The Practice of Devotion is the End in Itself

Hello! I’m a writer, editor, and book coach with a 15+ year career that spans Hollywood, book publishing, and other creatives industries. I offer 1:1 writing support to novelists and other passionate people who want to share their ideas through storytelling. I also founded the Creative Writers’ Community Lab for anyone who wants to develop a writing practice that is both personally expansive and practically sustainable. 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, as well as my personal creative work. I hope you dig it.

Well we’re a month into 2026 and the year already feels old. It’s been quite cold here in Berlin, and we’ve been having these recurring multi-day ice buildups of the sort where you risk braining yourself on the sidewalk every time you leave the house. None of the trams have run in the last two days, because the overhead cables are coated with ice. Apparently the emergency rooms are overrun with people who’ve broken bones just trying to walk around. It’s not the snowpocalypse, but that almost makes it more annoying. Like if transportation is going to shut down and the sidewalks are going to be impassible, we should at least get a nice blizzard out of it.

I’ve honestly been having an impossible time doing any sort of meaningful writing in the last couple of weeks. My energy and concentration have generally been poor - because it’s hibernation season, because I’m emotionally exhausted, because I actually accomplished a huge amount at the beginning of January but my brain got fried by the amount of multitasking I was doing.

I have also, honestly, not really wanted to write anything, especially in the last week. I have no desire to write about what’s going on in the news, but writing about anything else feels stupid. Trying to work out how to divvy up the very small amount of money I have available to donate feels stupid. Not being able to offer much else feels stupid. Being in Europe feels stupid, but also quite a lot better than being in America - though I do have a perverse tendency to get the most homesick when things back home are going poorly. We are what we are, and we are the places that raised us, and where our people live.

However. My Big Life Goal is to hold myself accountable to the writer part of myself, rather than just the part of myself that needs to earn money. The writer part of myself needs to show up for the work, even (and especially) when I know it’s going to be a slog and I’m unlikely to produce anything brilliant. The practice of devotion is the end in itself, etc.

So I’ve currently got Zoom running in the background, along with three other people from the online writing program I joined in December who are also working on their Substacks. I figured that joining a group writing session would force me to get something down, and I was right. Creating an obligation to someone outside of yourself has a way of making your own paralysis seem self-indulgent and small. Such is that whole thing we call community.

After consulting with some interested parties, I decided to put a pin in Creative Writers’ Community Lab so I can prioritize expanding my reach, both online and off. I still very much want to do it when the time feels right, and I built all the infrastructure, so when I’m ready it’ll be very easy. But I had a moment of being real with myself about how many things I can be putting energy into at once, and where that energy would be best directed. Running a writing group felt the least urgent right now.

As usual I’m back and forth about what to do with this newsletter, and where it fits. Perhaps because I’m now putting a fair amount of energy into LinkedIn, I feel almost no desire to use this space for “professional content.” I’m actually enjoying LinkedIn more than I thought I would, because I find its simplicity of purpose kind of a relief. Everyone is there to pander to the algorithm so they can gain visibility and earn money, and everyone there accepts that fact. You like, you comment, you post your little selfies because they get more engagement (ok the selfie part I kind of hate, but whatever). It’s basically performance art, and if you have some semblance of a real personality and point of view, you’re miles ahead of the game.

So if I’m going to turn myself into “content” for the internet, LinkedIn actually seems like the place where the boundaries are the most clear. It’s a very containered form of self-exploitation, as these things go. Whereas if I’m going to sit down and write 1500 words with my limited brain space, I kind of want to just do whatever feels good and not like a big lift. Blab about things with variable levels of intellectual heft, and post my little scrapbook poems.

No new analogue photos yet. I’m in the middle of my fist black and while roll but I’m going through it slowly, so it may be a couple more weeks before I finish it. In the meantime, thematically appropriate art:

As I said, I’ve been having a bit of trouble writing, but I’m trying. Last week I took a rather ambitious poem I’ve been fumbling with to a peer workshop because I sensed it wasn’t really coming together, and I needed help figuring out where the problems were. And also, because on some level I was hoping to be told that it was actually fine and I was just being neurotic.

So of course I was (diplomatically) told that it wasn’t really coming together, and then I had to go be butthurt about it for a minute before conceding that I already knew this, and that’s why I wanted feedback in the first place. The creative ego is really something else.

Anyway, the poem below is not that poem.

       Cut an accordion chain of men from white paper and unfold it so they lie on the floor before you.
       Tear the men up one by one, until you’re left with a small pile of white ribbons.
       Put the white ribbons in a blue bowl on your dining table and stare at them while you eat your red spaghetti, your runny eggs, your ferrous meat. Stare until you’ve forgotten the men they once were. Stare until you no longer recognize hunger.
       Bury the ribbons at the foot of your tree before the first frost.
       Each day as you pass your tree on your way to work, imagine how paper becomes earth. Imagine damp. Imagine worms. Imagine soil, made of all that time has taken from you and all that will still be taken. Imagine white, then brown, then black.
       Scrub the oven, grout the shower, wipe the mirrors, sweep the thresholds.
       Find a last white ribbon behind a door you never close.
       Light a candle and think about how a fire this small still burns.
       Be grateful you have a heart. Pull it from your chest and bury it beneath your tree.
       Watch the white lilies reach for the sun.

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