AGENT: You have to hook me with the first page. No, actually the first paragraph. No, first sentence. No, first word. You have to hook me with the first word of your 90k novel.

BOOK MARKETING/PUBLISHING GURU: You novelists think marketers aren’t doing anything for your book, but look there are so many things we’re doing behind the scenes and honestly we’re all overworked and underpaid and trust me we’re not prioritizing our bestselling authors over you or letting balls drop even though we’re overworked and underpaid, and I’m sorry but we don’t have time to update you constantly on what we’re doing for you, you’ll just have to believe that we’re doing stuff even if you’ve seen nothing in the press, not even our website, and perhaps you should take it upon yourself to advocate for your book and reach out to your marketing team even though you’ve never published a book before and have no idea what questions to ask and where to send your inquiries, but whatever you do, don’t be rude because we’ll know, and I’m not saying there’s a blacklist, but we talk to each other, us publishing people, and you don’t want to be known as the difficult author, so yeah advocate but don’t be rude. And listen I know it sucks your books sold poorly and I don’t know how to tell you this, so you’ll just have to read between the lines, but the reason is because your book is bad, and no amount of publicity and book cover feedback or promotions can blow the stink off your novel. Sorry. Go be on a podcast or something.

EAST COAST BOOK CRITIC: The Emperor of Gladness was trash and if you don’t agree you’re part of the woke machine and a coward and you don’t deserve to call yourself a critic.

ALSO EAST COAST BOOK CRITIC: No, you idiot, shitting on Gladness is too popular now. All the smart critics are jerking off to Voung’s work again.

LAID OFF BOOK CRITIC: The New York Times Book Review is producing criminally incompetent book reviews. How dare they use vague words like “luminous” to describe books? And why are they so scared to criticize a bad book? (They’re all beholden to the New York literati). I guess I’ll have to correct the record with my own scathing reviews here on Substack. But everyone’s book taste has gone to shit lately, why do I even bother? The Correspondent was the most overrated book of the decade. It’s all dime store psychology and fake celebrity cameos. Where is the verisimilitude people? If I’m not given every detail of your protagonist’s boring life I can’t be bothered to believe that this person wasn’t made up in your dumb brain. It’s been 50 years since anyone wrote a decent book. And you people are reading all the wrong classics. Anna Karenina wasn’t even Tolstoy’s best work!

LITERARY RAGE BAITER: Pride and Prejudice wasn’t a romance novel. Also, anyone who says they enjoyed reading Ulysses is lying.

POPULAR BOOK REVIEWER: I read ten books a week and thousands of people pay for my book reviews even though I only write about a paragraph for each book and you can’t actually tell if I liked the book or not. Read this paywalled article about how I organize my life so I can read more. (The trick is to not have children, dependents, or pets. That’s how you have time to read a lot).

LITERATURE’S GREATEST DEFENDER: I’m super defensive about anything that has even a whiff of threatening the existing literary establishment. No, MFAs are not ruining publishing. Lit mags are not run by New York literati types that like all the same things and have all the same taste and all live in Brooklyn. They’re not the problem; all those Romantasy readers on BookTok are the problem. All the self-published Romance writers are the problem. KindleUnlimited is the problem. BookTok is an existential threat. GoodReads is an existential threat. AI is an existential threat, but also AI is super overhyped and can’t write for shit and I know this for a fact even though I claim I never use AI for anything remotely related to writing. But if AI-written books ever do take off, only the dumb plebs who read popular books would read them anyway, so not a big loss for us true lit fic authors. Popular cultural media is trash, obviously. Marvel? Trash. Romance novels? Trash. The Normies have bad taste, what do you expect? This is our safe space for good books so if you don’t like it, you can go f*** off to wherever you came from. WaPo killing their book criticism section sucked, but whatever we can save literature guys, let’s just be punk rock about it. First order of business, make sure all the people who like normal books don’t come sniffing around demanding books that are easier to read, watering down our true art. It’s up to us: the real writers vs the pop culture zombies eating the literature we know and love.

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SUBSTACK GROWTH INFLUENCERS, EARLY 2025 EDITION: (To the tune of “Shots” by LMFAO) Notes! Notes! Notes-Notes-Notes-Notes. Everybody!1

SUBSTACK LITERARY MAGAZINE EDITOR: Every day I post a Note with the following formula: A sentence starting with “Me” and then “Also me,” for example: “Me: a serious novelist. Also me: spending a day deciding whether to use a comma or a semicolon,” and other such bookish memes along the lines of “books will save you,” “literature is my whole personality,” in a tart but inviting tone like, “I couldn’t write this morning because I was dreaming up responses for my future Paris Review interview.” Wanna-be fiction writers read my Notes and then find their way to my Substack lit mag which now has more subscribers than the New Yorker and a lower acceptance rate than Granta. Our most recent issue included a short story by Litstack heavyweight LITERATURE’s GREATEST DEFENDER who used to be a former lit mag editor himself. All this just by pretending to relate to writers via Notes and breadcrumb their desperate wish to be seen and encouraged for their shitty writing. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, honestly. Get yourself a good lit-related meme generator and you’ll run your own highly selective lit mag on Substack in no time, promise.

GRIFTER AGENT: Here’s some basic info about the publishing industry that I’m putting behind a paywall and also here’s my insider knowledge about said industry even though I only started agenting a year ago, have no authors under contract and have never sold a book. It’s worth the subscription, you’ll see once you’ve prepaid for a year.

GOOD LIT FIC AGENT: I’m not on Substack. I don’t need you people.

COZY CONTENT INFLUENCER/GRIFTER: Here I am sitting on a chair in my study with my woolen scarf and a blanket and a cup of tea writing to all you lovely people. I adore this scarf (link to buy scarf). Physical books are so great for my sensitive nervous system. I like to keep things calm here on All Things. You’ll never find any advertisements on my publication, friends. Oh affiliate links? Yes, well...By the way did you see my latest article in Elle magazine about why I choose to mother cats instead of human babies? I included it in my weekly roundup of things I’m reading (yes I read my own articles sometimes). My roundup is one of the most popular features of All Things, even though I just put links to articles everyone else is reading. And I include links to things I love to buy. So you pay me twice for that one—first for the All Things subscription and then with the affiliate marketing kickbacks. I started this publication as a fun little hobby and look I’ve turned it into a 6-figure business. Traditional media is such a racket (but see above my Elle article), self-employment is the way to go. But I will say, it’s such hard work. In my twenties I worked too hard. I had a blog, and a podcast, and Instagram and I wrote for magazines and then I wrote a book about how I did it all. But wait, don’t follow the advice in my book because it encourages overwork. But I did accomplish so, so, very many things. So I guess overwork is ok, but only if you’re in your 20’s or you’ve done enough to show your friends how accomplished you are. Here I am at an Italian villa where I will be hosting a writing retreat (sign up before it’s too late). If you’d like to stay at the villa, use code COZY for a discount. At my last retreat I wrote My Year of Rest and Relaxation. But unlike Moshfegh’s book, the protagonist (me) doesn’t do a lot of drugs to numb the pain of her parents’ death, she really does just rest and relax for a year. I’m publishing it using an innovative new model where I pay for the marketing, editing, printing, and everything else but I get to keep all the royalties. It’s a hybrid model, not self-publishing. I don’t self-publish, I’m a trad pub author. You can buy all my books here and here.

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AI SLOP TROLL: I disagree with you but can’t form any actual criticism so I’m just going to shut you down by claiming you wrote everything with AI. AI slop. AI slop. AI SLOPPPP!!!

PRECOCIOUS GEN Z THOUGHT LEADER: That conservative media reporter is very unserious. She tries but fails to capture Joan Didion’s voice. I know because I’ve read Didion’s entire oeuvre even though Didion’s popularity peaked about 20 years before I was born. I never read those dumb YA novels about teen detectives and toxic vampire boyfriends. How did I discover Didion as a teenager? I mean, didn’t you? Next you’re going to tell me you just discovered Susan Sontag. I didn’t even study literature or philosophy or journalism in college. I was a physics major. I don’t mean to crush you with my overwhelming genius or anything. Have you seen my apartment? It’s very messy. I’m very normal.

PRETEND AI HATER: AI is bad. Terrible. Very Bad. But also, I just uploaded my 600,000 word manuscript into Claude and he turned my turd of a novel into gold. So maybe AI is...good? No. It’s bad. AI is bad! But also, book publishers are using AI to read and assess your book for quality, so maybe you should run your manuscript by some AIs to make sure it’s good? But really, I think AI is bad. So, so bad. Please like and subscribe.

WEST COAST BOOK CRITIC: We don’t exist. Oh wait, I’m here, hi. I’m actually a tech worker with a highly successful Substack about tech culture (tech anthropology, if you will) but lit mags publish book criticisms that I work on after my day job and after writing my regular Substack content. You could probably do it too if you stopped scrolling on your phone so much.

WRITING CRAFT TEACHER: I know my newsletters are too long and kind of woo woo and full of terms I made up like “Aboutness” which I did define like 30 letters ago, so go look that up, but if you forget to unsubscribe and hang around long enough, eventually you’ll give in and join my cult of overly empathetic middle aged women writers.

PATRON SAINT OF WRITERS ON THE OUTSIDE OF IMPREGNABLE LITERARY INSTITUTIONS: I couldn’t figure out why it’s so damn hard to get anything published in the New Yorker so I spent 6,598 hours researching this topic and discovered that the magazine has (or had) really specific taste and if you can fit your writing style into that particular box it might even make you a better writer (like with John Cheever) but if your writing doesn’t fit their particular taste, you shouldn’t feel bad about it because some of the best fiction writers of the last century couldn’t get published there, and maybe for the better because the New Yorker style might have mangled their writing voice. I’m sharing all my research and conclusions here with you all for free because traditional media won’t publish my essay and you deserve to know this stuff, so we out here on Substack fam.

