Kia ora dear ones,

Hello from my own little patch of existence down near the South Pole. My local friends and neighbors are preparing for sausage sizzles, lazy beach days, and the languid haze of the long holidays. 

But you all in the Northern hemisphere, oh you lucky ducks. You are in a quiet time where nights are long and animals sleep. As a rural Pennsylvania girl, my mind and heart gets still between Commercial Christmas and the New Year. Even among days of summer dresses and beach fires, I am pulled to pause as if it is cold and dark, to reflect on the past year, and to plan for a new rotation around the sun.

Collecting treasures that will help us plan for 2024

So if you are feeling a similar mood, let’s take this quiet time to begin to pan for gold, the gold of our emotional lives.

• Begin to collect bits of memories, quotes, images, and experiences that fill you up, that move you.
• These moments will be the first drafts of our own new-year-planning.
• We are looking for what we yearn for, what we may like to create more of in the year to come.

Next week I’ll start walking you through the concrete planning I do to review my past year, celebrate successes, then plan for the year ahead. But this week is first about just noticing what ideas and values are calling to us. This week let’s just be in creative exploration, piling up precious images and words in a literal shoe box, on a voice memo, or in a scribbled list on a scrap of paper. (Below I’ve include some of my own examples.)

Wishing you deep sleeps and fierce mornings.

Love, Kerry

Kerry’s example mood board with bits of inspiration

Below is my author mood board. I’ve been adding little snippets to a blank Google doc for about a month. 

“Think of a book deal as the capstone of a mission, message, or other tectonically huge and important chunk of your life’s work. Do not think of it as the impetus or the launchpad. PLEASE.”

“I consider myself a writer, but the last thing I want to do is write a book. It’s a hellishly complex task with few rewards (especially monetary). It requires a mixture of delusion, ambition, and determination that defies good sense. I’d rather write anything else and most days you’ll find me reading anything else—mostly long-form journalism, essays, and countless newsletters.”

“This is the guiding principle of my artistic life. I call it “investment without attachment,” which means, we do the work consistently and well, tirelessly, doggedly. And we focus on that—the work, and the quality of the work, because that’s what we can control—not the outcome of the work.”

“Focus on the work for its own sake. Sometimes the money follows that, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s the only way...So often in writing, people want advice on how to succeed, but they don’t like it when that advice includes a lot of time or a lot of work. You can’t expect to get the results of a person who works very hard at something without also working very hard at it yourself...most people who vaguely dream about becoming a writer are not willing to put in the work that it takes to get there. But the hard reality is that those who can’t or don’t want to put in the hard work of writing—fair or not—cannot expect to be read except by their friends.”

“As a Black man, I’m not gonna allow myself to be programmed to not love myself, and not go after what I deserve as a human being for me and my people.” Sean Combs

“The goal of the people we represent is not to be Beyoncé. It’s not directly connected to popularity. Let’s say you’re inviting some people to your house for dinner. Do you want everyone to arrive? Or do you want a select number of intelligent people who are amusing and understand what you’re talking about? The latter, I think. There are some people I don’t want to have join the dinner. They deserve to live, but they don’t need to come to my house for supper.

What’s the right way? What are your goals?

To matter in the culture? No. Absolutely not. Who gives a [expletive]? You want to matter in this culture? Not me.

So what should a writer’s goals be? Just on the quality of the work. The kind of ineffable beauty of something extremely well expressed.” Andrew Wylie interviewed by David Marchese

“What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace*, but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the sweet spot of how we’re actually wired and produces valuable meaningful work, but it’s sustainable.

*Meaning one with more variability in intensity than the always-on pace to which we’ve become accustomed.” Cal Newport

“You do not have the life of prayer and silence necessary to sustain the work you are doing.” Franciscan priest quoted by Tish Harrison Warren

“People feel entitled to be famous and rich and I’m like, dude, you could be digging ditches bro.” Zach Bryan

“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.” Don Knuth

“I do not and will not fear tomorrow because I feel as though today has been enough.” Zach Bryan again

“Be a good steward to your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life.  Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can.  Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.” Jane Kenyon, first discovered via Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro

“A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy