Lucy Bellwood @lubellwoo@xoxo.zone

Mastodon I swear I haven’t abandoned you for good things are just complicated between me and social media right now. But I recorded a new Ramble this week! Maybe you’ll enjoy listening to it: https://www.patreon.com/posts/ramble-13-34777995

Sometimes you go for a walk to clear your head in the dusk and end up in a Yoshida Hiroshi woodblock print.

Yesterday I walked into Outsider Comics, one of my favorite shops in the PNW, and it felt like coming home. The staff made me feel so special as a creator, but I also saw them greet every customer who came through the door with the same easy enthusiasm and kindness. Definitely worth a visit if you're in Seattle.

Another day at the office.

People are posting photos of all the cool stuff they're mailing to trade with the Boat Gnome and I am so so so excited. Non-commercial art projects rule. Using the postal system rules. Gnomes rule.

I'm riffing on my friend Shing's project to launch the Boat Gnome Mercantile Trading Program. It's a playful, subversive game where you trade trinkets through the mail with a mysterious gnome. Learn more here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/creating-boat-29310969

My friends send the best mail.

Hooooly heck Daisy Johnson wrote a novel after her beautiful and unsettling short story collection, Fen, and it is VERY GOOD. It's called Everything Under. Go get it. #reading #bookrecs #books

Finished this hat I've been using to keep my hands busy while I recover from The Stingray Incident. You can't reeeeeally tell I had to stripe in a different color because I ran out of yarn 😬 (Okay you CAN but I don't think it looks awful.)

I've been giving myself permission to record 20-minute audio dispatches to keep people apprised of my thoughts and projects. I take a walk, or sit outside and watch the trees, and talk for a bit, and read excerpts of books I'm enjoying, and take a photo, and then it's done. The latest one is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/rambling-4-29225188

Knitting and television! The comfort! The familiarity! It's been too long.

Finally turned all these old calendar pages into envelopes. Lots of succulent mail headed out in the week to come.

Finally reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey right now and it is just STAGGERINGLY compelling. Direct without losing the beauty of the language. I'm flying through it.

Awww gosh, Good Omens 💛

Anyway, if folks want to check out the episode (and the show!) it's right over here: https://mailchimp.com/presents/podcast/going-through-it/samin-nosrat (And forgive me if I've threaded this incorrectly! Still learning.)

I'm nine years into my career right now, and putting constant pressure on myself to have a sense of the next thing, to produce faster, to learn more. The recognition that it takes SIX YEARS for something like that to come into being is a reminder I think everyone could use.

It's almost an afterthought—not the meat of the episode at all—but my ears perked up because those two tiny sentences hold SIX YEARS of hard work, drafting, revision, networking, dedication, and processing. They're placed next to one another so innocently, as if the hard work had already come to pass and it was just a matter of "sitting down" in order for the book to emerge.

Been listening to Going Through It, a podcast about women navigating pivotal decisions in their lives. The episode with Samin Nosrat (of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat fame) is splendid, but the MOST valuable thing about it is the line that comes after she quits her food-related job to become a writer. "Samin left her people-pleasing ways behind in 2011," the host says, "and she sat down at that desk. In 2017 she published her first book [...] which became a bestseller."