What I Learned From This Strange Week About What Comes Next
|
A short pause between holidays and New Year, gathering the threads of December’s essays before the calendar flips and momentum returns. Welcome to What I Learned From… "What if I told you none of it was accidental? ... I laid the groundwork, and then, just like clockwork, the dominoes cascaded in a line. What if I told you I'm a mastermind?" — Taylor Swift, Mastermind What I Learned From …We’re in that quiet, foggy weekend after the holidays and before New Year’s Day, when time feels wibbly-wobbly, energy is low, and no one wants to read a whole-ass essay. But instead of piling on more words, I'm going to let this strange week breathe. Consider this a bit of a test case. Going forward, I’m going to try ending each month with a bit of behind-the-scenes. A chance to step back and share the thread running through the topics I chose for these essays, before we all barrel into whatever comes next. I think it sounds like a fun way to share some of the ways I craft an arc through nerdy little missives. We’ll see how it feels as we head into 2026! So, yeah. December's three essays were written deliberately, to tell a bigger story about your writing life and craft. We start with rhythm, with candle flames that only steady themselves when the conditions and the spacing are right. Then we move outward to orientation, to an ancient machine built to map time and the sky long before anyone could explain the forces behind them; they could only trust the patterns enough to follow them. And finally, we end with the Yule log, with fire that’s not treated as a flash or a fresh start, but as something we tend to diligently, so it lasts through the darkness and reminds us that the light is coming. Read together, they sketch a way of working that starts with paying attention, figures out where you are, and focuses in on what you’re willing to keep burning once winter really sets in. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Freshly Forged …What's new, what's coming, and how to be part of it.
The Forge at CYC is cooling through January, while I bring together everything that’s been taking shape in my solo-flame time. I’ll share updates as soon as things are ready to strike. Thanks for holding the space while I make sure ours is set to glow. Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.” — Maria Popova Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. What in your life immediately got better once you stopped poking it every five minutes? What was your most comical micromanagement attempt? What miraculously clicked into place once you finally loosened your grip? Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Percontation [per-kon-TAY-shun] (n.) — A way of questioning that is more poking than pondering. From Latin percontātiō (“questioning, inquiry”), the etymology is fantastically literal: per- (“through”) + contus (“a long pole, like a spear or a boat-pole”). This wasn’t casual chit-chat. A percontatio was the kind of relentless questioning that felt like being politely, but intellectually stabbed with a stick until you spilled. Percontation is less about extracting answers and more about staying with a question until patterns begin to give themselves up. Sorta synonyms: poking around, rhetorical questions, deep inquiry Use it for: testing how your energy changes when you write at different times of day, turning off notifications and noticing how long it takes to sink into a project, letting a piece wander for a bit before deciding what it’s really about Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Paste your text into Read-o-Meter and it gives you reading time, reading level, word count, sentences, and paragraphs. All the little stats that suddenly matter when you’re working with something like, say, a newsletter that has very specific fields. Simple, fast, and quite useful. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. Going through 3 essays to remind yourself what you were really writing humbles you real fast. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - Support your local weird little geeky newsletter writer by interacting with a social post this week. Like, comment, share, you know the drill! It sucks, but the internet needs proof I have friends. I’m on Threads and LinkedIn the most…are we connected there yet? |