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Project Hail Mary – WOW! by Kitty Bucholtz

April 9, 2026 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz, Writing tagged as film adaptation, It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, Project Hail Mary, Sci-fi, science fiction

A couple Christmases ago, John gave me an autographed copy of Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I was so excited, but had a few books in my TBR pile that I wanted to finish first. Then I heard the movie was going to be made, so I wanted to wait. I don’t like reading the book before I watch the movie because the movie ends up feeling just a little disappointing. Reading the book after watching the movie also adds all the details the movie couldn’t add, so that makes me happy.

The day before my birthday, John and I went to the big cinema and settled in for the show. About three-quarters of the way through, I leaned over and whispered, “It’s not even over and I already want to watch it again!”

Project Hail Mary had me laughing and crying and gasping all the way through! As luck would have it, I was able to watch the movie again the next week — and it was still just as amazing! By then I had also started reading the autographed book — and like I’d hoped, it was even better! Then my friend and audiobook narrator, Catherine Gaffney, told me the audiobook narrator, Ray Porter, was incredible. I listened to just the 5-minute sample and was blown away!

This is a first for me: I own and am reading the hardcover, I own and am listening to the audiobook, and I have watched the movie twice in the first month of release. (And I am sooo buying the DVD when it’s released!)

I know there are a lot of romance readers and writers on this blog and let me tell you, Ryan Gosling’s character, Dr Ryland Grace, and his new friend Rocky — wow, they’re amazing examples of love and commitment. The characterization of everyone in the movie was heartwarming and made me feel connected to the story on every level. I hope you give it a try in whatever format you prefer.

I love Andy Weir’s The Martian and own it in paperback and on DVD, and I’ve watched the movie many times. But I love Project Hail Mary even more. Rocky’s expression sums it up for me: Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!

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Finding Peace and Joy Again by Kitty Bucholtz

January 9, 2026 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz, Writing tagged as ADHD in writers, It's Worth It, joy, Kitty Bucholtz, menopause, Perimenopause, writing

It’s been a rough few years for me. Burnout, butt-kicking perimenopause, then menopause that didn’t “pause” my symptoms much. I’ve felt broken. And every January, I hope and pray that this year will be better. This New Year’s, I barely let myself consider the idea for fear that I will be disappointed yet again.

And yet…

A friend of mine has been urging me for months to read some of the materials she’s found on ADHD in adult women. I’ve resisted, feeling these diagnoses are yet another fad created by Big Pharma to increase their profits at our expense. But I finally listened to one of the audiobooks over Christmas vacation. I felt as gobsmacked as when I took the CliftonStrengths test a year or so ago!

Suddenly, it seemed a light turned on in my head showing me what I already knew about myself but with a lot more depth and clarity and understanding. Both times, it was like I could see things I knew were there (like the living room couch, the TV stand, the window covered with blackout curtains) but now I could SEE them! The couch is red and has thick, soft cushions. The TV stand is small, made of pale wood, but the TV is quite large. And the window is bigger and lets in more light than I realized when it was curtained.

What a difference!!

Personality traits that I have been both comfortable with and frustrated by now appear to be different than I’d thought. Maybe I wasn’t actually broken; maybe some of my tools had broken. The tools I’d used to cope with life (we all have them, whatever our personality traits) stopped working as well when hormones and stress blind-sided me. But the books I’ve been reading have reminded me that I am not broken and I don’t need to be fixed. I’ve just been shoved, hard, off course and need to catch my breath and remind myself how to get back up again.

I have no interest in getting tested for ADHD by a psychiatrist or psychologist, but I am very interested in improving my toolbox: sharpening old skills, developing new ones, perhaps letting go of mechanisms that no longer work as well for me. And I think this is going to make a big difference in my writing.

I’ve just started reading The Artist’s Joy by Merideth Hite Estevez, and The ADHD Advantage by Dale Archer, M.D. Both are blowing me away and making me feel — I’m not the only one who feels this way!! (The book that I first read on my friend’s suggestion is A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD by Sari Solden, M.S.)

If you’re feeling overwhelmed with life, or lacking joy and passion, perhaps some of these books or other similar titles will help you get a better handle on what’s not working and how to get back on track again. I’ll continue writing about this in the future in case it’s helpful!

