4-Week Guide to "The Artist's Way": Week 3

Damn, I didn’t do morning pages one single day last week.

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Some occasions we do not rise to, friends.

This was also a struggle for me this past week after talking a big game about how my entire life was essentially one long, drawn out artist’s date. It was a busy writing week and my cousin was in town for a few days. While I truly enjoyed their company, that cut into the time to pull off an artist’s date.

I decided I would walk over to a needlepoint store in the city and grab a cross stitch bookmark kit I saw on a Reel. Last night, frantic about getting an artist’s date in, lest I have to admit I failed on two fronts last week, I ripped into the kit.

I’ve never done any kind of needlework before and don’t do well with fiddly things in general, so I was not ready for the aggravation in store for me. It definitely did not fill me with a sense of play lol. BUT. I did stick with it and finished an entire color block (only one stitched is pictured, but I did four more. 10 more if you count all the stitches I had to undo and redo correctly…).

It reminded me that with creative endeavors sometimes we don’t know how to begin or what we’re doing and that what we produce won’t be perfect, but if we stick with it, we will have something to show for our efforts. And that feels damn good.

Anyone else struggle this past week?

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I’ll be sharing on @writingforfakers a series of “drop-in” writing workshops throughout the month of December — free for subscribers. We’ll read a short piece together, discuss, I’ll provide a writing prompt and then writers can share what they’ve written.

Something very low-key and chill to keep you writing through the holidays, so you aren’t rusty come January when you have that “write more” New Year’s resolution to get after…

And, of course, I’ve got more in store for subscribers for 2026 too!

I published a piece yesterday with Harper’s Bazaar about how GLP-1s are changing how families do Thanksgiving.

Okay, that let’s get into it.

Big Cam begins this chapter spitting bars!

She preaches that the artist’s dates and morning pages are making us better at listening to ourselves. When you’re tuned in to your internal monologue, you’re not stretching and straining to pull ideas out of thin air.

This idea that we are “channeling” when we create is incredibly widespread.

I’ve watched the author Edwidge Danticat talk about it in interviews and it was a prevalent theme at filmmaker Terence Nance’s exhibit at the ICA in Philly. Elizabeth Gilbert in, Big Magic, writes about how ideas are sentient. If you don’t use one, it will flutter away, like a butterfly, to the person who might.

Julia writes that once you begin seeing yourself as a collaborator in your creative aspirations, you will begin to notice that you’ll receive anything you need to achieve your desires and there’ll be moments of “synchronicity” that emerge. I’ve experienced many of these moments firsthand.