Sometimes, I need to lift my head and look around.
Yesterday, I walked outside with my phone in my hand and my eyes down. A flicker of movement caught my attention, and when I looked up, I saw a mother deer and her two fawns in my yard.
I almost missed them.
Today, I had another kind of “look up” moment when I discovered the International Publishers Association. Once I found it, I thought, Of course an organization like this exists. Publishing is global. Storytelling is global.
But it can be easy, as an author, to get caught up in my own little corner of the publishing world. What changed at Amazon this week? What is BookFunnel doing? Should I be writing on Substack, recording a podcast, making short videos, or trying some completely new way to reach readers?
Sometimes, it’s good to look beyond all of that—not so I can find more things I should be doing, but so I can be inspired.
There are people all over the world telling stories in an incredible variety of ways: novels and poetry, audiobooks and oral storytelling, films and music, art and dance, tiny pieces of hint fiction and enormous epic fantasy series.
I don’t need to do all of it.
I can simply appreciate the creativity, let it expand my sense of wonder, and then return to my own little corner of storytelling.
In this week’s episode of The Truth About Storytelling, I talk about looking up, the worldwide world of publishing, finding inspiration without becoming overwhelmed—and then I return to my own story with more chapters from Dark Blade Forged.
More Adventures to Discover
And speaking of looking beyond my own little corner of storytelling, my young adult science fiction novel Liftoff is part of a BookFunnel promotion this month featuring free science fiction and fantasy adventures from many different authors.
If you’re looking for a new adventure—or several—you can explore the collection here:
FREE Adventures in Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Sometimes looking around isn’t a distraction from our own creativity.
Sometimes it’s how we find our way back to it.