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Planning for Peace by Kitty Bucholtz

December 9, 2025 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz, Writing tagged as It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, menopause, organization, Perimenopause, Planning, writing

Everyone who knows me knows I’m big on planning. That’s because my brain gets all stressed out if I don’t know what’s going on, whether I have time to say yes to something, or when I’m afraid I’m missing out on something. That’s why I already know where we’re spending Christmas (with friends a few minutes away), what I’m bringing for dinner (a homemade chocolate pie, homemade cornbread, and drinks), and what I’ll be wearing (embroidered jeans, a lightweight knit shirt, and taking both a sweater and sweatpants for warmth and comfort later). All that in the first week of December! Woohooo!! And now I’m not stressed at all about Christmas. (Yup, Christmas shopping already done!)

But when it comes to still trying to balance the changes menopause is having on my brain and my energy with the goals I want to achieve in 2026…well, planning in a way that will bring me the most peace is critical. One of the things I learned is that cortisol, the stress hormone, can make menopause symptoms worse. So if I’m feeling stressed by how I’m feeling (or by how it’s keeping me from achieving my goals!), the stress actually makes the symptoms worse.

Not to mention the fact that unused cortisol (if there are no tigers to run from or I don’t walk it off quickly) gets stored as fat. Great. Talk about insults and injuries.

I bought a one-year subscription to MasterClass.com last Christmas because Halle Berry hosted a 90-minute “class” with interviews with several doctors and women going through menopause. Here I am two weeks before my subscription expires and I finally finished watching it and taking notes. There was a lot of good information in the class, but let me give you a few bullet points that fit with my topic of planning for peace.

Decluttering — I knew this was not a time-waster or procrastination technique!! But I’d let people convince me it was, and my mess has been stressing me out all year. It’s gotten to the point, I don’t even like to spend much time in my office. Several items on my to-do list now have to do with sorting papers that are currently piled everywhere, filing the important must-keep stuff in boxes I just bought, and throwing out as much as I can. I need to let go of all the old plays I wrote a million years ago…even though I don’t really want to. I never look at them, won’t use them again, and don’t have room in our small apartment to keep writing only for nostalgia’s sake. (And no, for those about to leave a comment about scanning them or taking photos, it would take me weeks to do that! I have a lot of old writing!)
Have a “launchpad” where you keep your keys, your wallet, your purse, your phone/charger, etc. I’ve never called it a launchpad, but I get the idea. I have a bowl I made in pottery class in college where I put all those things. It is so stressful when I’m rushing out the door for the train and realize one of those items did not make it to the bowl and now I have to look “everywhere” for it…because right now my brain can’t remember.
Prioritizing tasks on your list before you begin. Many days I only have a few hours of functioning brain time, so I need to be sure that if I can only get one thing done today, it’s the right thing. And if I can get 2 or 3 things done, they are things I’ll be happy or relieved got done. Much as I want to watch the last episode of The Beast in Me on Netflix to find out how it ends, that is not the best use of my limited brain-time right now! And because limited brain-time has made me perpetually behind in all my goals, when I have a good day (like today!) and can get a dozen things done, I want them to be the things I desperately needed to have done last week and the week before.
Organizational Skills Therapy — one of the doctors mentioned this and I have no idea what it is, but it sounds awesome!! I’m totally Googling it later!

So those four items are now on my list of tools I want to use to plan for peace in 2026. I have no idea what to expect next year. My brain seems to maybe be working better, but I’ve thought that in the past right before a new wave of menopause hell bowled me over. At least with these tools, I can get a few of the most important items done and choose to be satisfied with it, not stressing about what I can’t control.

I hope this is helpful for you as well! Whether you’re in need of this information or know someone you can share it with, it’s always good to have some reliable tools in your author — and life — toolkit. I hope you plan for a peaceful and joyful end of 2025 and that it spills over into all of 2026. God bless you! And Merry Christmas!

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Do You Have Time to Write? by Kitty Bucholtz

November 9, 2025 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz, Writing tagged as It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, Perimenopause, time management, writing

I’ve always been one of those people who’s trying to get more done, looking for ways to be more efficient so I can do more in the same amount of time. I even taught a time management class for writers for over ten years, sharing everything I learned so people could try new ways to get more writing done. It worked delightfully well for me for years.

Until it didn’t.

Stress and burnout and perimenopause collided a few years ago, and it felt like I got hit by a train. I struggled to get writing work done while I tried to realign my health. Now on a good day, I’m working for 4-6 hours (down from 10-14 five years ago); a bad day might give me 30 minutes. It can be depressing, and that adds to the stress, which messes with my hormones, which clouds my brain even more.

