The Word Was the Door. Here's What Was on the Other Side.

No joke: Hopeless Semantic launches today.

In the summer of 2017, I started a project called Hopeless Semantic.

The premise was simple: spot a word in the wild — on a street sign, a billboard, a menu — photograph it, look up its official definition, and write a short piece inspired by what I found. The word was the door. The story was whatever was on the other side.

I loved it immediately. I also had no idea what it was actually doing.

On April 28, 2018, I got sober.

I won’t bury the lede on that, because it’s not something I’m interested in burying. Sobriety is central to who I am now: how I work, how I write, how I show up. But truth be told (and truth will always be told), I didn’t even know at first that it was permanent. I thought I was taking a break. Three months in to said “break,” as I was approaching my come-out-of-my-mother’s-womb July birthday, someone asked me if I was going to celebrate with cocktails.

And without pause, I replied, “Uh…no. No, I am not.”

And that’s when I knew: sobriety was the only way forward. The only way to actually live the life I kept writing about wanting. The only way to actually STAY alive.

That summer, I also went back to the pieces I’d originally written for Hopeless Semantic over the past year. Some from before I kicked the Bota Box of wine to the curb. Some from those first tender months of early sobriety, when my heart was broken to a level I have never experienced, from a relationship that imploded in ways that brought me to my knees and nearly took me out completely. And yet, somehow, even without lubrication to numb that pain, I realized I was paying attention to language and meaning in a way I hadn’t in years, maybe ever. I gathered about a dozen of my pieces, shaped them into something, and used that work to apply for my first writing residency.

I got it. The Writing by Writers Mill House Residency, November 2018.

I remember thinking: Would this have ever happened had I not turned towards sobriety?

Let me be clear: just because I got sober did NOT mean I suddenly started making the most awesome choices ever. In fact, my first year of sobriety was an absolute shit show at times, especially in the romance department, to the point that you might have been inclined to give me a breathalyzer to confirm I was, in fact, making such choices stone cold sober.

So what followed after unlocking my first writing residency was not a straight line (it never is), but it was movement, and it was mine. I adapted my second novel into a screenplay. I produced things that mattered to me. I kept saying yes to creative work and slowly, deliberately, started saying no to everything else. By 2022, I’d left full-time corporate life. By October 2024, I was working entirely on my own writing and producing. The thing I’d been circling for years, finally landed.

Hopeless Semantic didn’t go dormant during all of that. It became the foundation. And since then, we’ve been building and renovating.

And now it’s time for a house warming party. So here we are.

Let me tell you what “here” is: “Hopeless Romantic” describes a person in love with love. I am a Hopeless Semantic. A person in love with meaning. With language and subtext and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, how we got here, and what we’re going to do about it.

This is where those stories live.

Dispatches from the intersection of humor and heartbreak: the writing life, my sobriety, why dogs are better than humans, pop culture (the good, the great, AND the gross), WTF is going on in the world (no really… what the F IS going on in the world), and whatever else is currently lighting me up. Funny ha-ha and funny strange and funny-not-funny. We will not shy away from politics, because silence isn’t an option. We will absolutely get personal, because good writing has to be. Some weeks short; some weeks longer and harder-won. Occasionally, a word spotted in the wild that cracked something open and I had to tell you about it.

My name is Sarah Grace McCandless. My friends call me SG. I am a novelist, screenwriter, producer, workshop teacher, Poshmarker, and the dog mom of Gilda Radner, my corgi-terrier rescue and best decision I’ve ever made. I was born in Chicago, raised in the suburbs of Detroit, served time in Portland (Oregon), DC and NYC, but now living the life of a showgirl in Las Vegas with frequent jaunts to Los Angeles.

And I’m a Hopeless Semantic. I have been for a while.

Welcome. Let’s go.

xo,
SG

Hopeless Semantic lands in your inbox on Wednesdays. If someone in your life belongs here, send them this way.