Well, here’s a real-time civics lesson.

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On August 24, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to move forward, at least temporarily, with parts of an executive order aimed at changing how mail-in voting is administered.

But here’s an important distinction: the Supreme Court did not rule that Trump’s restrictions are constitutional.

Instead, the Court’s 6–3 majority concluded that the states challenging the executive order had gone to court too early because the harms they were challenging had not yet occurred.

The executive order seeks major changes to the way mail-in ballots are handled, including requiring states to provide voter eligibility information to the federal government and imposing new requirements on ballot envelopes and the Postal Service.

That could have enormous consequences. Nearly one-third of American voters are expected to vote by mail in the upcoming midterm elections.

And almost immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision, the legal fight shifted again.

On August 27, a federal judge temporarily blocked the restrictions from taking effect, finding that states would not have enough time to overhaul their voting systems before ballots begin going out. The Trump administration is appealing that decision, and another hearing is scheduled for September 3.

So, as of today, the restrictions are not in effect.

And This Is Why I Wanted You to Hear Barbara Arnwine

As I read about this case, I immediately thought about my conversation with civil rights leader Barbara Arnwine, founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition.

Barbara has spent decades fighting for voting rights. One of the things our conversation reinforced for me is that democracy isn’t something that simply happens around us.

We participate in it.

Voting rights can be expanded. They can be challenged. Rules can change. Courts can intervene. States can fight back. And citizens need to understand what’s happening well before Election Day arrives.

What makes this moment even more interesting is that just two months ago, the Supreme Court reached a very different result in another case involving mail ballots.

In June, the Court ruled 5–4 that federal law does not prevent Mississippi from counting absentee ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive up to five days later.

In other words, the rules governing access to the ballot are being contested right now.

As I dive back into school and continue work on my Peter Crosby novel series, the parallels to silencing voices are astounding. Book 1 deals with voter suppression and these tactics are ever present today. Some may not be blatant as in the 1800s but suppression is suppression. And the question remains the same: Who gets to exercise political power, and what happens when barriers are placed between citizens and the ballot box?

And that’s exactly why conversations like the one I had with Barbara matter.

In our full conversation, Barbara and I talk about voting rights, civic engagement, grassroots organizing and something I think we all need to remember:

Our civic power doesn’t begin and end when we cast a ballot.

I’ll be watching what happens at the September 3 hearing because this story is still unfolding.

Being an informed citizen isn’t a noun. It’s an action.

If this conversation gave you something to think about, please ❤️ like, share, and subscribe. Sharing these stories helps more people understand how our history continues to shape the choices we face today.

Until next time, stay curious, stay engaged, and remember: democracy works best when we participate in it.

Warmly,

Civic-Minded Jones

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References

1. Supreme Court, Trump v. California, August 24, 2026 — actual Court order
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/26a124_hgci.pdf?utm

2. AP, August 27 — Federal judge blocks the restrictions again
https://apnews.com/article/trump-voting-mail-ballots-democrats-lawsuits-15cf1ec7dcdb8211bf6b624b75a7f4ab

3. AP, August 29 — Trump administration appeals
https://apnews.com/article/trump-voting-mail-ballots-midterms-executive-order-8ef4a669a50f3406481ffb8387ccad3c

4. Supreme Court, Watson v. Republican National Committee, June 29, 2026
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1260_g3cn.pdf?

5. SCOTUSblog explanation of Watson
https://preview.scotusblog.com/2026/06/justices-uphold-state-law-allowing-for-late-arriving-mail-in-ballots/

It is a pattern.

Tulsa. Rosewood. Colfax. Ocoee.

I’ve shared this map a few times on my Substack.

Each dot represents a community that was thriving, organized, politically engaged, and then deliberately destroyed.

Add Wilmington, North Carolina, to the list.

Though in Wilmington’s case, what happened wasn’t just a massacre.

It was a coup.

Even though I’d seen Wilmington on the map as one of the towns where a massacre had happened, I didn’t know the story until I came across a segment on CBS Sunday Morning.

A City Worth Destroying

In 1898, Wilmington was something remarkable for its time.

A prosperous, integrated city where Black and white North Carolinians genuinely shared political power. Black men held leadership positions. The government was multiracial.

The city worked.

White supremacists decided that couldn’t stand.

On November 10, 1898, they took the city back at gunpoint. They overthrew the elected government, drove Black leaders and their white allies out of town, and launched a wave of violence that killed scores of Black residents.

It was the only successful coup d’état in American history.

And for more than a century, Wilmington buried it.

Now journalist Lauren Collins has written They Stole a City, a new book about her hometown’s darkest chapter. In a recent CBS Sunday Morning interview with Lee Cowan, Collins talked about what it means to reckon with a history your own community spent generations hiding.

That reckoning is exactly what this publication exists to support.

The Same Playbook

I’ve written here before about the Vicksburg Massacre and other towns that history chose to call “race riots,” a term that implies mutual combat when what actually happened was organized slaughter.

Wilmington is another chapter in that same book.

And what strikes me every time I dig into one of these stories is how consistent the playbook is.

Find a community that has built something.

Find a government that actually represents its people.

Then use violence, fear, and the machinery of white supremacy to take it apart.

Then make sure nobody talks about it for a hundred years.

Sound familiar?

It should.

Because what happened in Wilmington in 1898 rhymes with what happened in Vicksburg in 1874, the story I’ve been excavating for years through my research and in my novel in progress.

Peter Crosby, the Black sheriff of Warren County, Mississippi, was removed from office at gunpoint by a white mob of more than 600 men. The Reconstruction government Black Mississippians had built was dismantled piece by piece.

Same playbook.

Different city.

Different year.

These were not isolated incidents of racial hatred.

They were coordinated political strategy.

The violent suppression of multiracial democracy at the exact moment it was proving it could work.

History Doesn’t Erase Itself

Lauren Collins grew up in Wilmington not knowing this history.

But she knew something was off.

That wasn’t an accident.

It was the result of generations choosing not to tell the story.

When history disappears from our classrooms, our conversations, and our communities, it doesn’t stop shaping us.

We simply lose the language to recognize it when it happens again.

They Stole a City is available now. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to it.

I hope more people do what Lauren Collins did. Look beneath the surface of the places they call home. Ask what stories were forgotten, buried, or intentionally left untold.

Because the more we understand what happened in places like Wilmington, Vicksburg, Tulsa, Rosewood, and Colfax, the better equipped we are to recognize the patterns when they appear again.

History isn’t just something we inherit.

It’s something we’re responsible for remembering.

Danita

Every year the Fourth of July arrives, and every year I find myself holding two truths at the same time.

I love the promise of America.

I also know that when the Declaration of Independence was signed, people who looked like me weren’t included in that promise.

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And it saddens me every time.

If you want to sit with that pain a little longer, I wrote about it here:

The Past Didn’t Stay in the Past

The past didn’t disappear.

It became the world we live in today.

July Fourth isn’t just something we remember. It’s something we inherited.

The compromises, the contradictions, the unfinished promises of 1776, they didn’t get resolved. They got passed down. To Reconstruction. To Jim Crow. To the Civil Rights Movement. To us.

We are not looking back at history from a safe distance. We are standing inside it.

We’re Living History

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking differently about history.

History isn’t something that happened to other people.

It’s the story we’re still writing.

Every generation inherits unfinished work.

What Will They Say About Us?

In 1776, a group of men declared that all men are created equal while building a country that denied that truth to millions.

During Reconstruction, this country got a real shot at making good on that promise, and then it walked away from it.

During Civil Rights, people put their bodies on the line to drag America closer to its own words.

Each generation picked up where the last one left off.

So I have to ask: what will students one hundred years from now say about us? What will they say we did with the unfinished work that landed in our hands?

How Are We Shaping History?

Instead of asking, “What happened?” I’m beginning to ask something different.

How is this story still shaping us?

And maybe an even harder question: how am I shaping history?

A Conversation Worth Having

On this Fourth of July, I wanted to share an interview from my series From Discord to Harmony: Charting America’s Path to Unity. I sat down with Paul Carrese, a professor in the School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, and the school’s founding director from 2016 to 2023.

When I created this series, I was upset that so many young people didn’t understand how our government actually works. So I had Paul walk through that, and we also talked about why civics stopped being a focal point in our education system.