But I’m still the same Kitty, wanting to share what I learn so that I can help others. So I’m writing two nonfiction books right now. One is on perimenopause and menopause for writers. I’m taking everything I’ve learned and all my resources and compiling it all, aimed at writers. I’d love to add more stories from other women writers who have gone through mental and physical health issues, especially related to menopause. Please contact me if you’d like to share your story (kitty at kittybucholtz dot com, and put “Menopause for Writers” in the subject line).

The other book is called Going the Distance: Time and Project Management for Writers. I’ve taken ten years’ worth of my lectures and broken them down into the core elements, and then I’m updating all of the material as well as adding new tips. I’ll start blogging about it soon, but I just finished the outline and I wanted to share it with you.

The 10-chapter book will include the following topics:

Chapter 1: Your Story — Looking at the successes in your past, how does your brain create the best environment for writing?
Chapter 2: Mastering Self-Talk and Cultivating Joy — Creating attitude habits that increase your creativity.
Chapter 3: Dreams, Goals, and the SMART System — Turning goals into dreams is more than just will power; it requires systems to make it happen.
Chapter 4: Prioritizing to Conquer Fear — What to do first and what to do next seems easy at the beginning of the day, but how do we keep working on what’s truly important to us while living in the real world?
Chapter 5: Finding Your Available Days — One aspect of reality is that for most of us the answer to “How many days do I have to write this year?” is not 365. So how many days do you have?
Chapter 6: Translating Goals into Word Counts — This is where we take the real number of writing days and figure out how much we can write or, vice-versa, figure out how much we need to write to hit our goal for the year.
Chapter 7: Habits and Rhythms — All of us have our good days; it’s the rest of the time that gets us down. So how can we create an environment for more good days?
Chapter 8: Flow and Energy Management — So many things can help us get more done in a shorter amount of time! We’ll look at commitment, daydreaming and white space, physical and mental health, distractions, prewriting, and more.
Chapter 9: Organizing Your Writing and Your Workspace — The crucial organization needed to avoid stress and wasted time.
Chapter 10: Progress, Rewards, and Reassessment — Sustainability is the name of the game here! What’s the perfect amount of writing work that keeps you moving forward long-term without burning you out?

If this sounds interesting and helpful to you, let me know! In my post here in December, I’ll start sharing some of my tips and ideas so you can plan for a good writing year in 2026. It’ll be worth it!

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What’s the Answer? by Kitty Bucholtz

October 9, 2025 by Kitty Bucholtz in category Writing

I’ve told you before that I’ve been struggling the last several years with my creativity. Most of it seems to be a result of changes in my hormones during perimenopause and menopause. But before that I realized I’d gotten pretty deeply mired in burnout. Slowly, my creativity has been coming back, ideas have begun to flow again, and this past month I’ve been plotting away on my next superhero book. Yay!

The ”how” is partially from balancing my hormones with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and partially from several small things that have made a big difference. I got a scholarship to attend Author Nation last year, and it really helped energize me. There I met and decided to have a weekly check-in with some writer friends who are “more like me.” (I’m not going to try to explain the specifics; when you’re with people who get you and to whom you don’t have to explain your thinking, it’s so freeing! It really helped open the valve on my joy and creativity.)

Book cover of The Artisan Author by Johnny B Truant

That led to me backing a Kickstarter by Johnny B. Truant a couple months ago. He wrote a book called The Artisan Author: The Low-Stress, High-Quality, Fan-Focused Approach to Escaping the Publishing Rat Race based on the class he taught at Author Nation last year. (Release date November 4, 2025 – look for it!) I decided to back the level that included a 10-week college-style class based on the book. We’re just a month in and I’ve already met so many more authors who feel like I do – like, I started writing, and particularly self-publishing, so I could write my way. Then, in trying to learn how to sell books, I got caught up in all the reasons I “needed” to change this or that so that my perfect readers could find me on Amazon and other vendor sites.

I wrote a more detailed post on Substack if you’re interested. I talk about self-publishing and using your voice and standing up for others. Here is the ending to that post. I hope it gives you something to think about. It’s worth it.

YOU have more power than you realize. That’s the actual tagline. So let me encourage you to use your words. Use your power. Even if you believe the exact opposite of me, use your words. A world that becomes more and more homogenized becomes more and more unsafe for “the other.” Love isn’t just for the people like you. To Love means to take care of the widow and the orphan, the illegal immigrant and the transgendered neighbor, the politician and the farmer.

That’s how Love becomes the answer.

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