HYPOCRITICAL ATTENTION SEEKER: I make fun of popular Litstackers by reducing them to caricatures for laughs and attention while secretly being a devoted consumer of said Liststackers’ work and benefiting from their wisdom and knowledge.

On Substack, people will tear you a new one if you dare to neg cherished classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses. When I wrote a post last year criticizing Ulysses, I definitely caught some internet side eye. But the judgment didn’t even come close to the comments on Karen Rodriguez’ post “The 40 Famous Classics You’re Allowed to Skip (And Why Everyone Secretly Agrees).” The comments were so mean I physically flinched reading them. People said things like:

Even Substack-famous Lincoln Michael of Counter Craft (and Electric Lit) didn’t stay above the fray, calling Karen’s article “an obvious grift.”

My favorite section of her list is the “Literally Unreadable (But People Pretend)” category, which includes Ulysses (Joyce), In Search of Lost Time (Proust), and Finnegans Wake (Joyce), which Karen describes as “unreadable even for Joyce scholars.”

I don’t come from the academic literature world, I’m a lawyer-turned-novelist and all I care about from a reader’s perspective is that books are both 1) entertaining and 2) moving. There’s so many books that people praise lavishly but that I find fail that basic criteria, including Ulysses.

So why the hell is everyone losing their mind over this? Like is Joyce your god? Why is criticizing these books, these authors, such a cardinal sin?

I think I finally figured out why. And it has to do what people value in their books. There’s actually a whole debate in literary criticism concerning what fiction is supposed to do for humanity and what makes a novel good.

I happen to fall in with the group that doesn’t particularly appreciate Joyce. But there’s camps out there that die for modernist novels (like Ulysses) and experimental post-modern writing (like Pynchon’s work). I don’t agree with them, but it was helpful to understand what those readers value in those works.

Here’s what I learned:

Realism vs. Everything Else

The big debate in literary fiction boils down to this: should novels try to represent life as it actually is, or should they do something else entirely?

Realism is what most of us think of as “normal” fiction. It’s Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri. Characters feel like real people with believable psychology. The prose is clear and doesn’t call attention to itself. No one discovers they’re secretly royalty or gets abducted by aliens. It’s just life, rendered carefully on the page.

Critics like James Wood champion this approach. Wood wrote an entire book (How Fiction Works) essentially arguing that the novel’s greatest achievement is creating convincing interiority—making readers feel what it’s like to be someone else. (The reason I’m writing this Substack post is because I read Wood’s wikipedia page after which I promptly fell down an internet rabbit hole on lit criticism).

But here’s what makes realism click for me: it’s defined more by what it’s NOT than what it is.

Realism is not romance with impossible coincidences. It’s not allegory where characters represent abstract concepts. It’s not metafiction that constantly reminds you you’re reading a book. It’s not heavily plotted melodrama where orphans conveniently turn out to be related to their benefactors. And it’s not highly stylized or poetic prose where every sentence is gorgeously metaphorical.

Take Alice Munro’s story “Friend of My Youth”:

She tried at first to cozy up to my mother, as if they would be natural allies in this benighted place. She spoke as if they were around the same age—both stylish, intelligent women who liked a good time and had modern ideas. She offered to teach my mother to drive the car. She offered her cigarettes. My mother was more tempted by the idea of learning to drive than she was by the cigarettes. But she said no, she would wait for her husband to teach her. Audrey Atkinson raised her pinkish-orange eyebrows at my mother behind Flora’s back, and my mother was furious. She disliked the nurse far more than Flora did.

Her writing is clear, precise, physically observant. The prose is invisible—you’re focused on the experience being described, not the author’s cleverness.

Before realism became dominant in the mid-1800s (think Flaubert, George Eliot, Tolstoy), novels were full of improbable adventures, clear moral lessons, and coincidence-heavy plots. Realism said: what if we just showed ordinary people dealing with ordinary disappointments? What if we went deep into their psychology instead of hitting them with dramatic plot twists?

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Then Modernism Said “Not So Fast”

By the early 1900s, some writers thought realism was insufficient. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner broke with realistic conventions, but not because they didn’t care about truth. They thought traditional realism couldn’t capture modern consciousness.

Modernism’s insight: Reality is fragmented and chaotic, especially after World War I shattered Victorian certainties. Modernist authors used stream of consciousness, fractured timelines, and difficult prose to represent how minds actually work and how reality actually feels.

Compare Munro above with Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse:

What does it mean then, what can it all mean? Lily Briscoe asked herself, wondering whether, since she had been left alone, it behoved her to go to the kitchen to fetch another cup of coffee or wait here. What does it mean?—a catchword that was, caught up from some book, fitting her thought loosely, for she could not, this first morning with the Ramsays, contract her feelings, could only make a phrase resound to cover the blankness of her mind until these vapours had shrunk. For really, what did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs.Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing—nothing that she could express at all.

The questions pile up without clear answers, thoughts interrupt themselves—this is trying to show consciousness as it actually moves, not tidied up for the reader.

The key difference from realism: Modernists believed meaning still existed, but you needed new forms to access it. Joyce’s Ulysses is notoriously difficult, but according to the internet (I don’t know, I haven’t read past page six), the novel is ultimately trying to demonstrate the truth of a day in Dublin in 1904. The experiments serve a purpose.

The problem, for me, is that the experiments can make the writing very un-fun to read.

Then Postmodernism Said “There Is No Truth”

Postmodernism (think Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme) takes fragmentation and makes it playful. These writers are skeptical that fiction can reveal any stable truth at all. So they write metafiction that constantly breaks the fourth wall, mixes high and low culture, and treats meaning itself as a game.

Here’s an excerpt from Donald Barthelme’s “The School.”

One day, we had a discussion in class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? and I said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life? and I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of—I said, yes, maybe.

What’s interesting is that school kids wouldn’t, they couldn’t, be making the observation that death is “a fundamental datum, the means by which...everyday may be transcended in the direction...” because of their age and life experience. So if it’s not the children’s “voice” saying this in the story, it must be the narrator, or maybe even the writer. Barthelme is winking at us, breaking character (the fourth wall), reminding us that this story is all made up. It’s clever but keeps us at arm’s length emotionally.

When you read postmodern fiction, it often feels like writers writing for other writers—it’s inside jokes about literary conventions rather than stories that move you emotionally. That’s intentional. Postmodernists think the search for emotional truth through fiction is naive. Better to be playfully ironic about the whole enterprise.

This is why I sometimes find postmodernism so boring. (I actually like Barthelme’s short story “The Baby” which is harrowing.) But who reads Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) for pleasure besides academics who need to write dissertations about it?

Why This Actually Matters For Writers (and Readers)

Understanding these camps helped me see what choices I’m making in writing my novel—and how certain readers or critics might respond to those choices.

If I write a straightforward story with believable characters and clear prose, I’m in the realist tradition. If I experiment with fragmented timelines or stream of consciousness, I’m borrowing modernist techniques. If I get cute and self-referential, I’m flirting with postmodernism.

None of these are “right” or “wrong,” but they come with trade-offs. Realism connects emotionally but can feel conventional. Modernist techniques can capture complex consciousness but risk alienating readers. Postmodern playfulness might be intellectually interesting but often sacrifices what fiction does best: making us care about people who don’t exist.

These days the fiction world is pretty eclectic. There’s typical realism (Alice Munro), realism with fantastical elements (Kelly Link), experimentalism with emotional sincerity (David Foster Wallace apparently tried to split this difference), and everything in between.

My take after this deep dive: Fiction’s unique power is making us feel what it’s like to be someone else. When technique serves that purpose—whether it’s Alice Munro’s precision or Faulkner’s stream of consciousness—great. When technique becomes the point itself, I lose interest.

As an ex-lawyer learning to write fiction, I’m probably biased toward realism’s clarity. Legal writing beat the tendency toward flowery writing out of me. But I’m glad I understand the landscape now. At least when someone tells me my prose is too bland or my story is not experimental/unique enough, I’ll know which tradition they’re arguing from.

What do you think? Are you team realism, team experimentation, or somewhere in between?

I’m going to lapse into a little bit of snooty prejudice about sports fans. When I think of a midwestern, beer-drinking, Sunday-night-football-watching dude (like my father-in-law),1 I don’t think of bookish scholarship. No offense.

So when I stumbled across The Blood and Guts: How Tight Ends Save Football at my local library—and it wasn’t about a whole team, or play strategy, or even a great offense or defense, but instead about one, just one position in the game—I was taken aback.

I couldn’t help but think: if a whole book about tight ends can make it into the world, why not my dystopian sci-fi novel?

It struck me then that there are millions of examples in the world of makers starting unusual creative projects and actually finishing them, even though they’re kinda niche. The Blood and Guts exists in the world, despite people like me who underestimate the interest and value of such a book. And that is really inspiring.

Tyler Dunne, the author, became a bit of a hero to me, in my head. He’s a sort of an avatar for the kind of person who just wakes up and does their work—the rest of the world can shove it.

I kept wishing I could ask the guy how he actually did it—write the damn book. So I did. I asked him.

“I still get a little PTSD when I think about it,” Tyler told me, laughing. He’s a father of three living in Western New York with his wife and kids. Writing The Blood and Guts was something he did on top of his regular work as a sports journalist.

