I recently caught up a bit with a friend I haven't spoken to in a while. She asked me how I was doing, to which I replied, "I was super burnt out and iron deficient in March, but now I'm doing great!"
The following day I broke the handle off one of my favorite mugs—one with cute opossum pictures all over it. It had been a birthday gift from my roommate a few years back.
About two days after that, I found out I'm losing my job come August.
The following week I dropped my phone while using the elliptical machine. My screen protector shattered (though, thankfully, not the screen itself)
So. Y'know. I totally jinxed it.
Some things can be repaired. I replaced the broken screen protector with a fresh one. I bought a Kintsugi kit and glued my mug back together. The result was imperfect, but since the handle was the only thing that broke, the mug is still usable. And the repaired handle is surprisingly sturdy!
A photo of a mug on a wooden table. The mug has illustrations of opossums done by the artist Kness. The handle, broken in three segments, is adhered back on with smudged gold-colored resin.
I've always been the kind of person who rolls with the punches. Oh, a mug broke? Time to pick up a new craft so I can fix it. Oh, I need to find new work? Well, that sucks, but all I can do is put one foot in front of the other.
I had told myself when I started this newsletter: I want this to be strictly writing-focused. I don't want this newsletter to be a diary. Emailing a diary to a list of people is boring, nobody wants to read that. But the truth is: I'm not always a writing machine. I was so horribly fatigued by my chronic iron deficiency that I didn't even write out a proper newsletter in March—I just scribbled some doodles about burnout and called it a day.
And that's just how it is sometimes.
So when life throws you curveballs, what can you do?
Try to glue it together with gold-colored resin.
Okay. I'm mostly joking. But have you heard of the Japanese art of Kintsugi? The whole idea is that you can breathe life into a smashed piece of pottery by repairing it with gold. It creates beautiful works of art—and functional, too. What I fixed my mug with was the cheap Amazon knockoff version—$15 for a tube of resin and gold-colored powder. Like I mentioned earlier, my work was less than stellar, and the resin cured all lumpy and weird.
But there's something rather beautiful about a visible mend, isn't there?
The gold-colored resin can be literal or metaphorical. I guess a more sane person would call it "silver lining." But "gold-colored resin" sounds just a tad more achievable. Gold-colored resin is the cheap Amazon knockoff of silver lining—it's not quite the same, but it's what you can afford.
For instance: I'm losing a job—but what's the resin that's making the situation functional? I was already one foot out the door anyways—now it's just a bit more urgent. I got a job interview offer on the same exact day that I heard word I was getting laid off. And the ensuing interview went fairly well. The resin might be lumpy—I'm not sure it's a career worthy job, but it would pay the bills and give me health insurance in the meantime.
Okay. Y'all are probably sick of hearing my bad resin metaphor. Let's change tack. I mentioned I was burnt out in March, and that I'm doing better now, so let's take a look at what I've been up to!
Developmentally edited a really cool fantasy book for a client
Started judging for a writing competition (and got paid enough to essentially cancel out an entire car insurance bill)
Outlined a potential horror novel that's been lingering in my head untouched for a ridiculously long time
Wrote 2,000 words in my seafaring sequel, PLUS 3,000 words in my sapphic superhero competition WIP, which started as a screenplay I wrote in a college creative writing class, then turned into a comic I never committed to drawing, and now is going to be a novel. The word counts aren’t huge, but they’re better than 0!
Launched preorders for Blood of the Gods!
Speaking of that last one: you can snag yourself a preordered copy through any major retailer, or for those in the USA, you can preorder a signed copy through my direct store! Blood of the Gods releases on May 14th, and I’m stoked!
Catch you next time, and hopefully with more focus on writing and less focus on beating a dead metaphor with a stick.
Wren L. Rivers
@corvidarcana [Bluesky, Tumblr]
@corvid.arcana [Instagram, TikTok]
