Apple juice insights and the Summer Solstice.
(And thoughts from a rural Newfoundland clinic....)
What are you doing one week from today?
I hope you’ll be hanging out with me and some other awesome writers in my mid-year planning workshop!
Join us on Friday June 28 at 9:00 AM for this three hour experience (don’t worry – we take plenty of coffee breaks!) We’re going to be looking at things like how to pursue or perhaps perish our 2024 goals, determine how to prioritize our most financially viable writing services, and establish rituals and best practices for success … and a lot more!
If you want to enter Q3 with a plan to feel a greater sense of agency, clarity, and purpose, this is the place for you. Tickets are $85 (Canadian).
Ink & Income Registration is OPEN
I’m thrilled to announce that you can now register for Ink & Income, my monthly membership program starting July 1st. If you know your writing would benefit from a sense of external accountability and community support, this is the group for you. Members enjoy:
Three virtual coworking sessions a month
A monthly group coaching call
Quarterly planning days, and more.
Join now and pay just $49 a month AND enjoy an extra 25% off as one of the founding members. (And it’s even cheaper if you pay annually!)
Food For Thought
“...This is the solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future; the place of caught breath, the door of a vanished house left ajar...” ― Margaret Atwood
Today, on what is more or less the longest day of the year in Canada, I had glorious plans to get up at dawn to welcome the turning point of the year, see the sunrise and take a moment to embrace the passing of time.
Instead, I passed out, sleeping the glorious sleep that comes when someone has taken some Nyquil and has a gloriously bland and comfortable chain hotel room at their disposal.
I’m sick. I’m battling a cold. Maybe I’m fighting the plague. Who can say? (Actually, the clinicians at a rural Newfoundland clinic can say in three to four days when test results come in). It is downright crummy to be sick when you’re away from home and even worse when you’re on the move. I always thought that if I were confronted with this kind of situation, I’d become one of those beautifully introspective and unfiltered writers who can take the prosaic and the mundane (like the raisin biscuits that cost $125 - cash only - at the hospital commissary) and see a more significant meaning in it. I read many such essays during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was always moved to see how such tender and insightful words could come out of the most barren of circumstances. It embodies precisely the kind of writer I want to be. Observant, honest, unflinching.
As such, here’s a list of the observant, honest, and unflinching insights I have gained while battling a sore throat in rural Newfoundland and Labrador.
Apple juice is a good juice.
That’s it. That’s all I got, and, to be frank, I had to dig a bit for that.
I’m taking comfort in the fact that it’s okay to be a crummy writer sometimes. It’s okay to be a crummy writer most of the time. The world is not always our oyster. Sometimes it’s our petri dish. We don’t have to be brilliant observers of the human condition when battling green mucus. We don’t have to push ourselves out of our comfort zones in the name of good stories. We don’t have to build careers based on pushing our limits. Why don’t we build careers based on embracing our limits? I often joke that after a press trip, my brain is so overwhelmed with all that I experienced that I often can’t see the bigger story, and thus, all I’m able to write is something along the lines of “I had cake.” What is wrong with that? I, for one, think we need more cake based content in the world.
Thus, I am here to mark the turning of the year, the peak of our sunshine, and the flood of summer now entering our lives with no greater philosophy than apple juice is good juice. And I’m okay with that. I hope you are too. And I hope you can embrace this mid-year point with joy.
With sunny thoughts,
Vanessa
Hope you're feeling better soon, Vanessa!