The Evening and the Morning in 𝛕®∪m₽’s America

I fought in [a] war for this country, saw friends die, got PTSD. For what? For this? To be afraid of what the future holds for my wife and daughters? For our healthcare and retirement plans? For our beautiful planet that we humans seem hellbent on destroying in the name of a few cents off at the gas pump? For our republic which nearly lasted 250 years? This is my reward? Ashamed does not begin to describe how I feel.

(Source)

The week before the election I listened to The Evening and the Morning, a doorstopper of a novel set in medieval England. The YouTube algorithm had gifted me with a very interesting writing tip from Ken Follett and I wanted to see this plotting principle of his in action. (Spoilers to follow. You have been warned!)

Follett’s rule of thumb is this: your plot should be turning every four to six pages. Some sort of obstacle or revelation. The turn could be catastrophic or it could be something “small,” but it won’t be insignificant because it has somehow altered the character’s situation and how we view it.

And whoooo boy, the first turning in The Evening and the Morning is a swift hard punch to the gut. Our hero, Edgar, starts the novel embarking upon one kind of life, but by the end of that first chapter he’s on a totally different course owing to factors beyond his control.

The primary villain in The Evening and the Morning is a bishop named Wynstan. He’s a stereotypical baddie, cruel and conniving, using everyone he interacts with like pawns on a chessboard. This “man of God” is guilty of fornication, theft, forgery, arson, and worse. HE MURDERS HIS OWN BROTHER, for crying out loud.

And he gets away with all of it.

…Is this sounding familiar?

Wynstan’s corruption is SO egregious that a naively optimistic reader (ahem) keeps thinking, “WOW. Just when you think this guy can’t get any more flagrantly evil! This time surely he’ll be made to answer for his sins!”

But the comeuppance never happens. Wynstan gets away with EVERYTHING.

That’s how it looks right now. “Don the Con” has zero empathy, zero capacity for self reflection, and certainly no concept of public service. The rational 48% of the American electorate has repeatedly asked, what more does he have to do before the M⩓G⩓ crowd admits they’ve been scammed by a megalomaniacal felon?

But that’s not how cult psychology works. At this point I feel like the man could devour a baby on live television and retain a majority of his followers. This time, when cult members follow their leader off a cliff, the rest of the world might very well be swept along—into a fascist hellscape.

How are we to conduct ourselves inside this bog of eternal stench? How can we best employ our creativity in response to forces beyond our control?

When we read compelling fiction, it may seem that we have dropped through an escape hatch out of ordinary life, but in actuality we are cultivating our emotional intelligence, giving ourselves space to consider how we would feel and act in a hypothetical situation. What would I do if I were Edgar, Ragna, or Aldred discovering Wynstan’s latest act of sabotage? Would that be the crime that finally broke me?

In Follett’s novel, Aldred the abbot builds his center of learning and Edgar and Ragna finally get to live happily after. And where’s Wynstan?

Living in a leper colony, brain and body rotting with syphilis.

Don the Con is here to expose our hypocrisies (because, come on, no Black American is EVER going to wonder “whatever happened to common decency?”). He is here to teach us how to stand up to bullies, and to show us what happens when we defund public education. Clearly these lessons will take longer than eight or twelve years to learn. Bullies don’t always get what they deserve, but their power always comes with a time limit, even if it’s decades longer than it should be. Evening to morning, this plot will go on turning.

So let’s keep going. Keep making, keep dreaming, keep being kind to one another in the midst of all that is cruel and absurd. No matter how they distort the facts, this is our country and our world too.

A few more links:

Octavia Butler’s short story “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” [have you read Parable of the Sower yet?]

Heather Demetrios, Steady As She Goes

George Saunders, A Slightly Altered Course (Here at Story Club)

The most comforting hot breakfast cereal

Love in an Age of Madness, an (admittedly overwrought) 2016-election reaction piece

P.S. The International Rescue Committee is the humanitarian aid organization to which I contribute on a monthly basis. Here’s a link so you can click through and donate if you feel so inclined.

An ode to the humble index card

Organizing my notes for what would become A Bright Clean Mind at the Writers' Room of Boston in early 2017. Photo by Daniel Johnson.

Every student in my sixth-grade Language Arts class had to write a research paper on the same topic:

TERMITES.

I don’t know that any of us were thrilled about that—I certainly wasn’t!—but thirty years later I still get the warm fuzzies for Mrs. Kilcher for instilling my nerdly love of the 3x5” index card. Write one fact about termites on each card, arrange the cards into a logical sequence, and your paper has all but written itself.

As a chaotic creative type—at least that’s how I’ve felt on the inside, even back then—the simplicity of this tool and method has always made me feel serenely “on top of things,” especially when my tech has let me down. When my iBook crashed the spring of my sophomore year of college and I lost my almost-finished final paper for Traditional Irish Music [“that’s so NYU!”], I was able to reconstruct it quickly with the index cards I’d used to write it the first time. (In those pre-WiFi days we used flash drives to back up our papers. Guess I was too intent on finishing the thing in time—LOLsob.)

Chapter-by-chapter cards for Life Without Envy

Then and now, the humble index card is my first and best safeguard against overwhelm. Their sturdiness and uniformity calm me where my scrap-note grab-bag and Post-its fail (after all, they don’t stick so well after the first time). They are limitlessly rearrange-able. For the past twenty-plus years, fiction or nonfiction, I’ve used index cards to order my material in preparation for drafting: one idea or chapter subject/one card for nonfiction, one scene/one card for fiction, then arrange so that each proceeds inevitably to the next. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Uncle George talks time and again about the importance of causality—

I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.

First, a willingness to revise.

Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality. Making causality doesn’t seem sexy or particularly literary. It’s a workmanlike thing, to make A cause B, the stuff of vaudeville, of Hollywood. But it’s the hardest thing to learn. It doesn’t come naturally, not to most of us. But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.

For most of us, the problem is not in making things happen (“A dog barked,” “The house exploded,” “Darren kicked the tire of his car” are all easy enough to type) but in making one thing seem to cause the next.

This is important, because causation is what creates the appearance of meaning.

“The queen died, and then the king died” (E. M. Forster’s famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn’t mean anything. “The queen died, and the king died of grief” puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: “That king really loved his queen.”

Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.

—and in the process of rejigging my time-travel plot I used index cards to trace causality, like so:

Last week, fired up by all those juicy conversations with Heather and Zach, I finally felt like I had gathered enough jigsaw pieces to finish reconfiguring the plot. I (temporarily) turned my back on (not one but) two bloated Scrivener files as well as an (incomplete) spreadsheet, in which I’d attempted to track my thematic threads scene by scene. (Talk about a recipe for overwhelm.)

First I meditated for twenty minutes (it always helps).

Then I arranged the cards I’d written out so far, pulling out only three sheets from two binders’ worth of handwritten notes to refer to as I began filling in the gaps with new cards. 

Nice big classroom tables at my new workspace!

In the above photo the pink and blue cards represent mirrored emotional beats between my protagonist (Pat) and his sister (May) across the climactic section, but otherwise there have been too many color codes over the past several years for any pretense of consistency here. (Ideally, yes, you could use different colors to gauge your pacing and so forth.) I had to make two layouts because there are two timelines that needed to be “braided” together (my agent’s excellent suggestion), first the A-B-C-D layout and then the layout you see here, the 1-2-3-4, which I created by stapling small stacks of scene cards into sections and then alternating A and B (for parts 1 and 2) and C and D (parts 3 and 4). (Someday I will get into the nitty gritty of this process, if there is enough interest!)

It felt AMAZING to lay it all out for the first time, start to finish, after almost two years. I was riding high that night, let me tell you. NOW I HAVE A CLEAR STEP-BY-STEP PATH TO A NEW ROUGH DRAFT!

Here’s the thing though: I’m still missing a couple major details. Something awful is going to happen to May, for instance, and I’m still not sure how it’s going to come about. But the causal thread—leading us to that point and beyond it—is now solid enough that I could put an index card as a sort of “temporary brick” in place, and continue building. Given the much quicker flow of ideas in the short time since I finished this layout, I have every confidence that a humble 3x5” index card will hold the space for that murky plot point to figure itself out while I’m working on the rest of it.

Fun fact (and thanks again, Mrs. Kilcher): termites are even older than the dinosaurs!

More on index cards:

Gail Carriger, Using Index Cards to Play With Author Brain

David Gerrold/Rachel Scheller at Writer’s Digest, Create Structure in Your Fiction Using Index Cards

John August, 10 Hints for Index Cards

Susan Orlean, Another Essential Writing Tool You Should Own in Large Quantities

P.S. The International Rescue Committee is the humanitarian aid organization to which I contribute on a monthly basis. Here’s a link so you can click through and donate if you feel so inclined.

Four hundred pages and a thousand miles of yarn*: or, how to beat the sunk-cost fallacy

Our greatest duty as artists and as humans is to pay attention to our failures, to break them down, study the tapes, conduct the postmortem, pore over the findings; to learn from our mistakes.

—Michael Chabon

Just frog it already!

—the wise friend of many a knitter

Out of all the cognitive biases identified thus far—188!?!!—the sunk-cost fallacy has got to be one of the most pervasive. To make sure we’re all on the same page, here’s the standard definition (using a veganism-and-creativity presentation slide from 2021):

In other words, humans tend not to own up to mistakes and misconceptions simply because we’ve spent SO MUCH TIME making and believing in them. It can be embarrassing, even painful, to admit that the premise of a novel we’ve been writing for years is fundamentally flawed, or that we’ve spent money we don’t have on a graduate program that definitely isn’t the career path we want after all, or that the relationship into which we’ve poured all our emotional resources is never going to be the loving and growth-oriented union we’d hoped and longed for. When we hang on too long, the original mistake can compound itself many times over. Nor does the sunk-cost phenomenon play well with the standard pep talk on perseverance; we’ve all known at least one writer or artist overworking material they ought to set aside because they hold a (not-unfounded) conviction that professionals don’t trash work that isn’t working, they fix it. And in this productivity-obsessed culture, you’ve pretty much got to be a Zen monk to avoid framing the situation as a waste of time and resources.

…Okay, I am not nor will I ever be a Zen monk. But I think I’ve figured out what to say to myself to make it easier to admit that something’s not working and take action accordingly.

Sunk-Cost Dilemma A:

In my “‘writer’s block’ revisited” post last fall, I told you I submitted 360 pages of a novel I had no idea how to finish. And there were lots more pages that didn’t make it into that document, well over 400 total I’d say (it’s hard to tell when you’re working in Scrivener). With all my other novels I’d been able to write my way into the answers, but that wasn’t happening this time. To put it in quilting terms, I realized there was nothing for it but to cut up the thing for scraps and try for a different (simpler) design than the one I’d envisioned. I’m now pretty close to the end of this replotting process, and when I found myself in the midst of another sunk-cost dilemma last month, I decided it was time to write this post.

Sunk-Cost Dilemma B:

Waaaaay back in the spring of 2013, soon after moving to Boston, I purchased a sweater’s worth of sport-weight linen-rayon yarn in a life-affirming shade of green. Over the years I tried to knit myself a cardigan, but I always abandoned it (vintage stitch pattern + math to fit = eternal UFO. I should know myself by now!) Then in the midst of my craft decluttering, knowing I have a much higher/faster finish rate on gift projects, I figured that was the quickest way to stash down. Green is Heather’s favorite color too, and I’d found a sweater pattern on Ravelry I thought she’d love, so I downloaded the pdf, knit and laundered some gauge swatches, did some math, and cast on, hoping to finish it before my mid-October trip to Minnesota. 

Well, I’m writing this post just after flying home from those ultra-cozy four-and-a-half days with Heather and Zach at a lakeside cabin under perfect blue skies and a canopy of orange and gold. And this is the current state of the sweater:

*A thousand miles of yarn is the most ridiculous hyperbole I’ve indulged in all year, it’s more like 770 yards (not even half a mile, HAH!)

I could have finished it in time. I chose not to. What went wrong? I knit multiple gauge swatches and measured them before and after laundering. I DID THE MATH! But I flubbed it somehow. This yarn grows A LOT widthwise, so a relatively snug bust measurement of 51” (the designer recommends 15-20” of ease) would have blocked out to approximately 68.”

Thirty inches of ease. Way. Too. Big.

Ordinarily when it becomes clear that I have made a mistake in my knitting or sewing, my anti-perfectionist script begins to play in my head: Follow your perfectionism to its logical endpoint and you will never finish a thing. Not a dishcloth or a granny square, not one sentence, nevermind a complete paragraph. You will be THE CREATOR OF NOTHING!!!

And this is all true, of course. I tried to tell myself it would be okay, that I could put in a crocheted “seam” up the sides to tuck in some of the excess width, or that if it doesn’t fit her (“come on, it definitely won’t fit her!”) it will fit someone else who will wear it and love it.

But I’m not knitting this sweater for some other person. I am knitting it for my friend, who will look and feel good in a garment that is “slouchy” but not to such an extent that it feels like a(n albeit pretty-green) trash bag with three slits cut in it for her head and arms. If it doesn’t feel good to finish something that isn’t quite right, it definitely won’t feel good to give it.

Over morning coffee with Heather and Zach, I started knitting a smaller size. She oohed over the color (I knew it!) and we talked about sunk cost. Here are Heather’s two primary pieces of advice: 

1. to practice self compassion when reflecting upon supposedly-wasted time;

2. to look at EVERYTHING we write (or make) as skill building, meaning that the words we toss are just as necessary as the words that show up in a published work.

Our conversation reminded me of something Téa Obreht said in conversation with my friend Deirdre at the International Literature Festival Dublin this past May:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Dross is inevitable when we live in a state of creative possibility. False starts, dead ends, and poop-outs aren’t evidence of our failures, they’re an ***occupational certainty.*** No writer has published every single word they have written. Every fiber artist has had to pick apart (frog, seam-rip, whatever) stitches that won’t get them the result they want, just as every home cook or baker has had to dump a failed experiment in the trash at least once.

Knowing if and when to quit (or pivot) is a call-and-response between intuition and logic. Heather’s two guidelines are the most essential, but I also feel like that’s easy for me to say since my considerable writing and knitting experience (25+ years and 19 years, respectively) allows me to come to a quicker decision than I could have done at, say, age 25. If self compassion feels out of reach (so far) and “everything is skill building” doesn’t automagically override your obsession with the One Perfect Outcome, here are a few more things to try:

• Put the project in time out, and for longer than you think it needs.

• When you circle back to your sunk-cost dilemma, ask yourself these questions: What’s the un/happiest outcome if I persevere? The un/happiest outcome if I quit? What are the one or two likeliest scenarios of all these, according to my inner guidance system? Are there other options I haven’t considered yet?

