About this article:
The Side Project is a reflective, personal essay about the people, places, and passions that keep marketers creatively alive outside of work — and what those pursuits give back in return.
There’s a singular reason I fell into marketing as a career: the opportunity to create and be creative.
Writing was the most obvious path for me, having popped out of the womb as a wordsmith. My journey went from journalist → copywriter → brand marketer → social media manager, and then up the ranks to my current role as Director of Social and Influencers at Generac.
But that telling looks like a straight career line from point A to point Z. It doesn’t tell the whole story—or capture the side quests I embarked on along the way. Songwriter. Rom-com novelist. Children’s book author and illustrator.
Somewhere along this crazy road (I blame Covid), I lost sight of finding a creative spark outside of the day job. I let corporate America dictate how I defined my passions. I took great pride in adding “conference speaker” and “thought leader” monikers. My work defined me, and that’s a highway to the danger zone.
Always the eldest daughter/overachiever, when my therapist nudged me to find an outside-of-work passion, I chose not one, but two.
The first took me back to my music roots and to songwriting, something I once pursued professionally. But as a Taylor Swift convert-turned-obsessed fan, I’ve been inspired by her lyricism, her musical depth and the “I’m-a-mastermind” production behind her songs. I began relistening to her catalogue through that lens—hearing the harmonies, analyzing the ebbs and flows of the instruments as they build drama and intimacy, and noting the choices she makes with technology.
I made a LinkedIn plea to my network for introductions to music producers who would be willing to help me learn more about production and music theory. It connected me with some amazing resources.
One of those new connections told me something that became an “aha!” moment. When you listen to a song, you’re usually distracted. You’re driving in a car. Shopping in a store. Dancing in a club. So that song? It needs to hook you in seconds, bring you along on the journey and, in most cases, make you want to share it and listen to it on repeat.
If that doesn’t sound like the recipe for a great social media asset, I don’t know what does. It gave me a great metaphor to use with my team, my peers and my leadership to explain why I strive for the kind of content I do—and why our team’s metrics have grown 10x over the last two years.
My second creative outlet has brought me so much joy that I’d almost forgotten how much fun my original passion—writing—could be. I started by revisiting a draft of an urban fantasy I’d written years ago, but as I was noodling on edits, another inspiration grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. So, I began work on a four-book paranormal romance series grounded in Japanese mythology, set in cities that captured my heart and will become characters in their own right.
I’ve been working on this series differently from any other project I’ve written. Normally, the words just flow onto the page, and I edit later. This time, I had to build a whole world, with Easter eggs and everything intertwined across the books. I also had a research assistant in the form of Claude, which turned a multi-year task into a multi-month one.
Just as studying music changed how I thought about social content, writing fiction changed how I thought about AI.
This project has sparked creativity at work as well. It has also reinforced the notion that creatives are a long way from being replaced by AI. It won’t write one word of my series, because that’s what I love. Instead, it “does my laundry” in the form of research and organization, allowing me to focus on the crafting and writing.
As a result, I’ve become more familiar with prompting in ways that get the results I’m looking for, and I’ve been able to pass that knowledge on to my team. Throughout 2026, we’ve used AI to support our research and brainstorming, and we recently created a social media-specific brainstorming agent/partner to boost our content game.
We’ve also up-leveled our posts and recently discovered that content from the past six months continues to generate hundreds of thousands of engagements long after it was published. While the agent itself is new, it builds on the ways we’ve already been using AI to strengthen our content.
It has also changed my enthusiasm for great social media, which, if I’m honest, had been giving “the thrill is gone” vibes for a while.
The one downside of having these side quests is that I’m a little miffed at myself for letting my work life dictate my creative outlets for all this time. What could I have created if I’d stepped back and assessed the state of things sooner? I’ll never know, but I do know that I’m never going back into that box again!
Want to follow along with my series-writing progress? Subscribe to my free Substack. (even if you’re not a fan of paranormal romance, I talk more about the writing process)