dispatches from hell

aka being a writer is hard / crying / whining / hold me please

Sep 19, 2024

I have so much to tell you!

I know I’ve been MIA, but it’s because I’ve been working, like all the time. And also because I’m a neurotic maniac when it comes to any sort of writing. Every time I thought about writing a newsletter about Love is Blind UK or how deliciously camp the new season of Selling Sunset is, I just sort of panicked like, maybe let Roxane Gay handle the cultural criticism and go lay down, babe. (Please don’t unsubscribe me for being the worst.)

My writing anxiety is ramped up right now because I’m working on my second novel. There are just like A LOT of blank pages. And facing all my inadequacy and confusion in this early draft, combined with not having enough time to work in long stretches, it’s making me nuts, and I sort of fall into patterns of avoidance.

Here’s a neurotic thing I do, maybe you can relate: I set my alarm for 5:00 a.m. with plans to start my day with writing pages and pages of brilliance before the rest of the world gets a hold of me (work, the kid, the dog that needs to be walked, etc, etc) and then I rewrite the same paragraph for an hour and make very little progress. And then if I still don’t like the paragraph when the hour is up, I spend the rest of the day with this failure in the back of my mind like, bitch, why can’t you write a good sentence???

And, girl, yes, I know, that I’m working on a first draft and it doesn’t have to be perfect. I even very confidently proclaimed to my bestie / first reader Taylor that what I’d learned from writing FAN FAVORITE and moving through the editing / publishing process with Grand Central, was that everything changes and changes again and there’s absolutely no reason to write a first draft with insane expectations. I was like, I’m just going to blow through this first draft and then we’ll fix it later.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA.

I think writers come at their work from different places. Some people start with characters, or there’s a setting, or whatever. For me, it’s always this big idea, so writing the opening chapters feels like not only testing the idea to see if it works, but also getting to know the characters at the same time. And I feel like the decisions I’m making in the opening chapters affect how everything will play out in the rest of the book, so, in a way, writing the first chapters over and over again makes sense to me and my process because getting the facts of the situation right is important!

Except it’s also making it really hard to move forward!

But! There are bright spots! My new book is about a washed up girl group singer who is forced to go on a Y2K reunion tour to win the heart of her long-time boy band crush. So there’s a lot of 2000s outfits / hairstyles / nostalgia that is just really fucking fun to imagine and I also get to write songs! Last weekend I enlisted Taylor and NM to write Y2K girl group songs with me and we laughed so, so hard. Tell me this isn’t hilarious—

~Sting~

you sting like a bee, yeah

oh you hurt

when you buzz ‘round those girls

you’re a flirt

lookin’ like a butterfly, stingin’ like a bee

B! E! E! (ouch)

Why you stingin’ me

I mean, that’s a hit.

Other ways I’m dealing with the anxiety: making people who love me read what I have so far and tell me not to quit. Yesterday my bestie

Jeremy Owens

texted me—

Pull it together Sylvia Plath - this is so fun and funny and cute. Your jokes have me laughing - it’s all that and a bag of chips 🤣

And then I was like, are you just saying this so I’ll shut up, and he was like shut up and then I tried to.

I’m also JOURNALING about my FEELINGS and TALKING TO MY INNER CHILD and telling her I LOVE HER and that IT’S OK TO BE SKERRED and thinking that maybe I will one day listen to my therapist’s recommendation that I get EDMR to treat my MFA trauma. And I’m trying my best to JUST SAY NO to social engagements so I can carve out longer stretches of writing time and (hopefully) catch a flow.

Here’s something exciting—we’ve been working on the cover for FAN FAVORITE all summer and have just finished! Grand Central has been extremely awesome and let me weigh in on the concept and the look and feel and I think the design we’ve settled on is gonna look fantastic on the romance table at your fav bookstore ~ ~ ~ passes out just thinking about it ~ ~ ~ I think I’ll get to share the cover in October and the book itself is scheduled to come out in June!

Okay, my friends, thank you for not unsubscribing, I really am trying to pull myself together because I also want to write about all the pop culture because I love talking about books, TV, movies, celebs with you the most! To that end, lemme leave you with some recs—

happy endings

apparently I’m in my perimenopause era because I read both Sandwich and All Fours in the last couple of months and I’m both sort of terrified and looking for more women to discuss with???? Both books are great reads but in the words of Selina Meyer, “I’m still a young woman! Look at my hands, look at my neck!”
as I mentioned, the latest season of Selling Sunset is a delicious snack
I also started both of the new seasons of 90 Days the Other Way and Before the 90 Days on Max and wow-o-wow those producers are really working overtime, THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE
this is a VERY sexy read
do you or do you not want more costume tutorials for the Halloween season????