Feeling creatively stuck
To be honest over the last few weeks I have been feeling stuck creatively. It is like my brain is broke and won’t come up with new ideas. Usually, I wouldn’t worry about it, but when you do a living writing, then writer’s block is a no no. I knew I had to do something so I went and dug out The Artist way book and I am going to work through it. I have done it before, and it did help. I know it sounds kooky, but it is true. The problem is I stopped doing my morning pages and artists dates, and I stopped consuming stories like before, so my creative well has run dry. Seriously it took me 45 minutes just to come up with five measly things to write about today. The words flow but not at the moment. At the moment it is akin to pulling all my teeth out with out pain killers one by one. Very painful and not much fun. I am going to start my morning pages, and artist dates back up, and hopefully, ideas will start to pop up in my head again.
Sandman finally came to visit!
I have terrible insomnia when I am not depressed. When I AM depressed, I can sleep for hours and hours, but once I was better, my insomnia came back full force. I became desperate and begged the Dr to refill my ambient prescription. I know it is not the best solution, but I NEED my sleep. If I don’t get enough quality shut eye, my mood goes south, and I become an irritable, angry bitch. Luckily my shrink sympathized with me and prescribed Ambien. I took it when I came home, and that is why I am wide awake at 4 am. I need to get my sleep back on track. Sleep at night and stay awake during the day like the rest of humanity. I think if I just stay awake until 10 pm and then take my pill I can re train myself to sleep from 10 pm to 6 am. I did before, and once my body got in the habit of sleeping, I did not need the ambient as much. So the goal for the next few weeks. Train me how to sleep..again… I truly dislike it when I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. I mean who besides vampires is awake at 3 am? Funny thing is I can go to sleep but staying asleep is another matter altogether. I get the Ambient extended release so with that I know I am going to be getting at LEAST 8 hours of quality shut eye. Sometimes I get as much as 14 hours especially if I had a week such as last week where insomnia kicked my ass…hard. It’s like my body has to make up its sleep debt somehow. I do not depend solely on the Ambien. I also got me some lavender essential oils with body lotion, and I spray it onto my sheets, and I have a thingie that pumps out oil all day and all night. I drink natural calm, and I listen to my meditation apps. My therapist has met bring all these apps to sleep with in the hopes of finding one that works well for me. I have a few contenders but no clear favorite yet.
Trying out pondomoros…again
A friend was telling me how they do pondomoros to help plan out their day so that they can better judge what activity will fit where. I am not big on the whole work for 25 minutes take a 5 min break thing. If I am writing and I am in Flow, then I don’t want anything to interrupt me. However knowing how long it takes me to type up a blog post and all of that would be a tremendous help. I could put 5 minutes as a filter on Todoist and then pick something from the 5 min list. I can’t do that if I have no idea how long it takes me to do something. I hooked toggle and google calendar up through zapier, and now over time I keep track of time in Toggl, it will show up on my google calendar. I am hoping after a few weeks of this I will have a better grasp of how long stuff takes me then I can put it in todoist. And THEN I will be able to better plan my day.
Went back to Feedly..old habits die hard
Last week I wrote that I was fed up with Feedly and had switched to Bloglovin. Well, I got fed up with THAT service and broke down and emailed Feedly what my real problem was. They were super nice and helpful, and I got it all straightened out, so I am back to Feedly AND Feedly is working at the moment, so I have no plans to change again anytime soon. Since I have a million feeds, I finally stopped complaining and coughed up the 7 dollars a month for Feedly. I figure that the Feedly people have to eat also, so they deserve to get paid and I should stop being such a cheap ass.
Defining my ideal audience
In my mastermind, we were all talking about our ideal readers. I, of course, didn’t have one. I was just typing up anything and see what sticks but as the people in the group pointed out that will get you nowhere fast. I sat down and did some thinking, and I think I have come up with the prototype of the perfect reader to this here blog. I will write a whole post on this later once I see if it pans out or not. I hope after all the niching down that I did that there are still people who fit the criteria.
Insomnia sucks 🙁 I do hope you’re able to get into a good sleeping rhythm soon! I wouldn’t be surprised if the insomnia is contributing to your difficulty writing – a tired brain may not be as creative! Hope this week is better for you 🙂
I found a pdf on the author’s website that describes the Morning Pages and Artist Date but I still do not quite get it. Is 3 pages 3 pages FRONT AND BACK? Or one page front and back plus one more front? Can you do MORE than 3 pages or is it “pencils down!!!!!” at the end of page 3 (or 6 if we’re doing front to back).
For the Artist Date, what do we DO on the date. Are we writing more morning pages or are we drawing pictures…I need examples!!!
I hear ya about sleep and the lack thereof. I don’t suffer from insomnia, I suffer from being woken (awakened?) by my 90-yo mother to help her get up and use the bathroom. Sometimes I’m up until midnight and then she wakes me at 4am and then it might take me an hour or more to get back to sleep and then she wakes me at 7am to get up for the day. On those days, I am a bitch on wheels inside and it takes everything I have to be pleasant and cheerful on the outside because I know it’s not my poor mother’s fault so I don’t want to be bitchy towards her. But MAN is it hard when your sleep is broken up like that. On the rare occasions where we go to bed at 10pm and she sleeps straight through until 6am? I jump out of bed happy & humming a little tune. Yah, I need my full 8 UNINTERUPPTED hours to be a kind, loving individual.
Looking forward to finding out if I fit your ideal reader criteria or not. Ha ha.
hahaha you fit…honestly for morning pages I just use Day One and type out 750 I read online that’s how many words three pages would be so that what I do. For artist date, I go out to museums and stuff. I find that helps my creativity. I am not sure how it works but being surrounded by art and stuff seems to jump-start my brain.