🔖 📚 I found myself wanting to read so many of the books on Book Riot’s Best Books of 2020 So Far list that I decided it makes more sense to bookmark the whole list than to add each title individually.

📝 📚

“…we have little hope of producing excellent writing unless we write a great deal… If we want lots of practice and experience, we can’t limit our writing to times when our mind is operating well… If we write enough, we have at least a chance of producing some excellent bits.”
— Peter Elbow, Writing with Power

📝📚 I’ve started doing The Artist’s Way. Yesterday I read the chapter for Week 1 (which, now that I’m doing CS50x, I really want to rename Week 0). This week is about recovering a sense of safety as an artist, replacing negative statements with positive ones, and confronting fears and blocks.

For me, I don’t have much trouble starting or creating. I have trouble finishing and revising (though I quite enjoy working as an editor for other people). So I’ve been thinking about that, about why I fizzle out at the revision stage. Still working on it.

But just as an example, I’ve been sitting on this accepted with revisions paper for far too long now, and I make a little progress every once in a while, but I get stuck. I thought of something today that might help, at least when dealing with my sense of inadequacy in response to reviewers’ comments. (I need to get over it, I know. I’m working on it.)

I wrote the first draft of that paper four years ago.

I am a different, better writer than I was then.

Now Me can serve as an editor for Then Me.

I’ll let you know if this helps.

I’ll be 39 in a little over a week, so I decided it was time to just lean into becoming my mother. 📚

Finished reading: White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo 📚

From NPR: A Competition To Finish Louisa May Alcott’s Story - I mean why have a competition when you could just hire Mary Robinette Kowal? 📚

What to an American Is the Fourth of July? Power comes before freedom, not the other way around. - Awesome piece by Ibram X. Kendi about how resistance is patriotic, who is free, and the relationship between power and freedom.

Oh yeah THAT’S why I always stop listening after “Cabinet Battle #2.” 😭

I’m watching Hamilton & of course it’s amazing but I’m especially blown away by how much more nuanced Daveed Diggs’s French accent & Jonathan Groff’s Received Pronunciation are here than in the cast recording. Bravi!

Started CS50x and programming with Scratch last night and definitely decided to build a robot to be my best friend.