This existential crisis over my writing collided with an upcoming vacation to Europe. The journey began in Barcelona and ended in Lisbon. Back in May, when I was still feeling optimistic about my writing, I had thought that I’d have a draft of a book complete before this trip, so that I could let go and fully enjoy it. By June, however, I had written an incredibly terrible draft that I was embarrassed to even think about, gotten the unfortunate news about my option, and generally had my self-esteem gutted like a fish.

I used to interpret vacation as time that I wasn’t working my day job. That didn’t mean I got to stop working. I would see the 10+ hour flight as a way to get work done and would always bring my laptop, hoping to get some writing in. I’d bring a Kindle loaded with books, hoping I could finish them at a faster rate. And, I wouldn’t even bother silencing my work email, because I figured it would be good to keep track of emails that came in, so that I wouldn’t have to face a big number on my inbox when I returned (yes, I know, such a bad idea). It didn’t feel good to be busy, but it was more comfortable than having nothing to do. It meant I was needed, that I was important, and that I was still doing something. If I had down time during my vacation, like a few hours between one guided tour and the next, or I woke up earlier than my companions, I immediately began scheming over what task I could get a head start in.

I was still working on these vacations, carrying the full weight of everything I needed to do, rather than just removing it from my shoulders and setting it down. I had the luxury of being able to unplug from work, yet I didn’t. Because of that, every single one of my vacations is accompanied by some unpleasant memory of some email I received that collapsed my mood and tinged what should’ve been a great day with darkness.

This time, things were different. I set out with the intention to relax, and to be good at it for once. I logged out of my work email and left my laptop at home (although I did cheat and bring my iPad, which has a keyboard). On the plane, I actually slept and watched two movies instead of trying to hit a word count goal.

Because I hadn’t booked anything beyond a few dinners and a tour of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, we were left with a lot of time open. Open time makes me anxious to fill it. However, the heat was determined to thwart my productivity impulses. We arrived on the tail-end of a heat wave, which meant that if you were under the sun for any amount of time between 11am-6pm, it felt like you were being roasted and basted with your own sweat.

Whenever I’m a new place, I try to spend all my time outside of the hotel, walking through new neighborhoods and overstimulating myself. I always believed that time spent in your hotel was time wasted. It might be me getting older, or no longer choosing the absolute cheapest place to stay, but I spent a lot of time in hotels on this trip. We would go out for coffee and some kind of morning activity, then return to the hotel. There would be a nap, or a show, or journaling, but always under the glorious air conditioning. Sitting down was awesome, lying down even more so. Then we’d go out again when the shadows were longer and the sun was less fierce, and it almost felt like an additional day tacked onto our vacation because we were fresh from a few hours of rest.

Sometimes I’d get intrusive thoughts about work. If I entertained them for too long, they began metastasizing into something close to worry, before I reminded myself that I wasn’t saving lives, and I was only gone for 2 weeks. Other times I’d casually think that maybe I was ready to do some writing. I’d open a word doc and immediately nope out of it. I wasn’t ready, and I wasn’t going to make myself feel bad by forcing myself to be. After all, there were no deadlines. My option had been rejected. I’d told my agent I was taking my time on this one. Nobody was expecting anything from me.

For the past few months, I’ve been considering whether my world has shrunk. The number of friends I stay in touch with has grown smaller, every career move I make seems to shut many other doors, and my dreams of being a full-time author have mostly diminished into “I wonder if I’ll finish this third book.” Even the way I travel has turned into a pared-back version of what it used to be. What happened to the gremlin determined to scale every viewpoint and accumulate 30k+ steps per day and thought calling an Uber was a moral failure?

Three days into the vacation, I forgot what day it was. I did things spontaneously. If I wanted to take a nap in the middle of the day, I would. If I suddenly craved gelato even though dinner was in half an hour, I’d get it anyway. If I didn’t want to read my book and preferred to binge Bridgerton instead, then damn it, I would. That was the beauty of being on vacation. It was the freedom to do what I wanted because there was nothing to build my day around. In that free time, magic happened. Because we did not have to rush from one activity to another, I could step into a random contemporary museum in El Born to discover local artists, or linger for several hours over some cañas and anchovy-stuffed olives at a pool bar overlooking the city. My brain was blissfully empty, and I only needed to heed my most primal urges of hunger and tiredness.

The distance from my responsibilities was restorative in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before. I remembered that the world is way bigger than me, and that my ability to produce anything doesn’t really matter, so the only reason for me to do it is if I actually enjoy the act.

You know you’ve had a good trip if you’re ready to go home at the end, and that was the case for me. I missed my routines. I wanted to be in my own bed. I missed my cat, who was wreaking havoc on my friend’s house and required an extraction ASAP. I’d also come down with a gnarly cold after staying out too late in Lisbon outside a dive bar called MDMA (Mission Drink More Alcohol).

Before I went on my trip, I kept asking myself, is this it? Everything I have achieved so far—is that all I’m capable of? By the time I returned, I had admitted to myself that this was not the right question to be asking. Because now is not about what I can do, it’s about where I want to go deep. I’m not striving for some great, unknown thing, the way I had strived to be an author, or to get some “dream job” out of college, these big outcomes surrounded by ambiguity and variability. More of my world and myself has become knowable, and with that comes an understanding of my constraints. My world has shrunk, but in a way that has allowed me to focus on what truly matters.

Anyway, I have been writing again. It has actually felt easier and more fun than it has in a while. I’m back to my routines, but they don’t feel as burdensome. So, if your life kind of sucks, give yourself permission to take a break. It doesn’t have to be a flight. It can be anywhere that is away to you. But no cheating and thinking about what you could be doing instead. I want you to actually enjoy it.

Something I wrote today:

I check the invitation list. The other attendees are Directors of teams in Product, Legal, and Marketing. I look at who sent the invitation. Executive of Global Markets. That doesn’t tell me anything. I rarely work with Executives, and when I do, it’s usually the Research & Development Executive, a diminutive man who seems most eager to get his work done so that he can go home and play doubles tennis with his wife.

