It’s January, an introspective and forward-thinking month to begin with, and today Timehop reminded me that it’s been 6.5 years to the day since I moved to this city, and 1.5 years to the day since I accepted my current gig at Fit Pregnancy and Natural Health. It’s lovely to feel settled but still challenged, and to shake things up this fall, I filled in for the editor-in-chief during her three-month maternity leave, which wrapped just before the holidays. It was fun to fill a role but know it was temporary, the same sensation as dipping in and out of an internship or contract position. I loved working with the ad team and steering the ship on big projects, but the sojourn made me appreciate my own job more—the bits about hammering out the nitty-gritty with editors and really wordsmithing every last line.
I also participated in National Novel Writing Month in November, egged on by my friend Leah Konen and my sister Julia. I just pulled it off, hitting 51,000 (of the 50,000-word goal) before the month’s end, on a new fiction project, a deep-recession mystery with lies and betrayals and autopsy reports and all sorts of things to keep me up, spooked and writing, late into the night. I’m at 70,000 words now with a ways to go before I have a completed first draft, but it feels good to be writing, stringing scenes together into a whole. Eventually I hope to rewrite revise the whole thing, find an agent and turn the mess into a book, but what I keep begging myself to do is just to keep writing, keep writing, keep writing. On the eve of my opening a Googledoc entitled “New Project,” I whined to my friend Leah about a fear of starting, and total bewilderment about how anything would fit together, how the plot would unroll. The reply that got me started:
Go all in for the shitty first draft. Take off your editor hat. Take off your people-will-mock-me-for-