These conversations are a big part of understanding how we got here.

Every Fourth of July we look backward.

This year I’m trying to do something different.

I’m looking backward, while remembering that someone, someday, will look back at us.

We’re not just studying history.

We’re living it.

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How is this story still shaping us? And just as importantly... how are we shaping history?

Warmly,

Danita aka Civic-Minded Jones

Starting in the Middle of the Fire

There’s a technique in fiction called the flash forward. You open in the middle of the action, the highest stakes moment, the most dangerous place, and then you pull back to show the reader how we got there.

I had a real debate with myself about whether to use it for my Vicksburg series.

My hesitation wasn’t about the technique itself. It was about how I wanted to introduce Peter Crosby.

Did I want readers to meet him first among his community, in church on a Sunday morning, surrounded by people who love and trust him, and build from there? Let you see the life he’d built, the man he was, before the danger came?

Or did I want to come in hot, drop you right into the courthouse hallway with six hundred armed men outside, and make you feel the stakes before you even know his name?

Both were valid.

Both served the story differently.

I chose to come in hot.

And once I made that call, everything else clicked into place.

The church scene, which I’d originally been trying to open with, became Chapter 2. And suddenly it had weight it didn’t have when it came first, because now the reader already knows what’s coming for this man.

They’ve seen where the story is headed.

Now they get to watch him before he knew it too.

The Reader Knows What the Character Doesn’t

That’s the thing about flash forwards that I don’t think gets talked about enough.

They’re not just a technique for creating suspense.

They’re a way of giving the reader information that changes how they see everything that follows.

When you meet Sheriff Peter Crosby in a church pew in 1873, laughing with his friend Justice of the Peace Sydney Brooks, watching his wife Martha tend to a grieving mother, quietly deciding whether to step deeper into the fight for civil rights, you’re seeing him in an ordinary moment.

A Sunday.

Community.

The kind of life he’s built.

But if you’ve already seen the courthouse scene...

...already seen those six hundred men...

...already heard the gunshot...

...already felt the walls closing in...

...then that church scene isn’t just a Sunday anymore.

It’s a man who doesn’t yet know what’s coming.

And the reader does.

That gap between what the character knows and what the reader knows is where tension lives.

Storytellers have been using it since there were stories.

But in historical fiction it carries a particular weight, because we’re not just watching a character move toward danger.

We’re watching a real man move toward a moment that actually happened, that history recorded, that got buried and mostly forgotten.

The flash forward is my way of saying to the reader:

This matters. Pay attention.

History Doesn’t Give You a Warning

And here’s the thing that keeps hitting me as I write this story.

The flash forward isn’t just a craft technique.

It’s actually how history works.

Nobody got context before the crisis came.

Peter Crosby didn’t wake up on December 2, 1874, with a warning that six hundred men were coming.

The community gathered in that church in 1873 didn’t know what was bearing down on them.

They were just living.

Building.

Hoping.

Ordinary people in an extraordinary political moment, trying to figure out how to survive it.

That’s not just a nineteenth-century problem.

We know what it feels like right now to be dropped into the middle of something with no roadmap, no guarantee, no promise that doing the right thing will protect you.

The flash forward works for Peter Crosby’s story because it’s honest about how danger actually arrives.

Not announced.

Not with time to prepare.

Just suddenly there, at the door, demanding something from you.

The only question is what you do next.

A First Look at Vicksburg Troubles

Below this line is for paid subscribers: the first two chapters of Vicksburg Troubles (working title), my historical fiction novel about Peter Crosby, the first elected Black sheriff of Warren County, Mississippi, and the Vicksburg Massacre of 1874.

A quick note before you dive in:

I’m currently outlining Books 1 through 3, so these chapters are early draft material written for my Harvard assignment. Where they ultimately land in the larger series may shift.

But the story and the people in it are very real.

And these pages are ready enough to share with you now.

💬 If this resonated with you, tap the ❤️, share it with someone who loves history or storytelling,

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I'd love to know: what's a book that pulled you into the middle of the action and never let you go?

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It comes for the leaders first.

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Arrest the organizers. Paralyze the community. Then do whatever you want with the rest.

The struggle over who gets to lead and who gets pushed aside is hardly confined to the nineteenth century.

But this particular story happened on a Monday morning in December 1874, on Cherry Street in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

A man named Charles H. Smith is walking to work. He’s a carpenter. A former deputy sheriff. A known figure in Vicksburg’s Black community. The kind of man people look to when things get hard.

Three men cut him off. Pistols drawn, right in his face.

The ultimatum is simple: turn around and march to the jail, or die right here on the street.

That is how the Vicksburg Massacre comes to Charles H. Smith. Not with a riot. Not with chaos. With a targeted, surgical removal of a community leader because as the men who arrested him would later say among themselves: “Get hold of the leaders, and we can rule the balance of them just as we see fit.”

What fascinated me wasn't the gunpowder. It was Charles H. Smith himself. A sworn congressional interrogation in which Smith talks about starving in a jail cell, his home raided, his wife assaulted, his friends being killed in the streets outside and he answers every question with the precision of a man who knows that one wrong word will get him killed.

He never breaks.

I made a podcast about it.

It’s called Witnesses to the Vicksburg Massacre.

Here’s a five-minute preview.

The full episode — The Gunpowder Interrogation of Charles H. Smith — is available now for paid subscribers.

It’s the first in the Witnesses to the Vicksburg Massacre series, drawn entirely from sworn congressional testimony. Real voices. Real names. Real stakes.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, now’s a good time.

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Next up: Louisa Banks.

Louisa testified before Congress after watching armed white men murder her husband and eighteen-year-old son outside their home. The family had stayed home because they had been told that anyone who remained at home would not be harmed.

Her testimony is one of the most heartbreaking accounts in the congressional record and one of the clearest windows into what the Vicksburg Massacre meant for ordinary Black families.

This history didn’t disappear by accident. It was erased on purpose. I’m determined to put it back.

❤️ Like, comment, and share if this episode resonated with you. The more people who encounter these testimonies, the harder they are to erase.

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Danita

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Production Note

This episode was created using Google’s NotebookLM from the sworn congressional testimony of Charles H. Smith, given during the federal investigation known as Vicksburg Troubles following the Vicksburg Massacre of 1874.

The audio discussion was generated from the historical source material. Research, source selection, historical framing, and publication are curated by Danita Jones as part of an ongoing investigation into Reconstruction, political violence, and the witnesses whose testimony preserved this history.

Language Note: Historical witnesses frequently used the term “colored people,” which was common in the 19th century. In modern narration and commentary, I use the term “Black people” for clarity, respect, and accessibility. Direct quotations preserve the language of the original historical record.

Over the past few years, I’ve been studying the congressional hearings known as Vicksburg Troubles, conducted in the aftermath of the massacre. The hearings collected sworn testimony from Black and wh…

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The Question I Didn’t Know to Ask

I never used to think about the narrator.

I mean that literally. I’ve been a professional writer for over thirty years. I’ve written television. I’ve produced. I’ve taught writing at Chapman University. I completed the first of two pre-master’s classes in creative writing at Harvard Extension School. And somewhere in all of that, all those years, all those pages, I’d been overlooking one of the most basic questions in fiction:

Who is telling this story?

Not whose story it is. Not whose eyes we’re seeing through. But who is the actual voice, the invisible presence, doing the narrating?

It was revealed to me when my professor asked, “Who is the narrator?”

I felt caught.

I knew I hadn’t explored that well. And I wondered how other authors came to that decision.

I Thought I Had It Figured Out

Here’s what happened.

I’d already done the work of figuring out point of view. After studying Chekhov’s story Grisha, that tiny, playful piece about a two-year-old boy experiencing the outside world for the first time, everything filtered through the child’s incomplete, wondering perception. I understood that I wanted third-person limited for my series. I wanted readers inside the experience, not floating above it watching. Third-person limited would give me the intimacy of first person and the scope to move between characters as the story demanded.

I thought I had it figured out. I had my POV. I had my characters. I had five hundred pages of congressional hearing transcripts and years of research on Peter Crosby and the Vicksburg Massacre.

What I didn’t have was a narrator.

And those are not the same thing.

