a whole bunch of news!
a good thing to have for a newsletter tbh
Hello, friends! It’s been a while, and things look a little different around here. Both of those things are a result of my old newsletter host, MailChimp, changing the parameters of their free account and trying to extort me out of twenty-seven dollars a month to send a newsletter three times a year. You overplayed your hand, MailChimp!! I won’t even spend twenty-seven dollars a month on something I LIKE!
Hopefully I did this contact migration right, and everyone who wants to be here is here and anyone who doesn’t want to is not!
First thing’s first: remember this piece I commissioned in November of Grey and Ethan from horreurscopes?
Taylor, my amazing marketing person, very kindly offered to have prints made, and since I had it done on a whim and not as part of a pre-order campaign or anything, it took me a while to figure out how I wanted to distribute them. Should I make them part of the WTOWT campaign? Should I ask people to dig up their receipts of HTFIIH? Most importantly, can I trust myself to commit to mailing out hundreds of these?
In the end, I decided to make it a “thank you” gift, and send it to anyone who wanted one. All of the prints I already had got claimed on Instagram before I had the chance to post about it here, but since I asked for kind of an arbitrary number in the first place, I’m getting a second printing done to cover the rest. You can fill out the Google form here. Idk if I can express how moved I am that this many people care enough about these characters that they want to have art of them in their home!! I got very emotional making the mailing labels and seeing all the different places they were going, and I’ve loved getting tagged as they start arriving at their destinations. Writing a book is a strange and incredible thing!
This is probably a good segue to talk about the pre-order campaign for Will They or Won’t They, which has so much fun stuff it’s bordering on desperate tbh (because it’s true, I’m desperate! please pre-order it!!!)
I commissioned ANOTHER piece from horreurscopes of Lilah and Shane and all I can say is !!!!!!!!!
They did such a spectacular job capturing the vibe between the two of them, I’m obsessed. This piece is exclusively available through Best of Books, which is also the only place get signed & personalized copies of both books.
Now for the OTHER thing I’m super excited about: I wrote a lil bonus epilogue for them*!
*It’s not actually lil, it’s almost 6k words which is pretty meaty (approximately twenty pages)
You can access it when you pre-order in any format from any retailer, just submit your information here and it’ll be delivered to you digitally. (right now it’s US only, sorry!)
I’m not sure if this counts as a spoiler, but WTOWT doesn’t have an epilogue at all. Back when I was working on the first draft, I had a lightly sketched placeholder epilogue in there, but I wasn’t really feeling it, so I ended up scrapping it and fleshing out the last chapter to have epilogue energy instead. Even though it’s a convention of romance novel structure, their story felt complete to me without one.
I was also, frankly, feeling extremely burnt out from the process of writing this book. If I’d forced myself to write an epilogue just for the sake of having one, it probably wouldn’t have been any good. Having some time away from the characters was exactly what I needed to have fun checking in on them again, and I had a LOT of fun writing this. I hope you’ll have fun reading it!! My editor sent me an email about it that was so nice it made me cry!
I also found it healing to write in the same way it was healing to revise the HTFIIH bonus chapters. When you’re writing a book, you’re in a little bubble alone with the characters for months and months, and once it’s available to readers that bubble gets very unceremoniously popped. Even two books in, I still find it hard not to let other people’s opinions of my characters taint how I feel about them, which feels embarrassing to admit publicly (especially since I gravitate towards writing characters that are messy and difficult and will not be everyone’s cup of tea so like idk what I was expecting) and is something I’m trying to work on. It’s my fault!! I’m too sensitive!! But the point is, having the opportunity to revisit them once I know all the reasons other people don’t like them ends up reminding me that none of that matters, because I love them and am proud of them.
(Maybe saying this makes it seem like people are constantly telling me how much they hate my characters and books which is very much not the case lol. But if you’re a Creative with any kind of online presence, it’s impossible to keep yourself completely insulated from how your work is being received, and while I’ve seen a lot of extremely kind things, there are also some things I wish I could unsee!)
ANYWAY not sure how we ended up here, let’s get this back on track!!
Last but CERTAINLY not least: I’m going on a book tour! AAHHH!!! And with an all-star lineup of conversation partners 😭😭😭
You can RSVP to your event of choice here!
When HTFIIH came out, I was relieved to only be doing one event for Fear of Public Speaking reasons, but also a little sad I wouldn’t get to celebrate it at all on the East Coast, which is where I grew up and where the majority of my friends and family still live. My launch event at Full Circle Books was so much fun last year that this time around I was like, “lets’s do it again and also four more times!” I feel so lucky that, on top of two Oklahoma events, I get to travel to my favorite cities & see my favorite people with this one, and there are also so many people I’m excited to meet for the first time.
Okay I think I should probably end this on a moment of gratitude before it takes another turn. Thanks for sticking with me if you made it this far (in my newsletter but also my life), love you byeeee!!!