• Now for the most clarifying questions of all: Is this project making me miserable right now? Has it ever made me feel radiantly, ludicrously happy? If yes and yes, return to step 1. 

If you find yourself flinging your project (figuratively or literally) across the room again and again, over a period of years, well then—you just might have your answer. Keep in mind, too, that an indefinite time out still siphons a small amount of creative energy from your active WIPs.

I could have admitted the sweater was too big about five inches sooner. I worried about it all that time before I finally stopped. Owning up to the sunk cost meant not being able to give Heather her present in person, and that part was tougher than the necessity of frogging a full month’s worth of knitting. I was surprised at how I felt about the actual starting over. I felt good about it. I was looking forward to it, because knitting half of this sweater was a lot of fun. I listened to three wonderful novels—Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes and Bookshops & Bonedust and Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife—feeling oh so content all the way through. Casting on a second time for the same sweater means I’m 2x’ing my enjoyment of this collection of stitch patterns and (hopefully) listening to twice as many excellent audiobooks. I’m practicing self compassion and choosing to value process over product. I can reframe my glorious-mess-of-a-time-travel-novel similarly:

Cutting up (or altogether chucking) these pages is the first step towards a stack of pages that WILL work.

Tossing this plot gives me plenty more time to live among these characters, for whom I feel such profound affection.

After this reframing, it is obvious to me that starting over is a joy and a privilege. I’ve learned so much from this process that I can (and will!) someday write a book about it.

Whether or not you decide to throw in the towel, look for the boons inside this period of frustration and uncertainty. This is how we get better at the work we love to do.

P.S. The International Rescue Committee is the humanitarian aid organization to which I contribute on a monthly basis. Here’s a link so you can click through and donate if you feel so inclined.

Two weeks at Annaghmakerrig

Along the Ulster Canal Greenway in Monaghan town.

I’d been hearing about the Tyrone Guthrie Centre—informally known as Annaghmakerrig, for the lake it adjoins—since my grad-school days at NUI Galway, and I don’t know why it took me so many years to apply. My dear friends Deirdre and Seanan have both attended, enjoyed swimming in the lake and got a ton of good words down. When Seanan invited me to his wedding outside Dublin back in May, he suggested I finally apply so I could head up there afterwards.

(For anyone just finding me: this is Ireland we’re talking, in the Republic but up near the border. Map here.)

Okay, I do know why it took me so long: because as a non-EU citizen, I wouldn’t be eligible for funding, and until recently I couldn’t justify the cost, although the fees are quite reasonable. As a self-catering guest (they don’t accommodate vegan or gluten-free diets in the main house), the weekly rate was €400. At first I was a tiny bit annoyed about not being able to stay in the house (I was spoiled by the chef at Hawthornden, what can I say?), but the “cottages” (which are actually two-level apartments around a courtyard lush with rosebushes) are comfortable and very charming, and though I enjoyed the little bit of socializing I did do (a few brief chats in passing and a Sunday-evening open gallery tour), I reached my limit pretty quickly and hightailed it back to my desk.

Time-travel novel notes.

I’m in a very different place in life than I was back in 2010 (Yaddo) and 2013 (Hawthornden); after my best friend’s wedding and driving around Mayo and Sligo with my partner, and aware of how precious this time would be given my impending move to Richmond (decluttering and packing took AGES, and I was also taking care of my niece for much of July), I only wanted to write.

(And walk around the lake continuing to think about what I was writing.)

The bay window in my sitting room/study.

I got a lot of reading done too, aided by a full and eclectic bookcase. The Vaster Wilds might just be on my top-ten list of ALL-TIME FAVORITE NOVELS (!), Allan Gurganus’s story “Forced Use” (in The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction) absolutely blew my mind, and I also really enjoyed Jess Kidd’s Mr. Flood’s Last Resort.

As for food, I did my grocery shopping at Aldi in Monaghan town the night before (fortunately my B&B had a fridge!), and when a couple of dancer/playwrights who were staying in the cottages departed, I inherited more than enough vegetables to get me through the two weeks (thank you, David and Miles!) I had resolved to eat simply—beans and toast, veggie burgers, Linda McCartney sausages, soup from a packet, etc.—so I found that self catering didn’t take away from my work-time at all. Like I said, because I kept to myself, I actually had more time and energy for work than if I’d stayed in the main house.

On the weekends I fixed slightly more elaborate meals.

The cottage kitchens are very well appointed (air fryer! hooray!), and when I ran out of the instant espresso I’d brought I was able to use the free coffee in the main-house kitchen.

Todd sent me flowers, so life was super-abundant with roses inside AND out!

This recap (like all my residency recaps) is an encouragement to apply. Even if you’re not an EU citizen, you may find it worth dipping into your savings for an opportunity for extra-focused work-time in some of the most tranquil surroundings imaginable. (Or to work in community, if that’s what you need.) A few more practicalities, in case you do:

There’s efficient bus service from the Dublin airport via Bus Éireann Expressway (€32 round trip if you buy in advance). A taxi from Monaghan town to Annaghmakerrig will run you €40 (cash only) each way (there’s a recommended taxi service, the number is included in the orientation PDF). You can definitely time your arrival so that you don’t have to spend the night in town (my partner’s flight home was the day before my residency started, and it was a lot easier to grocery-shop without my luggage! There is no official left luggage service at the bus station, although the lady at the coffee shop was kind enough to hold my bag for me for a couple hours on my way back, so it’s definitely worth asking.)

The nearest villages are absolutely not walkable because of the winding shoulderless roads, but I didn’t find it necessary to rent a car for this part of my trip, I just made sure I had enough groceries for the full two weeks. (Seanan drove up to take me out to dinner one night, but I still would’ve had enough food.) It’s certainly possible to hitch a ride with someone else, just leave a note on the fridge in the main-house kitchen.

Two more notes:

I met artists working in a very broad range of creative disciplines, a couple of whom confessed that they hadn’t expected their work was “serious enough” for a successful application. Happily, they were wrong. Don’t count yourself out.

And I highly recommend swimming in the lake, no matter how cold it is. I didn’t stay in long, but it was so so invigorating.

If you have been to Annaghmakerrig, I’d love to hear about your experience!

P.S. The International Rescue Committee is the humanitarian aid organization to which I contribute on a monthly basis. Here’s a link so you can click through and donate if you feel so inclined.

Ego management 2024 addendum

One recent ego-management anecdote slipped my mind as I was composing my last update (even though it’s probably the most powerful!) Last August while I was visiting Heather and her husband in Minnesota, we went to the Center for Lost Objects for a leisurely browse. Their online shop doesn’t give you a sense of what this place is like in person: dimly lit, a tiny bit dusty, and chock-full of interesting old stuff. The bookshelves are a typical mix of 1990s New York Times bestsellers and gems I’d never have found otherwise, like Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry. Another book that snagged my attention was a first-edition hardcover from 1965: The Sorcerer's Son and Other Stories by Josephine Johnson.

I did a quick Google search. Turns out Josephine Johnson is the youngest person ever to win a Pulitzer for fiction (at 25, in 1935, for her debut novel Now in November). She taught at the University of Iowa. The back-flap bio mentioned the Pulitzer, and also that Johnson primarily considered herself a housewife and mother.

(I bit back a shiver of distaste. In fairness, I might’ve felt similarly had I been born seventy years sooner.)

Now, the point I am about to make is undercut somewhat by the fact that at least two of Johnson’s books are still in print with Simon & Schuster, but there are many many MANY more out-of-print authors to make my case. I had not heard of Josephine Johnson. Her name has never come up in any article of literary criticism I have ever found on the Internet, but that is not surprising. All but a few of the books that are widely read and lauded and talked about today will not be read (let alone lauded or talked about) thirty or fifty or a hundred years from now. Recognition is and always will be an ebbing curve. There will even come a day when no living person has heard of William Shakespeare.

So how do we authors (and aspiring authors) orient ourselves in response to this depressing truism? Two simple-but-not-so-easy directives emerge: write for the present, and for your own satisfaction. This is the only emotionally sustainable way to conduct your creativity. As George Saunders (also known as Uncle George) wrote in his Substack newsletter recently,

One thought I’ve often had about success is this: none of it is solid or is guaranteed to last. A supposedly great book can be forgotten or become dated.  Laurels fade pretty quickly.  But the one thing that seems pretty resilient is the pleasure one takes while writing – the alteration of the mind that takes place as we work a thing up the ladder, making it sharper and better – the person we are in those moments, that’s ours to keep.

We all want to produce work that resonates beyond the cultural moment in which it was created. But thinking too much about one’s posthumous reach (and the unlikeliness thereof) siphons generative energy from the story in progress—here, now, TODAY, the as-yet secret delight that is keeping you up at night and luring you out of bed in the morning. Nor is a preoccupation with posterity conducive to full-hearted presence in your creative friendships. The other day my new friend Bird told me she’s learned to gauge her success in terms of relationships and community building, and as the guiding force behind Quarry, Richmond Young Writers, and other similar endeavors, I’d say she’s one of the most successful people I’ve ever met!

Nothing lasts, but there’s no point choosing to experience that fact as an anvil in your gut. Instead, see it as a daily humility practice. Read up on the Buddhist principles of mindfulness and non-attachment, if that seems worthwhile.

…Then get back to work. 😎

P.S. I go back and forth about this inevitably self-indulgent blogging when so many people are suffering. The International Rescue Committee is my humanitarian aid organization of choice, so from now on I’m going to drop this link as a postscript so you can click through and donate if you feel so inclined.

Ego management, 2024 edition

Hard to believe it’s going on eight years since I published Life Without Envy! I made a couple LWE-themed videos as part of my “office hours” series—Ego management 2021 update and Ego management update: 2006 v. 2021—but since I’m on a long-term break from YouTube/Instagram, I’m posting a 2024 edition here instead.

I don’t need to “show them.”

As an aspiring novelist, one of the variations on the “making it” fantasy was that everyone who had ever expressed any doubt, disdain, or disinterest—professors, classmates, former friends and boyfriends—would spot my hardcover on the new releases table at their favorite bookstore and feel a complicated mixture of admiration and regret. To be fair to my (ahem, very self absorbed and rather arrogant) younger self, these sorts of daydreams aren’t only a manifestation of the ego—they are very useful as fuel for our earliest efforts. And over time, of course, we find healthy real-life ways of satisfying our hunger for validation.

A year or two ago now, snuggled up reading before bedtime, it occurred to me that I couldn’t care less if Professor Sullivan had ever noticed my book at Barnes & Noble, or if this or that ex had spotted the trailer for Bones and All—that I hadn’t cared for a very long time now. What did it matter if So-and-So or What’s-His-Name never thought of me again, given that we were long since mutually irrelevant? And I took brief, quiet, but genuine pleasure in that.

I’ve unhitched professional recognition from overall life contentment.

Speaking of my career prospects with friends circa 2021, I’d say, “This film could be a catapult or it could be the pinnacle, and I’ll be happy either way.” Sometimes my friends reacted with surprise, “of course it’s going to be a catapult!” and so on. And sure, I still occasionally daydream about finding my (as yet unfinished) time-travel novel with a staff-pick shelf-talker in an indie bookshop, and seeing it eventually adapted for television. But what fuels me now is a desire to do my very best work, to write fiction that is thematically and emotionally resonant and nonfiction that is helpful and heartening. [Is my blog helpful and heartening?? I really hope you find it so!] That’s always been the desire, but it feels much more concentrated now.

I do not want to be a “public figure.”

Far and away the most enjoyable parts of the Venice Film Festival in August 2022 were the quiet moments of connection—walking with Screenwriter Dave down the narrow stone passageways off the Piazza San Marco chatting about our respective future projects, and meeting up with Francesca for tea at the hotel the morning after the premiere. I saw and was seen in a way that felt authentic.

My brief vantage point at an epicenter of celebrity culture made me uneasy. To be frank about it, I think a lot of folks channel much too much of their own generative energy into adoration of famous creatives. Admire their talent, hard work, and dedication, sure. Then let their work inspire you to fall in love with your potential, to revel in your own creative power. That’s the only way parasocial relationships can be good for us.

As I said to my partner: “I just want to live a rich private life.” Which, of course, I have been doing all along.

All-vegan night at our favorite restaurant!

Expectations are (primarily) self imposed.

It’s taking me years to finish this new novel, and I have to remind myself every other day that it is ABSOLUTELY FINE that I’m still figuring out how to write it. In the publishing industry there is a poop-ton of toxic messaging around how, and how long, we all “should” be working, and how frequently we “should” be producing new work, and knowing it’s toxic doesn’t inoculate you. (Would that it did!) Last year I asked my agent for a Zoom catchup, just to tell her I’m still at it and that everything’s okay mental-healthwise. “You’re the one who talked about there being a ‘window of opportunity’ with the movie coming out,” she said. “I’m not over here tapping my foot. You take as long as you need.” 

Truth be told, there is a little bit of ego tied up in these self-imposed expectations—a desire to remain culturally relevant, perhaps? 

Yup. That feels at least 60% accurate. 😬

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I’ve learned JUST! SO! MUCH! in these last eight years that I really hope I’ll get the opportunity to do a revised-and-expanded edition of Life Without Envy someday. Did any of these resonate with you? Do please leave a comment!

The aspirational lightness of being, part 4

Last September I came down with a nasty mystery illness that lasted for eight days, and for various logistical reasons, no one was available to “minister to” me (LOLsob). On the third night I lay in the dark in a disgustingly sweat-sodden tangle of sheets, shivering violently even as my skin felt hot as a furnace, and it occurred to me that if I died, my sister (upon her return from a business trip) would have to sort through my mess. In the moment, of course, this thought seemed only a teensy bit melodramatic. I like to joke that I’m a stereotypical Scorpio—skipping blithely through life unafraid of death—but that night I had to call myself on my own BS: 

I was scared.

A few weeks later, I found myself in the strange, sad position of sorting through the belongings of a friend who had passed away. My friend was a sweet and loving presence in my life, but he definitely did not “have his affairs in order.” The experience of going through his things—and not being able to find what his family needed (keys, will, etc.) within a reasonable length of time—threw the problem of clutter (both personal and professional) into even sharper relief for me.

If you click on the “aspirational minimalism” blog tag, you’ll see just how long I’ve been talking about wanting to be the sort of person who doesn’t feel like she’s constantly flailing amid waist-high piles of novel notes, books, and craft supplies. In my twenties and thirties, tidying was a seemingly simple matter of practicality and mental health. Work-wise, I figured the best I could realistically strive for was a state of functional chaos. (“You’re publishing another book? Well then, you must be organized enough!”) Now that I am technically “middle aged” (not really, but…kinda?!), there’s a newfound desire to, y’know…end well, insofar as such things are possible. This is why I am a little bit obsessed with The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning (both the book and the streaming series), the point of which is very easy to distill into one sentence:

Dispense with your excess stuff NOW so your loved ones don’t have to deal with it when you’re dead.

