Hamilton wrote...the other 51!
Thanks for being part of Hibou's First Year!
Technically the one-year anniversary of my first HIBOU post was December 3, but who’s counting?
Me, as it turns out.
On December 3, I counted up the essays I’d written (skipping the repetitive Weekly RAP posts over the summer) and realized with utter delight that the final tally gave me a most excellent excuse to use a Hamilton meme:
Look, I know there’s no real comparison between Hamilton’s writing and mine—Hamilton’s essays took six months to help midwife our system of government while my essays took twelve months to spelunk mindset in writing—but just let me have this moment to pretend I spent the year writing like I was running out of time, all right?
Honestly, that song hits a little differently after spending a year writing 51 essays. It reminds me that there’s only so much time in a day and writing almost always takes more time than I think it will.
That said, I’ve adored writing an essay a week for all of you.
The three biggest gifts I’ve taken away from this first year are:
You—Seriously, thanks for being here!
Clarity—As with all writing, the chance to gather my thoughts about the writing process has been a true gift
Falling back in love with essays—Writing all these reminded my novel-obsessed writing self about how much I enjoy writing non-fiction—I guess you can take the girl out of the journalism but you can’t take the journalism out of the girl.
But it all takes so much time, doesn’t it? Time to write them for me. Time to read them for you. Time, time, time.
And I find that I'd like to spend some of that time on longer creative non-fictions essays that don’t belong here on Hibou. And of course there’s the time for the novel. And the time to launch some Hibou services in the coming year.
And so as Hibou enters its second year, I’m going to pare back posting weekly to posting twice a month.
I’ve found that I’m most interested in the posts on mindset and tenacity—two sides of the same coin, really—so my plan is to continue my monthly tenacity tales and another more general post that will likely be either about mindset for writers or whatever book I’m clutching to my chest and telling everyone to read that month or—if all goes well—the writing coaching services I hope to launch in 2024.
Stay tuned!
For today, though, I wish you the happiest of new years, though I say that knowing full well marketers preying on our insecurities have been saturating our feeds with messages about all the ways we need improvement, stat.
The posts about finishing your novel in 30 days, about losing a ludicrous amount of weight in a tiny window of time, about organization and finances and exercise and changing your diet.
Please.
Which is not to say that all goal setting is bad—if that’s your jam, spread it on your toast and munch away. But for those of us looking for a life a bit fuller than a completed to-do list, it might be better to put aside the New Year’s resolution and set a New Year’s vibe instead.
In that spirit, I offer up my favorite four mindset posts from this year as potential writerly vibes to adopt in 2024:
Believe your writing matters:
Your Writing Matters
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Your writing matters. Not the writing you think you’re supposed to do, mind you, but the writing you feel most called to do. The writing that fascinates you. The writing that—god forbid—makes you smile. It’s easy to forget, so consider this a friendly reminder: Your writing matters if it matters to you.
Embrace the process:
The Work is the Way
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The Mood Tools series started with a piece about befriending your inner critic. I talked about a stuffed monster I bought. It was a whole thing. But let’s face it. Some of the messages from our inner critic can be tenacious AF. Tenacious enough that even after befriending them, they continue to grumble and complain. If there was a person this toxic in y…
Jettison All-or-Nothing Thinking
All-Or-Something Thinking
·Does this scenario sound familiar? You planned to write for an hour, but your morning exploded, and now you only have fifteen minutes, so you decide today’s a bust and you’ll just write for two hours tomorrow. But during the night a storm dumps a foot of snow, so you spend the two hours you were planning to write shovel…
Be tenacious:
Tenacity Tales
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As a writer in the murky middle of her career, I’m something of a collector of tenacity tales that allow a brief peek at the sweat and tears spilled behind the curtains that published writers sometimes draw across their workspaces. Here are three of my favorites:
Happy New Year, Hibou readers.
But more importantly, happy writing!