IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY is here!!!!!

You know, I was looking back on past “release day” newsletters I’d put out for each book, and I kinda wish I’d established some sort of template for them. Some sort of “here’s five things to look forward to” or whatever, so I didn’t have to start fresh each time and come up with what I wanted to talk about.

The only thing I have been consistent about, at least since my second book, is that the titles always contain the same number of exclamation points as book I’m on1. So like this is book five, and I used five exclamation points in the title! Last year’s was four, the year before that’s was three . . . you get it, you know how to count down.

But I’ve found as I’ve been talking about this book that I keep coming back to two things about it: 1) that it’s the hardest book I’ve ever written; and 2) that it’s the most hopeful book I’ve ever written. So I thought I would unpack a bit of this book’s journey for you, just so you could see what I mean.

First of all, the idea for this book. After a terrible date on her 37th birthday, Jess gets mugged, hits her head, and wakes up in Ireland, where she ends up spending a couple days wandering around with a gruff Irish mechanic. Where did it come from? Why did I want to switch it up, add a speculative element? I don’t fully know. I really don’t. There was some alchemy of references and things I was thinking about — Before Sunrise, as you heard about last week, Ireland, Once, bad dates, birthdays, dream states, the Cranberries, W.B. Yeats, making art and wanting things and getting older.

I remember pitching it to my then-agent over the phone and her basically being like, “Okay.” Not in a bad way, definitely not in a good way, just in an . . . okay, if that’s what you want to do, kind of way. So even as we sent off a synopsis to my editor, I had no idea if it would ever be a book. Nobody seemed that excited about it. I was excited about it, but I’m also terrible at pitching over the phone. I always end up trailing off like I’m Kip from Napoleon Dynamite talking about using dial-up internet “. . . I don’t know, maybe not.” (Please read that in a Kip voice.)

I started writing the book September 16, 2024, which is the kind of fun detail I can share with you because I keep these notebooks where I track my progress and my thoughts as I’m working on something new. One thing I realized very early on: oh, you have given yourself a challenge. You have given yourself a challenge on top of a challenge on top of a challenge.

I returned to first person POV in this book, for one thing. My last three have been in third. I also returned to a single POV, instead of dual. I had specific reasons for wanting to do that, and I think they were the right choices, but it meant that there was an extra period of adjustment while I wrote because at first it didn’t feel as natural as what I’d gotten used to.

I set the book mostly in a country I had (at that point) never been to. I added this magical element, that I’d never dealt with before. I decided to tell a story in a very tight timeline, where all the action is continuous and the characters spend pretty much the entire book together.

Do you even know how much you skip time when you write?! I hadn’t, until I realized in this book that I couldn’t do it as much. Every chapter pretty much picks up where the last chapter left off. If they eat a meal, you’re going to hear about it. They’re going to spend almost forty-eight hours in each other’s company, and oh yeah, they have to fall in love in that time. You have to make it believable that they would.

I, personally, think I did that!! I’m very proud of this book, to be clear! But man, was it a challenge.

So I wrote through September, and got up to maybe 10,000 words or so. After that, there’s a break in my notebook followed by one of my massive freewrite dumps that I do sometimes, which almost always start with a “forgive me father, for I have sinned” type of message, where I have to acknowledge that I haven’t worked on the book in months and now I’m trying to figure my way back into it. “IN MY DEFENSE” I wrote in all caps in my notebook — so cute that I feel like I have to defend myself to myself even in the privacy of my own notebook, and yell at myself while I do it — I was working on Never Been Shipped edits in that time, and also waiting to hear what my editor thought of this idea and if it was even a go. (Her response ended up basically also being “Okay,” with three additional questions.)

So now it’s mid-December before I’m getting back to writing, I’m at about 13,000 words, the book is due end of January, I still don’t know if anyone is excited about it, the 2024 election just happened and the world is feeling especially bleak. I don’t know, man. Conditions were not perfect. It was a bit of a rough time.