If I am ever hit by a crosstown bus, here is a sampling of what my sister will have to trash, shred, or re-distribute via Freecycle:

• A bin of unsorted project notes and smaller caches of scrap paper and post-its (usually tucked into birthday-card envelopes).

• Another box containing medical and financial documents in no order whatsoever.

• Unfinished knitting and sewing projects going back eight-plus years. 

• A trash bag’s worth of teeny fabric and yarn scraps intended for throw-pillow stuffing.

• At the bottom of a stack of blank greeting cards, an international-Forever-stamped Christmas card I addressed to my friends Shelley and James in 2017 and have forgotten to mail every year since.

• Broken doodads (Christmas ornaments, magnets, coasters) I’d intended to super-glue back together.

My space is fully functional; the mess could be a LOT worse. But I feel low-key shame about my many projects in limbo, my paper bins and catch-all bags, and shame is not a friend to creativity. Also, I am moving house later this year, so there’s never been a better time to deal with my shtuff.

The trickster side of my brain reads these labels as SORDID and UNSORDID.

I intend to keep writing publicly about my clutter because I would love to see more creative folks being candid about how we (attempt to) stay on top of our material, and because it seems to me that tidying advice for a general audience only half-applies to our situation. If I were a different sort of person—someone who didn’t operate at “an intense level of creativity” (to quote my therapist), with all the scribbling notes for future novels, the home library (because all writers are readers, and I like to make notes in my books), casting on for a new sweater and starting yet another quilt project for my best friend’s wedding gift, and indulging the urge to save every last bit of paper my niece has ever drawn on (which is even stronger now that she can write her name!), and the gardening and furniture-refinishing supplies in the back room, and let’s not forget my watercolor pencil set on the shelf in the closet and those chocolate molds at the bottom of the bottom kitchen drawer—it would be exponentially easier to keep a tidy house. That low-key shame is compounded by the irony that my creativity is inhibiting itself.

Do I wish I were the sort of person who doesn’t itch to make (and re-make) things, or that I could “tone down” these natural impulses? Of course not. It’s just that something at some step in my creative process is in need of tweaking.

Here’s the thing I didn’t quite understand yet, back when I was blogging about decluttering in 2015: 

When we live in a state of creative possibility, dross is inevitable.

False starts, dead ends, and poop-outs aren’t evidence of our failures, they’re an ***occupational certainty.***

If you’ve been following my blog revival of late (thank you, friend!), you will have noticed a theme of setting healthier boundaries with oneself. The boundary here is: I must identify and dispose of the dross (recycle the outdated notes, frog the half-finished sweater and Freecycle the yarn, etc.) so I can focus on the projects I AM going to finish. DO THE THING, not just talk or blog about it, and go on identifying and responsibly-disposing-of on a consistent basis.

I Freecycled ALL! THIS! FABRIC! (and yarn!) before my move to D.C. in 2020. I low-key regret getting rid of a couple remnants in this photo, but it’s not as if I’d’ve used them in the intervening years. It was the right call.

Two more truths we arty folk could discuss more candidly:

1. Creative follow-through is all in the decision making: THIS book project, not THAT one. THIS pattern, not THAT one. Yellow, NOT blue. Which means that if you spend years deferring the choices that make you squirm, you could wind up smothered by your own potential. (Psychologically. Maybe literally, if you have that much yarn.)

2. It’s very hard not to look at an unfinished project in terms of the hours (and dollars) we’ve “wasted” on it, which means that the sunk-cost fallacy keeps us “persevering” when we ought to quit and pivot. If nothing else, it costs us energetically to spend years intending to finish something. This is how one ends up with a closetful of UFOs. (“UnFinished objects.” Not nearly as interesting, I know.)

It is the practice of a mature artist (a mature human!) to face her limits—24 hours in a day, 365* days in a year, an inescapable (if unreadable) countdown clock—and make decisions accordingly.

So over the next year, I intend to share my progress in posts on the following subtopics:

• How I prioritized my list of knitting, sewing, and mending projects using Google Sheets and arranged my time in order to, y’know, actually finish them! (along with notes on overcoming the sunk-cost effect)

• Re-organizing my supplies and UFOs for ease of worst-case-scenario donate-ability, storing like with like instead of a half dozen mixed-up bins (I’m going to call that post “The Awkward Art of Swedish Death Crafting.” Subtitle: “YOU’RE WELCOME, KATE!” 🤪) 

• Figuring out a new approach to processing paper so I actually follow through this time (…maybe?!?), and using Victoria Nelson’s adage about creative discipline (that it arises naturally out of honoring your deepest preferences) to figure out a note-taking and -sorting protocol I can stick with (understanding that I am and probably always will be an analog kind of girl, and am therefore not in the market for a tablet, app, etc.)

• Organizing my writer’s archive [hopefully that sounds less pretentious than “literary papers”], part 1 (analog)

• Organizing my writer’s archive, part 2 (digital)

• Rethinking the home library, part 2: MOVING DAY! (how my “read and release” initiative turned out)

Rereading those “aspirational minimalism” posts from 2015, I’m tempted to sigh at the person who wrote, You gotta release everything that's over and done with to make space for all the exciting new stuff that's waiting to come into your life, or My new strategy is to bring all that stuff to the Writers' Room, parcel it into manageable chunks and go through one stack at the beginning or end of each writing session. We'll see how that goes. Spoiler: it didn’t!

On the other hand, the home-workspace photos I posted back then prove to me that, for the most part, I am tidier than I used to be. It’s also a lot easier to cut myself some slack for being a flawed and sometimes-flighty earthling. Nothing bad is going to happen if I don’t manage to clear out any of that paper, or only a few folders’ worth, before my next move. The most self-compassionate approach is to say that if I can share something here that someone else finds motivational or otherwise useful, I’ll consider this latest go-around at least a partial success.

Rethinking the home library

Books come alive only in the act of reading them. That’s the overlooked everyday magic of what reading is, which is that [books] are inert, in some ways they literally don’t exist on the shelf when their pages are closed. It’s only when a mind is applied to the act of reading that the story comes to life.

—Ray Nayler

(Ideally I’d have no books on top.)

Like every other nerd on social media, I used to drool over photos of sprawling home libraries. A library is (usually) a safe space in which to learn about pretty much anything you want, in your own time and on your own terms, and when it’s your very own collection—infused with all the complexities of identity and curiosity and ambition and belonging, curated and arranged according to your own intellectual priorities and aesthetic principles—it becomes rather difficult to look at your collection with any measure of objectivity. Yet in this post I shall attempt it!

Here is the squirmy truth, which applies to my yarn and fabric stashes almost as much as my books: the rate at which I acquire is substantially faster than the rate at which I consume. This is probably true for most of us, eh? Our shopping patterns result in a compounding accumulation of objects we are not using for their intended purpose. When I lived at home my mother used to joke about the ceiling caving in, but this is not as funny as it used to be. My overflow—often-teetering piles on the top surface of all but one of the four bookshelves in my apartment—is a source of anxiety. I don’t want to live out my last years entombed amid dusty piles of books, 97% of which I never got around to reading. I never ask myself, “Will I actually get around to reading this new book before I die?” as I stand at the counter of one of DC’s many wonderful indie bookshops. But maybe I should.

Lately I’ve been thinking of my collection in a new way. I am telling myself that my books do not truly belong to me, I’m just keeping them neat and dry until it’s time for them to move on to their next reader. Reconceptualizing my home library as an evolving organism has made it much easier to let go of books I got for free when I worked at HarperCollins (that was TWENTY YEARS AGO, people!), useful books (reference, cookbooks, knitting pattern collections, etc.) I have never actually used, and books I’d been holding onto only because I have warm feelings for the people who gave them to me.

The solution is (and always has been) obvious: to avoid cluttered bookshelves, I need to read-and-release at a faster rate and/or winnow my collection before instituting a one-in-one-out policy. (Reading faster means reading more efficiently—turning the phone on silent before I chuck it onto another soft piece of furniture across the room. Side note: the other day a new friend told me about the Silent Book Club and I feel extra motivated to participate.)

How am I deciding which books to give away? Here are some questions I’ve been asking myself:

1. Have I already read this book? Do I (realistically) think I will read or refer to it again?

2. Do I feel obligated to go on intending to read this book? If so, why? Can I release myself from that “obligation”?

3. If I give this book away and change my mind about it later, will it be difficult or expensive to replace?

4. Does this book represent who I am (hopefully) growing into, or who I am growing out of?

5. If I’m feeling resistance to parting ways with this book, can I put a generous time limit on it? Say, five or ten years from date of purchase?

6. Can I listen to the audiobook instead? (More knitting/sewing time!)

It is also helping to consider what good a book might do if I release it. Take a book like The Hate U Give. Given the subject matter it feels wrong to write that I enjoyed it, so instead let’s say this novel deserves the recognition it has received. I am probably not going to read it a second time, however, and if I leave it on my shelf at home, there is zero chance of the ideal reader finding this particular copy in a Little Free Library at the absolute perfect time in their emotional and intellectual development. How miraculous that would be!, and even more wonderful for my never knowing that it happened.

So yes, that copy you see in the photo above—it used to be “mine.” If I change my mind about rereading it, I can always purchase another copy or make use of the public library. The White Goddess used to be “mine” too; it was a gift from a man I dated for three weeks almost ten years ago. If I ever want to, y’know, actually read this book, I can check it out of the library.

Here are more books that belonged to people I used to be:

• Anne of Green Gables was my favorite novel as a teen. Now I feel melancholy when I think of those books because Anne gave up writing.

• A gift from the parents of a boyfriend I had in my 20s. I was holding onto this partly for sentimental reasons and partly for Moon Ireland research, except I’m not writing for Moon Ireland anymore. I’ve had almost 16 years to dip into this book, but I never have.

• A book I purchased at an Irish imports shop in Baltimore on an 8th-grade field trip and forgot on the charter bus. My dad followed the bus for a couple miles down the highway before we hit a red light and I could run to the front passenger door and get the driver’s attention. Again, haven’t ever done more than briefly dip into it.

• The Camille who thought she’d read and review Bill Schutt’s history of cannibalism for a film promo post. Did she? Ha!

A book taking up space on my shelf for years and years, the spine never cracked? That’s a sunk-cost relationship. I may have moved house with it many times, even across the Atlantic. Carry it all this way, through breakups and so many other big life changes, only to leave it in a Little Free Library without ever having read it?! But when I started asking myself question #4, it was a lot easier to see a long-neglected book as an object deserving of a more enthusiastic caretaker.

A few more notes to self that are helping me let go:

If I never got around to reading this one for Petty Magic research, what makes me think I am EVER going to read it?

• I have the space that I have, here and now, no more and no less. Once there are too many books to fit on my shelves, I don’t need another bookshelf, I need fewer books. (See the “container concept.”) I am not allowing myself to keep books in cardboard boxes in my closet to fill the shelves of a future Macksey-esque library.

• Choosing to keep a book is often an instant yes or no, but it’s always worth gently re-examining an assumption that a book ought to stay “mine” to the very end.

• I won’t let myself feel guilty for paying full price for a new book and later giving it away unread because I’ve realized I’m not going to read it in the next few years. If nothing else, I am supporting my own industry.

• Fictionwise, two books out of three I’ll release after reading, even if the novel was written by a friend. If it stays on the shelf, it inspires and entertains no one else, only past-me. If I release it, I could introduce my friend’s work to a reader who will go on to purchase new copies of their other books.

• I’m much more likely to hold onto nonfiction for future reference, be it for novel research or personal growth. Though once I’ve finished revising the manuscript in question, I will reassess.

• With this new mindset, I’m much more likely to choose not to finish a book I’m not enjoying.

And how am I giving my books away? This is the fun part! I downloaded the Little Free Library app so I can make a game of locating LFLs, wondering if the next one on the map will have space for at least one deposit, and hopefully unloading all the books I’ve packed on the one-hour walk to my therapist’s office. It feels like a reverse scavenger hunt.

I must admit that there are two bins of books still in “purgatory”: 

1. books I want to take notes out of before donating (like cookbooks, self help, etc.)

2. Books that have been sitting on my shelves for years that I do still have a desire to read but am rather sure I’ll be ready to release afterward. Whatever I don’t make time to read before my next move, I will donate.

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How do you manage your home library? Has your attitude about book collecting evolved over time? 📚

5 strategies for moving through “writer’s block”

It is not neurotic to sit at a desk all day devising an imaginary world. It is not even neurotic to sit all day at a desk trying to devise an imaginary world but not succeeding in doing so. What is neurotic is to hate oneself for doing or not doing either of these activities.

—Victoria Nelson

[This post is a follow-up to The art of the coddiwomple (or, “writer’s block” revisited).]

Drafting is joyful again, though it isn’t enough to feel relieved and grateful. I’ve been asking myself, What has helped? And why has it helped? How do you channel your creative energy while you’re waiting on that breakthrough? I’ve teased out several distinct practices and ways of being, which I have semi-consciously employed in tandem. Only one or two of these suggestions may resonate for you, so let’s just say the point is to keep close this one pure nugget of truth: 

It may look to all the world like you are “stuck,” but you are actually in DISCOVERY MODE.

Stay curious and reflective and you’ll come up with more than a few solid strategies of your own.

I’ve settled upon my own definition of discipline.

Counterintuitive as it may sound, thinking of myself first and foremost as a “soft animal body” (thank you, Mary Oliver!) has done a world of good for my creative discipline. When I talk to friends about Kate and Nancy’s excellent parenting of my nieces and nephew, I characterize their approaches as love and discipline in perfect balance, and that’s something we can employ in our relationships with ourselves too.

For example, I have often called myself “clumsy” out loud when I’ve dropped or knocked into something. The other night, when my boyfriend dropped something and reacted the same way, I said: “What if we promise we are not going to call ourselves clumsy anymore, no matter what?” He readily agreed.

The next morning, I bumped my elbow into a carton of blueberries, a handful of which went scattering across the kitchen floor. “Aha!” I cried. “I am not allowed to call myself clumsy!” Instead, we arranged the fallen blueberries into an arrow pointing toward the dog, who promptly gobbled them up. We got a good laugh out of it, and though I can’t quantify this, I feel sure I poured that positive feeling into my workweek, which has been extra productive and joyful. (Note to self: research the research on reparenting and creativity!)

What discipline is: 

1. Setting an intention to do a certain type of work (drafting, revising, admin, etc.) at a certain time of day, for a certain length of time (or until I feel jangly-brained, which happens after two to four hours of drafting), with distractions minimized; and following through on that intention to the best of my ability.

2. Setting reasonable boundaries with regard to my working conditions (see what I wrote in my last post about the DC Writers’ Room).

