Event this Saturday!

Buffalo friends,

I’m excited to share that I’ll be participating in the holiday market at Cary House this Saturday, December 13th from 12-5. If you’re not a local, shame to your family, but otherwise I hope to see you at what might be the last pop up of 2025!

In other news, 2026 will mark ten (!) years since I sold my debut novel at auction to Little Brown Young Readers, an accomplishment I dreamed of since I was just a little cliche, long before I knew how to spell, back when I filled notebooks with scribbly lines I pretended meant something. I’m here today to say they did.

Getting published early in my career was a delight and a challenge, the latter because I secured a two book deal but had only written one novel. Hold please. They say the second book is the hardest to finish and I’m here today to say Bet. (My students teach me all the lingo. 6-7 to you, too, Forest, River, Grassy Plain, whatever your Gen Z eco-overgrowth name).

In fact, Dear Universe was the third second book I wrote, the previous two having been scrapped by my editor for excellent reasons: awkward pacing, weak plot, sentences playing dead on the page, the writing as engaging as “flat drugs girl” which is what I had to Google to find this ol’ chestnut:

Honestly, I almost didn’t make the absolute last deadline in my contract to submit the final manuscript, which would have meant returning part of my advance, but my agent had some advice. She said Write closer to your experience. She said, less tritely than this, What’s the book in your heart? It reminds me of something Ann Patchett said:

“I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.”

Amen for our capacities, limited and lolligagging.

In the spring of 2020 Dear Universe was published - TRIGGER WARNING - at the start of lockdown, throwing a monkey wrench in publicity plans that I blame for e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. Book festivals were shuttered and shuttled to Zoom. Speaking engagements turned their cameras off. What can you do? Every book has a shelf life, but every author just has a life.

Last month I learned that the print copies of my books are being remaindered—an unfortunate scenario wherein the printer outdid itself. You shouldn’t have! Copies of my books have officially outnumbered their demand and so off they go in their caskets to discount book distributors where, whether or not they see the light beyond the bubblewrap, will make no difference to my 10% royalty. Sorry, sugar. A new book is born every Tuesday in Big 5 publishing. $1.60 doesn’t sound like much until you multiply it.

Fortunately, I have two more days to buy back my books for less than $1! What would you do? It seems like a trippy modern art performance to suddenly start purchasing what I was initially paid to produce—like capitalism eating its tail, like a late stage snake duped by the exchange rate, stooped by how value is assigned to art and labor and how it changes and oh, how it changes!

The last part of the Patchett quote, at least as Goodreads chose the cut-off, reads:

“Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.”

Hope to see you Saturday :)