At the time of writing The Blood and Guts most of his working hours were spent running his Substack, Go Long, which required writing weekly 5,000 to 6,000-word feature stories and months-long investigative projects. Tyler also freelanced for the New York Times and hosted a podcast with Bills player Isaiah McKenzie.

All that on top of raising a two-year-old and a newborn who was, in Tyler’s words, “super colicky.”

How did he do it?

He woke up at 3 AM, four to five times a week, for six months. Most of those pre-dawn hours weren’t even spent writing. They were spent transcribing. Tyler interviewed legends of the tight end position: Rob Gronkowski, Tony Gonzalez, Jeremy Shockey, Mike Ditka, Jackie Smith, Ben Coates, Kellen Winslow, and George Kittle. He recorded all these conversations, then transcribed them himself because automated tools like Otter butchered the technical football terminology.

By the time he was done, Tyler had produced 510 pages of transcripts comprising 273,000 words of raw interview material—three to four novels’ worth of content. All separate from writing a single word of the actual book.

Transcription was just the beginning of the process. “I’d print everything out, highlight it, map out themes,” Tyler explained. “I reviewed every conversation three times before I even started writing.”

Tyler didn’t just transcribe from the comfort of his home office. He traveled for these interviews.

He went to South Beach to interview Jeremy Shockey. St. Louis for Jackie Smith. Florida for Mike Ditka. Charlotte for Ben Coates, then drove straight to Jacksonville to work on a Substack feature about Leviska Shenault because he was trying to combine book travel with his regular reporting work to save time.

He leveraged existing relationships and cold-contacted players himself. He arranged interviews. He booked travel. He juggled schedules. He did all of this while his wife managed their household, including two children under two years old. (She’s a saint, and Tyler knows it).

And in the middle of all of it—specifically in St. Louis, after interviewing Jackie Smith—Tyler hit a wall.

“I was finishing the Kellen Winslow chapter while managing other phone interviews,” he remembered. “I thought, ‘Can I even do this?’”

He kept going.

I needed to understand: why this book? Why this position? Why commit to something so specific that most people (like me) would assume has a tiny audience?

Tyler’s answer: “I wanted to celebrate the game.” The NFL was becoming consumed with debates about what counts as a catch, what constitutes roughing the passer, the escalating crisis around concussions. The game was getting sanitized, regulated, complicated.

“And I realized the tight end was the one position keeping the integrity of the sport alive,” Tyler explained. “They can still bowl people over in the open field. They can block. They can catch. They preserve the physicality that makes football what it is.”

Tyler wasn’t writing about tight ends because he was chasing a bestseller. He wasn’t writing about the Dallas Cowboys or Tom Brady or some scandal guaranteed to generate headlines.

But what Tyler discovered as he dove into his research made the project even more compelling. Almost every legendary tight end he studied had experienced some kind of young-age trauma that steered them toward the position. The position’s brutal and specific demands‚ blocking 300-pound defensive ends, catching balls in high-pressure traffic, being the smartest person on the field besides the quarterback‚ required a unique collection of traits that their life experiences had forged. The book stopped being about X’s and O’s. It became about people. That’s the book Tyler needed to write. And once he knew that, nothing was going to stop him.

His workspace was Spot Coffee in Hamburg, New York, where the staff got to know him and his project. After Blood and Guts was published, they added it to their modest library. “They got to say, ‘He actually wrote this book here,’” Tyler said.

But the real workspace was his house at 3 AM. Dark. Quiet. Headphones on. While his wife slept after another exhausting day with two kids, Tyler sat alone with the voices of football legends, typing out their stories word by word.

I had to ask. After all that—the 3 AM wake-ups, the sleep deprivation, the colicky baby, the moment of crisis in St. Louis, the 510 pages of transcripts—would Tyler do it again?

His answer came fast: “Yes. Absolutely.”

“It’s funny we’re talking about this,” he said, “because just yesterday I texted my brother-in-law. I said, ‘Man, as hard as it is to write a book, once you do it, you want to do it again.’”

“There’s something about seeing how far you can push yourself,” Tyler explained. “We’re not Olympic athletes training our bodies to the breaking point, but there are other ways to push ourselves. To see how far we can go. To discover what we’re capable of when we commit fully to something as writers.”

And, by the way, the book is great. My favorite chapter (about Rob Gronkowski) starts like this: “Rob is dead!” I recommend it for even the most fair-weather of football fans because Tyler is a great writer and his stories will draw you in.

He was clear-eyed about the book’s potential commercial performance, acknowledging that the topic is “very, very niche.” “The book did okay,” he said. “It wasn’t a bestseller by any means, but you know, the people who read it really loved it and I’ve heard from them and that’s enough.”

I love that. The book touched the people it meant to. A book about tight ends exists in the world because one person believed it should and was willing to wake up at 3 AM to make it happen.

When I think about my novel, I understand it deserves the same commitment. The same belief.

---

Tyler Dunne’s The Blood and Guts: How Tight Ends Save Football is available here. You can find his Substack, Go Long, where he continues to write those deep-dive features about football that make fans see the game differently.

This is the first in my “Make It Anyway” series, where I interview creators who finished meaningful niche projects despite the odds. If Tyler’s story resonates with you—if you’re working on your own creative project and wondering if you can actually finish it—subscribe to Write on Track to see more stories of creators who made it anyway.

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Update One: Looking at my “why” keeps me going with the novel.

I’m officially a couple months back to work after an unofficial maternity leave and damn does it feel good to be back. It’s a strange thing to love working so much that I want to cut my breaks and vacations short so I can get back to writing. Not that writing is always pleasant or even fun. It’s just very fulfilling and I crave that satisfied feeling of having gotten a scene down, or even just a diary entry.

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Hi friends,

I’m back after a short maternity leave. It feels great to be writing again. So much has happened since I last posted and I want to catch you all up. In short:

• I had my second kid!

• I had some scary postpartum complications, but I’m all better now.

• I’m back to writing the novel. It’s been slow and difficult, but my butt is in the chair and I am doing it.

• Being a parent of two kids is wild.

Raise your hand if your Sunday scaries have turned into your Friday scaries. As a parent, my weekends now feel like work and my Mondays feel like a Sabbath. Don’t get me wrong, I love my kids. Hanging out with them is even fun. Like this weekend, we went to a pumpkin patch. Check out this adorableness:

But rearing children is work. It’s during the weekdays, when my kids are cared for by other adults, that I can sit down and write, read, take a shower, eat a proper lunch, or do yoga. Having a nanny for Idris, my second kid, is the reason I’m able to write this letter to you all after all these months.

For my monthly 3-1-1 series, I’ve used the following format: three life/writing updates, one useful tool, and one meaningful image. For the sake of tradition, I’ll stick with it. Here we go:

Update 1: I got invited to a Substack Bestsellers event.

Earlier this summer I set a goal to finish draft two of my novel by August 1, two weeks before delivering my second kid. Last year I used the same goal-setting approach to successfully finish my first draft. This time, I failed pretty decisively. Draft two is no way near done. But that’s ok. Life is strikes and gutters.

I try to really celebrate my wins. Like for some wild, inexplicable reason, Substack Bestsellers invited me to hang out with other Bestsellers in August. Friends, I am nowhere near a “Bestseller.” I have like eight paid subscribers. Why I was invited to this event, I cannot know.

I gave birth to Idris on July 23—just one week days before this was scheduled to happen. But I was so determined to go, the first thing I did when I got out the hospital was get a haircut. No joke, I wanted to presentable for my fellow writers. I’ve made a lot of great writer friends across the country, but our hangouts are often over videoconference. I wanted writer friends IRL.

Unfortunately, the night before this event I was re-admitted to the hospital for the second time because I had crazy high blood pressure and spent the next 24 hours getting an IV bag of magnesium pumped through me to limit the likelihood of seizure. Yikes. Perpetuating humanity is a risky business. I don’t know why pregnancy and birth is still so dangerous in the year 2025.

Anyway, I couldn’t go. But I’m happy someone at Substack thought I deserved to be there.

Update 2: My brain function is suboptimal, but I’m still pushing.

Now that I’ve recovered from pregnancy/delivery, I’m so grateful to have a clear mind and functioning body again. The clear mind part is kind of debatable. Postpartum brain is making it so much harder to write. I thought at first that it was just me being out of practice, but apparently diminished brain function is normal for the maternal brain for up to year. Verbal recall—finding the words we’re looking for in real time—takes the biggest hit during pregnancy, and continues for some time postpartum. *Sigh*

Also, being away from my novel project for so long has made it harder to believe that the whole endeavor will result in a published book at some point. I find myself questioning more and more whether this novel-writing path is pure folly.

I think what keeps me coming back is my belief in the inherent power of story. There’s something magical that happens when words on a page are read. Characters and settings are populated in the reader’s imagination. Maybe the story I’m writing now will never be read. But I’m getting better at story-telling each time I work on it. That’s power! It’s worth it to keep going just for that alone.

Update 3: Writing dates are everything.

I’ve written before about how joining writing communities has really kept me writing when picking up a pen has felt impossible. Meeting weekly with my WFWA critique group has made the novel-writing process feel like a collaborative effort, even though I’m the one sitting in front of the computer, alone, just putting down words.

And now I’ve made additional changes to help with the “alone” part. I meet up with a writer friend over Zoom, or join WFWA’s “writing dates” every weekday morning. We do a 5-minute check-in where everyone states what their writing goal is for that morning session and then we silently write together.

It makes the whole process feel less solitary. It’s very much a pro-ADHD method of body-doubling that has worked well for me. I keep showing up and making myself write words.