3. Preparing for productive work sessions by either packing lunch and snacks for the day (which entails meal prep and grocery shopping) or deciding on a solid takeout option (read: good value and keeps me full for hours, like a Chipotle sofritas burrito) ahead of time.

Also discipline: A willingness to recognize when the work I planned to do isn’t actually the most effective or fulfilling work to be doing that day after all, and pivoting accordingly. Reaffirming the value of scratching.

What discipline is NOT:

1. Inward name-calling or other forms of self-beratement. (No more “lazy” either!)

2. Setting up an unnecessarily complicated productivity system that I will inevitably not adhere to for more than a day, leading us back to habit #1.

3. Trying to adhere to a 9-5 Monday-Friday work schedule because that is what is understood and respected in this culture.

4. Revising a manuscript from 10am to 11pm (or later) with very infrequent bathroom and meal breaks. (It may look like I am “working hard,” but it is certainly not healthy.) In general, being “so in flow” that I forget I have to pee.

All this amounts to setting healthier boundaries with oneself. Remember Victoria Nelson’s adage that creative discipline arises naturally out of one’s deepest preferences? Many of the most profoundly contented moments of my life occur at a desk in a shared space where silence is the rule, with a pile of notes and a thermos of Earl Grey. Those are my preferences. Notice what your preferences are and then do your best to live by them.

More than ever before, I am continually on the lookout for a reason to laugh.

I want to improve my comedic writing skills, and I want to get better at not taking things personally and taking myself less seriously in general. But the pursuit of these worthy goals isn’t what’s making a difference.

I believe this meme originated with Merry Blacksmith, but please feel free to correct me.

I figured out pretty early on that as a creative person, it is critical to surround yourself with folks who’ll only say “You’re so silly!” or “Man, are you WEIRD!” in a tone of astonished admiration. Admittedly these folks are rare birds, as clearly implied by the Apple Dictionary thesaurus:

Having friends who truly appreciate one’s quirks is necessary for the maintenance of one’s self esteem. Yet it hadn’t occurred to me that being in a relationship with someone who actually enjoys me randomly speaking in cartoon voices, and with whom nonsense song lyrics and groan-worthy puns are a secondary love language, could have such an amplifying effect on my creativity. No coincidence that the middle-grade novel I’m drafting right now is the funniest thing I’ve written (and that includes Petty Magic). Of course, part of this newfound facility with jokes and wordplay is the result of the foundational work of character development, but where do hilarious three-dimensional characters come from?

“Would you still love me if I was a worm?”

“Well, dear, that would all depend on whether the scenario owes more to Kafka or Rick Moranis…”

Or let me put it to you this way: how conducive are etiquette and convention to creativity? 

It doesn’t matter if it’s comedy in a more structured form or indulging one’s absurdist tendencies in private—it seems obvious, doesn’t it, that “silly people” are more likely to think thoughts no one else has ever thought before? (Okay, so we won’t ever know for sure—suffice to say it is possible.) Think of the jester of medieval legend, who was the only one allowed to point out the absurdities of the court. In this sense, to be “foolish” is to be wise.

So go ahead and rejig the lyrics to a cheesy ’80s power ballad on the fly. Sing at the top of your lungs. Giggle uncontrollably. Repeat. 

And see what happens next.

I have re-immersed myself in children’s lit.

Last Christmas I gave my niece a copy of Phoebe Wahl’s Little Witch Hazel, and we love it more every time we read it together. The summer chapter is the most thematically relevant for (most) grown-ups, but my favorite is the winter chapter, in which Hazel spends all day helping her neighbors (tending to wounds, caring for newborn bunnies, and so forth) in the shadow of an impending blizzard. I revel in the moment when Otis swoops down to gather a lost and tired Hazel up out of the snowy darkness, and I get to hoot like an owl.

When Heather visited last year I shared the book with her, and of course she saw right away how nourishing this book is for one’s inner children. In a recent newsletter she wrote, 

“As a child—okay, even now—I wanted to live at the base of a tree, with a rounded hobbit door. I'd wear felt slippers and sleep under quilts and live by candlelight, eating berries from my neighbors, the deer. Braided rugs under my feet, cups of hot cocoa, a roaring fireplace despite the fact that I live in a tree.” 

Heather surprised me with this Little Witch Hazel print for my birthday! (Photo by Jason.)

The material comforts and aesthetic pleasures of such a fantasy life are actually about cultivating a sense of safety and belonging, whether the reader is four, a hundred and four, or anywhere in between. Cozy children’s lit puts us in the best possible head- and heart-space for creative renewal.

As for middle grade, I’ve listened to many old favorites on the Libby app, like Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Egypt Game, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the version narrated by Brooke Shields). I finally “read” Howl’s Moving Castle—I did not enjoy it as much as I expected to, although I will certainly be reading more Diana Wynne Jones—and I can also recommend the audio versions of Karen Cushman’s The Midwife’s Apprentice and Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Da Vinci’s Cat (her Newbery-honored The Book of Boy is one of my all-time favorite middle-grade novels).

In general, when you’re feeling creatively pinched it’s one of the wisest things you can do to immerse yourself in categories and genres you wouldn’t normally read. Little Free Libraries are the perfect resource for serendipitized book selections! (More on LFL in a future post on systematically “redistributing” my home library.)

I have analyzed the narrative structure of novels (and films) I remember fondly.

I’d been wanting to reread my favorite Neil Gaiman novel, and it turns out the plot of Neverwhere corresponds quite neatly to the 15-beat Save the Cat! formula apart from the transposition of beats #11 and #12 (“All is Lost” and “Dark Night of the Soul”). This makes sense given that Save the Cat! is largely (if arguably) a distillation of industry conventions, and that Gaiman conceived of Neverwhere as a television mini-series and novelized it in the midst of the scriptwriting process. Richard’s misadventure in Neverwhere maps even more neatly onto the Heroine’s Journey, since his descent into the underworld is a literal one, and he makes it through his ordeal with help from a cast of newfound trickster-frenemies who eventually become true friends. (There’s more, but in case you haven’t read this novel yet I don’t want to spoil it for you.)

I enjoyed this exercise so much that I want to make this an official (if occasional) practice. Once Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun trilogy is complete (June of this year!!), I plan to analyze the overarching plot strands Book-Architecture-style, though realistically I may not finish this exercise before 2025. (Please leave a comment if this is something you’d find helpful to have in PDF format inside my resource library!)

Depending on the novel (or film) you choose, a closer reading can open up many more fruitful avenues of learning. I gained a whole new level of enjoyment (and more to the point: writerly insight) in reading this feminist essay by Belle Waring on the hidden narrator of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, for instance, and from a fascinating film studies dissertation analyzing the 12-beat story structure Frank Capra used in several of his best-known films. (Thank you, Brian Geoffrey Rose!) 

I practice “selfish creativity.”

“Going pro” means that nothing you write is purely for your own satisfaction. Even lines from my private writing tend to worm their way into my novels. (Yes, I want to see how many times I can drop a “worm” in this blog post.) Have I ever promised myself I’d write a story “just for me” without thinking at least fleetingly about eventually publishing it? 

…Nope.

With all my talk of creative cross-pollination [here’s a YouTube link from 2021], I’ve been dancing around this concept for a long time now. “Selfish creativity” refers to a creative practice that IS solely for your own delight and satisfaction. It’s not something you’re secretly hoping to make a living at someday, or something you feel like you “should” be “into,” like baking focaccia because everybody else is (apparently) doing it. It’s something you do because it makes you feel radiantly happy to be alive.

(The first thing that popped into your head when you read that last sentence? That’s probably it.)

Since I was a little girl I’ve wanted to sleep under a quilt I sewed for myself. For a long time, I made quilts and gave them away. Often the same with my knitting. I’ve been talking in therapy about my tendency to overgive, so designing (and finishing!) things for my own home and person has become a therapeutic exercise as well.

Working on this project (the pattern is “Minnie Stars” from Quiltfolk) in the midst of “writer’s block” has allowed me to feel much more serene about the situation than I would have otherwise. Because how could I berate myself for not being creative enough when something so colorful and comforting was taking shape under my own two hands?

It’s taking forever to quilt it by hand, and I’m okay with that. I’ve bound it so I can use it on the bed now, and will finish the handiwork next summer (…perhaps? I’ve got a bunch more projects waiting!)

Do you know how good it feels to fall asleep all warm and snuggly on a cold winter’s night, under something you made?

Maybe quilting’s not your thing—it could be something else. But find and do the thing that gives you the shimmers, and watch how it changes your writing practice (not to mention your inner monologue).

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I’m going to save a discussion of private writing specifically for moving through “block,” and how best to approach writing about your writing, for a subsequent post, because I know not everyone has the time to settle in for 4,000+ words.

Let me know if you have tried, or intend to try, any of these strategies—and how it’s worked out for you! 🪱

The art of the coddiwomple (or, “writer’s block” revisited)

Properly interpreted, a block is the best thing that can happen to a writer.

—Victoria Nelson

Recently my boyfriend suggested we spend part of a Saturday afternoon at a Friends of the Library book sale. Let me loose in a large roomful of secondhand books and will I meander happily, contenting myself with whatever treasures I stumble upon, like a normal person? Of course not. I convince myself that there is ONE book in this room that, the MOMENT I crack the spine, will make me feel as though the author thrust it out into the world ESPECIALLY for ME. 

After awhile, I found myself in the self-help section. Of course I did.

I spotted a book on writer’s block. That was the title, actually: On Writer’s Block: A New Approach to Creativity. Early-to-mid ’90s, to judge by the cover. Victoria Nelson.

I opened to a page at random:

I have never felt so seen by a book in my entire life. 

In late October 2022, I sent my agent a 360-page partial manuscript. (Yes, partial. It was supposed to be the first third. LOLsob.) In early December my agent emailed me her notes, pointing out (with her customary diplomacy) that this new work lacked a taut narrative through-line. It had no through line, in fact. I’d written some of the best prose of my career thus far, AND YET the pages I had given her amounted to a free-wheeling grab-bag o’ chaos.

I have spent this past year working out how to fix my plot. I’ve remembered my beginner’s mind, gobbling up craft books, essays, and workshop videos on narrative structure. I’ve read for research. I’ve taken several breaks to begin developing other novel ideas. I wrote fragments of scenes I felt certain belonged in the new draft. But for the first time in a very long time, flow was elusive. In A Bright Clean Mind I wrote about the powerful rush of ideas I received right after I chose to become an ethical vegan in the spring of 2011, and though I still believe that what we eat can exacerbate our anxiety, I now know it can’t be as simple as that. Because after twelve years of “easy” purely-plant-fueled click-click-click novel-writing, I had to admit that I was “blocked” again.

The situation is unprecedented. In the old days (2002--2011), my “block” would manifest in a very particular pattern of multiple false starts in between viable novel projects, which I called “trough periods,” and I never wrote more than fifty or eighty pages of a novel I would later abandon. This time I am hundreds of pages into the novel in question, the time-travel screwball dramedy that’s been in the works for over fifteen years. Leaving a novel idea on my mental back burner was my tried-and-true M.O. for a long, long time. After a few months’ “marination,” for example, the whole plot of Mary Modern slotted itself into place in a single instant, double love triangle, twist, and all. If I didn’t know what was going to happen next I would write my way into the answer, but that hasn’t happened this time. Earlier this year I read a ghost story set at the Winchester Mystery House, and I LOLsobbed at the description of the “staircase to nowhere.” Some days that’s exactly what working on this book has felt like.

Connie Willis, who is one of my favorite writers, said in a 2021 interview, “Early on, I thought, someday soon I’ll figure this out and then writing will be a breeze, but that’s never happened. Every story and novel has a whole different set of things you need to learn how to do. It’s like you’re starting from scratch every time.” I thought I knew how to plot a novel, but to be precise about it, I knew how to plot Mary Modern, and Petty Magic, and so on. With the time-travel novel, I am (almost) starting from zero.

Most advice I hear or read about “writer’s block” identifies fear as the root cause. This is either so obvious as to be completely unhelpful, or in my case, only like 3.5% accurate. I’ve written about so-called “block” on the blog before, but I tailored that advice (still valid, I think) for beginners. Comparing myself to other writers hasn’t been an issue for me for a long time now, and I can catch myself whenever I’m on the verge of trying too hard. The concerns and underlying conditions are (for the most part) quite different when you’re twenty-five years in.

So here is a distillation of the lessons of the past year—a run-down of the practices, attitude adjustments, and pertinent reminders that have actually helped—with some beautifully-worded assistance from my new friend Victoria Nelson, whose book, in a kinder world, would still be in print.

Self-flagellation never (EVER!!!) leads to the desired outcome.

[M]aking art isn’t in every case an act superior to not making art. That belief comes out of the same production-quota mentality that most writers adopt at any moment in their lives when they are not actually producing something.

Why do we conflate discipline and punishment? The usual perpetrators—Puritans and capitalists—but you’ve already heard that rant, so I’ll just say it’s a tendency that warrants continual observation. Nelson writes that discipline arises naturally out of honoring one’s deepest preferences, which is an elegant way to reframe such an unjustly tarnished concept. 

Some authors write three to five (or more) novels per year and say they never experience block. They’re probably telling the truth. But the sort of writing they do draws upon a rather different skill set.

You will be so busy calling yourself unprofessional that you will not be able to hear the lower-pitched inner voice that is attempting to explain the real problem.

Once I become aware of my inner-monologuing about being a professional and professionals doing the work no matter what and why can’t I GET! IT! DONE! when I have literally no other responsibilities, I label this self-directed trash-talk as problematizing, then ask myself: what is the flawed premise underneath this pointless gnashing of teeth? Here is what I needed to remember:

1. Met or exceeded, a daily wordcount protects us—we believe it protects us—against all those old insecurities, the I’ll never be good enough and the who the hell do I think I am. A wordcount legitimizes—again, seems to legitimize—not just our efforts, but our very conception of self. Writers write, right? I used to share Bukowski’s poem “air and light and time and space” with my workshop students, but now I have to wonder if the message isn’t halfway toxic. Not every reason is an excuse, and an intuitive writer can instantly tell one from the other. Raising three kids on welfare is actually a TERRIFIC excuse, ya know?! For the hypothetical aspiring-writer/mom living on public assistance, that is the season she’s in.

2. As embarrassing as it is to have to admit this, there is a part of me that is still smarting at my jerk flatmate back in 2008 making a shitty comment about my hanging around the house all day. (When I offered to show him my books, he declined.) I moved out of that apartment as soon as was feasible, and yet that aggressively unimaginative individual is still living rent free in some dank little broom closet in my brain.

