Shoot The Moon is six weeks old!
I’ve been spending the final days of my twenties and the fledgling hours of my thirties visiting with family (my sister-in-law is the proud, newly-minted mama of a very adorable baby niece) and based on what I’ve learned lately about babies, my debut novel is not quite able to discern shapes or color in anything, but she is just barely learning to crack a gummy smile at you.
(She is a very, very adorable baby niece.)
Since even before October I’ve been busy, and happy, and stressed, but happily busy and not-so-happily-busy alike. It’s the way things go around this time of month/year/current events/life, and I’ve been focusing on enjoying the little things as I go. Some of my favorite little things lately:
My niece. She is tiny and brilliant and very, very, very adorable.
I’ve seen some pretty killer sunrises in some pretty killer places, in part thanks to tour and in part thanks to family.
I been able to share Shoot The Moon with a lot of wonderful people, who have been saying a lot of really lovely things about it. If you’ve read it, thank you!!!! I hope it made you feel something, or want to go hug someone, or tell someone you love that you love them in some new way neither of you are quite fluent in yet. Or all of those things at once.
I finished developmental edits on The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf, and I’m very proud of the book it’s becoming (barf, too on-the-nose, I’m keeping it). She is a powerhouse. I don’t know yet how to articulate how much I love this book. I hope you all will too. I think I’ll hopefully find the words before it comes out.
I’ve been having a lot of fun in letting myself be indulgent and a little bit silly in my drafting.
The Texas Book Festival was a blast, and I’m still buzzing from meeting such wonderful authors all in one place.
My dad sent me several books he really loved when he was young, and even though I’ve known for a long time that we have the exact same taste, I love having new proof of it.
I’ve been cycling on the idea lately that the 2020s are the decade of weirdos taking over the reins of our cultural hegemony, and then I watch clip compilations from Fleabag again in an effort to replicate the high of seeing it for the first time.
This never works, but we knew that.
My niece, again; this time in the yellow onesie.
I have little else to share lately but the little things. My reserves are tapped out. I am entering the hibernation phase of releasing my first book into the great unknown—hunkering into a holiday-shaped hole where I can be a stress-lump of what-if-my-plane-gets-delayed-four-times et al, distracting myself by dreaming up visions of a Western and making offerings on an altar to Annie Proulx.
If I pop in again before 2024, it will probably be to fling a short at you which has petered out on the assembly line, but still might want one last journey upward so it can land among the stars. There are always plenty of those rattling around at the bottom of the coffee tin.
All my best to you,
- i