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Jumpstarting Creativity

My New Novel Released Today!

My new novel, Resurrect the Dead, just released today!

As with most of my fiction, this one is dark. And psychological. And dancing right on the edge of transgressive.

Here’s the description from the back cover if you’re interested in checking it out:

Roger is the only father Alex has ever known, although he’s not much of a father. Years after coming back from Vietnam, Roger is severely disabled, and dependent on Alex just to get by every day. A loner by nature, Alex hardly notices that he doesn’t lead a normal teenage life. Dealing with Roger’s mental breakdowns is a routine part of his existence. Heavy metal is one of his only escapes, as well as the clearing in the woods behind his trailer park. The clearing is a space that feels like his own private world, and it’s also his special place with Alyssa, his best and only friend.

With every day that passes, Roger’s health fails a little more, and Alex begins to fixate on the big questions that Roger has always avoided: Where is Alex’s mother? Why can he barely remember her? And why did she abandon her young son so long ago? When Alex and Alyssa finally get the chance to run away together, Alex decides to investigate his mother’s past and he finds something he never expected. The truth shatters him to the core, and triggers a chain of events that has explosive consequences for everyone, setting Alex on a fated path that changes him forever.

You can get it from Amazon in paperback:

RESURRECT THE DEAD PAPERBACK

Or Kindle:

RESURRECT THE DEAD KINDLE

Happy reading! 🙂

11 October, 2024 by Lauren Sapala

Codependency and Creativity

INFJ personality types and INFP personality types tend to struggle severely with codependency throughout life. This can be extremely detrimental to our creative lives because codependency is a major block to creativity.

When we are in a codependent relationship with someone, we often will hold ourselves back from doing anything that is threatening to the other person. We will accommodate the other person’s preferences and desires over our own needs, and end up betraying ourselves over and over again. Creativity requires us to take risks, and often these risks can be threatening to other people, especially someone who might be the other half of our codependent relationship. Continue Reading

22 June, 2024 by Lauren Sapala

How to Protect Your Creative Work from Criticism

One of the biggest fears that people deal with around creativity is the fear of what other people will think. Many of us try to tell ourselves that we don’t care, but this just isn’t true. We worry that we will be judged or criticized if we put our creative work out there.

Sometimes we’re worried that people will judge our work as inadequate and then we’ll feel like we have no talent as a writer or an artist. Sometimes we’re scared that others will misunderstand us and not grasp the message we’re trying to convey through our work. We might also worry that we will offend family, friends, or even strangers. Continue Reading

3 August, 2023 by Lauren Sapala

Tired of Your Life? Take Your Creative Power Back

Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of clients and students that they feel tired of their lives. This isn’t surprising, as we’ve all been in a big energetic cycle of releasing the past for a long while now. Releasing the old is always a good practice, as it helps us move into the new. But a problem that comes along with this process is not always knowing exactly what new thing you want to move into in the future.

Most of us would love to move into a new life full of freedom and creativity. We want to finally start (or finish) the book we’ve been dreaming of releasing into the world for so long, or we want to paint, draw, make music, or create something else of beauty in order to share it with a wider audience.

However, once we start thinking about making these creative dreams come true, we instantly feel afraid, even terrified. Continue Reading

2 August, 2023 by Lauren Sapala

Why Intuitive Writing and Deadlines Don’t Go Together

About once a month, I’ll get an email from a reader who is struggling with writing and meeting deadlines. Usually, they’ve discovered my Intuitive Writing course and they’re extremely interested in learning how to connect more deeply with their intuition to feed their creative process. They like the way I describe how they can shift their relationship with writing from stress and pressure to adventure, fun, and ease. The only problem is, they don’t quite see how they can fit that in with their current writing life needs, which involve a lot of deadlines.

Much of the time these types of writers are screenplay writers who need to turn in projects by a certain date, and also need their scripts to meet a certain set of criteria. Sometimes they are freelance writers who are writing articles on topics assigned to them by a company or nonprofit. Occasionally, I even hear from ghostwriters who are writing something that is supposed to be in someone else’s voice, and they also have a firm deadline on when the work needs to be finished.

Nearly all of these writers who email me are tired, frustrated, and feeling defeated with their writing process. They tell me they feel blocked or stuck, and they’re just pushing themselves through the writing because they know there is a deadline and they have to get it done. But every time they sit down to work on the project, they feel like they would rather be anywhere else.

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28 April, 2023 by Lauren Sapala

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