I’m Kristen Tate—editor, writer, and proprietor of the Blue Garret. These emails will be weekly until the spring, when I will likely go back to my every-other-week schedule. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of this email. Thanks for joining me at the garret!

It is week one of 2024! How do you want your writing to go in this fresh new year of weeks laid out before us? Are you going to tiptoe in—maybe weighing ideas for a new project—or are you going to take a running jump? Walter Mosley advocates for the jump:

My advice when it comes to the first steps into emptiness, that moment when you embark on the self-revelation of the Word, my advice is that you approach it as a child would—that is, full of wonder and a sense of play. . . .

So the first impediment and biggest obstacle to our novel, the blank page, becomes a big blue pond at dawn. All we have to do is jump in and flail around, laughing and discovering.

There’s no correct way—only the way that’s right for you. We’ve got fifty-two weeks lined up ahead of us, each with their different feelings and challenges. What will keep you going when the shininess of week one has worn off and you are facing down week eleven? Instead of a writing resolution this year, perhaps you spend time today crafting a writing motivation: What do you want to tell the world about what it means to be human? Why is it important to you and why will it be important—someday—to your readers?

Here at the garret, I finished up client work in week forty-nine and spent week fifty doing my end-of-year-business tasks—including my 2023 year in review post.

Time has been wonderfully stretchy and bendy ever since. We had an early Christmas celebration with the kids, who spent the holiday with their dad, and that immediately put us out of step with the rest of the world in a way that felt freeing and invigorating. In the past, my partner and I have taken long camping road trips during the non-kid Christmases, but 2023 was a wild ride and we decided to stay put this year to relax and also to give the house a thorough clean out and clean up.

Funnily enough, this little rental house, tucked into an obscure neighborhood in the south end of San Francisco, is now the place I’ve lived the longest in my life—eight years this coming November. I’m good at moving and was trained to it early; we lived in four cities across three states before I started first grade. My parents learned to move from their parents, all of whom seem to have been the restless black sheep of their families. My Papaw was the oldest of seven siblings in a family that had lived in High Point, North Carolina for generations. He left home at seventeen and lived in at least a dozen different places during his life—all over the South, but also stints in Michigan and Oregon. All of his siblings, and most of their kids and grandkids too, are still there in High Point.

Moving is a lot of work—physical work but also emotional work, even when it’s just a move across town. I like the practice of touching each of my belongings and packing it away or letting it go. I like the ritual of saying a bittersweet goodbye to a place that has contained months or years of emotional highs and lows. I like the strange feeling of waking up for the first time in a new place.

What I didn’t have was rituals for staying put, and that’s what it felt like we were inventing these past couple of weeks as we tore rooms apart and put them back together again. After finishing each room, we took a day off to just relax and enjoy its shiny newness. I feel rested and deeply refreshed, which was just what I wanted going into 2024.

I also knew that I wanted this year to start slowly and gently after the roller-coaster of 2023. I don’t have any client work coming in until next week, and I won’t be in full gear with editing work until the last week of January. My primary focus over the next couple weeks is going to be turning the Novel Study blog post series into a book, and I’m going to use these emails to chronicle the editing and self-publishing process, step by step from revision to publication day. I’ll be back in your inbox on Sunday with a review of my preliminary steps—I’ve done about twenty hours of work on it through December, and it will be my major focus this coming week as I ease back into work mode and out of staycation mode.

A couple exciting announcements before we get to our Thing of Joy:

Second, later in the month I’ll be participating in a free, online masterclass series: Be a Bestseller 5.0, curated by Emma Dhesi. I’ll tell you more about the speaker line-up and my topic in future emails, but you can register for free right now. The series runs from January 15 to 19 and features an impressive roster of 20+ writers, creatives, editors, and publishers. It might be the dose of inspiration and encouragement you need to accomplish your writing goals this year!

This week’s Thing of Joy is actually a whole collection of things of joy curated by writer Emma Beddington—many of them collections themselves. I’ve had this article pinned in my browser for months and dip into its links whenever I need a quick distraction instead of scrolling social media. I hope you are having the loose, unscheduled kind of day that allows you to spend an hour falling down all of these weird and wonderful rabbit holes.

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.

Kristen

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