Welcome back!

Welcome to the new Wicked Whimsy!

I am so excited about all of these changes, I can’t even express how much so! If you’re viewing in an RSS reader, click through to see the awesome new design – header courtesy of the darling Shenee, the rest courtesy of the amazing tool that is Headway (and a few hours of work) – and get a feel for the new vibe.

I also want to explain the motivation behind these changes. Let’s start with the beginning (a very good place to start…wait, what?).

I started Wicked Whimsy in late 2008, as a personal style & fashion blog. After rediscovering my love of writing, I started writing articles intended to help others out as well. But after a while, I started to feel stifled by the topic I had chosen. I wanted to stretch, and write about other things, as well.

And I did, after much waffling. I sort of meandered around various topics, whatever caught my fancy at the moment, without a clear direction to go in. It frustrated me that, although I had a lot of energy and time to give to this website, and I definitely enjoyed doing so, I had no idea what my end-game was, or to what ends I was writing. When people asked me what the site was about, I would sort of stammer and ramble until their eyes glazed over, because I had no idea what to say.

But now I do have a direction.

The new tagline: the thoughtful renegade’s guide to creating the life you crave.

Let’s break it down:

Thoughtful renegade – thinker, questioner, “Hey what about…?”er. Conscious chooser (whether their choice is the popular one or not). Not a rebel without a cause. Ew.

Creating – not manifesting or hoping or wishing, creating. Putting on your construction overalls & getting down to freakin’ business.

Crave - not sorta-want, not “Gee, I would like this”, crave. A visceral need. A demand. Something you can’t live without.

I got to thinking about what I write about, and why. The root of things. Lots of digging down deep. Eventually (as in, after months, which drove my impatient self up the wall) two main issues surfaced:

1. Most people do the things they do unconsciously. They don’t stop to consider all of the choices that are possible.

I don’t care what you choose to do with your life. But I do think it should be a choice, a conscious one, instead of just floating along & letting the dominant culture/your friends/other people/etc. dictate your life & choices.

2. Our lives are commonly depicted as an unrelated series of compartments. The labels on the compartments usually read things like “work”, “school”, “relationship”, “friends”.

Viewing things this way makes no sense to me. Our lives aren’t boxes, they’re spiderwebs – a change in one area shakes all the other strings.

This, I realized, is why I find it so frustrating to try and write about just style or just creativity or just any one thing. My life is multi-faceted, and I’m betting your’s is, too.

What’s next?

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. – Thoreau

I’ve written a downloadable manifesto if you’d like to read more about these changes & my thoughts about them. It’s titled “Build Your Own Castle” in the spirit of the above Thoreau quote. Building a castle (in the air or no) is an enormous undertaking that requires big picture thinking – just like creating the life you crave.

It’s a rallying cry, meant to get you up and moving and give you the tools to do so. I didn’t want to write another manifesto that was all pontificating & no action, so worksheets are included. And it’s short, too – 28 pages, counting the cover and table of contents.

Ready to build? Download below:

(right click & click “Save As”)

If you don’t want to read the manifesto (at all, or you just can’t right this minute), then here’s two things you can do instead, right now:

• Write down your five most recent choices or decisions. Think about why you made those decisions. Who was influencing you? What was the reasoning behind it? Ideally, you’ll be the driving force behind the decisions. One or two out of five decisions made because of someone elses’ influence (or because “that’s the way it’s done”) isn’t optimal, but you’re getting there. More than two, and you need to have a talk with yourself, & remember to make conscious choices.
• Write down any chronic problems you seem to be having. The best examples of these are based on actions you take, not on environmental factors (though if you’re repeatedly putting yourself in certain environments, that’s something to consider). Think about any possible root causes of your repeated actions – the reason you come up with might seem totally unrelated, but be the right reason anyways. An example Danielle uses in the Fire Starter Sessions (affiliate link there) is a client who realized that they’d been trying to forgive their father for years for cutting them out of the will, and that that was related to their chronic tendency to take out loans instead of working harder.

If you’re a long time reader and worried about not enjoying Wicked Whimsy any more, please don’t. Obviously I can’t guarantee you’ll love everything I write about, forevermore. But the actual topics covered here won’t be to different now – there’s just a new focus and force behind them, one that wasn’t there before.

And, whether you’re a long time reader or a new one, thank you for being here and for reading. I hope you enjoy the new direction as much as I do!