Hello, and happy spring!
So glad you’re here! I’m here! We’re still here! And we’re so lucky.
WHAT I’M UP TO
Things have changed around here! Husband and I got vaccinated and immediately signed our eldest up for in-person school. She has not been enrolled in public school for a full year, but as soon as we felt it was safe enough to do so, we sent her right back, and she’s thrilled. Her school has high accolades for their COVID-19 procedures, her teacher feels well taken care of, and most importantly, our kiddo is thrilled to be in a social circle again. She’s also been going to in-person piano lessons, we’ve been able to have meals and visits with vaccinated family members and playdates with a cousin, so it’s been all around a welcome shift. My husband’s even on the list to go back to his plumbing apprenticeship! I’ll never be able to forget what it was like to live through 2020—even after the pandemic ends, my bones will always remember that very specific and acute anxiety, as well as the rushing fear and acknowledgment that my nation’s leaders are not as competent or moral as I hoped they’d be in an emergency.
But as spring emerges in my neck of the suburban sprawl of Utah, I can envision an upcoming life where things feel, more or less, normal.
Not normal, better.
Other than that, it’s mostly the same—I’ve got a new deadline for my Circus Book revision, I’ve finished copyedits for my next middle grade (title reveal soon, I hope!), and lots more irons in the fire.
Right now, my biggest priority is following my creative energy and letting my ADHD brain drag me around to where it wants to go. This might seem counterproductive, and certainly it’s not the best way to finish projects. But I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years struggling to reconcile my own internal timelines and rhythms with the ambitions I have, and at times, it’s best to let the wild grow free. I don’t want to think of my brain as something I have to tame.
APRIL ROUND-UP
My mom got MARRIED! How cool is it to be able to say I attended my mother’s wedding? It was a wonderfully intimate ceremony and dinner, and she’s now hitched to a thoughtful, generous man who lets every grandkid name his new baby cows when they’re born. What a relief, to see your parent finally happy.
REALLY DEEP THOUGHTS
Bloom where you are planted.
I’m not sure if my mom remembers this, but she bought me a handcrafted wooden sign with this painted on it in the cutesy, feminine font that was relevant in 1999 (a.k.a. when I was in sixth grade). There were daisies on it. I hung it on my wall and didn’t pay much attention to it except as a decoration. I grew up LDS in Utah County, for heaven’s sake—there were so many inspirational quotes in my life. Too many to keep track of.
But I’m thinking about this phrase so much this month. Bloom where you are planted.
I think I came out of the womb with my roots in storytelling. I always knew I’d write. And thus far, much of my adult life has been about maintaining those roots, figuring out what to plant around them, pruning out anything else that threatened them—but writing, always, is right there at the center of me.
Last year I started a side business as a writing teacher. I started teaching right before the pandemic changed our world, and I was so, so fortunate to have hit a nerve. Writers took my classes. I made new connections. My outreach grew. I made another course for writers. I made a workshop. I did a few free webinars. I tried to study marketing, wondered if I should advertise, panicked when my enrollment numbers felt slow, worried that my classes were no longer relevant. I spent all of December swearing I wouldn’t let 2021 be dictated by my performance as a writing teacher… only to spend all of January, February, and part of March plotting to either write another course, do monthly free webinars to find more potential students, even start a coaching program where people could get one-on-one help from me with their writing woes—
But April has been a month of putting my foot down, again and again and again.
I am so lucky to have my writing courses. I am so lucky to be naturally decent at teaching, to have even had this option.
But I do not want to plant anything else in this part of the garden.
I’m ready to tend to my writing roots as much as I can for the next little while.
This isn’t to say that I’m stopping my courses! I have no plans to halt them anytime soon. They’ve been valuable to my writing community, and I revamped them this year to be more Lindsay-friendly: more automated, less cluttered, focusing on the parts of teaching that I do best and enjoy the most, namely delivering lectures and offering hard-earned and often out-of-the-box perspectives.
So if you haven’t had a chance to partake yet, fear not—the courses aren’t going anywhere. But I’m greatly looking forward to re-centering myself on my writing for at least the next few months.
What do I mean by that, practically speaking?
Because it’s one thing to say it, to declare that you’re committed to a practice or an art, but what does that look like?
First, I had to have a tough conversation with my husband—tough for me, because I would rather improvise in front of an audience of ten thousand than admit that I need a change that I alone can’t bring. We needed to talk about money, about bills, about income plans for this year. My writing courses paid all our bills in 2020. If I were to keep up that momentum, I’d have to spend a lot more time marketing and promoting to find fresh blood for my enrollments—and that’s exactly the kind of grind I’m trying to take a break from. Logistics are important if you’re going to make a big shift creatively—there’s so much head space that’s eaten up by the day-to-day, week-to-week configuration of how you’re going to earn your livelihood. I needed to free up some of that head space. In 2020, I’d taken on nearly all of it—so I asked my husband if he’d take a turn.
Luckily, I married someone who is not only amenable to such shifts and understands the teamwork required in a healthy relationship, I also married a man who is emotionally attentive and already suspected I was burnt out on trying to be Business Lindsay. When I came to him to ask if he’d let me focus on my writing for the rest of 2021 (still an income source for us, to be clear, but a much slower, unpredictable one), he already had a plan for us.
Second, I had to set/am currently setting some boundaries. At least once a day right now, I can expect to be hit by either a wave of panic, trying to convince me that yes, I SHOULD go ahead and start a coaching program for writers even though I really do not want to be a coach, or I’ll get an entirely new idea for a side hustle that I could plant and grow and turn into dollars—another way I could divide myself, divide my time, divide my energy.
