Kimberly Hirsh

Guess I better start cross-posting to Instagram more!

Big last day of the WB Bronze nostalgia with all the farewell tweets tonight.

I have a newsletter! It emails you all my posts for the week on Fridays!

The Muppets is (are? I’m sticking with is) my oldest fandom and I cycle away from them but I always come back so hi, time for me to reinvigorate my muppets obsession, welcome. 🐸🪕🌈

Today’s @750words playlist: Music for Writing in a Haunted Mansion curated by Sarah Chavez. 🎵

Want to read: Waterlog: A Swimmers Journey Through Britain by Roger Deakin 📚

Thanks for the rec, @agilelisa!

💬📚 “Those who mother are the sanitation workers of bodies— handling the refuse, the filth and putrescence, living in the stink.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

For Garbes, mothering is a type of care work not reserved exclusively for parents.

💬📚 “I don’t believe care work has to wreck us. This labor can be shared, social, collective—and transformative.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “We give the people we mother our bodies, and what they will recall is our presence and heat, our animal closeness.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

I just backed A Book About the Magic of Foraging Pigments & Making Art on Kickstarter.

A helicopter was just flying low and loud too close to my house and I’m very glad it seems to be gone now.

Dear Kimberly,

I’m just going to jump right in.

Remember E’s cute boyfriend and how you noticed she seems to not be dating him anymore and you think that’s kinda sad? Don’t be sad. YOU’RE MARRIED TO HIM NOW. I mean, you’ll marry him in 2009.

You’ll have a beautiful kid with him in 2016. The kid has long eyelashes and says delightful things. You had him later than you expected but he’s worth the wait, I promise.

Hey guess what neighborhood you live in starting in 2011? W! That’s where rich people live, you say? Well, two things: 1. It’s actually where a broad range of middle class people live and 2. you definitely would think of the household you live in by 2022 as rich. Y’all could eat Lunchables and Fruit Roll-ups and drink Capri Sun Every Day if you wanted to. (But you won’t, it would create way too much trash.)

You have a PhD (2021) and your job is to read, write, and talk to librarians. ON THE INTERNET. I know, right? Pretty sweet gig.

There’s a lot of scary stuff going on in the world right now (2022) - global health stuff, political stuff, war stuff, climate change stuff (that’s what we call global warming right now because it’s more accurate). Also, some family illness stuff. I know that doesn’t feel new, and it’s not, but it’s still a lot.

And yet in spite of those difficulties, on the micro level, your life is AMAZING.

Just wanted to let you know.

Love, Kimberly

Decided to do morning pages over at 750words. It’s not longhand, but it also doesn’t give me hand cramps, so. 🤷‍♀️

So worn out and it’s almost time to start the second shift of my day job (parenting).

Thanks to Ransom on Lower Decks, I now notice every time Riker has his foot up on furniture on TNG. 🖖🏻

🔖 Read Instagram Makes Parents Feel More Clueless Than We Really Are by Elisabeth Sherman (Catapult).

Great piece. Every time I think I’m parenting M wrong, if I just listen to him & follow my intuition, I’ll beat anything influencers can tell me.

🔖 How to Write a Novel (Or Anything, Really) with ADHD

Lots of helpful ideas for people who, like myself, struggle to finish writing long things.

I have a lot of friends, but the circle of friends I think of as my people is much smaller. If I make a list, it’s probably maybe 10 or so people right now, though the circle has porous boundaries.

This morning I sent something Austin Kleon wrote to a friend with the note “This seems like something you’d appreciate.” Sometimes my friends send me things that remind them of me.

Sometimes there’s an obvious reason, like when anyone sends my sister red panda stuff or me mermaid things.

But my favorite times are when it’s about a vibe. That feels to me like accessing the ineffable core of a relationship that I always imagine you can only get at after a very intense initial period of friendship, unless you happen to be friends with a literal horse, in which case it happens instantly because horses just understand you.

There’s a sort of distance that I think makes this kind of thing easier. My dearest friends all live far away. I think it facilitates finding this kind of thing. I want to be in the lookout for more opportunities to do it for my most inner circle, my innest circle? My spouse, my child, my household of origin.

Do your people have vibes that give you shortcuts to letting them know you’re thinking of them?

🔖📚 Read As a Queer Author, I Thought I Had to Come Out Before My Books Did.

Excellent piece about the dangers of outing anyone before they’re ready. Nods to Becky Albertalli & Kit Connor, who both experienced this. 💔

📺💬 On MythicQuest…

Ian: Poppy, lines are so Web1. You don’t wanna be in Web1, do you?

Me: I do! I love Web1!

It’s Sunday morning and I am back to being overwhelmed by meal planning, how’s your day? I should say that M & I made banana bread and pumpkin bread this morning, so that’s lovely.

💬📚 “We are entrusting that which we say is most precious—our children, our future— to other people, yet we are not willing to pay them a living wage? What does that say about our priorities as a society? Our priorities as individuals?” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “The perspective mothers bring to their jobs—whether it’s law making, coalition building, project management—is that family and care work are essential to life, not an inconvenience.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

📚💬 “Proximity to power, however real that feels, is a simpler choice than solidarity. True allyship lives in relationships, true solidarity requires giving up some comfort, material resources, and power—and sharing it with others.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

It turns out giving yourself credit for everything you write is actually really challenging because you have to pull it all together somewhere, and sometimes you lose track of the last thing you counted.

It’s far too early to give up on NaNoWriMo.

But have y’all noticed that November is a really hard time to write in the Northern hemisphere? There’s the time change. The lack of light because of it. If you’re in the US, Thanksgiving eats up fully 5 days it feels like. (That’s 17% of your writing time!) At least it does in my family.

It’s just a brutal time!

This is why I like Camp NaNoWriMo. Especially July. July, if you work in education and can afford to send your kid to camp, is a great time to write.

Anyway. I’m not giving up on NaNo but I’m also not trying to do word counts on all my texts.

The only time I won NaNo, I wrote 25K words on November 30.

I’ve won Camp NaNo a few times with smaller goals.

I do want to write. I don’t know what a good writing goal, process, or practice looks like for me. Maybe I’ll take the rest of this month to figure it out.