The Porch 😂

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See these windows above our newly painted porch?

Behind them, are nine shirtless John Belushis, all sweating in the kitchen and trying to make sense of why the ceiling has fallen in.

In sum, there are three carpenters, two electricians, three painters and a vaguely hot plumber named Johann, who looks like a pirate. But with better dentistry.

Going into the kitchen with all of them there at once—just to get, say, a juice—is not something you ever want to experience. Ever. I thought every gross-ass part of motherhood had cured me of my OCD, but nope. No. No. Nope. The very air felt like waking up kidnapped in that scene from Bugonia. Just no.

Hi there, Lovelies, how the hell are you? Hoo boy! It has been a week.

Why not start with the good. We’re about to be at war with Canada, after all. 😂

Our final 2026 books went to press last week. Nothing more for the rest of the year.

It is beyond satisfying—like a GRAPE HARVEST.

They are all gorgeous—especially the endpapers, inspired by vintage textiles and Dior wallpapers.

Final prepress production is always a wildly tooth-grinding endeavor. Every pixel, every line break, every bleed counts—or the whole thing gets rejected by a guy named Mo. I have never actually seen Mo, but I always imagine he looks like a lumberjack, with a voice full of flannel and a deep, personal irritation with pumpkin-spice anything.

And nothing on a book jacket ever looks quite the way you expect it to. The fonts are too chunky. The subtitle has wandered west. A byline is wrong. There is a great deal of fussy nudging involved. I love our production team for their patience. I would not be as patient with me. I would tell me tough nuts, lady and send me on my way.

Audiobook bids are also coming in. Those emails arrive like little gifts from the universe. The timing tends to be funky. Books that seem certain to get an offer often don’t, which maddens me to no end, but we now have a plan for this. I’m just grateful when our voices break through at all.

And finally—after sixteen months—we have a sales dashboard. What is this, you may ask? It lets us calculate the P&L for every book. Yes, of course, it’s mostly L. We never expected to break even in our first two years, but this is what my nerdy little heart has been longing for since the beginning: clarity.

And we can have a dozen wonderful things happen in a single week—like Scary Mommy introducing us to thirteen million new readers this week, with perhaps one more bit of good news still to come today, if the publishing gods are briefly distracted. Then, right on cue, something rears up and kicks us squarely in the teeth. I don’t want to say we’re getting used to it. But we’ll deal and we’ll set things right.

Life at the Shirley Jackson continues apace… We had a storm last night. The whole house sang a ghost chorus of Dvorak.

Meanwhile, our Irish gangster landlady, Siobhán, has taken up cosplaying as Martha Stewart hard. We’re talking fairy lights and bistro seating. This has the Lebowskis in open revolt.

Apart from The Dude, who finds the bistro set charming. The rest are incensed. There have been strongly worded, if grammatically terroristic, emails alleging an invasion of privacy. One Lebowski has already moved out. He simply couldn’t fathom being told to use the dishwasher rather than spend twenty minutes washing a single plate at the sink, shirtless, stoned and in his boxers. Others just undo the work being done, prompting multiple trips to Home Depot by the ornery lead contractor, Merwin. It is a farce beyond repair.

Seeing as this is none of my business, I have decamped to the far end of the porch for the bulk of my editorial meetings, as it affords an escape from the constant experimental jazz of nail guns, circular saws, and Walter repeatedly informing the workmen that they are all fired.

I tell myself it’s only a few more weeks until I am liberated and back in my real kitchen, where I will make deb perelman’s tomato pie and life will be good again.

Please God, I need this pie.

Yesterday, the pendulum swung back again—or at least put on a cardigan. It was cool out—like proper autumnal cool—so I went for a real run. Yes, a run. With my legs. On purpose!

Mums and dahlias were blooming everywhere, new, overgrown witchy houses kept revealing themselves in the ‘hood, and Harvard Square was once again bustling with students, moving boxes and bewildered parents carrying dopamine-infused dorm supplies. You could see Cambridge becoming its magical, quirky self again, which got me thinking about the comedy of different spaces and what it reveals about people.

In particular, I started thinking about how much the places and spaces in my own book, Ellery Goes Dark, reveal the protagonist’s character, and how the constraints of those places—from the set of her New York City talk show to the hospital to the town and gown territories of Vermont—drive the specific comedic actions that ultimately save her neck and move the story forward. In this regard, it’s not your typical rom-com. It’s all about bumping up against different, often difficult social, romantic, and neurological entrapments. And for me, it’s an unending source of fodder. The constraints force Ellery to improvise, and those improvisations reveal who she really is.

You see the comedy of place and constraint everywhere. The new film The Invite uses the confines of a completely swank apartment beautifully. Neil Simon had Plaza Suite. Friends had Central Perk. M*A*S*H had the Swamp. Even Nancy Meyers had a bedroom on Billionaires Row to battle a full-scale midlife breakdown and reinvention.

The point is every comedy worth its salt needs a room, a kitchen, or even a porch where all the characters can collapse onto the furniture and realize that the catastrophe that just happened is only the end of Act Two. Every comedy needs a room because rooms have specific rules, and comedy begins when people can no longer behave properly inside them. Like the Lebowskis and the John Belushis above.

Think of the space in your writing as your straight man. It remains fixed while the characters lie, panic, posture, conceal things, and ricochet off its walls, windows, and limitations.

Space establishes rules. Neil Simon’s hotel suite promises elegance. An officer’s tent decries discipline. A New England porch implies neighborly civility. The laugh comes from the total failure to maintain the anticipated behavior.

It also choreographs the story. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest is a farce of architecture with astonishing timing. Doors, stairs, windows, and often furniture make for entrances, exits, evesdropped conversations, fabrications and reveals.

It contains the pressure. If everyone can simply leave, the scene evaporates. A hotel suite, coffee shop, army tent, or wraparound porch keeps incompatible people with clashing aesthetics and belief systems within conversational striking distance.

A space remembers. Returning to the same place enables your reader to anticipate behavior, and then if you want, you can defy it. At Central Perk, we knew the sofa and who belonged on it. In the Swamp, we expected disorder, grief, intimacy, and rebellion. The space becomes part of the ensemble’s vernacular.

Contained spaces allow truths to surface safely. Great comedic spaces are usually sanctuaries. Characters can utter the unsayable because the room temporarily protects them from the larger world. It shields your character for the polycrisis so that they can finally show up as their most vulnerable self, which makes them

Ok, the truth that is surfacing today… is that I need to do laundry and pay bills.

I just finished soft hermeting with Sterling Point, which was a solid candy yarn, no? Go Megan Park! The only thing I didn’t find credible as the mother of a high-octane kid, is that if they never just apply to one summer program. Their backups have backups. If Wharton is a no-go, they bunk off to London School of Economics or INSEAD, but maybe that was in the book? In any case, I need a new dopamine-watch. Britbox only gets a girl so far. Hope you have a lovely rest of your Sunday.

Stay safe out there - xoxo - Gotham Girl 🖤

PS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.