Brave Writer online camp is designed for homeschool parents who need a little extra boost of support!
The day-long camp is packed with useful information about
The Brave Writer team offers a day of free webinars on topics like stress-free writing and learning through literature. And during the lunch break, I’ll be hosting a Poetry Teatime for your kids!
Playing my old game of typing nouns into this blog’s media library search bar and choosing one of the photos that comes up. “Crow” yielded comical results: a good many pics related to my book Fox and Crow Are Not Friends, as you might suspect, and several from Johnny Crow’s Garden; but also four pictures from Comic-Con? With no discernible relationship to crows? This baffled me until I clicked on one of the photos and realized it was labeled “crowds.” Which felt like it should have been obvious, but I had to get up really early today and am fuzzy. Took me five lines to solve Wordle, which hardly ever happens. Unless it’s the nasty kind with a dozen possible first letters, like -IGHT or -ATCH, which, today, it wasn’t. Is that spoilish? Does this caption need a spoiler alert?—Oh! all this and I forgot to say what the photo actually IS! It’s a crow mobbing a kite—the raptor, not the windborne disappointment machine—taken in 2012 on a sub-par phone camera and zoomed waaaay in so I could make the bird I.D.
That caption got so long I had to decaptionify it, because the caption settings here are for small, centered, italic text: annoying to read in bulk. Opening WordPress today felt like it used to, back in the bloggity heydey I now gaze wistfully at through glasses so rose-colored they are fragrant. Which is to say, I opened the tab with zero idea what I was going to write.
That really is how it was, most days, during that first ten or twelve years when I blogged almost daily. Very much a practice of discovering what was on my mind through writing about it. The act of writing came first, the discovery second. Or they were simultaneous. It’s too early in the morning for metaphysics.
I’ve completely lost track of the relative positions of the chicken and the egg. Did I write more because I was less distracted? Or was I less distracted because I wrote more? By “write” I mean blog, that clunky verb for a genuinely nourishing practice, the interactive learning-in-public we were doing together in a long-form manner that has almost entirely disappeared from the internet (along with idealism), except, possibly, on Substack (a platform about which I hold cautiously idealistic views).
Is what I’m writing now a Substack post? Like, what even is the difference? What I write over there is, I would say, still more like a blog post than an essay. Obviously there is a great deal of overlap between those two types of writing, which I’m somewhat stubbornly putting separate labels on: many blog posts are/were essays, and plenty of Substackers are writing loose, thinking-out-loud public journal entries, especially on Substack Notes. I think the distinction, in my mind at least, lies in the discoverability baked into the Substack app: writers can’t help but be aware that Certain Kinds of Writing are more likely to be shared and boosted, and words are like those quantum particles that behave differently under observation. (We think. How do we know? It’s too early in the morning for quantum physics.)
One thing I know is that I have never, never known Where to Post the Thing—whatever the thing may be/may have been. I always had side-blogs, some of them public but nichier than Bonny Glen, some of them invite-only where I used the kids’ real names or conducted experiments to see if I would write differently when anonymous. I had Lilting House, Bonny Glen Up Close, Unsweetened. I had a bread blog! (It was called Peace of Bread. I’m so sorry.) I had a LiveJournal. I had a column at GeekMom. I had blogs I don’t even remember now. Which means I have always, always second-guessed myself about where to post what. Patreon was a bit of a torment that way: I’d write something for my treasured patrons and think: wouldn’t this be better on Bonny Glen?
There was a period where Instagram created the same kind of quandary—that interval when the algorithm demanded long captions, and publishers desired a large IG following. I never did acquire a large IG following, because I couldn’t help resenting the implicit pressure to do more than share nice photos. Any long caption I wrote felt like a blog post, which was irritating.
Not just irritating to me: to many writers who felt affectionate about their blogs or newsletters. We understood that social media platforms had changed the game (as early as 2008 readers were shifting their discourse about blog posts from the comment boxes to Facebook posts meant only to share the links), and certainly we had moments of feeling excited about the possibilities of Discoverability. But the possibilities were mostly a distraction, a fragmenting of our powers of attention. As readers, writers, thinkers.
I do enjoy Substack. I like that it gives readers a way to read posts via email, if they prefer, or to read in the app or on the website, if that’s more to their liking. I do both. But I think it’s also wicked confusing to newcomers (there are Posts, Notes, and Chat—three different formats in which conversations can take place, each with its own nuances and logistics), and it only adds complexity to my where-to-post-what quandary. Blog or Substack? Substack post or Substack Note? Paywall or public? Gah. I don’t know about you, but I can’t run that gauntlet of questions without feeling like it’s rather more fuss than the piece of writing in question merits.
Here I am at the bottom (I think) of this post, unsure what my point is beyond: ugh, decisions of little real consequence are nonetheless hard. However, I do have clarity (950 words later) on one small thing: I like having a place (here) where I can write messily and clarity can be the end result, not the starting point. And that (she says, in the sort of arch ending favored by algorithm-driven platforms) is the kind of ‘discoverability’ I’m looking for. (Ew. Lol.)
I want to end the week with a few notes about our homeschooling high points. Olav Hauge was a big hit, and apart from a side-trip to Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” we roamed through my Hauge books every day.
“This Is the Dream” provoked intense discussion—
This is the dream we carry through the world
that something fantastic will happen
that it has to happen
that time will open by itself
that doors shall open by themselves
that the heart will find itself open
that mountain springs will jump up
that the dream will open by itself
that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known.
My copy of The Dream We Carry (named after a line from “This Is the Dream”) has the original Norwegian on the verso and the English translation on the recto. Rilla, curled up beside me, enjoyed comparing the two versions. She was struck by the lovely image of the mountain springs “jumping up” and reached for Google Translate’s snapshot feature to compare the literal (and much less poetic) translation. That led to a line-by-line unpacking of the language. The Hauge collection Luminous Spaces has an entirely different translation and we got really caught up in discussing the figurative and connotative differences between these variants:
…that we one early morning
will slip into a harbor
that we have never known
(from The Dream We Carry, translated by Robert Bly)
and that one morning we’ll glide
into a cove we didn’t know
(from Luminous Spaces, translated by Olav Grinde)
that I one early morning will glide
in on a wave I have never known
(Google Translate’s rendering of the original—interesting that it’s in first person singular, when both English translations use we)
Slip into a harbor, glide into a cove, glide in on a wave—such distinct and potent images, each in their own way.
There are buckets more I could say about our Hauge conversations, but the only one I’ll mention now is the Fillyjonk connection. We’re reading Tales From Moominvalley and today we finished the scene in which the anxious, constantly catastrophizing Fillyjonk tries to share her worries with her neighbor, Gaffsie, over tea in her gloomy seaside house:
“…This calm is unnatural. It means something terrible is going to happen. Dear Gaffsie, believe me, we are so very small and insignificant, and so are our tea cakes and carpets and all those things, you know, and still they’re so important, but always they’re threatened by mercilessness…By something one can’t ask anything of, or argue with, or understand, and that never tells one anything. Something that one can see drawing near, through a black windowpane, far away on the road, far away to sea, growing and growing but not really showing itself until too late. Mrs. Gaffsie, have you felt it? Tell me that you know what I’m talking about! Please!”
Gaffsie, a practical and restrained creature, doesn’t get it. She’s uncomfortable with the Fillyjonk’s demonstration of emotion, and she doesn’t have much use for a dramatic recitation of all the terrible things that could happen—because none of them have.
The poor Fillyjonk! Hauge’s dream is utterly closed to her—so far, at least.
Today this chapter sent me leaping (like a mountain spring) to read Hauge’s poem “We Don’t Sail the Same Sea”—
We don’t sail the same sea,
though it looks the same.
Rough timber and iron on deck,
sand and cement in the hold,
I ride low, plunge
headlong through breakers,
wail in fog.
You sail in a paper boat,
your dream fills its blue sail,
so soft is the wind, so gentle the wave.
Hauge struggled with depression and had to endure some very dark periods. Some of his poems acknowledge a sense of bleakness or of brooding menace—Fillyjonk feelings. I think the two of them do sail the same sea. But Hauge has the promise of that dream, the promise that some day the doors will open to a world where mountain springs jump up and and the wind fills a blue sail. I have hopes that the Fillyjonk, too, will encounter that dream—perhaps through an encounter with the Moomintroll family, or with Snufkin, later in the book. Right now she’s wailing in fog—with a kind of raw courage, the kind it takes to “plunge / headlong through the breakers.”
