February Newsletter 2025

Happy Saturday, everyone! Are you as happy it’s the weekend as I am? I kind of doubt it…

I wrote a lot for this newsletter from a place of exhaustion and lack of inspiration that I hope doesn’t show too much. But even though it might not be the highest quality email I’ve ever written, I believe it shows some more personal things about me, everything from my slightly extreme obsession with organization to what Autism looks like for me. I’d love to know what you think of it!

Writing: Organization

If you’re a writer, you probably know the feeling of having dozens of random envelopes, receipts, and sticky notes containing half-legible sentences, endless documents on your word processor that are impossible to navigate, and so many accounts on different online writing tools that you can no longer remember which one does what. Especially with my love of organization, I have gotten to the point of wanting to bang my head against the wall struggling to order the chaos of a writer’s brain.

While there’s some areas where I still have trouble, over the last few months I feel like I’ve finally got a handle on organizing my writing things. I thought it might be helpful for you, my fellow writers, to share some of the basic services/tools that have helped me!

Google Docs/Google Drive: Now, this one may seem pretty obvious because the majority of writers that I know already use this tool, but there are a couple tools within Google Docs/Google Drive that I’d highly recommend using. 1) Use Google Drive to organize all of your documents or even things like spreadsheets and slides into folders and sub-folders. This makes it seem more manageable visually and it’s much easier to find that random story you started writing a couple months ago when new inspiration strikes. 2) Take advantage of the tabs feature within Google Docs. This allows you to organize your documents even further. I found this super helpful for combining all my character profiles, editing notes, outlines, and the actual draft of a story into one document. Plus you can add fun emojis for each tab. 😏 

Trello.com: I mentioned this service in the 2nd newsletter I ever wrote and I still am using it today, though not quite as much. I originally found this tool very helpful for outlining (you can read about that here), but now I mainly use it to keep track of my goals as well as publishing and newsletter information. These are the uses I’ve found it helpful for, but I’m sure there are dozens of others— play around with it!

Writing notebook: At first, this one is just as obvious as Google Docs, but it’s not that you should have a writing notebook (most writers do), but I’m saying that you should have a writing notebook, just one. It can be easy to start dozens of notebooks or keep notes and ideas scattered around on random scraps of paper, but it’s super helpful to keep it all in one spot. I would recommend not choosing a super pretty notebook, that way, when it inevitably becomes a mess of illegible scribbles or half drawn maps, you aren’t tempted to start over in a new, cleaner looking notebook.

Calendars: This is one of my favorite ways to organize my writing progress/keep track of my writing goals. Each month, I print out a new calendar (from printabulls.com if you’re interested) and then each day, I log my writing progress. As you can see in the picture, I like to color coordinate what I’ve done that day based on what type of task it is. I think it’s really important to log every little achievement and not just word count. You should be proud of every page you edited, all the writing craft books you’ve read, and any time you critique someone else’s work because those are all important to your growth as a writer too!

I’m now realizing just how geeky this whole section sounds 😳🤣 But anyway… if you have any more questions about the specifics of these tools or have a writing organizer that you’d like to share with me, I would love to hear from you!

Reading: An Enchantment of Ravens

An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson

A gentle romance set in a cozy, but multilayered fantasy world.

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy

Age rating: 13+

With a flick of her paintbrush, Isobel creates stunning portraits for a dangerous set of clients: the fair folk. These immortal creatures cannot bake bread or put a pen to paper without crumbling to dust. They crave human Craft with a terrible thirst, and they trade valuable enchantments for Isobel’s paintings. But when she receives her first royal patron—Rook, the autumn prince—Isobel makes a deadly mistake. She paints mortal sorrow in his eyes, a weakness that could cost him his throne, and even his life.

Furious, Rook spirits Isobel away to his kingdom to stand trial for her crime. But something is seriously amiss in his world, and they are attacked from every side. With Isobel and Rook depending upon each other for survival, their alliance blossoms into trust, perhaps even love . . . a forbidden emotion that would violate the fair folks’ ruthless laws, rendering both their lives forfeit. What force could Isobel's paintings conjure that is powerful enough to defy the ancient malice of the fairy courts? (Official blurb)

Though An Enchantment of Ravens didn’t have the most plot-twist-ridden plot or the most complex world building, I still thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, that’s why I enjoyed it.