I feel an immediate onslaught of nerves. This is a mistake. This better be a mistake. I have tried to remain average in order to avoid things like this.

I spent 4 years of high school learning Spanish. I took another grueling semester of it in college, where I had to wake up at 7:30am every day to make it to my daily 8ams. Then I spent a semester abroad, living with a host family. My Spanish improved by leaps and bounds, my greatest achievement being when I was able to translate a love letter that my host brother’s exchange girlfriend wrote him for my host mom. She withdrew it from a blue glass bottle and handed it to me over a plate of berenjenas con miel. Translating it felt easy in a transcendent way. Small improvements built up over those months. There were more words that I could understand. Longer conversations that I could maintain. And yet I was acutely discontented with how far I still had to go. The further the language carried me, the more critical I was of how I couldn’t speak it quickly enough, how the slang and everyday conversational quality eluded me. I would keep at it, I told myself. When my Latin American coworkers visited, I tried to engage with them in Spanish. But too quickly, embarrassment kicked in. I was too slow, too rusty. I retreated. The other day, someone spoke to me in Spanish and I scrambled to reply, my brain a big blank. I had completely lost my grasp over a language that I once lived in.

Some people have trouble starting things, but that has never been a problem for me. I like the possibility and all the different directions something can go. I think that maybe I’m going to be a genius at this, or have some latent natural talent that will be discovered when I begin. It’s only after I begin that I grasp the real difficulty of the task. That is usually when I want to graduate from play to accomplishment. I examine my work with a more critical eye and see very clearly the ways that it falls short.

I think that’s why I tend to quit while I’m halfway in. I just can’t stand having my failure exposed, throbbing like a raw nerve, a truth about my capabilities that becomes visible. At least if I quit, I am withdrawing of my own volition, rather than letting the world expel me anyway, and that gives me a sense of control. When I was on submission with my first book, I constantly reassured myself that if things did not go well, I would disappear. I would delete my socials and retreat from the writing sphere, and nobody would miss me. The idea of not leaving a mark was a comfort. Because if I had no track record, I could still be anything. Two books in, I still think about it. It’s like that scene in a fantasy novel when the couple holds onto each other’s hands and say, “One day we will run away to a place where there is no war, nobody knows who we are, and we can truly be together.” I think that distancing myself from the problem will somehow make me happier. It would simply be the closing of a tab, the jettisoning of a fuel tank filled with ideas that only I cared about.

Staying with something you want to quit, though, is what leads to the breakthrough. Finishing my first draft is what led to revising it, then writing another book, then penning a query letter. Waking up every day for my language classes instead of dropping out led me to my host mom’s dining room, where I learned so much about her wild, wonderful life even though she knew no English. To this day I am stunned by the expansiveness of my love and understanding of her, even though we did not speak each other’s native languages. I came to terms with being bad, and because of that, I got better.

I was reading “Fail Better” by Zadie Smith when I came upon this passage:

Though we rarely say it publicly, we know that our fictions are not as disconnected from our selves as you like to imagine and we like to pretend. It is this intimate side of literary failure that is so interesting; the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either the regulatory atmosphere of reviews or the objective interrogation of seminars, and yet, despite all this, true.

It struck true. In my daily failures, I was circling closer to a truth about myself.

When I resisted quitting, my pain tolerance grew. I advanced beyond the initial jab of rejection to the truth of what it meant. Deep in revisions of my first book, I saw how the most important pieces of the story fit together. With a ruthless hand, I removed entire scenes and deleted long sentences, departing from them the same way I would from a crowded party where a goodbye is hardly remembered. The ego and self-consciousness of beginning dissipated into a relentless obsession that had no space for anything else. I fell asleep thinking about the story and woke up looking forward to working on it. I had only felt like this when I read a particularly riveting book, or got personally invested in the revenge subplot of a Korean drama. It was a miracle that something of my own creation had ensnared me so completely.

After my first book, I stopped feeling embarrassed about the parts of myself that had seeped into my work, inciting speculation on who I was and what I cared about. I had failed because I could not prevent my personal biases from inflicting themselves on my work, but that was also the only way my story could be different from anyone else’s—because that small piece of my soul had catapulted itself into the book and become the energy at its center.

That’s what a writer does? We wear our vulnerability like a cloak for all the world to witness.

—Blue Moon

Something I wrote today:

“I didn’t know it was your birthday that day, and actually, I didn’t have a reservation here.”

I look at Jacob, but he is pondering his wineglass, as if he cannot quite figure out the color of the liquid inside. “I just thought that you seemed very sad.”

I feel like I experienced several seasons of life writing this book. Not only did I have to rewrite it several times, almost entirely from scratch, but I also lost my imprint and then my editor in quick succession, and was wrestling with whether I even deserved to be a published author after the limited success of my debut.

However. It is not all doom and gloom. Because I obviously managed to turn this book in and get it accepted. And I am far happier now than I was in 2025, when I was too deep in my personal hell-spiral to really feel creative, even though last year I probably wrote close to 200,000 words.

I have a whole other post about the pain of writing book 2. I won’t get into that now because I’ve already spent 1 hour creating an Instagram post and I’m tired.

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What I will say is who this book is for. I try to hold onto a specific reader audience in my mind when I write. Women of Good Fortune was for the angry women out there. This one is for the 90s kids who got to experience the internet in all its weird glory and are nostalgic for simpler times. It’s for those of us who made some of the best friends of our lives in college and got to become adults alongside them. It’s for those of us who have lost friends, or watched friendships fade, and never really understood why.

There’s co-founder drama, a love triangle, a nosy reporter, and at the center of it all, a woman who is still a girl trying to figure it all out. And despite everything that publishing has thrown at me, I’m proud of what I’ve created. It’s out on Tuesday. If you’re in San Francisco, I’m doing an event at Book Passage on Wednesday.

Also, I made a playlist.

