Hello! Welcome to the winter-vacation syndication segment of the newsletter! The Friday Dispatch and other regular Hattie content is on a break until January 12th. Until then, you’ll be getting some top-ten lists from me.
Let’s kick things off with my own favorite posts from 2023. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, you may not have seen some of these before, because they were previously paywalled; they’re now available whether you are on a paid plan or not.
My 10 Favorite Posts From My Own Substack In 2023
The Pain I’d Like to Learn to Miss – This is my favorite thing I wrote in 2023. It’s about asthma, chronic pain, being believed and feeling okay. For a long time, it lived in my head – the week I was diagnosed with, and finally treated for, asthma, is when I started writing it in my mind. Getting it out onto the page was cathartic. I felt so much relief, almost as using my inhaler for the first time.
Okay. Not THAT much.Buy My Silence – An essay about the worst temp job ever, and the draft of my novel that came from it. This one has some bona fides! It was selected for, and published in, an anthology called “HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL: An Anthology of 20 Craft Essays About Writing, None of Which Ever Mention Writing.” That book is available via Autofocus Lit!
Everyone Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt – An open letter to the beauty blogs that made me the writer I am today, and the benefit of putting little golden dinosaurs in your hair.
Who is Writing Stepsister Erotica Under My Name? – A bizarre story with an unsatisfying resolution. If you look up “Hattie Hayes” on Amazon, you’ll see over a dozen Kindle books with my name on them. They’re all porn. I did not write them.
Solicited Advice #1 – The first installment in my writing advice column. My friend Tristan asks, “How did you build consistency with your writing practice?” I do my best to answer.
My Apartment Has a Chandelier – Originally a post on my old blog, revisited with love. I’m glad I wrote this, because I ended up moving out of my delightful, cruddy apartment and into a delightful, non-cruddy one, and I’ll always have this essay to act like a little locket full of memories.
The Hasty Retreat – A story I don’t tell that often. In fall of 2020, I locked myself in someone else’s house for a long weekend to write. It…did not go how I’d planned.
Some Final Thoughts on NaPoWriMo – I spent all of April writing poems or writing about poems. In my wrap-up post, I dig into many of the craft choices I made in my work and review my stats from this year’s National Poetry Writing Month. There are some interesting connections to prior years’ poems, as well as some new work that made its way into my book.
Maybe Barbie is Not for You – A critical look at the pinkest movie of the year. Is Barbie perfect? No. And if you wanted it to be, you’re missing the point.
The Worst Dunkin in the World – A love letter to the little Dunkin’ that couldn’t.