Kindle for Beta-Reader Manuscripts

I have been a beta-reader for multiple authors at this point, and reading massive PDFs on a phone is super annoying. There’s no good PDF reader app that takes you back to your bookmarked PDF page when you put the phone down. Word documents are even worse.

Then I realized that I could put my writer friends’ unfinished manuscripts on kindle! It’s very easy. I just attach the pdf or word doc to an email and send it to my Amazon-assigned kindle email address. For example, mine is noorjahan_45@kindle.com If you need help finding yours, check out these instructions. After I email the manuscript to my kindle email, it shows up in my kindle app minutes later.

Best of all, many of the ebook reading features available on kindle are available for the manuscript. I can bookmark pages, highlight, and add notes. It makes providing comments to the writer much easier, and a much more pleasant reading experience. I’m not one to praise Amazon, but this free service of theirs is excellent.

This picture pretty much sums up our life right now: Formula > Alcohol.

Lots has happened in the last few months, and I’ve been delinquent in my monthly updates, so this edition is packed!

Adulting is the worst part of getting older.

Let’s start with the personal stuff. In mid-April my family packed up and moved to a different house. We’re still in the Bay Area but now live closer to my husband’s job to ease his daily commute. My son transitioned to a new preschool (getting him into one was a whole ordeal), and I entered my third trimester of pregnancy. I’m getting pretty big, folks. Check it out.

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Like most writers, I know when my work is terrible. Sometimes I think it’s decent. And occasionally—in the darkest, most honest corners of my heart—I believe my work is truly great.

The Brutal First-Page Test

Earlier this month I attended Chuck Sambuchino’s Writer’s Day Workshop in San Francisco. At one of the sessions, attendees could anonymously submit exactly one page—the first page—of our novel manuscripts to be read aloud and critiqued by a panel of agents. The agents were told to raise their hands if at any point during the reading, they wanted to stop. As in, if that page was part of a hypothetical query package, they’d stop reading the page and reject the query. The panelists offered feedback on the page whether they got through to the end or not.

The session was scheduled for 75 minutes and they got through about 40 different first-pages. They finished the page for only about six submissions.

My God, they were brutal. For some first-pages they felt that the descriptions ran too long. For others they felt that the author hadn’t grounded the reader in space, i.e. not enough setting description. They dismissed some out of hand for starting the novel with cliches like the protagonist just waking up from sleep. They disliked some pages for not having a distinct voice, or for having juvenile prose, or for being too confusing.

Other times they would give feedback so vague, it’s impossible to know what they meant. Like a few times the agents would say, “I’m looking for story, and I don’t see that here.” What does having “story” on the first page of a novel manuscript even mean?!?

Going into this session I knew that my manuscript as a whole had some issues that I needed to fix, but I was reasonably certain that my first page was good. I had rewritten it three different times, after all. People in my writing group liked it.

The Moment of Truth

When an agent began reading my page aloud, my heart started pounding in my chest, and my cheeks burned. This was it. A bunch of those other writers’ pages were defective for some reason, but these agents were going to like my first page. They’d definitely get to the end. After months of toiling, here would be my first signal that I was on the right track.

That is not what happened. They barely got past my first two paragraphs. Two out of the four agents raised their hand to stop reading, and that was it.

And if I’m being honest, by the time they raised their hand, even I was growing tired of my page. How is that even possible?

What is the “Perfect First Page”?

After sitting through the reading aloud of a bunch of other first pages by that point, I saw how quickly the successful writers had established 1) who their protagonist was, 2) what their problem was, and 3) a hint of the character flaw that was keeping them from solving their problem.

When the agent reading aloud got to my second paragraph and was still droning on about setting, I was getting impatient for the story to start (which is clearly also what the agents were feeling). And it didn’t help that I had started my novel with an absolute banger of a catastrophe and didn’t elaborate at all on what the main character was going to do about the problem. (That doesn’t show up until page three).

I’ve learned that a huge catastrophe requires an immediate reaction from the point-of-view character. Or I could introduce a smaller problem and lead the reader along just a little longer, but still I have to hint at the character’s inability to solve the problem based on their traits.

Truly, every word of the first page of a manuscript needs to be placed there for a reason. A couple chapters into a manuscript, a writer has hopefully sucked the reader into the story enough to keep them turning pages. We can go deep on setting and exposition then, if necessary. But the very first page—getting that absolutely perfect is paramount. It’s the difference between getting published and not. It’s the difference between selling the book to a reader or not.

Finding My Way Back

Gosh, it hurt to get rejected, so quickly and so definitively. Especially when I was convinced that my page would make it through, that I had something great to offer. Sharing what I considered an example of great writing was a mind trip when gatekeepers in the publishing industry said, “Nope. This is not even good.”

It took me a few days to lick my wounds and get perspective around this whole episode. There is something so psychologically vulnerable about making art. It takes so much energy to gather up the courage to spend time on something so difficult to achieve, like writing a novel and getting it published. I need so much positive self-talk to keep going when my inner critic is constantly telling me that my work is trash. Then to hear from an industry insider, who filters out bad writing for their job, say that my work didn’t cut it—it really takes an emotional toll.

But the good news is that I now know my first page wasn’t going to hack it before I sent out the query package to dozens of agents, only to get rejections and not fully understand why.

The last week or so it has been hard to put the self-doubt aside and keep going. But inspiration sometimes comes to me in the most unusual places. I went down an Instagram rabbit hole learning about the life and habits of one of my all-time favorite actors: Cillian Murphy. What I learned about him is that he cares very little about celebrity and notoriety. What he’s obsessed with is this: the craft of acting. He’s always pushing himself to get better, to stretch his skills just a little more, to try roles that are weird and different and make him learn. He just wants to be a good actor for the sake of creativity and his inner drive for making beautiful, exceptional work.

It was a great reminder, really, of what made me want to give up my crazy prestigious well-paid lawyer job for the folly of being a novelist. It’s because I adore good writing and I would be lucky to spend my days just trying to get better at it, even if I’ll never be great.

Oof it hurts to say that though. I do want to be great. I want to be exceptional even. But Rome wasn’t built in a day. And getting good at anything worth being good at takes time. I’m reminded of Min Jin Lee, who gave up her legal career to write creatively (she went to my law school too: Georgetown!). She claims it took 30 years to write Pachinko. That book went on to be finalist for the National Book Award. I don’t think I have a National Book Award-winning book in me. But if there’s anything I can learn from Lee’s example it’s this: patience.

So here I am, continuing on after crushing defeat—not because I’m certain of success, but because learning the craft of writing is worth the journey.

What about you, friends? How do you keep going after rejection?

I’ve been more physically ill in the past 10 weeks than I have been in my entire life. Don’t worry, I don’t have cancer. Well, not exactly. I don’t have cancer, unless you think a fetus is a tumor.

Surprise! I’m pregnant. Yes, yes, very happy news. It’s wonderful and all that. But also, I’ve endured more than two months of vomiting my guts out and letting a cluster of cells in my uterus suck the marrow out of my bones. My lovely little parasite.

Well the nausea has finally abated but my writing and productivity habits are in shambles. Rather than my beautiful, peaceful morning routine that worked for the previous eight months, I’ve spent the last three months in bed surrounded by Zofran, vomit bags, crackers, and any book or tv show that could distract me from the painful burning in my esophagus caused by stomach acid. (Too graphic? Sorry, perpetuating humanity aint pretty folks.)

But back to the whole point of this post. How do I pick myself up from my current messy state of affairs and become the productive writing machine I was back in December?

I’ve been in this habits-in-shambles place before and there are a few strategies that work to get my days structured and back on track. It has taken me several years and lots of angst to find these methods so I hope they will serve you well:

1. Drugs (legal ones).

I have ADHD. The surest way to get me back into a routine would be to take my ADHD meds. Unfortunately, stimulant medications are highly discouraged while pregnant. So that won’t work for me for at least six more months. Damn, pregnancy is truly the mind killer. (Not fear, as Paul Atreides would say).

If drugs aren’t an option for you either, keep reading.

2. Friends.

The only reason this post is written and sitting in front of you right now is because I have a standing co-working session with the ever-wise and encouraging every Tuesday morning. We meet for a few hours over zoom or at a coffee shop and work together.

Honestly, if I didn’t have to plant my butt in a computer chair so I could keep my promise to Kat and show up for our session, I’d still be in bed reading the third book in Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series. The inertia that comes from not having a consistent morning routine is really really really hard to break.

The most important tool after drugs has been having colleagues and friends keep me accountable to my goals. There is so much power in having community. If you don’t have one, you better get one, friends.

3. A room of one’s own.

Ok you don’t need a whole room. But something that has helped me come back to my writing desk is the feeling that the desk belongs to me and I belong to the desk. Here’s what my writing space looks like:

When I’ve been in a fugue-state, like in the nausea induced delirium of the last few months, my desk will often be littered with crap like bottles of Tylenol, my toddler’s pajamas, random mail, and candy wrappers.

Maybe it’s an ADHD thing, or just a typical brain thing, but an organized space helps me have an organized mind. Organized doesn’t have to mean sterile. Note all the random tchotchkes and colorful objects on my desk that my stimulant-craving mind enjoys.

But there is a semblance of order to all the madness, and that makes all the difference. Often when I find that I can’t possibly bring myself to sit down and write, it’s a really bad feeling because it’s like I don’t have control over my own brain, my own body.

Tidying makes me feel like I can reclaim control again. It puts me back in my body. And the simple act of moving (to clear the space, take out the trash, put away cloths) makes me feel like I am behind the wheel again. My mind is at mission control, pushing buttons, directing limbs. And that is a start.

4. Journal.

Sometimes the brain is too clogged to write beautiful prose and coherent scenes. There’s too much trash gumming up the hallways.

