Hello, new readers!

A brief introduction to me and also this newsletter plus exciting news.

Substack does not mess around. Thank you to Caroline Chambers (@whattocook) for mentioning my little missives in her Substack Reads, there are hundreds more of you here now! The post that she mentioned was one I wrote about smoking as a teenager (I smoked as a teenager) and my novel This Time Tomorrow (I write novels, and also picture books, and this Substack, and the occasional lengthy Instagram post.) I thought, as an introduction, I might highlight a few more of my past posts, and tell you what to expect from me in the near future. Mostly I write about books and my feelings. My feelings about books! My dad died and it turned into a grief blog, which it still is, sometimes. I write about my bookstore, Books Are Magic. I write about anxiety and vintage clothing and fun things I get to do. I don’t write about my children except when I do. I love to do a good book tour blog. You’ll see.

I’m writing this from an Alaskan cruise ship with my husband and my children and my in-laws, and the WiFi is spotty, and my phone keeps sending me aggressive text messages about how much money it’s going to charge me, and so who knows how well I will do this. Right now it’s raining and foggy and we are about three hours away from Juneau, where we will disembark to go for look for whales and bears. Wish me and the WiFi luck!

This is where I would insert a photo from my foggy balcony if my phone would let me. Picture this: the balcony. You can’t see anything else.

Here is my new news, my secret news—in between my last post and this one, I sold my next two novels. The announcement will come soon, probably in September, and so you will all need to pretend to be surprised then, but since you’re here, I will give you this tiny scoop. The first book of the deal is one that I’ve spent this last year writing, but when I was talking to my mother about it recently, she said something about how I’d been working on it very efficiently, and I said, well, that’s because I’ve actually been doing research for the last thirty-five years.

What I’ve come to lately, as a novelist, is this—I don’t want to just make things up. That is hyperbole, of course—I do want to make things up—I want to make up characters and a plot and a world—but right now, my only interest is in things that feel absolutely urgent to my person. I loved writing This Time Tomorrow because it was a way for me to spend time with my feelings about my father dying, for me to think about how fiction works and how writing works and how genre works. My new book, which has a very good title that I can’t tell you yet, is about one of my longest and most abiding interests. Astute readers of this newsletter will note that I have mentioned this interest over and over again over the years. The book is completely fictional, but my passion is not. I want to go where my real passion is, that’s what I’m saying. I really can’t wait to tell you all about it. In the meantime, I’m glad you’re here.