Welcome to The (Writing) Fool’s Journey, a tarot themed log of my creative process as I work on a new novel.
The High Priestess: intuition, mystery, inner voice
I’ve read a few descriptions of The High Priestess card that talk about the idea of walking in two worlds - the spiritual and the physical. This week, I’ve found myself relating to this concept, though in my case the worlds are those of art and business.
As I mentioned in my last post, promotion of Where Lost Girls Go has begun, and I spent a few days last week in Minneapolis, meeting librarians, signing galleys, and talking about audiobooks (one of my favorite topics). It was amazing and, honestly, felt like coming home in a way. My last two books released during the height of COVID, so I didn’t actually do any in-person promotion for them. This was my first work trip in a long time, and I’ve missed it. I felt like I finally got to really be myself again, if that makes sense.
However, as predicted, I wasn’t exactly productive on my drafting. Now that I’m dictating my first drafts, it’s a little harder to write on, for example, a plane. And by the time I reached myhotel at night, I was exhausted. So I focused instead on the raw transcriptions I’d banked before my trip, cleaning them up whenever I had some free time.
I’m home now, back to my day job and able to get back to dictating, but my mind is divided. Part of me is in artist mode, and part of me is consumed with Where Lost Girls Go and all the upcoming (exciting!) plans as I gear up for its launch. I’m walking in two worlds.
But this brings me to the other theme that has guided me this week: inner voice. There’ve been a few times when I’ve beaten myself up a bit for not getting as many chapters done this week as I have in pervious weeks. I’m trying to turn that writer-guilt off, remind myself it’s not a race, and listen instead to the quieter but wiser voice in my head telling me it’s better to draft when my head is fully in it than to force out words just for the sake of word count. Because those will just end up rewritten anyway.
I’m almost done cleaning up the raw transcription. Once I have, I’ll go back to dictating new material. My plan is to bank up recordings again because I have another trip planned next week. I’ll be in Cleveland meeting some fantastic independent booksellers! And, even though Ohio is pretty close by, pretty much every destination involves a layover when you fly out of Rochester, so I should have lots of time to work on the clean up.
But I’ll be walking those two worlds for a while. Probably throughout the course of writing this entire first draft. It’s going to require balance and patience, but I’m still feeling optimtimistic overall about this project!
Have questions about the writing process? Ask in the comments! And join me next Wednesday for another installment of The (Writing) Fool’s Journey.
If you want to read more of my work, you can preorder my new novel here!
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