the quote from Mary Anne Radmacher "Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is that quiet voice at the end of the day that says 'I'll try again tomorrow'." So, I'll try again tomorrow, and all of next week.
Starting Monday I have multiple consultations and mentoring sessions scheduled, which will definitely help me keep my head in the space where I'm thinking about SLSC. I've also arranged most of my days so that SLSC gets morning brain instead of hoping to have brain in the afternoon. The week after that I board a plane to be a staff member for the Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat. That event is specifically designed around helping people write, so I intend to use the structure of it to help me get work done.
I hope to post a quick update during the event, and I'll give you all a full status report on October 2-3, by which time I plan to have the book fully revised and ready for line edits.
Thank you for coming along for this journey, even the doldrum-y bits.
Sandra Tayler
I had an ambitious plan for two weeks of productive work on SLSC. I failed at all of it. I did not finish a single item on my SLSC to do list because all of my efforts were pulled into work on the Schlock Mercenary book my husband and I are sending to print soon, also into extra babysitting for my daughter whose house had a plumbing adventure, also there was a bunch of medical stuff which I'm going to be non-specific about in this update except to say chronic conditions are hard, also there was emotional processing around that medical stuff, also I'm just tired. But even if I can't report piles of progress, I can make sure to report instead of giving you silence. Sometimes we don't get to be the creative people we want to be.
I love the quote from Mary Anne Radmacher "Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is that quiet voice at the end of the day that says 'I'll try again tomorrow'." So, I'll try again tomorrow, and all of next week.
Starting Monday I have multiple consultations and mentoring sessions scheduled, which will definitely help me keep my head in the space where I'm thinking about SLSC. I've also arranged most of my days so that SLSC gets morning brain instead of hoping to have brain in the afternoon. The week after that I board a plane to be a staff member for the Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat. That event is specifically designed around helping people write, so I intend to use the structure of it to help me get work done.
I hope to post a quick update during the event, and I'll give you all a full status report on October 2-3, by which time I plan to have the book fully revised and ready for line edits.
Thank you for coming along for this journey, even the doldrum-y bits.
Sandra Tayler