Something I wrote today:

What is wrong with that man? What game is he playing? Is this because, in the anonymous employee pulse survey last quarter, I had checked the box for “less satisfied” when the question asked me how I was enjoying work?

Creatively, I struggled a lot in 2025. I did not want to churn out words for the sake of churning them out, but that’s how it felt. But when I didn’t write, I also felt unwell. It was an unease that dwelled in my mind and my gut, but that I couldn’t expel, like some kind of creative nausea. Towards the end of the year, I managed to distance myself from publishing enough to pin down the struggle I was having: I was so afraid that I couldn’t bring myself to take any risks. And writing is supposed to be a risk, or else there is no point doing it.

I let myself step away. I stopped writing for the first week of January 2026. I enrolled in a year-long writing class. And I stopped expecting anything of myself. When I was dead-set on writing as a career, I would work backwards from the goal of a book every other year. But these milestones started feeling like a burden, and they gave me a dull sense of fatigue, rather than energy and excitement.

2026 is a year where I want to be excited about writing again. I want to experiment with new ideas and reach into pockets of creativity that I have not accessed before. I’d like to invite you to join me in whatever creative endeavor you’re pursuing.

Here are some of the ideas for how I want to feed my creativity:

• An open heart

  • No judgment. Approaching an event, another person, a new hobby, without preconceived notions. Only an openness to see what happens.

• Create space

  • I’m going to show up for my writing. I will think about it and go on tangents and do research, but I am not going to hold myself to a specific word count goal. I can do whatever I want in this space, but I must step into it.

• Think before googling (or AI-ing)

  • After watching a movie, or reading a book, I’d like to sit with it for a few minutes (at least!). I want to get better at forming my own opinion before jumping online to read others’ so that I become a better, self-driven critical thinker.

• Notice

  • AirPods out, phone at home. Where do my thoughts go? What catches my eye?

• Go outside

  • This unpredictable, constantly shifting world we reside in! Whenever I go outside, I always find delight in something. I forget how great the sky is, how tasty fresh air is, and how insignificant my problems are if I spend too much time indoors.

• Capture it all

  • A quote in a book, artwork in a studio I happen to walk by, the particular song of a particular bird. My memory isn’t as great anymore, and who knows which of these small details might be a creative spark in the future?

• A new medium

  • What other forms of creativity may unlock new ideas? A visit to a museum, reading a magazine, scrolling an architecture blog, reading a poem, crocheting. Venturing beyond the written word can be so freeing, because I’m not trying to make anything of myself in these other pursuits.

• Think about the doing of the thing

  • Beyond actually executing your creative activity, thinking about my own body and mind’s response. Chart how I respond, when I feel motivated and when I struggle. Perhaps there are patterns.

• Embrace the mundane

  • Boredom is great.

• Writing how I feel before, and after

  • Instead of always looking backwards, how can I warm up by writing how I feel before the act? What are the hopes that I can capture this way?

• Look far, and look close

  • What do I see when I cast my eye far? What about when I just look to my immediate left, or my immediate right?

If there’s anything you’re trying, do let me know! May 2026 be good to all of us.

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Some book news:

Women of Good Fortune is out in paperback! It was really sweet to walk into a local SF bookstore and see it face out on the bookshelf.

The Social Circle is out in March. We are fewer than 2 months away!

And since this is a bit of an annual roundup newsletter too, here was some of my favorite content from 2025:

• [Movie] The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

• [Movie] K-Pop Demon Hunters

• [Movie] One Battle After Another

• [Movie] Wolf Children

• [Show] Attack on Titan

• [Book] Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford

• [Book] Hello Stranger by Katherine Center

• [Book] Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

• [Book] Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey

Something I wrote today:

The first thing he did was give me a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. “That will tell you everything you need to know,” he said. Then, he proceeded to skip the rest of our buddy sessions. The next I heard of him, he had been promoted.

Ask me what I wanted when I was 10, and I would say, “I want to be an author.”

Ask me what I wanted when I was in college, surrounded by the ambitions of my classmates and schooled in the types of jobs that were considered prestigious, and I would say, “I want to be a consultant.” (Yes, I know. You can laugh.)

My goals for myself grew increasingly narrow as time went on.

Ask me what I wanted after 1 year of working at a mid-tier consultancy, burnt out on meetings and realizing that the glamor of travel is wearing business casual on a flight and having to send out an Excel ten minutes before Barry’s Bootcamp, and I would say, “I want to work X hours a day and to make $Y a year.”

Ask me what I wanted after a life-changing book deal, and I would’ve said, “I want to be an author who sells XXX copies a year.”

An ambitious agent aims, usually over many years, to achieve something difficult and perhaps important. Nonetheless, the pursuit is not, with respect to value, a learning experience: she is not, as she proceeds, coming to a better and better grasp of why she is doing what she is doing.

—Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, Agnes Callard

I was in a state of perpetual motion. I had opened a great number of doors only to discover new ones behind them with more complicated locks, which I would set myself to picking. I would experience a wave of panic when I couldn’t unlock these opportunities, a sense of my options narrowing. I would pull myself back into that vast hallway and see the clock ticking, tallying the minutes of my life I was wasting on the wrong things. I comforted myself that there were still doors unopened, paths I hadn’t yet tried.

I was going through life checking boxes. Everything could be captured within a title, an income bracket, a life update posted on social media. As if these tangible results could speak to my growth as a person.

These days we think of a lot of decisions as if they were shopping choices. When we’re shopping for something, we act as autonomous creatures who are looking for the product that will produce the most pleasure or utility.

—David Brooks, “Big Decisions”

Most of the way I’ve approached my career has been this way. Choosing from a menu presented to me by my peers, my parents, the university career center. Optimizing for a handful of factors. Part of the reason I feel so uncomfortable with myself now is because I don’t know how many of my choices were actually self-driven or crafted from an externally influenced view of who I should be. I hadn’t learned much about myself in the pursuit of these choices, besides what circumstances I was ill-suited for.

We’re mystical creatures. Often when people make a transformational choice they feel it less as a choice and more as a calling.

