I want to tell you something that took me an embarrassingly long time to stop being ashamed of.
I do not have one thing.
I have never had one thing. I have books and music and visual art and websites and storytelling and media projects and ideas that wake me up at 2 a.m. demanding to be written on whatever receipt or sticky note is closest to my bed. I have a brain that does not recognize the concept of “just pick a lane.” I have a creative life that looks, from the outside, like someone dumped six different puzzle boxes on the floor and started forcing pieces together with sheer stubbornness and a hot glue gun.
For years I thought that was a flaw. A lack of discipline. Proof that I wasn’t serious. Real creatives pick their medium and master it. Real artists don’t scatter. Real writers don’t also make music. Real musicians don’t also build websites. Real anythings don’t also do the seventeen other things rattling around in their heads like loose change in a dryer.
I spent a lot of years trying to be a “real” something.
Turns out the trying-to-be-one-thing strategy had roughly the same success rate as trying to use a single save point in a roguelike. You know. Zero.
So eventually I stopped fighting the wiring and started asking a different question. Not “which one do I pick?” but “what if these things aren’t separate projects that compete with each other, but different instruments in the same piece of music?” What if the reason none of them work in isolation is because none of them were ever supposed to be alone?
That question is basically the founding document of Sakura Studios.
What Sakura Studios Actually Is
I am going to be honest with you: there is no tidy elevator pitch for this.
Sakura Studios is not a company in the traditional sense, meaning I am not going to pretend there is a gleaming office somewhere with a foosball table and a team of ten and a pitch deck with hockey-stick revenue projections. That would be fiction, and not the fun kind. It is a creative framework. A container. The name I put on the part of my life that is about making things, so that all those things have somewhere to live together instead of being scattered across seventeen different unrelated contexts.
It holds the writing. The music. The visual art and design. The web presence. The storytelling in whatever form it decides to take on a given Tuesday. The media projects. All of it under one roof, conceptually, because all of it comes from the same source: me, this particular brain, these particular obsessions, this life that has been shaped by disability and faith and grief and joy and a relentless need to make things that mean something.
The cherry blossom image matters to me, by the way. Sakura. Not because it’s aesthetically pretty (although, I mean, obviously). Because cherry blossoms are famously temporary. They bloom hard and fast and then they’re gone, and the Japanese concept of appreciating that impermanence, of finding it beautiful rather than tragic, that hits different when you have lived any portion of your life understanding that time is not guaranteed. That beauty doesn’t require permanence to be real. That the making of a thing has value regardless of whether the thing lasts forever or sells a million copies or trends on anything.
I needed a name that understood that before I did.
The Parts That Were Never Supposed to Fit
Let me actually walk you through the pieces, because I think it matters to name them instead of leaving it vague.
Books. I write. Long-form fiction that I have been building and rebuilding and re-approaching for years. Stories that live in my head with the kind of urgency that makes it hard to be present at dinner. Characters who feel like people I actually know, which I understand sounds unhinged but every writer reading this just nodded. The books are probably the oldest part of the creative life. The thing I knew about myself before I knew most other things.
Music. I make music. I am not going to oversell my credentials here, I’m not dropping stadium tours. But music has been a language for me in the places where regular language breaks down, which, as someone autistic, is not a small category of places. There are things I can say in a melody or a chord progression that I cannot figure out how to say in sentences, and that is not a metaphor, that is a literal neurological reality. Music is not the side project. Music is the other primary language.
Visual art and design. I make things that you look at. Graphics, visual storytelling, design work for the projects themselves. This started as “I need to make a cover for this thing” and turned into its own territory because of course it did. Visual communication has its own grammar and I find that grammar genuinely fascinating. Also, sometimes you need to externalize what something looks like before you can figure out what it means.
Websites and digital presence. Sarahking.ca is this. Wanderer’s Notes is this. The architecture of how you show up online, the way you structure information and create spaces for people to wander through and find things that matter to them, that is a creative act. It is not just plumbing. The container shapes the thing contained. I have cared about this more than most people think is reasonable and I have zero regrets about that.