Well. At the end of lessons today I said we’d be moving on from Hauge next week, and such a clamor arose! Scott and the children think not. It seems I’ve been remiss in hoarding Hauge to myself all these years. I’m so happy they find him as compelling as I do.
time, it flies
Gotta be quick today: it’s a birthday in these parts. Y’all, my baby is 14. That’s bananas.
In lieu of a new post, here’s something delicious: my father’s family recipe for biscuits with chocolate gravy. When I was growing up, this was the star of the meal whenever we had breakfast for dinner (eggs, bacon, fruit, and biscuits with chocolate gravy—heaven on a plate). After Scott and I had kids, it gradually became our special birthday breakfast. Maybe that’s why we wound up with such a big family—more birthdays!
Okay, I thought this was going to be a quickie. Turns out that old post 2007 had an image hosted on my original Typepad blog. I didn’t know that was even still around! I had to update a bunch of old links and images and now it’s about time to go make dinner—Huck has requested paninis. We’re all about the food today!
A somewhat grainy photo of my four oldest children taken at the Point Loma Lighthouse in 2007, not long after we moved to San Diego. The Pacific was still quite new to them. When I coined the term “tidal homeschooling,” we lived in Virginia and the image was entirely figurative—but when I think back to those early tidal-learning days, this pic is the one I see.
I remember writing here long ago about how my favorite category of post was connections. The serendipitous links of thought we encounter when something we’re reading or experiencing echoes or relates to some earlier conversation, book, film, experience.
Today, for example: we read another Hauge poem (“Winter Morning”) and had a really rich discussion of how much is going on in those four simple lines—a discussion that incorporated some of the conversation we had in the comments here about yesterday’s poem. We talked about the way Hauge uses simple, crisp, concrete images (frosted windowpanes, the glow of a good dream, a woodstove “pour[ing] out its warmth/ from a wood block it had enjoyed the whole night”) to describe a moment, and something much bigger than the moment. And from that rather animated discussion we jumped to Linda Gregg’s “Art of Finding” essay:
I am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. At the beginning, they typically “see” things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become “old men with snow on their shoulders,” or the lake looks like a “giant eye.” The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck.
But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeing—and the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, “the mirror with nothing reflected in it.” This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not looking—just as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.
Okay, here’s the thing. I had planned to read this excerpt of Gregg’s essay, and to introduce a new practice for the four of us—Huck, Rilla, Scott, and me. We have a spiral-bound sketchbook that, at intervals, we use as a shared family journal. In 2020 it was the whole family chiming in with quips, sketches, and interesting tidbits. It went dormant last year, and when the Linda Gregg passage resurfaced in my Readwise review over the holidays, I decided to appropriate the journal for this practice. Maybe not daily, but several times a week, we’ll jot down things we’ve seen or heard.
But weeks have passed since I reread the passage, and I’d forgotten that last line—the “marrying of the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.” That’s exactly what we’d just been talking about with the Hauge poem, and what we talked about yesterday. The way he expresses a single image that speaks vividly both as a literal description (in a way that makes your breath catch) and as a reflection on some aspect of human experience. “Marrying the sacred to the world” is what Hauge does best.
So: part intention, part serendipity. The best kind of high-tide morning.
_____________________
A postscript added after I made today’s recording—listening to the Linda Gregg passage read aloud, I got to “the art of finding” and went Oh of course! And made a note to let tomorrow’s poem be Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” Another connection.
This photo is dated October 2016, which seems too recent? Huck would have been six and Rilla around ten. I think. My time-math is blurry. Huck will be fourteen this week. Can you even?
Well, here they are, my last two homeschoolers. We kicked off a new high-tide season this morning, lightly. It struck me recently that while poetry has been a staple of our lesson times since forever, I hadn’t introduced much contemporary poetry to these two. Which is odd, because I read so. much. of it myself. At least one poem a day, often many more than that.
This revelation made my 2023 Fresh Start plans easy: I have loads of lovely and arresting poems I want to share with Huck and Rilla. We’ll keep reading our old favorites, of course, but I plan to dip frequently into the two gorgeous collections edited by James Crews: How to Love the World and The Path to Kindness, as well as Poetry Unbound, Poetry 180, and all the slender, marked-up books on my shelves.
(I say slender, because ages ago I learned a big lesson about myself: I don’t like reading poems in big fat Collected Poems volumes. I want a slim, portable book. I seldom go for a Best Of.)
