🍿🎬 BREAKING: Join me TONIGHT at 7:15pm for the West Sound Film Festival Experimental Block screening of “Look Up” at the historic Roxy Theater in downtown Bremerton, WA! MORE INFO
Honoring Abundance
While hibernating and hopescrolling. (So much hopescrolling.)
—from the Rhymes With Camera Substack, August 2, 2024—
Fullness is the best way I can describe the way I’ve felt since mid-June. So very full. Brimming to the top, overflowing. All in service to the launch of my new dark speculative collection, Cul de Sac Stories.
Don’t think for a minute that all this writing and publishing business is easy, because I’m exhausted, seeking dormancy… even when the words flow and the vibes are positive.
And then real life interrupts…
Being a writer promoting a new book in the summer of 2024, I can’t not mention the noisy ubiquity that stands in the way of my personal dreams: current events.
Even while being so far offline that I didn’t watch TV for 10 days and barely had time for social media, I couldn’t—still can’t—avoid the tectonic shift of political plates that happened in July.
As a result, a nonstop firehose of histrionics has now become the backbone of every social media platform I belong to.
Talk about fullness! A creative person trying to find the audience for their work in online channels can no longer expect to compete with all that noise.
Writing life tip: Choose the water where you wish to wade
So I have to pivot my book promotion strategies because socials aren’t cutting it. Fine. I’m tasked with reassessing why I write and publish in the first place (an excellent practice, something I try to do quarterly every year).
As I do, I find myself wading in this little tributary of success. And I kinda like it here.
Listen, we all get to decide for ourselves what success looks like (in our writing lives or even just in our lives, period).
For me, success as an author isn’t tied to commercial goals, but personal ones. And right now, I’m wading in that calm and sparkling pool adjacent to the rushing canyon of water that is book marketing.
And there it is, again. That feeling. Of fullness.
It can be difficult to remember how good things are going when you’re negotiating the brisk rapids of book marketing. Taking deep breaths in the shallow pool tells me I’m alive and not drowning in the river.
It’s Olympics season: Don’t overlook the wins!
I thank Jennifer Brozek for inspiring me to keep a “win” journal. With it, I record at least one accomplishment from every single day.
I do this to remind myself how hard I work at being the writer I have always been, and that the fruits of the labor exist.
[Yesterday’s was hard, not gonna lie: I discovered I’d become victim yet again to a recent data breach, and spent the day putting up even more cyber shields in self-defense… so the chief win was “got out of bed at a normal hour.”]
Let me share what this fullness I’m feeling now as a writer—this win “bank”—has looked like over these last six weeks:
