Introducing The Write-Life Balance
On how rejection transformed into a newsletter
“We are unable to offer you a spot…we received SO many excellent proposals this year. It was a truly difficult choice for our committee.”
I know it was boilerplate language. I hadn’t even planned on applying, only doing so after my editor challenged me to spend an hour on the proposal. In fact, I submitted on the last day possible, coming up with the title 48 hours beforehand.
So I wasn’t super disappointed when they didn’t accept my talk idea. But then I lost my daughter’s nap, obliterating my plans to finish a book milestone by mid-December. A few weeks later, I got wait-listed for a prominent writing retreat. And because I’m the youngest of three and an “oops” baby (Fun fact: Psychotherapists call this a “wound of origin”), my brain suddenly goes to a place where I wonder if my manuscript will ever get done. If I’ll ever be good enough.
If someone or something is trying to say I’m not destined to be a writer.
But then I think about my daughter, who turns four next Spring. There are at least a half-dozen times I tell her “No” in a day, and yet she persists (“If I go potty, then I get popsicle?”) It’s a reminder that young kids don’t have the same garbage hanging out in their subconscious. For them, every outcome in life—good or bad—is an opportunity to negotiate.
So if she’s done napping, then I give the opportunity to bond with another caregiver. If they won’t accept me into the retreat, then I’ll book a cabin for myself in the woods. And if the conference can’t give me a platform to share my thoughts about writing a book while trying to juggle all the other things in our lives, then I’ll do it here.
And that, my friends, is how a rejected abstract turned into the newsletter I’ve been wanting to write since 2017, but couldn’t articulate properly until now.
So whether you’ve been a long-time supporter of the many iterations of creativity or reading my work for the first time, thank you thank you thank you 🙏 I have big plans for 2023, and I’m excited to share them with all of you.
Write 👩🏻💻
Sometimes you just have to say “uncle” to your manuscript, and this is one of those times. I’m grateful my editor takes partial manuscripts (Not all of them do!) and can hopefully nail down what’s going on with my protagonist’s character arc.
So I’ve mostly been exercising my writing skills on queuing up content for this newsletter, a short story that may never see the light of day, and personalizing every Christmas card—which has been a hilarious saga involving two vendors, multiple reprints, an overeager customer success rep who gave me a full refund instead of a partial one, and two missing stamp books that turned up after I replaced them 🤦🏻♀️
Life 🛟
Over the weekend, Matt and I double dated with friends visiting from Hawaii. You know it’s a wild night when I’m braving downtown Seattle holiday traffic for sushi and ignore my lactose-intolerance for a Macadon ice cream sandwich.
Though not going to lie—I may have spent half of the night texting my babysitter things that I had forgotten to tell her during the house walkthrough. It was even stranger when we got home and my daughter sobbed at the idea of the babysitter *leaving*, refused to let me hold her for fifteen minutes, and then demanded everything under the sun before going to bed (More milk, snacks, another potty, water, cuddles in my bed instead of her room.)
Am I traumatized? Maybe a little. Was it good for my husband and I to have a conversation without a three-year-old interrupting every five minutes? Absolutely. Should we do this more often than once a year? Probably—but we’ll avoid Seattle next time. (And to think I used to have so much vitriol for the suburbs in my early twenties. Turns out I enjoy having a backyard and going to restaurants with parking lots 🤷🏻♀️)
Balance 🧘🏻♀️
There’s nothing like writing out your resolutions for the New Year and feeling that rush of adrenaline, knowing you have 365 days to transform into a better person. I’ll share my thoughts on goal setting in my next newsletter, but until then, this is your reminder that it’s equally important to do a yearly review—especially if you’re like me and hate the idea of slowing down to talk about your feelings.
You can apply my feedback process on yourself, but I recently ran across my friend Laura Lopuch’s tweetstorm about her process. Most of the questions apply to solopreneurs, but almost anyone can get value from asking themselves:
(Pssst: If you’ve ever wanted to start your own business or currently freelance, sign up for Smart Solopreneur, Laura’s weekly newsletter asap. I know she will be the first person I call for help when it’s time to query book agents.
What I’m reading 📚
Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict by Tsultrim Allione. I’m appreciating this former Tibetan Buddhist nun’s how-to guide on how to handle those pesky beliefs that can impede achieving our goals (See above on rejection and my being an “oops” baby.) Despite originating from Carl Jung, her definition of psychological shadow is the one I understand most:
The shadow is the repressed self, the unwelcome aspects of our personality we disown. It might be our shame, our anger, or our prejudices. It is that which we don’t want others to know about us, and it often appears in dreams doing things our conscious self would not consider.
What I’m streaming ⏯
Despite my husband’s hipster music influence, I will probably go to the grave with an unapologetic love of late 90s boy bands. The holiday season doesn’t start until I hear *NSYNC’s “Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays”; and this music video of the Backstreet Boys doing “Last Christmas” is adorable. But if we were going to run a competition on which boyband wins the Christmas album game, it would be 98°. No, I’m not being facetious. Just trust me on this.
What I’m cooking 👩🏻🍳
All the Christmas cookies! But specifically, these vegan sugar cookies dusted with sanding sugar (Add 1/4 cup-1/2 cup flour to make them rollouts); einkhorn gingerbread people (I subbed the butter for vegan butter); and chocolate raspberry thumbprints (Recipe cobbled from this one minus dark chocolate chunks, with the addition of a thumb indentation and fruit-sweetened raspberry jam). It’s the one time I relax on my gluten sensitivity, embrace the sugar coma, and surreptitiously slip greens into everything else we’re eating.
Talk to you next year,
Sophia :)
P.S. Still wondering what The Write-Life Balance is? See my About page for all the details of what I’ll be sharing every first and third Tuesday of the month.
Fun stories about parenting and learning to love the suburbs. Good for you for rolling with the rejections. Happy holidays.