Hello writer.

Is your writing practice feeling a little rusty?

Or maybe your whole brain is? (It’s December, that happens.)

GOOD NEWS: The tools you use don’t rust.

That simply means to get out of the rusty rut, all you have to do is write. Even just a few sentences.

BETTER NEWS: It’s the last minute to get the early bird special for my Writing in the Junkyard online retreat on Jan 3rd and 4th. ($199 now, going up to $249 on the 16th.)

To be clear, I do NOT subscribe to the use-it-or-lose-it idea. If you haven’t written in a long time, you’re not starting over when you get back to it.

You just haven’t used your tools in a while, and they’ve gotten rusty because that’s what unused tools do. They avoid their job and party too much in the dark. They don’t call their parents. They live on Mountain Dew and ramen and do as little as possible.

Wait! Is that why every tool I pull from the gardening shed is rusty?

Yep! I don’t weed as much as I should. Or cut the hedges, or trim the whatever-it-is back so I can climb the hill behind the house.

I don’t use those tools regularly, so they sulk in the 82% humidity of Wellington and de-sharpen themselves.

When I don’t write, my brain de-sharpens, too. It goes mushy, and it sulks like the tools in the garden shed.

Luckily, getting that rust off is simple.

All you have to do is write.

Not much.

Badly.

Stubbornly.

Ignoring the voice that says “not today” because we know that’s Resistance, and Resistance lies.

Even five minutes is better than zero minutes.

If you’re able to join us in January, fabulous. I’d love to have you.

But if you can’t, I FULLY believe you can knock that rust off just by writing just a few words (and then repeating that tomorrow with as little fuss as possible). (A tall order, I know. I love fuss myself.)

If you manage only ten words today, then tomorrow you’ll be able to get eleven.

And that’s all writers do. We write, we rust a while, we PANIC, and then we write again.

That’s it.

We keep coming back.

Click here:

Rachael

Website | Facebook | Instagram | Podcast | Patreon

P.S. - I do have a few scholarships available, and I especially encourage BIPOC, disabled, and LGBTQIA+ writers to apply. Just click above for the details!

P.P.S. - I’m not a machine, and my words are 100% human-made. You can probably tell by my typos 😂. Hey, 26 of my books were stolen by Meta, so the reason AI loves em-dashes is because they stole those em-dashes from me! Yes, I did buy this T-shirt.)

P.P.P.S. All I can hear now is “TIN ROOF!!!! … rusted!”