Point of View and Narrator Are Not the Same Thing

The point of view character is whose story you’re telling. The narrator is the voice doing the telling.

In first-person, the two collapse into each other. The character is the narrator. That’s easy. I’m writing from the character’s perspective. That’s part of why first-person feels so immediate, so intimate. There’s no separation. You’re inside one consciousness and that consciousness is speaking directly to you.

In third-person limited, there’s a gap. A small one, but it matters. Someone is reporting on the character’s experience, filtering it, shaping it, deciding what language to use, what to notice, how the world sounds and smells and feels.

That someone is the narrator.

And in third person, that narrator has a voice of their own, even if it’s nearly invisible.

I’d been writing without knowing whose voice that was. And you can feel it when a narrator doesn’t have a grounded identity. The prose goes a little flat, a little generic. It sounds like “writing” instead of like a person telling you something true.

And I have to be careful with that because I’m writing historical fiction, and I don’t want to fall into the trap of sounding like I’m writing a history book.

The Voice Behind the Voice

I’ve been researching what other writers say about this, and two quotes captured my attention.

The historical novelist Geraldine Brooks put it this way:

“If somebody from the past doesn’t rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven’t got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act and that starts the plot in motion.”

That’s it.

That’s exactly it.

And Stephen King, in thinking about what draws readers to fiction, said:

“People come to books looking for something. But they don’t come for the story, or even for the characters. They certainly don’t come for the genre. I think readers come for the voice.”

Not the plot.

Not the research.

Not even the characters.

The voice.

Then I Knew Exactly Who It Was

So I had to ask myself: whose voice is telling the story of Peter Crosby?

And once I asked the question, the answer came almost immediately.

My maternal grandmother.

She was raised in the rural south of Mississippi. I grew up in the house with her parents, my great-grandparents. So I was raised with the sound of that world in my ears. The cadence of it. The particular way the South tells a story, which is never in a straight line, always circling around the thing before landing on it.

I do that too.

I especially get it from my mother. Though I’ll be honest, with both of us it can get to the point where people are saying, “Get to the point already.” LOL

But in the right context, in storytelling, in fiction, that circling has a purpose.

Certain words carry weight that outsiders can’t quite hear.

History isn’t abstract down there.

It lives in the body, in the land, in what people don’t say as much as what they do.

That’s the voice that belongs in this story.

Not mine, exactly. Though mine is woven into it, the way every author’s voice is woven into their narrator’s.

But the sensibility, the texture, the feeling of someone who understands that Mississippi earth and what it holds—that’s my grandmother.

That’s the sound I’m reaching for when I write Peter Crosby into a church in Vicksburg in 1875.

Why the Narrator Matters

What I’ve come to understand, working through this in my Harvard assignments, is that the narrator isn’t decoration.

The narrator is a structural decision.

Chekhov understood this. He didn’t write craft essays the way modern writers do, but his stories show you.

In Grisha, the narrator is calibrated precisely to the child’s two-year-old consciousness. It’s not dumbed down, but genuinely filtered through a mind that doesn’t yet have categories for what it’s experiencing.

Stephen King does something similar in Misery, but in reverse.

The narrator there is intimate and claustrophobic, trapped inside Paul Sheldon’s perspective just the way Paul himself is trapped in Annie Wilkes’s house.

You never get distance.

You never get relief.

The narrator doesn’t float above the horror and reassure you.

King keeps you locked in, sentence by sentence, the same way Annie keeps Paul locked in, room by room.

The narrative voice is the imprisonment.

And that’s the technique I’m using for my scenes with tension, like the mob scene.

That’s what I mean when I say the narrator is a structural decision.

The narrator is always making choices.

What language to use.

What to dwell on.

What to pass over in a sentence.

What carries emotional weight.

Those choices are not neutral.

They are the story’s personality.

When you don’t know who your narrator is, those choices become arbitrary.

You’re just filling space between plot points.

When you do know, when you have a real sensibility anchoring the prose, the language starts to cohere.

Things start to feel inevitable rather than selected.

Sometimes Your Narrator Finds You

I finished my Harvard assignment.

I made the choice to open with the flash forward with the 600-person mob, the danger, the stakes and then move to the church scene second.

The chapters went over well.

My professor said she was starting to feel and know my narrator, and the assignment came back with an A.

But more important than the grade is this:

I know something now that I didn’t know a few months ago.

I know who’s telling this story.

She was born in Mississippi.

She raised her family there and eventually made her way north.

She knew what it meant to survive in the rural South.

She knew the weight of what that land remembered, even when people tried to forget.

She’s been gone for about a decade now.

But I grew up with her voice in my ears.

And I think it was always supposed to end up here.

Doing this work, on this story, in this particular way.

Sometimes you don’t find your narrator.

Sometimes your narrator finds you.

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and tell me in the comments: who helped shape the voice you carry into your writing today?

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Warmly,

Danita

My "Write With Me" YouTube sessions are on pause for now. I'm aiming to return sometime this summer and will keep you posted here.

Too Much, Not Too Little

I’m stuck.

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Not in the way where I’m staring at a blank page with no ideas. I have too many ideas. I know exactly who Peter Crosby is. I know what happened to him. I’ve spent years living inside his story — reading congressional transcripts, digging through 1800s newspaper archives, watching his history get buried and then unburied again every time I pull a new document. I know this man.

What I don’t know is how to start writing him.

Writing in a Language That Isn’t Mine

Here’s the situation. I have a Harvard assignment due Friday. 1,500 to 2,500 words — which, for most writers, sounds manageable. For me it’s manageable. A long essay. A detailed scene. I can spit out 1500 words no problem.

But the assignment isn’t just “write something.” It’s the culmination of everything we’ve been building toward all semester. And I’m allowed to turn in half by Friday, which means I’m essentially writing toward a larger whole while also trying to make the first chunk work on its own. Third person limited. That’s what it has to be in.

Third person limited. He thought. He saw. He felt — but only what he felt, only what he noticed, only what landed in his body and his mind in that exact moment.

The problem is I’m a first-person writer. Always have been. First person is where I live. It’s how I talk to you right now — I did this, I noticed that, I couldn’t believe what happened next. That’s my comfort zone, my native language on the page. Third person feels like writing with my non-dominant hand. And I’m a lefty. I can do it. But it’s slower. It’s clumsier. And every sentence feels like I’m translating something instead of just saying it.

Finding the Story Before Shaping It

So I came up with a workaround, the way writers do when the rules get in the way of the story.

I’m going to write it in first person first.

Not for the assignment — just for me. Just to crack it open. I’ll write the scene the way I’d naturally tell it, in Peter’s voice, fully inhabited, and then I’ll rewrite it in third person limited. Use the first draft as a map. Because sometimes you have to find the story before you can shape it.

Where Does This Story Begin?

Now here’s the other thing I’m wrestling with: where does the story start?

I keep coming back to two moments.

The first is a church. I want to open in the church where Peter Crosby and the other leaders of Warren County are gathered — Black men, elected officials, men who had survived slavery and Reconstruction’s promises and were trying, against every possible resistance, to hold onto what little political ground they’d won. There’s something about a church that feels right for this story. It’s sanctuary and strategy at the same time. It’s where community gathers when the outside world is hostile. I can see it — the light, the voices, the weight in the room.

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Quiet Opening or Crisis First?

But then there’s the other opening. The one that keeps pulling at me harder.

Peter Crosby in a jail cell. Or better yet — a different flash forward event. The moment he’s facing a mob of 600 armed white men who have come to force him out of office. Six hundred people. To remove one elected sheriff. Think about what that number means. Think about what it says about how much power they feared he had.

That’s a thriller opening. That’s the kind of scene that makes you turn the page.

And this is where I’m fighting with myself — because I want this story to have that thriller quality. I want readers to feel the danger, the stakes, the clock ticking. Reconstruction was a thriller. It was a horror story. It was a political drama. It was all of those things, and the fact that most Americans don’t know Peter Crosby’s name is proof of how thoroughly that story got buried.

So do I start quiet — in the church, in community, before the violence comes? Or do I start loud — in the middle of the crisis, with the mob already at the door, and then pull back to show how we got there?

Just by typing this… I know my answer. Start loud.

This Is What Wednesdays Are For

This is what Wednesdays are for.

