“The Core of Beauty is Simplicity.” - Paulo Coelho

Lit Salon on simple approaches to jump starting creative work (and some reasons we tend to complicate it), plus a rudimentary nuts-and-bolts guide to finding and using Writing in the Dark's exercises

I write to you in the late afternoon today, from an Airbnb in Champaign, Illinois, with just one more day of driving to reach my home in Minneapolis.

Therefore, today’s Lit Salon is a simple one taken directly from an email I received from a reader just a few hours ago—a reader asking a nuts-and-bolts question about how to more easily find WITD exercises on the homepage.

I answer her question in two ways.

First, the question she directly asks, yes (and some good news to announce there as well!), Second, I speculate on a question she didn’t directly ask, but pointed to, which is whether and why we might sometimes procrastinate and make things complicated.

I’m interested in the second question, because of course I do those things myself. I procrastinate and complicate. I figure some of you do, too.

So I hope this is all useful to you.

And later, once my body and mind reconnect to the ground beneath me, once I can run my fingers along my own doorframes, smell the sunshine in my own living …