soaking up spooky season 🎃

by confronting the ghosts in my own mind 👻

It feels like half my camera roll is snaps of houses decorated for Halloween right now. There’s a giant skeletal dog standing guard outside a home a block away; spiderwebs spanning a whole garage door; gravestones in front yards and pumpkins on stoops. Mornings have been foggy and night falls earlier, and even on our unseasonably warm days, the light just has a different quality.

It’s been a (relatively) quieter month, and I’ve been using it to soak in some reflection. I love how everything is celebrating the underworld and cycles of rebirth and the spooky, subterranean myths underlying our world. It just feels right. And I know we’re now on to romanticizing the holiday season since it’s officially November, but before we jump right into carols and wreaths, a moment for October:

learning

I had a moment of guilt that there’s not enough “craft” stuff in this section of the newsletter this month, but a) I’ve spent the month trying not to consume too many other voices and to spend more time tuning into my own instincts, and b) I’ve been reading The Artist’s Way again and being very annoying about it—and my hero Julia Cameron reinforces over and over that tending to your life is tending to your art. So, my learning this month has been a lot of meditating on habits and beliefs about art and creation (and tbh I suspect that will be a lot of my learning for years to come lol).

For those who don’t know, The Artist’s Way is a twelve-week program built on two pillars: daily stream-of-consciousness writing (“morning pages”), and weekly “artist dates” (where you block off some time to let your inner artist play, without distractions or judgment, in some way that feels joyful to you). I’ve done The Artist’s Way several times before—some more rigorously than others—so, honestly, I was kind of surprised by how much sludge there still is to dredge up from my subconscious. You would think I’d uncovered and worked through it all by now, wouldn’t you?!

But no. The more I work on my morning pages, the more honest they get about what’s troubling me, what possibilities I dream about, what I’m always figuring out about myself and my work. All of that feels a little too fresh to unpack here, and a little too close to breaking Cameron’s rule not to show anyone your pages, so I’ll hold off on key takeaways until a future newsletter.

However! This week marks the end of week four, so in honor of being a third of the way through the program, I went back through to capture my favorite quotes from the book.

(Week four also happens to be my most dreaded week—the READING DEPRIVATION WEEK. YES, THAT MEANS NO READING. I KNOW. Maybe that’s why I felt compelled to go back to my annotations… just to touch some pages, like the book-sniffer I am…)

Sooo it was a great time to watch some sports on TV (go Dodgers!!) and play around in Canva. Here’s my humble offering/advertisement for Julia Cameron’s soul-healing words, with my extremely mediocre Canva skills that I am nonetheless inordinately proud of, like a child showing off their finger painting or pinch pots (this is a very Julia Cameron metaphor, tbh, so I think she’d be proud):

Thank you for indulging me, and I hope one of these feels a little like a hug today. 🤍 (For weekly updates on my Artist’s Way journey, you can follow along on IG! We have such a lovely group of folks working through it together, and I love reading everyone’s reflections and feeling a little more accountable as a result. 🫶)

The other significant creative meditation this month came thanks to my dear friend Nikki, who always expands my life by bringing me to cool events. We saw a We Live in Time screening followed by a Q&A with Andrew Garfield, and he was such an endearing, zany man—overflowing with thoughts about art and intimacy.

I found myself scrambling for my notes app to capture some of his thoughts:

• “The world needs more cracked open hearts” (one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard in a long time)

• “Rumination is death—turn those thoughts to creation instead” (the advice I always need WOW)

• A long metaphor, Big Magic style, about treating the scared parts of you as a small child who you must tenderly strap to your back on your way to work. You’ll pat them on the head when they scream that you’re bad at this and you will fail and embarrass yourself, and you just say “I’m sorry you feel that way, but we must go make a living now.” And maybe sometimes they’ll fuel you and that work. (“Those parts make me work hard—maybe too hard—maybe that’s why I’m always so tired…”)

• Discussing the beauty of working through scenes with Florence Pugh, and how “digging into the pain can be cathartic if you’re feeling safe and held” 😭

So I’m feeling appropriately contemplative as this month wraps up, and it’s the pause I needed before diving into a November that promises to be busier than ever.

loving

💕 getting obsessed with fic in a way I haven’t in many years 💀 a weekend flew by in a haze as a result and I’m not mad about it. iykyk!!

💕 visiting New Orleans with my beloved Alyssa Villaire and her coven—we had the most wonderful time enjoying everything the city had to offer, from ghost tours to music to delicious food to cozy bookshops

💕 an absolute banger of a reading month—from gripping and atmospheric spooky season reads like Kelly Andrew’s I am Made of Death and Christina Li’s Manor of Dreams, to lit fic that absorbed and transported me (Blue Sisters and Intermezzo both deserve every ounce of hype, my GOD)

💕 finding the new set of bookshelves I needed while thrifting so I can finally have space for my books to grow hehe (it was either this or purge some, which was gonna be SO MUCH HARDER)

💕 the tip from Crooked Reads to listen to poetry audiobooks??? why have I never thought of this before?? implementing posthaste

💕 getting back on my morning running grind thanks to the Nike Running app. Running is a huge part of my identity (so much that I made it a key thread in one of my books), but I go long stretches without being consistent… and of course when I get back to it, I remember why I love what it does for my mind and mood. Going to try to stay consistent here through the end of the year, as much as I can!

💕 watching the launch of the first Bindery class and fangirling to death over S. Hati and her brilliant book And the Sky Bled. I’m just so happy this book is in the world, and seeing it find its well-deserved fans is absolutely the best thing to happen this month.

💕 planning my solo Artist Dates in the most dedicated way I ever have, and noticing the transformation that follows. I haven’t missed a week yet, and have done everything from stationery binges to thrift store explorations to bookstore browsing, and I’m honestly really proud of myself for planning and committing to these!

💕 thinking up perhaps my favorite Halloween costume to date in the shower yesterday morning—I pinned entries from a works cited page to myself and went as MLA/Emily citations :) My students genuinely seemed to appreciate the nerdiness, so my work here is done.

& the latest!

Suddenly, so many very real book things are happening with Heart Check that I have to remind myself to pause and soak them in. This month I received my copy edits, did another revision pass, got some more exciting news (!!!), and did my best to celebrate it all. (Not a step of this process that comes naturally to me… or to many of my writer friends. How do we get better at this?!)

I kept telling myself to enjoy the little bits of this stage that, frankly, I often thought I might never reach: stet-ing my first comment, learning about my truly wonky comma and italics use, and getting a style sheet 😭 I truly hope I never take a single one of these milestones for granted.

To counter my nerves about this book being one step closer to out of my hands, I read my manuscript not just with a ruthless knife to filter words and echoes, but also with an eye to all the things I was proud of (something Clare Osongco has helped me solidify as part of my writing process—preorder Midnights With You, out 11/12!!). And even while interrogating em-dashes and dialogue tags, I made myself laugh out loud! I giggled and kicked my feet! I was nodding proudly at the little Easter Eggs and tiny details of characterization and world-building. Each moment I could find something to love—not just something to nitpick—felt like a win.

And that feels like the publishing lesson I needed to (re)learn this month.

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All right, that’s it for now, friends. I hope you’ve had a wonderful October and Hallo-week. November will be full of so much fun and adventure and I look forward to updating you at the end of it!!