Good Deeds

Thank you and go for it and yes please

I think I started this newsletter as a promotional tool (ha!) and in the years since, it’s become something more like a diary, which is just to say, if you’re here and reading this, thank you. It’s a weird newsletter! It’s very personal! It’s not always hilarious and it’s not celebrity gossip and it usually doesn’t even have recipes or anything else remotely useful, and yet you’re still here! Thank you for reading.

Today I got to do two wonderful things, and I want to tell you about them, because since you’re already here, I think you might be interested. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a little while, you may recall that I was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship this year. A fucking THRILL, I tell you! One of the best things about winning a Guggenheim was all the notes I got from novelist friends who said some variation on this theme—I never thought about applying, but now maybe I will! I had never considered applying before either—it just felt like something for other kinds of writers, better, more important kinds of writers. I encouraged every single person who wrote to me to apply, and I think lots of them will. Two writer friends of mine asked me to be one of their references, and I wrote those letters today.

Without telling you who those friends are, let me tell you what I loved about writing these reference letters. For starters, they give you the applicant’s statement of plans, so you get sort of an overview of the project they plan to work on with the Guggenheim’s dollars. The two statements I read today were wildly different and both so so wonderful—two books I will read and LOVE when they are written, no doubt about it. But what I really loved was seeing how these two novelists wrote about their own work, and their process, and how they think in advance about their novels. It felt like looking at them in their underwear, sort of, in a beautiful, communal dressing room at a sample sale sort of way. Like, all bodies are weird, all bodies are beautiful, you know? There’s no wrong way. These two writers are very well published, and I found it really comforting to remember, once again, that we are all just doing the best we can with our own little tools. Hopefully my letters were stupendous and the Guggies will fork over the case. Fingers crossed.

The other thing I did today was send some money to BINC, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation. Publishing royalties get computed twice a year, in January and July, and because publishing is slow as shit, I just got my statement for July. This period, my first book, Other People We Married, made $690 in royalties. That’s for about 400 copies. It’s not nothing! I donate all the royalties for Other People We Married because it is a book without which I would not have a career, and it’s a book that I wouldn't have sold a single copy of without independent bookstores. BINC supports booksellers in need by helping them with immediate financial assistance for rent, medical bills, anything, really. BINC is a terrific organization, and I am proud to support them. I’ve been sending them all the OPWM royalties for a few years now, and it’s a nice built-in reminder for myself, a little thank you.

The thing I didn’t do today was change more than a single sentence on my novel. But hey, there’s always tomorrow.