reader. writer.

My weekly check-in commenting on my favorite topics

What works

You can create your own habits. It takes practice, and you may have to remind yourself, but if there is something that would be helpful if you did it every day, make it a habit to do it every day. The habit of doing a small task daily is often more powerful than any amount of experience, skill, talent, or windfall. 

Pro tip: only add one habit at a time. Don’t wake up one day and attempt to add ten habits all at once. It’s unlikely to work. Focus on one habit at a time, and give yourself several weeks or more to make it stick.

What I’m reading

Lately I’ve been reading a few genre series that have something I like, a trope or humor or just insight into how a series lets you spend time with a set of characters. I’m not sure I’m prepared to recommend any of them, so instead I want to talk about a book I read this summer: Od Magic by Patricia McKillip. It has classic fantasy elements, but there was an emotional layer to it that caught me by surprise, that feeling of living with/after grief, a club many of us belong to. I hope it won’t be a spoiler to add that something I especially admired was that the story built suspense and conflict without resorting to what I have nicknamed the Thanos effect–that is, too many stories depend on infinitely raising the stakes, as if it’s not bad enough that one person gets hurt or dies, but somehow the number of casualties has to keep increasing until you reach Thanos level, in which half of all life in the universe is destroyed. Yet don’t we all know that even one life lost can be heartbreaking? And fearing even one person being harmed can be enough to make us hope that somehow things will  change for the better? 

What I’m writing

I’m still doing clean-up work across the series. Some of it is still mostly easy, searching and finding key terms to ensure I’ve been consistent in how I describe them. Some of it starts as a simple fix and explodes into a lengthier revision, which is fine except that sometimes I start to feel anxious if the task feels too large. I sometimes have to lie to myself and say, nope, don’t worry, this isn’t a big deal. And/or just do what you can and let go of what you can’t.

Democracy, yes, please

There’s a lot going on, so many reasons to be angry, outraged, alarmed, and dismayed that it’s exhausting. But I’ve been trying to let go of these reactions, to sidestep them so that I can keep focusing back on what I can do, what is helpful, what is sustainable in the face of such malice. And for me, that means finding ways to stay connected to other people, not only, as I’ve said, to find ways to take action but also to cultivate basic human connections. As a friend told me, they are trying to tear us apart. We don’t have to let them.

Notable words

“Sorrow was like sleeping on stones, he decided. You had to settle all its bumps and sharp edges, come to terms against them, shift them around until they became bearable, and then carry your bed wherever you went.”  

From Patricia McKillip’s Od Magic