Weekly Snippets
In which I try categorizing my life by the genres in a bookstore...
Read on for a glimpse into my week as expressed in genres.
Health & Fitness
Guilt To Move. A big part of my self care goals this year is to be more active. I’m wary of number-centric goals in this regard (though numbers can be a useful way of tracking progress). Instead, my focus is on movement. It’s pretty well documented that physical movement is tied to our overall health, but if you’re like me, it’s easy to spend most of your day sitting. Everything I do—work, reading, writing, art—seems to require a chair. And at the end of a busy day? The couch entices with its siren song. Aside from time constraints and energy, one of my biggest obstacles in fitness is boredom. After a few weeks of the same exercise routine, I. Am. Booorrrrred. So this year, I’m approaching physical fitness a bit differently. What keeps boredom at bay? Novelty. Each week I’m trying out a different online fitness program. So far, it’s going well. Each week I’ve been excited to try something new, and since most of the trials only last a week, anyway, I’m motivated to get the most out of them that I can. Stay tuned for a recap at the end of the month.
Literary
The Secret Life of Literary Agents. As a junior literary agent, I’m very excited to be building my own list of authors and illustrators! Curious to learn more about that? Check out my personal website here. Needless to say, I suspect a big challenge of this new phase in my career will be balancing my self care goals with the demands of my new role. For those of you not familiar, the publishing industry relies on an apprenticeship model. Literary agents gain practical experience and mentorship by first assisting more senior agents, and oftentimes continue in this supporting role while they build their own list of clients.
How does this fit into the 8 hour rule? Well, that’s a tricky subject. To be perfectly candid, agents do not typically have an eight-hour work day. While many of our administrative tasks take place during conventional office hours, much of what we do (reading queries, sample pages, and manuscripts) takes place outside of the conventional eight-hour workday. It is, as they say, a labor of love. For me, I frame any hours I need to work beyond the traditional eight as part of my Maintain time. Sometimes, I must put in extra time to maintain my job.
Business
Dream Small and Win. I’m really trying to embrace the idea of slow growth with my business. (New here? Let me introduce you to Storiologie, where I handcraft goods that celebrate storytelling.) While part of me would love to grow my audience and revenue exponentially, I don’t think that’s realistic. If for no other reason than for time; I have a limited amount that I can put into my business while pursuing my other interests/careers. Of course, this can be difficult to remember in the moment when I look at sales for a given period and the numbers are much lower than I’d hoped for. But I am making progress in my goals, one step at a time. A newly achieved small goal for this year: I’m now on Faire! I recently received my first wholesale order for earrings, which is pretty cool. So here’s to small, slow steps. Doesn’t that sound like a nice way to enjoy a journey?
Before you go, a footnote on the 8 Hour Rule I discussed in my last newsletter.
My husband and I have been catching up on season two of the drama series The Gilded Age (it hasn’t captured my heart the same way as creator and writer Julian Fellowes’ preceding show, Downton Abbey, did, but I digress). If you haven’t seen it, you may have deduced it takes place during the American Gilded Age of the late 1800s. As such, one of the subplots focuses on the industrialization of that era. After blithely hitting the publish button on my last newsletter, imagine my surprise when one of the next episodes we watched was about union workers going on strike. Their chant? “Eight, eight, eight!” Sound familiar?
I’m by no means a history buff, so I knew little about the labor movement beyond the vague notion that conditions in places like factories, mills, and the like were once Very Bad, and unions banded together to demand reform. I decided to do a little research to learn if the 8-8-8 chant was historically accurate. Here’s what I found out:
During the Industrial Period, workers led a movement advocating for better working conditions, particularly championing the concept of an 8-hour workday. The core belief was that laborers deserved 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours for personal pursuits. This movement aimed to address the harsh and exploitative working conditions prevalent in factories, seeking to establish a more balanced and humane work-life balance for workers. On May 1, 1886, a widespread strike occurred across the United States as hundreds of thousands of workers demanded an 8-hour workday. The rallying cry was, in fact, "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!” There was even a song about it!
The way my brain works, clinging to this concept of the 8 hours within my control isn’t pulled solely from the ether, but rather informed by how our society is structured. The key to my version of the 8 hour rule is how we think about those eight hours for personal pursuits. Because for many of us, the 8 hour workday is not a structure we can afford to break out of, and so the question becomes not how we can revolutionize the system, but how can we find fulfillment in the framework that is already in place. Like everything, it’s a work in progress.
