Mar. 2025 Newsletter: What I’ve Been Up To

Welcome to this month’s newsletter! Each month, I try to share what I’ve been up to, what things I’ve published that month, and exciting news if there’s any to be shared.

News and updates

This month we released our first new hub page, this one on Queer and Trans Literature. It contains resources about the importance of LGBTQ+ lit, reading recommendations, and more. These hub pages are living documents, and we will update them as needed. So if you have suggestions for the page, please contact us to let us know!

Next month we’ll hopefully roll out more hub pages, so there’s something to look forward to.

Blog posts from this month

In announcing our new hub pages, we also talked a little bit about moving from Surviving to Flourishing and what our hope for these pages is. Read more of our thoughts on that post!

As part of our new LGBTQ+ Tarot and Magic category, we both had thoughts about tarot, gender, and the future. First, Ashton talks about their experience with Erin Morgenstern’s Phantomwise Tarot and how it blends with their transness. Then Rachel adds thoughts on Rachel Pollack and Tarot coming from the future, not the past. Read it here: Meshing Transness and Tarot: Morgenstern’s Phantomwise Deck.

Changing Patterns

Before we get into the other main topic of this month, I am using Mac voice controls to dictate this portion of the post. It’s been a rough month in terms of joint pain, which finally pushed me to learn how to use Mac voice controls and dictation, for which I am deeply grateful. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to maintain my usual writing habit as I switched from typing to voice, but I think I’m writing more smoothly with my voice than I have been with my hands.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I am a very auditory thinker, so going from hearing my characters to speaking my characters is not that big of a transition. The second reason is that I can use my standing desk and pace. The third, very unsexy reason, is that this knuckle pain has been coming and going for a number of years and when I’m typing with my fingers, I’m sometimes also worrying about how much typing I should do, which pulls me out of the story that I’m telling. I grew up in a culture that mainly taught me to ignore low levels of pain, whether they’re physical, social, or emotional–rather than addressing them before they become moderate or severe levels of pain. In more recent years, one of my slogans for a living with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome has become: “no pain, no pain,” meaning that if I don’t put up with pain now I am less likely to have pain in the future. (See below for a deeper dive on my voice-based tech setup.)

Speaking of social pain, my original topic for this post was changing my shopping habits as some companies have backed away from their DEI stances. Capitalism has a lot of downsides, but one element that I appreciate is the option to vote with my money. I know a lot of people don’t have as much flexibility in that arena as would be ideal – and I definitely don’t want anyone to feel shame or other negative emotions if what works for you is to buy from Walmart, Amazon or similar companies.

For me, March has been a month of examining and changing patterns, including the patterns of where I shop. I had been getting a lot of groceries from Walmart, which in my area has great greens. I’d also fallen into the habit of ordering from Amazon rather than directly from vendors. 

I found this spreadsheet that maps which companies have backed off DEI, which have stood firm, and which have doubled down. In addition to looking at the spreadsheet, I’m also double-checking websites. DEI Policy Tracker for the People

Here are some of the companies that I am still shopping from or have added because of their commitment to DEI:

• Costco
• Lunds & Byerlys
• Hy-Vee
• Vitacost (owned by Kroger)
• iHerb 
• CVS 

I also had a lovely time last weekend visiting Restaurant Depot for the first time and buying about 15 lbs of various greens for a third of the price of grocery stores. 

Voice command and dictation deep dive

If you’re still with me, here’s the set-up that’s working for me now. In addition to learning voice controls/dictation, I also purchased a split keyboard so that when I’m typing, I can do so without also stressing my shoulder joint. The split keyboard is great not only for ergonomic typing but also because my cats are discovering that when I’m using the split keyboard, they can sit in my lap. In the past, I’ve used an ergonomic keyboard that was one piece and sat on my lap, which prevented cats from sitting there. Therefore, these changes are benefiting the entire household.

I’m using the built-in Mac dictation because I have all Mac products, though I’ve also found that the Google Docs dictation is very good. The benefit of using Mac for me at the moment is that it’s easy for me to put in custom vocabulary for character names. However, because I have an older laptop it turns out that the dictation on my iPad on my iPhone are much better than the dictation on my laptop. So I am using the app Diarly to dictate on my iPad and have it simultaneously show up on my laptop screen. I’m also using voice to text on my phone in a whole variety of apps which is really lovely.

I think the biggest challenge now is that it’s easy to keep dictating into a single document, even when I’m saying a variety of different ideas and parts of more than one story. The challenge is to then move those pieces of information and parts of scenes into the documents where they need to be. For this, I’ve been using Mac voice control because it has commands for “copy this, cut this, paste this,” and “copy that, cut that, paste that.” (Those are functionally the same.) This means that after I’ve done a bunch of writing, I can then use voice command and a left-handed mouse (because the left side of my body is in better shape than the right side in terms of joint well-being), to select chunks of text and use my voice to cut and paste them into the documents where they need to be.

Tune in next month when I will probably have an update about editing with voice. And also possibly some input about organizing story documents so they’re easy to access on multiple devices. 

Also, I would love to hear about your economic set-ups and any shopping or life changes you’ve been making this spring. You can let me know in the comments below. 

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Stay tuned next month for more blog posts, resources, and another newsletter. Thanks for being a reader!

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