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Thanks for opening this email! I truly appreciate your time. Lauren O'Malley A 1.5-minute read; a 3-minute listen Hi from the banded woolly bear caterpillars thanking you for letting autumn leaves sit and provide protection. (Are you familiar with the lore that the width of their bands predicts the winter weather?) A banded woolly bear caterpillar (photo from ownyardlife.com) If you’re ready to start looking at editors for your writing, congratulations! Yay you. Here are some

Pretty relieved to learn I wasn’t wrong Lauren O'Malley Oct 19, 2026 A 3-minute read Thanks for opening this email! You’re the best, and I hope you’re having a pretty good day. So, I finally did as I keep saying, and archived my Substack posts on my website/blog (here!). And I’m glad I did, because then I heard BET.com erased decades of interviews, shows, and content from their website with absolutely no warning. Many journalists and creators lost access to dozens of pieces o

Thanks for opening this email! Truly. Lauren O'Malley Sep 24, 2026 A 2-minute read (more like 20 minutes if you clickety-click) Hi from the first chestnut you picked up off the sidewalk this year. It feels like it holds all of autumn in it, right? All helpful (I hope) resources all the time: Seth Werkheiser and his Social Media Escape Club. I’ve been dabbling in Seth’s offerings, and finding lovely small groups, a super-chill vibe, and lots of ‘hells yessss’ nodding. I scribb

What would it be like to work and create courageously, without shame? Lauren O'Malley Sep 08, 2026 A 3-minute read (add many more minutes if you’re a link-clicker!) Hoping this waving of my own flag will be good for all of us—there might be a couple of things to learn in here; and hey, maybe you or someone you know is curious about working with me, and this will tell you how you could. Also, allow me to model for you—not necessarily in the humbling and weird bio pics below, b

So why am I writing a newsletter when I could be lying in warm August grass reading clouds? Lauren O'Malley Aug 25, 2026 (approx 2-minute read) Because newsletters build connections, and what’s life without those? (Asks the person who just stopped on a dog walk to ask if I could harvest some elderberries from a street-hanging tree, and spent two hours chatting aimlessly with a stranger.) Hey it’s me, the water you put on your bedside table for morning-you. Connections are how

Also, it's not about you (even though you are devastatingly fascinating) Lauren O'Malley Aug 17, 2026 Learning, learning, learning. That’s kind of all we can hope for, right? Constant growth? And at the same time, it’s a l i t t l e bit exhausting. Hey, it’s me, the cluster of reluctant brain cells who just want to chill in their old-school knowledge, thanks. But. I’m learning how to engage a bit more (dipping a single toe) on socials. Posted this in Notes recently to wild ac

Which is no one— Lauren O'Malley Jul 30, 2026 —so why do we feel the pressure to deliver? Calling on you, hustle culture! Hey, it’s me, the writing book you bought with great enthusiasm, cracked twice, and now feel guilty about neglecting. (I’m so sorry, Wonderbook. You’re still in my heart.) You’ll be thrilled to learn I’ve finally taken my own advice: blog every day, then offer that info in a light and delicious, easily-digested weekly sandwich of a newsletter. As I tell my

What neurodivergence feels like a lot of the time: life led kinda sideways. I've had a couple of interesting conversations about neurodivergence this week—some overtly so, some more subtle. Like so many people—especially women—I was diagnosed with ADHD very late in life. And with Autism a couple of years later. Both diagnoses made so much sense, while also feeling like rug-pull moments: wth? (Thank you, therapist number 451, for your gentle question: 'Have you ever been teste

Have I already talked (a lot) about Désirée Penner and her erasure poems made from rejection emails? Yes. And I am not alone. Many people are talking about them—hundreds of many. The post has had more than 150,000 views at the time of this writing, and Désirée herself has talked about it on the radio. Tell me, tell Désirée, tell the world about your rejections! Here's my erasure poem of my one rejection (I've only submitted four times, and haven't heard yet from the other thr

Another helpful Wednesday. Here are some supportive things that made their way through this day for me, specifically. Notion sharing garden or other grounding/joyful pics to stabilize connecting around different access points to shared interests Jukebox speaking up Notion Notion.so is something I've tried a thousand times to describe but can't quite. It's a bit like 12 years ago when a friend tried to explain Pinterest to me. They finally said, very simply, "I use it as a fil

Failed to understand my scope in a project. (Turned out okay. Maybe better than okay. But don't try to tell that to 3 a.m. me.) Failed to meet my own deadline of getting a newsletter out today. (Truly, absolutely, no one cares. Right?) There are two other deadlines I've let slip, and that feels shitty. One is a Big Failure that may be redeemable but damn; the other is an almost that could still land in the success column. Failed to find joy in making today's graphic—having fa

As they should be, Mondays are devoted to success. At least here they are. This week I'm celebrating myself—because yes!—and others. A pretty litttle posy to me: After committing (to the small and mighty Imperfect co-writing gang) to posting here every weekday, I did. I do. Another bouquet, please and thanks, wrapped in recycled newspaper, because I also committed to submitting at least one piece of writing a month for publication. Last week I submitted three times, and got t

Wildcard Friday, in which I feature my disgust with AI, even as its desperate little icon chases my text as I write. (Really, Wix? At least give me the option to shut this shit off because why.) You're probably a writer or an artist, so you're the choir, the converted, the team I'm happy to play with. But maybe, like me, you'll be truly surprised by the vile slop Meta proposed for an ad for my lovely client, Claire Ross Dunn. Claire was interested in exploring Meta ads, and,

It's me. Well, it's also you, and, you know, everyone. But this time it's me—because I'm so imperfect that I didn't have the courage to ask any of the people I spoke with today if they would be willing to be the Imperfect Human of the Week. So yeah, super-imperfect. Hyper, even. And also, super-effing-awesome because I'm going to create a nexus of many Venn circles here: social media, learning, fearlessness, and ideas. In the middle, where they all overlap? Brave and imperfec

While every noise at once may describe the inside of many a writer's head (over here!), in this case it refers to a website that—warning!—could take you out for rabbit-hole hours and hours. Poke around the site's simple, user-friendly interface to choose a genre or artist, anddddd, 97 layers into the subtle differences of dancehall subgenres, you have, well, something. It might be a new favourite artist, or a plane ticket to Serbia, or, in my case, another access point to the

It's very hard to find the word 'failure' in a magazine, which is where I usually source my zine-y headers. There's a tendency to focus on success, and see failure as shame-worthy and something to be hidden. So the graphic for this weekly exploration of blunders and defeats is snapped from my own scrawly notes on a dollar-store newsprint pad. My Tuesdays are now celebrations of failure. When I mentioned this in my co-writing group this morning, someone suggested I use the wor

In which we we explore interiority; compare sex work and writing; and discuss bananas, kind of, with author Claire Ross Dunn—my first podcast guest. If you found your way here via my first Imperfect Dispatch Substack post in two years, welcome to my own imperfection—I hope it offers some validation to your own procrastination. :) And if you stumbled here following your own path, congrats on your great navigation skills, and welcome. Reinvention is key in this world, particula

What is predatory marketing, and am I using it—maybe without even knowing it?

Me: I’m a neurodivergent weirdo; an introvert who happily spends 99% of my time alone or with my dog, Soda. Everyone else: Lauren is a...

I have another inspiring new client, this one with beautiful goals around inclusion, acceptance, and love. We’re working on pulling their...