It’s all been done, but don’t let that stop you.

I know I’m not the only one who has gone through this. We all want to believe we came up with something completely new, entirely different, utterly original. When that big idea comes, it fills you up and feels so undeniable, like you’ve tapped into something so unique and special that even The Muse Herself is gasping in awe. As creators, we can be narcissistic like that, and we can’t see the forest for the trees (that’s an accurate usage of that adage, right? Just checking).

That feeling can be what drives us and motivates us to make the idea become something real. Now I know I just lumped all creators into a basket of narcissism, which is super unfair, so I’ll kick everyone else out of that basket now and say that in my own experience, when that big idea comes and I get super pumped about it and am able to see it through to completion, I have a tendency to operate with blinders firmly applied, blocking out practically everything else. It might be the ADHD, but I also think that’s a common thing for creative people in general.

When the thing is finished (usually a written thing, because that’s my primary form of self-expression), the insatiable need to share it with others takes over, which kind of sucks because I have this thing where I don’t like to bother people, so, you know. This blog post isn’t really about that specifically, but it does live in the same neighborhood.

Yesterday when I was brainstorming ideas for sharing my newly released “thing” (Maladaptive! Now available on a whole bunch of online retail sites including Amazon, check it out!), I thought it might be cool to show the progress of retail locations populating on my wide distribution universal book link through Books2Read. But I mistyped the URL from memory, and what did I find, but another book with the exact same title.

So then I went to Amazon and typed in my book title, to find MORE books with the same title. And it would be a lie to say that I was, like, perfectly fine with that. I may have had a bit of an internal meltdown, actually, for a little while.

I’m okay now, but I’m a little embarrassed at my reaction. How territorial I felt, like the idea is mine, the title is mine, it’s all mine because I remember the moment when the idea came to me and I was daydreaming instead of sleeping one night, and unless someone else was in my head with me, I  was the originator. I. Me. Mine. (With some indirect credit to The Beatles because they’ve influenced practically everything In My Life… I’m on a roll, somebody stop me…)

What was I saying? Right. I’m ashamed of my territorial reaction, because after perusing the other books, and finding that some of them were, indeed, similar in nature to mine, they aren’t exactly the same. They are all unique, all original, and all part of something profoundly human that many of us have in common.

It’s not that I’m not special or unique, and it’s not that my book is not special or unique. We all are, and all of our stories are. This is a community, and I’m part of it, and I want to be someone who supports other members of that community, not feels threatened by them.

It’s been said billions of times in millions of ways, that even if it’s all been done before, you should do it anyway, because no one can say it, write it, paint it, play it, sing it, or make it the way YOU can. I’m heartened by that perspective and even though I knew it somewhere inside me already, I needed to confront it head on.

It brought me back to my creative writing program in college, so many years ago. A room full of hopeful student writers with variations on the same dream. And when our instructors gave us a writing prompt, we didn’t turn out 20 identical stories. We all came up with something unique (but maybe not special, because, you know, that takes practice).

The thing about creative narcissism (and what I mean isn’t the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder, I just mean the tendency that some… not all… creatives have to believe we’ve originated something groundbreaking because it feels that way to us, because it makes so much sense to us that our egos take the wheel) is that there is the inevitable flipside to that.

There are a lot of moments in our process where the opposite thinking takes over, like when something didn’t come together the way we envisioned it and the “OMG I’m not a genius, I actually suck” narrative begins to play. Or when impostor syndrome kicks in and we’re looking around, waiting and wondering when the Art Police will arrest us for… what? I don’t even know. Existing, maybe.

I’m generalizing again, of course. Maybe not everyone feels this way. But bear with me, because like I said, this is a community. This is a “we” thing, not a “me” thing. I’m not alone. Recognizing my own creativity and my own self-doubt means recognizing our collective creativity and self-doubt, and cheerleading for others who told their story in the way only they can, regardless of where or how much we overlap.

So, humbly, cheers to you, to me, to all of us, and our special and unique minds.

Happy Release Day to Me!

Well, doesn't that feel the tiniest bit lonesome? LOL. It is a bit of a me-party around here today as I celebrate the official release of Maladaptive into the book world.