Someone who is not a writer will probably not understand that the work of writing often does not involve the act of writing. Notice that I did not choose the word “sometimes”—I chose “OFTEN” because that has been my experience from day one. I’ve joked that writers are always working and never working, and I still think that’s pretty accurate. I just need to remember that in this context, “never working” means “writing is usually enjoyable,” although it’s not a problem when it’s not, and “always working” means “I get many of my best ideas while I’m doing the dishes.” Therefore, doing the dishes counts towards work-time logged. (Not that I’m keeping a spreadsheet.)

So like I said, the Rx for me here is to recognize—not “fix,” just notice—my cultural programming around what does and doesn’t look like work from the outside.

Even when things are going swimmingly, the desired outcome ALWAYS takes longer than you expect, so either adjust your expectations accordingly or chuck them altogether.

Your long-term productivity will increase in direct proportion to the care and acceptance you lavish on your short-term silences.

In a 2014 interview Connie Willis said, “My two-volume novel BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR took eight years to write, DOOMSDAY BOOK took five, TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG four. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Every story basically takes your whole career to write, both in the skills you acquire and where the stuff comes from that the stories are about.” Skills take years to sharpen. Research can take a long time too. I like “short-term silence” formatted like so—“short*-term silence”—because a “short” period of time could be a week, a year, or a decade. It’s all relative, right? The only long-term silence is death. 

Also, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: YOU ARE NOT A ROBOT.

To underscore another point I’ve already made:

“Scratching” counts as work.

This is the choreographer Twyla Tharp’s term for exploratory activity—some light research into whatever topic has stimulated your curiosity today, or reading in an unfamiliar genre, listening to music, or looking at other people’s art—that you engage in either before you’ve settled on your next project, or when you feel stuck. More broadly defined, scratching is anything you do in lieu of giving into despair. (Am I being facetious? Ask me again tomorrow.) 

For more on the concept of scratching, check out another blog post from my friend Heather. Also, the 2014 Connie Willis interview (here’s the link again) includes a scratching case study.

Treat yourself as a whole human being. You probably have needs that supersede your desire to feel productive.

The key to the dilemma lies not in any failure of will power—blocked writers tend to have more than their fair share of will—but in the relationship we have cultivated with our unconscious selves. This is the unpleasant moment when we learn that this invisible but inalienable inner kingdom runs on its own priorities—priorities that are not always or even often the same as those we hold consciously.

I found a new therapist at the beginning of this year, and my general outlook is so much clearer and brighter for our our twice-monthly sessions. She asks questions that draw dotted lines between my present habits and longstanding emotional patterns, leaving me space to develop the insights for myself. For instance, when she characterized my childhood creative practices as a “life vest”—“Who would you have been without your drawing and writing? What would have been your experience of life?”—it occurred to me that I couldn’t have called myself a happy child, and that I might very well have been diagnosed with depression. (As it was, I had some fairly weird psychosomatic symptoms—foot pain, back pain, fingernails falling out, etc., no vitamin deficiencies or anything like that—and because of those symptoms and persistent insomnia, my parents took me to see a series of mental health professionals.) My daily sketches and what-ifs were an effective coping strategy in the fallout from my parents’ vicious divorce, but it was also A LOT of pressure to put on my creativity—a pressure I might still be experiencing here in the present.

The truth is that this is no passive condition; it is an aggressive reaction, a loud shout from the unconscious calling attention to the fact that something is out of adjustment. The block itself is not the problem; it is a signal to adjust the way we approach our work.

I’m not necessarily implying YOU need therapy to “work through” your “block,” but it’s worth looking into. (Also, if you already have a therapist but responded with a sense of longing to what I wrote about mine, it might be time to look for a new one.)

Consider that something else wants to come through.*

(*This is not a poop joke, although joking about poop will probably help with your “blockage.”)

I know a bunch of people in the self-help space have posed the following question, but my favorite source is Campbell Walker (a.k.a. Struthless): “In what respects might this challenging situation be ‘the best thing that ever happened to you’?” I am aware this could be a very callous thing to ask in certain contexts, but “writer’s block” isn’t one of them.

If I had to choose one item on this list that is pretty much one-size-fits-all, this is it. (Also, yes, find a good therapist.) I asked myself, “If I put the time-travel novel in long-term time-out, what other book(s) could I write instead?” My attitude here wasn’t “well, all right, I might as well think about writing something else.” It was

I made space in my head for the unexpected. And what do you know? I got one dynamite idea after another.

Here is a reproduction of a diagram I’ve been adding to periodically as yummy new book concepts occur to me:

Okay, so I am probably not going to write all of these books (“ruthless realism,” remember!) It doesn’t matter. They are all viable book ideas, and I could get started on at least three of them right now. (And in fact, I have! I know this “block” is specific to the time-travel novel because when I switch to another project I find myself back in flow-state within minutes, although the other novel I’m working on right now has a relatively simple plot.)

Funny thing: if we assess my 2023 productivity using the volume of new-project material as our sole metric, I’ve actually been very prolific. With the number of viable book ideas I’ve come up with this year along with the ones I already had simmering on my mental back burners, I have enough to work on for the next fifteen to twenty years. (And I got ANOTHER idea, craft book #4, right after I uploaded the diagram photo!)

(But what if you throw up your hands and yell “HELL YEAH, UNIVERSE!”…and nothing happens?)

…[T]he active internal state Keats called ‘delicious diligent indolence,’ the silence that falls in the house of art while an idea is developing out of sight, down in the basement.

Let’s talk more about scratching. Heather and I passed a very happy few days in Grand Marais in the spring of 2022, where we browsed around an art gallery stocking this greeting card from a local letterpress: 

Coddiwomple is a marvelous word, isn’t it? I can’t remember if either of us said, “Ooh, look! It’s the Fool!”, but we were definitely thinking it. The Fool is card number zero, the very start of the 22-card journey of the Major Arcana. This is a good card for the enthusiastic beginner, but its message is even more relevant for a person of experience who may need to find their way back into a possibility mindset. How can you travel purposefully if you don’t know where you’re going? If you’re responding to this paradox with a flutter of impatience, your brain may want—no, require—a good deal more space to wander. Put aside all thoughts of plots and schedules and pursue a “side quest” (bake every last cookie recipe out of your grandma’s kitchen file? build a sculpture with materials recovered from the county dump?), or read for pleasure (I suggest The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber), or write a dirty limerick and text it to everyone in your contacts likely to reply with the laugh-cry emoji. (Or a skull, if you’re a zoomer.) Do something you’ve never done before and see what happens.

(Also, I would be a terrible friend if I did not take this opportunity to mention that Heather has a Tarot for Writers course!)

Take a snack break with some proof pudding.

What most chronically blocked writers lack is the gut faith in themselves that allows these needed intervals of silence to occur.

This is one of the central tenets of the Provisional Confidence course I put out back in 2020: because even if you’re just starting out, you can always look back to some earlier piece of writing and recognize how you have grown in the intervening months or years. (Dig out an essay you wrote as a high-school freshman. If you are a high-school freshman, go back to something you wrote in elementary school.)

Time to explain why I characterized this current round of “block” as 3.5% based in fear: because there have been moments when I’ve thought, Maybe this novel is too ambitious. Maybe I’m not up to the task. Truth is, I wasn’t—and perhaps I’m still not. But the Camille of 2024 or 2025 (or 2030) will be. I know this pinchy spot has a conclusion-point because my experience of those 25+ years promises as much. I am always learning, and therefore I am usually improving. And when all else fails, I remember that nothing lasts.

Take solace in your creative friendships.

The most effective method of self validation is to surround yourself with people who are consistently loving and encouraging—especially when love is candor, like the time Aravinda handed back the first two chapters of my practice novel saying “This is good, and you can do better.” Heather and Erin and McCormick and Henry and Chantal and Deirdre and Seanan have all given me pep talks over the past year. They’ve shared their ups and downs with me too. As my friend Joelle laughed on a catch-up call a few months back: “If you’ve got ‘writer’s block,’ then there’s hope for us all!”

Back when I was still only thinking about writing this time-travel screwball comedy—fall 2015—Joelle invited me to prepare something for a multimedia science-fiction event she and her partner Jim were hosting at a local brewery. Losing my nerve, I said, “Is it all right if I just read from Mary Modern?”

Her response was exactly what I needed to hear: “Nah, I’d rather you read from the time-travel story you were telling me about.” She lovingly pushed me into drafting the first six or seven (very rough) pages, which were warmly received at the reading. It’s these moments I can circle back to whenever I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do this.

Circle back to craft basics and en-JOY reinforcing that foundation.

I have several author friends who teach at the university level, and I greatly admire their ability to extemporize on craft. When I chose a not-so-competitive school for my master’s program, I retained the bandwidth for researching and drafting Mary Modern inside of a school year, but completing that manuscript came at the cost of academic rigor. Looking back, I see how frequently I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants, making decisions without thinking too much about the underlying why. And because I still want to teach on a regular basis someday, I must be able to analyze and chart out my initially-subliminal reasoning for the benefit of my students.

So I decided this pinchy interval was the perfect opportunity to build a sturdier knowledge-base. I’ve spent the past year listening to the excellent (and admirably concise!) Writing Excuses podcast, and I am grateful beyond measure to Heather for recommending A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders (a.k.a. Uncle George). I’ve revisited Gail Carriger’s wonderful guide to the Heroine’s Journey, and I have read other craft books by Ursula K. Le Guin and John Gardner and Samuel Delany. I also can’t say enough good things about Stuart Horwitz’s Book Architecture method.

Notice how your needs and priorities are shifting, and make whatever adjustments are appropriate.

You determine your limits by testing them gently but repeatedly, then respecting them—no matter how unlike anybody else’s they are.

The three-plus years I was a member of the Writers’ Room of Boston (late 2013 to mid-2017) were far and away the most productive of my career. Then I moved to Providence, and I got a lot done at the Athenaeum too. I miss both those spaces, and the lovely people I met in each one.

I moved to D.C. in September 2020, and between COVID and living solo for the first time, it never occurred to me to write outside my home. Between late 2020 and mid-2022, I wrote more than 360 pages of the time travel novel. Sounds like I was productive, right?

…HOWEVER.

I live on the ground floor of a very small apartment building. I like to write in the front room—where almost all the houseplants live, since it’s the only sunny room in the place—and I like to keep the blinds up and the windows open as long as it’s warm enough. I like where I live and I enjoy working at home, but sometimes there are interruptions: my across-the-hall neighbor getting locked out, my landlady wanting to talk about maintenance work, the next-door neighbor blasting the radio, a substitute mail carrier asking to be let in, some random canvasser trying to get my attention through the window. They don’t occur every day, but it has happened frequently enough that I realized part of my brain’s been holding back from the work out of an ultimately-futile sense of vigilance. Working in a more private location in the apartment doesn’t relieve the anxiety. I have tried working at the library, but the fear of interruption persists.

So I finally realized I needed a space like the WROB, and joined the D.C. Writers Room in Tenleytown. The office is clean and well organized, and monthly dues are very reasonable given that it is run as a business rather than a co-operative. The DCWR doesn’t have the lived-in, absentminded-professor vibe or community spirit of the WROB, but that’s not what I need, is it? I’ve been reveling in the delicious sense of purpose I feel as I settle into my desk-for-the-day with my notes and a hot cup of tea.

I’m kind of embarrassed that it took me so many months to see that I needed a dedicated writing-space outside the house. That said:

It isn’t a problem if what worked before isn’t working anymore—it’s an invitation to observe and experiment in order to find out what works best for you NOW.

[P]atience, patience in all things, is the most valuable quality a writer can have.

A writer’s working style is idiosyncratic (which is why, as Victoria Nelson points out, emulating the routines of famous authors doesn’t often yield the results we’re hoping for). Process and practices evolve with time and experience, and it is part of the writer’s job to monitor these changes and tweak her approach accordingly. It will take time to monitor these observations, and more time to implement the tweaks. As I laughed to my therapist: “It feels like I’m ‘rebuilding my search indexes.’” [That message appears when I launch Scrivener.]

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I recommend Victoria Nelson’s book for every writer (Abebooks link here), but especially those who, like me, find a great deal of (surprisingly practical) insight in Jungian psychology. I love how Nelson’s treatment of conflicting parts of self dovetails with the Internal Family Systems model (which is how I found my current therapist; if you’re not yet familiar, I like Alanis Morissette’s podcast interview with Dick Schwartz for an introduction.) I wish I had found this book before writing Life Without Envy, because the second-to-last chapter on success is as wise as the rest of the book. (Quick side note: I am super excited to use a Solid State gift card from my friend Jason to purchase Nelson’s book The Secret Life of Puppets, because if I appreciate a living author’s work, I buy it new whenever possible. Gotta represent!)

I still don’t believe in writer’s block, which might sound ludicrous given that I have just written or transcribed roughly 4,000 words on the subject. What I do believe in is the reality of whatever is causing the appearance of block. In my case, it’s mostly been a matter of needing more time to teach myself how to write this novel, of reinforcing a sense of trust that I will know how to write it someday. Victoria Nelson calls this particular variety “the silence of incubation.” The pre-birth metaphor feels especially apt by contrast, because a novel is not a baby. It is nonsense to say, “I’ve been working on this for nine months [or however long you’ve got it in your head a novel “should” take to write], therefore it should be DONE!” If this particular incubation period has lasted longer than fifteen years, well…no sense repeatedly banging my forehead against the brick wall of reality.

Speaking of brick walls: when I wrote, “I can catch myself whenever I’m on the verge of trying too hard,” did you wonder about that? I did too. I know it must look like I’ve been trying too hard with this novel. To clarify, it’s the difference between the overwhelming joy I feel when I am connecting to my characters and the trying to convince myself I feel that joy. If this weren’t a full-body YES!-YES!-YES! type of project even on those blindfolded-in-a-bog-of-molasses days, I’d have (rightfully) given up on it long ago.

As writers we do not want to accept that our life in art is not, and will never be, a steady linear progression into the sunlight—that it is actually a series of advances and retreats, stops and starts, unfoldings and closings up.

So that’s my situation. The underlying reason(s) for your (apparent) block could be something else. You’ve heard this before, no doubt, but the way through it necessitates a mixture of gentleness and curiosity, a complete and unconditional acceptance of the present situation (which is what you are ideally doing in any given moment anyway). SURRENDER ANYTHING TO DO WITH A TIMELINE (I’m so sorry, but this applies especially if you are under contract), and devise a simple yet specific list of self-supportive practices and helpful thoughts to think whenever you catch yourself engaging in self recrimination. (Since this post turned out much longer than planned, I’ll save my sample list for next time.) And for goodness’ sake, just put it away for awhile and work on something light, something that feels easy, something you can play with.

Notes on de-optimizing my life

Hello! I feel like a badger emerging from my burrow only to announce to the great open prairie that she’s been feeling quite happy down there in the cozy dark. I’ve been off social media, quietly re-plotting my novel and spending QT with my family, falling in love (see above image 🥰) and reveling in all my rich creative friendships.

