Author: Vanessa

#AprilCreativity – Day 5 – Photo Prompt

#AprilCreativity – Day 5 – Photo Prompt

 

Okay! Here’s today’s first photo prompt! If you’re art journaling, you can sketch your version of the photo, print it out to use, or do something related or completely unrelated but inspired by the sketch. If you’re writing, then I’d suggest studying the picture, setting your timer, and free writing for five minutes. You could even add to a previous story or prompt if you think it would relate. 

Don’t forget – if you want to share what you’ve come up with, you can do it here in the comments or on social media with the hashtag #AprilCreativity.

To Read Tuesday – Hunted by Meagan Spooner

To Read Tuesday – Hunted by Meagan Spooner

 

A Beauty and the Beast retelling? Hell yes!

  
Beauty knows the Beast’s forest in her bones—and in her blood. Though she grew up with the city’s highest aristocrats, far from her father’s old lodge, she knows that the forest holds secrets and that her father is the only hunter who’s ever come close to discovering them.

So when her father loses his fortune and moves Yeva and her sisters back to the outskirts of town, Yeva is secretly relieved. Out in the wilderness, there’s no pressure to make idle chatter with vapid baronessas…or to submit to marrying a wealthy gentleman. But Yeva’s father’s misfortune may have cost him his mind, and when he goes missing in the woods, Yeva sets her sights on one prey: the creature he’d been obsessively tracking just before his disappearance.

Deaf to her sisters’ protests, Yeva hunts this strange Beast back into his own territory—a cursed valley, a ruined castle, and a world of creatures that Yeva’s only heard about in fairy tales. A world that can bring her ruin or salvation. Who will survive: the Beauty, or the Beast? 

#AprilCreativity – Day 4

#AprilCreativity – Day 4

For this prompt, we’re going to do something a little different. Get out a sheet of paper.

Now, go and read this news article.

Now, spend 3-5 minutes making a mind map of some kind about the article and the ideas that it brings to mind. Brainstorm. After you’ve finished, you can either stop there, or you can:

​Writers
: free write for 5 minutes.

Art Journalers: Think about the emotions you would have in this situation. Create an art journal page about those emotions.

#AprilCreativity – Day 3 – Video Prompt

#AprilCreativity – Day 3 – Video Prompt

Okay! Here’s today’s first video prompt! Here’s some suggestions for using this prompt:

Writers: If you’re writing, then I’d suggest either watching the video and using it as a prompt, or (if you don’t want to be influenced) close your eyes and listen to the song (or mute it and just watch the video). Once it is over, set your timer, and free write for five minutes. You could even add to a previous story or prompt if you think it would relate.

Art Journalers: You can sketch a scene from or inspired by the video, or take one image or series of images and use them in your art journaling page. Or do something related or completely unrelated but inspired by the sketch.

Don’t forget – if you want to share what you’ve come up with, you can do it here in the comments or on social media with the hashtag #AprilCreativity.

#AprilCreativity – Day 2 – Dreaming

#AprilCreativity – Day 2 – Dreaming

I’m starting you off slowly – so don’t worry. This one is pretty easy. Today, I want you to think back to a dream you had. Maybe it was last night, maybe it was one from a couple weeks or months ago that really stuck with you. If you can’t remember a dream that you like, or will think will work, call a friend or two and ask about their dreams. Then take that, and spend five minutes writing about it. You can describe it. You can write what happened after you woke up. You can write about something totally different. Entirely up to you!

If you’re doing an art journal, then draw a character from the dream. Doesn’t have to be human. Or draw a scene. Whichever will work best for you.

Don’t forget – if you want to share what you’ve come up with, you can do it here in the comments or on social media with the hashtag #AprilCreativity.

Day 1 – #AprilCreativity

Day 1 – #AprilCreativity

 

All right! I’ve got pens and pencils at the ready, and my trusty writing journal/art journal with me. Time to start the prompt! Remember – I’ll be posting my spread from today (April 1) tomorrow in the comments of this post, as well as on instagram. This allows me time in the evenings to work on the journal, because I rarely have time before then. Feel free to post your own whenever you finish! It can be in the comments, or instagram or other social media – whatever works best for you! Be sure to use the #AprilCreativity tag when you do!

#AprilCreativity – A Month of Creativity

#AprilCreativity – A Month of Creativity

April is the beginning of Spring (at least in my mind) and as such, it’s a good time to start new things. I’ve decided that I need to get back into my writing and art in a big way. So I’m trying something new this month – a month of art and writing journal prompts!

