Between My Sheets—Episode 3: The Embrace
When the body says stop and the business finally listens.
What if (re)building a writing life could be its own story . . . especially when things start to wobble?
I’m giving it four Fridays to find out. Part entertaining, possibly educational. Worth continuing? You be the judge and jury.
Welcome, you.
Time to sink into this TGIF moment—a 13-minute read.
This is part of a (maybe) year-long series called Between My Sheets, where I share the real story of (re)building a writing life—with goats, grace, coffee and the occasional glass of ice-cold white wine.
Right now you’re reading the forward-facing version.
If you want to truly lie between the sheets with me for the next year and engage in some word-filled pillow-typing talk, you’ll be able to access the full reveal soon enough.
Consider this a word-partnership, Lovely Reader—more than a one-read stand.
For now, give this third episode a read and see what stirs within you.
And if you missed them, the earlier episodes . . .
Prelude: “I just want to write,”
Episode 1: The Morning After
Episode 2: Partnering
This week? It sucked.
No sugarcoating it.
No pretty purple bow.
Monday became a tech-mess when a JOYful Journey email didn’t go out as scheduled.
It was my error that caused the glitch, but figuring out how to fix it . . . that took hours of hair-pulling with a chat-bot, then human interaction, to finally resolve.
Speaking of chat-bots—and more AI talk—is it just me or does finding them everywhere make you crave connecting with a human even more?
Having to explain myself to a bot (and then again to a human) is like a forehead-meet-desk moment. Painful.
And my head already hurts.
After the messy tech morning, the tsunami hit Monday afternoon.
Fever. Chills. Earache.
Down for the count.
I stand.
I spin.
So no emails went out, which had been my plan after a silent—no words shared—day of much needed Sunday rest.
Perhaps a foreshadowing of what was to (cough) come.
But to top it off, more tech glitches to unravel on Tuesday, in between naps and sneezes delivered in sets of three.
No joke. It’s always been a thing. My father and I used to count—one, two, wait for it—three.
But on Tuesday I simply gave in . . .
No emails sent.
No fresh words written.
No VIP students were mentored (yet), which I feel absolutely shitty about.
Students? Hmm, feels too teacher scold-er-y.
Customer? Distant. Cold. True, but just off.
Mentee? Ah, now there’s a breath of yes.
Correction—no VIP mentees mentored—yet.
Instead of writing daily, I dropped the word-ball, and laid my head on the pillow and gave in as the world tilted like an unstoppable dreidel.
And it made me realize something I’ve been circling like a bonfire dance off.
The need for a machine humming in the background of my business.
Not a chat-bot . . .
A rinse-and-repeat system.
As automated as possible—without losing the connection and intimacy I so enJOY.
Because I am seeing that my flow, without a solid, completed structure, collapses.
Because I’m an idea girl.
Wildly prolific.
And yet, at times, I’m not always a completer.
Wildly inconsistent with follow-through.
Which is costly because the fortune is in the follow-through.
That my hesitation to step into the masculine energy needed to create a container—to structurally hold all the feminine side of me—creates something else.
Maybe even a misplaced belief that doing so will pull me back into my previous A-type personality.
See, I’ve been living in a space of patch-worked systems.
Like grandma’s handmade quilts, a square stitched together over here, three different ones over there.
Wait, do they match, connect? Should they? Must they?
And then another blaze erupts, or creative ideas spark, and the quilting squares that create one structure are laid down in scattered pieces—never quite finished.
Never able to hum away in the background but instead left as another dangling, chaotic mess.
A simple system.
That’s the ask, the dream, the desire.
Is it really so hard?
A pathway through the playground of me, my words, my offers.
A refusal of allowing the messy middle to invade my business, my words, my ability to serve—again.
These purple penned thoughts, this desire for structured ease, are now a real and pressing need.
This week has shown me that in a vertigo-tilt kind of way.
A simple framework machine that runs in the background—created and completed, tested and tried—once.
All done with ease, with simplicity, with structure and flow—that doesn’t clank and break, but purrs a consistent, steady, soothing beat.
So that regardless of me—regardless of my energy, my hormones, my Frenchman, my goats, or the fact that some days my body waves a white flag and says—“Not today, boo.”—everything deliciously carries on.
Maybe you can relate?
This is the dream for so many.
An ache for others.
