Meowdy!

1. News and Appearances
2. Pep talk: Get thee a hobby that can’t be monetized

Story Hour

I’ll be reading at Story Hour tomorrow the 10th, at 7pm PST with Dee Holloway. This is my second time at Story Hour, and it’s a very chill sit back and listen time—though I suspect this hour will be quite spooky!!

Futurescapes Spring 2026

Are you planning on going to Futurescapes in March? I’ll be faculty this year, and joined by some other amazing authors (P. H. Low! S. T. Gibson!) as well as incredible agents. Workshop the first 3,500 words of your novel with us ~ as well as your query letter. More faculty will be announced soon :)

Get thee a hobby that can’t be monetized

I’m in deep with fiber, y’all. I knit a lot, I have a spinning wheel and spin my own yarn, I’m studying the wool of different sheep, I visit local yarn stores as part of my tourism, I have a tabletop loom, and most days I wear at least one accessory or garment that I made myself from sticks and string.

Is this all a thinly veiled excuse to show off the things I’ve knit over the years? Maybe. You gonna snitch on me??

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I learned to knit around 2012. Then things got busy. I had kids, worked p hardcore jobs, wrote, and did twenty other hobbies, etc etc so I put the fiber arts down for a while.

The reason I restarted knitting was to get off my phone. In December 2023, I did a little experiment. Every time I reached for Instagram, I picked up a very fine-gauge t-shirt project instead and worked a few rows.

I was quite alarmed when I knit the entire shirt in less than a month. That got me off of Instagram fairly quickly—and fairly permanently. Holding my scrolling time in my hands was a good visualization, and an inspiration to stop.

(Did you also know? Crossing the bilateral midline of your body with repetitive tasks is good for your brain. It’s encouraged in PT, OT, and in children, and there are numerous studies that it is meditative and beneficial.)

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A well-meaning compliment knitters receive on their work is, “you could sell that; you should open an Etsy store”. Some knitters are extremely annoyed by this, even if we all understand the short hand intended: “your work is desirable and adept.”

It is typically a well-meaning sentiment, though it says a lot we can’t appreciate good craft for its own sake, and can only speak of things by their potential monetary worth. Additionally, making something that could pass as store-bought isn’t the only reason to knit.

Building a career on knitting goods by hand like I do is…not easy business. I’m fairly fast knitter. If I gun it, I’m knitting a fine gauge sweater over two months. If we include the cost of yarn and rock bottom American minimum wage, that’s prob $500 minimum for a long sleeved sweater.

Nobody wants to pay this. Nobody should be required to pay this to be clothed. Especially for a frankly ‘plain’ garment: I am often knitting a random workhorse piece of clothing that is meant to be unobtrusive enough I can wear it multiple times a month without people being, like, yo, that lady really loves that sweater.

Re: money, affordability in yarn is a bit weird, as yarn can be quite expensive. There can be some element of privilege, as not everyone can afford to drop dollars on the fanciest yarn. Lots of people knit to save money. Knitting your own stuff allows access to much higher quality clothes at a much lower price point. $100 can get you a very nice sweater quantity of yarn, keep you busy for 80+ hours, and then you can wear the sweater. Pretty good value-to-entertainment ratio. And there are all of the ethical reasons to slow consumption, wear more natural fibers that you know the provenance of, etc etc.

Still, there’s thrift and then there’s business. Knitting by hand is just too slow, and creates too little product.

Exactly the hobby I needed.

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I’ll caveat this by saying that Americans are encouraged to monetize everything. This is the source of the compliment, “You could make real money doing this,” even when it’s patently false. We are raised to be good capitalists, so I hope no one takes this as flippant or dismissive of that reality.

As a kid, I didn’t do creative stuff to earn money. I suspect you didn’t either. I genuinely liked to do it, and it helped me express myself and to think through things. But you hear “You could make real money doing this” a few too many times, and you start to believe that 1) money is actually a reliable metric of whether or not something has value, and 2) if you’re good at something, you’ll be able to make a living wage.

“You could make real money doing this” only means someone will take the bet that investing in something you make will make THEM more money. That’s why the capitalism of anything artistic or craft adjacent can be so soul killing. You go into it for the expression, the fun, the meaning...and you are expected to create a measurable desire that moves cash. Despite all the self-helpy books suggesting that capitalizing the art is a dark art (it is), capitalizing is not actually part of the Art. The two are not perfectly aligned.

I have known this for my entire adult life. It’s obvious. And yet, any time I would pick something up (watercolor, jewel smithing, bookbinding), I found myself unwillingly veering towards what I thought would be better business, not what would be what I really wanted to do. I would paint popular characters, because people are more likely to pay for and share fan art vs. a random portrait. I would design jewelry I thought would sell instead of getting lost in a project I loved.

It’s certainly possible to make thriving businesses in both these examples, but the will has to be there. Reverse engineering this, to me, is not a Good Time. In the end, I didn’t want to make businesses. I wanted to play around.

While I do gladly accept payment for the writing I do (💅🏻?), I needed to nip this impulse to chase business in the bud. Writing—the place I go to be alone with myself, my little cave, where the most difficult things in my life finally begin to make sense and I can learn to live with them—was going to break me if I tried explicitly “writing to market”. I did not want to kill my soul in that way. Again, privilege. But I’d always rather work a soul crushing corpo job than crush my soul via fouling up my writing.

Does this mean I never think about market? lol absolutely not. But that’s a whole ‘nother post.

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My writing and fiber time are often at odds. I mean this in a healthy way. I think healthy people call this “balance”. One should not be bent over the laptop at all hours. I mean!!! How will you ever repetitively cross that bilateral line, with your hands ever on home row??

Making all my sweaters and balls of yarn is a consistent practice in doing something that will never be a business. It makes me unclench the terrier jaw wrapped around preconceived notions of worth, around the unhealthy ideas re my value as a person and a creator.