It started as a therapy exercise. A journal. An attempt to revive my creative energy by clearing out the mental and emotional clutter that was getting in the way. I wasn't even convinced it would work. 

If I'd only known then that it would work, that the mental and emotional clutter purge WAS the creative act? 

It's probably for the best that I didn't know. The moments when it did finally click that "Oh, I AM writing, this IS creativity, I AM inspired" were little bursts of joy that I kept quietly to myself while I built that fire back up inside. A new fire, different from the old fire. Now it's just a matter of continuing to stoke that fire and not worry too much about what the rest of the world thinks... or doesn't think... about it.

As part of my Release Day activities, I posted the following on my Instagram, and I want to share it here too, because it gets to the heart of the matter, I think.

This book is for all the daydreamers and misfits out there, maladaptive or otherwise. I do see you and I hope this book finds you and makes you laugh and helps you feel a little more connected to yourself and to the universe.

The Maladaptive Arcana

File this under things I do that are not writing but are related to being obsessed with my own book and the world it contains.

I was thinking about creating character art, but something about that just didn't sit right with me. I think there are genres, like fantasy and sci-fi, where character art is really part of the world-building experience and I absolutely can see how creating character art can be helpful for the writer and also helpful to readers, allowing them to envision characters who may look like nothing we've ever seen before. That makes total sense to me.

For a book set in "the real world", I don't really get it, to be honest. And I know it's a very, very popular thing to do, and I'm not knocking anyone who created character art for their "real world novel, it's 100% a subjective preference and it seems very on trend as well. I'm cool with it. I'm just saying that when I thought about doing character art for Maladaptive, it just didn't feel like the right thing to do.

Probably because I try to avoid being overly prescriptive about how characters look. I like to let people's imaginations fill in the blanks. I may say someone had a "Ferris Bueller vibe" or mention a specific detail about them, like their freckles or dimples or unruly hair or smokeshow body, but I love the idea that readers will use those attributes as a jumping off point to fill in the blank spaces and make those characters their own, in a way.

It doesn't matter to me if someone's version of one of my characters looks different than how I imagine them. And as a reader, I don't really like to be hemmed in by character descriptions. My mind will draw a picture of each character, and sometimes it might look somewhere in the ballpark of what the author described, or they may have a vibe about them that makes me picture them completely differently.

So the idea of locking down specific appearances for Maladaptive's characters just didn't feel right, even if I have a specific idea of how they look in my own mind. What I do want to convey is their vibe.

When I started thinking about how to do that, it stopped being about the characters at all and started being about the book's themes. I've talked a lot about the themes in the chapter discussions in this blog, and so I loved the idea of illustrating the themes as a way of illustrating the world, if that makes any sense. And what better way to illustrate the themes of Maladaptive than... tarot cards!

Now tarot is a pretty locked-in system - there are some variations, but for the most part, the number of cards and the themes they represent are pretty static. But there are volumes of other types of oracle cards out there (and that's what tarot is, a formalized oracle) that follow their own system and encompass their own themes. So while I've stylized The Maladaptive Arcana in a very tarot-like manner, they aren't tarot, they're more generally, an oracle. But enough talking! I came up with four main cards.

	The Dreamer ~The protagonist/main character ~Daydreaming/maladaptive daydreaming ~Neurodivergent/ADHD ~Wish fulfillment ~Seeking validation, recognition ~Unrealized potential ~Inner conflict
	The Island ~Fantasy location ~Mirror to The Dreamer’s reality ~A place to explore desires and fears ~Consequences ~Storytelling/worldbuilding ~Self-soothing/self-destruction ~Survival/rescue ~Catharsis
	The Universe ~Multiverse ~Timelines/dimensions ~Creativity/art ~Inspiration/The Muse ~Connection ~Wavelength/frequency ~Taking chances ~Coincidence/serendipity ~Fate/destiny ~Free will
	The Memento ~Safety/protection ~Core memory ~Moment captured in time and space ~Alternate realities ~Barrier between reality and fantasy ~Fragility ~Portal/magical realm

My hope is that in some way, these four cards illustrate the vibe of the story, albeit cryptically, without giving away any spoilers. And they were fun to make. Are they a good substitute for character art? Maybe, maybe not. That's not for me to say. They'd make fun stickers or bookmarks for a giveaway though. Hmm....