Not for having it all figured out at the get go. Not for showing up with polished pages and clean answers. Wednesday is the day I sit down and do the work, even when the work is messy. Even when I’m arguing with myself about POV and structure and whether a church scene has enough propulsion to open a historical thriller.

I teach writing. I’ve been a professional television writer for over thirty years. I know what craft looks like. I know the rules.

And I’m still sitting here at my desk, talking myself into starting, what’s going to be on the first page.

That’s writing. That’s all it ever is, no matter how long you’ve been doing it.

Starting Anyway

Friday is coming. Peter Crosby is waiting.

I’m going in.

💬 If this resonated, tap the ❤️, share it with another writer, or leave a comment. I’d love to hear how you approach starting when the story feels this big.

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Warmly,

Danita

PS. I have a lot coming up in the next few weeks, so I’m pausing Write With Me until mid-June. I’ll let yo know when I’m back.

Today is normally about writing.

I’m just not feeling it today.

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I Wasn’t Surprised… But I Wasn’t Ready Either

After the President of the United States posted this…

…basically threatening genocide, I was all up in my feelings.

Still am, to be honest.

I woke up to this message plastered all over social media. I wasn’t feeling great already, but to see this just sunk me lower.

I Tried to Push Through

I mustered up the strength to get up, do my homework, and turn it in.

But the whole time, all I could think about was how I wanted to get back in bed and watch Superman—the original one from 1978.

My Comfort Place

That version of Superman is my go-to when I need comfort.

This and Superman II.

Whenever life seems so hard, it takes me back to when I first saw it in the theaters. I was 7.

I can’t say for sure it was the first movie I fell in love with, but it was the first one I was completely enamored with.

I loved everything about it.

Even the opening credits—I was in awe.

Every time I watch it, it brings me back to a simpler time where, for me, everything was happy.

I know adults were going through adult things, but for me everything was just innocent and special.

I remember being gifted a giant Superman coloring book that was almost as big as I was. And when a family friend colored one of the pages, I was like—wow, you really can color.

I’m talking about that kind of innocence.

I mean everything about the experience warmed my heart.

The wholesomeness of the storyline.
How cute I thought Christopher Reeve was.
The special effects.
How funny I thought Lex Luthor was—even though he was the villain.

When I Needed It Most

When my mom had her stroke—which left her unable to breathe on her own—I would watch this movie often.

This one and Superman II.

(The other two sequels really sucked.)

I visited my mom every day for months until she passed away.

And some days, all I could do—besides visit her—was come home, lay in her bed, and watch Superman.

It was my comfort.

It still is.

So Yesterday…

When the President threatened the lives of millions of innocent people, I needed to go to my safe mental space.

And I did.

The Line That Hit Me

In the opening sequence, Jor-El, played by Marlon Brando, says:

“Has it now become a crime to cherish life?”

He’s trying to warn the fellow leaders of Krypton of the impending catastrophe of their planet.

And I thought…

This is what me and millions of others have tried to warn fellow citizens about this guy in office.

But so many didn’t listen—or didn’t care to listen.

We tried to tell you.

A Pause… But Not Relief

By the time the movie was over, there had been an announcement of an agreement between him and Iran.

Crisis temporarily evaded.

But I don’t feel relief.

Not really.

For Now

I have a feeling Superman will be cued up, ready to play for a while.

Not just for comfort.

But as a reminder.

Because that line keeps echoing in my head:

Has it now become a crime to cherish life?

And I don’t want to live in a country where the answer is yes.

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Concerned,

Danita aka Civic-Minded Jones

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I didn’t expect this.

I wrote a piece about my own fear—that learning more about writing might actually make me afraid to write—and something interesting happened.

People didn’t just respond.

They deepened the conversation.

And not in a surface-level way.

They brought their own experiences, their own philosophies, their own ways of navigating this tension between craft and instinct.

And what I found myself in wasn’t a one-way exchange—

it was a dialogue.

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Writing vs. Analyzing

One reader said something that stopped me:

If you are thinking about rules when writing, you are not writing—you are analyzing.

That line landed.

Because I’ve felt that exact shift happen.

The moment when I’m no longer in the flow of the story, but standing just outside of it… evaluating it.

Is this working?
Is this the right POV?
Does this sound “good” enough?

And in that moment, something changes.

The writing tightens. The voice gets quieter.

It reminded me of something I already know—but have to consciously return to:

When I’m writing, my job is to trust my instincts.
The analysis comes later.

From Painful to Playful

Another reader shared a story about a mentor—someone highly technical—who initially felt restrictive.

Until they reframed it.

They stopped seeing him as someone limiting their expression and started seeing him as a piano teacher:

Helping them hold their hands just so.
Running scales.
Building range.

And what started as painful… became playful.

That shift stayed with me.

Because I think that’s the version of craft I’m working toward.

Not something that constrains me.

But something that expands what I’m capable of.

Internalized Craft

There was another idea in that same comment that really struck me:

That much of our voice is already supported by internalized craft.

Not memorized rules.

Not conscious decisions.

But patterns we’ve absorbed over time—through reading, writing, watching, listening.

That’s the part of writing that feels like instinct.

And maybe what studying craft does is make visible what was already there.

The work, then, isn’t replacing instinct with rules—

it’s allowing awareness to support what’s already working.

Knowing vs. Doing

And then another reader brought it into a completely different space—teaching.

They talked about working in psych hospitals, and how knowing all the classroom management theories didn’t matter as much as who actually walked through the door.

Who the student was.
What they brought with them.

The reality in front of you.

And I couldn’t help but think:

Writing is the same way.

You can know the rules.
You can understand structure.
You can study technique.

But at some point, you’re faced with the story itself.

The character.
The moment.
The voice.

And none of that lives in theory.

It lives in the doing.

A Bridge I Keep Coming Back To

As I’ve been sitting with all of this, I’ve realized something else.

This tension between voice and structure… between instinct and rules…

isn’t just about writing.

It shows up in history, too.

The testimonies I’ve been reading—hundreds of pages of them—are filled with voices trying to tell what happened.

But those voices don’t exist in a vacuum.

They’re shaped by:

• who’s asking the questions

• what’s allowed to be said

• what gets recorded

• and what gets dismissed

There’s structure there. There are rules.

But underneath all of that…

there’s still a voice trying to come through.

And just like in writing, the question becomes:

Do we hear it clearly—or only through the lens of the framework around it?

That’s something I’m thinking about more and more—

both on the page, and in the historical record.

What I’m Taking With Me

From this conversation—and from where I am right now—

I’m taking this:

Write from instinct first.
Let craft support, not override.
Don’t confuse awareness with authority over the work.

And maybe most importantly:

Stay in conversation.

Because writing may feel solitary…

…but the thinking around it doesn’t have to be.

Your Turn

What’s something you’ve learned about writing—not from a class or a book—but from experience?

👇🏾 I’d love to hear.

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More soon.

See you Wednesday.

Danita

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I had a moment recently.

Fear came knocking at the door.

It was about writing my novel series.

I hadn’t even put word to the page.

But the fear was sitting in my head.

Not writer’s block in the traditional sense. A voice showed up uninvited. A very well-read, technically informed, slightly insufferable voice that wanted to know:

Are you going to do this right?

Is this the correct POV? Is the opening going to land? Will my prose be prosey enough? I despise too much prose—but is that what literary readers want?

I’ve written in first person POV and that was pretty easy. But I want to do so much more with my Vicksburg Peter Crosby series.

And I found myself sitting there in a bubble of fear, wondering:

Is learning how to write better actually making me afraid to write at all?

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The Seduction of “Good Writing”

Here’s the thing about studying craft seriously: it’s intoxicating.

You start to see things you couldn’t see before. You read a paragraph and understand why it works. You recognize the choices—the sentence rhythm, the controlled distance, the way a detail lands at exactly the right moment.

It feels like you’re being let in on a secret.

And you want that.

So you study more. You take the course. You read the theory. You learn the terms—close third, omniscience, psychic distance. You fall a little bit in love with the architecture of it all.

I’ll be honest: I’m pursuing my Master’s Degree in Creative Writing because this project means everything to me. The Peter Crosby Vicksburg series isn’t just a book. It’s years of research, hundreds of pages of congressional transcripts, and a story I feel a deep responsibility to tell.