—David Brooks, “Big Decisions”

The desire to write was a transformative choice. When I wrote Women of Good Fortune, it was with some of the most intense conviction I had ever felt. I needed to write this story. It was a garden in my brain, and I wanted to smell every rose. Before, I had written stories and had new ideas and thought, “Maybe I’ll save that for later.” I saved nothing and gave it all away. Instead of weighing any pros and cons, tallying the hours this book would take, I risked it all on one idea. For once, I was not doing something because I thought it would gain me something. There was an absence of comparison, a never-ending obsessiveness that consumed me. I was shaping the story, yes, but it was also shaping me. I sat my butt down every day to write it, but there was something guiding the words that appeared on the page. For those transcendent months when I worked on it, I think I witnessed the shape of my own soul: the things that really mattered to me, the message that I wanted to share with the world, the source of my vitality.

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I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery: this idea of personhood is certainly changing, perhaps has already changed.

—“Generation Why?” Zadie Smith

That book changed me. Subsequently, the process of revising, editing, preparing it for mass consumption, did too. As I received the commentary of my editor, the public, well-meaning loved ones, (a passage removed that had been consistent through all my many revisions before submission, an Amazon-SEO-optimized tagline, a Goodreads rating that kept plummeting) the vision of my soul flickered, then disappeared.

The guardrails were visible and daunting when I began penning The Social Circle: a contract already in place, the expectations of a publisher that wanted me to clone Women of Good Fortune into another on-brand exposition that was different but not too different (juicy drama, light social commentary, fraught romance), the knowledge that debuts who didn’t manage to hit it big on the first book will not get anything close to the same support on the second. Halfway through revisions, there was a reorg at the publisher. My original editor left. Again, I was left questioning what the point was. Who I was writing this book for. Friendship. College. Growing up but still not knowing a single damn thing. It was pretty representative of my life at the time. The existential confusion, not the being in undergrad. I knew what being an author meant now. It meant being at the base of a towering mountain, with an 80% of perishing before I got even halfway up. And then an even scarier question arose: Do I even want this? Did I want to labor and struggle to ascend a few feet?

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The question gave me pause. It was the question I should’ve asked myself before all of those other imperatives. Do I want this, and more importantly, do I want to go through this experience and witness who I become because of it? Because that is hard. It will probably lead to another door shutting. With every book I’ve written, I encounter a new version of myself, a sharpened view of where my values and interest lie.

Answering the question of who am I is intensely private and personal, and there is no blueprint, no reference, no influencer who will give you a how-to guide of cursive text imposed on filtered pictures. I often avoid it in favor of scrolling LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, because it’s far easier to listen to all the voices already shouting their suggestions at me.

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.

—“On Self Respect,” Joan Didion

I don’t think I’ll try to open every door in my hallway of optionality. I think I can let it go dark, and it will be okay.

Now, ask me what I want, and my answer is: “I want to be content.”

Something I wrote today:

Behaving? I flashed back to his bathroom, the smirk he sent me as he stood in the tub full of ice cubes sloshing around him while smoke curled from the tattoo on his chest. A flush stole over my cheeks, and I quickly took a sip of tea.

Of course, we all know what happened there. That book did not make it past submissions. By the time that happened, about a year after we first officially went out to editors, I’d basically forgotten about that book. All my attention was on WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE, which went on to get a pre-empt only a few days after going on sub. I poured my heart into that book, and part of me thought, If it is any story of mine that makes it, it will be this one.

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It was a dream. The deal showed up as Deal of the Day on Publisher’s Marketplace. People congratulated me, and that joy carried me for months afterwards. I was publishing a book. Early on, I began to get signals of how much my publisher was championing my book. I got a publicist, did podcast interviews, began seeing the book show up on lists like Today.com and get starred reviews, got to have a wonderful dinner with booksellers where I truly felt like a star, called into book clubs, attended a book festival as a panelist. People told me I was writing exactly what people wanted at the moment. A first-time author could not ask for better.

But the heady excitement was tempered by a fear that the book would fall flat on its face. That I would not be able to meet the sky-high expectations. Now, it’s about 1.5 years after the book came out, and I can say that it did… okay. I’m getting a paperback, which means it did not do so poorly that my publisher decided to pull it out of print entirely.

It was pretty clear that momentum slowed after the first month it was out. Even after the support that my publisher threw behind me, support that a lot of authors don’t even get, I hadn’t managed to hit any lists or win any awards. That was when I began wondering… If, after all this, I had not been a roaring success, did that simply mean that I was the problem? That I had not written something worth talking about? The pride that I had felt over the book I’d written—the character arcs I’d worked so hard to build, the heist that I’d spent days outlining, the research I’d poured into accurately representing Shanghai—all of that faded. Where before, all I wanted was to talk about my book that was being published, now I didn’t want to talk about it at all, especially when well-meaning questions inevitably went into “how are the sales” territory. I’d gotten a real shot at turning this book into a huge success, and I’d blown it by not writing something good enough.1

So, that doubt you feel? About being able to write a book, then being able to get an agent, then getting a book deal? None of it ever goes away. It only takes on different shapes. As I began my second book, I got pretty bad yips. I probably wrote more than 300,000 words and scrapped most of them as I drafted. What started out as a revenge plot with one timeline has since resolved into a dual timeline novel that is about a group of friends coming of age. It doesn’t have the propulsion of a heist, but more of a will-they-won’t-they as one woman reunites with the group of men that she’d sworn off after they betrayed her. I can say that I’m proud of what I’ve managed. It’s an ode to the campus experience, of finding your best friends in college after being the odd duckling in high school, of building something you love and seeing it succeed, and weighing ambition against love. When the book comes out and I have to deal with the public opinion, I will return to this post and remind myself that I am proud. And that there are way more factors in play than just my writing when it comes to publishing.

