07.16 — on being 3 chapters deep
mood: feral, in a productive way
Three chapters into the new manuscript and I have officially entered the phase where I talk to my characters out loud in the kitchen. My roommate walked in on me mid-argument with a person who does not exist, defending a decision she made in Chapter 2 that I, the author, do not even agree with. This is normal. This is what writing a book is like. Nobody tells you that the characters unionize against you around the 15,000 word mark and start making their own choices.
Anyway I rewrote the opening line for the ninth time. It's either genius now or it's the exact same sentence I had four drafts ago with different punctuation. Time, as always, will tell. Or it won't, and I'll just keep doing this forever, which, also fine.
07.09 — the group chat went quiet
mood: soft, a little wistful
Not in a dramatic way. Nobody fought. It just... slowed down, the way things do when everyone's lives get fuller and the space you used to fill with each other gets filled with other things instead. Jobs. Partners. New cities. It's not sad exactly. It's just a specific kind of quiet that used to be loud, and I notice it every time I open my phone out of habit and there's nothing there.
I think this is just what growing up quietly does to friendships that used to be the whole entire world. I'm trying to hold it gently instead of grieving it like a failure. Some rooms just get smaller so other rooms can get bigger. I wrote that sentence down before I even fully believed it, which I've learned is usually how belief starts anyway.
06.28 — a good, unremarkable tuesday
mood: quietly, stupidly happy
Nothing happened today and I want to write it down anyway, because I think we only ever journal the disasters and the milestones, and then we wonder why our lives look uneventful on paper when they were actually mostly made of days like this one. I made good coffee. I finished a chapter I'd been stuck on for a week. The light came through the kitchen window at 4pm in that specific gold way it does in early summer, and I just stood there with wet hands from doing dishes and let it happen to me for a second.
That's it. That's the whole entry. I am learning, slowly, embarrassingly slowly, that a good life is not made of main character moments. It's made of Tuesdays like this. I'll take it.
06.14 — i cried at the grocery store
mood: unhinged (affectionate)
A song came on over the speakers in the cereal aisle — not even a sad one, just one that was playing the summer I was seventeen and thought I understood things — and I had to abandon my cart near the oatmeal and go stand by the industrial freezers for a minute to compose myself. A worker asked if I was okay. I said "yes, allergies," while holding zero tissues and zero allergies. We both knew. She let me have it.
I think about how much of being a person is just getting ambushed by your own nervous system in public places. Anyway I did buy the oatmeal. Priorities.
05.30 — on turning another year older
mood: reflective, cake-adjacent
Another year, another lap around the sun, another slightly different answer to "what do you actually want." This year's answer is smaller than last year's, and I think that's growth, not shrinking. I used to want to be impressive. Now I mostly want to be honest, and warm, and finished with the things I start. I want to keep writing until it stops being scary to hit publish, and then I want to keep doing it even after that, because the scary part was never really the point.
I made a wish before blowing out the candles that I'm not going to write here, obviously, because then it won't come true, and also because some things are allowed to stay just mine. But I'll tell you it involved a bookshelf with my name on the spine of something. A girl can dream. A girl is, in fact, doing exactly that, on purpose, as a career.