Getting into a creative writing flow state requires immense concentration. Getting into that state is even harder when the mind is occupied by other pressing feelings.

The last three months of my life have been very emotional. Imagine all the anguish of not being able to properly care for my toddler, or take care of my own physical body, let alone my mental state. Of watching my husband carry the entire burden of the household, on top of his very demanding job. Of eating poorly, sleeping poorly, and feeling guilty all the time for turning into a slug in the hopes of growing a whole set of kidneys and maybe some eyelashes for another human being.

It’s hard to cast aside those feelings and all the attendant thoughts when I’m trying to write a Substack post, or God forbid, a scene from my novel.

The answer, really, is to stop trying. I need to write a bunch of garbage in my journal about how I’m feeling and process all the difficult stuff from the last several months. All that detritus is floating around in my psyche, and it’s hard to make space for creativity when other feelings and thoughts are taking up so much space.

So, I journal. Whenever I feel light enough to write creatively, I do.

5. Do the pressing life admin.

Sometimes all the other demands in life press in and keep my mind from the clarity and focus needed to write. The bills due, the full inbox, the appointments that need making all ping my consciousness, saying “deal with me! deal with me! deal with me!” until writing feels impossible. That’s true of any time in life—even when I have my habits and daily structure in order.

Most of the time I don’t give into the impulse to work on life admin because 1) I hate doing them, and 2) I know if I give in, my brain will be too fried afterwards to get any writing done.

But every once in a while, I’ll have the wisdom to just capitulate to those demands because they’re too distracting to do anything else. And in some instances, that turns out to be the right move.

If I’m able to get some online bills paid and a couple emails sent within an hour or less, then the dopamine hit I get from accomplishing something important (some people call it “eating the frog”) gives me the helpful brain juice I need to do the work that is much harder and more taxing—creative writing.

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That’s it folks. That’s all I’ve got. There’s no magic bullet, really. None of the above works in totality, or all the time. (What do I look like? A wizard? I’m not peddling snake oil here). But they do help a lot.

It’s what I’m doing to pick myself up. One word at a time.

Cheers,

Noor

PS: How do you all get writing again when your world has been turned upside down? Asking for a friend.

Write on Track

How I Get Myself to Sit Down and Write

Over the years, I’ve felt the desire to write creatively but never formed a discipline to do it consistently. I think a lot of people struggle with this dilemma: the simultaneous wish to be creative but the inability to execute on that desire…

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2 years ago · 14 likes · 9 comments · Noor Rahman

Health is wealth.

I’m just coming up for air after over a month of being basically incapacitated. I never appreciate being healthy (of both mind and body) until I’m not. Last year I posted on Substack nearly every week from March-December, but Norovirus flattened me at the end of December and after that came a slew of other ailments. I was forced to break my publishing streak. I also haven’t made much more than a couple pages of progress in revising my sci-fi novel.

I’ve missed writing and connecting with you all. I’m hopeful that things are getting better healthwise. And I’m determined to get back on the wagon. I have some exciting ideas for what I’ll be writing about on Substack in the upcoming weeks/months. More on that below.

I get by with a little help from my friends.

Despite my sickness, I’ve managed to keep up with my commitments to writing colleagues and that makes me feel like the last several weeks weren’t a pointless blur. I have a little Substack writing group that I meet with weekly and we’ve cheered each on in our writing journeys since last August. (Shout out to , , ). I’m so grateful for their comradery, accountability, and guidance.

In November I applied to join the Women’s Fiction Writer’s Association, and they have a writing group matching program. I’ve met up with my assigned group a couple times and so far it has been really great. I also started my year-long novel-revision workshop with Writer House, and it has been inspiring.

I look forward to attending the SF Writer’s Conference next weekend. (If you’re going to be there, please message me so we can meet up!). Hopefully I’ll make more writer friends and feel more “plugged in” to the world of novel-writing and publishing. I’m still such an outsider.

I’m looking at other selfish artists for inspiration.

For some time, I’ve been grasping for examples of other artists that have put their creative work front and center in their lives, even it means living in untraditional ways and giving up things in life that most other people would value.

I mean, when I send my kid to daycare and sit at home to work on the novel instead of, you know, make actual money, I wish I had role models of other creative types (both past and present) that invested in themselves to help me feel like I’m not the world’s most self-centered person.

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Hi Readers,

This month’s 3-1-1 is my final post for the year. When I started Write on Track in May I had no idea how rewarding it would be to wrangle my thoughts into coherent letters for you all each week. I’ve had such incredible conversations and learned so much from this community.

I look forward to whatever comes next for this little publication. The sky’s the limit, but even if nothing changes, I’ll still be so glad to share my novel-writing/self-employment/career-pivot journey with you all week after week. Have a great holiday season and cheers to more words, more stories, and more meaningful conversations in 2025.

Yours in friendship and solidarity,
Noor

One: Boss-me is giving myself a “barely meets expectations” performance review for this quarter.

I think boss-me has been overzealous in her expectations.

I set a number of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for myself to achieve this quarter. (Lol you can take the girl out of corporate but you can’t take corporate out of the girl).

Here are my Q4 (Oct-Dec) 2024 KPIs and results:

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When I was in middle school, I read books to escape my bullies. During lunch I’d sneak away to the school library and wind the minutes down with my nose in a book.

I once read a novel about a society of rabbits that broke free from their tyrannical leader to establish a more equitable society. It was basically a fun story about rabbits.

Sitting in a high school English class years later, I was astonished to discover that my rabbit book was actually “literature.” Watership Down uses allegory to explore different forms of leadership and political governance such as fascism, democracy, and socialism.1

I still think about that book, now more than 20 years later. I love this book for two reasons: First, it was so masterfully written even a 12-year-old enjoyed it. Second, the book’s hidden complexity made adolescent-me think deeply about politics and governance in a way that wasn’t boring—and long before I grasped what those things were.

That’s the kind of writer I want to be—the kind that tricks a reader into thinking deeply about themselves and their world.

I love science fiction because good authors use the genre to make us reflect deeply on our existence without shoving their ideas down our throats. Instead, they feed us their views in delicious spoonfuls of drama and suspense.

I don’t agree with Ayn Rand’s philosophy, but I learned a lot about her particular brand of laissez faire capitalism by reading all three of her massive books: The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and Anthem. I enjoyed myself the entire time—she’s a good storyteller. What a clever way to influence people.

Unfortunately, many writers can’t or don’t try to earn that influence by writing a good story. In the last two decades since middle school, I’ve encountered more and more books where the author just pounds me over the head with their particular take on human morality and society—like with stream-of-consciousness tomes that lack any tension. The whole point of a story is to make complex ideas like philosophy and ethics palatable, not a bore.

One of my favorite Sarah Fay posts ever is a biting take-down of snooty English Literature academia, which is influenced heavily by modernism. These lines are just so damn good:

Modernists created the split between what we call literary and popular writing. “Literary” means essentially writing that’s praised by critics, writing that’s awarded fellowships and prizes, writing that appears in syllabi in colleges and high schools the country over. And then there’s “popular,” meaning books people actually want to read.

The modernists “experimented”…they rejected the conventions that, well, made books fun. No more engaging plots, they dispensed with that. No more punctuation to make meaning clear. Bring on the sprawling sentences and/or fragments. Bring on the elaborate backstories and mind-numbing interiority of characters that go on for pages and pages and pages.2

That’s why I’ll never read Ulysses, and I don’t care. If I asked anyone to sit down and parse 816 pages of the innermost thoughts of two random dudes living in post-modern Ireland—I’m pretty sure most people would say: hard pass.

As a writer, yes, my job includes studying good writing for inspiration and instruction. But that’s not the average reader’s job. In 35 years of living, I’ve never met a single person who read literary journals who didn’t also want to be a writer. Writers get so immersed in “literary” circles that they start valuing things that make their writing inaccessible, and frankly, boring.

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The stakes matter here. When writers prioritize impressing other writers over engaging readers, everyone loses. We lose readers to other media. We lose opportunities to influence thinking. We lose the chance to sneak complex ideas into receptive minds, the way Watership Down did for me.

Here’s what I think: Maybe the most impressive feat isn’t writing something experimental and complex—it’s writing something complex that people actually want to read. The magical middle exists. There are stories that keep us turning pages while leaving lasting impressions.

Those are the kinds of books that deserve to be on lists, awarded prizes, and lauded by the powers that be. Not because they’re particularly hard to read, but because they achieve the hardest feat of all: making complexity accessible, making wisdom enjoyable, making “literature” live.

Question for you: What’s your Watership Down book—a book that was fun to read but still makes you think?

Three Updates

One: Novels are like children. It takes a village.

I called in the cavalry to help revise my novel manuscript. It might be overkill, but here’s everything I’ve been doing (or plan to do):

• Join a fiction workshop with the SF Writing Salon;

• Collab with multiple critique partners I found through Writing Mastery Academy;

• Join a weekly virtual workshop with Berkeley Writers Circle;

• Attend the San Francisco Writer’s Conference in February;

• Apply to join a year-long workshop at Writer House;1

• Attend The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Deep Dives seminar; and

• Attend a Chuck Sambuchino Writer’s Day event in April.2

Critiques by other writers have been painful but essential. Beta readers help me understand what dialogue is believable, what events make sense, what parts of my setting are hard to imagine, and how to effectively choreograph the hero’s movements through space. I’m working hard at pacing and tone and mood.

Two: Try re-writing by hand.

Revising is hard because I have to actually write good prose now. I don’t know what my voice or style is. Being a lawyer beat the tendency to produce flowery language out of me. I am spare with my metaphors and my imagery tends to be concrete.