With every chapter I listened to, my writer’s brain was amazed how Margaret Rogerson could take such simple ideas and turn them into a compelling and heartfelt story. I think what made it work was her ability to take one element in each area of the story and really lean into it. It gave the world building through the romance depth and realism that I really admired.

I rarely read a book and feel like I really, really know the character, like almost on a personal level. But I felt that with Isobel. Even though I only spent a quarter to a third of the book in Whimsy (the small town where Isobel lives), I already felt at home and like I understood the villagers ways of life. And don’t get me started on the romance. Rook and Isobel’s relationship was adorably sweet and gentle.

So, to sum it up: I highly recommend this book and I hope that I can take some of the techniques used in this story and learn how to use them in my own writing.

Progress on my reading challenge: 2/16

These were both pretty easy challenges to meet, but I thoroughly enjoyed both books!

• A book with a map: The Blood Traitor by Lynette Noni

• Sword on the Cover: The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson

Spotlight: Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

This year, I would like to start writing some opinion pieces, if you will, for this section of the newsletter— posts where I discuss things that I’ve been thinking about/am passionate about. Let me know if that sounds interesting to you, or if there’s something you’d like me to write about!

To start with, I want to talk about a topic very close to me: Autism. Some of you may know this, most of you probably don’t, but I was diagnosed with ASD or Autistic Spectrum Disorder two or three years ago.

You may be wondering, “What?” “How?” “She doesn’t seem Autistic.” When many people, including myself at first, think about Autism, they tend to think of the extreme cases where the Autistic person is non-verbal or can’t take care of themselves. But that mindset is both false and harmful.

Autism is a spectrum—that’s why it’s called ASD. It can appear in many different ways, but many people don’t realize this. As a result, many individuals, especially girls, are often misdiagnosed with depression or anxiety instead of receiving the support and understanding they need for their Autism.

Because of my personal experience being misunderstood due to the nature of my Autistic traits, I believe it is my duty to help spread awareness about Autism whenever and wherever I can, so people like me don’t have to face some of the issues I did.

So what does Autism look like for me? Most of you are probably still wondering how I have Autism and that’s reasonable because, unless you’re super close to me, you probably wouldn’t even know any of my symptoms existed. For the purpose of this post, I’m going to divide my Autistic traits into three categories: sensory, cognitive, and social.

Sensory: Like most Autistic people, I struggle with certain sensory issues. For me, it’s not generally one sense in particular that bothers me, but the combination of a couple or more of them. When I'm in an environment that’s bright and loud and there are strong smells, I get overwhelmed very easily and my head gets what I call “foggy”. It feels like I have a cloud in my head and it makes it harder to process things and come up with responses.

Cognitive: This is one area where I fit in with a lot of other Autistic people. I’m highly analytical, preferring facts to people, I have extremely intense focus when I’m working on stuff that I’m passionate about, and my IQ is a little bit above average. That doesn’t mean these areas don’t have downsides though. It’s hard for me to connect with other people’s emotions and establish relationships with people who have different interests with me.

Social: This is by far the hardest of the three categories for me to deal with. Social situations are really hard for me, especially when the sensory and mental issues are added on top of it. Reading and forming the correct facial expressions/social procedures are generally hard for people with ASD and I’m no exception. I tend to over-analyze everything and it takes me longer than it does for most people to come up with correct facial/verbal responses.

One funny/interesting example of how my cognitive and social traits overlap is that I recently was in a minor fender-bender and when I called 911, I had a much easier time talking to the operator than ordering from the barista at Starbucks a couple of hours earlier. When I know generally what to expect, I do a lot better than more open-ended social situations. This also connects to how I would much rather perform on the piano or sing for hundreds of people than small-talk with one or two people.

I hope that this can be a window for some of you, giving you a chance to understand your fellow humans a little bit better, and for others of you this can be a mirror, an opportunity for you to feel seen and understood. Let me know if you have any more questions, I would love to answer them!

Quick Writing Update

• Wrote 10,000 words in my new sci-fi project

• Wrote 1,500 words in Project:Europe

• Started reading through The Phoenix Pendant in preparation for a third draft

What did you think of my post on Autism? Did it help you in anyway? Would you enjoy more posts like that? I would really appreciate it if you let me know by replying directly to this email or leaving me a comment of the website that corresponds to The Introverted Writer!

Thank you so much for reading! Have a great rest of your day!

Abby Henderson

P.S. Keep an eye out for my next newsletter coming out on March 1st!