Storytelling and media. This is the broadest bucket and intentionally so. Storytelling is not just novels and not just songs. It’s the way you frame a blog post. It’s the structure of a video. It’s the sequence in which you reveal information to a person encountering your world for the first time. Media, in whatever form, is just storytelling with a delivery mechanism attached. I care about both the story and the mechanism.
Now. None of these things are supposed to go together according to how the creative industry is typically organized. Publishers want writers who are writers. Music platforms want musicians who are musicians. Design clients want designers who design. The modern creative economy is deeply allergic to the person who does not stay in their box.
I have tried the box. I am claustrophobic.
The Themes That Live Underneath All of It
Here is where it actually starts to make sense, at least to me. Because when I look at everything that falls under the Sakura Studios umbrella, when I actually ask what all these things have in common, the answer is not “Sarah is easily distracted.” The answer is that there are four things I am always, in every project, regardless of medium, trying to work out.
Creativity itself. I am endlessly, almost obnoxiously fascinated by the act of making. Where do things come from? What does it mean to take what is inside you and convert it into something that exists outside you? Why does that matter? What happens to you when you do it and what happens to you when you can’t? This is not an abstract philosophical interest. It is practical and urgent. I have lived periods of my life where illness or circumstance closed off the making of things, and I can tell you with precision what that costs. Creativity is not decoration. For some of us it is structure. It is how we stay coherent.
Identity. Who am I and who are we and how do we know? This one is personal in ways I don’t always fully surface. Building an identity that is genuinely yours, not the one that was handed to you by pain or by other people’s expectations or by systems that were not designed with you in mind, is a life’s work. It shows up in the fiction (characters who are trying to figure out who they are outside of what has been done to them). It shows up in the music (the emotional archaeology of figuring out what you feel when you’ve been trained not to feel it). It shows up in the design and the digital presence (what do you look like to the world and is that actually you?). Identity is everywhere in this work because identity is the question I have been living inside for a very long time.
Memory. I am obsessed with memory. How we keep things. How we lose things. How the stories we tell about our past shape the present we can imagine for ourselves. How communities hold memory, how families distort it, how trauma embeds itself in the body and the narrative structures we build to survive. My fiction is basically memory given plot. My music is memory given sound. This blog, honestly, is memory given a comment section. I do not think it is possible to be a storyteller without being, at some level, a person who thinks hard about what it means to remember and what it costs to forget.
Communication. Not in the marketing sense, though sure, that too. In the fundamental sense: how do we actually reach each other? How do you take what is true inside yourself and transmit it across the gap to another human being without it dying in transit? This is the problem underneath every medium. Books try to solve it one way. Music tries to solve it another way. Visual art tries a third. Maybe we need all the attempts because the gap is too wide for any single bridge. I genuinely believe that. I think the reason I work in multiple forms is not that I lack discipline but that I refuse to stop trying to find the one that actually gets through.
Those four things. Creativity, identity, memory, communication. They are the DNA. Everything else is expression.
The Part Where I Refuse to Lie to You About Success
I am not going to dress this up.
Building a creative life around what actually matters to you, rather than around what the market most clearly rewards, is not the path of least resistance. It is frequently confusing to explain at parties. It does not always produce clean outcomes on any reasonable timeline. Some projects take years to become what they’re supposed to be. Some projects do the thing where they quietly teach you something essential and then dissolve without ever becoming a product, and you have to make peace with that because the learning was the point even if the learning did not come with a receipt.
Not every project I make under the Sakura Studios umbrella needs to be commercially successful. I want to say that clearly and without apology. Some things are made because they need to exist. Some things are made because making them changes me in a way I needed to be changed. Some things are made because they are the bridge to the thing after them, the necessary chapter that unlocks the map. Commercial success is lovely when it happens. It is not the only metric of worth.
This is something the productivity-guru internet actively hates. The internet wants you to monetize. Wants you to have your funnel and your audience pipeline and your seven-stream passive income from your creative work. And look, I’m not anti-sustainability, I live in reality, I understand that keeping the lights on matters. But I have watched too many people gut their actual creative vision in service of what performs well and come out the other side making things that are technically successful and personally hollow.
Hollow is not what I am building toward.
There is a verse in Ecclesiastes, and I know some of you just rolled your eyes, stay with me, where the Preacher is in the middle of his great inventory of everything that turns out to be meaningless, and he circles around to this: there is nothing better for a person than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their toil. “Find satisfaction in their toil.” Not conquer the market. Not achieve legacy status. Not be recognized by the gatekeepers. Find satisfaction in the work itself. I have read a lot of creative philosophy and that is still the most subversive creative manifesto I have ever encountered.
What It Looks Like to Actually Do This
People sometimes ask what a day looks like when you’re building something this multi-pronged.
Honestly? Like organized chaos wearing a trench coat and pretending to be a competent adult.
There are days that are pure writing days, where the fiction pulls focus and everything else has to wait. There are days that are design days, where I am in visual mode and trying to write prose feels like trying to eat soup with a fork. There are music days where I am working something out emotionally that I cannot yet put into words, and that’s fine, that’s what the music is for. There are admin and architecture days for the digital side of things. There are days where I sit down with the intention of doing one thing and an entirely different project elbows its way to the front and demands attention and I have learned, mostly, to let that happen.
Chronic illness adds its own scheduling commentary to all of this, which is to say sometimes the plan is irrelevant and the body has opinions. I have learned to treat creative capacity as a resource to be managed rather than a tap you can just turn on at will. Rest is infrastructure. I say that not as a wellness platitude but as a hard-won operational lesson. [will need more info if specific health context is wanted here.]
The autistic brain, which is my brain, does an interesting thing with multi-disciplinary creative work. It hyperfocuses. Hard. Which means when I’m in something, I am in it, and the depth I can reach is real. The challenge is the context-switching, the transitions between modes, which cost more for me than they might for someone with a more neurotypical processing style. I’ve had to build systems around that. Not to fight the way I’m wired but to work with it. The hyperfocus is the superpower. The system is just the support structure that lets the superpower function without wrecking everything else.
Why It’s Called a Life and Not a Brand
I notice a lot of discourse around creative work right now that is fundamentally about brand-building. Your aesthetic. Your niche. Your consistent posting schedule and your content pillars and your monetization strategy. And I want to be careful here because I do not think any of that is inherently evil. Showing up consistently matters. Knowing what you stand for matters. Being able to communicate what you do in a way that other humans can understand, that matters a lot.
But there is a difference between building a brand and building a life, and it is not a small difference.
A brand is a presentation. A life is a reality. A brand stays on-message. A life wanders, changes, contradicts itself, grieves, grows, doubles back, surprises you. A brand has a target audience. A life has other people in it who are not targets but actual humans you are trying to reach and be reached by.
Sakura Studios is a framework for a creative life. Which means it has to have room for the wandering, the changing, the doubling back. It has to have room for the projects that do not fit neatly into any category but demand to be made anyway. It has to have room for the version of me that exists in five years, who will understand things I do not yet understand and will need to make things I cannot yet imagine.
The cherry blossoms bloom and fall and the tree is still there and next year it blooms again, differently, because a year of weather and light and growth has happened in between. The impermanence is not a failure of the tree. It is the tree being alive.
I want to be a tree that is actually alive, not a very convincing plastic replica with excellent brand cohesion.
An Invitation, Not a Conclusion
I do not have a tidy bow for this one. That would be dishonest and also kind of against the whole thesis, which is that things don’t have to be tidy to be real and worth doing.
What I will say is this: if you are someone who has multiple things, who has never been able to pick just one, who has spent years either apologizing for that or trying to sand yourself down into a shape that fits the available boxes, I see you. I am you. The multi-thing life is not a failure of focus. It might be a different kind of focus entirely, one that is less about depth in a single narrow channel and more about depth in a particular set of questions, expressed through every available language.
Creativity matters. Identity matters. Memory matters. Communication matters. The reaching across the gap toward other human beings, through whatever imperfect bridge you can build out of whatever materials you have, that matters.
The parts that were never supposed to fit together are still sitting on my workbench. Some of them are bolted solid now. Some of them I’m still figuring out the joints for. The project is not done.
It’s not supposed to be done. That’s the whole point.
Sakura Studios is the name on the door. Come wander around in it with me.
