Growing Gills (Jessica Abel)

Growing Gills: How to Find Your Creative Focus When You're Drowning in Your Daily Life
Jessica Abel
Independently published
Nonfiction, Creativity/Self-Help

DESCRIPTION: Many people have creative goals: becoming a published author, showing paintings in an art gallery, producing a screenplay, even just making a little extra time for that woodworking hobby. But real life always gets in the way; unless you live in a hut in the desert with a donkey, there's always someone demanding your time, or a job that sucks all your energy, or other complications. Maybe you'll get to it next month, or two years from now, or after the kids get out of high school, or when your wife retires... yet it doesn't happen, and it's making you miserable. Creativity is a vital part of living, but too many people push it aside for other concerns that always seem more pressing. Like every working creator, Jessica Abel knows all too well how easy it is to fall into the traps set by life, and by ourselves. In this book, she explains why we so often give up on our creative goals and what we can do about it - all without having to buy a donkey.

REVIEW: This self-help book blends elements of Julia Cameron's creative advice books with concepts of scheduling and time management to create a realistic, practical, and ultimately flexible method for reclaiming one's time and one's life. She speaks as one who has "been there, done that" on being artistically stuck and confused. Key elements involve paying attention to what one is actually doing with one's time (to see where creativity could fit into one's schedule; most of us have filler habits, like mindless social media scrolling, that could be greatly condensed or even eliminated to free up space) and focusing on one goal at a time - clear goals, with definable finish lines, not nebulous notes to "write more" or "do something arty." The book includes access to a free digital workbook to download and print out; I'll confess I did not finish that, in part because my printer is being obnoxious about working with my new computer (and also admittedly in part because of a bad procrastination habit.) Overall, though, Abel's approach and advice are sound and easily customizable to most living situations.

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