I’ve been ‘afraid of changing (my emotional support commas)

An anxious girl’s guide to making small changes to punctuation and sometimes bigger changes, too

It’s been a while! I accidentally skipped a newsletter month here, so this letter will be about two things:

1. You can preorder my book, gosh please do, I will be HOPELESSLY TEAVOTED to you for it. Preorders are important; they let publishers know there is interest and that helps authors to keep writing books! This item is brief. The rest of the newsletter will really be about the next.

2. Change is tough.

First, a few thoughts on discourse (haha SORRY 💀) that every few months, rises from the dead like an immortal, as though it could be Madeline Ashton or Helen Sharp, body falling apart and held together with airbrushing and super glue, a finger popping up here and an odd head rolling across the internet floor there.

I have my reasons for thinking about Death Becomes Her, and reason number one is obviously Isabelle Rossellini, who by the way is on my list, and as much as I love Winona Ryder, will never be bumped. Reason number two is obviously the “Taste” music video, which requires no further explanation.

But I digress.

Back to the disk horse.

Here [people on the internet] come again 🎶 …

…suggesting that romance and romantasy books aren't worthy and that lit fic OR fantasy books written by men are. And here I am just wanting to love books.

And honestly, one of the biggest—and best—changes in my author career has been shifting from trying to write literary fiction to writing what I love most: kissing books. Was it scary? Yes. Did I worry people would take it less seriously? Absolutely. Did that prove to be true, many times over? Yup. But the thing about big changes, and I am willing to hold your hand when I say this, because I feel like I needed someone to hold mine, is this:

You can’t make a big change based on what other people are going to think or how other people are going to feel. And part of what makes change so scary is that you also can’t predict, or control, the way people around you react to those changes. You just have to figure out what it is that YOU need to do, and make that happen.

But I can promise that the most agonizing changes, the things I really tore myself up over, like switching genres when I returned to writing in 2020 after starting and stalling and stopping for two decades, those BIG scary changes are usually the best ones.

If you had a nickel for the number of times I quoted the narrator from Pushing Daisies with “the facts were these,” you’d have at least a few dollars.

And the facts here are these: This month, I finished copy edits, after two rounds of what I would call extremely loving developmental edits, and I just know that every time I’ve revisited this book—every revision before querying, every revision after, every revision with my editor—it becomes better, and stronger. Each read through, each CHANGE polishes the message, the line level writing, and the nuance. I have crafted this with far more care and thought than any of the academic writing I have ever done, including for my Master’s Thesis (which was in English Education, tldr we do need a department of Ed, like, VERY MUCH, but I digress).

Change sometimes hurts like hell—I know this because I can now attest to the fact that many emotional support commas have been removed from my work, and that I fear it is stronger for it. Like, I LOVED those emotional support commas. I damn near wrote “stet, for voice” next to every single one of my commas, knowing full well that they were not, in fact, for voice, but for my love of the curvaceous little mark. Stet, by the way, is a proofreading mark that means “let it stand” in Latin, and in copyediting it’s a nice way to say no thank you to a suggested change.

My point is, the book has been clarified, adjusted, fine tuned, and I know it is stronger for it. Sure, I realize I cut a few GREAT jokes* in early edits. It was hard to change, though! I really did wax poetic about many commas that on an intellectual level, I knew were unnecessary. But on an emotional level, those commas meant the world to me! And what if taking them out changes the tone ever so slightly. What if taking them out makes it WORSE?

It turned out the solution to this, as it so often is, was to sleep on it. I recommend the same for facing bigger changes, too. I went to bed clinging to those commas and woke up knowing in my soul that I could let them go. A journey ™️! But the point is that it was an intentional journey. And I, and most of the romance writers you read, take that journey so seriously. We craft our books with care, we shepard them into the world, and we know they are worthy. We have to, for there are already too many people who have decided they are not, sight unseen.

I’m sure I will waver in this (anxiety, am I right?) but I am starting to know, deep in my soul, in some part of me that makes me who I am, that my romance book is important. That it is revolutionary. And that many, many, many romance authors before me and others now and still others who come after all of us have written and are writing and will write greatness, too. The Norns, the fates**, the muses, tbh we are all always going to have been and going to be and going to do. We are part of the academic conversation, that ongoing thing that weaves together Aristotle and Sartre and, yes, knotting, and extremely good girls, etc.

Anyway, when it comes down to it, I think a lot of people are afraid of change, and I think because so many of us have been taught the same (often very important) literary works all throughout school, it can be scary to change. So the idea of recognizing the merit of romance, especially as a thing that is often considered to be for women in a world where power, respect, fame, and success are all sometimes considered to NOT be for women, well, that can be scary. But if I can give up my emotional support commas, surely you can understand why the Dickens I’d want you to sometimes give up your Charlie D in favor of, well, Charlie and Nora (and, ahem, dick ins) for instance.

Obviously, as a millennial, I can't talk about Change without mentioning the poet Tupac Shakur, whose song, “Changes,” moves me basically the same way Hamlet does—that indecision! IS life worth living? Especially if we don’t see any changes? When the old way doesn’t work any more we have to change, especially when the old way includes systemic inequity. To be honest, this is the antithesis to the entire MAGA movement. We can choose to pretend that things were once so great, to cling to the old ways that CAUSED harm, or we can turn and face the changes, a la another poet, David Bowie. Now I kind of want to write an essay on David Bowie & Hamlet & Tupac, but that feels like a topic for another day.

Back to the point!

Change—whether it’s a big life decision, or shifting genres, or as seemingly small as an emotional support comma—is scary AF. It really is. But as much as we might, in the immortal words of Fleetwood Mac, be afraid because we HAVE built our lives around a thing, we can also rebuild. It’s part of the beauty of being human, that capability.

And I hope that if you need to, you make a good change.

*What do you call a careless space pilot? HAN YOLO! Is only one example.

**From Norse Mythology, because who amongst us did not have an obsession with the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda?? What can I say, the same professor at UMD taught Tolkien courses, and I took them all. I would have followed her and her mythology courses to the mountains of Mordor themselves. I’m very cool, yes.

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