by Julie, enjoying summer
These past few months have been a professional whirlwind. It started in January, when I had a twelve hour brunch with my friend Courtney. I encouraged her to take a leap and apply for a job she really wanted. She encouraged me to figure out how to create more space in my life for my writing, and to embrace the artist within. So, two weeks ago, I took a leap. I’m working on opening an online arts administration school built for artists in September. I’ve called it Your Ladders, and I’m creating the classes now. The plan is that this will give me more time to focus on my writing.
At my going away party, I talked to an actor who is my age. She looked great, and I told her so. She said that she was, surprisingly. She told me that she’d grown tired of hustling for a job that she took for the paycheck, rather than the work itself. She’d lost the connection to her artist self, and decided to take a break from acting. She’d taken a “real” job, in an office. I asked if the break was temporary or permanent. She told me she wasn’t sure. She isn’t the first artist I’ve met who is taking a creative break because they’ve lost the connection to their artist within. It’s always hard to hear, and scary.
In between January and August, Liz Mugavero and I took two online classes. One was a business course called B-School, taught by Marie Forleo. The other class was Gabby Bernestein’s Spirit Junkie Masterclass. Marie’s class gave me a new set of business skills. Gabby’s class helped with aligning with a higher purpose in my work. Both helped give me the courage to take my professional leap into an online business.
Liz and I are also going to be doing a masterclass at the New England Crime Bake, and we’ve been talking about what we’re going to cover in “Creating Your Author Life”. The description is about making the leap from writer to published author, and what that means. We have the experience to talk about that. But we both agree that it needs to be about more than that. Liz has been thinking about the “more” for a long time. In February she wrote a great blog reminding herself (and folks like me) that writing is our soul work. I’ve been thinking about my actor friend who lost the connection to her artist self coupled with Pressfield’s book, and realize that we have to dive deeper in this masterclass. We need to talk about the magic of the work.
As a writer, I acknowledge that I’ve answered a call. I also have a deep knowing that I need to stay connected to that call. The work of being a published author, and staying published, can get in the way of remembering that sometimes. But my new path has to be about remembering that, and honoring it.
There’s magic in the call, and in the doing of the work. That’s what Liz and I need to talk about in our masterclass. The magic.