Sparkly, Spooktacular and Spectacular October

An edition of the newsletter in which my hair is full of secrets, a la Mean Girls' Gretchen Weiners, but I cannot share them.

For those of you who don’t know, when I am not writing books, I am a high school English teacher, so part of my undergrad degree was adolescent psychology. Did you know that Mean Girls is based on a nonfiction psychology book? In addition to the very interesting psychology take, I really thought the movie captured the occasional awkwardness of teaching. I have never been through a messy divorce or accidentally pulled my shirt off a la Tina Fey’s character, but I have found teaching to be both rewarding AND stressful, and also sometimes messy. For example, one time I caught the seat of my suit pants on a metal desk drawer, which tore through the pants and my skin (during a planning period, thank god, and not a live class) and I had to bandaid my bleeding cheek wound and then staple together the gaping hole in my pants. My next class arrived, and I just kept teaching until the end of the day. It’s what you do.  

After that I brought a permanent change of clothes to keep in my room. You would think I’d keep that up as a habit, but nope, at some point I stopped and this year I found myself once again staring at my trusty stapler when my charming new witchy skirt was giving slit-up-the-thigh energy I had somehow not noticed. I stapled it from renaissance fair wench who definitely would fit into the books I write to buttoned up librarian (who, fine, would also fit into the books) in five minutes before anyone arrived.

The point, somewhat convoluted, is that staplers can save the day, and to be frank, I HAVE PUBLISHING SECRETS. And I’m bad at keeping secrets. I could crack like Gretchen at any moment. So to distract myself, because I don't think anyone is going to tolerate another paragraph of niche teaching anecdotes, I am going to talk about my writing journey a little bit. 

Last October, I was pitching a few events, waiting on fulls that had been out for half a year, and wondering if I should give up on querying, which had brought me hundreds of rejections, three shelved manuscripts, and a keen understanding of just how much waiting goes into publishing. 

You tell them, Skelly Steve. And if you like this image, you can get it on my instagram (See what I did there? Shameless.)

So it was October and it felt like it was the season for witchy romcom, and to my shock, November brought both exciting news and tough decisions about the path for the book. And if you had told 2021 Audrey that 2022 Audrey would sign with an agent, she probably would not have believed you. And if you had told 2022 Audrey the thing that’s happening now, she wouldn’t have believed that either.

But the weird bit is, with each milestone, instead of just the sense of relief and accomplishment of achieving something comes the next benchmark, and the next set of forks in the road that require impossible decisions. I got to X, but I need to be at Y. Which choice will lead me to Y, if there are benefits to both? What if one would have got me to Y, but I don’t pick that one, and I never get there? I’ll feel like a real writer when I get to Y. And then Y comes, and it’s great, but I won’t feel like a real writer until Z. And the whole process of decisions and revisions repeats, and then I understand poor Prufrock even better, which is saying something because I am a nerdy nerd and I love T.S. Eliot so very much. And I mean, do I dare disturb the universe? 

I have a feeling maybe that just goes on, and that no matter what choices I make or what levels I reach, there will always be other goals and other what-ifs. So I am going to go on by reassuring myself of a few things I can control, and hope that this brings some sort of peace. Think of them as tips for waiting, if you want them.

1. Find friends. I have never regretted or wondered about the writing community I’ve built via social media. There have been pitfalls and pitch fails and missteps and misreads, but I survive the agony of all the waiting with the unwavering support of wonderful fellow writers. 

2. It is OK to take breaks, and to say no. It is OK to step away from communities on the internet, temporarily or permanently when you need to, and it is OK for other people to take solace in a circle that brings you pain. Saying no to other writers is also hard for me, but the further I get into the process, the more necessary it is for me to be honest when I cannot make time to read something or participate in something that requires a specific deadline.

3. We get to dream big, impossibly big, and those big dreams may not always happen exactly the way they planned, but we do get to believe in their possibility. And friends, I have the biggest dreams for me, and for you. I think that if we want to, we can see our books in the stores and see the fan art we dream of and see the titles on enormous billboards. I also think, most importantly, that we can help them find the right readers, and by right readers, I mean the people who need them as much as we needed to write them. Reaching those dreams goes faster for some people and slower for others for so many reasons, many of them unfair or even problematic, but to focus on that alone is to forget the specific beauty of our dreams, of our books, which no one else could write exactly the way we did. 

So that’s all I have for you, really. Find a community and cling to it, take breaks when you need them or when you can, and dream the beautiful, impossible dream. 

Treat YO SHELF this month: I’ve been too consumed by the decisions happening this month to read anything new, which is RARE for me, so I want to recommend two of my all-time favorites, one which has been out for a while, and the other of which comes out in November. 

All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir. This book is one of the best I’ve ever read; it’s incredibly compelling and beautiful and heartbreaking, and my gosh I believe it could be the sort of required reading that reminds us of the compassion we ought to feel for other humans, particularly children, in times of war and anguish. It’s contemporary YA fiction that follows Noor and Sal, two Muslim Pakistani American teenagers grappling with grief, love, trauma, and high school. The points of view go back and forth between that of each of the two kids and a parent years earlier, and it is just a beautifully woven story of how we make peace with ourselves and how we survive even the most horrendous and infuriating injustices. I felt like a better human for reading it, and it is threaded through with Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art, which is poetry at its finest. 

For Never and Always, by Helena Greer. The book comes out in November, and Greer just announced a third book set at Carrigans, described as “The Wedding Date with lesbians,” and obviously I need that immediately. For Never and Always is a second chance romance between Hannah and Levi, both Jewish. Here’s the review I wrote when I was lucky enough to score an eARC from Netgalley: FNAA brings with it a story of two people grappling with anxiety and grief and trauma. Levi has experienced a much different and much crueler version of his hometown and the Jewish Christmas Tree farm than his best friends and the love of his life did, and as much as they overlooked the reality of his experience, he has also overlooked some of the reality of their experiences. Both Levi and Hannah grow tremendously over the time they are apart and then when they are reunited. 

Stay tuned for a monthly newsletter with updates about what I’m working on every month around the 15th! You can find my socials and other fun stuff here.