Want some Permission Slips + Accountability Slips to get you moving and grooving with your own poetry writing?
The creative process brings up a lot of feelings for most everyone. Sometimes you’re scared to commit something to the page for fear of someone reading it and then hating it or hating you. Sometimes you feel guilty that you’re spending time enjoying the act of creating rather than doing something “productive.” Then, when you do get past such feelings, you have trouble sticking the landing: you can feel yourself at the start, but you can’t see where you’re headed or how to keep yourself headed in that direction.
As someone seeking to make a living from this whole being-a-writer thing, I can assure you those feelings never go away. Not permanently, anyway. You cycle in and out of feeling you have that sense of permission to do the thing, and you cycle through having and not having the energy to commit to seeing it through.
So a while back I made a super-simple printout of Permission Slips (just like the ones we all remember from school) and Accountability Slips (to help motivate the follow-through). The which I am now sharing with you because if one human has an itch, there are at least 10 other humans out there who have experienced the same itch at some point.
Now, that super-simple printout? You click the link above and it’ll take you straight to the PDF where:
- Page One has a layout of 4 Permission Slips to use as you see fit in your creative endeavors; and,
- Page Two has a layout of 4 Accountability Slips which include the prompt of reporting the results of your creative endeavor(s) to a person or group of your choosing.
As an example, I used one permission slip to give my brain the whole of Winter off so I could come back this Spring ready to do something (more on that in a second). Then, I wrote myself an accountability slip because when it comes to The Mission, I’m accountable and report to you.
My Report To You
Taking Winter off was necessary. I was firing on cylinders I didn’t have to fire, and my brain was fried as a result. Now, when I’d first started resting, I’d been updating my Patreon page (not linked because I’m not prepared to re-launch that sucker just yet) and part of the update was pulling from my Dream Journal to make writing prompts (Dream Prompts) and prep some project starters (Idea Files).
Posting these things to Patreon makes sense because they’re “messy,” being all unfinished whatnots the lot of’em. It’s more fun to share something finished and clean, to have that sense of being done. It’s just not realistic to act like there’s no messy part to all this writing.
So, a new permission/accountability slip duo:
- Rose Jermusyk has my permission to post two Dream Prompts per month of Lunar Spring (mid-February to mid-May).
- In accepting this permission slip, I agree to post 7 Dream Prompts over the course of Lunar Spring (February 11 to May 11), and report on the results to the readers of the Penrose Mission Reports.
You’ll recognize them by the preface Subspace Log and honestly I’d love for you to write and tell me about what you’re giving yourself permission to put on the page. Maybe we can hold each other accountable.