sunday roundup

at the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you

SURPRISE! Hello! It has been A WHILE. How’re you doing? Happy New Year!

I’m both really sorry for the delay in updating and also really grateful to anyone who stuck around while I took a little hiatus. I feel like, here in the death throes of late-stage capitalism, we’re very quick to discard things that aren’t immediately gratifying and so if you have waited around, hoping I’d cop onto myself, thank you for your grace, and your faith. Whether your gamble paid off is another question.

Before I went AWOL, I’d mentioned in the last couple of newsletters about having trouble with writing for the first time since I started out, and how it was seriously shaking my confidence. I’m going to level with you here and admit that just before Christmas I was very close to burn-out; I’d hit a wall regarding what I working on; I couldn’t make the story I wanted to tell get from my brain to the page in a way that satisfied me and I was starting to wonder if I ever could. After a lot of attempts to fix it, including writing an entire new draft from scratch; immersing myself in media that felt thematically similar; workshopping it with friends; and even asking for help from my editor, I was out of ideas because nothing worked. Everything I tried left me more confused about what it was I even wanted to do.

The only thing left then was to fake my own death and move to Cuba, or take a break from writing anything, even newsletters, even social media, while I figured out what I was trying to do, say and be. I hoped if I took a break and stripped it back to the core premise—the one line hook, as a writing guide would have it—it would begin to become something I could work with.

On the whole, I think discipline is worth more than motivation and that if you actually want to be a writer you have to show up, regularly, even when you’re not feeling it, or short of time or being pulled in a million different directions. I called this newsletter IT GROWS BECAUSE YOU TEND IT for that exact reason—if you want things to happen you have to show up and do the work, and what’s more you have to keep doing the work, keep showing up, day after day after day. But I also think it’s important to know the difference between simply not being in the zone and knowing when you’re running on fumes, and I was there. So I stepped back. I spent six weeks not writing anything more creative than Instagram captions.

The good news is, it worked. I think (at the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you).

I’m behind schedule on a lot of stuff, but that honestly feels like such a minor issue (ha!) compared to wondering if I could still do this at all. I started easing my way back into writing with short stories over the past few weeks and this week I decided to bring back Sunday roundups, because for the first time in a while I wanted to talk about things I’d seen and read and done.

Hopefully, you’ll also be pleased to know I’m bringing back the monthly newsletter too which, as previously, will focus more on what I’ve been up to that month in terms of writing, as well as news and condensed catch-ups on media I’ve enjoyed.

The Sunday roundups will continue to be for paid subscribers and they’ll also have access to the full archive online. For everyone else, you’ll get the monthly posts, which will be available for four weeks (and forever in your inbox if you don’t delete them).

So, without further ado, let’s get into what I’ve seen and done this week, beginning with The Iron Claw at the cinema.