Life... Our Greatest Creative Act

And the Art of Not Knowing

With Joybellion arriving on Monday, I thought it would be fun to take you behind the scenes of how the title and cover came to be.

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I’ve been an artist for more than forty years and one thing has become increasingly obvious to me:

Creating art and creating a life are remarkably similar.

Neither begins with clarity.

They begin with a feeling.

A hunch.

A spark.

A thing that catches your eye and won’t leave.

Or keeps coming back, no matter how many times fear tells you it’s a terrible idea.

As I worked on the manuscript for my first book, I thought I knew what I was going to call it.

For a long time the title was Insignificant.

Mockup cover I made as part of my pitch for the book.

I loved it.

Almost everyone else hated it.

I understood why.

No one wants to see themselves as insignificant.

But I wanted to explore something deeper:

What happens when we stop caring so much about what society thinks of us?

What happens when we stop chasing significance in all the places we’ve been taught to look for it?

Insignificant felt right until it didn’t.

So the title evolved.

Then evolved again.

Early title ideas.

At the eleventh hour, while finalizing the manuscript, I stumbled across a section heading I’d written months earlier:

Joybellion.

Suddenly everything clicked.

Not because I forced it.

Because I was finally ready to see it.

One creative journey had ended.

Another was just beginning.

When the first covers came in they were nice but they were also wrong.

Not bad.

Just incomplete.

Looking back, I can see why.

Each cover captured one piece of the book.

None captured the whole thing.

First round of covers.

So back into the unknown I went.

Wild, unconventional graphics.

A headless woman.

Disappearing into the background

Image inspiration

More ideas.

More uncertainty.

More experiments.

Then, a breakthrough.

Death and rebirth.

The old turning to ash.

A phoenix rising.

Finding the central image.

And finally there she was.

The final cover.

One of the gifts of midlife is realizing clarity rarely arrives in a straight line.

We try things.

Stumble. Try again.

Let things go.

Follow what feels true.

And somehow, if we stay open, what we feel but can’t yet name reveals itself.

The journey this book took me on reminded me that creativity rarely rewards certainty.

It rewards curiosity.

Openness.

The willingness to follow what feels true, sometimes before you can explain why.

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Joybellion arrives Monday. If you’re a woman reimagining what’s possible in midlife, I’d love to have you here.