Today I knew exactly what I wanted to reach for: Olav H. Hauge’s beautiful The Dream We Carry. We read “One Poem a Day” and I was delighted by how much Rilla loved it and saw in it. Huck was reserved at first but warmed to the poem as we discussed it.
One Poem a Day
by Olav H. Hauge
translated by Robert HedinI’ll write one poem a day,
every day.
That should be easy enough.
Browning did it for a while, though
he rhymed
and beat time
with his bushy eyebrows.
So, one poem a day.
Something strikes you,
something occurs,
something catches your eye
—I get up. It’s lighter.
Have good intentions.
And see the bullfinch rise from the cherry tree,
stealing buds.
That last image always goes straight to my core. The way he, after mapping out a simple, spare plan for himself, does just what he has resolved to do, capturing some small, striking observed moment in a few lines—lines that represent exactly what the poet does. Like the bullfinch, he rises up, carrying something small, simple, full of promise, the bud of an image that will unfurl into a poem.
Oh, I love him.
Something especially fun about the way our lessons have worked these past few years is that Scott is present for them. He’s got his coffee and his computer, but he listens to the readalouds (of which, despite the kids’ ages, there are many, because we all like learning that way) and he chimes into the discussions, and when I want to show the kids a picture of a bullfinch, he’s already got one pulled up on his screen.
We also began our next Moomins book (Tales from Moominvalley) and watched a couple of scenes from Taming of the Shrew, just for the fun of seeing John Cleese as Petruchio.
A mellow beginning, and then lunch.
Today’s pic is from Emily J’s keyword suggestion of leaf. This one was taken in 2019 and I remember being smitten by the green light shining through!
Well, today turned out to be a medical-mom day, by which I mean I spent 3 1/2 hours on the phone making appointments and updating records. But now my boy is set for the next few months, pending a few callbacks I should get next week.
All part of the job, eh?
Now the blue dark is settling outside the east window. Over the side fence, my neighbor’s magnolia tree looks a bit forlorn; our landlord sent some guys today to cut back the branches that were overhanging our patio. I can see clear through the tree to the trunk now and it feels a bit impolite to stare at its secrets.
Have you read Wishtree? I wrote a Dart for it, one of Katherine Applegate’s loveliest novels. If you don’t know it, you should treat yourself, even if you haven’t got a small child around to read to. I don’t either, anymore! How strange is that? But Huck read this one, perched beside me while I wrote the Dart (he often chimes in with adjective suggestions), and it was his favorite of last year’s Dart line-up. A gorgeous book about the long memories of trees, and the bustling world in and above and under and around them, and human stories, too: prejudice and pain and friendship and wonder.
We saw an owl in the magnolia last summer. Heard it calling and one by one we gathered in my studio to listen. He flew silently into the hidden center of the tree, behind the wide flat leaves, and resumed his thoughtful two-note meditation as we stood there, hushed and awed.
There. I put in “owl” and look what I found. Rilla painted this pair in 2014, just before she turned eight. Sometimes I forget what riches this blog holds for me.
I typed “January” into my media library and this African violet from several years back is what popped up. Today’s windowsill looks much the same.
Updated to add audio again! Like yesterday, I recorded this in one gulp on my phone. It’ll have hiccups, but if I start trying to polish it up, I’ll never be able to stick with this. Thanks for understanding!
Oh my goodness, what a delight to wake up to so many comments from old blog-world friends! I really really want to get in the habit of dashing off a quick post every day, probably around lunchtime, because otherwise I’ll start doing the thing where a half-written draft takes on too much weight and I never come back to it.
I am terribly fond of containers. I used to have such a good one for blogging—the necessarily short transition from mom hat to writer hat. If I spent too long on a post, I’d lose my window for writing, and I had pretty intense book deadlines when I started this blog (and a lot of bairns) so I didn’t have any windows to spare.
My day still falls pretty neatly into a mom focus and a work focus, but the rhythms are quite different now that I’m only homeschooling Huck and Rilla—who, if you’ve lost track—are now both in their teens, and now that I do a lot of freelance work in addition to writing my own books. I’m prone to catapulting straight from lesson time into work brain without taking a breather. (Or else I dip into social media and take too long a breather!)