It’s strange—I love using metaphor and allegory when I write poetry. I just can’t seem to infuse that voice into my story-telling. When I try to do it, all I seem to push out is cliche metaphors.

The other day I started re-writing a scene by hand and that helped. Hand writing is slower than typing and forces my mind to write out the tangible images and sounds and sensations my hero is perceiving. I was surprised that it helped.

But I tried it again yesterday and it didn’t work. I just kept rewriting what I had already written before, without adding the texture and depth and complexity that makes a piece of writing really immersive for a reader. In short, revising is hard.

Do any of you have any suggestions for me?

Three: Writing can be taught, kind-of.

I started a novel-revision course with Writing Mastery Academy, and a few lectures in, I realized my manuscript needed a deeper sense of the hero’s character.

So I pivoted and started a course on effective character portrayal, where I learned that I had to include the character’s interior thoughts and bits of information that refer back to defining moments in her life.

That made me realize I don’t know how to smoothly insert those pieces into my scenes, which made me start yet another course focused on scene design. I’m about 1/3 way through the scene design course, and it has been critical.

I haven’t found a course on how to write beautiful prose. Maybe that’s the part of writing that just can’t be taught.

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One Useful Tool

Google chat—a  Slack alternative.

I’m part of a Substack writing group that is run primarily out of Slack. Five of us formed our own subgroup and we were using the Direct Messaging feature to communicate amongst just ourselves.

But recently we realized all our helpful comments and resources would disappear from Slack in six months unless we upgraded to the paid version.

We searched for an alternative and landed on Google Chat. I didn’t even know Google Chat was a thing. Turns out, the chat feature on Gmail actually has a home page that you can use as a group messaging board. It looks like this.

It’s totally free, and file sharing is actually easier than with Slack. (Share directly from gDrive). If you need a platform to communicate with a small group, and you’re tired of Slack, Dischord, etc, give Google Chat a try.

One Impactful Image

Mood for November is this picture. Deep contemplation that stems from paradigm shifts caused by world events. 

This woman is my aunt. I took the picture in 2011 when I visited Bangladesh. We’re on a boat ride down the Padma river. Every time I look at this picture, I wonder what she’s ruminating about. A lifetime of memories? Regrets? Ambitions?

For many years I dreamed of doing creative work, but I could never meaningfully start or finish a writing project. There were a lot of reasons: My brain was tired from working as a lawyer. I let perfectionism stop my pen from moving. I felt like an imposter who would never create anything good, so why bother trying.

After decades of floundering around reading self-help books, trying different jobs, observing jealously from the sidelines as friends built creative careers, or colleagues spiked their corporate jobs in favor of something more fun, I finally developed a modicum of self-awareness and courage to actually do the things I was dreaming about doing.  

In the past seven months, I have:

• Written a 100,000-word draft of my sci-fi novel

• Built a community of 290+ fellow writers and creators

• Published 28 essays about creativity, career pivots, and productivity

• Helped dozens of subscribers overcome their own creative blocks

Write on Track is letters to my former self. I tell her the things I learned that helped me get to the place I am now—pursuing writing seriously, humbly, and strategically. I am by no metric perfect or “arrived.” But I would have gotten to this place faster if ten years ago, someone had shared the hard-earned lessons I now share in these letters.

Many of you are new subscribers here (welcome!). Today I surface foundational posts that I believe may serve you on your creative journeys.

For my OG subscribers, this list may help identify letters from me that you may have missed because of life and work and family and everything else.

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This post contains raw truths about walking away from a well-paid legal career to pursue writing and the framework I used to decide if this massive life change was worth it.

This controversial post reveals uncomfortable truths about what it takes to do creative work. Using six months of detailed time-tracking data, I show exactly how I “selfishly” stole 420+ hours of time from my traditional responsibilities to make art happen.

This is my most viral post to date and it’s a little snarky. I wrote it during a time I was frustrated by all the unqualified people trying to make money selling Substack growth advice to newbies. I freely share a few tacticts that worked for me as a new writer on the platform.

I share strategies that got me from “wanting to write” to completing a 100,000-word novel manuscript. It includes on-ramps to productivity, methods to capitalize on existing ideas, and how I move past perfectionism.  

As a follow up to “How I Get Myself to Sit Down and Write,” (above) I share two additional strategies that helped me write over 27,000 words in a single week during my novel’s final sprint.

Embracing beginner’s mind helped me set aside the self-doubt that was halting progress on my novel. I tried to turn my creative inexperience into an advantage—being new at writing craft might allow for fresh prose and unique stories.

When I first joined Substack in April, I was really irritated by other writers’ paywalled posts. Why would I pay $12 a month for some random internet person’s weekly diary? Fast forward six months and I am now a paying subscriber to several solo content creators. In this post I tell you why I had a change of heart.

Further Reading

If you enjoy my letters about building a creative life while maintaining authenticity and connection, you’ll love these fellow creators who I admire:

Renee Fountain’s Gryphon Quill: Renee is a literary agent with 30+ years of experience in the industry. Her letters offer clear, actionable strategies for navigating the publishing world. She is also incredibly generous in her interactions with subscribers. Here’s one of my favorite posts of hers.

Jennie O’Connor’s Down the Rabbit Hole: Her writing captures the messy truth of creative life with both humor and depth. Here’s one of her most popular posts.

I doubt my little newsletter will fare well in a battle for your attention against the election news cycle today. But if you happen to find this letter in your inbox, I invite you to read 272 words that I re-read at least once a year: Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. (Presented below).

This speech was so masterfully written I can’t help but feel like the words came through Lincoln from a higher power. No matter how many times I revisit the prose, I am always awestruck by the solemnity and weight of this text.

Delivered on November 19, 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln managed to reframe the entire project that is America. In just ten sentences, Lincoln invoked the Declaration of Independence and established a new vision for American democracy.

While American’s founding documents focused on the mechanics of governance, Lincoln’s words elevated equality to the heart of American identity, arguing that a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” was worth dying to preserve.

I hope these timeless words anchor your thoughts today, as a reminder of what our nation has endured and of our capacity for greatness.

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When I was in high school, I secretly thought kids who wanted to be artists when they grew up were selfish bastards. How could a person be so enamored with their point of view that they thought slapping paint on a canvas would be valuable to society? 

I felt so smug in my own path. I was going to study history. I was going to figure out how the world worked and shape it. I was going to make a difference. I was going to be a leader and not a cog in the wheel.

Those wannabe artists could spend their whole day playing. I’d spend my days kicking ass and taking names.

It’s been two decades since high school and now I’m one of those self-centered artist types that I used to judge.

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Artists Steal Resources to Indulge their Ego

I’ve observed that being an artist requires megalomaniacal levels of confidence. Artists have to believe that all the time they spend in the studio is worth the opportunity cost of having a real job. They have to believe they can contribute to society in ways that cannot be measured by dollars. (At least initially.)

The inner conviction of an artist has to be so bullet proof that when they get turned away over and over by intelligent minds who say: Your story is boring. Your art is ugly. No one cares about your point of view. You have nothing new to say—To keep going anyway. Artists must stay anchored in the belief that what they are doing with their time, their hands, their mind, their future, is worthwhile.

The core belief of artists is that they have something unique to say, and that the world should listen. Art is born from an artist’s lived experience, their interpretation of the world. Come see water lilies through my eyes. Or: my cancer diagnosis story will make you feel alive. Or: my abusive father’s childhood will teach you about poverty in America. Or: my graffiti bears more truth than the news.

Artists must be selfish. There’s no other way to get our point of view heard. Society says that the resources we artists possess—our mind, our time, our focus—should be allocated for money-making, our families, our children, our community. But we steal those resources for ourselves.

And for what? To put bits of ourselves into the world in the form of images and words and sounds and ideas. We call that art. What could be more arrogant?

Artists are selfish—I have receipts.

Last week I pledged to analyze six months of time-tracking data about my work habits as a novelist. I have recorded every minute spent writing, reading, learning, networking, marketing, organizing, planning, and everything else a writer does with their working hours.

Here’s what the data shows:

In 25 weeks, I spent 87 hours just consuming content. For about 3.5 hours a week, I watched YouTube videos, read Substack, and skimmed craft books that inspired me to write. Most of that occurred right before intense writing sessions.

I spent 73 hours on creative writing education, including classes, workshops, and webinars. Just under 3 hours a week.

I spent 78 hours, just over 3 hours a week, on physical activity (Peleton, dance classes). Regular cardio improved my sleep, mood, attention, and energy levels.

And last, but most importantly, I spent 182 hours of my best brain function drafting the novel. That averages to about 7.3 hours a week of writing. Almost all of those were spent between the hours of 10am and 2pm, my most productive time.

Even though I only clocked 182 hours directly writing my novel, I required an additional 238 hours to prepare my brain to write and to do it well. That means I spent at least 9.5 hours of my workweek on activities supporting brain function.

Notice that I have now gone so far as to justify my mindless youtubing as “necessary” for doing my art. I am making fun of myself, but in truth: that shit works. I spent hundreds of hours priming my brain to pull taut like a string behind an arrow. I needed my mind sharp and tense to nail those words to a page.

When people ask me how I wrote a whole novel in seven months I point to the numbers. I put in the time. I gave the project my best brain. Et voila. A whole draft.

I haven’t even talked about all time I spent setting up processes to be productive—the tools I learned to use (Obsidian, ToggleTrack), or the hours dedicated to “personal knowledge management.”  

