What I've Written Since Having a Baby
Five (long) emails about the baby (featuring photos) so that friends and family can follow along as she grows and changes. These monthly emails are more an exercise in keeping in touch than a writing project, but I have been told by more than one person that I craft a nice narrative. (Come for the cute baby photos, stay for the narrative arc of my development as a parent!)
One draft of a blog post, which I didn't end up publishing, about how looking through my old photos reminds me that I'm living a good life and helps me feel happy about the choices I've made and excited for the future.
One finished blog post, which I started writing in early June while sitting in the waiting room of my ob-gyn's office, and finally published in mid-December.
Two drafts of On / Off newsletters, which I haven't finished (and probably won't). One is about how I'm an MCU fan (and how that's not like super on brand for me) and the other is about naptime.
Three drafts and one final version of an application for a writing fellowship that I almost certainly will not get, but hey, as the saying goes, you miss 100% of the writing fellowships you don't apply for.
One short story, which is probably unreadable to anyone but me because I wrote it in German and I'm really not fluent enough to write fiction. It's about an engaged couple deciding to break up. In order to write it, I had to look up how to say "marriage proposal." I really had no business writing it in German. It was fun.
One short story about a driving instructor that's really about what we owe our children. I wrote it back in the Fall, but I put it last on this list because I think it's the thing I've written since having a baby that I'm most proud of. When the baby was a couple months old, E and I started trying to give each other a two-hour block of time every week to work on creative projects. I take the baby and he gets to work on game development, and he takes the baby and I get to write. I'm proud of this short story not because it's good, but because it was fun to ease back into writing with something low stakes. It was fun to come back to it each week during my writing block, to know generally where it was going and then be surprised by how it got there. When I was two-thirds of the way through it, I realized it might work better as a play. I finished it as a short story anyway, and I can think of one way I'd like to edit it (other than re-writing the entire thing as a script), but I haven't done that yet. I might never do it. And, wow, is that freeing! I'm not planning to do anything with this short story. I just wrote it because I wanted to and I like parts of it and I don't like other parts of it and it's all good. Let me know if you want to read it.
(8. One On / Off newsletter about what I've written since having a baby. This one. That you're reading right now.)