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Jessica Nickelsen

Mum, geek, writer. Software discombobulator. Insect rescuer. Cat box /child den constructor. Experimental desserts a specialty.

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Reluctantly going into autumn

Issue #11 Unusual Fictions Hey there. This is UNUSUAL FICTIONS, a sporadic newsletter from Jess Nickelsen. Happy March, everyone! It actually sort of sucks, going into autumn right now. It really doesn't feel like the summer was long enough. I wonder if I say that every year, or if this year summer was particularly...meh? We had a few hot days back around new year / early Jan, but February was pretty underwhelming, weather-wise. That said, the cicadas are out right now, which is one of my...

about 2 months ago • 5 min read

Issue #10 Hey there. This is UNUSUAL FICTIONS, a sporadic newsletter from Jess Nickelsen. Happy January! We are in the middle of summer now (at last!) which means lots of pool time, gardening, eating with friends, feral children (it’s still school holidays), and wandering around in pyjamas at all hours of the day. Despite all of this I have managed to hit a few big milestones that I’m happy about. I’m still figuring out what I want to focus on in the year ahead, but generally speaking they...

3 months ago • 3 min read

Issue #9 Hey there. This is UNUSUAL FICTIONS, a newsletter from Jess Nickelsen. Greetings from nearly-December! Here in NZ we're getting tantalisingly close to summer. It's amazing how a bit more light in the mornings, and the odd sunny day, does so much to lift the spirits. That said, we’re currently in the middle of a polar blast coming up from the south, which means despite the sunshine it’s still woolly sweaters and socks in bed territory round here. We all got our flu jabs this year, but...

5 months ago • 3 min read

Issue #8 Hey there friends. Long time no email! Life has been...ah, you know the story. I've been writing, but the newsletter unfortunately fell by the wayside a little. So here we all are in 2023. Already it's shaping up to be better than the last couple of years, which I suspect everyone is quite happy to leave behind. I'm trying to get back on track with everything after the summer holidays here in NZ; work is ramping up, term one is, well, done, and we're heading into autumn now. new cool...

about 1 year ago • 2 min read

Hello! Tired looking woman, with glasses, and a face mask hanging over one ear. The Beauty of Ten Minutes I was struggling a bit to decide what I wanted to write about in this month’s newsletter, so I got up to make a cup of tea. That turned into making some toast, and that turned into emptying the dishwasher. Somewhere between the first and second drawers I found it. Just popped into my head: The Beauty of Ten Minutes. Giving things ten minutes out of my day has been revelatory! For a lot of...

almost 2 years ago • 3 min read

Well, hello! Another month has zoomed by, disturbingly quickly! It’s been a busy time for me, what with my new job, and my daughter learning from home at the moment while Omicron surges. Writing updates I’ve stalled out a bit on my “trash planet” story, and so decided to give myself a bit of leeway to get back to basics. I’ve done a few interesting online courses (Cat Rambo’s are particularly good), and I’ve found an excellent (and hilarious) writing podcast called Couch to 80k, by Tim Clare....

about 2 years ago • 6 min read

Hello there! It’s been a little while since the last newsletter, but it was good to be able to go “off the air” over summer. New Zealand is in a strange place at the moment, with Omicron surging (in a hopefully-controlled process of slowly pulling back on some of our health restrictions) and what with protests happening in most of our cities (against vaccine mandates), and the war unfolding in Ukraine, the news is just crammed with scenes of conflict. At times it’s really hard to pull away,...

about 2 years ago • 16 min read

Hello everyone! This is a bit of a long-overdue newsletter; there have been a lot of ups and downs, and highs and lows lately. Everything seems to get busier the closer you get to Christmas and the holidays, and family issues have been taking up a lot of my mental bandwidth lately. It seems a perfect time to write about how to keep moving forward when (for whatever reasons) your routine blows up on you. Maybe I'll even manage to convince myself, sheesh. But first... The #1 most important...

over 2 years ago • 3 min read

Hi everyone. The newsletter is coming to you a little bit late, though I did do a rough mind map thinking about the sorts of things I might write about this month. We’ve had an interesting second half of August, with the country going into a “snap” full lockdown for several weeks, after we got a case of the Delta Covid-19 variant in the community. Because New Zealand’s approach to the virus is that of elimination, the response has had to be a fast and hard one. Lots of newspapers around the...

over 2 years ago • 2 min read

It’s August already, so apologies for getting the newsletter out a bit late! It’s been a “wild and woolly” July here in New Zealand, with some big storms and lots of rain coming through. We’re truly in the thick of winter, and it’s been so strange watching the northern hemisphere going through heat waves and other associated summer-weather extremes. (You’d think that I’d be used to that by now, even after living in New Zealand for over 20 years, but it would seem the months and seasonal...

over 2 years ago • 6 min read
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