Hey newsletter people, happy 2023!
Time keeps marching on. Is that a good thing? I’ve tried slowing it down, but nothing seems to work? Is it getting faster? Can anyone advise? All the kids I was writing books for are now somehow older than me. Hmmm.
I was going to do a little roundup of 2022, but I’ve blocked it out moved on already. No, come on. What did I do? I worked on a couple new books which are out this year. When Moon Became the Moon should be out end of August. I’m really excited about that one. Did I mention that we got someone at NASA to fact check it? What is my life? Also, we have another fun book coming out in March. I’ll post about that one real soon, too. It’s got googly eyes on it, I mean, c'mon.
But mostly last year I was trying to get unstuck. Is this a cool thing to talk about in the newsletter? Something happens when you’ve been doing a creative thing for 10+ years, where you get funnelled into approaching that thing in the same way every time. Disclaimer *I love my job and I am the luckiest person on the planet*. But, you gotta keep it new and fun. So that was the goal at the end of last year and into this new one.
Something that really helped was Julia Cameron’s great book ‘The Artist’s Way’. I love how she talks about how important frivolous things are. After I did a lecture at a uni at the end of 2022, and looked back over a bunch of projects, I realised that anything cool I’ve ever done came from a little seed of doing something silly or fun or weird or… ya guessed it, frivolous.
So, with that in mind, I hope you all can make time for some silly, fun, weird and frivolous things in 2023 ✌️✌️✌️✌️
I love the Artist Way! It’s so important to keep doing the things that we loved when we were children and stay playful. This fall I’ve been out a lot more looking for mushrooms and photographing them, the variety is so wild! Taking the time to do something playful just for myself is really key for my practice.