Hi, I’m Rianna Cohen, a speculative fiction writer and hot chocolate aficionado currently reading The Neverending Story. If you feel so inclined, please:
We’ve reached the end of the first quarter of 2024, Good Friday, the early days of Spring. Here we turn a corner. Here we pivot, reassess, pause for breath.
And pause I have:
I’d fully intended to send the first part of Oma at the Opera this month, but there’s more work to be done and I’m still waiting for permissions from publishers.
I set aside the novel draft I was working on because I couldn’t focus, couldn’t find or settle into the voice of the story.
Illness kept me in bed for the better part of two weeks.
I was fortunate to spend time with family in New Hampshire and Maine.
I was accepted into a writing program which begins in the fall and, subsequently, I’ve been reevaluating finances and my writing plans for the remainder of the year.
I have no idea what I’m doing in this space—it’s still wildly experimental and I greatly appreciate you being here, especially given most of you don’t send me straight to your email trash can. But I took a moment (or several) this month to consider whether or not substack is the right platform for me. I’m not sure yet.
While in Maine, I visited a Lithuanian-founded monastery in Kennebunk. It was an overcast day with periodic heavy rain and, after attending a Latin Mass (where I was saved from lack-of-fluency shame by a face mask), I walked the grounds. Yellow, marshy grass squelched underfoot and I envisioned myself as an extra in Wuthering Heights or Northanger Abbey. Albeit one with sneakers.
As you would expect at a monastery, everything was blanketed in silence. But not the suffocating kind. The silence of peace and contemplation and intimacy. The sort that invites us in and exposes our hidden depths.
Though I (and I imagine most of you) don’t have a monastery nearby, I’m trying to carry a piece of it with me—that sense of spiritual rest which refuses to worry about worldly success or timelines or muddy patches of grass.
This has been difficult since, I admit, I’ve felt a bit like I’m falling behind, that I’ll never get there, wherever ‘there’ is. But, as Confucius reminds us:
It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop.1
And so, like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable, I will go, however slowly, while still remembering that to pause is not the same as to stop. For only a fool, when finding himself lost in the woods, would keep charging blindly forward rather than taking stock of his surroundings.
Until next time, may you press pause (because you’ve watched enough Netflix for one lifetime),
Rianna
March…
Music: The Yellow Bustard by Traonach, Shostakovich
Read: The Neverending Story, lots of articles, 1 Corinthians
Wrote: New scenes, revised old ones, this post about rejections
Up Next:
Music: I’m looking for epic French horn moments (particularly from film scores, but I’m open to orchestral excerpts). If you have recommendations, let me know.
Reading: 2 Corinthians, The Last Unicorn
Writing: The goal is to finish something…
More: Celebrations, open windows, memorizing poems
Less: Internet use while writing
Some translations prefer “as long as you do not stop.”
I love this. ♥
“that sense of spiritual rest which refuses to worry about worldly success or timelines or muddy patches of grass“
Love this so much… the layers of wisdom.