I was reading a book in bed one day about how being inspired is to be deeply energized or “in-spirited” by something. In my exhausted state after chasing around my wonderful, deeply energized toddler all day, I tried to think back to the last time I had felt like that. I realized it was several months previous: the moment I met Clare C. Marshall. I had been sleepily wandering through a craft market with some mom friends one day, when I suddenly felt energetically stopped in my tracks. I turned to see a beautiful young woman in a lavender wig, surrounded by piles of eye-catching jewel toned books. She beamed a welcoming smile at me and before I knew it, I had left my friends and was pushing my stroller into her booth.
“Did you write all of these books?” I blurted upon approach, cringing at my own abrupt curiosity. It turned out she had in fact written AND self-published nine books and counting. As a simple blogger who finds it truly agonizing at times to complete and share a single post, and realizing how young Clare looked, I found the idea of completing 9 books dizzying. My mind grappled with the idea of how much dedication would be needed to accomplish this by her age. The staggering amount of time required to hone one’s craft to this point, create literal universes, background stories, and personalities, lovingly wrapped around interesting and emotional happenstance. And can we just take a moment to acknowledge the bravery required to release all of your precious universe babies into the world to be devoured by hungry readers? The vulnerability required?
I've always been utterly fascinated by creative entrepreneurs and how they came to be doing what they’re doing. I suppose part of my curiosity is the never ending attempt to make sense of my own blind determination and meandering journey as a creative entrepreneur. Realizing I had far too many questions for Clare to cover at a craft market with a squirmy toddler, I quickly purchased one of her fantasy books titled “The Violet Fox”, asked her to sign it, and handed her my card. Would she be willing to be photographed and interviewed for my tiny blog audience I asked? To my amazement (and relief to the fires now burning in my brain), she said yes.
By the time I arrived at her home in Calgary a few weeks later, I had already binge read the book I purchased and ordered the rest of the series off her website. Her tale quickly became the companion to my nightly bath after getting my son to sleep, and I was officially a fan. As she welcomed me into her home with the same warmth and bubbly personality from the market, I was unsurprised to hear she has east coast roots. She shared that growing up in rural Nova Scotia her parents were very supportive of her dream to become a writer and often made sacrifices for their kids' interests. Her Father, who Clare referred to as an unrecognized genius, was an entrepreneurial woodworker. She credits him for her interest in sci-fi and fantasy themes, and for encouraging her to deep dive into whatever caught her attention. She says he instilled in her a kind of self-reliance and would often tell her: “you can go and do whatever you want, as long as you're asking the right questions and doing your homework.”
“Whenever one of us took an interest in something, especially my Dad, he would make sure that we went deep into it.” Clare remembers.
Growing up she was well known in her class as the girl who was always writing stories, often that were “way too long”, she says laughing.
“I would come home from school, and because we didn't really have TV, that was kind of one of the ways that we entertained ourselves. There was never a doubt of what I'm going to do. I was gonna figure out how to make it work. I had always wanted to be published, and I was submitting novels to publishers when I was 15. ”
She was encouraged from a young age by family and mentors to go to school for journalism because it was a writing job she could reliably earn money with. Half way through her degree at the University of King's College however, there was a market crash that suddenly changed the narrative of how lucrative her journalism goals might actually be. Though she had every right to feel discouraged, Clare saw an opportunity to expand. She decided she would finish her degree and get a publishing certificate from Humber College in Toronto.
“I was studying [journalism] but I was also just getting really interested in the business side of publishing. And I was looking around, and I was like, oh, this company looks interesting, but I can see how I could maybe do it better, in my own ambition and hubris, perhaps. So when I started, it was like, I want to have the control. I want to have the vision. This is what I want to do.”
Thus, Faery Ink Press was born.
“...certainly a theme in my life is gaining all the knowledge for myself, trying to do it all myself. And so, out of that program, I started freelancing kind of in the publishing space… I also started publishing my own books in 2011. Since then, I've published 9 or 10 books. It was almost a book a year for a while there until 2019.”
Clare says that along with her Father’s encouragement to leave no stone unturned, her journalism degree also helped her with learning to research and write to deadlines.
“I have been sort of conditioned through that training to follow that trail. Make sure that there are no lingering questions, and also using an editor's mind like… be very clear and make sure you know what you're talking about so that people understand what you're writing.”
In 2020, Clare found herself feeling a bit burnt out. Although she had made her usual plans for the year, she, like many of us, had to put them on hold due to the pandemic. Undeterred by the state of the world, Clare found an outlet for her creative energy by making YouTube videos doing tabletop role playing games, and showing people how they could improvise storytelling by using dice or tarot cards as writing prompts.
“You don't have to wait for an idea.” she explains. “You can help that process. You can help your brain with prompts and get yourself moving, and don't wait to be inspired. Because it definitely comes and goes.”
Hearing this from Clare gave me a moment of pause. This is something I think most creatives could stand to hear more often. I myself often work within the natural ebbs and flows of inspiration and energy levels. But given what she has accomplished as a writer, it’s clear she’s come up against and gotten around many of those pesky creative blocks. And as our conversation shifts to the business behind the writing, a palpable determination emerges in her tone of voice and posture. I glean there is also a love for the grit and hard work that accompanies having an entrepreneurial spirit. I would soon find out that not even the toughest of challenges would keep Clare from her writing dreams.
In 2022, Clare found she was dealing with a lot of fatigue which she had initially chalked up to the stress of being self employed and dealing with the pandemic. But upon digging deeper, she was hit with the shocking diagnosis of stage 3 endometrial cancer. She shared on her social media: “I've been in a lot of pain during my cycle, I was tired, and had been having terrible mood swings. This really affected my focus and creative output. I thought ‘maybe this is just part of getting older’ - though I'm only 34. I eventually went to the doctor when the pain was "crying on the bathroom floor" level bad, and persuaded him to give me an ultrasound ".
