2027 Writing Planner Update

I did a second spread in this planner I intend to use for 2027. It's as amateur-looking as the first spread, but I've decided I'm having fun with it.

It's nice to have a creative outlet that doesn't involve words. It's a great way to get my head in a creative space without any pressure and to allow my thoughts to wander. Plot problem? Let's decorate a page and let the subconscious work on it while I decorate paper.

Yes, I'm really bad at art. I'll never be good enough to be happy with what I produce, but as long as I can let that go and be satisfied with the process, I think it's a win.

I repurposed a 2026 planner that I didn't use. It allows me to use stickers, not only to re-date the calendar, but to decorate the blank pages behind it. I'll never be a bullet journal person for my personal planner, but this planner set up? It's really a bullet journal in an old Erin Condren planner. This let's me revisit a process I thought would be fun, but just didn't work for my day-to-day life. Since my writing planning is minimal, this works for me.

Oh, and it also lets me use my Tombow marker collection, which has mostly been underutilized.

This is my latest attempt at decorating. The spread is for July 2027.

Title page with seagulls at the beach. I used the image on the sticker box and just taped it down.

My 2026 calendar set up for 2027. Since it was originally a Sunday start and I prefer Monday start, I really only need to change the day labels for the dates to be correct, but I wasn't passing up the chance to use colorful date squares.

 

This is the monthly dashboard layout. I'm not really using that this year, so it'll probably just sit blank, but who knows?

 

July 1st is a Thursday, so the first spread only needed four days. There are eight check boxes. Each represents 250 words. To check all of them off, I need to write 2000 words. The box at the bottom of the page is to record my total word count for the day.

 

These four spreads allowed me to create a scene with markers and stickers. Many of the ideas came from the Hubman and Chubgirl YouTube channel, but since I'm using my planner for a different purpose than most people are, I frequently diverged.

 

 Here, I used the journaling card and some washi sticker strips to decorate the final page of the month.

Another Brilliant Idea Crushed by Reality

I had this grandiose plan to make my own silicone stamps for my planner. I knew exactly what I wanted and all I needed was time to sit down with my graphics program and make the images.

I'd found a video on YouTube about how to do it, so I was set. Piece of cake.

Yeah. Right.

Sadly, my graphics skills failed me. They're rudimentary at best, but trying to put together the check-ins I was looking for was beyond me. I tried. And tried. And I failed.

I went with a different plan and bought rubber stamps with the icons I wanted. I would have preferred self-inking stamps because I seriously have trouble with inking, but those were $10 per stamp. The rubber ones were slightly over $2. Big difference, especially when I was looking at about half a dozen.

So disappointing, but I've had a new brainstorm. I'm going to make my own stamps for my book journal! Those would just be words, not images, and I'm sure I can type them successfully in my graphics program. The only problem will be getting the size right. I figure printing them out will solve that issue, so I should be able to handle this.

But this is a project for future me. Stay tuned.

Social Media ARGH!

Instagram has been showing me reels and images from pages/people that I'm not following. I actually don't mind, which surprises me. Maybe because a lot of it has ::SHOCK:: been things that I'm interested in. Usually, when sites do something like this, it's stuff I couldn't care less about.

So why the ARGH!? Let me explain.

Some of the reels have been sewing related. I'm all in for those since I've got so much to learn. So I'll watch the video a few times and scroll down to the words to see what they're making, what they're doing, why they're doing it. You know. An explanation.

And what do I see? A language that I don't speak.

That's right. Instagram is showing me reels from people who are posting in other languages other than mine. It's okay if I only need the pictures, but when I need more than that? I suppose I could copy and paste into an online translator, but I'm not going to take the time.

So far, I've seen reels for really cool sewing and knitting techniques. I've seen a woman wrapping gifts (this was before Christmas), and while I don't know how it ended up in my feed, I enjoyed watching her do this. There were people folding paper, cutting it, and creating cool snowflakes. And all if it in another language.

Another ARGH! is I'm getting a lot of artists in reels, too. The short video is enough here, but it's amazing to watch them just create beauty out of a blank page and some paint or ink. So why is this an ARGH? Because I'd love to be able to do that, too, and I can't. I used to periodically buy art supplies and try to draw, but it always ended up being discouraging. I never was good enough.

Although maybe this shouldn't fall into this category. I enjoy watching the real artists work and I stand in awe of their talents. I'm just kind of bummed that I got so little drawing ability.

Creativity Exercises

I've been listening to a lecture series on creativity. I'm not very far into it yet, but there's been one episode with an exercise in it and it was sort of interesting. Maybe not too helpful, though? I'm not sure about it.