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But there is a silver lining. I got to sign copies of my book when I went to Indigo, even a year after it came out! Sometimes I still see a rogue bookstore carrying it! A couple of my friends just recently read the book and told me how much they loved it! It was in a bunch of airports (if you’ve watched American Fiction, you know the zenith for commercial fic is showing up in the airport)! And when I announced my second book, THE SOCIAL CIRCLE, there were so many wonderful people who told me they were excited for its release. And, hey, my childhood dream of being published did come true, so that’s a pretty big win.

There is one good thing about the doubt. It has made me more certain than ever that I love writing because I insist on doing it anyway. The thought of not doing it is worse than the thought of continuing but being bad at it. And if I stop now, how will I ever get better?

For those of you interested in THE SOCIAL CIRCLE, here’s the jacket copy:

The Social Network meets Daisy Jones & The Six in this dual-narrative novel about a group of college friends who found a social media company in the early days of the internet, their scandalous falling out, and the 10-year anniversary exposé that forces them back together again.

When Maggie Tang arrives as a transfer-student at UC Berkeley in 2005, she has no idea how her life is about to change. In the hallway of her dingy apartment building, she meets Adam, Charles, and Hari, the friends with whom she’ll create Circle, the world’s first major social media platform. But navigating her ambitions alongside love and friendship isn’t so simple, and when they inevitably collide, Maggie exits Circle in dramatic fashion.

A decade later, Maggie is struggling with a new professional venture when she receives an invitation to celebrate Circle’s 10th anniversary on a private island in Norway, with the three people she has tried hardest to forget. While she’s still bitter about how things ended, her company desperately needs the publicity, and deep down, Maggie can’t resist the handwritten plea at the bottom—Come, please.

Between boat rides and adventurous hikes, bit by bit the reunion begins to feel like old times. But the journalist writing a retrospective on Circle is eager for a scoop, which means they can’t tiptoe around the past forever. And when a new truth is revealed about their fall-out all those years ago, Maggie will have to decide whether to run again or fight for a second chance with the people she once loved most.

Something I wrote today:

I chewed my lip. I wished I could entrust more of the operations to the staff, but I’d already caught Kevin the line cook smoking meth in the back alley far more times than the acceptable limit, which was not zero, by the way.

“Could you think a little quieter?”

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Before we walk in the door, we’ve usually made a reservation on a screen. You could still make reservations by phone in 2012. Many places were on OpenTable by then, but if you didn’t feel like using it or couldn’t find a time you wanted, you picked up the phone, and your call would usually be answered by a human. Pleasantries were exchanged. Polite phrases were used: Please. Thank you. I’m sorry. We look forward to seeing you.

When I first read this, I didn’t get it. I’ve always hated phone calls. There is just something nerve-wracking about listening to the ring tone, not knowing when the person on the other end will pick up. Then the dead air when you run out of questions, unable to see the other person’s body language. It was good that we had online reservation apps. They had taken the awkwardness out of the equation.

It was the same with Uber and Lyft, which made it so much easier to call a car rather than waiting in line for a taxi or hopelessly trying to flag one down. And now, there’s a future where Waymo might replace them too, making what had been a low-friction solution even more low-friction. It is so easy to take one. Easy to open the doors without saying a word to anyone and watch the world go by through tinted glass. No small talk, no tips, no eye contact, just you and the robot car. We might soon end up in a future where we go to work and talk to people through screens, then leave work and walk among masses of people with their AirPods or Meta Raybans, on our way to take an autonomous vehicle home, talking to nobody, our faces oriented towards the lights of our phones. The noise, the hustle and bustle of life, become mere irritations that can be muted or removed altogether.

Lately, I have been wondering if my mission to avoid awkwardness has also turned into avoiding humanity. What did we used to do when we were caught out at a party without a phone in our hands? How did we distract ourselves? Of course it was excruciating, the embarrassment of being someone apart from the crowd. But that moment was also a grim becoming. Understanding that you were different, accepting that there were some places you didn’t belong. In some cases, finding fellow loners in the crowd.

It’s incredible what our phones allow us to do, but it’s also created a way for us to manipulate the world and shape it to the dimensions we want. I feel a little frightened when I step onto the subway and see everyone in the same zombie posture, lost in a world where they can scroll past things that don’t interest them, a simple flick of the finger rearranging their tiny world. I fear that we’re retreating from the rhythms of a real life, and forgetting how to actually live.

A Wall Street Journal article talked about how college kids are using “Notice of No Contact” orders to block each other, rather than deal with confrontation. NCOs were used as tools in Title IX cases, stalking, and domestic violence, but on college campuses the breadth of the policy has expanded:

If only life were like the internet may not be a fantasy for most, but for young adults whose social lives evolved in the digital age, the idea clearly has some appeal. It’s far easier to swipe right to show romantic interest than to approach another student after class. Much cleaner to ghost or block people you can’t stand than to physically dodge them at every party, especially when sharing the same small college campus.

I fear confrontation as much as anyone else, and I can’t imagine growing up in the world as it is now, where everything is so polarizing and overwhelming. I don’t know where the line is between what we should be forced to bear, and what we are allowed to ignore.

The speed that we get information also has made trends proliferate. So many new things are just a version of history with a new label slapped on. Dystopian fiction seems to be coming back. Yes, romantasy is a thing now, but we used to have paranormal romance. I got to a point where I began feeling fatigued by the Goodreads newsletters I got every month, blasting me with books that I should read, many with similarly-textured covers and premises that bled into one another. I would never be able to crest the wave of new content, and so much of it was just the same. The same trends, the same tropes, the same things that had already been validated by the market.

It’s like seeing all the billboards in San Francisco, which have all been refreshed to include AI in some way, shape, or form. Come the next buzzy keyword, they’ll find a way to insert that, too. There’s also this one, which made me laugh:

As someone living in San Francisco, I like observing the duality. The isolation of technology and the colorfulness of so many people crammed into one city.

