Setting some goals
Six weeks until my final semester
Hi everyone,
The fall semester ended last week, and I’m now on week 1 out of 6 weeks off before my final semester begins. I’ve been working on developing a plan of action for this time off, and I’ve come up with a three-pronged approach.
Writing-related goals that are either productivity-based or grounded in refilling my creative reserves.
Anything based in rest and relaxation or personal enjoyment—things I want to do just for the fun of it.
Taking preparatory steps now that will make my life easier come spring.
This is what I’ve come up with.
Writing-related
I’m pairing up with a friend to host our own winter writing workshop. We’re each going to write 20 pages over the course of about 4 weeks, then meet a week later to give each other feedback. I haven’t decided if I want this piece to be related to my book/thesis or not. Related would make my life easier come this spring, unrelated would feel a little more fun.
I’m going to revise two pieces of writing. One of them is very close to being done done and just needs some line editing. The other is less close to be publication-ready, but I’m close to finishing a completely new draft of it.
I want to read a non-MFA-related book. I started reading Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee (she and David went to undergrad together). The cover is insane—one of the most stunning book covers I’ve ever seen. (Sometimes I try to think about what I want my own book cover to look like, but I just can’t picture it. I truly have no idea what I want.) And though just a single book would be fine with me, if I have time to read another, I think I’ll go with Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!. This book has been on most of the year’s best books roundups, and I’d wanted to read it as early as last spring, when I transcribed an interview between him and Jordan Kisner as part of my research fellowship with her. I was really charmed by him. You can listen to the interview here if you’d like.
I’d also like to read an MFA-related book. Next semester, our program’s visiting writer is going to be Robert Lopez, and we’ll be discussing his book Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere. I ordered the book the other day, and though we aren’t required to read visiting writer’s entire books in preparation for their visit, I find it helpful to do so. Getting it done over break means one less thing to do in my last semester.
I’ve had Scrivener for quite a while, but never bothered to take the tutorial course they offer to learn all its intricacies, so I’d been using it like a regular word processor, which makes it less compelling than just sticking with Google docs. But I finally went through the tutorial and I’m amazed that I never bothered to learn sooner. Now I want to input everything that has to do with my book into Scrivener: all drafts of all essays, all research of any kind, any notes. All of it.
I’d like to think a little bit about agents. I met with one over the summer that I really liked, and she encouraged me to formally query her when I finish my MFA, but I’d love to have more of a list already put together, with names, emails, writers they work with, and the kind of writing they usually publish.
Less of a concrete goal, but I’d like to think a little more about social media and what I want my strategy with social to be. Social feels so icky to me (I pretty much gave it up in the early days of COVID), and having to “have a strategy” feels even worse, but I’m hearing from all sides that it’s pretty much a non-negotiable for debut essayists. It feels ridiculous to cut my chances of success over something so dumb, so I figure I’ll give it a shot, and maybe if I approach it in a really tactical way, I can keep my head on straight? Maybe…
Writing all this out feels like so much. But I usually work on writing and classwork for 2-2.5 hours each weekday morning, another 10 throughout my weekday evenings, and about 6-10 on weekends. I’m just going to keep the morning writing time (I’ll be logging onto MWC again all this winter!)—that way I’ll remain productive but it will be considerably less work than usual.
R&R
I’m trying not to plan my fun out in advance (LOL) but I definitely have some ideas.
I have some projects around the house I’ve been putting off, and I’ve been dying to learn how to marble paper, so maybe this is my time. As I wrote about in my last newsletter, I’ve been dabbling in making gelato. I made a cardamom one a few weeks ago that came out pretty well, and I’d like to make a few others this winter, possibly to sell some. I’m hosting Christmas for the first time ever, and I’ve been making some decorations since I don’t own any. First was this paper garland, and next up is a bow garland for the tiny tree I’m planning on buying.
And this one is perhaps craziest of all: I want to SEE MY FRIENDS!!! Friends: I’m sorry I fell off the face of the Earth this fall. Please take me back.
Planning ahead
I have two goals here.
The first is to make some meals that freeze well in order to stock up for the spring. Something that caught me off guard with school is how hard it’s made it to eat well. I even met with a dietician this semester to talk through ways to eat better, and she had basically zero concept of how hard it is to cook when you work 11-15.5 hours per day. Her advice was to “think of myself as worthy of the time it takes to cook.” As if my problem is one of self confidence and not of the time itself. So she was not super helpful…Hopefully my freezer and rice cooker will be more useful.
The second is not really something that is my goal, but it’s something that will make life easier this spring. Instead of David and I exchanging gifts this holiday season, we’ve decided to each invest in something for the apartment that will make both of our lives better. I’m getting blinds installed in our apartment to help keep more heat in (our apartment is SO cold in the winter) and he’s getting a dishwasher installed. This dishwasher is going to save me. I can feel it.
Recent reads
I read Molly by Blake Butler over my Thanksgiving break (shoutout to the 5-hour blackout at my Airbnb in a cabin in the middle of the woods in the middle-of-nowhere rural Pennsylvania!). It brought up a lot of tough questions for me. What do we owe the dead? How do we write about people that we love yet hurt us deeply? Do we have the right to look through dead loved one’s phones/diaries after their passing, and more so, do we have the right to publish them for the world to read? I don’t think this book answers any of these questions, per say, but it definitely reckons with all of them, and I’m happy that people are making work that toes the line of privacy and ethics. It’s a little Sophie Calle-esque.
This fall, we read Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams” (the essay, not the entire book), and though I had read the entire book several years ago, I enjoyed the essay a lot more the second time around. I feel like it’s a great example of work that is really winding without ever feeling like its lost sight of its aims.
I wasn’t the biggest fan of Jia Tolentino’s book, and I know I’m seven years late to this, but “The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of ‘Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends’” was so good. I’ve always been interested in writing about children’s media (like writing about Elsagate), even as someone without much skin in the game. It just seems like so much of it is just complete brain poison, meant to either make kids stupid or good little workers. Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends is apparently the latter. In one anecdote, a train that doesn’t want to run in the rain lest it ruin its new paint job has its tracks taken away and is entombed forever in its tunnel. The train is apparently unbothered by the fact that it is destined to a lifetime of solitude and imprisonment, and is only concerned that he will never be allowed to work again. “The last line of the segment is the narrator saying, ‘I think he deserved his punishment, don’t you?’” It’s just…so insane…you have to laugh to keep from crying. Anyway, I like when Tolentino writes shorter pieces. And thank you to David for the recommendation.
I logged onto MWC on Monday morning for the first time since the summer, and Chelsea pulled an Oblique Strategy card that felt divinely chosen just for me:
“Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency.”
Anyway, today I’m thinking about this incredible scratchitti in the Stockholm tunnelbana.
<3 Arielle
I’ve loved seeing your face at MWC! 💖