Finding time for hobbies is also a hobby

What I read, wrote, and made this week

Welcome to issue #10 of Soft Hobbies, a series of creative check-ins for imperfect perfectionists around the world. New posts typically go out every Wednesday, and you can respond to this post by liking it, leaving a comment, or hitting Reply to this email. I’m Auzin, a Seattle-based writer in the fiction, poetry, and tech writing spheres. To see what else I do across the internet, go here.

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Hi softies,

A very warm welcome to my new subscribers!!! Being slightly more active on Notes (Substack’s low-key social platform) has brought more friends to this newsletter, so yayyyy for that. I hope you like it here :)

Cultivating hobbies has completely changed my life. It took a huge upheaval in both my personal life and the world at large to reach this place, but I now feel completely comfortable calling myself an artist and giving conscious priority to art in my life, whatever my day job might be. All because I was brave enough to submit my writing for publication for the first time in 2019.

If you want to learn more about the process of publishing your work at literary magazines, check out the article I wrote for Write Or Die magazine. I delve more into my personal experience there, and give advice on what you should and shouldn’t do when trying to get published for the first time. If you’re a reader, you can be a writer too, I promise.

Here’s what I got up to this week <3

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3 things I’m reading:

1. I’m a huge fan of Jillian Hess’ Noted newsletter, where she delves into the personal notebooks, journals, and diaries of famous and interesting minds throughout history. Her posts on Octavia Butler and Kurt Cobain are classics, but I also deeply appreciated this week’s meditation on if it’s okay to write in antique or rare books. She just took down the paywall for this post, so head over there quick! As someone who used to balk at making any marks in my books but now believes that a book in my collection without food stains isn’t worth reading, I adore her perspective on this.

2. Started IQ84 by Haruki Murakami, which my boyfriend’s mom gifted me last year. This has been on my radar for years and I’m super excited to get entrenched in a bigger book. Even 20 pages in, the characterization is A+ and you can tell you’re reading work from an incredible writer. Excited to keep going with this one.

3. Read a lot of Letterboxd reviews because it was SIFF this week and we saw a lot of great movies :)

3 things I’m writing:

1. Still up-to-date with my One Line A Day journal — I do it every morning. Sometimes it’s a braindump, sometimes an affirmation, sometimes just a list of things I’ll do that day. Highly recommend picking up one of these for a quick and easy journaling habit.

2. I made a collage poem/found poem with some translated captions on Instagram. I follow a dog account that has captions in another language, and when my phone translates them into English, it often sounds very cute, funny, and strange. Some of them sound like poems already, so it was simple to write them down and rearrange them a bit. This was just a messing-around exercise, enough to hold my attention but not interesting enough to show anybody.

3. Gotta count the newsletter this week. I’ve been doing lots of writing/revising for work, and it’s been a jam-packed week, so time for personal writing has been hard to come by. I need to start blocking time for it on the calendar again, but it’s hard. I feel like movement, art, and socializing are all in a deathmatch to win the lion’s share of my off-hours.

3 soft hobbies:

1. Finished a couple quick sewing projects! I fixed a hole in a pair of socks, and a rip in my sunhat where the wire was sticking out. Basic sewing skills (and mine really are basic) are so helpful if you’re a fashion person — you get more freedom with and mileage out of your stuff.

Left: The rip in my hat. Center: The rip, mended. Right: My socks, mended.

2. Gorgeous walk on Sunday to the rose garden near my house, which is apparently over 100 years old! The roses aren’t in full bloom yet, so we’ll definitely be returning to watch their growth over the summer. There was a wedding celebration, a tiny puppy, and an English garden pond with lotus and goldfish. Joyous.

Beauty is gloriously simple to witness when it's 75 and sunny.

3. Dance class is going really well! I look forward to it each week and am sad when other obligations block me from going. It feels like a section of time that is specifically for me, where I don’t have to do anything for anyone else, and that is truly precious to have. I even had time and space to practice the routine when I got home from class last Tuesday — see below for one of the videos I took.

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Your turn! What are you reading? Writing? Making? Where is the section of time in your life that is just for you and nobody else?

Let me know, and thanks for your time.

Softly yours,

Auzin