Kimberly Hirsh

Meet Midnight and Wednesday.

💬📚 “I hunker down with books when I need time to process what’s happening in my own life.
Books give me the space to breathe.”

• Kelly J. Baker, Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness

Currently reading: Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness by Kelly Baker 📚

Austin Kleon says to climb your creative family tree. Kelly is like an intellectual big sister, so I’m starting with her. (Katie Rose Guest Pryal is another.) 📝

Twenty-five years ago tonight, W. and I went on our first date. (Yes, we were young.) We went to see a cross-cast production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Afterward, we went to Ben and Jerry’s.

I was going to catalog a bunch of memories of those early days together here, but I think I want to keep them in my heart. And, of course, as heady as that first rush of falling in love is, it’s the time after it that builds to an anniversary this big.

It feels like and is a long time, 25 years. It’s wild because it doesn’t seem to me that we’ve been together that long because how could I still find someone so incredibly delightful after all that time? How is it that every pun he makes still cracks me up? That the way he moves through the world, like literally physically carries himself, can still bring a flush to my cheeks? What miracle is this, to get to spend this much time with someone so great?

It’s a choice every day to wake up and keep loving each other. To show up, to have patience when we’re not on the same page. To know that even when we’re not on the same page, we’re on the same team. And it’s a blessing, a gift from whomever gives us cosmic gifts, to have the chance to make that daily choice.

We’re celebrating a quarter century by taking M. to the animal shelter to pick out two kittens to add to our family.

Finished reading: From Bad to Cursed by Lana Harper 📚

Loved it even more than Payback’s A Witch. Full review coming later this week.

📚💬 “Disaster and hero, monster and martyr, beauty and beast . . . Choose your own dichotomy. Because it doesn’t matter. We were always built to be both.” Lana Harper, For Better or Cursed

W: I just don’t have a framework for doing this kind of writing…
Me: You need to read a lot of it and then just start writing.
W: holds up invisible mirror

If generative AI traffic is declining, does that mean AI can just become another tool we use and we can talk about it normally without talking about it exclusively?

Everybody else: You seen Barbieheimer yet?
Me: Nah, I’m going to the theater to see Terminator & Robocop. (Time travel is rad. So are retro cinema experiences.)

The belief at the beginning of a writing project that we don’t know how to write it comes for all of us who write, no matter how many writing projects we’ve finished or awards we’ve won, and IT HAS COME FOR ME RIGHT NOW.