Sneaking this in late and, well, done is better than...

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

1. 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 filing system." Notion is that for me, especially celebrating the toggle feature which hides one thousand ideas in a single header. It sucks a lot that Notion seems to rely on AI, but... is it still okay to use it in that the way in which I do? AI's involvement is minuscule? But am I justifying, in the same (but much diminished) way the use of the occasional plastic straw is pitted against private jets used to pick up croissants?

   Google Docs is... worse, right? Is there a better alternative?

   While my questions are imperfect, there aren't enough of us asking.

2. Flowers matter

   Désirée Penner, an Imperfect pal, has accidentally found online virality not in the extraordinary beauty of her poems (I'm confident that will come), but in her post about rejection. At last count (which was a few hours ago, and the numbers are growing exponentially) her post featuring her erasure poems from rejection letters was exceeding 114,000 views. We all feel the pain of rejection, and Désirée found a powerful way to make it relatable and validating. And when the numbers of success about failure may have felt a bit overwhelming, D sent me a photo of a daylily blooming in her garden. "She’s a tropical sunset caught up in a flower," she said. This is how we ground ourselves, literally.

3. Does hockey really connect all of us?

   As we debriefed during Imperfect co-writing today, I asked one co-writer to tell us about their (not-yet-accepted/in-her-mind-rejected) novel. They explained it's about hockey culture, and the things we choose to allow. I mentioned another co-writer had made a zine about the queer ranking of PWHA teams, and the two of them went offfffff! on their passion. It was a beauty to behold.

4. Books have hooks

   People like stickers (esp in this trend of junk journalling, which, honestly, seems to me like expensive scrapbook-spending for Gen Z, but shrug). Apparently Jukebox is the glue—according to Lady Lou Collective and their delight-filled mystery machine. I will be excitedly designing fun stickers for book clients! Could you make fun and promotionally useful stickers from quotes and/or images from your work?

5. If you think it, say it—for real

   In seeking to merge my marketing as fully as possible with a publicist on a shared project, I asked them to book a call with me through my website. They, very politely, mentioned they weren't very comfortable with my booking form's question around having our conversation transcribed by Otter.ai. D'oh! I set that up at least four years ago, when I naively believed AI was benign. smh (again) SO GRATEFUL they made the effort to express their discomfort around it, because damn. The things we set up and forget about. Say it! Or we don't know it!