Now, I hope that others will join me. I’m going to post every day’s journal on my Instagram, blog, and FB pages with the hashtag #AprilCreativity so you can see what I’m doing (or not – accountability, right?). I hope you’ll join me. Feel free to post in the comments section here, and on twitter or Instagram – but make sure you add the hashtag so we can scroll through each other’s entries easily! Some days will be boring, full of words in the photos. Other days, it might be artistic and full of color. Either way, I hope it will inspire all of us to get back into the creative groove!

Here’s how it’s going to work:

Each day around 9 I’ll post the prompt for the day. They will be everything from photo prompts to music clips. At some point during the day, I’ll (and hopefully you as well) will sit down, use the prompt as the catalyst, and create.

It might be a free write about a photo prompt. The same photo prompt could be sketched, printed and used in a collage, or used as the inspiration for a seemingly unrelated piece of art. The key is that you create something – even if you don’t like it, or it doesn’t have any sort of relation to the prompt. The point is that you’ve stretched your creative muscles, and the more you do that, the easier it is the next time.

Like anything else, it requires practice to be creative. I can’t tell you how much harder it is to sit down and write when I’ve stopped for a while. But if I sit down and pound out 500 words a day – even if they’re crap and I’ll delete them later, the act of sitting down to write really makes it easier. If you look at my calendar and I do this on a regular basis, the amount of words written per day just goes up and up if I stick with it every day. When I do it sporadically, the numbers are low, and it’s easier to find other things to distract me.

In April, I’m making a real effort to create, and to help set a standard for myself that I will do my best to stick with for the rest of the year. I hope you’ll join me, and I hope you create amazing things!

To Read Tuesday – Blood Rose Rebellion by Rosalyn Eves

To Read Tuesday – Blood Rose Rebellion by Rosalyn Eves

First, this is an awesome cover. And I love that she breaks magic, rather than casts it. Can’t wait to read this one!

 Picture
The thrilling first book in a YA fantasy trilogy for fans of Red Queen. In a world where social prestige derives from a trifecta of blood, money, and magic, one girl has the ability to break the spell that holds the social order in place.

Sixteen-year-old Anna Arden is barred from society by a defect of blood. Though her family is part of the Luminate, powerful users of magic, she is Barren, unable to perform the simplest spells. Anna would do anything to belong. But her fate takes another course when, after inadvertently breaking her sister’s debutante spell—an important chance for a highborn young woman to show her prowess with magic—Anna finds herself exiled to her family’s once powerful but now crumbling native Hungary.

Her life might well be over.

In Hungary, Anna discovers that nothing is quite as it seems. Not the people around her, from her aloof cousin Noémi to the fierce and handsome Romani Gábor. Not the society she’s known all her life, for discontent with the Luminate is sweeping the land. And not her lack of magic. Isolated from the only world she cares about, Anna still can’t seem to stop herself from breaking spells.

As rebellion spreads across the region, Anna’s unique ability becomes the catalyst everyone is seeking. In the company of nobles, revolutionaries, and Romanies, Anna must choose: deny her unique power and cling to the life she’s always wanted, or embrace her ability and change that world forever.

To Read Tuesday – Garden of Thorns by Amber Mitchell

To Read Tuesday – Garden of Thorns by Amber Mitchell

I’m still a little thrown off by the burlesque group and what exactly the Garden is, but I’m sufficiently intrigued enough it give it a go – how about you?
After seven grueling years of captivity in the Garden—a burlesque troupe of slave girls—sixteen-year-old Rose finds an opportunity to escape during a performance for the emperor. But the hostage she randomly chose from the crowd to aid her isn’t one of the emperor’s men—not anymore. He’s the former heir to the throne, who is now leading a rebellion against it.

Rayce is a wanted man and dangerously charismatic, the worst person for Rose to get involved with, no matter what his smile promises. But he assumes Rose’s attempt to take him hostage is part of a plot to crush the rebellion, so he takes her as his hostage. Now Rose must prove where her loyalties lie, and she offers Rayce a deal—if he helps her rescue the other girls, she’ll tell him all the Garden’s secrets.

Except the one secret she’s kept for seven years that she’ll take to her grave if she must. 

To Read Tuesday – The Hollow Girl by Hillary Monahan

To Read Tuesday – The Hollow Girl by Hillary Monahan

This one just looks interesting. There isn’t much description yet, but I love the pitch at the top of the book cover, and anything with Wales I’m interested in. So yeah, I’ll keep an eye out for this one!
Delacorte Press has acquired Hillary Monahan’s feminist horror YA novel THE HOLLOW GIRL, about a Welsh Romani girl who must exact a horrifying revenge to save a truly good person and punish a crime against her. 

Publication is scheduled for fall 2017