안녕하세요, 친구들, and welcome to Creative Alchemy, a podcast about artistic wounds, feeling lost in translation, and the magic necessary to transform inspiration into art. I’m your host, S. Jae-Jones, but please call me JJ. I’m the New York Times bestselling author of the Wintersong duology and the forthcoming YA fantasy series, Guardians of Dawn, the first installment of which will be published August 2023.
Anyway...hello again. Here I am in your eardrums with yet another podcast because it’s not like I have another book to draft or a thousand other myriad tasks to fulfill. Some of you might be familiar with my voice from the Pub(lishing) Crawl podcast I used to do with my friend, Kelly Van Sant, a literary agent at KT Literary, or from the little audio essays I uploaded to this stream before I revamped this entire endeavor. What was formerly and she abandons her mind to obscure arts: the podcast is now Creative Alchemy, and with its rebrand, I wanted to give a little background on its evolution and the direction I want to take this podcast moving forward.
So, firstly:
what is creative alchemy?
Creative Alchemy is a term coined by my very good friend, Lemon, in one of our many conversations about writing, art, and the performance of value that we undertake as public figures, no matter the size of our audience. Specifically, we were discussing what sorts of things our audience seems to resonate with most when it comes to Contentâ„¢ and where that overlaps with the work we want to produce. And for me, that place of mutual interest with my audience seems to be this notion of creative alchemy, or transforming inspiration into something tangible. Something real. Something like art.
why is creative alchemy?
There’s been something of a theme — or rather, several related themes — in the essays I’ve written for my newsletter ever since I relaunched it a few years ago. The meaning of art and why we create art vs. the commercialization of art. I’ve made no secret of how much I’ve struggled with publishing — not the business part of it, but the creative part. In fact, I feel like my choice to be an author would be so much easier for me to handle if I could actually separate myself from my art and view it wholly through a capitalist lens. And honestly, I can do it, and for that I credit my years working in publishing, but unfortunately when I do it, it completely strips all the joy out of writing for me. And let’s face it, finding joy in writing is hard enough without worrying about whether you can commercialize your joy for a living.
But part of this dissonance between art and business is the reason I stopped doing the PubCrawl podcast (among other factors, including the fact that both Kelly and I got way too busy to do a weekly podcast). I honestly don’t know if I have anything to say about the business side anymore, and frankly, there’s only so many times you can discuss Publishing 101 stuff without wanting to yeet yourself into the sun. Giving advice to help writers get published ultimately started to feel hollow after a while because I felt like I was peddling the publishing equivalent of clickbait. 5 Hacks to Get Your Query Noticed Faster! 6 Mistakes Writers On Submission Don’t Know They’re Making!
And what is the end goal of being published anyway? Is it to have your name on the spine of a book? Okay, that’s all well and good, but what is the value of that? Attention? Validation? Somewhere along the way, I felt like the reason I wanted to write at all got lost. And because I didn’t know the reason I wanted to be published, I couldn’t in good conscience tell other people to do it either. Because the unasked question I couldn’t answer was this: is it worth it?
And honestly, five years into this, I don’t actually know.
If I can’t answer the question about whether or not publishing is worth it, then I can absolutely answer whether or not writing is worth it. It is. It is absolutely worth it, but it took me a long time to figure out what I write, why I write, and who I write for. And I’m still sorting through all of that, and probably will be until I die. That’s okay though; that’s what creative alchemy is to me. It’s perfecting creativity — this impulse toward creation — until it transforms into gold.
when is creative alchemy?
As with anything else on this newsletter, I’m not going to commit to a set schedule because my ADHD ass already has a hard enough time committing to the deadlines I need to meet for cash. But hopefully I’ll get a podcast out to y’all once a month or so.
how is creative alchemy?
To some extent, I wanted to start this project as a way to document what I’m going through as a working writer. Not the business side of it, but the artistic one. The everyday magic of finding inspiration while taking a shower, the ritual of sifting through and processing fragments of ideas into something resembling a coherent thought. The building of sentences into paragraphs into entire books. What comes easy to me. What doesn’t. Why. I don’t intend the podcast to be a prescriptive learning tool, but something more akin to the philosophical ramblings you might have with a friend in the wee hours of the morning, sitting on your fire escape and watching the sun stain the sky pink and gold.
where is creative alchemy?
In your podcast feeds, hopefully. Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Also in your inbox.
who is creative alchemy?
For now, this podcast will just be me talking into the void. No podcast partner this time, which both excites and terrifies me. I do better in conversation, so maybe in the future I will bring in guests, but for now, it will just be you and me.
Anyway, that’s all for this introduction to Creative Alchemy. And as I always tell myself, Take your art seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously. Until next time, 친구들.
credits
Theme music is BTS Euphoria Lo-fi by Smyang Piano
Introducing: Creative Alchemy