Death and Birth

The process is for you. The end product is for them.

The process is for you. The end product is for them.

Our book Create.Repeat: 365 Days of Creativity releases in the UK next week. It’s exciting. But if I’m being honest, the past few days have felt more like mourning.

I’m mourning the process.

The creative process is weird. The beginning is a high. The middle is torture. And the end is another strange kind of high — more like a death than a birth. You cross the finish line, and suddenly it’s not just yours anymore. It belongs to the world now.

I’m bumping up against that. The process is over. The book is out of my hands.

And I still, probably just like you, feel anxiety every time I release something into the world. I don’t know if that feeling ever fully goes away. When you pour months of your life into a project, you just hope it mattered. You hope it wasn’t a waste of time.

And I know this book wasn’t a waste because I was just reading it, and it helped me.

It’s wild when you look back at something you made and realize a past version of you was writing to your future self. That’s what Create.Repeat has always been. A place to say what we needed to hear. A practice of turning fear, confusion, writer’s block, burnout, and self-doubt into something honest. Something forward-moving for myself and a community of creatives.

This book is for anyone who wants to stop overthinking and start expressing.

For the dreamers. The doers. The once-a-year painters. The late-night writers.

The burned-out designers. The inspired-and-overwhelmed.

The multi-hyphenates. The in-betweeners.

We don’t have all the answers. But we do know this: if you create and repeat, something will shift. Something will move. And eventually, something will break open.

Maybe that’s what this is — not an ending, but a beginning.

A death. And a birth.

If you’re in the UK, you can pre-order the book here.

If you’re elsewhere, hang tight — it’ll be available in the US early next year.

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Create.Repeat is a community for creatives.

The Create.Repeat Substack is a project designed to be a bi-weekly diary on creativity. Sharing inspiration for artists to keep creating and repeating.

Written and curated by Zack Evans & James Warren Taylor

Each week we will be sharing recent thoughts on creativity, some links helping us stay creative, and a talent show featuring an artist from the community. Thank you for engaging with us.

History repeats. Create the future.