Reading time: 1.48 426 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, Relatability is everything. I once had a client who wrote a fantastic book called Eat Drink Think. Her book is about addiction, about ending the battle with food and body image and living a life of authenticity and joy. Renae Saager’s book contains multitudes, as does she, but one line gut-punched me: “Stop trying to love your body.” She was incredible at seeing through the glossy, aspirational, unreachable, beautifully...
3 days ago • 6 min read
Reading time: 1.29 352 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, When Sharon was in college, double majoring in English & Psych, her English professor told her she “can’t write and never will.” She’d written short stories as a child, and journalling seemed to her like good prep for writing a memoir (it is). And although Sharon had always dreamed of writing a book, after that encounter with her low-quality professor, she just assumed writing was a talent she didn’t have. So she didn’t...
4 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 2.06 498 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, I’m elbow-deep in soil and worms, building a new vegetable bed, when Joe finds me. He’s a bit surprised because I’m supposed to be writing my book. “I thought you said you were too busy to bowl,” he says. I am. Too busy to bowl, I mean. I’m supposed to be writing a book. So obviously I am now building a new vegetable bed and also cleaning out the greenhouse and filling the bird feeders. It’s URGENT. I’m too busy to have...
5 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 0.35 136 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is just 37 pages long. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is just 133 pages long. Johanna McWeeney, one of my first MicroBook Magic authors, wrote Stop “Falling Short” in just 43 pages. Each of these little books has made a huge impact on my life, and two of them have shifted cultures. You don’t have to write a 1,000-page tome to make a difference...
6 days ago • 1 min read
Reading time: 1.26 338 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, In 1831, Victor Hugo huddled naked in his room for several months, having given away all of his clothes and possessions, in order to finish The Hunchback of Notre-Dame before his publisher flipped a table. Or so legend has it. In the early 1800s, Henry David Thoreau built himself a cabin in the woods, into which he disappeared for weeks at a time to write. The Romantic poets swanned around Europe partying with opium and...
7 days ago • 2 min read
Reading time: 5.53 1,398 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, Yesterday, I finished reading How To Stop Time by Matt Haig and I adored it. Last week, I finished his book The Humans. I’ve just reserved everything else he’s written at my local library. A couple of years ago, I read There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak and immediately bought everything else she’d ever written. Last year, I read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, then read everything else...
10 days ago • 6 min read
Reading time: 1.10 277 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, I present to you the 9 stages of writing a book: This is AMAZING I am genius This is TRASH kill me now Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Mushrooms. Coffee. Xanax Procrasti-running Pyjamas, typewriter, whiskey, nicotine-stained walls, broken pencils, a cloud of woe, a raven, and a sense of impending doom I can’t do this why did I think I could do this I can’t even make an omelette Oh wait I wrote 48,000 words I’m a fraud THIS MIGHT...
11 days ago • 1 min read
Reading time: 4.03 962 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, Question: Do you have any tips for the ADHD’ers like me who have a tendency of burning themselves out and still not having a finished outline? (Also, when is it ever finished?) — Steph (a very tired writer) There are two types of writers in this world: those who make outlines and those who scoff at outlines. Then there alllll the other types of writers, such as those who sometimes make outlines, those who word-vomit then...
12 days ago • 4 min read
Reading time: 5.28 1,298 words Read this email in your browser Hey Reader, What price would you be willing to pay for unlimited knowledge and a life without effort? Your ideas? Your voice? How about the essence of who you are? In medieval times, a German magician, alchemist, and itinerant conman named Johann Georg Faust was said to have made a deal with the devil. In exchange for his immortal soul, Faust received unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. This deal with the devil feels, to...
13 days ago • 6 min read