Who doesn’t love their weekly dose of inspiring links on creativity and writing that The Artist’s Road tweeted during the week @on_creativity? But did you know the tweets offer insights into your blogger’s week? This week your faithful blogger found his schedule get away from him (yes, that passive wording frames your blogger as a victim and not the culprit). No coincidence that several of today’s links have to do with time management. Oh, and bacon and monkeys.

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CREATIVITY

• “201 Ways to Arouse Your Creativity,” Katie Tallo, guest post on Write to Done: That headline sounds like I’m supposed to seduce my muse. I was hooked on the first one, however, “Talk to a monkey.” How can you not love monkeys? Even the word itself is fun.

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  “How to Steal Back Time to Create What Matters,” Dan Goodwin, A Big Creative Yes: Dan makes a return to Creativity Tweets of the Week with an interesting mind shift — don’t think of your creative time as stolen, think of non-creative activities as stealing time from your creativity.

• “16 Great Tips That Will Add More Hours to Your Day,” Abhijeet Mukherjee, Dumb Little Man: A good follow-up to the post above.
• “How to Cultivate Dolce far Niente,” Courtney Carver, BeMoreWithLess: She’s referring here to the Italian expression for “the sweetness of doing nothing.” We all need to slow down and enjoy those peaceful moments. One of her recommendations is “Make dinner with your lover.” For me, if bacon is involved, I sometimes feel I’m making love with my dinner.
• “6 Techniques to Ignite Your Creativity and Passion,” Ronald Alezander, PhD, The Huffington Post: Tap into creativity through “open-minded consciousness.” No, I’m not going to explain that, I don’t have  PhD. I’ll leave that to Dr. Alexander.
• “Want Creativity From Your Team? Leave Out the Details,” Tamara Kleinberg, Imaginibbles: I’ve learned this lesson the hard way as an executive when I’ve commissioned work from graphic artists — the more “guidance” you give a creative, the less creativity you get in return.

WRITING

• “Topical Round-Up: How to Win Readers,” Janalyn Voigt: What? I can’t find reades just by writing beautiful prose and putting it out into the universe? Shucks. Fortunately Janalyn has some recommendations.

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  “Transforming Negative Energy Into Positive Ambition,” Carolyn Arnold, A Writer’s Journey: Writing involves rejection. Lots of it. Here are some tips to make the most out of that reality.

• “Culprits that Block Writers from Reaching a Pro Level,” Ray Rhamey, Writer Unboxed: We can spot the flaws in the writing of others, so why can’t we see the flaws that keep an agent or editor from reading past the first few lines of our own prose?
• “Description 101: Is Your Description Helping Your Story or Holding You Back,” Janice Hardy, The Other Side of the Story: Description is an area of my creative writing that could use a lot of improvement. I will say, however, that if my writing often lacks olfactory description, it’s because I have a ridiculously poor sense of smell. There. I said it.

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The latest Creativity Tweets of the Week is done, and The Artist’s Road now owns the rest of his day. Hmm. A nap sounds good.