Things are not great.

And yet we keep moving.

Hello again, from the creative trenches. Or something like that where I am fighting to do work over and over trying again and again and still feeling like I’m behind.

Everything is not fine outside of my house.

My little plot of land here in suburbia feels like a haven. Things are okay here inside the fence. The deck may be falling down and I worry every time my kids climb up on the fence because it might also fall down, but the tomatoes are red and the peppers are red and the blackberries are ripe. My face is red from running a couple of miles a week, and because my skin just turns red in the heat. I’ve got coneflowers and daisies and zinnias to cut and cosmos waving in the wind. Sunflowers are on their way. And my garden pinwheels make me inordinately happy.

It’s so hard to live in this world. To stay informed without getting overwhelmed. To watch the flooding and families torn apart. To know that the safety nets that saved us before are being systematically cut with full knowledge that people will die.

Birthday dinner with flowers and plants and cocktails. There is still some good in the world.

So I light my little candles in the morning and I write in my journal and watch the sun rise. I put my hands or my thoughts on my manuscript. I try to move my body despite the heat.

And just like you (probably), I’m scrolling and scrolling and no amount of dopamine boost from the anticipation of the next great story will overcome the existential dread.

But there’s always that cup of coffee. And green tomatoes turning red and yellow.

I guess one good thing about the world burning down is that I don’t have to care about fitting in anymore. I don’t want to fit in. Only our weirdness and willingness to not conform to who they want us to be will save us.

That and maybe a little belief in our own power to change our little corners of the world.

I think I’m going to build a dang pond in my yard, now, because it’ll make me feel better.

Recommended Reading

as always, links below are probably affiliate links through bookshop.org. Please consider purchasing through these links to support me and independent bookstores.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

A disturbing look at how power (and money, a lot of money) corrupts, makes people think they’re better/smarter/more deserving than everyone else. And how more often than not, that kind of power turns people into monsters who only want to protect their own wealth rather than actually do good in the world. This book may not provide you with existential relief, but it will remind you that these assholes are just people like us—except worse.

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

What an interesting narrative frame for character development: A women’s boxing tournament. Love the lessons in characterization. Don’t super love the plot-less structure. Or, if there is a plot, it’s hard to find. I read this one more like a related series of short stories.

7 hand-written pages a day

On the insanity of the #1000wordsofsummer and how it's grounding me.

I am writing to you from the throes of #1000wordsofsummer, that two weeks out of the year when all the writers hole up in their rooms for at least 45 min a day and try to create something.

I have sat down for the last 4 nights and written four hand-written pages in my trusty quad ruled notebook, which equals about 1000 words, give or take. When I write like this, I really make it difficult for my future self, because I refuse to put in line breaks for new paragraphs or dialogue, I just write straight through, every line from one side to the other. It’s easier for me to keep track of how many words I’m writing when every page is uniform, and it also scratches a little completion itch when I can flip through my notebook and every page is filled to the brim with words.

Like an insane person, I don’t count my morning pages (three hand-written pages) toward my 1000 words. So if you want to be technical about it, and I do, I’m writing closer to 1750 words a day. I’m bookending my days as well. Morning pages in the morning, 1000 words in the evening.

Look at that coreopsis in my mailbox bed. Those colors!

I’m getting up at 5 am to have coffee and write my morning pages, and after 10 weeks of doing this, I feel positively untethered if I don’t get those pages written. I woke up at 6 this morning due to a late night involving

• The end of a very good book,

• A chirping smoke detector,

• A mislaid box of batteries,

• A child nightmare at 4am (Mama, I don’t want to go to the beach. I had a bad dream about crabs).

I gave myself a pass to try to sneak another hour of sleep, and it didn’t work out in my favor. I just felt off all day. So I stick to the morning/night pages despite the routine’s restrictions and the tired headaches. There’s coffee for that.

I wrote my novel in the evening after the kids went to bed, and perhaps that’s what I should be doing with my time these days. I’m currently generating words on another project for 1000 words, but the magic of this program (? Fortnight? Community? Not sure what to call it) comes from it being okay to work on whatever I want.

Do I have to write 4 pages a day? No. I could set a timer and do 45 minutes of revision instead. I could noodle around with those essays I’ve been mulling over for months.

Yes, I know that doing all this sounds insane. But aren’t all artists a bit insane? They have to be a little outside the norm to make something happen. Gonna embrace my weirdness with this one, and just continue to create.

Recommended reading:

As always, book links are affiliate links with bookshop.org, which also gives back to local bookstores.

