What? A New Substack?

The Wordle Bot Made Me Do It

I promise I’m not one to post my Wordle scores, but today, the Wordle bot gave me this response to my first word pick (I change my word every day based on my mood, which I think says a lot about my personality):

This feels like a sign, like a fortune cookie message that comes at just the right moment.

I’m bold! Well, I like to think I’m bold. I’m afraid of phone calls and babies with no neck control, but I have not an iota of care about crunching a 2-inch palmetto bug¹ beneath my shoe (not yet at the point where I can do that in bare feet). I drove alone across the U.S.² and hitchhiked in Bulgaria³. I can listen to my (somewhat adult) daughter discuss her dating life without screaming “Nooooo!” and locking her in her room.

This is me, in 1997, with a monk named Mikel, at the Bachkovo Monastery in Bulgaria. Apparently, 1997 me was very good at labeling photos. The monk and the monastery were lovely, but not so much the bus back to Plovdiv that never showed up, forcing me to hitchhike back to my hostel.

I’m creative! I’m a little more confident in the creative part as I am a writer who also crochets, cooks, embroiders, comes up with weird names for my dog, sings songs incredibly off-key while making up new lyrics, and always has the idea for something that will definitely get me in trouble.

I’ve been thinking of starting a newsletter for a while now, and clearly the Wordle bot was trying to give me a nudge. So this is the result. This is just the introduction. The first newsletter will appear on this page and in your in-box (if you subscribe! Please subscribe!) starting on January 13, 2025.

Hopefully I’ll see you again! Until then, make good choices.

jennifer

1. “What is a palmetto bug?” the northerners among you might ask. It’s like a roach. But bigger. And it flies. You can google it yourself.

2. I still have the three-page letter, written by hand, from my mother who left it for me under my door the night before I left. It warned me I was going to get myself killed driving solo on the empty stretches of Texas and that the trip was the dumbest ideas I’d ever had. Well, I’ve proved her wrong. In the years since then, I’ve had MUCH dumber ideas!

3. I asked my husband, “If you were me, where you be keeping your photos of Bulgaria?”

“Obviously in my Bulgaria file. Was that helpful?” No. No, it was not. Luckily I found the photos despite his unhelpful advice.