I need to know I’m doing it justice technically.

I need the rules.

And I found them.

And I love them.

But somewhere along the way…

“I love the rules” quietly became:

“I’m terrified of breaking them.”

When Craft Starts to Mute You

There’s a version of learning craft that sets you free.

And there’s a version that builds a cage—bar by bar—until you’re sitting inside it wondering why the writing feels so airless.

Lately, I’ve been bumping up against that second version.

When you’re deep in the study of technique, every sentence becomes a test you can fail. Every word choice gets interrogated. Every instinct is second-guessed by something you read last Tuesday.

And the voice that used to just talk—the one that knew things before it knew why it knew them—that voice gets quieter.

That’s the fear I’m sitting with.

Not that I’ll write badly.

But that I’ll write correctly… and it won’t sound like me anymore.

What Got Me Here

I’ve spent most of my writing life in television and film.

And here’s what that world taught me:

Rules are your friends.

Screenplay format is rigid for a reason. Act structure exists for a reason. The slug line, the action line, the parenthetical—all of it has a purpose.

I thrive in that.

Give me a container and I will fill it. Tell me the rules and I will work beautifully within them.

But here’s what that world also gave me—long before I ever thought about craft theory:

Instinct. Voice. Story.

The ability to drop into a character’s world and feel it.

I didn’t learn that from a textbook.

That came from years of sitting in writers' rooms, reading scripts, writing scripts and watching what some people may consider ad nauseam countless hours of TV and film.

It’s in my bones.

And the fear?

That in my pursuit of technical correctness, I’ll sand that down.

That I’ll write something structurally sound…

…but emotionally hollow.

That I’ll get an A—

and lose the story.

The Balance I’m Learning — In Real Time

I don’t have this figured out.

This isn’t one of those neat, tied-up conclusions.

But here’s what I know:

Craft is a tool. It is not a replacement for voice.

It never was.

The writers I admire most—the ones whose work stops me cold—aren’t following the rules perfectly.

They’re using the rules to do something.

The technique is in service of something deeper.

You don’t notice the structure…

because the story is alive.

That’s the balance I’m reaching for.

Knowing the rules well enough to know:

• when to lean on them

• and when to trust the instinct that’s been writing longer than the rules have had a name

Studying POV didn’t give me my storytelling instincts.

But it is giving me a framework to use them more intentionally.

And that’s what I come back to when the doubt creeps in:

Technique should support voice.
Not override it.
Not replace it.
Not sit in judgment of it.

I’m reminding myself of that.

Daily.

(Some days more than others.)

Have You Ever Felt This Way?

I’m genuinely asking.

Have you ever been in the middle of learning your craft—really studying it—and felt like the more you knew, the harder it got to just write?

👇🏾 Drop it in the comments or hit reply. I’d love to hear your experience.

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This is something I’m exploring deeply right now—especially as I develop my work around helping writers reconnect with their voice.

More on that soon.

See you next Wednesday.

Danita

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Wednesdays Are for Writing

Let’s get into it.

I’ve been taking a course through Harvard Extension School — yes, that Harvard — and for these past few weeks we’ve been deep in the world of Point of View. And it’s got me thinking about one of the most important decisions any novelist has to make before they write a single word.

Who is telling this story—and how close do we get?

POV 101 — A Quick Breakdown

The Lens Shapes the Experience

Point of view is exactly what it sounds like: the lens through which a story is told. But the choice of lens changes everything — the intimacy, the tension, the emotional stakes.
It determines not just what we see, but how we feel it.

Here’s a quick overview of the main options:

First person — The narrator is a character in the story.
“I walked into the room and felt the air change.”
You’re inside one head, hearing one voice. Intimate, immediate, but limited to what that one person can know and see.

Second person — The narrator addresses the reader directly as “you.”
“You walk into the room and feel the air change.”
From what I understand, it’s rare in novels but creates an unusual, almost unsettling intimacy — like the story is happening to the reader in real time. And I tell you, I tried it for the first time and it’s a tricky one for me to get down.

Third person omniscient — The narrator knows everything. Every character’s thoughts, every room, every secret.
“She didn’t know he was watching from the window.”
This is the God’s-eye view. Powerful, but it can create distance between the reader and the characters.

Third person limited — The narrator follows one character at a time, staying close to their thoughts and feelings, but uses “he,” “she,” or “they” instead of “I.”
You get the intimacy of first person with a little more narrative flexibility. You’re in the room with the character, not floating above it.

That last one is where I landed for my Vicksburg series. And it took studying to get me there.

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Chekhov, Harvard, and a Full Circle Moment

Why Perspective Matters

In our Harvard course, we studied Anton Chekhov’s short story Grisha — a deceptively simple piece about a two-year-old boy experiencing the world outside his home for the first time. Everything is filtered through Grisha’s limited perception. He doesn’t understand what he sees. He just experiences it — the colors, the sounds, the strangeness of strangers. And because Chekhov keeps us locked inside that tiny, wondering perspective, we feel everything.

Reading it, I found myself thinking: this is exactly what I want to do with Peter Crosby.

But there was something else happening too. A feeling I wasn’t expecting.

Over thirty years ago, my very first job in theater was as an assistant stage manager on a production based on the works of Chekhov. I was young, green, taking it all in, without fully grasping the significance of what I was part of.

Now, decades later, I’m studying that same writer — but from a completely different place. With more experience. More perspective. And a deeper understanding of the craft.

That’s the thing about great work. It meets you differently at every stage of your life.

Why Third Person Limited

Closeness Over Distance

So why third person limited for the Vicksburg series?

Because I want my readers inside the experience. Not watching from a distance. Not receiving information — living it alongside the characters.

Third person omniscient would let me pull back, show the bigger picture, jump between perspectives freely. But that distance is exactly what I don’t want. The Reconstruction era, the people caught inside it, the weight of what they were living through — I need readers to feel that.

And you can’t feel it from a balcony—you have to be in the room.

First person was tempting. But my series follows multiple characters across the Vicksburg world, and locking into a single “I” would mean losing voices I’m not willing to lose.

What Is Serial Third Person Limited?

One Chapter, One Mind

That’s where serial third person limited comes in — and it’s worth explaining because it’s a specific and powerful choice.

In serial third person limited, you assign each chapter (or section) its own POV character. You stay locked inside that one person’s head for the duration of the chapter — their thoughts, their fears, what they notice, what they miss. Then in the next chapter, you move to a different character, and you’re fully inside them.

No head-hopping. No slipping into someone else’s thoughts mid-scene.

Think of it like handing a camera to a different person for each chapter. Same world. Different eyes.

This gives me the intimacy of first person and the scope to tell a story that’s bigger than any one character. Readers get to inhabit Peter Crosby. They get to inhabit the people around him. They feel the story from the inside — which is exactly where I want them.

What Grisha shows is that the closer you stay to a single consciousness, the more universal the experience becomes. Grisha is about a toddler discovering the world. And yet it’s about all of us.

That’s the power of POV done right.

And over the next couple of months, I’ll be putting this to the test myself — writing chapters from this POV and sitting with how it feels. That’s really the only way to know if you’ve made the right choice. You can study it, you can analyze it, you can be convinced in theory.

But the proof is always on the page.

If you’re working through POV choices in your own writing, this is exactly the kind of work I help writers unpack in my 1:1 sessions—getting clear on what serves the story, and what brings you closer to the page.

Hit reply and tell me what POV you’re working in—I read every message.

Your Turn

A Simple Craft Exercise

This week, I want you to think about the story you’re working on — or the one you’ve been meaning to start.

Ask yourself: whose head do I most need to be inside? And how close do I want my reader to get?

Try writing the same scene twice — once in third person omniscient, once in third person limited. (Even just one page.)
Feel the difference. Notice what you gain. Notice what you give up.

POV isn’t just a technical choice. It’s an emotional one. Choose accordingly.

See you next Wednesday.

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Warmly,

Danita

Tap the ❤️ if this was helpful, and share it with someone who’s working on their story. I’d love to hear what POV you’re choosing—and why.

