Grace

Stock Up

Hi friends,

WHEW! I mean, you don’t need me to tell you anything about what’s going on. I hope you’re staying home as much as possible, keeping yourself and your family and your neighbors and their neighbors and their neighbors safe and well.

Some of you, like me, are trying to stay safe and sane and healthy while caring for others. My daughter is VERY, VERY three and a half right now, and all my careful plans of center time and Cosmic Yoga videos and socially distant walks through the neighborhood are quickly collapsing. Yesterday was hard because I was holding TIGHT to the idea that if I made our day as close to her school day as possible, it would feel familiar to her and she’d be happy and relaxed.

AHAHHAHAHAHAHHAH. There is nothing about now that is familiar or relaxed, except the fact that we’re all home and with each other. So today I am giving myself grace. Today, we have a looser schedule, but still a schedule, and at this very moment I’m able to write this because she’s taping yarn to paper and putting it into little envelopes leftover from Valentine’s Day to “put in the mail” to her friends. 😭😭😭😭😭

Right now is working and I’m going to run with it until it doesn’t work anymore and then we’ll do something else. And even if you’re not dealing with a toddler (or an 8 year old or 13 year old or 42 year old), you can do that, too. If you’re trying to be productive, and it’s not working, try something else. Do the laundry or clean out your sock drawer, one small thing that will feel like an accomplishment, and see how it feels. If you’re writing (and this goes for later, too, when all of this passes), if a scene isn’t working, go try something else and come back to the hard part later. Don’t beat yourself up for something that’s hard. Something hard is not automatically your failure. Give yourself some grace and come back to it. It might look different in the morning.

Here’s hoping it all looks different soon.

I like normalcy, so I’m going to keep Agents & Books as normal as possible, going forward. Send me your questions. Let me know if there are topics we haven’t covered. Let’s keep talking books, publishing, agents, and writing.

Stay safe. Stay home if you can.

XOXOXO,

Kate