🌟 Expanding my Substack 🌟

...in pursuit of more joy through more writing!

a lovely black walnut tree on our land

Corresponding to my inner growth these days, my Substack is growing up and out like a tree! I’ve created four sections (all free), to which people can subscribe separately: River Reflections, Serenity Splashes, Learning Lagoon, and Song Stream.

Current and new subscribers who don’t choose otherwise will be subscribed only to the first section (“River Reflections”). If you want to subscribe to one or more of the others, follow the steps at the bottom of this post to manage your subscription.

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1. River Reflections

a river I visited in northern Wisconsin

This will be my main, default blog, which will serve as a home base and author blog (for someday when I’m a published author! 😁). In this space I’ll post polished essays and poems, as well as updates from my writing life—including periodic digests of recent posts from other sections.

Speaking of writing-life updates, I actually have a big one to share at the moment: I won 2nd place in short story at the West Virginia Writers, Inc. contest! I’m so excited—it’s the first time I’ve ever placed!! 🎉🎉

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2. Serenity Splashes

looking at the sunset on Sannibel Island (2016)

This is the section I’m most excited to announce. I aim to post brief, daily “splashes” of uplifting thoughts, rooted in reason.

These posts may contain:

• quotes from books I’ve loved,

• pep talks (to myself, but shared),

• brief reflections on topics such as suffering and compassion,

• “learning poems” from my backstock (including ones posted previously, but not recently),

• and, of course, lovely nature photos.

I have so often yearned to have a resource like this, when I’m feeling low and scrolling the internet for something to uplift me. So now I’m finally just creating it! 💖

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3. Learning Lagoon

Twin 2 looking at the Kanawha River near Gauley Bridge

I’m also very excited about this one, but in a way that feels a more childish—I get giddy at the idea of having a designated space to write about things I’m learning.

I’m leaving this pretty wide open for now, topic-wise, to give myself plenty of rein for whatever currently interests my “shuffle brain” (as I call it). I might write about what I’m learning from the book Thinking Physics; I might write little lessons in poetry scansion, purely for fun; and of course, I’ll write plenty about personal growth—the main constant of my learning life.

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4. Song Stream

daylilies by the creek near our mailbox

This is a dedicated section for my songs—and it now includes a page for free downloads of the audio files, which I’ll update as I get my songs recorded.

I love putting my personal-growth learning into song form, to be able to sing and/or listen to it so as to help myself learn it better. And if my songs could help others in that way too, that would be the ultimate bonus! So if my songs resonate with you, please feel free to download them and listen at will.

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More Substacks in the Wings—and the Shadows

I’m also cooking up several other Substacks, separate from Whatever the River Brings.

Waiting in the Wings

These Substacks I’m planning will need to wait until I’ve finished my current main work-in-progress (the middle grade novel):

• A fiction Substack or two (or more!), for certain fiction projects currently on back burners

• A rationality Substack that aims to teach, in layperson/simpler terms, the concepts Eliezer Yudkowsky writes about in his essays Rationality: A-Z on LessWrong.com, as well as other concepts discussed in the Less Wrong/rationalist community (minus the AI talk, which is beyond me)

Hiding in the Shadows

I’ve also created three anonymous Substacks, to give myself spaces for raw, honest, explorative—and, hopefully, healing—writing on subjects that feel vulnerable to me:

1. My past spiritual abuse and developmental trauma

2. Grappling with conflicts in my marriage

3. Discovering and empowering neurodivergence in myself and my kids

If any of these particularly interest you, drop a comment, message, or email-reply to this post to let me know which one/s (1, 2, or 3), and I’ll subscribe you.

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Rooms for my writer

Creativity needs containers—structure and limits (though not pressure) that spark ideas, focus, and motivation. These Substack sections and blogs will serve as containers or structured spaces for my writing, like rooms of a house. Indulging this metaphor here for the fun of it…

• The anonymous Substacks are the basement, bedroom, and garden, respectively

• River Reflections is the living room

• Serenity Splashes is the sunroom

• Learning Lagoon is the study

• Song Stream is the music room/den

The idea is that on a given day, I can pick a room, walk in, and start talking (writing).

This feels like love to the deepest part of me—my inner writer. 💗

Thank you for being here to help me create this space!

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Instructions for managing your section subscriptions:

• By email (easiest): Just click “unsubscribe” at the bottom of any email from me—don’t worry, it won’t unsubscribe you—and you’ll be taken to the subscription management page.

• In the app: you’ll have to open my Substack (annaeplin.com) in a web browser, because apparently the Substack app does not really support sections yet. Then:

  • Enter your email address if prompted, and verify using the code emailed to you

  • Click on the circle with your picture/avatar at the top right

  • Click “Manage Subscription” from the drop-down menu.

Let me know if you have any trouble!

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