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Being Selfish is Key to Actually Making Your Art

The data is clear. For months, I selfishly set aside my ability to make money for my family. I set aside the opportunity to spend all day with my young son. I didn’t use my productive brain to do work “benefiting society.”  Instead, I pursued the insane dream of writing a novel.

The arrogant little shit that is my current psyche must have lived in me all along. Before, she thought she’d change the world with laws and society and politics. Now she understands that her best shot at influence is through her ideas. Her stories have a better chance than any cog-in-wheel law job she’d ever have.

Here’s what I think, dear readers. If you spend any time on creating—even it’s just your free time, your nights, your weekends, the quiet pre-dawn hours before work or in the middle of the night—you must believe that you are special.  

And you SHOULD.

Let’s stop hiding that belief like it’s some shameful secret. Put it out in the open. Embrace it. No use being fettered by false humility.

You need that self-belief. It will keep you going when the whole world tells you no. It’s the voice that says: me me me me me. It’s the one that encourages you to be selfish.

This week I dare you:

• Stop feeling like you need permission to choose yourself.

• Make your art a priority.

• Do less work at your “real” job.

• Eke out writing in the hours before work.

• Spend all your best brain energy on creativity.

• Let your kid stay in daycare for the extra 30 minutes so you can think.

• Order food for dinner, don’t cook.

• Take all the short cuts.

Art is not for the feeble hearted. Guard your time like a lion. Steal those moments to find your unique voice. All artists are selfish. You are no different.

Write on,

Noor

Question for the comments:

What is the most “selfish” thing you’ve done for art?

I’ve tracked how I spent every minute of my working hours for the last 6 months using Toggle Track. What do you want to know about what I do all day? Put your questions in the comments. I’ll analyze the data and respond in next Tuesday’s post.

Let me share why I go to such lengths to track my time, and what I’ve already learned from this experiment.

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If you’re wondering how I ended up here, let me catch you up. I quit my trial lawyer job at a major law firm in March of this year. Since then, I’ve been a full-time writer. The money I make from writing is a drop in the bucket compared to my last job. But the sacrifice has been worthwhile to me.

When I reflect on the decade I spent training for and practicing law, I sometimes regret the lost time. I could be so much farther along as a creative writer if I had known myself well enough to start sooner.

But my legal training wasn’t without its gifts. Maybe the most surprising one: the ability to track how I spend my time. As lawyers, we live and die by six-minute increments, perpetually tracking our working hours through software that keeps a constant clock running in the background.

The process is relentless. We toggle between clients, switching the clock off for one client matter and on for another. This is how we bill clients, so we have to be extremely diligent and ethical about it. Onerous right?

It gets worse. Clients make us turn the clock on and off when we switch the type of task we’re doing for them. They want to know how long we are in meetings versus how long we spend drafting their motions or answering their phone calls. On a typical day, I’d record over a half dozen time entries each day representing different clients, and different tasks.

Worse still, each of those time entries had to include a written narrative justifying the time spent. A simple “3.7 hours drafting motion” wouldn’t cut it. Instead, I’d have to write: “Analyzed X case, for argument Y in Motion for Summary Judgment brief.” And “Meeting about X lawsuit” would never fly. I’d have to say stuff like “Strategized for oral argument before Judge X, considering outcome of recent case Y.”

If our time narratives weren’t clear, the client would contest the bill and refuse to pay. It seems shitty, but our billable rates were so high, I couldn’t blame them. My firm charged me out for over $1000 per hour. If I couldn’t explain what I did in a seven-person team meeting for .5 hours, the client would be paying the firm $500 for me to be in a meeting where I might have added less value than a potted plant. (Over $3.5K total for seven lawyers at my billable rate.)

All of this is to say: I found the miserly and soulless time-tracking responsibilities of being a lawyer very difficult. Because of ADHD, my mind naturally bounces between tasks, making it difficult to maintain the linear focus that precise time-tracking demands. I eventually figured it out through a combination of ADHD coping mechanisms and, frankly, ADHD meds. But it was one of the shittiest parts of my job.  

So, here’s the plot twist that surprised me when I quit law practice: I chose to keep tracking my time.

It’s because I transformed a lawyer’s time tracking system into something less oppressive and actually useful. For example, I noticed that my best creative work happens between the hours of 10am and 2pm. So now I guard that time like a dragon and refuse to schedule meetings or admin tasks during them.

Here’s what makes my current time-tracking valuable:  

• I can look back on my “unproductive” days and see where my time actually went;

• Patterns emerge that show which habits boost my productivity;

• I can plan realistically, knowing exactly how long tasks like writing Substack posts typically take;  

• Long-term projects become less daunting when I can see their true time commitments;

• I can quickly spot when certain activities are eating up too much time;

• I understand how my other roles (wife, mother, house manager) take from my working hours.

Also, in my version of time-tracking, I took out the soul-crushing parts. No lengthy narratives required. No client scrutiny. No justifying every six minutes. The data is purely for my own growth and efficiency.

I track all my potential “work” hours, which I define broadly as writing and anything that helps me be a better writer and grow my business. This includes weekdays from 8:30am-5pm when my son is in daycare (and not sick), after 8pm when he’s asleep, and weekend naps between 12:30-3pm. Some weekday and weekend evenings are taken up by my husband, because fortunately he likes me and wants to hang out.

And now that I have over six months of data to analyze, it’s time to dive in and find some insightful gems. Here are a few questions I’m looking to answer for myself:

• How much of my workweek goes to family and household management?  

• What was the true time investment for my novel’s first draft?

• What’s my weekly time commitment for Substack posts?  

• How much time goes into Substack infrastructure (marketing, community engagement, design)?

• What’s my time investment in learning writing craft?

• How do I balance work hours with exercise and self-care?

I plan to share these insights and more in next Tuesday’s post. Have something you’re curious about? Drop your question in the comments—I’ll make sure to include answers in my analysis.

Until next week,

Noor

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Here’s the October installment of my monthly 3-1-1 series where I share 3 personal/writing updates, 1 useful tool and 1 impactful image.

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Three Updates

One: I am in revision hell.

This is the first time I’ve had a meaningful crisis of faith regarding my novel. Reading my manuscript after some time away has brought on such a confounding mix of emotions.

During some reading sessions, I am totally absorbed. It’s only when I pause that I realize how much I was carried away by the story, how quickly I had devoured chapters.

During other reads, I am just plain bored. I don’t care what’s happening. I don’t care how the events impact the hero. Regarding the story—I could take it or leave it.

As an author of that story, how can I possibly expect readers to care if I don’t?

Pausing to take stock, I understand that my plot is not the problem. Things are happening on the page. My hero is working to achieve her external goal.

But I feel that my hero’s internal motivation, her would-be personal transformation is just not a palpable part of the story arc. The story is missing character depth. Before seeing this flaw in my manuscript, I never realized how much witnessing the internal growth of the hero is a key part of a reader’s experience.

My plan is to revisit Lisa Cron’s Story Genius with the hope that I can learn how to build out my protagonist’s internal world, work in some interiority, and raise the emotional stakes.

But let me get real: I am worried I simply won’t be able to make this story better. I honestly do not know how to make a character have more depth, how to show that complexity through scenes and dialogue and prose, and how to make the character’s choices and rationalizations believable. I am truly flummoxed and it’s a scary place to be.

Two: Somebody show me some fall foliage, please.

It’s mid-October, and in central Ohio where I grew up, the trees have become an astonishingly bright shade of orange. Dotted throughout the orange are smatterings of sand-colored leaves that drift lazily to the ground and carpet lawns and parks until the foliage is piled so thick you can smell their sweet earthy decay almost everywhere you go.

The air has taken on a crisp quality, and though the sun is still bright in the sky, its rays have become sharp and sparse, as if it must cut through thicker atmosphere to reach the wanderers and dogs and children roaming the earth.

The nights come sooner and the darkness outside encourages time spent at home, curled up on a couch. It’s cool enough to snuggle under a blanket. Maybe light a spiced candle, or feed a fire with fresh logs. Fall in Ohio is for morning strolls through dense trees with a hot thermos of coffee in hand and soft leather boots underfoot.

I know, I know, weather in northern California where I live is the stuff of dreams, but maybe not my dreams, ok? Maybe I don’t like all the sunshine and lack of rain. Maybe I don’t like that the trees and shrubs look exactly the same shade of greenish brown month after month, year after year.  

There’s just nothing quite like that hygge feeling of living through autumn in the American Midwest.

Three: I’m in my punk phase, 20 years late.

I went to brunch last week with two of my friends, and told them I was thinking about getting an unusual haircut. I had printed out pictures of other people on the internet with the cut I wanted and I was going to show them to my hairstylist. I brought them for my girlfriends to take a look. 

But when I went to hand them the photos, I had the reflexive urge to snatch the photos away. The new look was going to be a big change from the standard shoulder-length hair style that was appropriate for the courtrooms and law offices I had frequented for the last decade. Internally I thought: What if my friends find this cringey? Will they think I’m having a mid-life crisis? Will they see this as a cry for attention?

But my internal response to those silent questions really surprised me: I didn’t care. I didn’t care what other people thought. This was what I wanted.

My friends are super nice, by the way, their comments were really encouraging (they probably would have been under any circumstance). But the point is that I didn’t need their affirmation.

For most of my life, I never knew myself well enough to feel confident in making bold choices about how I present in the world. It’s like I’m finally getting acquainted with a version of myself I had buried. I carry myself differently now, and it’s awesome.

Here’s the haircut, by the way.

One Useful Tool

Arc is the best browser I have ever used.