These days I just laugh and shake my head whenever I see mention of “hustling” or “productivity systems” or “optimization”—as a wise person once said, some games you can win only by declining to play—although I have to admit up front that I am writing from a very privileged position as a result of the Bones and All adaptation. It is a lot easier to say “Nahhh, I don’t want to do that anymore” (e.g., stay visible and responsive online; finish a new manuscript as quickly as possible, knowing it won’t be my best work) when royalty checks are paying the rent. It is a luxury to opt out in the way that I have, AND I think it is possible to reorient oneself in relation to the “shoulds” and “have tos” regardless of one’s individual circumstances.

“De-optimizing my life” means doing things in my own time and for my own reasons. Here are some specific mindset alterations to that effect:

I don’t need a fancy website.

A conversation with my friend Forbes Graham (check out our three-part No Bones at All chat over on YouTube!) on the frustrating aspects of “maintaining an online presence” culminated in my declaring that I wanted a new website almost as minimal as Zen Habits, and Forbes offering to migrate my old website to Squarespace for me. (I knew I wanted Squarespace because my friend Heather has been happy using it for hers.) And here we are!

[Note: I’m still tidying up, so you may notice some wonky formatting and a broken link here and there. I’m working on it! Feel free to leave a comment if there’s something you’re looking for and can’t find.]

For anyone only just finding me, here is what my site used to look like:

It was pretty (thank you, Evan!) and it served me well for a full decade. And then I found myself yearning for something VERY simple.

I don’t care about digital marketing.

“Comet Party” is gone apart from the URL—for now, anyway—so I suppose you could say I’ve unbranded myself, since I’m not teaching or coaching or making videos and can’t say when I’ll get back to it. I’ve moved on from the preoccupations I outlined in a 2017 blog post called Email Marketing and “Authenticity.” I don’t have to send an email newsletter when I have little to say, I don’t have to sell you anything (not even my books), and I don’t have to be a “public figure.” The Bones and All film experience, though marvelous in SO many ways, made me realize that maintaining firm boundaries (like turning off Instagram DMs) and a certain level of remove is way better for my mental health than trying to be warm and responsive to everyone. Despite all the oversharing I’ve done on this blog over the years (ha!), I really am an introvert who is happiest either at home drafting a novel in her pajamas or out having real-life adventures with one or two or three dear friends.

Note: If you purchased one of my Teachable courses (THANK YOU!) or are missing my “office hours” videos on Instagram (bless you!), it’s all good—I will be back eventually!—and if you have any questions about the course you purchased, you can always email me.

Having said all this, let me assert that a choice to withdraw (temporarily or not) is not the same as “playing small,” which is a micro-aggressive judgment frequently employed to sell exorbitantly-priced coaching packages. After my main Bones and All event (YouTube link) at the Celsius 232 festival this past July, several young women came to the signing table to tell me how seen and understood my remarks on misogyny had made them feel, and I still feel VERY fired up about reflecting the real-world experience of women in this culture in my fiction. It’s just that a new story (not the time-travel novel, although it will certainly touch on these concerns) is going to take a considerable amount of time in solitude. I’m not going to try to fast-draft a new novel because somebody else on the internet says they can draft a 70,000-word manuscript in thirty days or less. And on that note…

Slowly, quietly, steadily.

As I knit another fingering-weight cardigan for my four-year-old niece, I think of how her great-grandfather used to razz me for choosing such tiny yarn and needles. “That’s going to take you forever to finish!,” he’d laugh, even though he understood that the point isn’t to finish something quickly. As an expression of love and care, there is nothing quite like a handmade garment that fits well and is designed with the recipient’s likes and needs in mind.

And the process of matching yarn to pattern, assembling your tools (needles, stitch markers, waste yarn, my tiny canister of tapestry needles), and casting on: this is a series of pleasurable tactile experiences in and of themselves, and to focus on completing a project in an expedient manner is to diminish that pleasure. There’s also the matter of creative hindsight: when I make something, be it a novel or a sweater, I don’t want to look back five or ten or more years from now and regret the corners I cut. (More on this in a future post.)

When I feel the need to slow down (or whenever I make a mistake), I say to myself (usually aloud), “I am not a robot!” I want to be effective (standard = mine), but I don’t necessarily need to be efficient (standard is external). These days I’m working with the cyclical nature of my own creativity, just as I make a point of taking it easy when my body is in winter mode. I’m hand-quilting a quilt for myself, and yes, we are at seven months and counting. In the kitchen, I put on a fun audiobook or podcast and let food prep and cleanup take however long it takes. And I don’t set my alarm unless I have an early train to catch.

But for anyone reading this post who doesn’t have that luxury, I want to offer a maxim my friend Sierra shared with me back when I did care about the digital-marketing stuff: Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Ever notice how you get more done when you first do the things you need to do to feel sane and centered?

I don’t have to finish what I start.

(You’d think this wouldn’t feel new to me given that I have so many unfinished manuscripts on my hard drive and feel no shame about it.) Recently I checked out a biography of Buckminster Fuller from the library (my protagonist is an inventor and I was hoping for inspiration). But the more I learned about Fuller, the more disgusted I felt. Turns out it is possible to be a visionary and a psychic-vampire-slash-con-artist. I’m well over a hundred pages in, but I don’t want to continue. So I won’t!

I am paying attention to my “completist” tendencies, which result in wasted time whenever I’m not truly enjoying a book or learning as much as I expected to. I couldn’t even tell you how many Libby audiobooks I’ve returned around the ten-minute mark in recent months, because LIFE IS SHORT and there are PLENTY OF BOOKS I WILL ACTUALLY SWOON OVER!

There are way fewer “have-tos” in life than we think.

As a self-employed person with no dependents, I can’t even imagine how much harder boundary-setting must be for folks with Constant Pressing Demands On Their Time and Energy. Because even for me, it is HARD.

If you were to make a list of all the things you think you “have to” do, how frequently would you find you are trying to live up to someone else’s (whether societal or individual) expectations?

I don’t have to cook dinner for anyone other than myself.

I don’t have to say yes to an interview request.

I don’t have to continue socializing once it’s occurred to me that I would rather be alone.

I don’t have to maintain a relationship with a toxic family member.

My time and energy are mine to do with as I please: that’s a hard thing to declare when women are socialized for (over)giving. Oftentimes we’re still seen as selfish for not putting someone else’s needs (or “needs”) ahead of our own. My people-pleasing tendencies loooove to masquerade as generosity, and let’s face it: I am going to spend the rest of my life observing which of those two motivations is in the driver’s seat in any given interaction.

A daily practice of “ruthless realism.”

Since turning forty (today is my 43rd birthday!) I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to have entered a more mature phase of my career/life and how I can best formulate what I’ve learned for the benefit of younger writers. And while it might sound depressing at first mention, it is actually the best thing for my mental health to be ruthlessly realistic about what I can and cannot, or probably will not, accomplish in this lifetime.

I am (probably) never going to read that book, so I’ll leave it in that Little Free Library around the corner.

I am (definitely) never going to write that novel about the burlesque dancer and the chocolatier. Time to recycle those notes!

I am (probably) never going to make that pile of fabric into a garment I will actually wear. Time to post it on Freecycle.

This person I’ve just met seems wonderful, but do I have the bandwidth for cultivating new friendships? Especially considering that I already have several dear friends I’ve been meaning to reconnect with for months?

I have lots more thoughts on this mindset as it pertains to my physical space (there is an “Aspirational Lightness of Being, part 4” in my drafts, LOLsob), but I’ll leave it here for now.

It’s okay to live for pleasure and connection.

I have next-door neighbors who sit out front chit-chatting all day (and evening) whenever the weather’s warm and fair enough. Though they are often annoying (blasting the radio, occasionally throwing a beer bottle over the fence, yelling at their dog), these goings-on leave me reflecting on a daily basis about what it means to live a “good” life. It is a timeless absurdity of the human experience that some folks—my neighbors and me—get to kick back and enjoy ourselves when people elsewhere in the world are living through war and famine.

What can we do beyond trying our best to be a positive presence in the lives of the people around us (and making a donation to humanitarian aid)? What if that is the sole criterion for a life well lived?

I’m not saying it is. Just something to think about.

---

I’ve been blogging so infrequently these past several years that I don’t know how many people are actually going to read this, but if you’re still here (thank you!), tell me in the comments if any of this resonates for you! 💗

Vegan Upside-Down Pear Gingerbread Cake

This very festive recipe is adapted from Jeanne Lemlin's Vegetarian Classics (which I'm pretty sure I scored off the free book shelf when I worked at HarperCollins circa 2002). The pear/caramel topping is a wonderful and (relatively) unexpected way to serve gingerbread. I'm posting it now to go with my Vegan Thanksgiving 2022 video on the No Bones at All playlist!

The topping:

4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted vegan butter

1/2 cup firmly packed light or dark brown sugar

2 ripe but firm pears (Lemlin prefers Bosc or Anjou but Bartlett is fine too)

The cake:

1 cup flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cloves

1 vegan egg replacer (over the years I have tried Ener-G, Vegan Egg, and Bob's; all are fine, but in my experience Bob's results in the fluffiest cake)

1/2 cup firmly packed light or dark brown sugar

1/3 cup unsulfured molasses

1/2 cup plant milk soured with one tablespoon vinegar or lemon juice

4 tablespoons melted vegan butter

Preheat the oven to 350º. Grease the sides of a 9-inch round cake pan. To prepare the topping, melt the butter in a small saucepan, adding the brown sugar and stirring until blended. Scrape into the cake pan and spread evenly.

Peel, core, and quarter the pears and cut each quarter into thinner slices, arranging evenly around the pan.

Combine the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves in a large bowl. In a separate bowl mix the vegan egg replacer (prepared according to package instructions), brown sugar, molasses, soured plant milk, and melted butter. Scrape into the flour mixture and mix until well blended.

Pour the batter over the pears. Bake for 30 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes, then invert onto a plate. Serve slightly warm or at room temperature. Non-dairy whipped cream optional!

Although this cake is best served the day it is made, Lemlin writes, it will still be delicious if made one day in advance, covered, and kept at room temperature. (I can vouch that it's almost as good even a few days later!)

My Patchwork Writing Process

I've been writing novels for more than twenty years now—CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?—but there is always more to learn about the craft, and more to observe of one's natural inclinations. This is how and why I do what I do. Here are some ways I might fine-tune a particular step in my process—for greater "efficiency," yes, but also for greater enjoyment.

As I listened to the audio modules inside my dear friend Heather Demetrios's new on-demand course, You Have a Process, it occurred to me that while I've spent plenty of time charting out my idea-generation process—on YouTube and inside The Bright Idea Kit—I haven't reflected too much on the actual drafting, which is far and away the most intimidating part from most aspiring writers' point of view. If you'd asked about my first-drafting style before going through You Have a Process, this is what I'd've told you:

I bring piles of handwritten notes to the Scrivener document. I don't write in chronological order. Usually I'll write fifty pages or so and then I'll outline the entire book. At the end of a writing session, I try to have a kernel of a scene to start with the next day—something I'm excited to dictate into Scrivener as I'm watching it play out in my head. Maybe eighty percent of the time I slip into flow within minutes, the other 20% being tooth-pulling days, but I don't get down on myself. Doing yoga, going for a walk, taking a shower, cooking dinner, or working on an easy knitting or sewing project helps with a mild case of creative constipation (because I don't experience "block," per se—not anymore). Whatever isn't quite coming together, the solution generally slides in at an oblique angle (i.e., it has nothing to do with whatever is in front of me, but it shows up because mentally I've cleared the space for it.)

This is all true, but it's not as specific (and therefore as helpful for other writers) as it could be.

From the beginning I understood that many (if not a majority of) writers draft their stories in chronological order, and it didn't seem like a problem that I never felt inclined to write that way. In my initial drafting phase, I sit down to write whichever scenes I feel like. I'm only 30% of the way through my first draft of the time-travel novel, but I've already written a pivotal conversation that happens in the last chapter. At some point as I was listening to my friend's warm and reassuring voice coming out of my bedside speaker, I had the most delicious little a-ha moment:

I draft a novel in much the same way I cut and assemble a piece of patchwork!

It's been a long time since I've blogged about my crafting—I have a baby-quilt show-and-tell post from 2019 still languishing in my drafts—though I have shared more on Instagram in this video on creative cross-pollination and this one on "avocational ambition." (Those are YouTube links, in case you don't have an Instagram account.)

Baby quilt for my cousin Jenni, 2019.

The most basic definition of patchwork is cutting large pieces of fabric (usually quilting cotton) into smaller—sometimes very small—pieces, rearranging and then stitching them into a visually pleasing design. Sometimes it's traditional and perfectly geometric and other times (as in "crazy" or crumb quilting) you're making it up as you go. It's not a perfect analogy, but for me it's an illuminating one: because in both disciplines I generate purposeful fragments—discrete moments of connection or observation or insight, without thinking too much about context or finishing—and after months of working in this fashion, I can arrange those many pieces into a sensible order and add the necessary "sashing" so that each scene continues "seamlessly" (har, har) into the next.

My first curved piecing (2018).

Slowly coming together...

Arranging and adding the sashing.

To mix our metaphors here, what I'm calling "sashing" is what many writing teachers would refer to as "connective tissue." In a particular chapter, I might have 60% of scene A, only a half-finished dialogue from scene B, and a scene C that is more or less complete. Because I have my outline by this stage—my self-drafted pattern, in needlework parlance—I mostly know what more is needed in scene A, how to get the characters to the point that they are having the conversation in scene B, and how to segue into scene C. There are still question marks here and there, particularly where the science (or "science") is concerned, or more historical research is required, but as I proceed from here I have every confidence that I will eventually gather the information I need to fill those lacunae.

In essence, I compose my first draft in two stages: there is the initial draft-whatever-I-please, cutting-up-calico-into-itty-bitty-pieces phase, and then there is the arrangement and assembly/filling-in phase. Both are enjoyable, but the second phase is more consistently so because I already have a large bank of material to work with. It's easier to compose a line that sings—a sentence I can feel proud of—if it's closing out a scene I half-drafted three months earlier.

Amazing, isn't it, how long it's taken me to notice just how process-oriented and low-pressure my natural method of drafting truly is! (And of course now I'm thinking about how I can demonstrate using actual writing samples—that'll eventually be a video inside the Bright Idea Kit. I'll include photos from my crumb-quilting, which is an even tidier analogy!)

[EDIT, November 2023: my Teachable courses are no longer available (I gotta cough up to keep them live, and I don’t have the bandwidth for marketing right now), but I will make it available inside my Resource Library; subscribe to email updates to snag the password.]

Hot water bottle cover for my friend Joelle.

Fridays at Mealey's: Recipe Roundup!