For me, it was a thought, a desire, a nagging need but now—now it’s a necessity.
This week reminded me that my creative life is—well—delicate.
Powerful, yes.
Impactful, when working.
But delicate.
It reminded me of a wonderful woman, a long-time friend and colleague who texted me out of the blue back in 2022.
After a few minutes talking about life, her two kids, her husband, and the thriving coaching business she’d built that relied on her—she burst into tears.
As we’d jumped on a Zoom call, I saw her painful meltdown live.
I sat with her, didn’t ask what was going on, what was wrong. I simply let her get it all out.
Pent up feelings, fears, tears.
And like a dam bursting, the words came—the story unfolded and like pieces of a mad puzzle, I fit them together.
Thirty calls a week.
No systems outside of her.
Her girls. Just four and six.
She was stressed.
She was wearing all the hats.
She was successful on paper and spread too thin in life.
I thought this was the meltdown and then the real reveal dropped.
Cancer.
Stage four.
Oh my God.
Oh my God, her girls.
I cried with her, for her and prayed.
We prayed.
And then her ask came in hesitant fragments.
Not sure.
Not much time.
Canceled ten calls this week.
Struggling.
Just.
Can’t.
Do.
It.
Can you help me?
The very next day I stepped in as chief-help-me officer and drafted emails that went out to all of her clients with an option.
Option A. Stay on with a new “master” coach. A coach who built a successful book business of her own and is here to help me in a time of great need.
Option B. Or bow out, no hard feelings, no penalties. Money back, if pre-paid.
I turned down a book project, put another one on hold and shuffled my life.
I shifted my focus from my own business of writing daily emails and creating amazing things with the help of a new coach I’d hired, and dove into absorbing my friend’s content, voice and coaching-style.
The very next week, I took over her 30-plus hour call schedule.
Only one refund request came in.
Within three months, we transitioned the one-on-one coaching to a group format, brought on a team member and started to create systems.
My friend, she did what she could until chemo took over.
And sometimes, in just two or three minutes a day, we created life-changing systems for her business in the event she wasn’t able—or there—it could continue to run without her.
Masterclasses of past content morphed into standalone offers.
Literally dozens of them that once systematized could be bundled and sold.
Sales pages, checkout pages—all the words written for each and every one—and a digital home framed out so once there, they could live, breathe, and sell for a lifetime.
And all those 60-minute coaching calls each and every week? While lucrative, they were taxing and weighted me down fast.
So priority one was a new path, new plan.
Thirty one-on-one calls weekly, slowly over six months of my time, became two group calls per week.
There was talk about me buying her out of her company, her brand.
Lots of talking, texting—back and forth.
Choices had to be made.
Hers. Mine.
It was heavy and beautiful, hard and wonderful.
Decision made, another team member came on board—a master coach. One we both admired and believed could take over, should the need arise.
Either as a single payment pay-day or a monthly licensing fee.
It was an exhausting time.
For her.
Each breath.
For me.
Hiring, training, coaching, writing, building what was needed to run things in a Jesus take the wheel kind of way.
Yet, when I stood in the cool air behind her two little girls and husband as they lowered her casket into the pre-frost ground—the light misting of rain seemed a perfect teary farewell—I was glad I’d stepped up to the plate.
Her plate, during her time of need.
Her family now had a steady income from the machine we’d discussed, mapped out, and created.
Space to be, to breathe, to mourn without a ticking time bomb or clock of must work.
Life is so fleeting, so delicate.
And now, as I wear a headband to protect my aching right ear from the slight tropical breeze washing in through the open slider, I give thanks to my friend and all the lessons that season, that slice of life taught me.
If I’m capable of systematizing her million dollar business in six months flat—I’m capable of systematizing my own, am I not?
Of creating that humming (kind of masculine) structure that runs while I write, that serves my clients while I rest, that pays me while I feed the goats, stretch on my yoga mat or simply watch the sun part ways with the day.
And the time for this is now.
This week, when I’ve not been able to help those three VIP mentees by reading and responding to their words, as promised.
This week when not one email has gone out—yet.
Which leaves me wondering, imagining what an intentionally built, simple but structured humming machine of a system could do.
How it might free me up to quietly create even more.
How it might give me a framework, a repeatable process to release the many creations that have never seen the light of day—even if halfway released.
