January 3-1-1

3 updates, 1 useful tool, 1 impactful image

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 Kat Nieh, Jody Gates, Janet Ridsdale ). 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.

After some research, I’ve identified a few of those writers/artists/creators and want to share their stories with you all. Their stories inspire me to stick to my guns with my own writing. So I feel like they might help some of you as well. I’ll post my first essay next week. I’ll even tell you who I’m writing about: Henry David Thoreau. Here’s a sneak peak of the first paragraph:

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods to “live deliberately.” At least, that's what he wrote in Walden—a book that launched the modern environmental movement, inspired civil rights leaders from Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr., and taught generations to question mindless consumption. What he didn’t mention? His mom was doing his laundry the whole time.¹

Spotify Audiobooks

Most of the tools I feature in my 3-1-1 are free, and this one isn’t, but almost. I mean almost because a ton of people have Spotify subscriptions, but they’re sleeping on a really useful feature: audiobooks.

I was delighted to discover last year that my basic Spotify subscription offers a number of audiobook hours to use each month, however I choose. The reason this is incredible: I can preview books I’m thinking of reading/listening to for as long as I want before deciding to buy them. Unlike Audible previews, I can listen to half the entire book (or the entire thing) before deciding I want to buy it. Alternatively, I can listen to 20 minutes of like 10 different books to decide which ones are worth spending the Audible credit.

This is as close to browsing a bookstore I’ve ever gotten in a digital environment. Digital book previews are never enough to actually decide if I want to buy the thing. It’s so nice to feel unleashed and listen to however much of the book as I want. Or to just listen to the whole book if I don’t want to buy it.

Spotify caps the number of audiobook hours so I can’t go truly nuts, but each month I find I have more than enough to preview and listen. I learned in my 2024 Spotify Wrapped that I was a top audiobook listener on Spotify, which is wild. People are overlooking this awesome feature.

My kid’s been preparing me for literary agent rejections since 2022.

1. Depending on who you ask. Apparently this New Yorker article started a whole controversy about Thoreau and laundry on Twitter (now X) about 9 years ago.