join us for a 🥳️fall planning party🥳️ on Sunday, September 8, from 2-3 pm eastern
how to FINISH WHAT WE STARTED this fall, whether it's a poem, an essay, a pitch, that email to an editor you've been avoiding, or an entire book
Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. I’m a poet and an essayist, and my most recent books are the poetry collection Pocket Universe and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, which I edited with the poet Emily Pérez. My next book, The Good Mother Myth, will be out in January 2025, and you can pre-order it now!
Today’s newsletter is a quick one: an invitation to join us on Sunday for our fall planning party, and a note about some prep work you might do in advance, if you like to plan before the planning!
the magic of One Thing
This will be a quick note: the fall planning party is on Sunday from 2-3pm eastern on zoom, and I’d love for you to join us!
We’ll be focusing on the magic of One Thing: committing to one project, one clear next step and getting it done. Whether you’ve got a ton of little projects and good ideas floating around, or if you’re midway through a whole book, we’ll talk about strategies for figuring out what to prioritize, how to get unstuck, and ways to ensure your writing stays at the top of your priorities even as life fills up this fall. You’ll leave our hour together with some clarity about what matters most in your writing life this fall. The group’s collective energy is always a great boost as we move into a new season.
If you can’t make it, stay tuned, because I’ll share a recording, and I’ll write up the highlights and share it in the newsletter afterward. Make sure you’re subscribed to get the recording.
before the big fall to-do list, make a done list
One more quick note: if you’re like, a planning party sounds amazing, but maybe there’s something I could do now to jumpstart my planning, a suggestion: instead of going all in on what you’re planning to do this fall, take a minute and look back at what you’ve already done. It’s so easy to rush ahead, so easy to keep in mind everything we haven’t finished yet—but if you’re a planner like me, it might be really helpful for you to pause and look backwards first to reflect on everything you’ve already done and maybe even celebrate that a little before you start a whole new list of to-dos. Flip through your calendar, scan your emails, maybe scroll backwards on your social media: what have you done in the last couple of months that you’re proud of? I’d love to know.
What’s on your done list?
Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this email, comment below, or find me on instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).
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I'm proud of myself for going from never having had anything published online on December 2, 2023 to having 16 short nonfiction pieces published on three websites. I turned all the pieces into audios and made a podcast on Substack. I took a flash fiction boot camp in August and wrote my first stories in 33 years. I never had the confidence that I could write something that people wanted to publish. A monthly online critique/support group not only encouraged me but helped my writing to improve.
Thank you for the reminder to look backwards as well as forwards... I had just been lamenting that I hadn't written as much as I wanted to over the summer, but I'm realizing I still submitted 10 times from July-now! Even if nothing comes of it, it's still great to feel like I'm putting the work out there and to see the possibility of so many "in progress" notes on Submittable!