September 3-1-1
3 updates, 1 useful tool, 1 impactful image
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.
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.
Two: I experienced my first major rejection as a writer.
I threw my hat in the ring for the Rattle Poetry prize competition, submitting two of my poems. I didn’t win, and I wasn’t a finalist or semi-finalist. Of course I’m bummed. But I’m also kind of embarrassed that I thought I had a shot. I really liked the poems I had submitted.
For a while, not getting affirmed by gatekeepers like literary journals had me feeling like maybe I don’t have good taste. If I like poems that don’t get published, does that mean I can’t recognize when my writing is bad?
Of course, I realize this entire chain of thinking is flawed in many ways, but it’s what ran through me for a few hot minutes.
Now I’m back to just liking my poems and wondering if there are other journals that would be interested in publishing them. Rejection is part and parcel of a writer’s life, and one I anticipated. So, onward.
Three: I’m going to the San Francisco Writer’s Conference in February next year.
Do any of you plan to be there? Email or DM me if so, I’d love to organize an IRL hang!
1 Useful Tool
If you record voiceovers or podcasts, Descript will save you a lot of editing time. I learned about it from Sarah Fay, who shared it on her workshop about making voiceovers for Substack posts.
I’m used to editing audio on Garage Band, where you have to identify where to make cuts to the sound track based on heart-monitor looking waves that are supposed to represent various noises in the track, and then have to listen to the file over and over again to see if you got the cut-paste-splicing right.
But Descript is great because it cuts all that work out for voiceovers. It uses AI to make a transcript of everything said during an audio recording. When you want to edit the piece, just delete words or pauses in the written transcript that you don’t want and it edits the audio file for you, exactly as instructed. It’s incredible. I used it edit the voiceover for my “Why I quit law to become a novelist” post.
It’s also free at the moment. I signed up for a free version which only allows 1 hour of audio to be edited per month, but that’s enough for me.
1 Impactful Photo
This is me. I struggled with committing to post this one. I absently took it while snapping candids of my son being silly in the back seat of our car on the way home from somewhere.
I don’t post pictures of myself much these days. I gained a lot of weight during pregnancy in 2022 and still carry a lot of it.
When I see recent photos of myself I can’t help but compare them to pre-pregnancy me. I had sharper features back then, my face was more elegant (in my opinion). I looked like I had more poise. These days I can’t help but keep my image out of the limelight.
But this picture—it was the first time in a long time that I glanced at a photo of me and thought: huh, not bad. My birthday was seven days ago. For this new year around the sun, I hope I get even better at embracing all of me: tired, with more wrinkles, weight gain, graying and all.
That’s all for now.
Write on,
Noor
Love your photo 🔥 and that's wonderful that you were able to bounce back into loving your poems. I think that's the point of art, to love what you've created. Even though it's hard to turn off that universal quest for external validation, everyone has different tastes, so as long as you love it, that's what matters and that is the best thing to inspire others, so keep it up!
Regardless of the outcome of the poetry contest, you should be so proud of yourself! You win some, you lose some, but you're still such an inspiration, Noor! And you don't look a day older than when I last saw you nearly 13 years ago!