And rediscovering The Wheel of Time 🐉

Yellowed pages with a preteen’s attempt at italic calligraphy copying passages of prophecy and names from The Wheel of Time

Today I want to talk about creative joy.

Reconnecting to The Wheel of Time has reminded me what creativity felt like before it got all tangled up in career and profession and entrepreneurship.

For the last decade my creative energy has been focused outwards.

Everything I did became fodder for “content” on Instagram, YouTube, or (eventually) Substack.

I love documenting the process, but the frame of creative business definitely impacted the types of things I chose to make and spend my time on. This was particularly tangled up in “positioning” myself as a professional artist & author.

Certain parts of my identity got lost along the way. I’m in the process of untangling it all which I wrote about a few months ago: I'm not a brand. I'm a human. 🫀

What I didn’t share then is that rediscovering my humanity was largely tied up in a book series called The Wheel of Time.

14 Blue Wheel of Time Books (image credit: Juniper Books)

During my teenage years I had basically no friends my own age. What I did have was The Wheel of Time. I logged in to a fansite called Wotmania every morning and later on a fan fiction site called Silklatern. The interactions I had with other fans was the one place that I really “fit in”.

Navigating two degrees as an undiagnosed autistic took pretty much all of my social energy. During that time I completely lost touch with fandom and reading for fun. By the time I finished my postgraduate studies I’d pretty much forgotten what it felt like to get lost in a book.

Enter 2020. I had a one year old baby. The world was chaos. And I turned to… The Wheel of Time. I pulled the Eye of the World off my shelf and fell into a world of magic that I knew and loved. The characters were old friends and the story was comforting in its familiarity, but that wasn’t all.

Rereading the books awakened something in me.

A creative spark. It is no coincidence that these are the books I was reading when I starting writing my first book, Discover Your Creative Ecosystem.

The writing of Robert Jordan just has this effect on me. I love other authors and other books, but the Wheel of Time is etched into my bones.

Myself in a multi colored patchwork gleeman’s cloak at WotCon 2023. Thanks to the volunteer photographers at WotCon for this shot.

It’s hard to explain. It’s… ineffable.

But there must be some kind of soul connection to something in this story for me. Why do we love the stories we love? It’s something I’m really curious about. It always feels flat and superficial when I try to explain.

The Wheel of Time has always inspired me to create. I high school I filled notebooks and notebooks with world building. I made sketches of costumes and drafted stories and put myself to sleep imagining characters in worlds of my own.

I gave up writing somewhere along the way, but after self publishing my first book I’ve also started writing fiction again. I’ve been working on a fantasy story that I’d like to tell for the last two NaNoWriMo’s and I’m ready to start working on it year round.

Meanwhile I have felt the ta’veren tug (if you know you know) pulling me deeper and deeper into WoT fandom community.

It’s becoming an important part of my life so you can probably expect to hear more about it here.

It all started in March when I created a muppet style puppet for a song parody contest… an in world version of These are the People in Your Neighborhood. The first project I’ve done purely for creative joy in YEARS. 🤯

Fluffy purple Ogier puppet with large ping pong ball eyes, a wide purple nose, and tufted ears. Ogier are book loving creative souls and I feel a deep kinship with them.

This was in no way for my portfolio, content marketing, or even something for my family. It was a gift for the Wheel of Time community and complete joy to make.

I really loved the challenge of creating in a brand new medium (I’d never made a puppet before) and figuring it out through trial and error. I drew on various creative skills in a way I haven't done since working on set and props during my undergraduate degree.

Almost immediately after finishing it I jumped into another project. A gleeman’s cloak.

Something I noticed about making something for me was that I didn’t have to fuss over setting up a camera to film or creating perfect process photos.

I wasn’t making this for DIY content. I was making it for me.

Because of this I worked for many hours at the kitchen table (much less photogenic than my studio) simply because I could cut squares or I could sew while Davy role played as Link from Zelda.

I wrote a bit about that here.

Multicolored and textured patches for my cloak. These are 209 out of 350 patches required.

I sat down to write about the cloak itself today, but instead I found myself wanting to share the story behind how it came to be.

The shift that opened up “time” for something like this. News flash: I didn’t actually have more time. I just used my time differently. I spent a similar amount of time last summer making this.

And the value I’m finding in creative joy.

Let’s discuss.

What would you make if you had a dedicated period of time where you couldn’t do anything productive and had to let yourself play?

Where do you find creative joy?

Cheers,