2025 may be the year of the snake, but around these parts January 2025 has been the month of the shower niche. Sometimes I think back to younger, innocent times like December when I had never even heard the term “shower niche.” Those were the days.

I won’t bore you with tales of woe about all the dilemmas these shower niches have given us, but suffice it to say that I am not exaggerating when I say that niches have consumed our attention this month. Who knew that they could take up this much of anyone’s time? Not me, that’s for sure.

But this is supposed to be a newsletter about creativity. Well, and contentment too. Content is what we’ll be when the house next door is finally done, but until then I’ll have to try and focus on creativity, well in between dealing with shower niches. (There’s a very good chance that as of this morning we are finally done with shower niches, but that’s what I thought yesterday and also two weeks ago so I’m not holding my breath.)

Anyway, there is a corollary between our shower niche drama and creativity, and what it comes down to is the old pantser vs. plotter debate. Basically a pantser is someone who dives right into whatever project they’re working on without doing much if any sort of planning, while a plotter tends to spend time creating an outline or a blueprint or some sort of plan for how things should go. One doesn’t need to be all of one sort or another, and when we’re dealing with creative projects there isn’t really a hard and fast rule as for what is the better method.

When it comes to remodeling, on the other hand, a bit of planning goes a long way. With some planning, I can confidently say that January 2025 would not have been the month of the shower niche. I can also say with confidence that this wasn’t a case of a lack of planning on our part, but if you aren’t doing everything yourself then you have to rely on others, and I guess that’s something that’s also true for house repairs as well as creative projects.

A lack of planning is probably less of an issue when writing than it is when laying tile. It’s a lot easier to make corrections in a Scrivener file or a Word document than it is to fix a tiled wall. Still, in both cases skipping the planning sometimes means you have to do a whole lot of extra work to get to a satisfactory finished project.

This is why when I haven’t been busy scouring the internet for the perfect shower niche (Spoiler alert: the perfect niche does not exist) I have been working on creating an outline for a book that I might one day actually start writing. (I did just take a break from writing this post to help choose the perfect color of grout, so I think it’s safe to say that it will be some time before I can dive into writing this novel.) I am anxious to start writing, but I also know that things will be much smoother sailing if I have a pretty good idea about the novel before I actually begin drafting it.

As for that outline, while some of it is pretty well fleshed out here’s the sum total of my notes for the current fifteenth chapter of this book, “I don’t know what this chapter is about or if it is needed.” I guess I’ll need to figure that out before I do the actual writing, that or I could just start slapping some tile on the walls and see how it goes.

— Alissa

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Weekly Inspiration

What I’m Reading: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

What I’m Watching: High Potential

What I’m Listening to: “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)” by Bruce

Springsteen

Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com

Find out more about my art at alissacarin.com

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My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.