Like Mother Like Mother, by Susan Reiger

Three generations of women who have varying levels of apologies for their own behaviors. This book examines how we hurt each other in order to find our own way in the world. It’s told in a largely reportage fashion, and at a clip that carries you along quickly.

How 2000s Culture Messed Us Up, Culture Study Podcast with Anne Helen Peterson

Those of us who were teens in the 90s lived through the commercialization of teen girls plus the post-feminist treatment of women, and it messed a lot of us up. Discusses Britney, Spice Girls, and Pretty Woman among other cultural touchstones.

Brunette ambition

If Madonna can do it, why can't I?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ambition. It often feels like a dirty word, a thing to be avoided, a sin.

And we love to stomp on women with ambition: Madonna, Britney, Kamala. You can see it clear as day in any comment section. These women want to make art or make the world a better place or even, yes, be famous, and we cheer their successes—until we don’t. And it’s that last part that’s so scary.

No wonder I’ve taken so long to even believe that I could write this book. The ambition of it, the audacity of believing in myself and my own (however meager) success brings with it the terrifying specter of being perceived, judged, and ultimately rejected.

Neighborhood kids under a big cloudy sky. May you have the fashion confidence of a pack of 4 year olds.

I know I’m getting ahead of myself. No agent, no book deal, no reason to really think I’ll be successful. And yet, the ambition remains.

While I’m working, I don’t think about these things. However, when I’m journaling, when I’m thinking deeply about my writing and the what and the how and the why of what I’m doing, well the doubt begins to creep in. So I list the reasons why:

• I am doing this because I have a story to tell.

• I’m doing this to teach my children that they should follow their dreams.

• I’m doing this because it’s hard.

• I’m doing this because I want to create.

Sure, I can (and do) create in many ways. And I could achieve those goals in many other ways that don’t require a 5am wake up.

But I keep coming back to it. I keep coming back to this character and her story, and I think that’s what it means to be ambitious.

I’m driven by something deep inside of myself, and I cannot turn back now.

I tend to shy away from celebrating my own accomplishments, because I feel like I they have come too easily. Like I expect excellence from myself and when it happens I shrug it off, because I met my own expectations.

So let me brag a bit: I submitted my query letter for public feedback last week. I was terrified that it would be torn apart. But I got good feedback! Not for the first time, but maybe in the most public way yet, I got feedback that the work I’m doing right now could be good. I’m still riding high on that interaction, because I worked really hard on that pitch.

And it makes me feel a bit of hope that this dream might actually come true.

So, if that’s ambition, then fine. It feels good.

Recommended Reading

Not much to recommend this week. I’m reading a draft of a friend’s historical fiction novel, and getting lost in that. Other than that, I’ve been watching The White Lotus (mostly for Parker Posey, but also because Walton Goggins. Little known fact: I have a long-abandoned Twitter profile @WaltonBloggins. I honestly don’t know what’s on there, probably embarrassing stuff from 2017.)

I’ve also been spending a lot of time in the garden. So that’s my recommendation: Go spend some time outside.

Reading Deprivation

The Artist's Way, Week 4 may break me. Send help.

Checking in from week 4 of the Artist’s Way. I hate it.

I mean, I’m supposed to hate it, or at least feel uncomfortable with this week’s main assignment, which requires me to go on a reading diet.

When I told my husband, he laughed in my face. “Do you do anything else?” Well, maybe. Sometimes?

The whole point of the assignment is to see what opens up, what creative things your brain will create if it’s not constantly being fed written media.

I have not been successful at cutting reading out entirely. I have work to do with deadlines, so I have to read a bit for those articles. I also have read to go to sleep since I can’t remember when, so I have cheated in that capacity. That’s about where the reasonable accommodations end. Beyond that has been a struggle that has also resulted in some revenge doom-scrolling and even a whole afternoon of binge reading.

Take that Julia Cameron.

Let’s count the successes, because this newsletter is about love and light, dammit.

1. I took my sketchbook with me on a couple of appointments and sketched instead of reading or social media.

2. I spent an evening waiting for my daughter to go to sleep listening to music instead of podcasts/Instagram. I realized during this time that I have a strange affinity for songs with intense tambourine parts.

3. I’ve been listening to music in the car instead of podcasts. Had my yearly reconnection with Counting Crows and drove through the neighborhood singing “Murder of One” at full volume. Highly recommend.

