Intermittent fasting but it's just me forgetting to eat all day and then at 4pm devouring all the junk food in the house in a Tasmanian Devil-esque rush before I crash out. Follow me for more great health tips.
Claire Taylor
@clairemtaylor.com
Writer. EIC of Little Thoughts Press (@littlethoughtspress.com) clairemtaylor.com otherthoughts.beehiiv.com đź“ŤBaltimore April and Back Again available now: https://www.publishinggenius.com/catalog/april-and-back-again-by-claire-taylor/
A thing bumming me out: though sub guidelines for my kidlit mag clearly state no AI, it's becoming increasingly hard for me to confidently assess if a submission from a kid writer was actually written by a kid. I hate having to second guess myself & stress over it. It's tedious & depressing.
Listen to this man with good taste and a great beard!
ERolf@erolfpleiss.bsky.social · 4d agoThis thing is incredible. Everyone should read it.
Ah August, that beautiful time of year as a poet when everyone shares the huge stacks of poetry books they’ll be reading all month and none of them include your book.
The sound of my children eating popsicles is my villain origin story.
The hardest thing about writing as a parent is not finding time to write but that most of the mental effort of writing happens in periods where you're not physically writing & that space is so overwhelmed by noise & your children's needs that your mind feels constantly chaotic & overstimulated.
Since spam invitations from fellow writers are filling my inbox daily, I just want you all to know that I would never cordially invite you to do anything. If you ever think, oh wow, how nice, Claire wants me to join her for a party…no she does not. She definitely, absolutely does not.
Self-serving but I think every time your writing gets interrupted by your kids and you manage not to act like a total bitch about it, you should get a little reward.
This version of me just has to write the novel. A different version of me can figure out how to make the novel make sense.
Fully 90% of what my children say to me daily is shouted from at least two rooms away, and 95% of that comes 15 seconds after I’ve just left the room that they were in.
Trying to make tuna salad with two hungry cats in the house feels like living inside an episode of I Love Lucy.
This is just a sailboat account now I guess. Here’s Ecuador sailing in earlier this afternoon. Crew standing on the masts, music blaring!
Don’t mind me, just committing rage-induced arson because my printer won’t do the only job it’s designed to do.
A great source of conflict in my house right now is that if I work for 15 minutes my kids think that time feels like 2 and a half hours and I think it feels like 2 and a half seconds.
It’s only day 2 of summer break and I cannot bear to throw any more balls, or draw any more cars, or dance around to the same three songs any more, or lose another Mario Kart race.
"Sexual Orientation • Heterosexual • Homosexual • Okay, so it’s 1999 and The Mummy is in theaters and everyone is falling in love with men and women and eyeliner as thick as the lid of a sarcophagus..." today from Frances Klein! https://www.havehashad.com/lk1uf
If you’re terrible at crafts and have zero artistic talent but love to disappoint people, I highly recommend having children.
I went pretty much a full year without submitting any writing anywhere and just recently started sending stuff out again and boy, not doing the whole submission waiting game was way better for my mental health. I really gotta figure out a way to send it then completely forget it.
"A dated reference can break the spell a book casts on readers....it can pull young readers out of the story." This completely ignores that kids are constantly reading words & character names they have never encountered before & they just keep on reading, no problem. Let's trust kids more.
Summer Brennan@summerbrennan.bsky.social · 2mo agoI must say I am (unsurprisingly) virulently against this. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/b...
so much for the soccer ball drenched with rain water left outside the back door
Perhaps in a world increasingly obsessed with efficiency, hacks, and outsourcing all human effort to AI, the most radical thing you can do is take forever to finish writing your novel.
Should I keep all my old writing notebooks so that someday when I’m dead, my children can find them and realize how pathetically few synonyms I knew for extremely common words?
I’ve drafted 12 new poems this month and they are all for a project that I started just for the fun of doing it, so take what you want from that about writing and motivation.