Cloth-spine journals & such

Ali Edwards has a great guest post today with creative chica Jamaica (whose web site I regularly check for sweet crafts and projects). If you're interested in creating a field journal for your writing notes or a booklet for your source material, this would be a great technique.

This would also be a fun project if you're worldbuilding. Consider it your handmade guide to your world/city/village state!

More online inspiration

Perfect Bound Studio does amazing things with office supplies, creating intriguing vignettes like these:

If the image above doesn't give you plot ideas, I don't know what does.

Check their Flickr site for more. (Via Craft Lovely)

Ali Edwards has *another* fabulous blog up today--The ABCs of Color Inspiration. From "Art" to "Zoo," she tracks ideas--online and otherwise--that can help you find the perfect pallette for your next project. But the list works just as well for writers, and each of Ali's "letters" can inspire your next manuscript.

Working through Creative Fear (Ali Edwards)

Another excellent post from Ali Edwards on Working Through Creative Fear. Here's a tidbit:

What are we afraid of in our creative lives?

1. Messing up.

2. Thinking this is the one and only chance to tell this story so it simply must be perfect.

3. People not appreciating what we create.

4. Being seen as selfish or extravagant for indulging yourself in your creative endeavor.

5. Not getting anything done.

Any of those sound or feel familiar? Let's look a bit at the realities . . .

[Read More]

As I approach the final stages of drafing my third novel, FIRESPELL, I'm kneedeep in #1. The only solution I'm aware of? Keep writing.

Great blogs on visual inspiration

A couple of fabulous blog entries on visual inspiration...

From Ali Edwards:

So much of creativity is about how you see things; and more often than not how you allow yourself to be open to seeing things in new ways.

It's been my experience that many of us tend to pass by things in our surroundings with a nonchalant "this doesn't apply to me" thought as we rush on to the next thing on our list. We move too quickly to whatever is next: the next image, the next page, the next person, the next job, the next thought, without really looking or giving something the chance to inspire us.

Today I challenge you to take a closer look at something you initially pass by. Slow down. Do a double-take. Take a deep breath. Let yourself be inspired by something you would normally skip. This could be an image online or a conversation or a new person or something you read in the newspaper.

There are so many gems hidden in our world if we just slow down enough to experience them.

And from aspiring author Anna Claire Vollers:

Today's the birthday of my home state's most famous author, Harper Lee, born in 1926 in Monroeville. Nearly everyone here who loves literature thinks she's a goddess, maybe even more so because she's published just one book and avoids national attention like the plague.

So it's fitting I post pictures today of my muse house. See, I'm deep into plotting my next novel, a post-WWI Southern Gothic tale. My genius sister has been the best sounding board I could have asked for, offering advice as I work through characters and plot kinks. And, as a bonus, she's getting her master's degree in historic preservation in one of the most quintessentially Southern cities in the country, so she's a wealth of knowledge on Southern architecture and the way it influences culture.

This is a bonus because of the house.

It's me writing this book, so you knew there'd be a big, creepy, dilapidated house, right?

She sent me a link to an antebellum mansion in west Alabama called Rosemount Plantation. I looked at the photos and fell in love:

[Click to read more.]