Writing Seasons Part 2: Season of Tending

A time when you're ready to try courageous experiments, learn new technology (yikes) and bring your writing into the world. Where are you in your writing life cycle?

⚪️ Part 1 — Season of Musing

🟢 Part 2 — Season of Tending

⚪️ Part 3 — Season of Craft

⚪️ Part 4 — Season of Rest

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Welcome back to Writing Seasons.

In our first part of the Season of Musing, we touched the raw, restless beauty of Musing — a time of interior wandering and unresolved questions. Now, we pivot into the Season of Tending, where the writing asks to be seen, shared and supported. This season invites you to build containers for your voice — through marketing, platforms, community and design — not in performative ways, but with intention and care.

In the midst of my Season of Musing, there was a lot to uncover. As a late-diagnosed person, I felt like everything that made my life especially tiring or challenging was rooted in the fact that I was trying to imitate neurotypical people. I had secondary training in marketing, branding and design, but how all of these modalities are normally applied made me deeply uncomfortable or made no interior sense to me. I had imitated their advice anyway and forced myself for years into uncomfortable, exhausting situations where I always had to assume a new mask to make it through.

Once I accepted the truth of who I was, I began looking at where pretending to be a neurotypical writer had been setting me up for failure.

And now the task in front of me was to decide if I wanted my own writing to become more than a thing I fiddled with during my daughter’s naps — or if I wanted to take on the gargantuan task of embracing a Season of Tending.

It’s the time when your writing practice is in a supportive rhythm (less of a slippery fish like in the Season of Musing and more stable) and it’s time to give your attention to connecting with people who need your writing most. This is the time when we writers have to decide if our work isn’t just for writing in romantic coffee shops or Italian villas — and consider if we want our work to be something that others read.

In a Season of Tending, we’re giving concentrated attention to marketing, branding, learning and relationship building. Depending on your aims, this can include a lot of study and socially participating in new and different ways. This might be a season where you offer concentrated effort to choose one way to regularly share your writing online — is it a website, a newsletter like Substack or something else entirely?

Once you have picked a single destination where all your writing is shared from, give yourself the proper amount of time to really, deeply understand that tool.

• If you are using a new website platform, it’s OK if it takes you several months to get up and running. We’ll wait for you to figure things out.

• Once you understand how to draft, format, insert images, write headlines and publish a piece, nothing can stop you.

• If you’re struggling with the basics, that’s OK. Take your time! Your writing is worth learning how to confidently use these tools.

Perhaps you need some help with heart-centered branding, the kind of design and stylization of your work that feels most reflective of you. This means:

• choosing which typefaces you want your newsletter to show up in;

• designing a header and choosing colors you want on your emails, your website or newsletter;

• deciding how you will give your work a visual tangibility alongside the wonderful prose you are sharing.

Maybe you already have the visual and branding things worked out. But how will you find and cultivate a readership? One of the most frustrating pieces about being a writer is that networking isn’t something we can get out of but it is something we can and should step into as ourselves.

I’m not really inclined to go to random coffee houses and talk to strangers. Even if I go to a conference, I’m not instinctively drawn to be chatty with other people — I’m there to learn and tuck away what I want to dream about next. However, after a decade or more of this, I realized that how neurotypical people “network” and how I build relationships aren’t so far apart. It’s just that I do this work slowly and methodically so that I don’t burn out.

A Season of Tending prioritizes deeply nourishing relationships in diverse settings. This takes some experimenting for each writer to find the right combination of in-person versus online versus short-form dialogue versus forum engaging in comment sections and so forth. There are so, so many ways to connect with other writers and readers. And it is energy-intensive work to find the places where you want to intentionally learn and share your work.

As you consider what it means to tend to your writing and invite others into your world, remember: the tools you choose should fit you. Whether you’re experimenting with branding or quietly learning a new platform, every small effort contributes to a practice that can sustain you. In the next season, we’ll explore how to polish and elevate your words in the Season of Craft — where refinement becomes a form of devotion.

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Trying to bring your work into the world? Are you publishing on Substack?

The Season of Tending is usually the one where creatives bristle the most — it involves elements like marketing, promotions, learning new tech and (gasp) maybe even learning to befriend your analytics. But it’s part of what the seasons invite us to consider: that getting our work into the world is a sacred calling and it asks us to bring more courage than ever.

If you’re feeling the tension inside the Season of Tending, The Publishing Spectrum is designed to help support your publishing and creative processes. These are some of my Substack publishing foundational pieces, which can help you with things like welcome email frameworks, your Substack first impressions and a Substack editorial branding checklist.

If you’d like to talk more in-depth about the Writing Season you’re in, please consider joining us next week in a live Zoom call. Registration is free and linked below.