I cry while writing every single book I’ve ever written — what can I say, I’m a Pisces. Sometimes I cry in a good way, like I’m writing an emotional scene and I’m just feeling it, and sometimes I cry out of frustration or even with a sense of great relief, like I know I just got through something hard. I can honestly say this is the only book where I ever like, went to bed and started sobbing because I just didn’t know if it was working and I felt so lost in it and I didn’t know what to do. It was like I could see what I wanted the book to be in my head and I couldn’t tell if it was shaping up to be that on paper.

I did stop around this point and go back to rework some of the early chapters — they are still fundamentally the way I originally wrote them, but Eamonn was a hard nut to crack. He’s a hard nut to crack in the book, which was part of the struggle. I needed him to be somewhat taciturn and gruff, but I did still need him to talk. You can’t have a walking/talking book if one of the people just won’t talk! So I had to find the right balance with him, where he was closed off but also could be opened up.

This is also the most I’ve ever outlined for a book. I kind of had to, because logistics play such a large part of the story — where do they go in Dublin, in what order, what do they do, what are they going to talk about while they’re there. I had to think about those things very carefully. Does their route make logical geographical sense. Because I’m unhinged and you know this, I also thought at some point I was going to try to reference every single Cranberries song from their first three albums throughout the book, and I made little notes about that.

I abandoned this pretty quickly; “I Just Shot John Lennon” was the song that really sent me into the next room. How was I supposed to ever work that in. But some of these references still linger (hahaha) — for example, Jess thinks during her bad date I’m not sorry if I do insult you, which is a direct lyrical reference from a pretty deep cut off their first album. If I had choices about how to phrase something, a normal way or a Cranberries way, I would choose the Cranberries way if it was right there. But ultimately this wasn’t a challenge I needed to give myself on top of all the other ones.

I really got into a flow after that. The book started coming together. I loved these characters; I loved being in Ireland; it honestly did transport me a bit to write. I think maybe because it was such a rough time in the world (we’re up to January 2025 by now), this book almost became my escape. I put a lot of my feelings into it about how we can find beauty in the mundane; how strangers can be kind to each other in really magical ways; how it’s good actually to have a hopeful heart, to want things, to dream big, even when it hurts if those dreams don’t come true. But also . . . what if they did?

While I was writing, I was also doing a ton of research — that could be the subject of a whole nother newsletter, so I won’t go deep into it here. But I really immersed myself! I was living inside this book at this point.

I can tell when I start to get desperate because the notebook keeps the score. Around the end of January, it was all schedules and revised schedules and promises to reward myself if I hit x milestone and then berating myself when I didn’t do it. There are many allusions to “Future Alicia” and how everything will be her problem. But I finished the book right on time, on January 30, and turned it in.

While I waited for my edit letter, I knew I wanted to go to Ireland. Get the feel for the place, make sure the things Jess and Eamonn do together make sense and could happen the way I described them (within reason . . . it’s still fiction, after all, so you have to allow me some liberties). Luckily, my friend Jessica — the one the book is dedicated to, the one who will be my conversation partner at my launch event, one of my favorite people in the world! — had her spring break coming up and was like, sure, I’d go to Ireland with you. So we booked a trip for my birthday weekend, which just happens to be my character Jess’ birthday weekend, and thus the exact same weekend from the book. That’s right, we went to Ireland for St. Patrick’s Day, basically, which was hilarious because it KEPT being a Big Deal and that wasn’t even the real reason we were there.

This was the part where writing this book was the least hard. It was just an amazing trip, from start to finish. I’d gotten through one major task (drafting the thing) and hadn’t yet had to begin the next major task (revising the thing).

But revisions ended up being challenging, too, in their own way. Just making sure that I did capture Ireland as accurately as I possibly could, balancing the realism with the magic and fiction of it all, I had to fix one scene with the same precision a mechanic might use to fix a boiler and that’s all I’ll say about that right now but it was an intricate process.

