I’m Tania, a writer, editor, and book coach with a 15+ year career that spans Hollywood, book publishing, and other creatives industries. I work with novelists, screenwriters, and topic experts who want to share their ideas through storytelling. To learn more about my services, check out my website or connect with me on LinkedIn.
This newsletter is where I share my Brain Stuff on writing and culture. Sometimes my personal creative work finds its way here too. Let’s get to it.
Friends!
Here I am, I am here. EU daylight savings has come and the DarkTimes are upon us, but I’m feeling pretty good about it so far. ‘Tis the season for witchery, for wealth magic and ritual baths, for dancing in your living room by candlelight to the music of your 20s. For batch cooking and sweater shopping. For having zero FOMO if you just want to burn incense and sit in bed and read. Friends are planning film clubs. The veil is thin, and I’m doing what I can with it. I’m writing more again.
Beyond that I’m mostly trying to juggle the mental load of doing work I dislike, while figuring out how to attract more work I do like (more on this below), while also not having quite enough of any work at all. As I’ve said before, this year has been very rough on creative professionals, and I am no exception. I got a ton done in September on the business-building backend, but the last few weeks I’ve been treading water. One of the things about being self-employed is that your bandwidth may vary, and thus does your ability to make shit happen. But November should be easier.
So yes, I’ve been up to some things. One of the bigger things is starting the slow, uphill process of pivoting away from the crappy corporate gatekeeper work I’ve been doing for the last several years, and back to working more directly with other writers and creatives.
In the short term this means finding more clients for the services I offer right now, which are mostly editorial - concept development, developmental editing, and book coaching. Because building a business means relentlessly reminding people you exist, some version of that self-promotional header at the beginning of this letter is going to become permanent. Sorry if it’s annoying, but I need to earn money. And maybe you, or someone you know, or someone who might find this newsletter in the future, is in the market for a person who can help them write things.
My primary focus right now is fiction, but I also work with screenwriters, narrative nonfiction, and other people who want to hone their narrative storytelling skills and/or wrangle a book idea for professional reasons. Basically, I help people tell a story for an audience, with an eye towards supporting and developing the client’s broader creative practice. I will do ghostwriting in VERY special cases, especially if it’s short form, but the client has to be a really great fit.
In the longer term I have a bunch of ideas for new services I’d like to develop, some of which might still be corporate-facing, but in a different form. When I have professional updates you’ll hear about them, because of that whole “relentlessly reminding people you exist” thing.
So… check out my website! Send it to people! I finally updated it so it’s not several years out of date, and I’ll probably make it even sexier in the next several months. You can also follow me on LinkedIn, where sometime in the future (though not quite yet) I intend to become very annoying.
I’m also aiming to publish this newsletter more regularly starting in 2026, though frequency will vary with bandwidth because I don’t want to burn out. I’m going to curate more for content that’s geared towards my expertise, but I don’t think that’ll look so different than things I’ve published previously - such as this essay on my own creative reckonings or this one on Jane Eyre. I’m still going to write what I find interesting, and I’ll still save space for the occasional personal thing. Especially now that I’m doing more creative work of my own again.
After a 15+ year hiatus, I’ve started writing poetry pretty seriously again. This happened both on purpose and also kind of by accident.
This past June, I took a weekend poetry intensive with the Berlin Writers Workshop - not because I planned to get super back into writing poetry, but because I felt like my brain would benefit from becoming more attuned to language in that particular way again. A helpful boost for my “real” writing practice, etc. (I have a lot more to say about this mindset, but I’ll save it.)
Taking a poetry workshop, with other people, meant I had to confront the clumsy insecurity of trying to do something I hadn’t done regularly since college. That felt very sticky, but once I pushed through it, I couldn’t believe how switched on it made me feel - creatively, intellectually, and emotionally. Both by the work itself, and being back in community with other people who approach writing with a certain kind of elasticity.
Right now, I’m taking a fall workshop called “The Poetics of Incantation” lead by Tracy Fuad, who is fantastic. I wish the course description was still up so I could share it. I call it my WitchPoems class. A lot of BWW facilitators teach out of their homes, and sitting around someone’s book-lined living room drinking tea and discussing Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth is just so *incredibly* my shit. It’s also the most nourishing thing you could possibly imagine on a northern European fall evening. Hygge on steroids (yes I know this isn’t Denmark, but still).
All of it has me writing more regularly, and with less stress and more engagement, than I have in years. I may start throwing some poetry or other weird shit into this newsletter, but anything published here can’t be submitted elsewhere, so I’ll have to think on it. If I do, it’ll probably be more scrapbook-ish than stuff I intend to heavily work.
A full year after buying my first film camera, I finally taught myself how to use it just in time to go to Paris in July. Given that Paris was only the second roll of film I’d ever shot, I was pleasantly surprised by the results. So I thought I’d share!
For the nerds, these were all Portra 400, shot at 400 and developed at 800 by the lovely pros at Film Speed Lab. None of them are retouched from the lab scans. The camera is a Canon A-1 with a 50mm f/1.4.
Since this seems to be A Thing I Like Doing, you may get more analogue photo content in the future. Because what I need right now, obviously, is an expensive new hobby.
Look at you! You read all the way to the end! You must have really been enjoying yourself. If you’d like to support my very enjoyable writing, you can...
This will help make my creative work more sustainable, and you will be rewarded with an enormous amount of my very genuine gratitude.
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