Sometime in the last couple of years, I began conceptualizing my creative practice as a space, a room that is either neat and organized or messy and needs to be tidied.
(I almost said that there is nothing else in my life that I think of this way, but that’s not true. I think of the books I love most this way: they are spatial, places that exist on some other plane and can be entered and explored.)
I don’t currently have a writing desk. I write at the kitchen island or the dining room table, which is not really a dining room table because we don’t have a dining room. It’s also not a kitchen table, because it’s not in the space we think of as the kitchen; rather, it is between the kitchen and the next apartment, in the corner near the windows.
From here, I can see both the kitchen island and my desk. My desk is where I used to write but now I use it for work. I used to be able to use it for both, until, after five years of working remotely, I gave in and got an external monitor. And now something about that monitor says, “This is a desk where a job gets done.”
Maybe it’s not having a separate writing space that has pushed my concept of my writing life onto this other plane. Or maybe it’s that my writing is all digital and it’s easy to think of digital entities as places we go to — we go to websites, we go to apps.
This is all to say that in the lead-up to this year’s 1000 Words of Summer, my creative space has been feeling messier than it’s perhaps ever been. Multiple projects, each with dozens of open tabs full of videos I meant to watch, articles I meant to finish, sources I’m not yet sure how to use, ridiculous things my child wants for his birthday, etc. Some projects in Scrivener, some in Ulysses, some in Google Docs because I’m in the middle of transitioning my filing system.
In the same way that I have trouble concentrating if the apartment is a mess, I knew that it would be more challenging to get my 1000 words a day amidst the digital chaos.
So, this week, I took time to clean house. I closed out tabs and organized others into groups. I minimized windows I won’t need for the next few weeks.
Then I set up an “Essays” project in Ulysses and brought in all my half-written essays and essay ideas from Scrivener and Bear, my notes app. There are 24. I spent some time fiddling with the settings in Ulysses, set up a “goal” of 1000 words a day, and tested out the tracker.
The space is as ready as it’s going to be, and so am I. 💪
My prep this year has been very specific to me, but Jami has a more general prep list for anyone joining us!
This week in writing
I submitted my first AWP panel proposal! It’s called “Marketers Tell All: What Writers Can Learn from Marketing Pros” and it brings together a bunch of writers I admire who all have different kinds of marketing day jobs so we can share our best practices for finding your audience, choosing marketing channels to invest in, planning a campaign, etc. I personally think it’s a GREAT idea — fingers crossed that AWP agrees.
Once that was done, I worked on an essay. A tiny part of me was like, “No! Save the words for June 1!” But if there is one thing I have learned from six years of 1000 Words of Summer, it’s that momentum is key — words bring more words, ideas bring more ideas. It’s that classic Annie Dillard quote — “spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it” — that I used to keep on a postcard above my desk, back when I wrote there.
This week in reading
I finished Splinters by Leslie Jamison.
Then I started rereading Chelsea Hodson’s Tonight I’m Someone Else in preparation for her essay class that also begins June 1. I LOVE this essay collection. I’m listening to it on audio, and walking around Brooklyn, where it finally feels like spring, listening to Chelsea read her own work, is probably the best 1000 Words prep I could be doing. Highly recommend if you like essays that go all sorts of unexpected places.
Next up: Attachments by Lucas Mann, which I’ve been excited to read since listening to this interview. I was hoping to do this one on audio as well but there isn’t one (yet), so paperback it is.
Seeking recommendations for more essay collections available on audio, the more experimental the better.