Well, they say a good battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy, and so it was with June’s reading list. During the last month, I packed up our things from our 6-month rental, moved them down to our new home, unpacked all the things from our two storage pods, and began trying to put our family’s life back together. I front-loaded a lot of audiobooks because I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of energy for physical reading this month, but even so I didn’t make it through all the physical books I wanted to read. Plus I got sidetracked by two unplanned reads. I guess that’s #writinglife. Expect me to double up on my writing-related books next month, as those are the ones I’m still working through.
Continue reading “What I Read: June 2021”Category: Life
Springtime and Change
So, a lot has changed since my last post in September. To sum up:
- My husband and I moved our family from Washington to Utah! My husband’s job as a programmer went permanently remote, so as of January 2021, we can live anywhere in the US. I have always wanted to move back to my home state of Utah, and this seemed doubly important after the pandemic cut us off from visiting family. So we sold our home in Bellevue and are now under contract to buy a home in Highland, UT. It’s been a wild ride, but we’re in the home stretch and should be settled in our new place this summer.
- Homeschooling is wonderful and horrible and ending soon. Being able to school the kids anywhere was a real blessing during our move but has also been an absolute drain on my creative energy. I’ve loved teaching about science and literature, but all the planning has really kept me from doing much else. The good news is: only 10 or weeks to go. I’m excited to have a break for the summer and send the kids back to public school in the fall.
- I’ve decided to be more open about my interest in Mormon literature on this blog. At first, I was hesitant to include my religion in this blog at all. As someone once told McKay Coppins, “Mormons have no cultural cachet.” The religious right hates us because we’re not mainline Christians, the left sees us as bigoted conservatives. Obviously exceptions exist, but to admit you’re Mormon and to talk about Mormon books is to severely limit your audience in both directions. Even other Mormons often aren’t interested in Mormon lit. It would be so much easier to just focus on mainstream works. But the intersection of religion, and particularly Mormonism, and speculative fiction is kind of a big thing for me. I’ve had an abstract accepted for the SFRA Review special issue on Mormons and SF, and I haven’t been this excited to write something in a long time. I’m going to have to embrace this niche and hope someone appreciates it as much as I do.
I hope to come back to writing more frequently on this blog as my homeschool workload wraps up and the move finishes, so watch this space for more lit crit and writing process in action!
Self Care and The Three Selves
I have a friend who struggles a lot with mental health issues. Recently, her therapist has mandated working on her sleep health (going to bed at a reasonable time, not using screens in bed, not sleeping during the day, etc). She was sort-of-pretend complaining on a Zoom call the other day about how she was “being mean to herself” by forcing herself to skip her typical three hour afternoon nap. I think she knew inside herself that it was necessary to skip afternoon naps in order to be able to get a full night’s sleep. But she still felt like not taking a nap was “mean.”
This conversation gets at the problem of the whole “self care” movement. The definition of caring for ourselves can mean different things to different people at different times. Sometimes a nap is self-care, sometimes it’s not. If you are occasionally exhausted, allowing yourself a break for a short nap is a kind and productive thing to do. But if you chronically stay up late and have trouble sleeping and end up crashing for three hours in the afternoon, then a nap becomes something unhealthy, a bad habit to break. How do we make sense of this?
Continue reading “Self Care and The Three Selves”Writing Goals for the Post-Pandemic World
In January 2020 I set myself some writing writing goals. Let’s look at how I was doing on those before, you know, that thing happened.
Continue reading “Writing Goals for the Post-Pandemic World”Finding Motivation to Write During Hard Times with 4thewords
Well hello again.
Like many others, my writing productivity has suffered during the pandemic. I went from having mornings free of kids to pursue my writing (and physical therapy) to suddenly supervising four kids learning at home. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one.) It was stressful and many times it was all I could do to get the kids through their school work in the morning and spend the rest of the day on the couch, obsessively reading Google News and Facebook.
After a month or two, I started building a foundation that allowed me to come out of hibernation. Honestly, I was forced to. I had agreed in February to write a blog post due in June, and my deadline was fast approaching. I had to find some way to come out of my funk and get some kind of work done.
Continue reading “Finding Motivation to Write During Hard Times with 4thewords”