What's New?
At the beginning of 2025, I set the intention to finish my edits on the Lonely Girl memoir and build my author website.
Our weekly podcast, Inspired Writer Collective, helped me foster connections with an accountability coach, Amanda McKinney, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for an upcoming episode to help writers, like myself, create writing-themed goals and finally reach them. She introduced me to her online course, PATH. The course walked me through this process, and I left with a week-by-week action plan to get all my rewrites completed by the end of March - a 90-day milestone to reaching the bigger goal of finishing all the edits by the end of 2025.
By the way, if this is something you'd be interested in, her program is set up to apply to ANY goal, and I have a discount code I know she wouldn't mind if I shared with you. Shoot me an email and I'll send it right over! Stephanie and I devoted a whole podcast episode to how eye opening this course was for each of us and how it differs so much from any goal setting system we've used before.
So the month of February has been devoted to rewrites. At the start of the quarter, I identified 21 scenes or stories that I still needed to draft. These came out of that massive realization I had last year that my story had too much on the front end, and there would be more value in cluing the reader into my current relationship (hence the photo at the top).
I'm happy to report that I've managed to tackle 16 of those scenes! I've really buckled down in taking advantage of the single kid-free hour I have between work ending and school pickup several days a week. The writing isn't polished yet, but you can't edit a blank page! I hope you'll celebrate this accomplishment with me, as it means the book is getting ever closer to being in your hands. And I'm feeling more motivated and accomplished than ever in this writing process.
Cut Stories From the Memoir
In addition to my rewrites and new stories, I also took time this month to go through the archives of cut stories to see which ones might be suitable to share here. Please keep in mind while I have done basic grammar edits, I haven't committed much time to other editing aspects of these stories. Some of the lengthier ones I'm choosing to save and publish as personal essays, but I know you'll find enjoyment out of the shorter ones.
This month's read is a section I've titled "Into The Bottle" which outlines some of my alcohol use in college. This piece was originally intended to give the reader some perspective on my alcohol use before I ended up in the emergency room one night in grad school after consuming too much. In the published memoir, there will be a significant part of the story that revolves around me getting sober in October 2021 after moving to Colorado.
Reflections on the Blog
I’ve had two major goals or habits I’ve been building since the start of the year: making major strides on my rewrites and book edits and bringing back strength training into my exercise routine. With my work schedule and childcare responsibilities, these two endeavors often compete for the same small windows of my time.
I’ve just come off a recording of two podcast episodes, one for my own Inspired Writer Collective podcast and as a guest on Angela’s Been There Dunn That. While I always press record with some basic intention of subject matter to cover or introduce, I live by the philosophy of great content happening organically, so ultimately I allow the conversation to go wherever it may.
Today’s recording took me by surprise. There was something in Angela’s description of her podcast mission and intent around grief, trauma, and giving voice to the typically silent suffering that pushed me to share a raw and vulnerable story.
