January 20, 2025

The Practice of Attention

Dear reader

Today I want to start with a celebration and to talk about the process of writing a book. My sixth book, The Practice of Attention, has officially been announced and is set to be in a bookstore near you on January 13 2026. Grateful to my agents Rebecca Gradinger and Madison Hernick for shaping this book and Sounds True for making this longtime vision a possibility. A dream come true to find a publisher whose authors and ethos are in alignment with my own radical values and hopes for the world.

I turned in the first draft last Thursday after years of research and planning, months of outlining, and weeks of 5am mornings writing ten chapters and 58,646 words. My process was strange and fitting and worked well for me. I started keeping extreme hours and going to bed earlier and earlier and waking up somedays closer to 4am when no one else is awake but me. Or at least that is how it feels. My dad also keeps strange hours so he is awake during that time so some mornings I called him to talk before I wrote.

It was important to me in this process to just keep writing and to never look back. While the process of outlining the book took many twists and turns and involved jumping around, to write this book I found I had to write it in order and not pause to edit. I had to let it pour out of me one chapter at a time. I knew that if I paused to look back at anything I’d written I would get stuck or frozen, editing was for the end. Getting the first draft down in this way was a miracle for me and out of everything I have ever written I feel like it just makes the most sense.

I relied heavily on the Pomodoro Technique also known as tomato timer where you work for 25 minutes and then take a break for 5 minutes. I could usually do three or four rounds of this a morning before my brain started to fizzle out, or around 4k words. The most words I wrote in a day was 7k and the least was 23. I made myself a very beautiful spreadsheet to track the word count of each chapter and how much I wrote in each session. I found this to be extremely helpful in meeting my deadline, which I did have to extend by a week.

I was reminded multiple times throughout the process that the only way to write is to to write. Whether by voice dictation or hands to the keyboard, the words have to hit the screen and come through the body. There is only so much outlining and visioning you can do and then it comes time to tell the story.

To celebrate the birth of this book my prayer book : Look About You : is 20% off this week! No code needed.

This past weekend I taught an amazing sold out class called Mapping Your Creative Business to fifty of the most brilliant minds. Soft tender beautiful souls looking to bring their business ideas to the forefront. So many of people’s questions are answered in the book which made me feel even more excited for it to exist. It centers setting up the foundation of your life with hobbies, creative practice, research, and service so that you can pay better attention to your own life, your business, and the world.

While teaching this weekend, and still today, I am having a horrible pain flare up in my spine. I have rescheduled a class twice in my life, once when I had to go to urgent care and once when I had covid. This was the first time I had ever considered rescheduling something because of the level of pain I was in. The adrenaline of teaching kept my body safe and the warmth of the room calmed my nervous system. I was able to teach with little distraction from the pain and was also met with multiple students who were tending to doing business with CPTSD, chronic pain, displacement from flood and fire, burnout, and more. I quickly realized I was in a room of other minds and bodies that wanted what I had carved out for myself - a life and business where I can attend to those things but still make money. I needed their examples of resting and pivoting and stopping just as much as they needed my modeling of pushing through. Providing examples of both proved fruitful.

I felt like class could have gone on for six more hours. While we got to everything I hoped for it also felt like it stopped short of something. Afterwards I realized I think in part this is about missing human connection, wishing we could have all just been in the room together mapping with pens and paper and index cards.

A big vision I have for this year is more in person gathering and teaching. I also want to travel more places by car instead of airplane, and love the idea of driving somewhere to teach. I am thinking of retreat ideas near and far, and open to your requests.

I started my second semester of my MFA this week and I am filled with purpose and the joy and rigor of study. I am also reading Blood in the Water in the evenings before bed - a 1000 page book about the 1971 Attica prison uprising. I don’t choose to pick up history books much so this is a new genre and way of learning for me. It is leaving me incredibly humbled, inspired, and radicalized in new and profound ways.

In other news there is no new episode of Common Shapes this week but I’ll be back next week with a very special interview. I tried to sit down multiple times to record in my pain flare up and just could not do it without wincing through it. I had to text multiple people to confirm it was ok to skip a week, and in class yesterday we also talked a lot about consistency and ableism and how these things bump up against each other. I felt like I was admitting complete defeat by skipping a week of the podcast, when now I see that it was actually a huge win for me to trust that missing a week would not be the end of my career or prove I am unable to show up.

I hope that you tend to yourself today in whatever way you need to around the changing of political hands in the US, honoring the life of MLK JR, witnessing a ceasefire deal come 471 days too late, and the mundane moments of your day to day life. There is so much to hold, may you build the tools to hold it with ease and care. Even in the big grief there are glimmers of hope.

Thank you for being a reader of this newsletter, it is such a gift to touch in each week and tell you the happenings of my mind. If you have a book of your own wanting to come through consider downloading the free Creative Ideation Portal or booking a 1:1 Creative Advising Session. Better yet - join us in Landscapes! The best writing co-working group on the planet. I had the joy of turning in my book draft during a session and everyone unmuted and cheered YAY CODY. I am the most blessed! We are ready to welcome you with your writer’s block and writer’s wins.

Later this week : A new issue of the Yes Yes advice column about love and relationships.

CLASSIFIEDS : 

NEW: Perfect Hunger, a bi-monthly newsletter series to nourish & delight. From a sober writer & Traditional Chinese Medicine Dr. living in Thailand.

Radical reconnection. Somatic trauma resolution & breathwork for queers, creatives & changemakers. 30% off for all sessions booked in January, use the code CONNECT30

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