January’s Zine

This month’s zine is a collaboration between 38 year old me and 13 year old me. I made it with stickers and journal entries from my millennial time capsule - created in 1999.

To celebrate waiting 26 years to open this time capsule I’ve made a full color zine this month! To go with the Crayola vibes I used rubber stamps instead of my typewriter this month. Sometimes it’s nice to get your hands dirty.

Patrons watch your mailboxes. The rest of you can click here to read online.

I was SO sure there was a Tamogotchi inside! But the only “artifacts” were a dried out gel pen (I’m 90% sure it was dried out before I put it in) and a McDonalds Beanie Babies Happy Meal bag. I remember being really confused about what to include that I wouldn’t somehow miss in the next 26 years. 😂

What would you have put in a time capsule to represent the year 1999?

In the Studio ✂️

Something I realized during NaNoWriMo is that I want to make my noveling process more interdisciplinary. My first step was printing out images from my novel’s mood board. Holding these in my hands and moving them around was incredibly regulating after an overstimulating holiday season.

10/10 would recommend paper mood boards.

I’m planning to pin these on a cork board so I can continue to move them around rather than gluing them down. I may even use string. (I have a long standing thing for conspiracy corkboards.)

The added benefit will be keeping my story visible to my conscious and unconcious mind throughout the year. Here’s a time lapse since I’m not on Instagram anymore.

Over the last month I’ve realized (reading Ray Bradbury & Dorothea Brande) that my creative ecosystem needs more time for dreaming and ideation. So my word of the year is Reverie and I made this phone wallpaper as a visual reminder. The painting by John William Waterhouse is titled Boreas.

I’m also starting a “writing from life” practice - separate from my self reflective journaling - to keep up my prose writing throughout the year. I both need space to think about my novel and space to write. I’m using this gorgeous spreadsheet to track my progress. Something I love about it is that you track time as well as words. Time researching, writing, prepping all counts. There’s tons of flexibility in setting goals and the spreadsheet even encourages you to allow for missing days.

My kid is 5 1/2 years old and this feels like the first time I’ve had the energy and capacity to stay up late writing most nights. (Brain fog in the morning means waking up early never worked for me.) I’m so grateful to home education for giving us the flexibility to set our own hours.

My Reading Nook 📖

I posted my 2024 reading wrap up to my blog.

My favorite reads were…

Seaborn by Michael Livingston

Pirates, magic, queer characters, and grounded historical details bring this world to life. The sequel Iceborn comes out later this year!

All of the Discworld books I read by Terry Pratchett.

And these books on the writing process:

Zen & the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

A Slip of the Keyboard by Terry Pratchett

Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

Reading these together really formed a constellation of creative process. Observing what overlapped and what differed. I learned years ago I can’t use another creative process wholecloth, but reading about other people’s experience can help demystify the process. Studying early drafts of Tolkien and Sanderson’s work is really doing that for me as well.

Regarding my blog…

Here’s the breakdown of my online ecosystem if you are curious.

Mostly, I wanted a tidy photoblog when I quit Instagram.

You can follow along via RSS or Bluesky (if you’re into that.)

Digital Foraging 🍁

• How Professional Colored Pencils are Made 🎥 (14 minutes)

• The European Space Agency Photographs the Birth of a Star 📷

• Apparently a Rat Rod “is a custom car with a deliberately worn-down, unfinished appearance, typically lacking paint, showing rust, and made from cheap or cast-off parts.” Pretty cool. 

• Wicked's ‘Dancing Through Life’ Full Scene Breakdown (I love the stage production and never expected to like the film version, but with Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman at the helm this is a stunning adaptation so far.)

This time last year…

Hello from a Human Jungle Gym is a reflection on time and energetic capacity. I had similar goals last year, but continued to sink too much time into Substack. I’m hoping that making the big jump to Beehiiv will help me realize some of these intentions.

We’ll see what happens long term, but I had twice the open rate on my last email as I have on Substack recently. People are starting to treat Substack like a social media and posts get lost in the feed.

The Compost Heap is handmade without the use of AI. 🐝

Support doing things the old fashioned way by joining my Patrons ($3+) and I'll send paper copies of my zines with the coolest postage stamps I can find.

Not into snail mail?

Here are other ways you can support.

• Share with a friend. (It’s free!)

• Art swap! Let me know if you’d like to swap your art for a zine.

• Buy a book or a zine from my online bookshop.

• Share this post on social media.

• Reply to this email and suggest a book, a link, or something else that you’ve been loving lately. 🥰

I’d love to hear from you.

Hit reply to email me directly. Or ask about doing an art / zine / book swap!

Thanks for being here.

I appreciate you.

Compost Heap Illustrations by Gracie Klumpp of Leave the Fingerprints. 🐞