As she waited to start treatment, Clare decided to channel some of her nervous energy into documenting her experiences as well as sharing the outlining process of a mermaid book idea she originally had during the pandemic. In a YouTube video she created titled “I Plotted a Novel During Cancer Treatment” Clare shares: “I needed to work on something that was for me. I had to work on something that no one was expecting or waiting for because there was a real possibility that I would not live to write this book… or any other book… or anything.”
“I kind of pivoted to like, this time is a gift… it's a lot of waiting for results and people to call you and appointments… I have a gift of time where no one expects me to do anything, so that means I should do something creatively.”
Clare completed multiple cancer treatments including two surgeries, 6 rounds of chemotherapy, 28 days of radiation, and an immunotherapy trial. Clare explained to me how this intense health crisis, brought her a lot of clarity when it came to her life and work.
“[the initial differential diagnosis] was very extreme and a kind of cancer that will kill you in a year. So that does kind of bring a lot of things into relief. … I'm definitely more like, I don't wanna waste any time on that, and also, why was I so afraid to not do this?”
Although Clare can recognize how difficult this time in her life was, she says it also gave her a renewed energy for her business, especially once she started to recover.
“It's certainly a turning point that helped me pull things into focus. I am grateful for the experience that it gave me, because nothing can be worse than that. I definitely feel like more things are possible, and I feel like I can even take Faery Ink Press a lot more seriously because of it.”
“I think it's easy when you are a creative person who's trying to do something as a business to kind of look at [it] and be like, well, this is not real or feel a lot of impostor syndrome about something. And I think that's something that was definitely holding me back before. But now that I'm through all that, I can be like, there's no reason for me to look at myself and the things that I create as lesser than. I'm very capable of making this be real. Other people see it as real. Why can't I see it as real? ”
During the tail end of her recovery she decided to take a 9-5 marketing job to establish routine, and support herself so she could be more intentional with her writing.
“I took a full time job, which is the first time I've ever had a real job in my life just to bring stability, because I stopped freelancing during my treatments. The goal [was] just to put all the energy that I can into writing and building that back up, and making that sustainable, so that I [didn’t] burn out again. I was like, okay, I have to establish routine, try something different, and create life. So in a way, the beginning of that job was part of my recovery too.
Although Clare felt the job was serving its purpose in some ways, and even helping to bring new ideas and tools she could apply to her writing and publishing life, she eventually realized it simply wasn’t her destiny. A tough 6 week leave of absence from work to care for her Father during his final days struggling with Parkinson’s disease helped her solidify how she was feeling about her 9-5, and what she really wanted to be doing with her time.
“...He had not long passed and I just remember standing there just being like, now there's no excuse… now is the time to do everything. He was an entrepreneur too, and I feel like there were opportunities that he didn't take… I mean, he worked really hard, but he didn't have all the resources to do what he wanted to do. So he gave me the gift of time… I just kind of felt this moment like being punched in the chest almost like… okay, let's get down to business… no bullshit.”
When I ask Clare what’s next on the horizon now that she has a clean bill of health and a fresh determination, she shares about how she’s currently finishing up the final book of her “Sparkstone” saga, with the mermaid book on deck next that she’d love to experiment with funding through Kickstarter.
“...people read so fast now, and there's a binge culture. And I've also had so many people tell me, ‘I don't wanna buy this series until it's finished.’ I would [like] to kickstart a whole series versus one book …because shipping is extremely expensive. …that would also help with getting an influx of capital.”
While Clare has experimented with other outlets digitally such as YouTube and releasing a fantasy serial via podcast, we discussed how people still love analog books and how she enjoys selling them at markets.
“I like interacting with people. I like doing the in person events and meeting people, and there's sort of a feedback loop that happens when people are like, oh, I love your books. And that does kind of feed back into, oh, I need to create more.”
Luckily, Clare has a lot of neat tricks and tools up her sleeve to keep her on track of the daily writing grind so that she can continue to create more. Some are as simple as giving a task a fun name so she’s more motivated to check it off. Another is an app that has helped her manage her projects by planning her calendar around her goals. She also often tracks how long she spends on tasks to make small adjustments to her productivity. Clare has even recently started a new blog sharing and comparing many productivity and marketing tools for writers.
“I'm just very interested in new technology and business and it just kind of finds its way to me. I'm very motivated by timers and milestones and goals. I do try to either make a game of it or, just have a diligent tracker to be like, this is what you did. Also having a deadline for something is its own motivator. Like, get it done. You promised people that you would have this. I think finding what motivates you, whether it's sort of a positive or a negative…taking a critical eye to things that are working for you, and …trying to harness that energy and putting it into the creative.”
I’ve always been one to doubt the effectiveness of such tools for myself, but seeing how much Clare has accomplished despite all the challenges she has faced has me looking at them with a renewed perspective. One that I had the opportunity to put to the test when I sat down to write this blog post in fact. When I realized there was several hours of interview to sort through, part of me started to doubt my ability to finish it. But I decided to take a page from Clare’s book (wink wink), and think about what tools I could use to make it easier, stay focused and get it done. For me, this meant paying for a transcribing app to make reviewing this interview easy peasy, and using one of her trusty apps to plan working on this into my calendar.
It was Clare herself, who deeply energized this tired mama’s curiosity to create this article. But it’s her inspirational story that has helped me change my approach to doing the work to get it done and out into the world. She has dazzled me with her warmth, imagination, and grit! Not many people can look their challenges in their life in the eye like she has and use them as fuel to transform them into gifts. Thank you for everything Clare.
