New-vember, New Year

On the shores of Lake Michigan, January 1st heralds the new year with crisp, cold air that pricks your eyes and freezes the breath in your throat. Snow falls while we nestle indoors, bolstered by blankets and steaming cups of tea/coffee/what-have-you, planning out all the ways that we’ll make our lives — our selves — a little bit better this year.

Isn’t that a lovely picture?

I’ll be sure to think of it while I chase my newly-potty-trained toddler around the house, simultaneously trying to put away our holiday decorations, meal prep, and clean the house because if it doesn’t get done soon it won’t get done at all before the second kid shows up later in the month. I’ll also be training my team at work on how to do my job while I’m on parental leave, Kickstarting an anthology, and trying to wrap up a round of revisions on my manuscript that I’ve promised to send out to beta readers.

Life is messy. Life doesn’t fit itself nicely into our picture of what it should be, it doesn’t wait until a convenient time to pop up with surprises and complications.

That’s what I want to blog about: the uncomfortable, unglamorous, and uncontrollable, and how we write our way over, under, and through it all.

That’s why I’m starting now, not on January 1: because it’s a better way for me to make this work.

And that’s who I want to talk to, and write for: other creatives who feel like they’re barely keeping their nose above the water line, who have no organization system because who has the time, or they have one that’s insanely complex and esoteric because they’ve tweaked it for a decade to actually make sense in the cyclone of their life, writers who are wondering how the heck anyone else is doing it and how some people make it look so easy.

This isn’t an advice blog. I have no idea what I’m doing — most of us don’t.

But one thing I’ve figured out is that even if I don’t know what I’m doing, I do know what makes me happy. What helps me get through the day, the chaos, the potty accidents and the tea that got cold while I was cleaning up said accident. I want to talk about writing and I want to talk to other people about writing. I want to talk about why we keep writing even though it’s hard, and how we keep writing even when everything else is hard.