From the Compost Heap header. A pencil style illustration of a compost heap with flowers and plants growing around it. A bee buzzes by and a white rabbit hops by.
  • Dusky photo of a purple hyacinth bean vine flowering with the compost heap in the background
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  • Birdhouse gourds growing up gazebo of green pipes (a greenhouse without the plastic cover added) and a white metal house planter I thrifted beyond with morning glory leaves twining through

    Our first birdhouse gourds!

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  • Creative Chaos

    How about an old fashioned update from my creative compost heap? 🌱

    We haven’t done one of those in a while.

    First, some recent posts from my microblog (the kind of things I used to post from social media.)

    The Garden

    Our chaos garden turned feral. Some real life updates.

    The birds are loving it. We’re even learning to identify some by their bird call with the Merlin app.

    Brick house with an undulating garden bed overrun with grass. A black armillary sphere and purple russian sage pierce the weeds.
    Birdhouse gourds growing up gazebo of green pipes (a greenhouse without the plastic cover added) and a white metal house planter I thrifted beyond with morning glory leaves twining through

    Creative Chaos

    I’ve accepted that I can’t always work in my lovely studio. So earlier this year I set up a workspace in the living room. And I am getting SO much done.

    This summer I’ve made lots of progress (from this chaos) on Entwined & Ember. Now that copy edits are done I’ve started book design for Ember.

    Here I am sorting the prompts into their final order.

    Art or Trash?

    Sometimes being an artist means preserving paper towels with blueberry stains.

    Just me? 😂

    Papertowels with blueberry stains on a glass oven cooktop beside a bunch of bananas and a papertowel with a note that says, "Do not throw away!"

    Best in 3D

    I won an award in the local art exhibition I was in.

    I should really add that to my CV.

    Here’s the post they did about it on Instagram.

    An embroidery frame holds a cross stitch that reads "I'm Fine". A second image shows the reverse which is a tangled mess of navy blue thread.

    Neurodivergence

    At the end of my Spectrum zine you’re invited to make your own spectrum and send it to me. The very first came in from Liz Getty.

    Watercolor wash in a spectrum rainbow spilling outside of a pencil circle. Text reads: Most days feel like my being is seeping outside the lines, though the lines don't feel like they belong. The artist is Liz Getty.

    I love where Liz took this. You are so much more than what fits within the lines. 💫

    Seaborn 🌊✨

    Want to read a shiny book about queer pirates and magic?

    I’m hosting a read a long with some of my Wheel of Time friends. We start in September so there’s plenty of time to pick up a copy.

    Join us!

    The read along will be hosted on Discord and Storygraph. Hit reply if you have any questions.

    Seaborn by Michael Livingston book cover. Blue background with gold details and two pirate ships: one sailing and one flying.

    Just for Fun

    The Great Sword Heist of 2025 ⚔️ Someone’s sword collection was stolen off their walls while they were sleeping. They’re having a great sense of humor about it.

    Last One Laughing, UK 🇬🇧 If you love British comedy like Taskmaster you will love this. Some adult material so not for kids.

    A poem about railway cars. 🚂 We don’t have enough trains in this country for my taste.

    Ways to Support drawing of a white rabbit hopping into flowers
    Two zines and magazine clippings on a wooden desk with scissors, gluestick and pencils. Both zines titles are cut out magazine letters: Chaos Gardening with leaf rubbings and Spectrum with a hand painted watercolor color wheel.

    Psst…

    I’m also trialing a new type of 1:1 support over email.

    You can ask me about creative projects, neurodivergence, self publishing, home education, or chronic illness.

    If you want to help me test this idea (for free!) click here.

    Here’s a little video I made about how it works.

    I appreciate you.

    Sarah signed with a swoopy S
    Read more: Creative Chaos

  • Email Guidance

    One-to-one support over email.

    This is a new offering for gentle guidance at your own pace.

    No Zooms. No scheduling. No time zone math.

    After years of trying to offer support in neuronormative ways I am neuroqueering the process. Ask me about creative projects, neurodivergence, self publishing, home education, or chronic illness.

    How it Works

    Email your question to hello@sarahshotts.com.

    It’s that simple.

    I’ll respond with a thoughtful answer with multiple ideas to explore.

    Your first email is free. If you’d like further support you can sign up for five more back and forth emails (at your own pace) for $100.

    Responses will come within one week. Time will vary based on my capacity.

    I can offer support in…

    • Creative Ecosystems 🍃

    Everything in your life is part of your creative practice. Bring balance and inspiration into your process through my creative ecosystem framework.

    • Neurodivergent Supports 🎧

    I’ve spent a decade diving into research on neurodivergence after my autism diagnosis. We can work together to find supports, tools, and accommodations for you or your family. I have particular experience with sensory processing (seeking and avoidance), focus tools, and navigating conflicting access needs in neurodivergent families.

