Kimberly Hirsh logo Kimberly Hirsh

A white woman with dark hair and glasses stands in front of a wall with several words in 3d on it. The word 'BOOK' is centered over her head.
Kimberly Hirsh in front of the wall of words at
Planet Word Museum in Washington, DC

Hi there! I'm Kimberly Hirsh. My pronouns are she/ her/hers. I'm somebody's mom. I work as a school librarian. I have a PhD in information and library science. I love to read, play tabletop and video games, and make things. I used to perform in theater and improv comedy and I may one day again. I have been extremely online since 1993 and still enjoy tinkering on the web. I manage multiple chronic illnesses. I'm married to my kid's dad. We have a cat.

Want to get in touch? You can reach me by email.

Recent posts

Moved Mastodon instances from mastodon.social to indieweb.social because the prior kept timing out. People who were following me shouldn’t need to do anything.

💬📚 “Weekends aren’t time off for parents; they are two long days of caregiving.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “Early on in quarantine, I found myself thinking, ‘What is the most valuable thing I could be doing with my time?’ The answer clearly wasn’t writing an article or making a podcast, but rather, keeping my family, and my community, safe and healthy.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

Just moved a publication on my CV from “In Progress” to “In Press.” An RA gathered data in 2018-19. A professor & myself wrote the first draft in 2019-20. It’s been submitted 2x, accepted w/revisions & revised, w/an additional author. This is fast for scholarly publishing.

🔖📝 Read How to Finish.

Should I force myself to Make New Work or should I let the blank pages stay blank and sharpen pages I’ve already made? Should I go run or walk and shake the fog out? Could the fog be interesting, if I try not to have too much control? Should I read or go look at art or ride the subway back and forth with a notebook?

This is all writing.

🔖📝 Read “You Make the Space, You Fight for the Space”

“…every draft after the first draft for me is a kind of process of stripping away the stuff that I had to write for myself & happening upon the stuff that I want to offer to other people.”

“I don’t have the sort of life where I can write every day and that’s fine.”

“…so much of writing is not writing but you have to inhabit that not writing space as a writer and not as a mother or a teacher or the 3,000 other things you are.”

NaNoWriMo pivot: Back to 50,000 words of literally anything at all

Hello friends!

It’s been slow-going working on my TNG fanfic. Early in October, I toyed with the idea of being a NaNo Rebel with the goal of writing 50,000 words of literally anything at all. At the time, I meant fanfic, original fic, and academic writing.

But at 4 AM this morning, I decided to return to that, with a much more expansive definition of “literally anything at all.”

Here are the things I’ve added to my word count so far:

  • Blog posts (including short notes)
  • Emails
  • Texts
  • Slack messages
  • Meeting agendas
  • Comments on other people’s documents
  • Forum posts

And once I log back into social media tomorrow (I’m posting this via micropub), I’m going to add replies and quote tweets.

Why am I being so generous to myself with this definition?

A lot of the time, I use a goal like NaNoWriMo to prove to myself that I “can* write.

But lately, I’ve felt not that I have writer’s block, exactly, but that I’m just at a moment in life when writing is beyond my current capacity, that I just don’t have the bandwidth to write at present.

So I’m using this expansive definition to prove to myself that I do write, that I an writing, even when I feel like I can’t.

How’s NaNo going for you? Can you find a way to be more generous with yourself this month?

Logging out of socials until at least Wednesday. See kimberlyhirsh.com/hello if you want to get in touch.