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📝 Planning Writing Goals with Kate McKean

Kate McKean’s Agents and Books newsletter yesterday includes a flowchart to help you plan writing goals for next year.

I’m in the “I need a new idea” bubble, or rather, I have lots of ideas fragments but I’m not psyched enough to write any of them yet so I want to hoard even more ideas. So my goals are to:

  1. Read more. Sure, I’ve read 41 books this year but I know I can read more. Let’s have a loose, gentle goal of 50, counting audiobooks, comics, kids’ books, everything.

  2. Journal and blog. I’m going to do at least some of Esmé Weijun Wang’s Rawness of Remembering: Restorative Journaling Through Difficult Times. I’ve also got Austin Kleon’s The Steal Like an Artist Journal and Leigh Bardugo’s The Severed Moon. So I’ll look to those for help, and of course I’ll blog, too. I’m not setting a specific blogging goal but let’s say I’m shooting for some form of long-form journaling at least once a week.

  3. Have fun. If I’m doing 1 & 2 and it’s not fun, I’ll figure out how to make it fun.

📚 Today’s library haul. Catching up on Holigays22 and some other holiday reads, plus a YA biography of my hero Sarah Bernhardt - quand même!

A stack of holiday romance novels sitting on top of a biography of Sarah Bernhardt, next to a gingerbread house that's sitting on top of a holiday tin.

Finished reading: Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur 📚

The first holiday rom-com of a month where I hope to read many. Elle is an astrologer who dreams of a big love. Darcy is an actuary who’s terrified of having one. This book’s heat level is sensual, a couple explicit scenes. A lovely book but I wish the third act break-up had been resolved more quickly so I could’ve had more joyous reunion time.

The book Written in the Stars in front of a Christmas tree

It reveals something about my character that I’m really psyched about being on someone’s dissertation committee.

Fun with migraines: in the past year or so I’ve started having vertigo in the prodrome stage, tilting involuntarily when I walk. In the past couple of months I’ve developed olfactory hallucinations. I don’t like migraines, y’all.

🍿 Watched Airplane!.

Super fun. I can’t begin to imagine how delightful it must have been for the people who saw it when it was first released.

🔖💻 Read The Hacker Manifesto.

the beauty of the baud

I love this turn of phrase.

We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons…

This was published in 1986.

🔖 Read True/useful by Seth Godin.

Seth shares a handy matrix for helping us stay resilient and cultivate belief, shaking off cynicism and avoiding traps.