Let's Get Excited!
On reframing goals, considering our legacies, and shouting our emotions on the page
Hello friend, 👋🏾
The first week of 2024 is under our belts. Are you starting out strong? Or already wishing for a reset button?
While I don’t do resolutions, the new year is a great time to reevaluate goals. This is, of course, an ongoing task, however a fresh turn around the earth can be excellent motivation.
This morning, I read this in the always inspiring Momentum newsletter:
Instead of being burdensome, your goals can also be wings that lift you. Each goal can bring you closer to the joy of flight, the thrill of soaring to new heights. In the process, you embrace the wind, the sun, and the vast expanse of the sky.
What a lovely, expansive way to look at our plans for change and growth!
I do weekly and daily planning in my paper planners. In addition, I’m currently using Notion and Todoist in my organizational load out. (I’ve also enjoyed using ClickUp, Asana, Sunsama, Trello, Basecamp—I’ll stop there, you get the picture. I love project management software. It’s a problem.)
Of course, no planner or software can truly help you reach your goals because goals are not technology problems, they’re people problems. To paraphrase something I’m pretty sure I read from Marie Poulin: We need to manage our projects, but what we really need is to manage ourselves.
To that end, I’ve cracked open a brand new notebook and started doing this activity at the beginning of most days:
It adds a layer of self management to my day before all the work starts. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you!
If you find this weekly email useful, please hit the ❤️ button, share it with a friend, and consider becoming a paid subscriber!
📝 Who’s to Say?
Imaginary Worlds is one of my favorite podcasts. Episode 241, “Prologue to Ursula K. le Guin,” is actually an episode from a new to me podcast, The Last Archive, called “The Word for Man is Ishi.” The episode starts in one place and takes the listener somewhere far different—on a journey touching many topics including: colonialism, anthropology, Native American rights, friendship, betrayal, humanity, and, of course, science fiction and fantasy. It’s honestly too much for me to summarize here.
However, along the way, the host theorizes that a core source of Le Guin’s inspiration for the themes and stories she tackled came from the sins of her anthropologist father.
I found the episode fascinating on many levels. Apparently, the author herself never spoke about the conclusions arrived in this podcast, namely, that her writing was grappling with incidents in her family’s past.
For those of us writing today who might one day be successful enough to still be talked about after we’re gone, is there any value to positing what future historians might make of our inspiration? Or, in this era of social media, blogs, and podcasts, are we simply more able to define ourselves for ourselves, thus taking the mystery out of it all?
Of course, we are not always the best analyzers of our own motivations. I know what I think I’m writing about, but maybe it really is for others to say what they believe I’m tackling and why, since once a piece of art leaves the creator’s hands it belongs to the world and no longer to them.
📝 Ode to the Exclamation Mark!
I attended a long-ago writing class where the instructor advised us that a book should only ever have four exclamation points in it! Four! In the entire novel! Now, I do have a tendency to over-exclaim (particularly in emails, where I fear I come across like an especially caffeinated cheerleader) however, this post from The Millions, “How to Exclaim!” really backs up my inherent belief in the power of the flagrant bit of punctuation that was originally named punctus admirativus.
Not only did I learn the origins of the punctuation (700 years ago from an Italian scholar and poet—of course, it had to be a poet), but also “five ways that literature can recuperate the abused exclamation point.”
From Ernest Hemingway’s under utilization in The Old Man in the Sea to Salman Rushie’s fervent adoration of them in Midnight’s Children:
Rushdie uses the staggering number of 2.131 !s—and average of six exclamation points per page! That’s a lot of shouting.
And poor Jane Austen’s many exclamations were largely edited out.
...this was too much eagerness for her male editors who muted her voice through flattening out her varied punctuation. If in doubt, be Jane, and exclaim!
💡Upcoming Live Workshop: The Second Draft and Beyond: How to Revise Your Novel
Have a rough first draft but stuck on the revisions? Learn how to analyze your own work, identify issues, and make an organized plan to take your novel from draft to finished in this live workshop on Monday, Jan. 29, 7pm ET.
🚀 Quick Bites
This pen has the soul of a magic-8 ball. Roll the 6-sided Oracle Squire pen to get insights into your future. This is the type of thing that amuses me.
Doing research? Need access to research-type things? Perlego is an “online library of books, academic texts and tools” with flexible payment plans.
“The stories write us, you see. We read something that moves us, touches us, speaks to us and it… it changes us.”
— The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer
🎙️ Ink & Magic podcast: Ep 8 - Novel Openings: How We Get Hooked
Join bestselling authors (and former college roommates) Ines Johnson and L. Penelope as they read and discuss the writing craft, worldbuilding, and romance of paranormal and fantasy novels.
In this episode, Leslye and Ines break down the necessary elements of first scenes and first lines. Want to see how we cracked the code to awesome beginnings? Curl up and listen close!
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Thank you for the planning tool tips! And hooray for exclamation marks!! 😊