And I don’t know, I was just going through a lot. I had this weird stomach thing for a couple months in this time period where my appetite got fucked up and I felt sick all the time — which is very unlike me because I’ve always had a strong stomach. I read once about a baseball pitcher who had a really bad outing and then he went to the clubhouse and put down a bunch of pasta and he overheard a clubbie basically be like, “man, how can he eat after that?! couldn’t be me.” I’m telling you that it could be me. I could absolutely give up 9, 10 runs and then go murder some spaghetti. But suddenly I couldn’t.

I’m going back to Flutter Romance Bookstore on this book tour, for example, in part because I had such a fun time doing an event with them last year. But I can also say that around that time I just felt so sick. I was staying with Ali Hazelwood (name drop, I know) and she couldn’t have been nicer, but she kept offering me all these snacks or food or whatever (she’s Italian) and I felt like the world’s biggest weirdo because I kept being like no thank you, no thank you, just water is fine, really, that looks delicious but no I don’t want to try it. I was so stressed about this revision that I remember trying to work on it on every flight, at every spare moment in between events, and this is one of my least favorite things about publishing but also if you’re going to release a book a year it ends up being the way the schedule goes. You’re revising next year’s book while promoting this year’s and maybe starting to think about one that won’t release for another two years after that.

(I’m revising my 2027 book now! And in a way writing this newsletter has been very comforting to me, just to remind myself that I often have the exact same doubts and fears and anxieties about getting it all done, and yet somehow it always gets done and I feel good about the result.)

So it’s true — this was the most challenging book I’ve ever written, and I also think it’s the least cynical book I’ve ever written. I write romance, so not that my books are ever bleak, but there’s just an optimism and a hope to this one that I can feel even through the pages, despite everything I went through as I was working on it. Maybe because of everything I went through. It’s a very special book to me, and I hope it can be special to you, too.

Here are my upcoming events, including a virtual one you can participate in from anywhere on June 30!

• June 23 at 7pm ET - Tombolo Books (St. Pete, FL) in conversation with Dr. Jessica Cook

• June 24 at 7pm CT - Flutter Romance (Austin, TX) in conversation with Ehigbor Okosun

• June 25 at 7pm CT - Half Price Books (Dallas, TX) in conversation with Alexa Martin

• June 26 at 6pm ET - Barnes & Noble (Orlando, FL) in conversation with Amy Buchanan

• June 30 at 7pm CT - Virtual Event in conversation with Kasee from Longhand Pencils! (ticket includes a signed book plus a pencil set and other goodies)

Currently reading . . . I listened to Workhorse by Caroline Palmer on audio, on recommendation from my friend Julie Cassidy who said basically if you love that early ‘00s magazine world like The Devil Wears Prada you’d love this book. Well, I DO love that world; I love novels about work in general. It was a 19-hour audiobook, though, which was quite the commitment.

watching . . . I’m still rewatching Girls, and am currently on the fifth season. My family is on the third season of Avatar: The Last Airbender and, simultaneously, the fourth season of Malcolm in the Middle. (We had to adjudicate a whole thing where we watch Avatar most nights except for Pizza Fridays, when we switch to Malcolm . . . if you ever studied the Yalta Conference in history class it was a lot like that.)

I’m also not proud of myself but I watched both The Crash and Maternal Instinct and then went on a whole deep dive where I watched hours-long YouTube videos breaking down both, reading Reddit threads, basically anything that was like What Netflix Left Out or What Netflix Got Wrong and then I was like, Alicia, you have got to stop. You have got to just let Netflix be wrong or leave stuff out without making it your life’s work.

listening to . . . All it took was one Everclear reference to send me spiraling back on my “So Much for the Afterglow” bullshit. I ended up listening to “Father of Mine” on Father’s Day. I didn’t even realize until it was blasting in my car as I pulled up to Publix and I thought oh no, I hope nobody can hear this, it feels a little on the nose.