Hard to believe it's already been more than a year since I got to Washington, DC—a COVID-prompted move that has allowed me almost-daily quality time with my sister and her family. 🥰 Elliot helped me unload the U-Haul on a Tuesday morning, I invited everybody over for dinner that Friday, and they've been coming every Friday night ever since. I've used many excellent new-to-me recipes over the past year, and will (of course) be updating this post periodically.

My New Favorite Cookbook

Every single dish I have made out of Sweet Potato Soulby Jenné Claiborne is out-of-this-world delicious:

• Coconut collard salad (page 74)

• Quick-pickled onions (page 75)

• Tender mess o' collards (page 103) — definitely double this

• Happy hearts "crab" cakes (page 129) — Elliot's favorite; I whip up a dressing with vegan mayo, Dijon mustard, and fresh dill

• Pan-fried butter beans & greens (page 118)

• Lentil loaf (page 138) — I have tried so. MANY. Lentil and nut loaf recipes over the years, and this is one of the best

• Ooooh Mama mushroom gravy (page 205) — I sometimes add a small tin of tomato paste for the sake of variety

More Main Courses

French Onion Skillet Lasagna (Vegan Richa) — I "reconstructed" this lasagna by tripling the white sauce and adding layers of roasted butternut squash. Kate's all-time favorite!

Chickpea Seitan Cutlet (Isa Chandra) — served with the mushroom gravy recipe from Sweet Potato Soul

Seitan Gyros (Lettuce Veg Out) — I used this recipe before I found Isa Chandra's chickpea cutlets, and I prefer the latter, but this recipe is good if you prefer baking to frying. I serve it with BBQ sauce from Trader Joe's.

Vegan Pot Pie with Herby Biscuits (Shanika Graham-White via Food52)

Lentil Shepherd's Pie (Rainbow Plant Life)

Penne alla vodka (Miyoko Schinner, The Homemade Vegan Pantry, page 148) — uses homemade cashew cream

A dinner plate with plant-based macaroni and cheese, collard greens, barbecue seitan, and biscuits.

Mealey's Old Reliables (ICYMI)

Tater-Tot Casserole (Vegan Stoner)

Quiche (using my vegan onion pie recipe, but mixing up the filling; Kate's favorite combination is sundried tomato, onion, artichoke, kalamata olive, and Daiya cheddar)

Scottish-inspired handpies (sign up for the mailing list to get the recipe link in your welcome email; lately I've been using the quiche pastry for these handpies—two quiche crusts = enough pastry for four handpies)

Side Dishes

Best-ever roasted potatoes (Serious Eats) — quite time- and labor-intensive, and TOTALLY worth it!

Best Damn Vegan Biscuits (Minimalist Baker)

No-Fuss Vegan Cornbread (Gena Hamshaw for Food52) — I sprinkle canned or frozen corn on top of the batter

Lemon Vinaigrette (Minimalist Baker) — I always double this and use the second half in the next salad I make, often one with massaged kale.

Macaroni and cheese — I don't use a recipe. The essential ingredients are raw cashews, broth, steamed or roasted butternut squash, lemon juice, miso, a boatload of nutritional yeast, and other seasonings to suit your preference, sauce-ified in a high-speed blender.

Air-fried French fries — highly recommend getting yourself an air fryer if you love fries and or/fried tofu enough to make them at homeon a regular basis.

Desserts

Cranberry upside-down cake (so easy and absolutely scrummy)

Oatmeal raisin cookies (Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, The Joy of Vegan Baking, page 120 in the original edition)

Chocolate peanut-butter buttons (Vicki Brett-Gach, The Main Street Vegan Academy Cookbook, page 212) — best eaten straight from the oven!

No-bake cookie dough bars (Rainbow Plant Life)

DIY sorbet — frozen berries or mango with fresh mint and a bit of plant milk and maple syrup in the frozen dessert setting on the Vitamix.

Camille's Rules of Engagement (or, The Right Way to Ask)

(EDIT, October 2023: I am not accepting any invitations or requests right now because my novel in progress is eating up all my professional bandwidth! When circumstances change, I will update my contact page.)

I often think about how I can be a more useful member of the writing and publishing community. As in many industries, it can be very difficult to "get your foot in the door," and back when I was an aspiring novelist, it seemed to me that established authors could help us newbies a whole lot more than they (seemingly) did. After all, they must've had their share of teachers, mentors, and other benefactors guiding and supporting them back in the day, right?

Well, sure. But if you ask for "a leg up" and don't get a response, that doesn't mean the author in question isn't already helping a lot of other aspiring writers. It's not a matter of gatekeeping or snubbery, but of establishing healthy boundaries. Let's use these tweets as an example:

From my point of view, this person was being incredibly cheeky. It was obvious he hadn't read any of my work, nor had he taken just a few seconds to find my email address on my website. He hadn't even bothered to click the "follow" button. As I joked to my friend (and fellow author) Shveta, this dude was acting like an energetic shoplifter. Naturally, he disappeared as soon as I tweeted a link to my video on finding critique partners—diplomatically asking him to, y'know, do the work.

Many folks have contacted me over the years looking for advice, and sometimes I don't even get a one-line thank-you for my thoughtful response to their writing and publishing questions. Lots of aspiring writers don't read much, don't self reflect, and don't seem to understand the concept of reciprocity and energetic exchange. They just want easy answers. (If you have a creeping suspicion you've acted like one of these writers in the past, read How Do You Know You're Not a "No-Talent Ass Clown"? It will probably make you feel better.)

On the other hand, my friend Steve asked, "Is this writing/publishing etiquette universally acknowledged? Or is it culturally specific? Maybe you should lay out some clear guidelines for anyone who wants to contact you." So here is that post, which I will link to on my contact page. If you think you're worthy of my time and attention, then you must read this post before contacting me (and if it's obvious you haven't read it, then I will not reply).

Clear guidelines for you, and healthy boundaries for me. Everybody wins!

Can I interview you?

If you're emailing about the Bones and All film adaptation: feel free to reach out with an interview request, but please watch the book-to-film playlist first and let me know that you have taken the time to do so. This way we'll have time to go deeper!

Otherwise, I enjoy corresponding with book bloggers and very much appreciate their enthusiasm and support...BUT you have to show me you've actually read the book you're asking about and have done even a small bit of research. If you ask questions in your initial email that make it clear you have not spent even a few minutes browsing my website—for instance, "Why would a vegan write a novel about cannibals?" when I link to an explanatory blog poston the Bones & All book page—I am not going to say yes to a Q&A that requires more time and energy than you yourself have put in. It also frustrates me when bloggers ask for free books and don't follow through with the interview questions, because that seems dishonest (alas, it has happened more than once).

Also, a quick note on social-media etiquette: please DO NOT tag authors in your posts if your review is negative (or even lukewarm). This is callous behavior and at best it comes across as attention seeking. Please treat us like real people with real feelings, okay? 🥺

Can you donate a signed book for my auction fundraiser?

There are lots of worthy causes out there, and if I said yes to each of these requests I'd have no author copies left. So here's a policy that feels good to me (but is subject to change): if you are fundraising for a humanitarian or animal-rights organization, I will most likely say yes.

Can you come visit my class/school/library?

I'd be happy to (via Zoom, at least!), but please iron out the honorarium and other practical details before you send your invitation. This is my livelihood, so I need to be compensated for my time, energy, and experience.

Can I ask you for writing/publishing advice?

Drop your question in the Comet Party Wish Jar. This way I can make a video that will (hopefully) benefit everyone who watches it. If you send me a DM or email I will only refer you to this form, so please save us both some time. [Though I am on social-media/video-production hiatus as of November 2021 in order to finish drafting my new novel, your question will be waiting for me when I come back!]

Also note that I'm much more interested in talking about craft, ego management, and process-oriented creativity than about querying tips, book marketing, and all of that. You can find that sort of content elsewhere. So come to me with the questions your heart is asking (as opposed to your ego). To be clear: if you come to me looking for product-oriented, how-do-I-get-a-book-deal type of advice, I am not going to answer you.

Will you read my work?

This question is one of the prime frustrations of every author's professional life, and I will explain why the answer is virtually always no. Reading and critiquing manuscripts takes an extraordinary amount of time and energy, which is why it's only reasonable to expect them from the following folks:

1. your professor (who is paid to teach you and review your work)

2. your workshop classmates (their critique of your manuscript is part of their coursework, and vice versa)

3. a freelance editor or writing coach (whom you have hired for this purpose)

4. a critique partner or beta reader (with whom you enter into a reciprocal arrangement)

I know this list must seem frustratingly out of reach to a new writer who hasn't found a community yet and may not have the funds to enroll in a writing workshop, so dive into my round-up of free creative writing 101 resources, reach out to potential critique partners on social media, stay on the lookout for free or low-cost workshops and communities (like my dear friend Heather's Well Writers), and invest in your education as soon as you are able to do so. If you admire my work, are hoping for mentorship, and are willing to put in the time and effort, read How to Work With Me (if You Can't Afford to Work With Me) for a clear step-by-step progression. Please explore the many resources I offer for free (there are even more inside my resource library for email subscribers; opt in here for link and password) before emailing to ask for more of my time and energy.

But I'm willing to pay you to read my work!

I appreciate that, but I'm too busy writing my own novel right now. Thank you for understanding.

I feel REALLY discouraged and I know you can help. Please can we email?

I feel you, I really do. But I have noticed a pattern of frustrated writers bypassing the work I've offered publicly and expecting or at least hoping for more of my time and attention in private, for free—and that's not fair to me. So please read upon the concept of emotional labor (as the term is currently used) before exploring the work I've already done—Life Without Envy, A Bright Clean Mind, the Life Without Envy web workshop, my private-writing workshop (watch the introduction here, part one is free with email opt-in), my office-hours video series)—you're bound to feel heartened again long before you've finished!

Also remember that if funds are tight, you can always ask for my books at your local library.

Can we collaborate?

In my experience, collaborations arise organically out of rich creative friendships. So unless we already know each other well and feel passionate admiration for one another's work, the answer is no.

But you and I are already friends, and I need your help with...

If you are truly my friend, then you will not take offense if I have to say no (even to a "small," "quick" favor) because it's what's best for my mental health.

I have a book coming out. Can I ask you for a blurb?

I'll be happy to read your manuscript (if it's science fiction/fantasy, gothic/horror, historical, and/or literary fiction—middle grade, young adult, or adult; or on the nonfiction side: creativity, personal growth, travelogue, or anything related to ethical veganism) and provide an endorsement if I love it (provided there's enough time before your deadline; if you give me less than two months' lead-time, I will not be able to say yes). I'm particularly glad to boost indie authors, because I know this process is demoralizing enough when you're traditionally published and can make use of your publisher's contacts. Keep in mind, though, that I wouldn't dream of emailing a colleague to ask for a blurb if I hadn't read (and very much enjoyed) at least one of their books. (Also, Bones & All is the odd book out in my body of work, so if that's the only book of mine you're interested in, I'm not going to be as enthusiastic about reading yours. Please don't ask me to read your book if it's about or includes cannibalism.)

To give you an idea of how this relationship-building over time would ideally work: E.F. Schraeder emailed me a couple years ago to tell me how much she appreciated A Bright Clean Mind as a fellow vegan writer; awhile after that, she forwarded me a call for proposals for a conference she figured was very much in my wheelhouse (so thoughtful!); so when she got in touch again more recently to ask if I would read (and hopefully blurb) her novel, my answer was a whole-hearted YES. Again, building these literary acquaintanceships (and eventually friendships) takes time, intention, and integrity, and if you don't actually care about an author's work (see above tweets), you are not going to fool us into believing that you do.

I am truly a fan of your work. Can you recommend me to your literary agent?

Feel free to compare your work to mine in your query letter, but I don't feel comfortable honoring this type of request unless I already know you well. (I'm pretty much an outlier on my agent's list anyhow!) For advice on finding an agent, read author and agent Eric Smith's blog post A Beginner's Guide to Looking Up Literary Agents. (You can read my old but still useful advice here.)

In short:

Oftentimes "the right way to ask" is not to ask at all, because even a "quick," "no-pressure" request is energetically draining for me. The plain truth is that I've written this post so I don't have to feel guilty about not responding to random people asking me for favors.

If you are truly a fan of an author's work, you will respect the boundaries they set around their time and attention. The more we live by those limits, the sooner we'll be able to get another wonderful novel into your hands!

Creative Writing 101: Free Resources

My best writing advice sounds much like every other author's:

Read a lot—across multiple genres—and reflect on why and how the story "works" (or doesn't!) How, specifically, has the author managed to fashion characters you truly care about and root for? How do they establish a narrative pace that has momentum without feeling rushed? How have they furnished a world that feels fresh and vivid? What elements have they used in developing a plot that offers both surprise and a satisfying sense of inevitability?

Notice how your personal taste is developing, and consider how your reading choices will inevitably influence your own writing—indeed, be deliberate about this! Keep a private notebook. Cultivate your emotional intelligence and self awareness, because your personal growth work will allow you to develop themes that truly resonate and characters who are (in a sense) just as real as nonfictional people.

Be discerning. Even a wise and experienced writing instructor may offer advice that does not apply to your chosen genre/subgenre or style, or is not in alignment with your creative vision. That said, you must cultivate enough humility to know when you're intelligently breaking the rules and when you're just being arrogant. Do not convince yourself of your own genius. You will never "arrive" at a place beyond all error and frustration. Even the most critically successful authors are continually seeking to refine their craft. You're going to feel ecstatic when you write something that seems utterly brilliant and unprecedented, but put the draft away and reread it after the high's worn off, and you'll see how much work you've yet to do. Don't waste energy feeling foolish though—because this is the process. Some days writing and revising will feel hard, and that's okay. Look for ways to take more pleasure in it.

One more note before we get to the resource links:

You don't need an M.F.A. Though depending on the type of program and financial aid available, you may find it worthwhile. I'm glad I decided to do an M.A. in Writing at NUI Galway because 1, I only had to take out $15k in student loans (which I was able to pay back with the sale of my first novel); 2, it gave me the time and space to hone my craft and complete my manuscript (faster than if I'd stayed at my NYC day job); 3, it exposed me to powerful literary influences (Kate O'Brien in particular); and 4, I met some of my dearest writing pals and 16+ years later we're still cheering each other on. Keep in mind, though, that this was MY experience. I can't promise you'll have a worthwhile experience even if you're accepted into the same program.

The following resources are a mix of craft talk and philosophy that I find insightful. Perspective, style, and approach vary quite a bit. Please leave questions or recommendations in the comments for the benefit of other aspiring writers, and I'll periodically update this list with your suggestions. 🤓

Podcasts

The good folks at the Writing Excuses podcast devoted an entire season to learning the craft from square one.

