Tomorrow is my one-year book-iversary! On April 5th, 2023, I casually exceeded the daily goal for National Novel Writing Month while telling myself to not get excited, and that it would likely amount to nothing. I then proceeded to write 50,000 words in the next 19 days, and I’ve continued to work on this project consistently and obsessively ever since.

I’m interested in the way we are things, and the way we are not things, and the way what we are changes while staying exactly the same. In 2022 and early 2023 I was pretty seriously pursuing painting, and landscape painting, and trying to figure out what my art business might look like after a shift to traditional media. And if you go back a few years in this blog, you’ll find entries written by someone whose self-worth was measured by how many miles she ran that week. I can look back ten—heck, even twenty, or twenty-five—years and see the full writing journey, hundreds of thousands of words, so many manuscripts and ideas that I’ve learned from and left behind. I’ve never not come back to it. But I also know there were entire years, or longer, when I barely wrote anything. And I’m thinking about this now because I haven’t done a painting in a while, and every time I think my body might let me be a runner again one of my injuries will flare up, or something else will go wrong. And I’m wondering if I should try for 50,000+ words again this month since I did it last year, but I’m also working on finalizing some post-workshop revisions, and hoping to get my next round of query letters out ASAP, and maybe that’s too many things! And when am I going to paint??

I don’t have answers. I never do—I mean, except that capitalism doesn’t leave us enough time for our own stuff if we wanna, like, pay rent and eat and go to the doctor occasionally, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I will say that I really enjoyed the Futurescapes Spring Workshop, and I think that the tweaks I am making to the first two chapters based on feedback are good edits. And I’m just going to keep trying. Happy Solar Eclipse!