I got fed up with the Chrome browser earlier this year, and I was desperate for change. I needed a browser that didn’t make tab management so damn hard. I perpetually have a thousand browser tabs open. And I needed a way to store bookmarks that wasn’t just the stupid bookmarks bar, or an annoying array of embedded bookmark folders.

Thankfully, I found Arc. It’s a browser that lets users set up multiple “spaces,” which is like entering a different dedicated browsing mode (e.g., work, personal). I have four spaces, including a “content” space where I bookmark sites like Substack, Youtube, Kindle, and online courses for when I’m in a content-consuming mood.

Each space offers its own lefthand menu where users can pin frequently visited websites and organize them into folders. Having different spaces gives me more real estate to pin sites and store open tabs. My distracted, non-linear mind is so much better served by this browser.

And I don’t have to give up the things I do like about Chrome. Arc is built on the Chromium engine, so all my Chrome plugins, like my password manager, still work in Arc.

Arc values privacy. Unlike Google, it does not track my browser activity data and use it to sell internet ads.

One Impactful Photo

I was in Pittsburgh recently for a friends’ wedding. I managed to fit in a visit to the Andy Warhol Museum. If you haven’t noticed—I’m a huge Warhol fan, and his work influences a lot of the photos and branding here on Write on Track.

For example, this picture of me on the right is inspired by Warhol’s Marilyn collection.

I was surprised to learn that Warhol was friends with Basquiat (another artist I admire). They collaborated with each other on art projects, and damn I wish I was a fly on a wall during their hangouts.

Just imagine it—an artsy gay white man who grew up in Pittsburgh hanging out with a Haitian graffiti artist in 1980’s New York. They should make a movie. (Actually, I discovered that someone wrote a play about their tumultuous friendship).

Here’s a photo of an elephant that Baquiat worked on for Warhol, but that Keith Herring ultimately finished. Behind the elephant you see other art that came out of Warhol-Basquiat collaborations.

That’s all for this week.

For the commenst:

1. Have you ever been in revision hell? If so, how did you get out of the woods?

2. What is your favorite season?

3. Who is an artist that inspires you?

Thanks for hanging out, friends.

Noor

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When I first joined Substack in April, I was really irritated by other writers’ paywalled posts. Who did these people think they were? Did they really think I was going to pay $12 a month for some random internet person’s weekly diary, when I could get an entire New York Times subscription for near that amount? Or Netflix?

Disney spends millions (perhaps billions) making high-production movies for me to consume for $15.99 a month. Why should I pay this one person in Australia $15 a month to wax on about her daily writing routine?

Fast forward six months and I am full-on drinking the Substack Koolaid and have become a paying subscriber to several solo content creators. What changed? How do I reconcile this change of heart?

I’ve reflected on this and share my conclusions with you all, dear readers. Understanding why I found value here on Substack (and also Patreon) helps me understand what value I should aim to give to all of you.

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Information Curation

I pay for critical information that is timely, easy to consume, and possible to implement.

Here’s what Substack writers have over the New York Times: they give me information that are specific to my needs.

I am a member, for example, of Sarah Fay’s Substack Writers at Work community. Her content is tailored to what I absolutely need to know about providing value to my Substack subscribers.

She writes about how to make my writing appealing, digestible, and valuable. She taught me how to make high-quality audio voiceovers and how to build community with Notes and comments.

This is not a service I can get through NYT. So, Fay fills an important need in the word-selling marketplace.

Another example: Rebecca Makkai’s essays have had immense impact on my novel writing process. I have been thinking about her post on Interiority for weeks. She explains how and why a protagonist’s interpretation of the events happening around them is key to making a reader latch onto a story. This is the first time I encountered a survey of this topic in a way that made sense to me and that essay has been so important the quality of my writing.

It’s likely that info about Interiority exists somewhere in various tomes about writing craft, or maybe in some MFA curricula. But Makkai’s content showed up in an easily digestible format at a time when I really needed it. She did the careful work of information curation for me. And she presented it in a way that my mind could absorb easily. There’s a lot of value in that.

Transcendent Art

I pay for art that is specific to my taste—art that transcends algorithms and mass consumption.  

Netflix makes content with broad appeal, and I enjoy a lot of Netflix shows. But Netflix does not make cozy writing ritual videos. And it turns out that I am obsessed with cozy writing videos because they inspire me to sit down and do my own writing.

I use Youtuber Christy Anne Jones’ writing vlogs as an onramp to my own writing sessions. Jones’ visually appealing video diaries make me feel like the somewhat mundane process of sitting alone in a room typing, is actually a peaceful, cozy, calming journey.

I have somewhat niche taste in this regard. Jones’ videos don’t have the broad appeal of, say, Emily in Paris. Or The Witcher. But hers is the art I need. So, I have to pay for it.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a “Wyvern tier” patron in Jones’ Patreon community. Wyvern is the highest-cost subscription she offers at $15 a month.

I have thought long and hard about why I pay almost twice as much for Jones’ content as I pay for Hulu or Apple TV. The answer is: her work means more to me, feels more personal to my taste, than anything I consume on Hulu. For that reason, I want to make sure Jones has the financial security to keep making her art.

The Wyvern tier subscribers also get a custom, exclusive video every month. We suggest and vote on topics we’re interested in, and Jones makes a bespoke video for us. Her videos regularly take over 8 hours to produce.

For the amount we pay her, she provides her specific skill and labor to the niche group of people on the internet who love what she makes. It’s almost as if we’re paying her a consulting fee, or commissioning art based on our precise tastes—certainly worth the value.

Niche Community

I pay creators who help me find community that share in my particular passions.

Many of us regularly pay $6 for coffee. Mostly, we do it for the caffeine. But it’s also because we want to be in the coffee shop where they sell the coffee. We are there to catch up with friends, have a date, run a book club, or use the ambience to study in a corner. In the Bay Area we pay far more than $6 for a pint of beer for similar reasons—it’s not just the beer. It’s the company.

What makes Substack different from a coffee shop—better than one, actually—is that everyone engaging with a particular stack is there for similar reasons, which makes the interactions so rich and satisfying. I haven’t found many other novel-writers IRL here in the Bay Area (I’m always looking so let me know!) but through comments and other features here on Substack, I’m getting to know other novelists.

All three of the above (Fay, Makkai, Jones) cultivate community and provide value outside of just the content they make. Fay’s chat community helps select gripping headlines for posts. Makkai is an incredible novelist and being in her orbit, even just as a subscriber, makes me feel like I get to hang out with one of my writing idols. Jones has a private Discord server for her patrons, and a monthly book club.

When I think about it, Substack (and Patreon) are valuable because they move me beyond mindless content consumption into experiences that are much more impactful to my life: education, art, and community.

Instead of comparing Substack subscriptions to tv streaming services—I should be comparing them to the cost of consulting engagements, college tuition, transcendent art, and the spaces where I go to make friends.

I’m still a Substack newbie. I have room to grow when it comes to providing valuable information, art, and community. But each week I strive to do just that, dear readers. Thanks for being on this journey with me.

Write on,

Noor

Hi Readers,

Here’s the September installment of my monthly 3-1-1 series where I share 3 personal/writing updates, 1 useful tool and 1 impactful image.

I’m technically a day late for September, but who cares? Last month was full of novel-progress updates so I didn’t think y’all would mind.

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Three Updates

One: I had the novel manuscript printed and bound into books to make editing more fun. Cue the colored pens, highlighters and sticky notes.

I made the right margin huge so that I have a lot of white space to write notes and draft on the side.

In my lawyering days of writing lengthy legal briefs, I found that printing out the drafts and editing by hand spurred a lot of new ideas and helped me focus. Hopefully that is also true of novel-editing.

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Hi all,

A short letter today. For those of you who have been following along in my novel-writing journey, I just wanted to pop into your inbox to say: I did it!

At 12:26pm PT today, I stopped typing at word number 100,167. That closes the book (pun intended) on draft one of my post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. The draft is sitting at 401 pages over 40 chapters. Over 43,000 of those words were written in the last three weeks.

When I took the big risk of quitting my job at a big law firm in March of this year, I set the goal of finishing draft one of my novel by today as a birthday present to myself. I was scared of what was going to come of my insane-sounding career pivot and knew I needed a solid win to give me the confidence to keep going.

And I have delivered on the promise I made to myself. It’s hard to do the self-love thing, but today I’m giving myself a big hug and a high-five.

There’s a beginning, middle, and end. That’s all I can promise about the quality of this draft. But that’s still more than I had six months ago.

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Before I leave you, I just want to take this opportunity *gets on stage behind podium* to thank my husband for indulging in my wacky trial-lawyer-to-novelist career pivot, my son for staying healthy enough to attend daycare this month so that I could write, my in-laws and parents for accepting my 180 degree turnaround in career identity, and to all you, my dear Write on Track readers, for cheering me on in this journey.

I would be remiss to not mention *cue Oscars walk-off music while I clutch the podium* Shayne Terry, whose publication I shamelessly binged these last couple weeks as inspiration to keep going, and the lovely ladies of #AmWriting and TSNOTYAW, who made me feel like even the worst novel drafts can be improved with effort and dedication.

Now for the daunting task of turning this clumsy noodle of a first draft into something that people will someday hopefully want to read: it’s time to shift gears into editing mode.

But first I’m going to take a vacation from this novel. It’s been heavy y’all and I need to walk away for a minute.

For the next couple weeks, I plan to hang out on Substack, read books, and do some journaling. I might spend time reflecting on how I got from 0 to 100,000 in seven months. Maybe there will be some interesting lessons there for future drafts and writing projects.

Yay for me and for us and for writers everywhere. If you’re in the midst of a big creative project, I’m cheering you on. You can this.

Noor