The exercise was to use a random word generator and try to think on a different path, one guided by this unconnected word. The example the professor gave involved "Tadpole" and he showed how the person used that word to come up with a solution to a teacher shortage in a school system.

Okay, I can see how the solution this person came up with sort of fell into line with the word. Hmm, I thought. I found an online word generator and got my word. I did it again. And then a third time, this time requesting a word with more than one syllable.

Three times and I didn't find it particularly helpful, but I'm going to give it another shot. I was distracted while I was trying to use my words and that's not conducive to creativity.

Creativity is one of those skills that grows the more you use it and I think it stretches it further if you try to make your brain work in new ways. That's why I'm going to try that random word thing again and why I'll try any other exercises that come up in the lecture series because no matter how silly something might sound, you never know what paths it might open up. Brains can be strange things.

Anything Can Be Creative Inspiration

I get ideas from all over the place so that no two books really have the same spark.The vast majority of the time, it has something to do with the characters, but not always. And sometimes the blood starts pumping without any story or characters at all. Here are a couple of things I've had lately that have put my imagination in overdrive.

My guilty pleasure TV show--Ancient Aliens--always gets my brain spinning. Not with concrete ideas or stories, but just fired up imagination moments. I tell people all the time that I don't care if anything on the show is real, what matters is what it does for my imagination.

There are even weirder things that inspire creativity in some odd way. Sometimes it's just a feeling rather than mind-spinning excitement. For example, over the weekend, I saw a Mid-Century Modern home with furniture to match that period. And as I looked at the picture, I could feel this incredible optimism. Maybe that's what originally attracted me to this design trend--I can see the hope for the future, the brightness the designers must have felt to create these things/homes.

Which leads me to wonder when our view of the future changed from this 1950s, 1960s view to these dystopian apocalypses that we see everywhere now. It isn't new. This dark view of the future has been around at least since The Terminator. It makes me wonder.

And this is how creativity gets flowing: Seeing things (or hearing/sensing/smelling/touching) and the mind asking questions. Sometimes these questions lead to stories, but even if they don't, it's still a good thing because it causes ideas to flow faster when it is time to think about a story or scene or chapter.

Why Isn't This Already a Thing?

In my house, I have flashlights that plug into the wall and also act as nightlights. They run on electricity until the power goes out and then it switches to battery. Already charged battery. I don't have to replace the batteries ever. They just charge whenever the power is on.

This got me thinking. Why don't smoke detector manufacturers build their equipment to do the same thing?

The smoke detectors are hard-wired into the house, but I still have to replace the 9 volt batteries because they start that incessant and horrible chirp when they get too low. It's like the most annoying thing ever, and because I have a fear of heights, this means I have to live with it until I can get the handyman to come out to change them.

It would just make sense that smoke detectors would use these rechargeable batteries like my flashlights. Can you imagine only hearing that chirp when the super long-lasting batteries finally needed to be replaced?

Can you imagine not having to spend a fortune on 9 volt batteries every year just to keep the smoke detectors from being annoying?

It would also guarantee that in the case of a fire, the smoke detectors would go off even if the power is lost because people disconnect them. When I was searching online for instructions on how to change the batteries, I discovered all kinds of information on how to disable the entire detector because people hate the low battery beep that much. Is this what we want to push some to do because of the stupid chirps?

Come on, smoke detector engineers! If my flashlight can work on a rechargeable battery, so can your device. This should already be a thing.

Saying No

Someone tweeted a link to an article on Sunday that I thought was really interesting: Creative People Say No.

The one thing I've learned is how important it is to guard writing time. It's hard to come by and easily sacrificed by others. I can't tell you how many times people have argued with me saying, it's just one evening or it's just a few hours.

But it's not that simple. First of all, there are a lot of people who only want "just a few hours." Without the word no, there'd be zero writing time left. They discount the days when the words all have to be cut because none of them are the right ones. They discard the way life has a way of throwing little emergencies at people.

Right now I'm on deadline and panicking because I have to close on my house in Minnesota--it's sold--and find a house in Georgia. Um, there is no extra time in my schedule. I'm like hyperventilating on this deadline, so just an evening? No, sorry. I can't do it.

Creativity Burst

While I was home for Christmas, I had this incredible burst of creativity. It was rather unexpected, but I was able to sit down and do overviews for six stories (two trilogies). For me, overviews are usually like back cover copy on a book. This time, however, they were much longer than that. Still not synopsis length, but probably about 2.5 pages apiece.

It was intense. For five or six days, all I did was work on these things. I got characters, I got the big picture on the story, and I couldn't stop working on it.

Until I got stuck.

The sixth story, the second set of trilogies, had a heroine without a job/career. Nothing I came up with worked for her.