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A weekly writing lesson from a produced TV writer

A Pretty Cool Thing Happened

I was recently featured in Writers Online, a UK magazine for writers, in a piece about authors who live-stream their writing sessions and why they do it. The journalist, Simon Whaley, reached out and wanted to talk about my Write With Me sessions on YouTube, and honestly, being asked to reflect on why I do it made me think harder about the answer than I expected.

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Because the honest answer isn’t glamorous. It’s not “I wanted to build a brand” or “I had a vision for community.” It’s simpler than that.

I needed to show up. And I needed something that would make me do it.

“I needed my own accountability. For years I’d been researching my historical fiction novel series, but I kept getting stuck on the 500+ pages of congressional hearing transcripts from the 1800s. Creating a thirty-day challenge helped push me through the research so I could begin writing the actual series.”
— Writers Online

Why Habits Fail (Even When We Know Better)

Here’s the thing about habits — the writing kind especially. We all know we should write every day. We’ve read the books, we’ve heard the advice, we’ve nodded along. And then life happens, and the blank page is still there at the end of the day, still blank, and we tell ourselves tomorrow.

I’ve been there. Many times.

The Power of Public Accountability

The Write With Me sessions started because I was deep in research for my historical fiction novel series — 500+ pages of congressional hearing transcripts from the 1800s — and I kept getting stuck. I needed accountability. Public accountability. So I went live. 5am, every morning, thirty days straight.

And it worked. Not because I’m superhuman. It worked because I had told people I’d be there.

Why Habits Fail (Even When We Know Better)

The schedule has shifted a little since then. I now teach the Writing for Television and Film course at Chapman University, so I’ve adjusted to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:30am — a full hour of writing together, ending at 7:30am pst.

Which brings me to this week.

Showing Up When You Don't Feel Like It

Monday, I was exhausted. Like, genuinely dragging. The kind of tired where you make a cup of coffee and then forget where you put it. I sat down at my computer, turned on the camera, and thought: why did I agree to do this.

And then today — Wednesday — I showed up again. Still tired. A little delirious, if I’m being completely honest. The first sprint I was basically running on fumes and sheer stubbornness. Somewhere around the second sprint, something clicked. The fog lifted a little. And guess what — I had reached a pivotal moment. Page 399 of the transcripts. The page where Peter Crosby’s testimony begins. I read his section years ago, but haven’t revisited it since I’ve been taking diligent notes on the previous 398 pages. Now, roughly only 101 pages left to go.

What Consistency Actually Feels Like

That’s the thing nobody tells you about consistency: it doesn’t always feel good at the start. Sometimes it feels ridiculous. Sometimes you’re sitting there in your pajamas at 6:30 in the morning wondering if any of this matters.

But you stay. And eventually, the work shows up for you.

The Ritual That Keeps Writers Going

In the magazine piece, I talked about how the sessions create a reliable ritual — not just for me, but for the writers who join.

“The biggest thing I get from the sessions is consistency. Showing up to the page is the hardest part for most writers. The blank page can feel intimidating, but writing every day creates momentum.”
— Writers Online

And I think that’s what I want to leave you with today.

You don’t need to go live on YouTube. You don’t need an audience or a camera or a thirty-day challenge. But you do need something that makes the habit stick. A time. A signal. A commitment — even a quiet one — that today, you write.

The blank page isn’t going anywhere. Neither are you.

Your Turn

This week’s challenge: pick one time — just one — and write for twenty-five minutes without stopping.

No editing. No second-guessing.

Set a timer and show up for it like someone is watching — even if no one is.

And if you want some company, you know where to find me:

Join the sessions:

https://www.youtube.com/@TheDanitaJones

Monday, Wednesday, Friday
6:30am PST

See you next Wednesday.

Warmly,

Danita

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And the first lesson I gave my Chapman screenwriting students this semester was simple:

A scene can tell us everything about a character without a single word of dialogue.

The first day I taught at Chapman, after going through the syllabus, I pulled up a clip and said: Watch this.

The opening of There Will Be Blood.

If you haven’t seen it — or haven’t seen it in a while — here’s what happens. And I want you to really picture it as I walk through it, because that’s the whole point.

The screen goes black.

Then we’re in the middle of nowhere. Barren, windswept land. No music yet. Just silence and the sound of the earth.

A man is alone, picking at the ground with a pickaxe. We don’t know his name. Nobody introduces him. There’s no voiceover, no title card explaining who he is or what he wants.

There’s just him — and the work.

He chips at a rock face.

Climbs down into a hand-dug shaft.

And then — he falls. Hard.

You wince.

He’s clearly hurt.

He lies there for a moment at the bottom of this hole he made himself.

And then he climbs out.

That’s it. He just… climbs out.

He limps — visibly limps — and goes right back to work.

Here’s what I asked my students:

What do you know about this man?

The room went quiet for a second.

Then hands started going up.

He’s determined.
He doesn’t ask for help.
He doesn’t quit.
He doesn’t even seem to register the pain as a reason to stop.

The obstacle is just… a thing that happened.

He acknowledges it and moves past it.

Not a single word of dialogue.

Not one line of exposition.

And yet we know exactly who Daniel Plainview is.

We know his engine. We know what drives him — and maybe more importantly, we can already sense what it’s going to cost him.

That’s the magic of visual storytelling.

We understood all of that without anyone ever telling us.

That’s what I wanted my Chapman students to feel in their bones on day one:

You can tell us everything we need to know about a character through action alone.

Writing dialogue is one skill. It’s an important one.

But there’s something even more powerful about learning to write a scene where the character does something, and what they do reveals everything.

Think about the choice P.T. Anderson made.

He could have opened the film with Daniel at a dinner table, explaining his ambitions.

He could have had someone ask, “Why do you keep going, Daniel?”

And Daniel could have delivered a speech about his drive, his hunger, his vision.

Instead, we get a man climbing out of a hole on a broken leg and going right back to work.

And it tells us more than any speech ever could.

After discussing this with the class, I found myself thinking about scenes I’ve written — and which ones I might rewrite with this in mind.

Your Turn

Here’s the exercise I gave my students — and now I’m giving it to you.

Write a scene. No dialogue allowed.

Pick one defining trait:

Obsession.
Fear.
Loyalty.
Recklessness.
Pride.

Whatever it is that drives your character — or haunts them.

Now put them in a situation where that trait is tested.

Give them an obstacle.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be small and quiet.

But let them respond to it in a way that, without a single line of spoken words, shows us their whole soul.

One scene.

No dialogue.

Make us feel who they are.

If you try the exercise, drop your scene in the comments. I really do read them — and I’d love to see what you come up with.

See you next Wednesday.

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Warmly,

Danita

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Where I’ve Been

I owe you an explanation.

Not an apology — well, maybe a little bit of one — but mostly an explanation.

It’s been a minute.

And in that minute, a lot has happened.

I started teaching Writing for Television and Film at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. Me. Teaching. The same craft I’ve been practicing for over thirty years — Frasier, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, development work, producing — now I’m passing it on to the next generation of storytellers. I won’t lie to you. It’s been humbling and exhilarating at the same time.

I also started a pre-admissions course at Harvard Extension School, working toward my Master’s in Creative Writing. Because apparently I don’t believe in doing things halfway.

And this week — today, actually — I’m graduating from the Entertainment Community Fund Teacher Artist program. Earlier this month I had the honor of teaching my lesson plan on the Compromise of 1877 to a very engaged High School classroom at Harvard-Westlake High School in Studio City. Standing in front of high school students and watching them connect 1877 to right now? That’s something I’ll carry with me for a long time.

I’ve also changed my Write With Me days on YouTube. Instead of Monday through Friday, I’m on live M, W, F from 6:30am-7:30am (pst).

So yes. I’ve been busy.

What It’s Been Feeding

But here's what I need you to know: all of it — every single bit of it — has been feeding the work we do here together.

You all know Peter Crosby.

You know the Vicksburg massacre. You’ve been with me on this research journey — the testimonies, the names, the violence that history tried to bury. You’ve read these stories and you’ve stayed. That means everything to me.

Now I’m ready to give you something new.

I’ve been building a podcast using the individual survivor testimonies from the massacre. Real voices. Real accounts. Brought to life in a way I’ve never done before. It’s not ready to launch quite yet — but it’s close. And when it drops, I want you to be the first to hear it.

