It was 4 a.m. I'd finished the final edits the night before. The 24 hours after I finish any book is always an emotional roller coaster. The giddy high of completion. The satisfaction of adding another title to my growing catalog. The sense of completeness that comes from telling a story just the way I wanted to tell it. 

Often, the story keeps replaying in my head, my mind not ready to leave it just yet. But soon a "letting go" process starts, the emotional distancing needed to properly release that story into the world. You see, once the readers have it, it belongs to them. They'll love it or they'll hate it—that's their job. Mine is done. 

But here I was at 4 a.m., wide awake and feeling the terror of vulnerability. What if the book was actually terrible? What if the cynics were right and daring to hope wasn't punk at all but naïveté? Who was I to think I could write this and do it well?

These are the secret fears of writers. Ones I'd grappled with and conquered long ago, rearing their hydra heads once again.

Why? Because you can't write a book about radical compassion without vulnerability. You can't dare to create something new, something so deeply counter to a culture of cynicism and violence, without risking something. You have to take the chance of being wrong, being soft, being attacked. That's what hopepunk is... and you can't write it without living it.

Then I remembered, at 4 a.m., that I'm strong enough for all that. 

You see, I know vulnerability is the compass pointing where I need to go with my art. The terror is reduced to stealth attacks at 4 a.m. because that's the only time it can get to me. I mean, seriously, get in line, tribulations about my art—there are greater monsters to fear than you afoot in the world.

But it was quite the dip in the emotional rollercoaster, one I should have seen coming. That's okay. Vulnerability is courage. And I have enough of that to love expansively, create compassionately, and dare greatly. 

Which is good, because I'll need all that when I start the second book on Monday.

If you haven't seen Brené Brown's TED Talk on Vulnerability, drop everything and watch it now.

When you have a keen sense of what vulnerability is all about and how it intersects with art, watch the video below and observe this beautiful demonstration of it.

A LITTLE SIDE NOTE

You know that trick of the universe where you put out a certain kind of energy and, eventually, it starts coming back to you? Well, I've been talking about hopepunk enough that my friends are starting to bring me little gifts—memes, songs, threads. They say, "Look, Sue, it's hopepunk!" And it is. And there's such a joy in that, I had to share. Because that's how this works, friends.

That's how this works.

Peace and Love,

Sue

Previous Newsletters

1. A Brief History of HopePunk and how I've been writing it for years.
   
2. On Writing HopePunk
   
3. Hopepunk vs. Dystopias
4. The Hero is All of Us
5. First Draft DONE!
   
6. The Heroine's Journey
7. We're all Connected...
8. Writing in the Time of Insanity