Day 14 #1000wordsofsummer 2025

Because you are trying to carve out some space for yourself in the world.

Hi friends.

Today you will write 1000 words. Because you are trying to carve out some space for yourself in the world. In the beginning, it will be out of thin air. There is just the blank page and you digging into it. Starting from scratch, again and again, until the words begin to pile up and you’re forcing the world to open itself up for you. One thousand words at a time.

Congratulations, you did it! Two weeks in a row of writing, thinking, pushing your work forward, challenging yourself. Showing the fuck up. I know that it was hard. I hope that it was worth it. This was a tough one for me, and I know for a fact I couldn’t have done it without you. So thank you for being here with me.

And thank you to this year’s excellent contributing writers: Karen Russell, Torrey Peters, Susan Choi, Hala Alyan, Ada Calhoun, Rosa Alcalá, Jade Chang, Jason Diamond, Claire Cameron, Crystal Hana Kim, Angela Flournoy, and Aria Aber. Absolute all-star hitters this year. I am just dazzled by their words and generosity.

And another thank you to Kristen Arnett and Alex Chee for doing delightful livestreams with me early on a Saturday morning. Good friends, good humans.

Please buy everyone’s books. (And mine, too!)

Some housekeeping: We reached our fundraising goal! I will have final numbers next week and will report back to you. (Any overage will go to The Lynx Watch, which works to distribute challenged and banned books widely in Florida.) Thank you to everyone who donated.

And I will remind you the slack will stay open through the end of June. Our moderators Brooke and Melissa have done a great job (everyone give them a round of applause!) but now they must move on with their lives, as I must, too. I will be taking the next week or two off from this newsletter, and then I’ll be back here solidly in July with more letters and the occasional prompt. I hope you’ll stay with me as I claw my way to the end of this next draft.

My final thoughts: I’m proud of you all for making it to the end of this project. For some of you, you may say to yourself, “Well, I did that, and now I’m going to take the rest of the summer off and go swimming.” And honestly? That sounds really nice. Please invite me to your beach house.

And for some of you, you may close this window, write your final 1000 words of this week, and have a new understanding of what discipline and structure looks like and how to apply it to your writing in the future. I hope this project helped shift your relationship with your creativity—even if it was just in a small way.

And there are those of you who may say, “I’m in this now, and I can’t walk away from it,” and you just buckle down and do another fourteen days straight of writing and then keep going until your work is complete. And I am with you. Let’s cross this finish line together.

You do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself. But don’t forget about your writing. And don’t forget about your community, either. We need each other.

Sending you all my love,

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.

p.s. Are you going to your local No Kings protest tomorrow?