Going viral!

I've got Covid again, and I've also started a Substack.

I’m fine. Really, it was just a one-day head cold symptom-wise. One day head cold and five days of social isolation, plus another five wearing a mask when going into the world. The worst thing was the timing, in the middle of a 10-day multi-city trip, and missing the wedding of the century (really, the groom knows how to throw a party.) The second worst thing: filing the travel insurance form.

So I was surprised when my friend Julia Roberts (no, this one) agreed to meet me at Red Eye for a (masked) cup of latte on my 8th day of Covid. Nobody ever wants to get together with someone still in their Covid protocol, but Julia moved to LA a few years ago and I was the only one in her old cohort who was available. Anyway, we talked about her new novel and her writing coaching business and all of our kids and a little bit about my painting life and at the very end, standing outside in the fresh air, pulling off my mask so she could actually see what I look like, I asked her one last question: Medium or Substack?

She laughed, because she’s been pondering the same question. Substack, she pointed out, could actually earn you a little pin money. And since Medium never has, I thought what the heck. But the monetization thing really isn’t the motivation. I’ve been wondering for a while why I haven’t written for five years, why I’ve taken so strongly to painting. I’ve never felt like I’ve had an interesting enough life for a memoir, and trying to write another novel feels like training for a marathon.

I’ve done this before, living out loud, so I thought I’d try it again. Slip back in.

If you’re getting this as an email, it’s because you’ve signed up with me at some point. So I’ll be showing up in your inbox from time to time, talking about what it’s like to be a privileged American woman of a certain age at almost the quarter mark of the new century, watching the world fall apart and then checking out boots on Amazon. I’ll probably stay pretty local. I’ll mull the little absurdities of modern life and do my time-traveling thing, remembering this and that from my past and our collective one. I’ll be talking about art, of course, and the mystery of the writer-to-artist transition. And I’ll share too much information about my bunion. If it’s too much information, I’m sure Substack makes it easy to unsubscribe. I’ll understand. After crying into my pillow.

And if you’re reading me in the Substack app, bully for you. Because I haven’t figured it out yet.

Here we go…