Well, I’ll try this midday container for blogging and see how it goes. My friend Chris O’Donnell—who has been blogging longer than anyone I know—made me laugh on Facebook this morning with his New Year’s Eve post: Happy “I will write more on my blog and less on social media next year” night to all who celebrate. Ha! I can’t deny that that shoe fits!
Okay, SO. As I read your comments, a slew of replies and post ideas rolodexed through my brain. I made a list. I made several lists. This is so energizing! Thanks, seriously, for jumping right back into conversation here. You made my day.
Question: if I reply to a comment, do you see it? I used to have an option for readers to get comment replies by email, but I feel like that stopped working a long time ago. Just curious.
My gravatar isn’t working, either! But some of yours are. I mean, I logged into my gravatar account and it still appears to be linked to this one, but the pic doesn’t show up.
Well, that’s cosmetic and not all that important. I promise I’ll stop being 100% metabloggy soon. But, you know, first you have to tune up the jalopy before you can take it for a spin! 😄
I liked, yesterday, that I landed on the idea that our old blog conversations were like letters from friends. They didn’t always feel that way, but they often did—chatty glimpses of life in someone else’s world. I’ve always loved a good epistolary tome! I remember so happily the leap of the heart at seeing a friend’s particular handwriting in the mail, and that’s how it felt when your names popped up here yesterday.
All righty. Lunch is over and I’m ready to get back to the household-reset that is my much beloved New Year’s Day tradition. I did the files this morning and now I want to tackle some bookshelves. And it’s sunny today! In Portland, in January! I think Scott & I will take a walk after he finishes chopping an onion for the black-eyed peas.
I’ve already overhauled my studio for the season, and I’m half giddy over the enticing rows on the little built-in shelves next to my writing chair: a shelf for poetry, one for fiction and nonfiction (currently reading or at the front of the queue), and one for embroidery and art books. Heaven. The two books delighting me most at the moment are Padraig O’Tuama’s perfectly wonderful Poetry Unbound (which I forgot I’d preordered until it arrived—on my birthday!) and Gareth King’s Modern Welsh: A Comprehensive Grammar. It sounds funny to say I’m enthralled by a grammar book, but I am! Both for the clarity he brings to the concepts I’ve learned in three months of study on Duolingo and Say Something in Welsh, and for his descriptivist approach to language, which is so in keeping with my own approach and the vibe of the Brave Writer programs I write for.
How about you? What’s your first New Year’s read?
(Cybils Award finalist lists are out today, if you’re in search of ideas.)
I want to say more about the Say Something In courses soon—I’m wildly enthusiastic, and if you or your kids are studying Welsh, Spanish, or Dutch, you should check them out—and more, too, about Readwise and some of the things you mentioned in the comments. And Moominmamma, that post has been percolating for a while.
So much to talk about, once I start talking.
Well, I said I wanted to dash off a post and I have, in the sense that I wrote it rapidly and haven’t gone back to polish anything at all—but I didn’t promise it would be a short one. I’m not a novelist for nothing. 😉
…is where I’ve been. Literally, kind of: May & June allergy season kicked off a pretty brutal adventure with asthma—same as every year, but worse this time. Last week the doctor changed up my asthma & allergy meds and I’m much improved. Still coughing but the shortness of breath & crushing fatigue are diminishing. I can wipe down the kitchen or take a shower without getting winded, which is huge.
I’ve been keeping up with my client work, but my own writing bore the brunt of the fatigue. Creative battery totally drained. This week, as I begin to feel lots better, I’m working to reset my creative practice and good habits. Taking it slow, though!
I’ve been dialed waaaay back on social media, too—which is a good thing? But this blog fell silent too, and I’ve missed capturing thoughts and adventures here. And I’m aching to be back in a fertile groove with my book.
So much for what I haven’t done; how about what I have?
—Lots of Minecraft, with kids and without. We have a Realm where we can all play together and I had fun building a whole village of medieval-style houses for us to live in. In my own world, I’ve got a pretty little Hobbiton going. Mellow and satisfying, and certainly creative in its way.