My own rebellion has been to return to the old things, instead of being sucked into the endless cycle of new, new, new. Here are some of the things I’ve done lately that have helped me feel a little more grounded:

1. Getting a library card. It’s helped me rediscover old books I never got around to reading.

2. Leaving the phone at home when I go for a walk.

3. Taking public transit more. Looking at the people sitting on the seats around me (but not too long because I don’t want to start something), and saying thanks to the bus driver when I get off.

4. In that vein, observing the people around me. Looking at what they’re wearing or doing, and wondering at them a bit, if only for a respite from my own life.

5. Going through my old clothes from my childhood home and adding some of them back to my closet instead of buying new ones.

6. Calling up old friends on the phone—phone calls are still weird to me, but they’re actually such a great way to connect with someone far away. There’s something warming about hearing the voice of someone you love, even if you can’t see them.

What does all of this have to with writing? Nothing and everything. How do we write with feeling if we numb ourselves to feeling anything in our own lives? How can we create realistic character arcs if we duck away from the challenge of our own character growth? Sometimes, returning to the old feels like returning to my roots.

—Sophie

Something I wrote today:

Silver hair curls around a shadowed face, obscured by the black hood of his cape. I see high cheekbones, the sharp arch of collarbones through the fur at his neck. Every part of him seems to have been rubbed against a whetstone. Then he tips his head back, his hood falling, and I inhale sharply. Remembering the eyes I saw in the woods.

Some of these goals were achieved within a year. Some were bound by the deadline of graduation. 5 years after I created this list, I had done everything on it except #2: finish working on and publish a book. As each year came and went, I began to feel that I had hit my expiration date on this goal. In my belief system, it was already too late for me. Besides, I had no idea how publishing a book even worked, and you know, it felt safer to just not try at all, so I didn’t taste the bitterness of failure.

Thinking back to it, I loved writing, but I had not loved it enough to take it seriously. I didn’t know how to commit. I didn’t know what I wanted to say, and I only did it when I felt like it. I applied to creative writing classes, and when I was rejected, I folded over. It was easier to think that I didn’t have what it took, rather than recognize that there was a steep path towards my goal that I was afraid of embarking on. To date, that’s one of my biggest regrets. Just because I was not ready, did not mean I should have stopped trying.

The reason I started again? I read an author’s post about her agenting and publication journey. I discovered that she was only in college, and it lit a competitive fire in me. Normally, I discourage against comparison, but in this case, seeing someone younger and not so dissimilar from me in background accomplish this made me feel like I could do it, too. Reading that post flipped a switch. It listed out exactly what I needed to do to get published: write a book, revise, write a query, query agents, get agented. Suddenly, publishing did not seem like some ambiguous aspiration. There were clear steps to get there. I did not need to be “of age” or have a set of qualifications to do it, the way you do for a normal job. If I kept waiting to be “ready,” I would never be.

For a while, I was jealous and anguished. I was jealous because maybe that could’ve been me! I was anguished because I could’ve been writing and building up a repository of failures and learning and words instead of stagnating. But that was the kick in the ass I needed. I got to work. I wrote with the intention of completing a book, no matter how sucky it was. I researched queries. I got serious. All the while, I nursed the doubt that it was already too late for me. At the time, I was writing YA. I had always believed that I would publish in YA because that was what I primarily read. I used to think that it would be great to publish YA while I was in high school or college because when else would I be an authority on the YA voice than when I, myself, was a young adult? Writing it as an older, post-college grad, I felt like I’d missed the train. I was also reading way less YA at this point, but I was hesitant to dip my toes in the waters of adult fiction. I didn’t know if I had the skill or maturity to write it.

If you have read past newsletters, you know I got my agent with my YA. That failed to sell, and my next project was adult fiction about a group of women who commit a heist at a wedding. I felt lots of fear and imposter syndrome as I was writing it, and sometimes I would spiral when I thought about this being yet another book that wouldn’t sell and having to start all over again. But greater than that fear was the determination to write this story. It became Women of Good Fortune, which published in March 2024.

buy women of good fortune

I should have been satisfied after that. After far longer than I could’ve anticipated, I had completed my list. And yet, I still constantly feel like I’m falling behind.

When I moved back to San Francisco last year, I felt like Rip Van Winkel. Many of my friends from college were homeowners, married, planning for kids, while I was just re-entering the workforce again, except with more joint pain. At work, I discovered that people with far more seniority than me were actually not that far away in age, or sometimes even younger. I used to take a lot of pride in being the youngest in a group, but I was beginning to reach this inflection point where I was no longer considered young. Now, I see posts about “what I learned in my twenties” and realize I’m not the audience for those sorts of lists anymore. Someone, please link me to the “what to avoid in your thirties” list, though.

While struggling through my second book, I watched people from my debut class sell second, even third books. I was in the middle of a complete rewrite while others had their second books already publishing. My first book made me experience imposter syndrome, and my second one drove me to the edge of madness. This book has been a killer to write. It’s been dragging me in its wake since 2023, and nothing about writing it has been easy. Also, it seems to be a lightning rod for bad luck, something I’ll write about once I actually turn this thing in. In the beginning, I raced to finish it. I wanted to have it in the bag and work on my third book, so that I could keep pace with literally everyone else (or so it seemed). But as I went through relentless rounds of edits, I realized there was no point in hurrying. I might be able to pump out thousands of words, but they would lack heart and intention. I needed to take my time, not just satisfy a contractual obligation. If that meant spending 2 hours on one page, then that was what I had to do.

If you race time, you’ll always lose. Time will run on, and it will never tire. There will always be someone younger, and brighter, and more talented. Look at the chess grandmasters. You keep thinking they can’t get any younger, and yet, they do. I have mostly left social media, so I get fewer reminders of this, but I still feel that latent anxiety when I see others hitting milestones. To me, milestones are things you can point to and say, look, I wasn’t wasting my time. They’re visible, easy for the rest of the world to understand and admire. But they are blips in the long stream of life. What matters more is everything that happens in between. The thinking, the deleted words, the showing up.

