Chapter One

How exactly does one write a newsletter?

Prologue

Confession: I started working on this newsletter over six months ago. New social media options pop up constantly, and I simply don’t have the energy to learn five different Instagram or Twitter alternatives per year. But Substack seemed different. More spacious, somehow, more gentle. It reminded me of the blogs I used to follow, the magazines I loved to collect and read.

But, as with most things, my excitement was immediately drowned out by the voice of my close companion — Imposter Syndrome.

What if I don’t have anything interesting to say? Does the world really need one more aspiring author shouting into the void?

Yeah, my Imposter Syndrome is a little bit dramatic. And kind of a bitch.

But if you are reading this, I have chosen to ignore her and give this whole newsletter thing a try. Take that, voice.

Because ignoring that voice takes practice. Taking up space in this world, even if it’s in a very small corner of the internet, takes practice. Practice that will serve me well when it comes to writing (and one-day publishing) books.

More on that in a minute…

About the Author

If you don’t know me, hi! I’m Emily. If you’re going to stick around, you might as well know what you’re getting into.

I’m a thirty-something aspiring writer, wife to my husband of almost nine years, and mother to an adorable but anxious English Shepherd, and an equally adorable and remarkably well-adjusted Aussiedoodle. I’m an Enneagram 4, an INFP, a Taurus sun, a Capricorn Moon, and Scorpio Rising. So basically I cry a lot but I’m also good at getting myself a little treat to make things better.

Like many of us, TikTok and my therapist have assured me that I do in fact have ADHD and a host of other fun brain things (anxious depressive girlies rise up!)

But what you really need to know is that my childhood was shaped by an obsessive love of stories in all forms. From Narnia to Wishbone to A Little Princess. From Don Bluth movies to Wuthering Heights to The Hunger Games. From The Royal Diaries series to countless historical romance books to the ever-classic Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen Cinematic Universe.

I guzzled stories like they were my life force. Hyperfixated, really. I created stories too, at least in my mind. Yet somehow, it never occurred to me that I could write those stories down. And that maybe, someone else could read them.

That is until I had a super fun and totally not devastating quarter-life crisis. An inciting incident, if you will. I desperately needed to escape my life and go ANYWHERE else. And so, about six years ago, I started writing.

I’ll share more about my writing journey over the years, but it’s not lost on me that I’m feeling quite similar these days, though for different reasons. The world is.. well…

I want to disassociate, to hang out with the characters in my head, and mentally run around in worlds I’ve made up. Worlds where the good guys eventually win. Where hope, though messy and bloody and gritty, remains. Where magic is real and dragons soar overhead. Where people fall in love and love those around them because perhaps our love for one another is one of the only true magics we have.

Escapism gets a bad rap. But I love what Ursula K. Le Guin says in her series of essays called The Language of the Night.

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”

When we read and write, we escape. We fight back against the forces in this world that weigh us down. And when we write? Well, we get to take people with us on that journey.

My hope for this newsletter is to document the ups and downs of writing life and life in general. I’ll share bits and pieces of the stories I’m writing, as well as what I’ve been loving and what’s been making life a little gentler, a little more lovely. And maybe along the way, I’ll start to escape that pesky Imposter Syndrome.

Let’s escape together, shall we?

Love,

Emily