It was frustrating and yet I was obsessed. I had to finish this overview. I tried it with her not knowing what she wanted to do. Maybe that was why I couldn't find anything for her, but that didn't work and I continued to spin my wheels.

Then on the afternoon of the third day, it all came together. She was a spy! And suddenly everything fell into place.

I knew what the conflict was between my hero and heroine. I knew what the storyline was and I really hadn't had much of anything up until then. I even had a vague idea of the ending and that's rare. Heck, sometimes I don't know the endings of my books until I'm almost there.

Of course, the overview is probably the easiest part of the whole process. Writing the stories is the hard part.

It also kind of messed me up. The week of intense writing/kind of plotting left me exhausted and feeling used up. It also kept my attention on this world and not on the story I'm supposed to be working on. I'm still messed up on the writing. And despite this, I still think of that week as the best, most exciting thing that's happened to me in a long while.

My Creative Failures

I've always been attracted to creative things. I danced when I was in grade school and enjoyed it except that it was my mom's idea (she always wanted to tap dance). Once I hit the rebellious teenage years, I dropped it because my mom wanted me to do it. I regret this because I was good--at least in my dance school. I was always slotted into the top group of tappers. I did make one foray into ballet, but it ended when I broke my leg ice skating.

Ice skating--that was another creative endeavor. I wanted to be a figure skater with all the jumps and grace. Unfortunately, I was never good at this. I broke my right tibia bone, and three years later, I broke my left ankle. That's when I hung up the skates for good.

I took piano lessons, but I hated to practice so I never became very good. I had guitar lessons, but I wanted to play an electric guitar not acoustic. Not that it mattered because I didn't practice that either. I also didn't practice the viola, but because we had music scheduled almost every day in grade school, I was better on that than the other instruments. My parents wised up and did not let me add the clarinet to my repertoire. And when I asked to take drum lessons, they rented the drums. Um, that was another failure on my part. Again, I wanted to learn to play rock 'n roll drums, not marching band drums, but if I'd been a little smarter, I'd have realized marching band drums were cool. Hey, my high school marching band went to England our senior year. If I'd only known...

This wasn't my only foray into music. I love to sing. I was in my junior high choir and I like to think I was decent. Or at least that I was until I got sick. When the virus or whatever it was passed, I couldn't hit the notes any more. Of course, it was just as likely I only thought I was good, but if I noticed a difference, maybe it was there.

In junior high I also tried my hand at theater. I was in two productions. For the first, I had a decent-sized role, but got strep throat the week of the performances and missed them all. The second was Cinderella and I was the narrator. The only character with more lines than me was Cinderella herself. But this was something else I didn't pursue past junior high and I really have no regrets about that.

And let's not forget art. I loved art and took as many classes as I could in school. If only I could have skipped Home Ec and done more art! Let's just say that Home Ec and I were not a good match and I loathed it. To be fair, I also loathed wood shop and they made us take that, too. But art I enjoyed. I just wasn't that good at it. Drawing, jewelry making, sculpting, I'm pretty sure I tried it all. What I always wanted to do, though, was to take a sketch pad and a pencil and draw incredibly detailed pencil sketches. Alas, the talent was not equal to the vision or at least I wasn't close enough that I was willing to work at it and get better. I doubt I ever would have been awesome, but adequate would have been cool.

I also attempted craft stuff, although I will admit I have little patience for it and none of my projects ever came out right. Knitting, crocheting, needlepoint, cross stitch, sewing (inflicted on us in Home Ec) and latch-hook rugs. Nothing came out except the latch hook rugs which, let's face it, are so easy anyone can do them.

I scrapbook occasionally now and I know I'm not very good, but I have accepted this and do it because I find it relaxing and it's a way to be creative that isn't writing. When I'm stuck in a book, it's actually been helpful to sit down with my scrapbook supplies and put together a few pages. It seems to break the logjam, but not use up my creative energy. Maybe because it's so different than writing? Maybe because I've embraced my mediocrity and don't waste energy trying to strive beyond it? I don't know, but it doesn't really matter.

A while back I read this interesting article that had the thesis that we're capable of many things, but give up before putting in the time it takes to be good at them. What grabbed me about this was looking at my long and varied creative efforts and realizing it was true at least to a degree. I wasn't willing to put the time in on anything I tried to reach a level of competence--except writing.

With writing, I was willing to come back to it again and again, to learn, to improve, to edit. I never gave up in frustration when my work wasn't good enough yet. I kept writing, practicing, honing my skills and abilities and craft. It never occurred to me to quit. But I love writing with a passion I don't have for any other creative activity and that makes all the difference. (I still wish I could draw, though, darn it!)