    • Self Publishing & Crowdfunding 📖

    I’ve successfully crowdfunded four self published books and created two free courses to share my experience. If you’d like direct support as you navigate publishing a book or crowdfunding a creative project I’m happy to help.

    • Living with Chronic Illness ☕

    I have experience managing dynamic disability, chronic illness, and fluctuating energy levels. I can’t offer medical advice, but sometimes we just need to talk to someone who “gets it.” We can talk about setting boundaries, accepting accommodations, and finding support tools. My own diagnosis include: POTS, hEDS, and MCAS.

    • Home Education 🍎

    I’m a second gen home educator with expertise in neurodivergence and twice exceptional gifted kids — both as student and teacher. We can talk about educational resources, supports for neurodivergent kids, and how to make home educating work for you.

    What it’s not.

    This is NOT…

    • Business Coaching 🙅

    While I’m happy to support professional artists and creative business owners I am not a business coach. I am not a good fit for financial or growth related goals. My focus is on supporting creative ecosystems — not making more money.

    • Therapy 🙅

    This is peer to peer support based on my own lived experience. I’m not a therapist, doctor, or mental health professional.

    • One Size Fits All Advice 🙅

    I don’t have all the answers. But I can offer ideas and support, but finding and implementing solutions will come down to you.

    Ready to start?

    Email your question to hello@sarahshotts.com.

    I’ll respond with a thoughtful answer with multiple ideas to explore.

    Your first email is free. If you’d like further support you can sign up for five more back and forth emails (at your own pace) for $100.

    Responses will come within one week. Time will vary based on my capacity.

    Want a free book?

    If you sign up for ongoing support I’ll send you the ebook of Discover Your Creative Ecosystem for free.

    Photo of Discover Your Creative Ecosystem book by Sarah Shotts. A silhouette of bird in flight shows a landscape beyond. Lays on a table surrounded by autumnal leaves.
    …
    Read more: Email Guidance

  • “A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls.”

    Ursula K. Le Guin

    Source

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  • The Value of Creative Joy

    And rediscovering 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.

    Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time large blue books in a line
    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.

    Eilonwy in colorful gleeman’s cloak with multicolored and textured patches. They have short brownish hair, pale skin and glasses.
    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 wide nose, tufted ears and ping pong ball eyes
    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.

    Piles of 209 square patches sorted by colors: red, gold, yellow, blue, green, purple, white, brown, black. There are also various textures: velvets, brocade, silk, corduroy, satin, batik, embroidered, and a red pleated satin with a row of red and gold buttons.
    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,

    Sarah signed with a swoopy S
    Read more: The Value of Creative Joy

  • Made with Love… and Buttermilk

    We each have our own memories tied to food… The healing properties of Mamaw’s chicken and rice. Standing on the kitchen stool to help make cranberry relish for Thanksgiving. Licking the beaters at Nonnie’s house after making cake.  

    Revisiting a cherished family recipe can be as powerful as stepping into a time machine.

    Your recipe may be a curry or a gumbo or a tortilla depending on where you are in the world, but there is a universal language of love in the family kitchen.

    I never knew my own grandmother, but I grew up eating Mamaw’s chicken dumplins every February at our home gymnastics meet. (She was our gymnastics coach’s mother.) It was the highlight of my year. When I started learning to cook I asked for the recipe, but was told it’s not a recipe that can be written down. It’s done by sight and feel as much as measurements so I went off to college without learning the secrets.

    In fact no one in Mamaw’s family knew the recipe… not her daughters, not her granddaughters, absolutely no one else knew how to make them.

    When I was planning our wedding I knew that I wanted Mamaw to make her chicken dumplins and she graciously brought two giant crockpots to our Mississippi reception. Moving to Northwest Arkansas I realized my chance to learn this recipe was getting smaller. So, somewhat selfishly, I asked Mamaw’s granddaughter Rachel if she’d like to make a video where she learned firsthand how to make from scratch chicken dumplins. She loved the idea and we set a date.

    My heart grew three sizes editing the video. As my Papa would say, “it warmed the cockles of my heart.” I had never been so connected with a project before. Video turned out to be a perfect way to document a family recipe… it caught nuances and texture that recipe cards miss. Rachel caught Mamaw doing things she didn’t even realize she was doing. The recipe had become such second nature to her she didn’t even realize all of the steps she was taking herself.

    But what really made me glow with happiness was the heartwarming connection. Mamaw wasn’t performing the recipe for camera. She was teaching Rachel and the moments happening between them were magic. I felt so blessed to document it.

    What’s your favorite family recipe? Let’s chat in comments.

    Cheers,

    Sarah

    Read more: Made with Love… and Buttermilk