On top of everything else that’s going on, we’re still early enough in the year that all the “New year, new you” messaging hasn't quite subsided, and I am over it.

One of my husband’s apps recently taunted him with a notification about the number of people who, statistically, have already given up on their resolutions and asked if he’d be one of them.

Who needs that kind of snark right now? I don’t, and I’m guessing you don't either. There is another way.

Now is a season for what my colleague Danielle calls “the magic dark.” It’s the space you enter to rest. To sit with the void and ask questions of the unknown. To reset and get ready to reemerge when the time is right.

It’s winter. Days are getting longer, sure, but they’re still short and mostly gray. My energy flares for a few brief hours in the morning and then sputters weakly until I go to bed—and that’s on a good day.

The vibe around here is extremely not “Hit the ground running.” It’s more “Sit on the ground in stillness with some tarot cards and listen.”

I didn’t set goals for the new year. I have intentions—I know what I want my year to feel like, and I make choices accordingly—but I am not holding myself to concrete actions or outcomes. (I’m not setting myself up to fail, which I have done in the past!)

I’m not expecting myself to make massive personality and behavioral shifts at the drop of a hat in pursuit of a goal I have not already been training to reach.

But that’s often what we’re encouraged to do, and then we wonder why it doesn’t work.

Why our motivation fades. Why we don’t seem to make as much progress on our writing as we think we “should.” Why everything feels bad and stressful and overwhelming (apart from all the other obvious reasons everything feels bad and stressful and overwhelming).

We’re taught that we have to become someone other than who we already are before we can make progress toward the things that matter to us—like writing a book—and that, quite simply, is bullshit. Pardon my French. Sometimes you just have to tell it like it is.

You do not have to change in order to write your book.

You can write just as you are. Right now. Today.

📚 The Book Nook

Here are some of the best books I've read recently! (Affiliate links*)

• ​Gathered, by Gabrielle Cerberville—Part memoir, part intro to foraging, all gorgeous. Fall in love with the outdoors again (and learn about some edible plants!)
• ​Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz—A group of robots awaken in the abandoned restaurant they worked in and decide to reopen it as a noodle shop. A quick and delightful read.
• ​Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane—One of the most gorgeous pieces of environmental writing I've read in a hot minute. One to read, sit with, and read again.
• ​Replaceable You, by Mary Roach—Equal parts uproariously funny and deeply fascinating. Nobody does science writing quite like Mary Roach.
• ​Spread Me, by Sarah Gailey—Look, one of the blurbs on this horror novel about a crew that discovers an unusual specimen in the desert says, "Made me blush so hard I cried," and that's real.

You do not have to “new year, new you” yourself into a grueling, overly ambitious writing schedule that will fall apart after two weeks because it was designed without attention to your real-life creative cycles and energetic capacity.

You can have fallow periods. You can rest. You can start slowly, a little at a time. You can stop and pick up the writing again in the future.

You do not have to cultivate superhuman discipline before you start writing.

You can ease into it. You can make writing a refuge, a space of play, a site of resistance and joy and the magic of fully human creative labor. You can design a writing practice that actually works for your real life, not an imaginary perfect one.

You do not have to wait until you’ve learned one more thing or taken one more class or read one more craft book.

You can learn as you go. Practice, fall down, get back up. Take classes as you figure out what you need to know. You’ll only discover where the gaps are by tripping over them as you write and get feedback.

You do not have to wait for life to calm down or your schedule to clear “next week” (it’s always next week and somehow never this week, have you noticed that? This week is always busy. And then somehow it’s six months after you said you were going to start and the notebook is still empty).

You can take breaks when you need to. But you can also write in small snatches of your day or during a blissful stolen afternoon when all your meetings miraculously get canceled.

You can build a writing practice around the knowledge that circumstances will never be ideal, and that you can weave creativity in and around and through those circumstances anyway.

You don’t have to wait to be perfectly motivated or inspired.

You can write even when your motivation ebbs (and discover that sometimes, inspiration works backward—we have to write to rekindle the motivation for writing). You can use metacognitive activities like journaling to keep track of when your inspiration waxes and wanes, and build a writing practice around that powerful self-knowledge.

Writing is magic, but we don’t have to overhaul our whole lives to access it.

The magic is there in every moment you choose to put pen to paper instead of picking up your phone to scroll.

The magic is there each time you act in alignment with your energetic capacity instead of holding yourself to someone else’s productivity standard—even if that means choosing to rest first and write later.

The magic is there each time you let yourself show up to the page messy, imperfect, unsure, in the midst of life’s chaos, and create something new anyway.

The magic is there. It’s already yours. It was always yours.

So, tell me: What are you going to make with it?

🔮 Creativity Oracle Card

It's a new week. Let's pull an oracle card to see what creative energy we're working with.

It's pretty obvious where the dead man's fingers mushrooms get their name. They are eerily finger-like, but harmless. Unlike many mushrooms, which can appear and disappear over the course of a day (or even a few hours), dead man's fingers might stick around for years.

As a message about creativity, this mushroom invites us to think about timing. Like the dead man's fingers, we might wait years before the conditions are right for our work to come to fruition.

In my graduate studies in rhetoric and writing, we often talked about the concept of kairos—a Greek word referring to the opportune moment for speaking or taking action. Timing is important!

We can sharpen our kairotic intuition by paying attention to our energy, capacity, and needs. Here are some prompts to journal or reflect on this week.

• What role has timing played in your creative activities and success in the past?
• What influence do time-related factors like deadlines and external accountability have on your writing?
• How do you sense when the time is right to work on your writing?