Creativity in Public: Tools, Essays, and Experiments
DIY Art: Turmeric Anthotypes
An easy art project using what you already have in the kitchen.
Being Bad at Hobbies as a Creative Strategy (and Zine Again!)
How to practice relaxing expectations around the results of creative work by pursuing hobbies we aren’t good at. Also, new zine!
Making the Most of Writing Advice Series
Links to every post in the “Making the Most of Writing Advice” series.
Image © 2026 by Ann Cooper
Making the Most of Writing Advice: Goal Setting, Permission, and Validation
SMART goals should be achievable, but what does that really mean? This post is about making more ambitious goals and pursuing them with self-compassion.
Image © 2026 by Ann Cooper
Another Zine Thing!
It’s time for another ZINE THING! Bring your low expectations and enjoy another minizine of emotional self-portraits. I also rounded up some places to submit your zines for publishing and/or distribution. Let’s go write zines!
Image: Biscuit Driver © 2026 by Ann Cooper
Making the Most of Writing Advice: Tune Your Perspective
This is the first post in a series on making the most of writing advice without getting overwhelmed. We’re starting with two principles for putting writing advice into perspective: consider the source and remember that everyone’s process is different.
Image: Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Dora Greenwell, and Dalziel Brothers, Young woman leaning against a wall reading a book as snowflakes fall, wood engraving by Dalziel Brothers, 1863, after E. Burne-Jones, Wellcome Collection, https://jstor.org/stable/community.24885859.
Around the Web with Cutaway Drawings
I love cutaway drawings, especially of buildings. This post is a gallery of public domain cutaway drawings, mostly from Wikimedia Commons, followed by a short list of cutaway books to check out.
Image: Russell Porter, Cutaway Sketch of 200″ Telescope and Dome, 1938, https://jstor.org/stable/community.30991769.
Lists of Rules
What’s more satisfying than a list? A list of lists! What’s more fun than a list of lists? A list of lists of writing rules!
Image: Hermann Rorschach, Rorschach Inkblot Test, Bern Switzerland, 1942, Science Museum Group Collection, Open: Science Museum Group, Artstor, https://jstor.org/stable/community.38358143.
Zine Thing!
I can't draw—I have no training and less talent—but I made a minizine of some of my drawings, anyway! This post has a free pdf of my zine and a roundup of resources on zines and zine making.
Image: Logs Don’t Need to Smile © 2025 by Ann Cooper
Mumscapes
A gallery of fall flower portraits for a winter’s day.
Image: Ann Cooper, 2025, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Creative Commons and the Public Domain: What Does it all Mean?
A roundup of resources to help creators and users of media of all sorts navigate licensing and copyright issues.
Image: Lachenal and Favre, 558 Glacier du Géant, Chamonix, Savoie, 1871-1882, Lachenal and Favre Glass Stereoscopic Photographs Collection, Williams College Visual Resources Center, https://jstor.org/stable/community.16225604.
Divination and Confidence
November! It used to be NaNoWriMo for writers all over the world. For years I told myself that next year, I’d do it, but I never did. The problem wasn’t time; at least, it wasn’t after I left my work as a history professor. It was confidence.
Image: Felix Fontaine, The Golden Wheel Dream-book and Fortune-teller (1862; Project Gutenberg, 2019), https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60045/images/i_frontis.jpg.
Liminal Spaces on JSTOR
A gallery of images of liminal spaces.
Image: William F. Small, Robert Cary Long, Jr. and William B. Phillips, Western State Hospital, 1828, photograph, University of Virginia Richard Guy Wilson Architecture Archive, https://jstor.org/stable/community.2059536.
Hello, World
Welcome, and thanks for being here! This is a burst of firsts: first blog post, first website, first time seriously trying to launch my own business. My goal with this blog is to collect useful resources for writers and talk about what I'm writing and my experience of the writing process.
Image: William Henry Fox Talbot, Winter Trees Reflected in a Pond, 1841–42, photograph, The Cleveland Museum of Art, https://jstor.org/stable/community.24624786.