October 3-1-1

3 Updates, 1 Useful Tool, 1 Impactful Image

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.