Plot Points #96 💌
Winter storms, cozy games, middle-school crushes, and piety
Plot Points is a weekly newsletter where I share my favorite books, links, words, and more. If you enjoy what you find here, please consider subscribing or leaving a tip. Thank you!
Hello and happy Friday!
We’re all of us bracing for Winter Storm Fern, set to arrive with gusto late tomorrow afternoon and into Sunday. We don’t winter well here in Georgia, and ice tends to cause a lot of stress and heavy damage in an area that doesn’t typically require more layers than a thick sweater until January. We’ve learned our lesson and are better equipped than in previous years (#snowmageddon), but it’s always a cause for concern. I’m praying for all of us in the path of the storm, especially my Mid-Atlantic and New England pals. Stay safe and warm!
Thanks for being here today,
Wendi
P.S. I just re-released The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Published as a FREE download if you want to snag a copy for yourself! Get it right here 👇🏻.
Word of the Week ✍🏻
Matutine: (adj.) Just before the dawn.
Point #1: Don’t waste that!
Y’all know I’m a thrifter. It’s my Roman Empire. Almost all our home decor and my entire wardrobe is secondhand. I’m also learning ways to reduce waste— particularly food waste—in our home, so I was excited to see this wonderful post with wartime tips from Sarah Lee! Did you know you aren’t supposed to let tomatoes ripen in the sun? Well, you do now.
Point #2: Cultivate piety like it’s 1999.
Whenever Autumn Kern speaks, I’m gonna listen. She is a classical home educator with writes, speaks, and shares resources for mothers who want to live more embodied, virtuous lives, and I loved this short list of habits she’s encouraging in both herself and her children. How can we honor the different roles we play at home and in society? How can we regain some of the healthy social norms we’ve lost? Autumn has some ideas:
Point #3: How about some board games?
During my weekly1 perusal of Barnes & Noble, I’ve noticed a wonderful selection of bookish and cozy board games on sale. What a fun trend! I’ll take a stroll through a small English village for points, please and thanks. While we’re wintering and spending more time indoors, Kristen LaValley has a curated selection of cozy games, both board and video, to help keep us occupied.
Bonus Point: We’re entering the middle-school crush era.
I used to be the kid in the backseat, now I’m the mom in the front.
Reading in The Nook 📚
I’m just about done with The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, which has been an experience of sheer delight. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, I’ve marveled at Brower’s ability to craft a sentence that just dances though your mind. If you haven’t gotten on the Emma M. Lion bandwagon, do it!
Next up on my list is a NetGalley ARC of Each and Every Spark, the latest middle-grade novel from one of my favorite Substackers, Claire the Catholic Feminist. If you read my piece on Anne Frank last week, you know how much her diary and the events happening in the world at that time have informed my writing and my love of stories. Each and Every Spark is a dual-narrative of two young girls set during WWII and present-day Paris, and I can’t wait to see how Claire has taken this much-beloved genre and created her own beautiful story of resistance.
What are you reading right now? 👇🏻
(All Bookshop.org links are affiliates. Thank you for supporting The Nook with your purchase.)
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
—Albert Camus—
Ahem, daily
I'll add 'being included in a newsletter along with Emma M. Lion' as a highlight-of-the-day to my journal.
Later
Or, perhaps, highlight-of-the-week.