The middle-grade book is a guide on grief and anxiety for children and adults alike.

I’ve been reading a book per week lately. Some longer than others, but all books. I’ve gotten better at mixing in personal development books with BookTok’s favorite romance novels (and I’m all the better for it). As we start inching towards a new season, I know that the “back to school” feeling isn’t limited to kids. As adults, we ache for something that helps us determine a before-after or helps propel us to the next chapter.

In addition to this being the year I get a better handle of my finances, it’s also the year I learn to love books and reading again. Over the last few years, really through the thick of the pandemic, I got my heart burned by publishing. I worked on two different book proposals that never made it across the threshold and learned a lot about the back end of the publishing world that made me a bit jaded.

One of my goals for this year is to read a book a week or 4-5 books per month. So far this goal has been a fun one. It’s pushed me to redefine what a “book” is in my eyes — ie it’s not just the biggest novel on the bookshelf — and challenged me to take more time quietly sitting with a book.

I’ve been thinking a lot about self-care and self-improvement this week. My mind has specifically gone to how we describe our life when it’s at its fullest or we’re at our most cared for. Do we call it complacency or do we see fulfillment? Are we constantly drawn by the promise of “more” simply because it’s deemed the antithesis of “settling” or is more actually what we’re after?

We all have different answers to those questions. If you pick up An Ordinary Age by Rainesford Stauffer you’ll be able to read some of them.

I didn’t mean to pull together a starter kit on creativity and artistic development, but I’m glad I did. Whether I was listening to Matthew McConaughey or flipping through Lisa Congdon’s imagination, these books helped spark something inside of me that had been dormant for a long time — my desire to fail. McConaughey has a whole section of his book dedicated to telling tell me all about that one time he had to throw “it” all away in order to get the kind of roles he wasn’t getting naturally asked to play. All of these books help you define what “it” (how you see creativity now vs how you want to see it) is and then offer up a roadmap that challenges you to grow.

Oftentimes being stagnant within our creativity comes at the heels of a some success or major “aha” moments. We’ve found something that works well and we stop trying to understand how to make it work better. I’ve been writing and creating content for 8 years now and I’d forgotten how to study the craft. I’d grown to the point of assuming that I would always be typecast for the kind of writing or content creation I was known for so there was no point in pushing my boundaries, but then this year something shifted for me.

January was a rough month. Apparently I’m not alone because we’re all seemingly hitting the same COVID wall, at the same exact time. In an effort to try to bring myself some joy and comfort, I’ve been working to list out the better habits that have come from a whole year mostly at home. I wrote about my list making habit earlier this week.

At the top of that list is that I’ve been making more and more time to read. I spent so much of the beginning of my career hustling to be as productive as possible and traveling a ton that if I got through one book a month it would be a miracle. Now I’m getting through so many and they’re bringing me joy in different ways.

Recently I realized that I tend to read books in pairs. The habit is helpful in making sure that I don’t get bored halfway through and abandon a book. It also helps lighten the mood if the book I am reading is heavier or more dense.

In the case of my latest pairing I was pretty intentional. Going in to starting The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown, I knew that Brown’s writing style would be story-led but also have a layer of research in it that could feel dense to me if I was only reading that. Enter: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.