Day 50 (!!): wild card 🃏

how's it going?

Hello, friends!

Day 50!! I hope you’re having fun. I hope you’re proud of showing up and making all that you’ve made, and that you’re giving yourself grace for the days it didn’t quite work out as you hoped.

Here’s a recommendation to honor your first 50 days: take an image of all of your work (or your favorites!) together. How does it feel to see them collectively?

Let’s check in:

• Describe your first 50 days in a word or two – tell us in the comments!

• What are your hopes for your next 50 days?

• What would feel really good to say on Day 100?

A big thank you to

Anna Brones

for taking the lead on the very big and important topic of community last week. You can sign up for

Creative Fuel with Anna Brones

to read more of her wonderful writing (I really look forward to her Saturday newsletters, it’s become such a lovely part of my week) and participate in the Creative Fuel community.

Here’s a little backstory on the daily creative prompts: people asked for them for YEARS! We said no, for years! The project is and has always been self-guided. Then personal and collective circumstances changed (ahem, a global pandemic) and I thought…why not? We’re allowed to change our minds.

The prompts are meant to help you stay connected to your project and the community, but they can’t be too prescriptive because we’re not all doing the same project. They should be substantive enough to have meaning but not so in-depth that they distract from the real goal – doing your actual projects! It’s a fun challenge.

In the last few years, I’ve started inviting guest writers to contribute. They pick their themes, something they’re excited to write about. More often than not, someone has an idea, starts writing, and through the act of working on it takes it in a different direction. Or they get bored or run out of ideas. Or they think it’s about X but are surprised to find out it’s really about Y. Or some days land better than others – their favorite post doesn’t get much of a response but another one takes off instead. Just like doing the project! It’s all pretty meta.

For my posts, I keep a running brain dump that I add to all year long, ideas and images that spark something in me. By the time I sit down to organize it all, I have to write them out on physical notecards to make sense of it all. Kinda like this!

It’s very fun, highly recommend. I’ve learned that my creative mind likes a lot of space and a lot of mobility.

I had a theme in mind for this week – which is to say, a plan – but I kept finding myself putting it off. It didn’t feel right. And I had all of these others ideas but they seemed pretty unrelated. I couldn’t quite make sense of how to connect them. Then I remembered – the rules are made up! As in: I, me, myself, made them up.

Just like the project, you can only plan so much. And just like the project, the rules about what counts or what’s allowed are self-imposed.

I’m post-plan, baby. Join me.

This week’s theme is wild card.

As soon as I gave myself the permission to not have to tie it all together neatly, to trust that the connection would come through the act of doing it, I felt so much more energized to sit down and write.

• What’s your wild card?

• What self-imposed rule are you ready to break?

• What is your practice asking for permission to do?

XO,
Lindsay

P.S. Here’s the link to submit your work for the Day 60 Reel!