The Makings of an Artist
The Infrastructure of an Artistic Career and Daily Creative Habits
Starting 2025 off unaffiliated with a school or a university was terrifying—if only because I’d never done it before. My entire conscious life I’ve been in school or employed by a university at the top of the calendar year. The thought of having an entire 365 days to fill a life up from scratch gave me heart palpitations until I leaned into it.
I am getting to build exactly the kind of life I want from the ground up.
I get to be an artist.
Romantic as it sounds, deciding what it meant to be a full time author required making infrastructure: how am I going to do this? How am I going to make this sustainable? Over the last several weeks, I’ve been literally creating documents to help, including a multi-tabbed Google doc my agent and I are calling “the Master Doc.” It’s full of personal mission statements, a job description for my multifaceted day to day as an author, strategic plans, timelines and calendars, budget spreadsheets, tables full of my WIPs with useful metadata. I’ve been applying for things (I’ll share when I have something to share), which has required me to really organize my writing plans out through June of 2026.
It’s the kind of large-scale, detail-oriented planning that I got known for in graduate school. (Actually, most of my life.) Sometimes, it takes me a while to remember that taking time to get myself organized, setting goals, and leaning into building new routines is the best thing I can do for myself.
Now? I finally feel like I’m steering the ship again.
After I got a handle on the logistics and admin of it all, I was able to decide on my Creative Habits. I have writing goals, of course: I have my sights set on finishing working drafts of at least a couple of things this year, plus I want to try to branch out with a project in a genre and age range I haven’t tried yet. I tend to be a “small chunks every day” type writer as an adult, even though I grew up writing thousands of words in my documents at a time, flying through pages in a fury. My commitment is to 500 words a day or at least an hour in a document or journal. Most days I go well over 500 words, but when you factor in the days I can’t get anything out, it usually evens out. Currently, that practice has gotten me a several thousand new words and a really messy essay draft about flying and other impossible things. (I missed Essayist Ravynn. She was great. I’m bringing her out of retirement in 2025. To that end, if anyone wants me to wax poetic about Ironheart prior to the show premiere this summer, let a girl know! I am a good choice for a think piece; here’s some of my receipts.)
As far as the new experiment is concerned, study is a huge part of my practice. I built myself a syllabus of about twenty books in the age range and genre that I’m looking to try out and am pulling what I can from the library to study and take notes on, just to start. I’ve been carving out time to study two of those books a week so far. One of the benefits of being a former academic is that I know how to research (or find books mine would be in conversation with), study, teach myself new skills and build a syllabus—I had no idea how useful that would be as I branch out.
In addition to that self-guided study, I’ve also committed to reading more comics this year. Right now, I’m working through the first Milestone Compendium at a rate of one comic a day. I’ve only read what I needed for projects from Milestone, and never my whole compendium, so I decided now was the perfect opportunity to go from start to finish. As of today, I’ve read over 500 pages of comics since the start of the year. This is something between a study and for fun: I’m hopeful my opportunity to write comics will come soon, and I intend to be ready. Plus, I didn’t read nearly as many comics as I wanted to in 2024, so I absolutely had to fix that.
I’m a firm believer that making good art necessitates engaging with a lot of art. For me, this means being steeped in the things that I write, but in forms that I don’t practice. I committed to listening to more full albums, which I’ve been doing while taking walks around the neighborhood to help me move my body more. Because some of the forms I’m thinking about working in require an economy of words for their storytelling, I’m considering how I’m going to work in reading a little bit of poetry into my rotation. I’m enjoying watching TV and webseries, just to absorb storytelling in different forms.
I’m trying to get notes on a lot of the things I’m engaging with. I don’t capture everything, but generally, this does require a lot of thinking on my part. These last two weeks of reading, watching, creating and writing have felt a lot like my comprehensive exam reading period from grad school. And frankly, I’m not mad at it. As brutal and intense as comps was, it taught me the value in creating your own self-guided study for the purpose of giving you a foundation for whatever sort of writing you will do next. I’m grateful for the skill set.
It’s funny that I started the year off in a hurricane of huge feelings, especially about what I was doing with this writing thing.
Just before the new year, I reread a journal entry from 2017 in which I wrote:
“And when I say ‘give up’ I mean, give up on everything—I want to quit blogging, writing articles for websites, stop writing novels, stop writing my thesis…I’m no writer. I’m a fake. I’m not going to write anything that’ll even matter. No one’s going to read my stuff and if they do, they won’t have anything to say about it….I’ll never write and publish a novel, a scholarly article or an academic book.”
Today, on January 17, 2025, I was watching the first episode of the second season of my best friend’s webseries, Black Enough. One of the characters, Hadiyah, is a voracious reader, and she’s telling her girlfriends everything she devoured over the break including “the new Stringfield joint.”
I’d seen the scene when it was raw footage years ago, but I had forgotten Micah had written me into a long line of Black women writers, many of them feminist, that Hadiyah was excited about. When I texted her about it, she said, “And what’s crazy is that you hadn’t even gotten a book deal when I wrote that. I just believe in you.”
To be honest, I’m still emotional about the whole thing, a couple hours later. I had to sit in a moment of healing. I got to sit with that version of myself, and remind her that I didn’t stop…I didn’t stop any of it. I didn’t stop blogging or writing articles for websites or stop writing novels. I finished my thesis and my dissertation. People not only read my work but look forward to it. I wrote several novels, published one and have another on the way. I published a scholarly article. I have a contract for a popular audience book with a university press.
Knowing that there was a version of me that had completely given up, but my best friend knew there was a world soon coming with books adorned with my name everywhere?
Yeah…I was a mess. I am a mess.
I can’t know for sure that I’m doing any of this right. But I know I’m trying. And I know my people believe in me.
I will keep putting one foot in front of the other until I fly.
Things I’ve Been Reading or Rereading or Studying
Teen Titans: Starfire by Kami Garcia and Gabriel Picolo
Skin & Bones by Renée Watson
We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson
Bemused by Farrah Rochon
Ellington Was Not a Street by Ntozake Shange and Kadir Nelson
Legendborn by Tracy Deonn
This Is My America by Kim Johnson
Things I’ve Been Listening To
GNX by Kendrick Lamar
Metamorphosis Complete by Infinity Song
Buckle Bunny by Tanner Adell
DeBí TiRAR MáS FOtOs by Bad Bunny
Things I’ve Been Watching or Rewatching
XO, Kitty (Season 2)
The Sex Lives of College Girls (Season 3)