Let me start by saying I highly recommend subscribing to Process by Wil Dalton, a Substack by another member of the Foreign Service community, writer, and friend of mine. Wil recently wrote a post called “Songs I Cried To Flying Away From War” that resonated with me. For those who don’t know, Wil and I were both evacuated from the Middle East months ago – an experience I mentioned in my final post on my Foreign Service blog, nandm.sbitani.com.

A dear friend and colleague recently tagged me in a call for submissions to a self-published anthology of stories from diplomat moms. (Don’t worry; I checked and all the appropriate approvals will be completed with our employer.) I went back and forth on whether to submit – after all, shouldn’t my writing energies be going to my (painful but necessary) revisions on my latest novel? But Wil’s post reminded me that our personal stories also matter for our fiction. This is one of the things that will always separate human art from AI. We are whole people with life experiences and stories and loves and fears, and how could that not affect how we write, how we read, and how we understand the world and each other?

This is one of the reasons why, when I finish a book or a short story (especially one that I loved), I want to learn more about the author if they’ve chosen to make that information available. I love reading and listening to and watching author interviews, discovering their other work, hearing from them directly how they’ve grown or changed or how they hope people read their work or what they didn’t expect when they were creating it.

So I’ve decided to make some time to do some personal storytelling in addition to hacking away at my second novel draft. I’ll be sure to share more here once I have it.

For now, thank you for reading!

Nicole

Disclaimer: The views expressed in my newsletter or on my website are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of State or the United States.