All I need to do is look at my 5-year list. It may have taken me more than 5 years, but I checked everything off, things that I perceived as big and difficult enough to type them out on a laminated piece of pretty paper. Few of those things would have happened if I had withdrawn from the race early. Sometimes, I get frustrated at myself for how long it takes me to do certain things, like come up with an apt synonym or the right way to express a feeling. But that is the beauty of the struggle. And the reward when I get it right is immeasurable.

So, here is a reminder: take your time to get it right. It is not the speed with which we complete things that matters, but the time we spend in the race. ✦

Something I wrote today:

She has spent longer missing him than being with him.

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My recall is terrible. Often, I begin to tell a story from my past that was significant or funny, only to give a watered-down version because I can’t remember the particular details. Once, I told my friend about a soft serve shop near my house that I had been going to since I was in high school, yet when she asked what its name was, I could not remember it. I knew what letter it began with, but it felt like the name was just beyond my grasp, floating about in a gray space whose depths I reached into again and again, yet I knew each word I grabbed onto wasn't correct. It was only several hours later, in the middle of another completely irrelevant task, that the answer appeared at the forefront of my mind like it had been there all along. I struggle with the same thing when writing, knowing there is one word that captures what I want to say, but unable to remember. There are few things more frustrating than knowing you have the answer but being unable to access it.

If there are so many words that have slipped through the gaps of my memory, what about moments? As I write my second book, part of which is set in the early 2000s, I have been sifting through my childhood, trying to recall what it was like to grow up during that decade, and the trends that were part of my life. Through my research, I am surprised by what emerges. A Reddit thread reminds me of the Flash games I used to obsess over, how I spent a summer playing some game where you capture bees in soap bubbles. Suddenly, I even remember the name of the website, and I'm shocked by how my brain has managed to hold onto this when I sometimes can't even remember what I did last weekend. Listening to an old P!nk song, I remember the blue iPod nano I used to own and how I filled it with songs that I thought were the cool songs to listen to, but that I actually didn't like that much. Watching Didi, I remember the slang that we used to use and that one year we had "totally swank" as a multiple choice answer on our standardized tests. I remember upside-down smileys, weird AIM usernames, LiveJournal and Tumblr. How vivid those memories are, how heightened my emotions during that phase of my life. But it also makes me wonder—does being older mean that more experiences become less impactful? I don't want that. I want to continue being thrilled, embarrassed, and overjoyed. I want to still be passionate about life.

I have another hypothesis for why my memories from my childhood were so much stronger. That time felt so IRL. Phones were not really a distraction, especially if your parents didn’t give you any money to pay 10 cents a text. You couldn’t just dip your head and pretend to look busy. There was a lot of time spent being bored and marinating in embarrassment. Once, my friend organized a “Dare Day” where we went to the mall and pulled random dares out of a box. Someone was dared to knock off Santa Claus’s hat and she actually did it! We were such little sh!ts…

When I was older, I would come home and see my Gen Z sister sitting next to three of her friends on the couch, all of them on their phones. I never did that with my friends. We didn’t have the option. We were stuck with each other, and it was up to us to entertain each other. We also didn’t have the ability to constantly be taking photos. Studies have found that taking photos can actually impair memory because capturing that perfect shot takes up some of our cognitive load and disengages us from the actual moment.

So, if photos aren’t even the answer to keeping our memories, then what is? In 2020, my new year’s resolution was to journal every day for the entire year. To write something down even if nothing happened. What a year to decide to journal every day. And yet, I am so glad I did. It’s a piece of history and an artifact of my feelings at the time. Of course I remember the stress, the uncertainty, the thrill of our once-a-week trip to Costco. But there are little gems of a daily life that I’d forgotten, until I scrolled through and saw something like this:

If we let the present consume our lives, we forget how much learning can be found in the past. I think that's an important part of journaling—doing the actual writing but also revisiting it. In reading my old entries, I discovered that I tend to journal when I feel negative. So many of my entries are about being nervous, being stressed, being fearful. There is a slew of entries around the time of my debut, comparing myself to others and worrying about my book's eventual performance. There is one entry celebrating the book finally being out and seeing all my friends show up for me, a single bright pinprick amidst the darkness. As if only the blindingly brilliant moments are worth capturing forever, even while I fastidiously log every unhappiness. The present me, with the benefit of hindsight, wants to shake the past me by the shoulders and tell her to enjoy what's happening, instead of trying to leap ahead into the future where everything is wrong again. I don't want to dismiss these moments when I'm in them and then miss them when they're gone.

I even said it myself in one of my entries: "I need to start journaling when I'm happy, too." That’s something I’ll try to do more in 2025. To record the moments when I feel good because those are just as important to capture and remember. If I only record the rough times, I will slowly forget the happy ones. I've been capturing random meals and jotting down thoughts, and it’s freeing to know this is just for me. I don’t need to be grammatically correct or sound especially eloquent. This is my version of self-care, and a type of focusing. It makes me dig into why I feel the way I do while noticing the small things around me. It helps me pay attention, which I think requires more of an active effort now, when there's so much content we are consuming at every moment. It’s also making me recall more of the words that describe happiness. In doing so, I am beginning to appreciate what's around me, instead of hyper-focusing on whatever's swirling around inside me. When I look back at these entries, I hope I see someone who, in the middle of all the angsting, found ways to be happy, too.

Something I wrote today: Nothing!! I turned in my draft! I’m freeeeee!

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I’m no stranger to prestige. I think most of us are part of a society where people find ways to categorize and rank you. By your university, by where you work, how much money you make. I can see the calculation that people are making when they ask me where I work, or where I went to school. I went to business school for 2 years, where there were 3 main career paths that people chose from. Isn’t that ridiculous? That out of everything you could do in the world, really there are only three respectable things you could be doing?

How do you win the prestige game in the world of business? You work at a name brand bank or consulting firm, or you work at one of the massive tech companies. It doesn’t matter if it’s another soulless job with backbreaking hours. The title of the company shines from your LinkedIn like a beacon, making everything worth it.

