Goodbye January, and Thank You
Goodbye January, and Thank You
The month in review, plus sketchbook pages.
January has been good to me, and I'm sad to see it go. I’ve had a productive month. I revised 40,000 words of my book, and plan to revise another 40,000 in February. My goal had been to get through 60,000 words, but the human body can only do so much. I wrote 18,000 words in daily five things drafts as part of my Project 1,825 Things, and posted a little over 6,000 of those words here on Substack in the form of seven notebook entries.
In case you missed them, here they are:
The Madwoman in the Other Apartment
and
I very much appreciate having the readership to play around with writing these here. I should have dates for Essay Camp very soon, and am brainstorming some larger class projects. I’m considering teaching a year-long workshop wherein we’ll write a book we don’t intend to publish—but more on that later.
I hadn’t been drawing or painting at all for the past few months. I was trying to focus on my writing and my book deadline. But this month I started drawing again, and it feels good to do so. I took my little pocket sketchbook with me to the Louvre for my second visit to the still life exhibit, Les Choses, and drew some of the artworks I found inspiring. Above a sketch done from a painting by Matisse, I wrote: Matisse knows what color the world is when you’re happy.
One morning I went out and brought a hot chocolate and a croissant to the Jardin du Palais-Royal, and tried to make a sketch while sitting on a bench under the naked lime trees. It was raining. At this time of year, all the bare branches have a sort of reddish tint to them, and there was green moss on the trunks, so I tried to capture that.
Thank you for following along with me in my various projects this month. Thank you to you, and thank you to January, and here’s hoping that February will be similarly kind. I will continue to post my notebook entries once or twice per week.
xoxo
Summer
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Spending January with you has been a joy. Looking forward to February :-)
I really hope you'll teach the class about writing a book not to be published. I *love* this idea.