—Read Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. I’ve followed his blog for ages and I really like his “CODE” process (Capture, Organize, Distill, Express) for navigating all the reading I do constantly, on many fronts, and finding connections and throughlines in the ideas I’ve captured, and writing about them to assimilate and synthesize that knowledge. Basically it’s a name for what I did on this blog in its first twelve years—gathered thoughts about my reading, noted connections, worked out my ideas about whatever topics were gripping me. Somewhere along the line I shifted to doing that work more on paper than on the blog—also a nourishing practice but it eradicated some vital steps in the Organize, Distill, and Express parts of the process. It’s so hard to find anything I jotted down in one of the dozens of paper notebooks I’ve filled over the years. Which makes distilling the ideas difficult, which makes expressing them a longer and less serendipitous process. So my big takeaway from Forte’s book was to:
—Revisit the ways I’m capturing information and ideas. I’ve used Evernote for at least a decade, for stashing away everything of interest I encounter on the internet. So this past month, I tidied up my notebooks and reorganized with Forte’s Second Brain (digital brain) “PARA” structure in mind: Projects, Areas of Interest, Resources, Archive. Now, personally I find a lot of overlap between Areas and Resources, so my system is different from Forte’s. Which tweaking he encourages, of course! But if your Capture tool has a robust search engine (and Evernote has one of the best), how you organize your notes is of less importance, because you can always surface what you need via search.
—Of course I’m still writing in notebooks. Pen and paper does spark a different kind of fertile, creative thought. So I’m making it a practice to read over my scribbles at least weekly and move anything of use or interest into Evernote. Sometimes I type things up (a helpful practice for zero drafts of poems) and other times I just take a picture. Evernote’s search can even deal with handwriting! This practice is another way of leaning into the “Second Brain” concept—recognizing that we live in an information-overload age and it isn’t possible to hold it all in one’s own (first) brain anymore. There’s a lot of peace in trusting you’ll find what you need in your archive. And, I mean, so many of us homeschooling blogger types experienced the magic of the Distill and Express parts of the process in the enthusiastic discourse that led to such good writing & experiences in those days.
—Even in my fatigued state, the thrill I get from trying out a new app or platform has been as intense as ever. Over the past year or two, I’ve tested lots of notetaking and project-planning apps (a slew of Capture tools, basically). Notion, Roam Research, Logseq, Mem, Sunsuma—these are all excellent projects with unique structures and uses. You’ll find diehard fans of each one. In the end, though (ha—there is never a true end to this experimentation), I determined that Evernote makes the most sense for me. I like its looks, its functionality, and its amazing integration. For task tracking and timeblocking, I use Todoist, and I’ve been really happy with my setup there for a long time. The other two apps I lean on constantly, with gratitude for the role they play, are Readwise and Momentum Dash. The former catches all my Kindle highlights, article quotes, and any passages I’ve marked in print books & sent (via photo) to the app; and it sends all these juicy bits of good stuff to Evernote where I can…search them whenever I want. And Momentum Dash is a nice focusing element in my browser. When you open a new tab, you get a nice clean screen with a beautiful photo—no Google distractions. You can add habit tracking across the top if you wish, plus other tidbits like the weather. And you can customize tab sets to make it easier to stay focused on a particular type of work. For example, I have one set that opens all the tabs I need to do my social media job for Low Bar Chorale. Another one opens only what I need for daily planning. It’s an elegant little browser extension that went a long way toward cutting down drifting and getting sucked into feeds, or having Twitter open all day.
(P.S. That Todoist link is an affiliate link—I rely on the app so much I signed up for their referral program. If you’re interested in how I use it to keep track of homeschooling, housework, medical admin, client work, and creative projects, I’m happy to rave about my system anytime.)
—Since May, I’ve written the first three (!) Brave Writer Darts of the current year’s lineup. Am at work on the fourth, for Pam Muñoz Ryan’s lovely novel Solimar, now.
—I’ve worked a little bit on a long-term project to create a resource for Oregon families with a kid making the shift from child disability services to adult services. I documented the almost-a-year-long process we navigated for my son, and I was stunned to discover the road map/timeline/checklist I yearned for doesn’t exist. So I’m making one to share. Slow but steady progress.
—As for stitching, I’ve mostly been mending socks and jeans. My embroidery projects have been on idle.
—And (since this got long!) one last thing I’ve been reading and enjoying immensely: A. R. Moxon’s post series called “Unpacking LOST.“ I’m a major LOST fan, have watched the whole run at least six times, plus twice more chronologically. Moxon’s take on the show is brilliant and riveting, and each time a new installment drops, it makes my day.
Hope summer is treating you well, friends. Let’s catch up!