N.K. Jemisin’s master class in world building | The Ezra Klein Show

YouTube

Ingrid's Notes: How to Teach Yourself Creative Writing, The #1 Piece of Writing Advice I Ever Received, How to Discover Your Heart Theme, 11 Beats of Story Structure, What is Profluence?, and more

Brandon Sanderson: Ten Things I Wish I'd Known as a Teen Author, Five Tips for Writing Your First Novel, and plenty of full-length lectures

Alexa Donne, HARSH WRITING ADVICE! (mostly for newer writers) [snarky but spot on], The WORST Amateur Writing Mistakes, and more

Blog Posts, Articles, PDFs, and Transcripts

The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings), Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers; James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Responsibility to Society

Heather Demetrios, How to Write a Bingeable Chapter, Sports Psychology for Writers, and everything else on her blog

Matthew Salesses, On Worldbuilding and the Question of Resistance

Nalo Hopkinson and Connie Willis, Science and Spirituality in Science Fiction (transcript of an authors' event at MIT, March 6, 2000)

The Literary Ladies Guide: Octavia Butler's Rules for Writers; Writing Advice from Classic Authors (blog category)

The Best Writing Advice from Colson Whitehead's 60 Minutes Interview on Lit Hub

The Snowflake Method for Designing a Novel (I haven't used this method, but the suggested structure-building exercises are very sensible)

Multimedia

The Writer's Workshop @ TEDEd

Books (ask for these titles at your local library)

Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses (doesn't matter if you're not currently participating in a writing workshop)

Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

The Heroine's Journey by Gail Carriger

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Creativity and Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (I don't love this book as much as I did when I first read it twenty years ago—parts of it haven't aged well—but I still believe it's a must read)

When you're ready: paid workshops that are totally worth the investment

I have taken classes hosted by these organizations and have learned a lot from all of them. Scholarships are sometimes available. If nothing on the current course schedule interests you, sign up for their mailing lists for future workshop announcements.

Writing the Other

Clarion West

[My friend Henry Lien teaches fantastic workshops for both these organizations. Here's his current schedule. Sign up for his newsletter here.]

I also highly recommend my friend Heather Demetrios's classes (Writing Bingeable Characters, etc.) and one-on-one coaching packages. Her self-guided introductory writing course, Unlock Your Novel: A Workbook For Getting Unstuck at Any Drafting Stage, is only $25.

I trust this list will keep you happily occupied for a good while! Check out my archive page for even more resources, and be sure to leave a comment with your own suggestions. ⬇️

The Power of Private Writing is LIVE!

This free workshop is for email subscribers, so sign on up if you haven't already and you'll get the links in your welcome email! 🙌

How to Work With Me (if You Can't Afford to Work With Me)

Inspired by Rachael Rice's question,

“Can we imagine the impact of our work beyond those who can afford it?”,

I offer a clear progression as to how any aspiring writer (or other creative person) can benefit from my experience:

1. Watch the Life Without Envy mini-workshop and read the essays I've posted on Medium (links are on my Archive page.)

2. If that content resonates for you, sign up for my mailing list so you'll get access to my free resource library. Watch the The Power of Private Writing and do the prompts. Also be sure to check out the Life Without Envy mini-workbook inside the resource library—the success-to-satisfaction paradigm shift is particularly important.

3. Ask for Life Without Envy and A Bright Clean Mind at your local library. (Depending on the library, some librarians are able to order books that patrons have requested for the collection.)

4. By now, you probably have at least a few questions percolating. Ask as many of them as you like, and I'll make one or more videos especially for you as part of my office-hours series. [EDIT, January 2024: I am still on YouTube/social media hiatus, but your question will be waiting for me when I come back!]

5. Watch the video(s) I've made to answer your question(s), and ask any follow-up questions you may have.

At any point in this progression, you can DM me on Instagram or Twitter or send me an email to introduce yourself; I will be very happy to connect with you, I just ask that you respect my time and psychic energy by refraining from asking me to read your manuscript (which is something I don't even do for paid coaching clients before we've established a rapport) or writing emails that require a long private reply (like many folks these days, my email inbox is a source of anxiety for me, so relatively quick messages are the way to go).

As a white woman from a middle-class background who has sometimes been "broke" but will never be "poor," I also ask that my fellow white writers take some time, in general, to reflect on what they truly can and cannot "afford." I want to practice generosity in sharing my experience with everyone, but I am also trying to avoid being taken advantage of (which has happened more than once, alas, and usually with people who could have afforded to compensate me for my time and insight).

Over the next few years, I'm looking to develop a free group mentoring program for aspiring writers from marginalized communities, and if that sounds like something you'd love to be a part of, then get started now! And if you feel so inspired, I'd love it if you shared my free resources with any friends or colleagues who would find them useful. Thank you, and I hope we'll be in touch soon. 🙏💕

Emotional Hygiene Resources for Writers (and Everyone!)

If the title of this blog post caught your attention, then you probably already understand that your emotional wellbeing is the bedrock of your creative practice. Not only are you not capable of your best work while you're in "hot-mess" mode, your unexamined, unmanaged emotions may very well be creating a more stressful environment for your loved ones, friends, and colleagues. I've been the daughter, sister, friend, and girlfriend foisting her toxic storm of feelings onto her loved ones, and it's high time I shared what I've learned about emotional hygiene since Life Without Envy came out in 2016.

More recently (in May 2019) I made a video as part of a Life Without Envy web workshop on YouTube, and the recommendations in that video are still good. I've gone deeper into my private writing practice since then, though, and I have one daily prompt to share that will hopefully be as big a game-changer for you as it has been for me (it's at the end of this post).

Quick disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional, merely a fellow artist committed to taking responsibility for her emotional wellbeing and developing her emotional intelligence.

More on YouTube

Guy Winch’s TEDx talk, Why we all need to practice emotional first aid

Dr. Abdul Saad's Self-Transformation Series [I really appreciate his pleasantly neutral presence and delivery—it makes the concepts he's sharing much easier to grasp]

Clean vs. Dirty Pain and other videos from Therapy in a Nutshell [this channel is very helpful, just beware there's occasional religiosity]

How to Feel Peace Even with Challenges, Leslie Huddart

What can I give?, Taking responsibility for our own happiness, and other videos from Ralph de la Rosa

My favorite yoga teachers on YouTube: Koya Webb (highly recommend Yoga for Anxiety and Stress Relief), Kino MacGregor, Yoga with Adriene, Erica Rascon

Read on the web

An excerpt from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now

7 Ways to Practice Emotional First Aid [also Guy Winch]

Byron Katie [There are free downloadable worksheets on her site, though you don't necessarily need to fill them out; for me the key takeaway is to ask after every judgmental or otherwise negative thought you have, "Is that true?" Because it's usually not.]

Heather Demetrios, Halting Your Thought Traffic and Hold Your Seat [+ her whole blog!]

Books

[Full disclosure: I'm using Bookshop.org affiliate links.]

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now and A New Earth

Guy Winch, Emotional First Aid [I recorded an excerpt here]

Joe Dispenza's Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself

Pema Chödrön's Comfortable With Uncertainty

Trevor Blake's Three Simple Steps

Dr. Eric Maisel's Coaching the Artist Within and Mastering Creative Anxiety

Lauren Sapala's The INFJ Revolution [I'm an INFP and I still felt like Lauren was reading my soul!]

And the daily practice that has helped me most:

Since last spring, the first thing I do each day (after going to the bathroom and brewing coffee) is to write down how I'm feeling and why—and if I don't know why, I keep writing until I have some semblance of an answer. And if I find myself feeling grumpy or frustrated during the day, I pause whatever I'm doing, go back to my journal, and ask the two questions again:

• What am I feeling right now?

• Why am I feeling it?

I didn't really learn this from anyone, it just occurred to me one day that it would be beneficial to articulate my emotions in real time, and I noticed soon afterward that I was much less reactive. I'm also much more patient with myself and others—there have been several occasions over these past eight months when I paused and thought, Before, I would have snapped. Owing to a few unfortunate episodes in my early childhood (flagged "TMI" in the context of this post), my "pain body" is activated when I feel invisible in social situations, so (for me, at least) it's the "self witnessing," "self validating" aspect of the exercise that has resulted in this shift. I articulate my emotions without attaching a sense of "rightness" to them, remaining as lovingly neutral as it is possible for me to be in that particular moment.

I hope at least one of these resources offers you some relief from the COVID pressure cooker (in addition to all the "usual" stresses of life). I'll add to this list whenever I encounter more helpful content. If you have any favorite books or links to share, I would be grateful if you left a comment. [And a big shout-out to Rachel for inspiring this post!]

Sign up for more where this came from

My new opt-in goodie is a concise 35-minute private writing workshop video + workbook. (How is "private writing" different from journaling? Watch this.) If you found this post helpful and want more, sign up for my list and you'll receive the link in your welcome email.

Comet Party Summer School: the Vision Statement

What are the two most powerful words in this or any language?

I am.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since Jill Louise Busby dropped me a DM after reading Life Without Envy. Thank you for being a vessel, she wrote.

I am a vessel, I thought. I said it out loud. And the more I said it, the righter it felt.

In the beginning, I only wanted to tell stories. I wanted to be clever and I wanted to be recognized for my cleverness. The other day I cracked a journal I kept in 2007, scanned one entry, and felt a sweet surge of relief that I am not that person anymore. (This is why I keep my notebooks.)

The evolution out of a desire to prove oneself into a desire to contribute is the central tenet of Life Without Envy, and for me that first twinkling happened in the summer and early autumn of 2010 when I volunteered on my friends’ homestead farm in Vermont. I have never been quite so content as I was those days I spent planting and weeding and watering, sleeping in a platform tent, rising before six to watch the sun coming up over the treeline as the fog withdrew from the rolling meadow before me. Best of all were the people: Gail and Paul and their neighbors, their daughters, and my fellow volunteers. That summer we all felt like Gail and Paul’s brood. Nature + making myself useful + community as close as family, that’s all I need to be happy.

The meadow at Harmony Homestead Farm.

My experiences at Sadhana Forest and Squam Art Workshops the following year brought the new desire into focus: more nature, more community, plus ethical veganism, art, and handicrafts. At Sadhana Forest I helped with meal planning and prep for something like 35 to 45 people, and I became my grandmother’s granddaughter (more fully than ever before) even though the cuisine couldn’t have been more different than the lasagnas and salmon loaf of my childhood: food is one of my love languages. It’s how I love my family and friends, it’s how I love myself, and it’s how I express care and concern for people I don’t know all that well yet. And I loved the feeling of being at sleep-away camp and making beautiful things alongside new friends who had also come to make beautiful things and bask in the tranquility of Squam Lake.

I thought of how one of my grade-school friends had gone to music camp every summer; I remembered the name of the organization, so I Googled it, curious as to how much it cost. Well, I don’t know how much it was back in 1995, but in 2013 it was $8,000 for a six-week program. I started to think, wouldn’t it be great if kids (whose parents could never afford a typical sleep-away camp) could have an experience like Squam? And what about kids who didn’t have parents to come home to?

I’ve been to Squam many times now—as student, teacher, and staff—and each time it bothered me how white and upper-middle-class we were as a group. More recently, Elizabeth has done a wonderful job of highlighting and supporting the work of artists, artisans, and teachers of color, but the economic inequities remain; I’m sure many knitters would love to spend four days taking classes at a lakeside cabin but will likely never have that $1,400 to spare.

On one trip I stopped at the general store in Holderness and found a rack of greeting cards with quotes attributed to Rumi: “Live your life as if the universe is rigged in your favor…because it is.” I had a flashback to a church my family and I visited above Lake Kivu in Rwanda, where 11,000 people were murdered during the genocide. Slavery, lynchings, civilian casualties. I felt this fury any time somebody brought up the Law of Attraction. The universe is rigged in your favor: this was a message appropriated by and intended solely for privileged white women like me.

I met Rachael Rice at Squam in 2014, and I referenced her excellent blog post in Email Marketing and "Authenticity," but the message is too important not to share again here:

“Can we imagine the impact of our work beyond those who can afford it?”

Nowadays the summer camp in my mind is primarily for grownups—at least to start with—purely for logistical reasons. During quiet afternoons at the Providence Athenaeum I would dream of a library in the forest with cozy carrels where writers of all stripes and sensibilities could focus on their manuscripts. Everyone would see themselves represented on the shelves in this library. Attendees who could afford to pay for their retreat-time would subsidize those who could not; or maybe it would be a pay-what-you-can model? Filling vegan lunches packed with care, just like the ones that fueled the Bones & All revision at Hawthornden. Childcare. Hammocks and more hammocks, hammocks everywhere, and a home-sewn quilt on every bed. Writing workshops, painting and drumming workshops, workshops on foraging and herbalism and anything else people want to learn about. Safe spaces for members of marginalized communities to come together (“safe” meaning that every soul in the place understands why “no white people in this room for the next two hours” is not racist). A food forest. A swimming pool. Campfires and jam sessions. Tiny houses, perhaps—though after reading Sunaura Taylor’s wonderful book Beasts of Burden, these spaces I was dreaming of became ADA-compliant. And because white saviorism is something else I’ve been thinking about a lot, I saw myself asking, What do you actually want and need? How can I help make it happen and then leave you to use and enjoy it?

Every day—up until just a few months ago—I’d been asking myself, how the heck am I going to get from here—making next to no money off my writing at the moment, without much saved—to there, that pretty plot of acres with architectural blueprints in hand? 

I’m not sure what’s shifted, exactly, I just know that I don’t need a bridge, I AM the bridge. I’ll bring this retreat into being one plank at a time. The workshops? I can make those happen now. That’s why I wanted to publish this post on the day I launch The Bright Idea Kit and finally hang my shingle as a writing coach. The course is a $200 investment and coaching is $100 an hour, perhaps a tad ironic given the vision I’ve just shared with you, but I’ve poured all of my twenty years of experience into this class and I’m feeling confident that it’s going to catalyze a lot of creative awakenings. In terms of walking my talk, I am making myself informally available for aspiring writers who can use the mentorship, and I’ll allot more bandwidth (creating an actual program, perhaps?) as I get myself sorted financially. I'll also be hosting free workshops starting later on in 2021 (first up: the power and potential of private writing!)

I see myself—white hair, liver-spotted hands—working away in one of those carrels. I am a writer. But my greater work for this lifetime is to “take up space” by holding space for others, to create a warm, welcoming retreat and inhabit it for the rest of my life without ever claiming it as mine.

If you’d like to be a part of this community (virtually for now and eventually IRL), you can join my mailing list to watch it all unfold and participate as much as you feel like. Thank you for reading this, and I wish you a healthy, joyful, and fulfilling 2021! ✨

EDIT: Adding the link to Be Seen Project founder Mindy Tsonas Choi's relevant and insightful piece from March 2021, "The Cost of Selling Belonging."