My job right now, when those impulses arise, is to recognize them for what they are: just thoughts. That’s it. Just thoughts that trigger the most vulnerable of emotions for me. My most recurring thought is that by NOT expanding my courses or taking on new side hustle ventures, I am leaving money on the table. You can see how this spirals into regret, worry, fear, the desire to take rash action (like spending two hours feverishly outlining a new romance pen name or brainstorming curriculum for a new course so I don’t “leave money on the table”).
Of course, these worries are not unfounded, not completely. Everything is a trade-off. By focusing more on writing my books, I am potentially turning my back on some immediate income—I might be able to catch a few more students by doing another free webinar, or making a freebie to get people to sign up for a promotions newsletter, or what have you.
But the thing I’ll be trading? Writing time. Writing focus. Writing fever.
I am making up some imaginary money on some pretend table somewhere and letting myself believe that these are real stakes. I would rather have my own real stories than imaginary money.
I can expect these panicky thoughts daily right now, and when they arrive, I try my best to deflect them and distract myself until they go away. No, it’s not like I’m selling my house in order to fund three months of finishing my novel in the hopes that I’ll earn a million dollars. All I’m really doing is shifting my priorities for the next few months, away from the frenzy of growing one business and onto the frenzy of growing another—but to my brain, I might as well be hammering that For Sale sign into my front yard. To my brain, I might as well be walking away from a million dollars.
My brain is very good at making things up. (Hence, I’m a writer.) So I’m recognizing those fear-motivated thoughts, banishing them, and refusing to act on them.
The rules are real, and they are enforced. No brand-new courses right now. Just the two I already have. No coaching. No new workshops, no webinars, no huge advertising campaigns. I’ll continue to rely on word-of-mouth to bring students to my courses, and when I do run a class, I’ll do so with gratitude and conviction, knowing that I’m a better teacher when I am a writer first.
Third, and I’m still working on this one, I am writing with one aim and one aim only: to fucking love it. I have deadlines. I have projects due that are paid for, and projects due that I have promised to finish.
I have projects that I’ve been dying to dabble in for years, projects that are nothing to anyone else but myself—projects that feel transgressive to think about, projects that feel unsellable and unwanted.
And I will write them all.
The chance to focus more on my writing this summer (and beyond, hopefully!) is an absolute gift. I have a husband who will take on our monthly money-in situation so I can mentally be in my own worlds. I have kiddos who are very used to Mom being with her notebook and pen, half-absorbed in her words. I have support in the industry and now, thanks to the boldness of past Lindsay, I have hundreds of students who have heard my deepest creative secrets, who offer an encouragement I never would have thought I’d even wanted.
I have nothing but wind behind me, pushing me along—so it’s time to run. Take off. Grow.
Bloom where I am planted—and I’m planting myself right here, right in the thicket of my stories.
It feels like coming home again.
COMING UP FOR ME
I do not have specific dates for my upcoming books, but I have seasons!
My next book, a middle grade, will be out SPRING 2022.
My next book after that, a young adult, will be out FALL 2022.
My next book after that, another young adult, will be out FALL 2023.
Those are just the things under contract. I’ve got something on sub, something I’m revising for my agent, and something else on the docket to send out to editors.
Other than that, it’s the summer session of the Creative Revisionist (starting June 1st) and an 80/20: Fast Draft Method class in the fall.
TIDBITS
WORKING ON
The usual suspects—a few things under deadline, a few things that are not. There’s one very strange project that made the switch from nebulous “someday” energy into a more tangible, graspable, corporeal form into my mind, so I’m feeding that a drop of blood here or there, just so it will stay alive. It’s very outside of my wheelhouse, but feels pertinent to the overall garden, so I’ll let it hang out for awhile, see what it turns into.
READING
Plain Bad Heroines by emily danforth (my first reread since it came out in October—and it still is so, so good), Women and Other Monsters by Jess Zimmerman, The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey, Thornlight by Claire Legrand, and a new Anna-Marie McLemore book, plus lots of books with Clementine (A Bargain for Frances just absolutely holds up)
LISTENING TO
Lots of Abba (always), Wrecking Ball on repeat, old Disneyland records on Youtube (the Enchanted Tiki Room is a highly problematic fave)
WATCHING
I’m watching Seinfeld all the way through for the first time, and it makes me simultaneously chuckle knowingly and also roll my eyes (George is bad, but Jerry really is the worst). However—it is also making me think about the power of writing about small things. Seinfeld’s so often touted as a show about “nothing,” but even in all this “nothing,” there’s so much tension, morality, consequence, and universality. As a writer, it has me glorifying the tiny moments in my manuscripts where seemingly “nothing” happens—because that is where the reader often connects with the characters. Even in huge epic stories, those little moments of nothingness can do so much more heavy lifting than pages and pages of action.
I’m also watching the Green Knight trailer obsessively until the movie comes out.
DOING
Lots of springtime walks, watching Clementine devour Dog Man books for hours every day, and oddly savoring this phase before things go back to “normal.” 2020 was terrifying and I’d never want to live through it again, but it was also full of precious time together as a family that I can’t imagine we’ll fully replicate again. I was lucky to have patient, gentle people to comfort me during the first part of the pandemic (it’s not over yet, don’t forget!) and part of me will miss that.
Thank you so much for letting me land in your inbox! See you next time!
This all resonated so much for me - and I'm cheering you on all the way!
I especially loved this bit, which I need to save to remind myself in my own anxious moments:" I am making up some imaginary money on some pretend table somewhere and letting myself believe that these are real stakes. I would rather have my own real stories than imaginary money."