Fall Break

when your fearful leader steps away from the keyboard

This week, I’m giving a TEDx talk.

(cue the silent panic)

I’m quite excited about this opportunity, and also quite nervous. This is not my first talk, but it’s the first to be filmed and put on a website that gets millions of page views. Thankfully, I’ll have a bit of time to recover before it gets posted. I’m lucky to have a cousin who’s given one of these before, who warned me it could be six months before it’s publicly available. (When I know, you’ll know — promise)

This post isn’t to share the talk. It’s to share the amount of bandwidth a 10-15 minute talk requires. (Short answer: more than I expected.)

Since I finished my work for the week Friday, I’ve been a squishy jellyfish. Not exactly nervous, just not ‘on’ as I usually am. I fall asleep at night running through the points of my talk. I’ve run through it three times today into a dictaphone. It’s so rare to get to share a message with an audience this wide and I want to make the most of it. I want to give everything I’ve got, so it helps those who hear it as much as I can.

As a result, I found I had nothing to say for Murder Diaries on Friday other than, “My head is full of this talk, and I haven’t written much this week.” So I didn’t record an episode.

Today, I can’t share much more to inspire you besides, “Sometimes you have an opportunity that takes all the creative juice you have, so everything else has to be set aside.” That moment for me is now.

What this looks like in practice.

I’m honoring the pull to focus on the talk this week. Next week, I’ll be at a writing retreat, with my phone in a drawer and my computer disconnected from the internet. This is how recovering from a big effort like this looks for me.

Know that my being quiet here is the sort of quiet where things are growing, and ideas are sending up shoots. I’ll be back to share the progress more in-depth after I return to Berlin on October 12th.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for our usual discussions.

Paid members: You’ll get your first monthly accountability thread for October tomorrow. Not a paid member yet? Learn more here.

Thank you for being here. You are part of the alchemy that books come from.

See you soon!