Heather Demetrios's Blog, page 9

How To Be A Broke Artist During The Holidays

You can find it here.

This post for today is specifically about being an artist during the holidays. In my experience as an adult, the holidays are a mindfuck for almost everyone. Top of the list is…

My Response To The 2016 Election Results

I’m searching for words that are not doused in anger, words that do not embolden fear or division to run like wild fire through our families and communities. And yet I believe that, now more than ever, it’s essential that we speak out against the hatred and fear-mongering and violence that we are seeing around us in the wake of Trump’s victory, this whitelash that has become an epidemic. It’s essential that we hold people accountable for what they’ve…

Life Without Envy

something that has plagued me for the past many years).…

Sailing Your Ship

here)

Some of you know I've been getting into meditation like nobody's business. One big thing in Zen is this idea of the Beginner's Mind. Shunryu Suzuki, the Yoda of Zen Buddhism, said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” When you’re a beginner, you are humble and open to learning as much as you can. You’re a sponge, soaking it all up. You don’t mind getting constructive criticism or making mistakes because you’re a “beginner.” Beginners get a lot of slack. You have more freedom, less at stake, and you can always save face because nobody has an expectations of you. This is all fertile ground for creating great art. Making mistakes is how we do this thing. The minute we start thinking we’re masters, we start closing the door to possibility. We start thinking about how others perceive us, which allows fear to take root. Fear loves when we worry about our reputations. It loves when we find our self-worth in others’ perceptions of us. We want to look like we know our shit. But even Steve Jobs said, “It’s…

Das Kapital For Writers: Part Four

Here’s the deal: publishing is a business. In all likelihood, your publisher is a major corporation, possibly owned by Rupert Murdoch. Enough said, right? Their ultimate goal is to stay in business and make money. Their product is books. And sometimes you yourself become a bit of a product, if you hit the big-time. Publishers sell dreams and information and fantasies…

Das Kapital for Writers: Part Three

EXPENSES

My friends, PLEASE learn from my mistakes. When it comes to this, they are legion and I want you to avoid waking up one morning to realize that you’ve spent your entire advance in a matter of months.

Here’s a few things to NOT do:

Don’t spend your advance when you get it. Sit on it for a while. As long as you can. See what it feels like to be in possession of money someone paid you in exchange for your words.

Don’t assume there’s more where that came from. You might get a huge, badass advance and for a little while there, you think this is how it’s always going to be when you have a new book. And it might! But it might not. Remember what I’ve…

Das Kapital for Writers: Part Two

The Day Job vs Writing Full-Time

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Das Kapital for Writers: Part One

I decided to write an epic post about it in honor of Labor Day and also in honor of the end of my third year sans day job, working as a full-time artist. This also happens to coincide with my three-year anniversary of living in NYC. A quick note: I am writing this in a spirit of generosity, not bitterness or as an excuse to complain. I’ll get into this later, but there is a seriously unhealthy negativity syndrome among writers (I myself am very guilty of contributing to that after too many glasses of wine), and while I think it’s good for us to speak out about our frustrations, it can really bring a girl down. So, have no fear: this is a no-bitch zone. It’s just real talk about something that’s gets a little bit icky sometimes.

In this…

I'm Not A Terrible Person!

wrote my Whiplash post, and I wanted to continue the conversation with an update about some things I realized about myself. As much as I love those hard-ass teachers, I've found that when I teach or coach my creativity clients, I'm not quite like that. I think (I hope) I tell it like it is and am not afraid to push or say the hard thing, but I've discovered that I'm naturally nurturing. THIS IS HUGELY SURPRISING TO ME. As I said in the original post, I’ve always had a deep passion for encouraging artists, especially hurting artists and those on the brink of really going for it. I’m also super interested in working with people who honestly don’t know if they’re artists and they need someone to help them process it all. Reaching out to artists in need and doing my own writing go hand in hand as my vocation. I found that, despite loving those mean teachers, I catch myself gently pushing those in my tribe (as opposed to kicking them in the face) who are talented but don't believe in themselves. Surprisingly, I don’t act as though I’m taking cues from…

Chasing Fireflies: The View From Rock Bottom

I haven’t written a blog for over three months because I’ve been too busy chasing fireflies: ideas, and feelings, and revelations, and experiences that have flitted across my inner landscape, glowing bright in the darkness. I’ve had to catch them—quick!—before they disappeared. It’s not often you see the same firefly twice.

In May I got back from YallWest, weary. It’d been a tough six months. Nothing I’d produced (two romance novels, one fantasy novel, an impassioned pitch, and over fifty thousand words of other stories) was working. For the first time since I sold my debut novel in the summer of 2012 I was coming up dry. I experienced the horror of turning in a book that I knew wasn’t working because I was on deadline and that was all I had. Ideas weren’t sticking around long enough for me to flesh them out, I suddenly forgot how to plot, how to develop authentic, rounded characters. Worse, there wasn’t anything I was burning to write. And everything on the page was unreadable.

I was empty.

This emptiness manifested itself in my life in various ways. Depression, my lifelong companion, decided to rear its ugly head. Of course. My Brooklyn apartment and the entirety of New York City started getting on my nerves more than usual: there wasn’t space to breathe, to think, to grow. I’d go to cafes to write and just sit there, lost in a horrible labyrinth of plots that were…