Honestly, I’m sure I have two or three dozen ebooks like The Magnetic Storytelling Method, 105 delicious pages I wrote and released in under two weeks because I was “on.”
I have recorded classes—some masterclasses on writing, others on JOY—that people, maybe you could be enJOYing.
Oh, and let’s not get me started on the already done book just hanging out—Write Your Most Delicious Life, part journal and part new essays. The darling companion to Create Your Most Delicious Life.
And that leads me perfectly to the audio records of yep, that last title, which I planned to release as the audiobook version and also as a private podcast with commentary and answers to questions I get often in regards to that book, the writing style, memoir type writing, and transformation, in general.
Which leads me to mention the difference between creating systems and creating words to be read.
As you can see, I’ve mastered the creation side and would even go so far as to say I’m what I call a Prolific Creator—sigh.
Ah, you thought that was a good thing?
Well, it is when there are systems.
Example?
My agent is the system for my books.
I write.
She has access.
She takes a title when she sees it’s nearing “ready.”
Without her heavy-handedness, my books may have just languished in those digital files much like some programs have . . . for years.
And being Prolific without a system?
That’s the part that drains me more than it delights me.
I crave a shift from the Prolific (but Chaotic Creator) energy and into the Quiet Creator who has a bit more structured ease.
This isn’t just about systems . . .
This is about my sanity, my soul, my words.
But creating can also live in the structure space, something I’m just now tapping into.
I remember telling my Dad once that he was a logical guy and I was a creative girl—opposites.
He was offended and declared he’s creative.
As a builder, I took pause. I thought of building as architectural plans, precise measurements, tools and materials, lots of logic.
As he wasn’t the designer, I didn’t peg him for being “creative”.
However, years later driving through a residential street, he’d developed, I realized my error.
No house was street facing, cookie cutter, but instead each one was nestled into the land.
Tilted this way and that, at the edge of a forest, around a bend, situated with a lovely view of a little swamp-lake.
The homes themselves weren’t rectangular boxes but more sprawling or tumbling creations. Interesting, unique each and every one.
The street was the location in a story.
Each house a character.
My Dad was more creative than I’d given him credit for. But unlike me, he’s comfortable in his structured, logical space.
He is logical.
He easily, naturally embodies both the masculine machine and feminine creative energies I am striving to blend.
When I stepped into that season of structured creation with my friend, I stepped into a more masculine energy.
An energy I associated with the bro marketing culture and made bad, wrong.
And this week—this sick, stalled, motionless week—I was reminded that the best version of me could and can embody them both—creative and structured—without making one wrong or bad.
Because if I had, I would have had a week with more than just one sale trickled in while I rested and healed.
The past systems I built for my friend and half-assed built for myself, have shown me it’s possible.
To have creative flow, I need structure.
To have feminine ease, I need masculine grounding.
Not the bro-marketing, hustle culture masculine energy but the steadfastness of systems that create the structure ease I so desire.
And this can come in two forms.
A simplification of what I create and offer.
As in one thing, one container, one offer.
But that’s so not me.
Or a simplification of how I run all-the-things.
A stopping of the split-focus nightmare, the tech-web of intrigue that too many systems, duct taped together, has created.
I have the path of structured ease—that purring machine—before me.
Imagine how much lighter I’ll be if I simply make a choice and then go—like my mantra that I share often.
Eleven minutes on the clock—go.
Go—as in write.
But in this case, go—as in build those humming, supportive systems in eleven minute masculine bursts.
We all hold both masculine and feminine energies.
And creating from masculine energy doesn’t need to be the bro marketing, which (to me) is hustle culture.
Pushing.
Gamification.
Results-driven instead of people-driven.
To me, that way doesn’t allow for the natural inclusion of the feminine energetic side.
It doesn’t allow for the ebb and flow that IS the messy middle.
It doesn’t allow for the feminine magic.
It doesn’t allow for the slow, quiet, word-centered life I crave.
Because I’m done being a Prolific, but Chaotic, Creator.
Ease doesn’t come without a plan.
Flow doesn’t appear without a container.
Creativity doesn’t blossom without some safety.
My friend, when alive, was always IN her business. On calls and doing all the things.
She told me during one of our chats that, of course, over the years she spent countless hours thinking about her need for systems but she didn’t prioritize them.
Didn’t know how.
Like her, I’ve been spending hours thinking but not doing.
Spinning but not decided.
