TL;DR: No action items for you. I've given you another chapter to read. Journals have arrived. I've made progress on warehouse clean up. And I finally got a handle on edits for the grief chapter. Your next update will be the week of June 23-27.
The Details
I'm happy to say that both the blank page and dot grid journals have arrived. The Lined page journals are on their way to me. I was quietly worried that these would be heavily impacted by tariffs, but the company which makes these has decided to handle the tariffs on their end instead of passing them on to me. That inevitably means higher prices on future purchases from them, but these orders were placed months ago and aren't affected. My project budget is intact. Here they are:
That shelf they're sitting on is a newly cleared space where I'll be storing all of the items that will ship out as part of this project. The fact that I have a cleared shelf is a triumph. This unit sits in the jumble of a room which I showed you last time. It is still pretty jumbled, but progress is visible:
(The shelf with the journals is just out of frame on the left of the second picture.) And because I showed you the nook before, here is the current state of that as well:
Those deep shelves from the jumble room are perfect for storing boxes. These boxes will be used in shipping out orders. We have piles of boxes ready to go on that empty shelf, we just need to think through which boxes go where.
"Thinking through" has been the sticking point on so many projects lately, because in order to decide whether or not I need to keep an item I have to remember why I first acquired it and decide whether that use is still relevant. If I want to keep something I have to decide where it belongs instead of the weird spot it has been sitting. If I want to get rid of something I have to decide whether it is to be trashed or donated. Taking trips to actually trash or donate is yet another step. This week I finally did some hauling away of piles that had accumulated. I can finally see that I'm making progress rather than just moving stuff around to different piles.
Thinking through has also been the trouble with making progress on editing Structuring Life to Support Creativity. I've been working on the chapter about how Grief is a Creative Process. Most of the ideas I wanted were in there, but they lacked an organization that made sense. The chapter was as jumbled with ideas as the spaces of my warehouse. Then this past weekend the Locus fundraiser switched to fulfillment and suddenly I didn't have to pay as much attention to it. In that new brain space, I was able to see that I should pick one or two grief experiences to connect all of the thoughts to instead of throwing in fragments of every grief I've ever had. With that new framework, the chapter is coming together really nicely. I expect to have it in layout by the end of the week. I particularly liked this paragraph:
Grief is the transformative gift that none of us want to receive, but if we grow with it, learn from it, and incorporate its lessons into our lives, we become stronger and better than we could otherwise be. Each time I encounter grief, I think “Ah yes, I really understand this now.” But the next grief always hits differently, and I must learn again.
After the Grief chapter I only have one more full chapter and then the conclusion. I am so close to being done with this edit. Of course then I put these chapters into layout and do another edit on paper. I'm scrambling to get to the part where everything is on paper because I can carry that with me when I leave for the Writing Excuses retreat in Minnesota on June 13. During the week I am teaching, I don't expect to get much done on SLSC, but the week after that, I am on site as support staff while the Writing Excuses hosts record episodes. While they're recording, I can be writing. I'm hoping I can push SLSC all the way through to where it is ready for print.
My next update to you is planned for the week of June 23-27 which is when I'm at the Minnesota retreat center. That might be an update full of reporting on what I got done, or it might just be full of pictures of birds and waterlilies.
Thank you so much for your patience as I'm sorting through my jumble and getting this book done to deliver to you. All the best, Sandra Tayler
