Despite the Best Intentions (and LA)

There’s something about mindset, something about thinking in terms of writing. There’s something about noticing, about attuning your senses to the world but maybe even more importantly to your own ideas. There’s listening to the sound of your voice inside your head, to paying attention to the voice that speaks in paragraphs instead of tweets, that notices ideas instead of how much laundry there is to fold, that speaks in questions instead of complaints.

I haven’t been in any of those somethings for a while. My inner voice today is all it’s raining, my coffee tastes weird, I wish I had more coffee, I don’t feel like it, my leggings weren’t clean, there are two baskets of clean laundry to fold but none of that is my leggings.

There’s juggling probably too many jobs, or too many jobs that I don’t feel totally clear on what I’m doing with them. There’s probably not enough good sleep. There’s definitely not enough doing morning pages.

But there is also reading. There’s watching bare trees for the first hint of leaves. There’s my kid having a big bed now so we can lie there together sometimes. “If I fall asleep will you stay until then? Or if I don’t fall asleep you can leave whenever you want.” Him holding my arm across his chest. At least there’s that.

This is sort of about why I haven’t been writing this newsletter, a question I have to confront whenever I want to send you a note about an upcoming thing, an event. Self-promo. (Scroll down, big surprise, for some of that.) The abundance of newsletter ideas isn’t exactly a measure of my mental and creative wellbeing, but it’s not not that either. No cup’s been overflowing here! Drip drip drip, instead. A horrible thought occurred to me which is what if part of the problem is actually being off twitter, more or less, these days, that without the daily microdose flow of ideas to share, I’m not noticing the ideas that are too big for that format, or ideas that start there and want to keep going?

There are plenty of other ways to do it, though, I know. And the point isn’t (just) wanting to have newsletter ~content~, it’s also wanting to have ideas, words, sentences. Anything to share. Using the muscles, flushing the pipes. Writing begets writing, ideas beget ideas. I know all of this. It’s why morning pages works, just practicing letting words follow one after the other, noticing the landscape of the inside of your brain. It’s why starting this newsletter with just a sense of a sentence led to howevermany paragraphs in we are now, things I hadn’t been thinking of writing and I make no promises about if any of you have stuck with it, but here we are. Get the fingers moving, and they keep going.

Wild how that works, almost every time.

That’s a reminder to me, then, and maybe you if you need it, too.

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Thursday April 18 will be one year since my book came out. The day after that I’ll fly to LA, and then on April 20 I’m on a panel at the LA Times Festival of Books: 11am at the Ray Stark Family Theater, talking science writing with Rebecca Boyle, Eugenia Chang, Daniel Lewis, moderated by thee Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Indoor events require registration, you can find that info here, and we’ll be signing books afterward.

If you’re in the UK, my book is out in paperback today! US paperback should be coming this summer.

Thanks for sticking with me. More soon, I hope. One step at a time turns into a path.