4. Spent mornings line editing chapters from my book instead of doomscrolling (this might be the greatest win).

5. Managed to avoid reading most of the newsletters in my inbox this week, limiting myself to work/kid related email. Recommended, although please continue to read my newsletter. I’m important! I swear!

6. Had a breakthrough about fear holding me back from some pretty intense work/writing changes that everything in the world is telling me to lean into but I kept getting in my own way.

When I tally up those successes, I do feel like I’ve made some progress. Thanks, Julia Cameron. You may actually be onto something with this whole Creative Recovery thing.

A sketch by the artist. Footstool with blanket, Ticonderoga on sketchbook paper. Fingernail polish is a paid actor.

I’m only on week 4 of the 12-week program. I’m pretty sure that the 17 times I have attempted the AW, I have quit during this week. Not reading just feels like such an imposition. In the past, I’ve felt like a failure because I just couldn’t put the books down.

This time, I decided to be gentler with myself, writing about why I slipped up rather than castigating myself until I abandoned the project. Not this time, brain! I’m going to deprive you of reading and succeed. At least for a little while.

Recommended Reading

links in this section are affiliate links for Bookshop.org.

Of course, this week’s recommendation is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. If you didn’t know who she was from context clues before, now you get those jokes above. Ha. Isn’t it always funnier when someone tells you the punchline?

The Artist’s Way is not just for writers, although many of those I’ve given my copy away to in the past have been writers. It’s for musicians, painters, dancers, potters, lawyers, engineers, and anyone else who wants to create or open their brain to more creativity. I give this book away every time I buy it, because I know what the morning pages have done for my own mental health, goal setting, manifestation, and just general stability.

You’ll love it. And hate it because it pushes you and makes you take a hard look at yourself and figure out what you want and what’s holding you back. But that’s why so many people love it.

A Retreat

And recommendations for resolute and beautiful books about women's fertility.

Last week a friend and I went on an overnight retreat to get some serious writing time in. It was lovely.

Except for the three or so hours we waited in the DMV for her to be seen to get her RealID.

But we went to (what I assume is) the last remaining Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant. I love a good salad bar, and RT’s is a place my husband and I would frequent when we first started dating. Ah, memories.

The retreat is a little place just outside of Nashville called Penuel Ridge. You can AirBnB a cottage or an apartment, and it’s just lovely. The Ridge has a lake, waterfalls, a labyrinth (of bricks in the ground, not, like, The Shining-style), and a freestanding meditation room called The Well. There’s also a 2.5 mile trail that traces the ridge and the property.

The ridge trail was just coming to life, and we saw swarms of swallowtail butterflies. They flew down the trail toward us and would swoop around us. Daredevils. I also slowed our pace considerably to take pictures of and attempt to identify the flowers and plants just beginning to bloom.

Little Sweet Betsy or Wakerobin was blooming all around the ridge in leaf-covered spaces like this.

I brought the first 48 pages/3 chapters of my book to edit. I ended up doing line edits on that whole section, plus thought really deeply about how to rearrange the opening to accommodate some new scenes I wrote last month.

It’s scary and fascinating and exciting to do this work and watch the story take its own shape. I’m learning from it as I go.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about being perceived and ambitious in my own work and as the author of my work. So much of my life I was told to calm down, be quiet, take it easy. My mother likened me to Tigger, like the hyper tiger from Pooh tales. And society doesn’t like an ambitious woman. We want to tell her to sit down or that her story isn’t important.

But we have important stories to tell.

And if I didn’t have ambition, I wouldn’t have spent the last 18 months + the previous decade working on this story. I have a story to tell, and I’m going to put that story out in the world. When it’s done.

Recommended Reads

Blue Hour Homecoming: Finding Life on the Fringes of Reproduction by Alle Mudrick

Every Amazon review (including my own) contains the word “unflinching.” Because Alle goes there. Every time, whether she’s talking about the complications of her own body, the suffering of her children, or the beauty of the New Mexico arroyos she and her husband hike. This memoir is published by Third Rail Press, a new publishing company born of the Big 5 publisher’s fear of memoirs and stories about women’s issues of grief, fertility, and loss. Third Rail Press was co-founded by Alle and author Mary Adkins, who also founded The Book Incubator, where Alle is a memoir coach.

I’m also looking forward to reading You Might Feel A Little Pressure by Mary Adkins, which I should be receiving soon!

I’m going to let these two recommendations stand on their own today. As women’s bodily autonomy is stripped away little by little every day in the US and threats to the personhood—and let’s not forget citizenship—of women rise, it’s important to humanize these issues, read about them, and promote stories about them.