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.