Week #6: Celebrating our transformations, and moving forward one step at a time

To reach your goals, make a commitment to yourself, your dreams, and your writing.

This week the Make Your Journal a Book of Transformation subscription course wraps up with our 6^th and final lesson. 🎉

Meanwhile, as I shared in recent posts, a New Year’s dream offered me a single word printed on a white gym sock.

So, I’m thinking about …

next steps.

I’ll begin by telling you about the next steps in my writing practice. Then I’ll reflect on wrapping up this series of lessons on sustaining a daily writing practice—which is not an ending but is instead a stepping-stone on a path of new beginnings.

But first, I’ll tell you about the book I am reading, that is launching me into the New Year:

A friend recommended that I pick up a copy of This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, by Ann Patchett.

At first, I was perplexed. I’m not particularly interested in books on how to achieve a happy marriage; my husband and I have pretty much got that covered. But the recommendation came from the same friend who several years ago gave me the book Listen to Her Voice, by Miki Raver which launched my other Substack publication, The Life of H: Sarah, Reimagined. Because my friend’s previous recommendation was so impactful, I got a copy of Patchett’s book and began reading.

I quickly realized that Patchett’s essays are not so much about marriage, as they are about writing. Which brings me back to my dream in which I found the single word I’d been searching for to guide me into 2024:

The word that appeared on a sock in my dream, as you now know, was:

Author.

Why that word? After all, my dreams usually bring me new insights. So, where was the revelation in author? I already am an author. I’ve published seven books, and I’ve written a few more that are stashed in cardboard manuscript boxes, unpublished, on a high shelf in my closet.

But I’m not one to argue with a word written boldly across a dream. So, I took another look.

As it turns out, the sock on which the word Author appeared, looked like it needed to be laundered.

That got me thinking: Am I clinging to unhelpful beliefs about being a writer that need cleansing? Does my self-image as an author need spiffing up?

On reflection, I realized there is one area I would like to clean up:

Despite having written poetry all my life (since age 10 at least), and although dozens of my poems have been published in journals and anthologies, my poetry has never stepped out into the world between the covers of a book of their own.

As for the poems in my online publication, The Life of H: Sarah, Reimagined, I’ve written more than enough to fill a volume of poetry. But I am far from certain that they will ever be published as a book.

Maybe I’ve been dragging my feet about finishing the collection because I don’t have much hope that I can find a publisher for them.

And yet, my dream seems to be asking me to try. So, although I can’t be certain of the results, I’ve decided to act a little bit more like an author in 2024. Specifically, like the author of a poetry collection.

But how?

I found guidance in the pages of Ann Patchett’s essays. In one, she offers this advice to writers who feel stuck:

Write your book for at least an hour a day, for a full month.

So, I’m putting my socks on, settling in at my desk, and claiming my seat as the author of The Life of H: Sarah, Reimagined.

For at least one hour each day in January, I’m closing out all the other windows on my laptop, putting my phone in Do Not Disturb mode, and writing, revising, and editing the poems in this collection.

As for whether the book will ever be published, I’ll have to keep my socks on, be patient, and see what happens.

In today’s sixth and concluding lesson in the Make Your Journal a Book of Transformation subscription series, we’ll honor where we’ve been, and look ahead to where we’re going.