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| The view from my office window |
It's honestly been a lot longer than a minute. There was a time this blog served as my virtual journal, where I wrote without thought to who might be reading it. Then somewhere along the way, I got suckered into the clicks, the metrics, the shares and spent my time boosting posts into my social media timelines. It suddenly became more important to be noticed than to be creating.
Which wasn't good for my mental health or my writing.
Creativity is a tiny flame in the darkness, vulnerable to wind and weather. I had forgotten how carefully it needs to be tended.
It doesn't not slip my notice that my endless scrolling on social media and craving for the external validation it sometimes provided coincided with the long slow slog of my current manuscript. I've said this before and I'll repeat it here - if only to hammer it home in my mind - to write means being able to sit with the discomfort when it gets difficult. Having social media as a crutch meant I had a ready exit from the work.
Not only that, but the rapid fire nature of a social media feed seemed to obliterate my ability to focus my attention on long form work - both reading and writing.
If anything is the death knell for a writer it's the inability to read and think deeply.
It's also been a year full of radical changes in my personal life. In 2023, my spouse left a toxic job and is now semi-retired. We sold a house and moved fully to our homestead farm in Central Massachusetts. (We still have a storage unit full of unpacked boxes to prove it.) I won't even mention the cataclysmic changes in the world at large.
Everything culminated in my decision to step away from most of my social media streams. I haven't checked my personal Facebook feed in 2 weeks.* And in just those weeks, feel like my mind and thoughts have room to grow. I've engaged with my writing more fully and more deeply than I have in a long time.
I'm letting myself be bored instead of reaching for my phone.
I'm emailing long letters to friends. I have a bunch of cards I'm planning to mail as well.
And most remarkably, the days feel longer. Story is swirling around my mind again. I spent several intense days doing a final read through and light edit to LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD ahead of sending it to my editor. After all the time struggling to write it, rewrite it, multiple revisions and changes, it finally says what I wanted and needed it to say.
Whether or not it finds its readership isn't up to me. I can't make that happen through social media or promotion. I will be releasing it just after the new year. What happens after, happens. There will be a book 2 (Working title EVERY SKY A STRANGER). There are other stories tickling my back brain.
There will be plums to harvest in a week or so. And blackberries. The kale and chard are taking over the garden. Everything grows and matures in its own time. The garden, the orchard, stories. Our lives are a process. Not a destination.
I'm still here. I hope you are, too. Wherever you are in your process, I hope you find the breath and time to simply be.
With fondness,
LJ
*You may still see me posting on IG, because there's never a bad time to add beauty to the world. Most of what I post there are photos of StarField Farm, knitting, pottery, food, and of course, my dogs.
