Notes from the next book
In defense of forgetting to self-market
Well! November 4th has come and gone and with it the publication of my pseudonymous new novel. To the likely chagrin of my publishing team(s) I completely spaced on any sort of publication substacking. Oops!! Honeymoon Stage is out now and I’m proud of it—it’s a romp through early aughts feminism and it was fun to write.
But here’s the thing, a little publishing-world secret: by the time your book has made it through the pipeline and popped out to readers, you (the career writer, in the ‘I’m going to keep doing this because even if I have to make money in a different way, this work is vital to my soul’ kind of sense) will have already begun your next project. Indeed, I did forget to market myself—and it’s because I am knee-deep in the next thing. I’ve closed the book on early aughts pop stardom, but if anyone wants to talk about the Fox/Claflin Sisters or the Reagans’ White House astrologer or the witches in Macbeth I’m your gal. Now that I’ve officially published four novels, I can say unequivocally that the best part of publishing a novel is the writing of it. I’ve never hit the bestseller list, but I’ve gotten great press and engaged reviews and lists and tours and so many things that young me could have never imagined. I say this not to brag—I’m basically living the midlist dream, which is…lol, nothing to brag about. But despite any flowers, it always comes back to the work. Building and engaging and falling in love with a project. The work is here and happening and I am currently IN IT in a new novel to the extent that I am haunted by its characters and questions. I live for this. I’m not interested in watching a three hour movie1 (I promise one day I will watch One Battle After Another, new Knives Out, etc), because as soon as my kids are in bed and my day job work is done my brain is begging me to return to the page. What a blessing.
It’s a tough time to be a person in the world, but the work is always there. Aren’t we lucky to have minds and feelings and to not be AI? I keep reminding myself that it is beautiful to feel things deeply, to care about the world and how I move within it, even when it feels impossibly hard. I hope as this holiday season gets into swing2 you can hold the complexities of what it means to be alive and engaged with life within you, too.
xxx.
J
Extra, extra:
As of yesterday, CBP is back in Chicago. Know your rights and keep your whistles at the ready.
I’m currently reading Adam Morgan’s A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, a new book about Margaret C. Anderson, the pioneering modernist lit mag editor who first serialized and then was arrested for serializing James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s a fabulous reminder to be brave in art and publishing and life. (Those mid-century Margarets really were something.) I’ll be talking to Adam about the book at Women and Children First on January 15. Chicago, come out!
I can not recommend the Lincoln Center production of Ragtime highly enough. I sobbed the entire way through. If you’re able, please go give yourself this gift.
I also read the newest Ian McEwan and if you did, too, let’s talk about it. I have thoughts!!!
What I am interested in watching? Bad holiday romcoms. Please join me on Instagram Stories for Netflixmas, now in its 8th year.
Happy Hanukkah, I got my 5yo a Labubu, I am still part of the problem)!