Latest updates and patron exclusives from Orna Ross's blog

On Borrowed Time

February 24, 2022November 14, 2012 by Orna Ross

We lie together in a gifted bed knowing the alarm is set to sound, your thighs a seat I’m settled … Read more

Finally Succumbed to NaNoWriMo

November 1, 2012 by Orna Ross

50,000 words or more in a month. That's the challenge set by National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Leave the editing to December, they say. For November, just concentrate on getting out the words. So many per day. Every day.

Sound advice. The sort of advice I give people myself.

Why would a writer bother with this initiative if they've already managed to complete many a book without it? If I fail to get a – te dah! – NaNoWriMo Winner!'s badge at by the end of the month by not meeting my target, nobody is going to

Poem of The Week

August 25, 2022October 25, 2012 by Orna Ross

A Ritual To Read To Each Other If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t … Read more

Remembering How To Create

September 20, 2012 by Orna Ross

It’s easy to forget the principles of going creative. And even easier to forget to practice.

Here’s a ditty to help us remember:

Connect to all I touch. Hear. Smell. Taste. Look, see.
Return to now.

The Multitasking Myth

September 16, 2012 by Orna Ross

The discovery in 2007 of a “bottleneck in the brain” showed that multitasking is not productive.

Doing even just two tasks, both very simple, involves negotiating three bottlenecks in the brain.

Fill Up To Flow – The Key to Creative Success

September 13, 2012 by Orna Ross

The key to creative success is excess, suggests Anais Nin, because creation comes from overflow.

“You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings.

“… Creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness.

Overcoming Self-Sabotage

September 10, 2012 by Orna Ross

BUSHNELL PICTURES — Shadow Self- Overcoming self-sabotage

When you set out to create something, the conventional, conditioned part of you sets off fear alarms, in the form of resistance and self-sabotage.

Stephen Pressfield's book Turning Pro, talks a lot about this tendency, which he calls resistance, in terms of the “shadow self” of Jewish Kabbalism.

“The [conventional] self doesn't care about you. It doesn't love you. It has its own agenda and it will kill you,” says Pressfield, quoting rabbi Mordecai Finley. “It will kill you like

A Small Imagining – Excerpt from Blue Mercy

September 4, 2012 by Orna Ross

Novel Excerpt: “Sometimes, not too often, really not often at all, I allow myself a small imagining. Not a why-oh-why, or a what-if; something closer to a dream.

“It is dusk in summer and we are walking towards the lake. The fading light has greyed the water that we can glimpse through the trees. The wildflowers are out — wood avens, honeysuckle, greater bladderwort — and on the lake’s eastern shore, a cluster of white water lilies.

Irish Secrets of The Past Uncovered

August 25, 2022August 15, 2012 by Orna Ross

Exciting news from Ireland (for history nerds). Secrets of the 1916 Easter Rising and War of Independence have been revealed by a new project from The Bureau of Military History that focusses on eyewitness accounts of the time.

How I would have loved these to have been available when I was researching my first novel. In those days, I had to hunt deep – in the National Library, museum of military history, University College Dublin Archives and other archival sources, for accounts of what had actually happened. So much myth and legend surrounds those times in Ireland, with so many commentators having

When In Doubt, Work

July 16, 2012 by Orna Ross

One of the best events I've been to this summer was Hop Farm Music Festival, headlined by Bob Dylan, who delivered a fun, high-energy interpretation of his classics that I thought pure genius.

Even more exciting, though, was the heart-clenching set delivered by one of my all-time artist-icons, Patti Smith.

It got me reading her autobiographical prelude to fame and fortune, Just Kids, and I wanted to share this great passage, about how she handled creative doubt when she was becoming an artist.

She is writing about painting and poems here but what she says applies to creating anything, including the rock career and happy family she went on to have.

“In my low points,” she writes, “I wondered: what was the point of

Who's Your Creative Community?

July 6, 2012 by Orna Ross

Creatives have always known the value of community and that ideas – and the people who have them – attract each other. Just ask any writer or artist who left home for the big city.

Copy Connect Create

July 4, 2012 by Orna Ross

“The kernel, the soul – let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material … Read more

Join The Creative Economy

June 25, 2012 by Orna Ross

In his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, author Daniel Pink describes the change we now experiencing in work and education, as we shift from information-shuffling to creativity.

“We progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers,” Pink writes. “And now we’re progressing yet again – to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers.”

In this new economy, manual labor and knowledge work become so mechanized that they don’t require much human input. And, suddenly and unexpectedly, the most profitable products and services are not high tech but

Finding Creative Space Between your Thoughts

June 21, 2012 by Orna Ross

The best skill you can teach yourself as a creative is how to find the space between your thoughts, at will.

Your thinking mind is best understood as an instrument, a tool. Yours to be used for a specific task and when the task is completed, laid down. We do that by entering the space of ‘no thought' as often as possible.

We haven't been taught how to do this. So for most of us, most of our thinking is either

What Writers Do

May 27, 2012 by Orna Ross

#writers #amwriting #writetip

Writers! There's what your mother, your publisher, your friends and society at large think you do.

There's what YOU think you do.

And then there's what you really do (see below).

Be part of something great