In a Germy Ouroboros 🐍
Yesterday was burn out, but today is burn out too.
Yesterday was burn out, but today is burn out too.
Emerges from the compost heap covered in rubbish a la the junk lady from The Labyrinth:
I planned to take a week offline to recover from Entwined.
Very demure. Very mindful.1
When three weeks passed I didn't panic.
At four weeks - despite my best efforts - I have properly failed at regenerating.
Here are a few of the reasons why.
My kid is processing wasp trauma and is having anxious meltdowns if I try to spend any time outside. (We're making very gentle progress on this, but last week was absolutely brutal. Outside is my best reset tool and it's been completely the opposite as we try to navigate this.)
Sleep is elusive because I'm so overstimulated that by the time night comes my nervous system is too jazzed to sleep. Luckily, we don't have to wake up early for school.
That didn't stop a migraine from waking me at 6am this Monday.
Just when we made the tiniest progress on the outside thing David came down sick. The whole house is snotty and we're desperately trying not to pass the same sick around and around in a germy ouroboros.
There's definitely more going on, but you get the idea.
I think it's important to share this part of the process because people see me doing something like the Entwined campaign and they make all kinds of assumptions about "what I am capable of." But it takes it's toll and without a proper rest period that effect is cumulative.
Take this post for example.
Two years ago I wrote this articulate post about fluctuating capacity.
This post is actually a much better explanation of what I'm navigating right now.
From a time when I had more facility with language.
Right now I'm still trend toward,
In the Studio ✂️
Ha!
In the Garden 🌱
Double ha!
Books 📖
Ah, yes. I have been reading. I'd rather be reading outside, but even reading indoors has been helping.
I'm enjoying Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett (it's pairing nicely with Agatha All Along) and I've also completed his collected essays.
I have a nice stack of books in my queue to pull me through. Things that feel like a "waste of time" are actually the most helpful. Louise of Curiosity Spot wrote a brilliant piece about this phenomenon called From Burnout to Balance.
Digital Foraging 🍁
I opened this week's letter with the imagery of the Junk Lady because, although I haven't been writing you or curating my discoveries, I do keep foraging.
The brave at heart can rummage through this mess. (Most everything was dumped into 2024-09-Week-4. The next two weeks I tried to write a normal update, but didn’t send one: 2024-10-Week-1 & 2024-10-Week-2.)
I'll hold onto the links from this week and see if I can't make some sense of them for next week's update.
This time two years past...
November is for Noveling
If you haven't heard of NaNoWriMo it is short for November is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write 1,667 words a day and end up with a 50,000 word first draft by the end of the month. (You can also go full NaNo Rebel and change the word count or work on a different project.)
Ah, the glory days before NaNoWriMo had a regime change and sided with AI.
I'm feeling bitter and frustrated, because I've been preparing all year to kick off the next draft of my novel this November.
I take solace in Hank Green's perspective from Twitter is not Elon's. His argument is that online communities are people and cannot be owned. Platforms are places. And bad leadership of online platforms is similar to bad leadership of physical places.
It was a timely video to watch as I see NaNoWriMo going up in flames. I'm deeply embarrassed by the current leadership of NaNoWriMo.
The same way I was embarrassed when our President was Donald Trump.
PLEASE VOTE.
Yes, Leo. I do.
PSA: Sensitive introverts - it's definitely worth investigating "early voting" in your state. Ours started THIS WEEK.
I didn't stop being American when Donald Trump was president and I won't stop noveling in November. I refuse to let them ruin NaNoWriMo for me.
They actually have no control of the event. Just the website (and the forums which they nuked.) We will have to be egregiously erroneous on our own turf.
I'll be writing in November. I've yet to decide if I'm using the actual website or how much I'll caveat the experience. I just think it's such a bold take for a creative writing organization to side with the AI overlords.
What is the world coming to?
PLEASE VOTE.
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How are you holding up? What resonates?
This newsletter is a curated collection of tidbits from my overgrown Compost Heap (or digital garden.) Rummage around, turn the heap, and see what you can find for yourself. 🪱🐛🌱
Illustrations by Gracie Klumpp of Leave the Fingerprints. 🐞
P.S. Who caught the Supernatural reference?
P.P.S. Have you seen any great vintage vote posters?
So far my favorite is: Give Mother the Vote, Rose O'Neill 1915
I have no business making this reference, but it is almost 1 am and I am unhinged. 😂
Well, I read the title as ‘In a German Ouroboros’ and it took me a minute to get up to speed. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a German ouroboros out and about, hopefully bringing you schnitzel with noodles, because nothing surprises me these days. Hope you all feel better soon. 💜
Sending you big recovery vibes. I often find that actual recovery is even longer than the buffer that I plan for, too.