Allow yourself the shitty first draft.

"Name my Fictional Bakery?" :: a random question that sparked creativity.

the aforementioned shitty first draft of my novel, with not one, not two, but three working titles ;)

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I love living creatively.

Every day is oozing with creativity.

The choices I make. How I shape my days. The beauty I pull in.

I am not an artist, per se. I don’t deal in paints or crafts or music or ceramics.

I am ABSOLUTELY amateur-hour to a comical degree in every creative pursuit I daily chase — which is probably why I LOVE it all:

• foraging wild flowers & grasses & often dead branches & arranging them;

• decorating my spaces (home & studio);

• preparing meals, hosting dinner parties, and arranging still lifes of food, bits & bobs, fora & fauna;

• getting dressed everyday (mostly creams / canvases / whites, but I’m debating going vibrant & wild in my 40s 🤔)

creative bits & bobs I have foraged, arranged, eaten, & enjoyed over the last few years

And, of course, my writing.

Most of my writing is totally invisible to the public eye.

Everyday, for over 8 years, I’ve handwritten my Morning Pages. In sketchbooks of growing sizes (at one point, it was up to 11x14!). I have stacks and stacks and stacks of these notebooks and my kids, one day when I’m gone, will either throw them away cursing my pack-rat-ness or open them up and be mildly shocked & hopefully tenderly amused by what they find there.

(my kids have always crawled all over me while I write my Morning Pages. Most recently, my youngest, Georgie, asks me to draw swimming pools with each of us in it and Power Rangers along side of the pools. Obviously.)

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I do not care how invisible, quiet, private, and comically amateur most of my daily creativity is.

Because I am happy. And creativity keeps me whole. Makes my life beautiful. And keeps me at a relative baseline of low-stress living.

As I mentioned in a recent post, CREATIVITY actually does relieve our stress. Look up the research. Try it for yourself and report back.

I didn’t always live this way.

In fact, a dozen years ago, I was still a fried-as-burnt-toast corporate litigator — a young associate, total bottom of the totem pole. Overworked. And deeply uninspired. I fell asleep most nights on the couch with the TV on and my beeping red-light blackberry in my hand, after eating chips and salsa and a bottle of wine for dinner at 10pm when I got home from work.

The extent of my creativity then was practicing yoga as often as I could sneak out of work and binge-stress-shopping online at J. Crew (the era of business-casual and brightly colored paisley pencil skirts & costume jewelry) .

Oh — and plotting my eventual escape from Big Law.

Most of us, when we are kids, get placed into boxes.

Athlete. Check.

Academic. Check. Correction: Math & Science Academic or Liberal Arts Academic?

That was me — the last one. The Liberal Arts Academic.

Definitely not the Artist Box.

So I set off doing what The Liberal Arts Academics do: Scoring straight As on report cards, testing well, getting into the next good school and the next right job. Prestigious university —> Ivy Leave Law School —> Top 10 Law Firm. Check. Check. Check.

It’s been almost 11 years (time!), since I left Big Law.

Eleven years of freedom from the childhood box and the adult box-checking.

Eleven years to play and create and make and move and shake and explore and iterate. Which is another way to say: fail!

My creative exploration has now come to an almost HILARIOUS head.

Because this past summer, the week I turned 39, I decided I needed to WRITE A NOVEL over the course of the next year.

I’ve never written a piece of fiction in my life.

Well, actually I did, once. I was 8. It was a short story about a woman who’s husband left her for a life of crime and murder. 🤣

But this whole novel idea, the story, the themes to explore, the character, the loose plot line came to me like a FEVER DREAM over the span of a few days in late July.

For such a novice endeavor as I approach mid-life, it’s kind of surprising how open I’ve been in talking about my novel writing progress.

Like, there is a VERY real possibility that it could SUCK! I’ll self-publish it. And my mom and mother-in-law will be the only ones to read it!

But I keep going and I keep talking about writing my novel, nonetheless, because it is FUN.

That is why. And that is all.

The mere creative act of writing my first novel at almost 40 is just plain fun and exciting to me.

There is no business plan, no promise of prestige or a paycheck. Just pure enjoyment and play.

I absolutely work on this thing in the margins. In the evening when I climb into bed, if I still have some juice left. Throughout the work day, if an idea for a scene comes to me and I have to capture it. On the weekends, covered in my kids playing nearby. Sometimes I’ll set aside a half day to putter my way through it. Slow and steady and sometimes erratically — I persist, nonetheless.

In my novel, my main character and her husband run a bakery in the Hudson Valley.

And one of the most incredible, satisfying and inspiring parts of writing the novel has been researching and daydreaming about bakeries. I’ve been reading food magazine articles, bread baking cookbooks, watching documentaries & movies, and even interviewing a friend who actually DID run a bakery in the Hudson Valley with her husband a few years ago (hint: it was the best place to buy bread — if you could get there before it sold out — on Warren St in Hudson from 2020-2022!).

Oh, and of course eating a lot of really good bread!

It is such sensory-level enjoyment to create this bakery in my mind.

I hadn’t yet settled on a name for the bakery, so a few weekends ago as I was writing, I went on Instagram and asked if anyone wanted to “name my bakery.”