marching on
what do i do here & what have i been up to!
Hello wonderful readers! It has been a while. If you’re new here, normally these newsletters come out on the first of each month, but in February I was travelling through Turkiye and Iraq to meet my partner’s family so could not be bothered. This month… I just haven’t got back into the routine yet. But I had been thinking about switching to the first Sunday of each month so it’s the same day of the week, so I guess I’ll start now! (Okay…soon.) I feel like reading Substacks is my version of sitting down with the Sunday paper… I get my tea, my morning music, and with sunshine streaming in the window, I read through all my Substacks I’ve been marking unread over the week. So I think Sunday is a good newsletter release day. :)
I have nothing really planned for today, because it happens sometimes, so I thought I’d just do a casual what-have-I-been-up-to since my last newsletter in January when I made some goals, as well as a re-introduction!
welcome here
I thought I’d take some time do a quick intro of myself and this newsletter since I have a few new followers – welcome! My name is Alyssa Sherlock and I’m a writer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada/Treaty 1 territory. Last April I self-published my first book, working together with a designer and illustrator to put together this is a love story: poems and essays on friendship, love and mental health. It’s all there right in the title, and the book is available now.
The publication of this is a love story also coincided with my own mental health recovery journey, and you can read more about my publication process and thoughts in a blog post I recently had published with Nourishing Word! You can read more of my writing by going to my website at alyssasherlock.com/writing. Right now, I am in the “emerging” grant category of being a writer and still learning how everything works. My current project is a novel about three friends in their first year of university breaking apart and coming back together while they discover things about themselves. It includes all my fav themes: loneliness, mental health, and self-discovery. I would love to try to go a more traditional publishing route for this one (self-publishing is time consuming, so much work, and $$) but first I need to actually finish writing the dang thing.
For this newsletter, I do a combination of writing updates, occasional interviews on writers I’m interested in connecting with, and behind the scenes of writing or publishing. I would love to hear about you, even if you’ve been following for a while – why do you subscribe? What are your current projects? Tell me about yourself!
what have i been up to
A couple weeks after my January newsletter, I went on a three week trip travelling around Turkiye and Iraq with my partner. We went to Istanbul and Amasya in Turkiye for ten days, then spent two weeks with my partner’s family in Baghdad. It was a long, full, busy and beautiful trip. My goal was to keep a journal every day and I pretty much accomplished that save for a few days I was too tired at the end of the day to pick up a pen so I just recorded a delirious video journal for myself. We’ll see if I write anything more than journals about this trip.
While I miss the good food and lack of snow, it does feel good to be back home, settled, and past the winter flu hurdle. Now I can actually start working on my goals that I set at the beginning of the year. Let’s see how it’s going…
Commit to writing regularly – If you count the journaling I did on my trip, plus working on a few messy essay drafts on the plane home, then yes I have been writing regularly! I’ve also worked on my friendship novel a few times and now that I’m checking in on this goal I’m realizing that I need to track when and how often I’m working on it so I can see the progress.
Consistently posting on socials – I am trying to let go of my own expectations of having a specific kind of social media presence, especially right now when I don’t really need to be promoting anything upcoming. So for now I’m just trying to have fun with it. I have actually posted fairly consistently since January.
Take a workshop – I haven’t done this yet but I have my eye on a few. If you have recommendations for free or low-cost/sliding scale writing workshops, send them my way!
The other thing I want to do is connect with other writers, and I already have a list in my head of people I want to reach out to (if you want to connect and do something, please reach out!)
life of an artist
It is a constant struggle trying to balance day job working for a living and working on an art career off the side of your desk. As always, I’m grateful I can connect with other people in the same boat and we can commiserate together.
Thanks for following along.
Happy March!
Alyssa
P.S. Taking this directly from E.K. Johnston’s newsletter but 1.7 million Palestinians have been made refugees in their own country, in places where they were told to go to be safe. They need everything, and anything you can donate helps.
I always find that a change of scenery does a lot for my creativity! It sort of reshuffles my ideas :)