Letters from the Homestead: September 2022
Let's get ready for *fellowship month.* ✍️
Emily Dickinson called her Amherst home “The Homestead.” I lovingly call my apartment in St. Louis the same thing (although I definitely get out more than Dickinson). This monthly newsletter is my attempt to work through what it feels like to put down roots as a writer in my own Homestead.
Bring on October (aka, *fellowship month*)
The month of October is a special one this year because I’ve decided that this is when I’ll use my fellowship money from the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission for a full month of working on writing projects. I’m not great at taking time off, so the fact that I’ve firmly decided that October is now *fellowship month* is a big deal for me (with the caveat that I’ll still be working many of my smaller gigs, just not my “big” gigs like romance novel-writing).
I couldn’t be more jazzed about October. I’m feeling hopeful about all I plan to create, and I’m allowing myself to be overly ambitious just because I can. If I don’t finish everything I plan to in October, then that’s okay—I’ll just keep moving forward. That’s the mode around here at The Homestead, y’all, and it works just as well for writing as for my life.
The fellowship money is specifically for completing my draft of Margaret Fuller Magick Show, a new full-length play about the nineteenth-century feminist Margaret Fuller. The gist is that she would like not to die at sea at age 40, so she must perform a “magick show” on a cruise ship in order to save herself. It’s a comedy? About cheating death? On a boat? All of the above!
I’ve drafted about ten pages so far, and I’ve already decided that I’m going to have fun with this. When I wrote Brontë Sister House Party, I made a commitment to myself that I’d have fun writing every single page, and that was one of the greatest things I could do for my writing health. I’m planning the same approach with Margaret Fuller Magick Show. Just have fun. Tell a story that your friends would love to perform. Write a play for your community. Those are the goals.
I also have some big ambitions for adding on extra writing to *fellowship month.* I’m halfway through a draft of a new literary speculative novel that I’d love to finish drafting in October. I’m going to experiment with fiction in the mornings and playwriting in the afternoons.
So, here are my official goals for *fellowship month.* In the next installment of Letters from the Homestead, I’ll give you an update on how it went.
Finish a full draft of Margaret Fuller Magic Show and make a plan for a read-a-long with my closest collaborators. A full draft in this case is no more than 80 pages.
Finish my new novel draft. This is a stretch, but I’m hoping to pump out the next 40,000 words of drafting so that I can get to a full manuscript that’s ready for heavy revision. The romance novellas I write for my “Miranda Markwell” gig are usually 35,000-40,000 words (per month), so this isn’t outside the realm of possibility for me. Still, it’s a ton of writing. Wish me luck.
All this to say, I’m taking *fellowship month* very seriously.
No retreat baby. No surrender. Let’s write. ✍️
A small writing breakthrough…
This past month, I experienced a small (but significant) writing breakthrough that seriously altered my focus and productivity. One of the biggest things I’ve learned about working as a writer is that you often have to write your way through to quality work. For me, this means that I often write 30% more than I need to in order to muck out the good stuff that I actually keep. But in order to get to that point, I have to write a lot of words.
Because I was on a tight deadline for a romance novel job this month, I decided it was time to experiment with a new writing strategy. My usual practice of just blocking off several hours in a day and hoping the writing would get done was (obviously) not working for me. I felt daily anxiety about whether or not I’d be able to meet my word count, unsure of how long anything would take me to write. This cycle of anxiety was exhausting. Something needed to change.
So, this month, I did something I never do. Timed writing sessions. Butt in the chair. Hands can’t come off the keyboard until the 25-minute timer goes off.
To my shock and amazement, this strategy worked.
Actually, at first, I thought, This must be a fluke, but a few straight weeks of this method showed me that I can make real predictions of how much fiction I can draft in a twenty-five-minute session (1000 words!). This meant that I was meeting my daily word count of 3000 words in roughly 90 minutes of focused work each day—writing about 4-5 days per week.
I’m almost afraid to put these results in writing for fear that the writing gods will smite my newfound optimism, but it struck me that this is a new craft breakthrough for my writer’s toolkit, not a surge of artistic inspiration, so perhaps the gods are not involved?
I will joyfully use this strategy until it no longer serves me. This is the way it goes with writing sometimes. For now, though, I will rejoice.
What I’m reading this month…
Soberful: Uncover a Sustainable, Fulfilling Life Free of Alcohol by Veronica Valli. I’m continuing my library reading through the genre of “quit lit,” books that describe the process of stopping drinking alcohol and getting sober. What I like about this one is that it’s written by a psychotherapist who now works exclusively as a sobriety coach. This means that she approaches the topic of sobriety with a seriously holistic mindset. Highly recommend this one if you are at all sober curious.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I somehow made it through an entire Ph.D. in English without reading The Bell Jar, so I picked it up this month to finally give it a gander. To be honest, I find this novel both fascinating in the pacing of the protagonist’s mental breakdown, but also frustrating in its forceful descent into self-destruction. As someone with her own depression diagnosis, I recognize so many of Esther Greenwood’s fixations, especially her inability to pin her mind down to one moment at a time. But the breakdown itself is hard for me to read—sometimes so hard that I have to put the book down. Haven’t finished this one yet, but I will.
New World Witchery: A Trove of North American Folk Magic by Cory Thomas Hutcheson. Getting myself prepped for Margaret Fuller Magick Show and loving this overview of folk magic in North America. It’s a great primer for thinking about “witchery” in general, but I’m really enjoying how it’s helping me add some specificity to the “magick” I want to include in the new play.
Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin. I’m on a self-help kick! I want to have good habits! I like reading Rubin’s work (really enjoyed The Happiness Project), in part because she has a totally different personality from me. For whatever reason, this makes her more trustworthy to me as a self-help guru? (Anyway, if you are a fan of Rubin’s “Four Tendencies,” I am a “Questioner.”)
How I made money this month $$$
I believe freelance artists should be more upfront about how they support themselves financially, rather than maintaining the illusion that they are fully supported by their art (they usually aren’t). This is me attempting to live out that principle. So, here are all the ways I brought in money to the Homestead for the month of September.
Romance novel writing. It’s the end of the month, which means “deadline day,” so I just turned in Lady and the Camper Van and submitted new pitches to my editor for the next few months of writing. So happy to take off October from romance writing, though. (Sorry, Miranda!)
Teaching artist work. This month, I’ve worked with COCA (Center of Creative Arts) with their youth writing program and with Prison Performing Arts.
Online graduate courses. Still trucking along teaching online graduate courses in literature for secondary educators renewing licensure or gaining content area credits.
Substack paid subscriptions! Thank you so much to all the paid subscribers of this newsletter. I’m so grateful for your support of my work.
Thank the gods for October.
The windows are open. The leaves are starting to turn. My year-round Halloween decoration (Midge 🐈⬛ ) is catching bugs on the back porch. I just made myself some spaghetti carbonara for one, and I’m about to settle in for an evening of watching the new Lord of the Rings series on Amazon Prime.
Tonight starts a new month. This new month will be a gift to this here writer, and I’m planning to soak it all up.
Yours ever & etc., etc.,
Courtney, Mistress of the Homestead, and Noble Midge the Cat 🐈⬛
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