Wondering about the how it will all work and forgetting my other mantra of truth.
The how is none of my f_cking business!
The how unfolds naturally when you move your feet and do.
My mind has known of this imbalance in my business life and now, now my body has decided to show up in painful protest to declare—now is the time.
Now is the time to embrace the masculine energy and brick-by-digital brick build the structured ease foundation I crave . . .
Or stop-all-this helping others via classes, coaching and products and go write more books.
And that was—is an option, a thought—to stop this creator business, to stop mentoring people who also want to step into their own slice of sunlight and earn cash from their words.
It would, after all, be easier to finish Jack and Emma’s story—the one where 80 percent of the scenes are already penned thanks to my jaunt with AI-Partnering™ that I wrote about in Episode 2.
I mean that story opens with a baby goat in a classroom!
Extremely cinematic, heartwarmingly funny and could so be turned into a movie script once on the paperback book shelves.
But I crave something more.
Community, maybe.
A desire to help others in this messy middle of life, yes.
Perhaps even a bit ego driven—to make a mark in a profound way.
Because as an author, it tends to be a solo endeavor.
But writing and creating publicly, like this, sometimes that feels the same solo way, too.
Those quiet cricket moments where no one responds . . .
Are the words even landing?
Are they reading? hearing? caring?
Here’s what I know after more than 30 years of “successful” word-play.
Silence doesn’t mean you’re not being read.
Silence doesn’t mean you’re not being seen.
Silence doesn’t mean your work isn’t landing.
Sometimes, the right eyes are already on your words.
Sometimes, the universe whispers instead of roars.
Sometimes, the validation you crave shows up in unexpected ways.
Or you realize validation isn’t what you need after all.
Instead, all you need is to create.
And make bank.
Because let’s face it—writing, like any endeavor born in passion, is just a hobby until you place a value on it and are compensated.
And that humming machine in the background, that structure, having that turned in is how a Quiet Creator can keep on creating.
So along with healing, this is my time to create a hub, a simple space that once built runs in the background while I write, mentor, live.
Word-business (re)building needs support.
Mentors.
Containers.
Systems.
Something that supports me even when the day feels heavy, the body feels off or a goat needs some more hugs.
Or I do.
What do I build/create that moves my business quietly forward with structure, with ease while I rest or play or simply write?
That’s the question I’m sitting in today.
And I think I’m finally ready to tell the truth—
My writing, my creativity is like a never dry well I can dip into at any time.
My life runs beautifully in flow, but my business needs more structure.
That’s the masculine/feminine dance I’m currently in.
I create to create—not necessarily to share—unless given a plan, a path.
And even then, I have been known to veer.
My agent hates this about me for she can never predict what I’ll have finished or when, when I write for myself.
What saves me, in her eyes, is that I’m so prolific!
But this week showed me, up close and personal, the cost of not having a plan, a system in place, a purring machine supporting me.
The sick week didn’t derail me.
It revealed me.
Structured ease is the dream.
But not accidental.
Not magical.
Built.
With intention.
I’m not meant to hustle loudly.
I’m here to write passionately.
I’m here to impact quietly.
Quiet Creator energy is my natural state.
This week made the cost of not choosing—
not acting on my desire for structured ease—
impossible to ignore.
Structured ease isn’t accidental.
And something in me knows . . .
it’s time.
What are you here to do?
JOYful,
Jill “The JOYful & Quiet Creator” Stevens
💜
Next week brings the fourth episode of Between the Sheets . . .
and then it’s decision time.
Do I keep rolling out these Friday words—or call it a wrap?
I’m curious to hear what you think . . . and whether a full year of this (re)building of a creative life is something you’d want to witness unfold.
I’ll be asking.
If something in today’s story stirred a spark in you, here are a few places where my words live beyond these Friday sheets:
✦ The 33 Day Magnetic Storytelling JOYful Journey
✦ Create Your Most Delicious Life
✦ The Magnetic Storytelling Method
And coming soon . . . with all the structured ease . . .
✦ The Book: Write Your Most Delicious Life
✦ The Quiet Creator hub—(for lack of a better word)—reveal.
And if these Friday words are speaking your language, you can subscribe below.
Just so you know . . .
This is my slice of the web where hot flashes meet cold wine, neck waddles are real, and birthdays feel more like breakdowns.
Step into my word-world as I (re)build my writing life in real time.
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