This is what happens when a television writer spends years obsessing over a piece of forgotten American history. You start to hear it differently. You start to think about how it should sound.

That podcast is coming. Soon.

This Newsletter Is Evolving

Here’s what I’m building going forward, and I want to be transparent with you about it:

This newsletter is evolving. I’m still writing about hidden histories and the threads that connect Reconstruction-era America to today. That’s never changing. But now I’m also bringing in what I’m learning — in the classroom, in my own graduate work, in the research for my historical novel series on Peter Crosby.

For paid subscribers, I’ll be going deeper. Behind-the-scenes from the novel research. The craft of telling true historical stories — what I’m teaching my film students about structure, scene, and narrative. Primary sources. My own process.

If you’ve been reading for free and you’ve been thinking about upgrading — now is a good time. We’re entering a new chapter, and I’d love for you to be fully in it. I’ll also be raising subscription prices later this year — so if you subscribe now, you’re getting in at the lowest rate this newsletter will ever be.

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If you’re already a paid subscriber: thank you. Truly. You’ve kept this going during a season when I had very little bandwidth. I don’t take that lightly.

Comments are open to paid subscribers — join us if you’d like to be part of the deeper conversations shaping this work.

We Are Not New to This

Now, I haven’t been ignoring what’s been going on politically and all of the racist things we’ve seen just in this Black History Month alone. From BAFTA’s inadequate initial response to the n-word being yelled out during their ceremony — which took days of public pressure before they issued an actual apology — to Trump’s post of the Obamas on apes’ bodies. And everything that continues with ICE.

It really has been disgusting to witness.

It’s not like we haven’t been here before in some regards and I feel it’s appropriate to release the full video of my interview with Steven Niven that I did for my series From Discord to Harmony where we looked back at how the election of President Obama triggered the racists to come out of hiding. We take it back to the 1800s and discuss the retribution when Black people get into power and how some white folks get their panties all up in a bunch and do things to make sure power is reversed and goes back to them.

Please share this video. The information in it is very important to get some understanding about how we got to this current climate.

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More coming soon.

The podcast. New posts. The stories that haven’t been told yet.

I’m back.

Be blessed. Be safe. Take care.

— Danita aka Civic-Minded Jones

P.S. If this new chapter excites you, tap the ❤️ below. Paid subscribers, I’d love to hear what you’re most looking forward to in the comments.

These are not separate crises. They are expressions of the same system, and many of us have felt pulled in a thousand directions — shaken, saddened, and emotionally overwhelmed.

Not to mention our own personal struggles in the midst. For me, the uncertainty of the entertainment industry. Though things seem to slowly be picking up again, it’s nowhere near what it used to be. And my cousin who I wrote about in 2024 who was missing but this past October she had a severe stroke. Every day, every week, her life is uncertain as she’s been in and out of ICU since the last week of October.

These moments don’t just stay “out there” — they land in our minds and bodies, shaping how we feel when we wake up, how we engage with the world, and how we show up for the people we love.

That’s why I want to share two deeply thoughtful conversations that are especially timely right now — not just as interviews, but as tools for understanding and grounding ourselves during uncertain times.

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These interviews are from my From Discord to Harmony series and there isn’t a more important time to share them with you all. I hope they give you some solace and peace while navigating these difficult times. What I’ve learned is that when the world feels unsafe, our nervous systems often carry the weight first.

Why Our Nervous Systems Are Under Strain — and How to Care for Them

— Politics & Mental Health
Watch here:

In this conversation, trauma-informed mental health expert Dr. Shanté Holley helps us unpack how stress, anxiety, civic uncertainty, and emotional exhaustion manifest in our lives — especially when we feel like we have no room to rest. She talks about:

• how constant political flux can affect mental well-being

• why anxiety shows up in so many forms

• how to care for ourselves without disconnecting from what’s happening in the world

This isn’t just theory — it’s a practical, compassionate look at how to navigate emotional weight in a hyper-charged era of news and conflict.

Naming Political Grief — and What Healing Can Look Like

— Political Grief
Watch here:

In this conversation, Njeri Njuhigu, transformational grief coach and founder of Living Light and Care Box Network, helps us name something many people are carrying but don’t yet have language for: political and communal grief.

As Njeri explains, millions of Americans are living with sorrow, anger, and despair — not because they’re disengaged, but because democracy can feel broken, unsafe, or unrecognizable. While the U.S. may be treated as a spectacle abroad, for those of us living here, the emotional impact is real and deeply personal.

A Moment to Breathe

There’s no easy way to process what’s happening in our country right now — but part of caring for ourselves and our communities is naming how hard it feels, acknowledging the emotional toll, and seeking understanding from thinkers and guides who bring both wisdom and empathy to these topics.

I truly hope these conversations offer clarity, comfort, and perspective — not as a replacement for real rest or support, but as companions in the journey.

Stay tuned for more conversations that help us think not just critically — but compassionately — about how we live, care, and participate in our shared lives.

If this resonated with you, please hit the ❤️ and share it with someone who might need it right now.

With care,
Danita

As you know, I’ve been doing my Write With Me sessions on YouTube Monday through Friday from 6:30–7:30 a.m. (PST).

One of the unexpected joys of these mornings has been what surfaces in my research for my historical novel series on Peter Crosby and the Vicksburg Massacre.

Sometimes it’s not the big moments that change everything, but a single line buried in testimony.

The Bond That Was Never Enough

While reviewing the congressional testimony of Judge Luke Lea, I came across a list of names tied to Peter Crosby’s surety bond.

If you’ve been following Crosby’s story, you know why this matters. The official justification white supremacists used to forcibly remove him from the office of sheriff was that his bonds were “insufficient.”

That explanation was never neutral.

During Reconstruction, sheriffs were not only lawmen. They were also tax collectors, election enforcers, and custodians of public funds. Because of this, sheriffs were required to post surety bonds. These bonds were financial guarantees that public money would be handled properly, and they were backed by other individuals who pledged their own assets and reputations as security.

In plain terms, if a sheriff was accused of wrongdoing, truthfully or not, everyone listed on that bond was exposed.

This is why surety bonds became such an effective weapon against Black sheriffs. White officials could claim concern over finances while carrying out what was, in reality, a political and racial overthrow.

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Two Names That Changed Everything

As I read Judge Lea’s testimony, two names stopped me in my tracks.

One was William H. Harney, a Black sheriff of Hinds County, Mississippi.

The other was Blanche K. Bruce.

Most people know Bruce as a U.S. senator, and I wrote about him in a recent Substack quiz. But at the time Peter Crosby’s bond was issued, Bruce was the sheriff of Bolivar County.

That detail changed everything for me.

These were not distant figures. They were not symbolic allies. They were three Black sheriffs in Mississippi, serving at the same time, legally and financially tied to one another.

Their names appearing together on a surety bond means they trusted one another with their livelihoods, their freedom, and possibly their lives.

Hinds County, Harney, and Home

What made this discovery even more personal is that my mother’s side of the family is from Hinds County.

If I had known about Harney when I first began researching Peter Crosby, I might have started with his story instead. But I also believe there’s meaning in discovering him this way, through connection rather than chronology.

Knowing now that Harney, Bruce, and Crosby were all sheriffs at the same time, navigating the same dangers and underwriting one another’s survival, changes how I understand this period. It has also reshaped the novel series I’m writing. These men will appear together in scenes that explore not just public office, but the constant calculation required to survive it.

Why Mississippi Was Always the Story

I didn’t land in Mississippi by accident.

My family once owned 400 acres in Hinds County in the early 1900s. The settlement was called Hickstown, named after my family’s last name, Hicks.

My mom grew up there and told me these stories long before I ever thought I’d write them down. How my great-great-aunt Joanna, Papa Sebass’s sister, ran a grocery store and a juke joint. How they grew their own produce, raised animals, and picked cotton.

Tomorrow is my mom’s birthday, and it feels right to say out loud that this history exists in me because it lived in her first.

She explained why the juke joint existed in the first place. In other parts of Mississippi, if a Black person was seen walking out of a bar, it didn’t matter whether they had one drink or none at all. Just being seen was enough. The police would arrest them for public intoxication, and walking home made you even more vulnerable.

In Hickstown, people felt safe.

Until they didn’t.

As racial terror escalated, most, though not all, of the family fled to Chicago during the Great Migration.

Some stayed. The land remained.

My great-grandfather Sebastian, Papa Sebass, and his three brothers purchased the 400 acres together. Today, the lineage under Papa Sebass still owns 120 acres. The rest has long since been sold.

I came across this image online. The name on the sign, Robert Hicks, belongs to my great-great-uncle. I know I have photographs somewhere that show the Hickstown street sign itself. At the time of writing, I hadn’t yet found them.

Black Land Was Power After the Ballot Was Taken

What my family did was not accidental, and it was not rare among Black families who survived the collapse of Reconstruction.

Between the end of the Civil War and the early 1900s, Black Americans acquired land through cash purchases during postwar land depressions, tax sales on indebted white landowners, collective family pooling, and by settling just outside white-controlled towns.

When Black political power was violently stripped away, land became another form of sovereignty.

The ballot was taken.
The deed remained.

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The fact that any of this land still exists today is extraordinary.

Black Sheriffs of the Reconstruction Era Beyond Mississippi

What you’ve read so far focuses on Mississippi, because that’s where my story and my family’s story intersect. But Peter Crosby, William Harney, and Blanche K. Bruce were not alone.

Across the South, Black men briefly held one of the most dangerous positions of the Reconstruction era… sheriff.

Most of their names were never meant to survive.

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Much of this history was intentionally erased, and these quizzes are one small way to bring some of those stories back to the surface.

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Today I’m sharing the first quiz from my YouTube series, along with brief biographies of the two leaders featured.

Watch the quiz first, and then continue below to take a written version and go deeper.

🎥 Reconstruction Quiz #1

Mini-Bios of the Leaders Featured

Hiram Revels (1827–1901)

Hiram Revels became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate when he represented Mississippi in 1870. A minister, educator, and community leader, Revels symbolized what Reconstruction briefly made possible: Black political leadership at the highest levels of government.
Source: U.S. Senate Historical Office

Blanche K. Bruce (1841–1898)

Born enslaved in Virginia, Blanche Bruce rose to become the first Black man to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. Representing Mississippi from 1875 to 1881, he fought for voting rights, fair treatment for Native Americans, and economic stability during a period of intense white supremacist resistance.
Source: U.S. Senate Historical Office

Ready to Test Your Knowledge?

Paid subscribers can access the full written quiz, answer key, and deeper context below.

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Life pulled me in a few directions these past few weeks, but I’m back and excited to share what’s been unfolding.

There’s a lot shifting right now—creatively, professionally, and in the ways I’m showing up for my writing and for this community. As I move through this new season, I want to keep bringing you along. Today I’m sharing three updates I’m excited about: a new Write With Me time, a collaboration with author coach Amy Page (@MsPage), and a personal milestone for 2026.

1. New Time for Write With Me ⏰

As the year winds down and new opportunities open up, I’m shifting our morning writing hour to a time that supports everything unfolding right now.

Beginning Monday, November 24th, the new schedule is:

6:30 AM – 7:30 AM PT (Monday–Friday)

Holiday note:
I’ll be off this Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving.

If you’re new to the sessions, here’s the rhythm:

• Two 25-minute writing sprints

• A 5–10 minute break to chat about what you’re working on, ask story questions, or share wins

• A short wrap-up

It’s focused, cozy, and a supportive place to show up for your writing—even on days when inspiration takes its time.

→ Join the next Write With Me - And subscribe to get the notifications of when I’m on.
Replays will still be available if the time doesn’t work for you.

Why this shift matters for you:
If you’ve wanted a predictable morning routine or a gentle accountability partner, this is a great moment to begin or restart your writing habit.

2. A Collaboration I’m Excited About — and a Free 3-Step Publishing Guide from Amy Page (@MsPage) 🤝📚

Some of you have seen Amy Page (@MsPage) pop into my Write With Me sessions on YouTube. She’s an author coach with a vibrant indie-author community, and we first connected during one of those morning sprints. From the start, I could feel her genuine care for writers.

This week, she’s offering something valuable to you:

→ Get Amy Page’s 3-Step Guide to Publishing Confidently
It’s short, clear, and incredibly useful if you’re thinking about publishing—or even simply exploring the idea.

I’m not sure how long Page is going to have this available. Grab it now before it goes away.

If you download it, hit reply and let me know what stood out.
I love hearing how writers connect with resources like this.

And if you’re here because of Amy: welcome. 💛 You’re in a good space for creativity, history, and grounded conversations about craft.

3. I’ll Be Teaching at Chapman in Spring 2026 🎓

A personal milestone I’m excited to share: I’ve accepted a teaching position at Chapman University for Spring 2026, where I’ll be teaching Writing for Film and Television I at Dodge College.

It feels like a full-circle moment—bringing together my TV writing experience (Frasier, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and feature films) with my love of mentoring writers.

When I got the news, I took a quiet moment just to let it sink in. This journey has been long, winding, and deeply meaningful—and I’m grateful to be stepping into this new chapter.

As I add teaching into the mix, you may notice a few subtle shifts in what I share here—more reflections on voice, structure, writing craft, and the creative process.

But don’t worry: History’s Untold Stories is still very much part of this space.
If anything, the two strengthen each other:

• Studying story deepens how I approach history

• And studying history sharpens my understanding of character, conflict, and narrative

They work hand in hand.

If you haven’t grabbed it yet, here’s a resource from my own creative journey:

→ Download “10 Tips to Enhance Your Storytelling Skills”
Not tied to Chapman — just something I created to help writers reconnect with their voice.

What’s Coming Up Next

For those who aren’t subscribed on YouTube, you may not know that I’ve been creating History Quizzes over there—short, visual quizzes on lesser-known figures and moments from history. I’ll be sharing them here as well, but you’ll get a bonus: I’ll also include short bios of these little-known figures so you can get the fuller story behind each quiz.

And soon, I’ll be sharing another From Discord to Harmony video from the series.

As things continue to shift and expand, I’ll keep bringing you along for the journey.

How You Can Plug In This Week

• Join the next Write With Me at the new morning time 6:30am (PST)
  

• Download Amy Page’s “3-Step Guide to Publishing Confidently”
  

• Grab my free “10 Tips to Enhance Your Storytelling Skills”
  

• Hit reply and tell me:

  • What project do you want to make progress on before the year ends?
    

  • Would you be interested in future workshops inspired by my creative process?
    

Thank you for being here. For writing with me, reading with me, and growing with me.

More soon,
Danita ✍🏾

What I’ve Been Up To

September and October have been very busy months for me! I’m still doing my Write With Me sessions on YouTube at 5 a.m. and making steady progress on my research into Peter Crosby and the Vicksburg Massacre.

The exciting news? I was one of 15 people accepted into the Entertainment Community Fund’s Teacher Artist Program! It’s a program that trains artists to become Teaching Artists in K–12 schools. Basically, you bring your industry experience—whether that’s producing, writing, directing, painting, acting, or set design (just to name a few)—and share it with students in the classroom.

You can also collaborate with teachers to incorporate history, science, or math into your lessons.

Bringing History Into the Classroom

Well, you know me—history is my bag. So for my lesson plan, I decided to have the students take a look back at history and how it compares to or affects today’s world.

I’ll have them examine the Compromise of 1877.

For those who aren’t familiar with the Compromise of 1877, here’s a short video to catch you up to speed.

If you choose not to watch the video, the Compromise is what ended Reconstruction and propelled the country into almost 100 years of Jim Crow.

Why the Compromise Still Matters

The Compromise rolled back protections for Black people. I’ll have the students compare that to today’s world and discuss what protections have been rolled back recently—and how those changes affect people.

Then, they’ll come up with concepts for TikTok or other short-form videos comparing the two and sharing their vision for how we can overcome or prevent these things in the future.

History Has Patterns—And People

While reflecting on this, I thought it would be a good time to showcase the interview I did with historian Steven J. Niven.

We discussed how, historically, whenever Black people gained political power, there have been waves of white backlash throughout U.S. history.

Take a look at the short clip below.

Paid subscribers can watch the full, insightful interview—where Steven J. Niven and I dive deeper into Reconstruction, resilience, and what these lessons mean for America today.
If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, this is a powerful one to unlock.

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