Two years

the alley cat approves

This little newsletter has just turned two, a post every week. I’m proud of myself for keeping it up but even more, I’m thankful to you for reading. It means a lot.

On the practical side, what I wrote last year about my experience putting this out once a week still stands. I’ve (mostly) stuck to the midnight deadline, though I did go over it a couple times—recently by an hour and a half, for the jatra post two weeks ago—when I just needed more time to get it right.

Titles are still damn difficult for me and I sometimes struggle to come up with something original, forget insightful or witty: that either comes or it doesn’t.

Last year, I wrote “…sometimes, as months passed, I’d choose a title only to find later that I’d virtually repeated myself from an earlier post.” This year, I went one better: last month I published a post called Happy Wednesday and didn’t realize for days (weeks?) that I’d used the exact same title, give or take an exclamation mark, in 2022.

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A more recent part of my process has been keeping a running list with topics and ideas, something I started out doing and lost somewhere along the way, writing about life as it happened.

Spontaneity, random happenings and unexpected inspiration are what I love—and when they strike, will always take precedence over any list. But when your mind is blank and the clock is ticking? A list can make all the difference. Whether it’s in a notebook or an app on your phone, a few words that sum up your thoughts, jotted down when you think of it.

Are they sometimes bad ideas? Most certainly. But not always. And even a less than stellar thought is better than staring blankly at your screen in rising terror because you have… not a single idea in your brain. You can work with it.

But if you don’t write it down—well, you may remember it later, but just as often it’ll have taken the bus by then. At least that’s true for me.

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Last year I also wrote about learning to let go, even if the writing isn’t as perfect as I’d like; I continue to do it but it’s still hard.

One Wednesday night, I’d sent the day’s post out in the world with time to spare and was puttering around the kitchen, when I had a flash of inspiration for a final sentence. It was perfect. For, you know, the thing I’d just sent out. It was only a sentence, but I felt absolutely sure it would have tied everything together and been the perfect note to end on. I even considered editing it in, but knew that wouldn’t change anything for those who read my posts by email. So I let it go.

Fortunately I can’t remember what it was anymore.