Let's celebrate!
you and you and you.
Happy 2024, writers! I’m so eager to see all we will accomplish with our writing this year. We’re going to use this newsletter to celebrate: the public wins as well as the private, the significant and seemingly small. Each month, I’ll share at least one of mine—and each month, I’d also love to share at least one of yours!
This issue of Real Quick is brought to you by Ken. Thank you for encouraging craft and community! I hope that this year, you find, and thrive in, your just-right balance of creativity and discipline.
While I still hesitate to say I won NaNoWriMo 2023, I *know* that it definitively changed how I pre-write and draft. After years spent (wasted?) unnecessarily laboring over nearly every draft, my process has become much more efficient these last few months. (Tell me if you’d like to know more specifics!)
Last month, I mentioned writing “a loosely holiday-themed vignette” for The Baltimore Banner; on Christmas Eve, they published it.
_____________________ <~ insert yours here! Did you finish that chapter you’ve been avoiding? Submit a piece, no matter how scary it felt? Were you accepted into that dream publication? I—we—want to know!
Seriously—please tell us! You can reply to this email. Comment on this post. Share it in our chat. You choose!
I spend more time talking about my hard times than my happy. So today, I’m going to share a short and sweet writing-related experience I had in 2023: my first commissioned piece.
After a decade of pitching and submitting my writing to various outlets, an editor emailed me early last year. She’d seen my byline and, compelled by my “reputation and style” (!), invited me to submit to her magazine, which is published by one of my alma maters. Over the years, I’ve been so thankful that readers have found value in my writing, emailing me or complimenting me about my words; this editor reaching out was especially validating. I mean, someone who professionally handles words chose to initiate contact—with me!—to request I contribute something—me! my writing!—to her publication. Not only did my writing resonate, she wanted more of it.
Now, I sometimes like to let myself wonder: who might be reading this most recent piece I wrote? And what might come of it?
one of the last pieces I plan on writing about teaching for a while. Teaching is almost the only thing I’ve written about for a decade; branching out has been a challenge, but it’s time.
Yellow Arrow Publishing, which supports and promotes the work of women and women-identifying writers. I’ve been lucky enough to interact with Yellow Arrow in numerous ways throughout the years: as their inaugural Writer-in-Residence, a former board member, and lately, a workshop facilitator. Yellow Arrow’s impact on my writing has been life-changing, in part because of how proud they make me feel to be a writer, and to write what I write.
This issue of
’s newsletter, in which he writes about the value of self-celebration:It is so tempting for each of us to just focus on the items that are still undone on our to-do lists. To constantly be focused on tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. But when we pause, even for a moment, to recognize what we have created and learned, I feel that is where transformation happens. When we are reminded what we did, not just what we hope to do. Where we recognize our capabilities, not just our hang-ups. Where we can celebrate the risks taken along the way that remind us: you are alive and vital, you have something to say, and your work matters.
This is a practice I fully endorse, especially during this season of goal-setting.
This issue of
’s newsletter; not only does she share a useful writing-specific planner, I appreciate her insistence on giving ourselves credit when we don’t think it’s due. She prompts us to compare our recent accomplishments with where we were in the past, which is a strategy I often use to remind myself to be grateful—and proud.