Where am I going with this? Entering publishing reminds me a lot of the uncertainty I experienced during my undergrad years and straight out of college. I went into all of it blind. I had no idea what was good or bad, but I quickly began picking up how people judged prestige in this world, and I let it dictate my own worth. Instead of asking where you worked or where you went to school, people would instead ask about your agent, how many books you’d published, your imprint. Then there were the awards you could’ve won, the book boxes, the book clubs you could’ve been chosen for. Frankly, it is scarier than the world of business because there seem to be far more ways to find yourself lacking, in all directions.

The most horrifying thing is that being an author published by a traditional publisher is supposed to be that prestigious thing. After all, we’ve already jumped through so many hoops: querying, submission, revisions. And yet there’s always more.

Paul Graham has a lot of interesting things to say about prestige in his essay, “How to Do Great Work”:

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.

Most prestige is fake. For example, what I mentioned above, about there only being three acceptable career paths post-MBA. I learned there was a reason for that. These three things were the only things the already-impotent career center knew anything about. So, it benefited business schools, whose major selling point is placing people into jobs, to push people into those three career paths, which in turn inflated their employment reports every year. In some instances, they actively discouraged people from walking off the beaten path because they didn’t understand it, and it would probably bring down their precious employment numbers.

The perceived prestige of publication can also lead us down bad roads. For writers who have struggled and struggled to get an agent or a publisher, writing to a trend becomes the thing that they believe will save them. To get to the prestige of a book deal, perhaps the only solution is to write what people will buy. I had a conversation with someone where I shared my itty bitty dream to try my hand at fantasy, but they counseled me to stay away from fantasy because it was tough to sell. It made me sad. The joy of unhindered creation, crushed beneath the capitalistic machine. Like there is no point pursuing an idea that excites you, if it can’t be sold, or it diminishes your odds. Instead, let us all pen sexy demon-bodice-rippers (harder done than said).

I fully understand how disheartening it is to write several things, get close, but never over the finish line. But how many of us are writing because we want to be rich, and how many of us are doing it because we love it and it brings to life something inside us that would otherwise be dead? I choose to believe the latter.

I take faith in Graham’s view:

The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. So the question to ask about a type of work is not how much prestige it has, but how well it could be done.

Even after publishing a whole damn book, I was reminded of all the prestige prizes that were out there. Like year-end lists. I never used to pay attention to “Best of” lists. Because in 2025, there will probably be a whole host of new content that I can lose my mind to. But lists kind of rule debut-land. First, it’s the “most anticipated” lists, then it’s the “best book of 2024” lists, then there are the bestseller lists. Everyone tries to game the New York Times bestseller list by pushing pre-orders of books, since they’re all counted in the first week of sales. Lists create buzz, and we note our absences from them with alacrity.

And yet, why do so many lists exist? They’re pretty easy to come up with, at least relative to a longform article or an actual book, and easier to read. 3 things I can’t live without. 5 things that I wish I knew in my 20s. 10 best books of 2024. You don’t even need to give a well-thought-out justification for why that thing is on your list. When the New York Times published their list of the 100 best books, there was some lively debate. There were lists about the list! They are (comparatively) lower effort and spark plenty of discussion. An easy win. In some instances, like the US News & World Report on top universities, it’s a massaged mass of data points with no truly unpredictable results, yet people still lose their minds because so and so school fell by one point.

My point is that a lot of prestige is manufactured. It’s a differentiation ploy by institutions to set them apart from their competitors and anoint themselves the arbiters of taste and greatness. That kind of differentiation is what builds a brand, and brand is priceless because it’s something you can’t mimic. So think about the power it gives these institutions and media outlets when we entrust them to tell us what is impressive.

The other part of prestige is that it’s perception. It’s us thinking about what people around us might find admirable or impressive. Prestige infiltrates every industry. Humans seem to have this unrelenting desire to find a way to set themselves apart, but only in a context that their peers can understand. It’s a language that we develop within our niche because it makes us feel elevated above the rest of the plebs.

Prestige is what we resort to when we don’t know what we really want. When I didn’t know what I wanted to do in college, it was the easy way out. Even if I wasn’t happy, at least people would be impressed by me, because I’d chosen a job that was recognizable. Recently, I have come to realize that not being more intentional about my choices may have irrevocably put me on a path going nowhere, but at least with my writing, I’m still a baby in publishing and can put some real thought into what direction I want to grow. When the hubbub about end of year lists mounted, I stepped away from it. I was working on bettering my book, and that gave me a fulfillment that a callout on someone’s list never would.

Something I wrote today:

She nodded, mesmerized by everything about him. His ambition, his confidence, his willingness to make space in his life just for her. He stood up and stretched. “I’m going to turn in, too. Let yourself out whenever.” As he passed her, he put his hand on her head for a brief second.

I couldn't come up with a specific thing that I'd really wanted. Yes, there was one year that I wanted a Nintendo DS so I could play Nintendogs, but then my parents gave me a DVD of Madagascar instead for Christmas and after a period of feeling woefully denied, I made my peace with the fact that I would probably never own a handheld gaming device. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that even as a kid, what I wanted was an ideal.

The image came unbidden to me, so clear that it was like it had only happened a week ago. I remember being in the parking lot of a store at 15, waiting for my mom to come out. Across the lot, I saw a girl get into her car. It was a cherry red convertible, sparkling under the sun like freshly washed fruit. She had her blonde hair pulled up into a perfectly round bun, and there was a pink bow tied around it. I watched her put her car into reverse, drape one arm around the seat, and easily back out of the spot. In that moment, I felt a rush of aspiration. I wanted to be just like that girl. I wanted to look polished and put-together and like there was a particular part of the world that I inhabited with ease. Maybe it was also my first ever girl crush and I got my desires confused.

There are a lot of kinds of people I’ve wanted to be. We all like imagining the paths we could’ve led; isn’t that why we love books like The Midnight Library or Before the Coffee Gets Cold? Most of all, though, I wanted to be an author. I used to read a lot of Meg Cabot, so there was a particular type of author I wanted to be: a writer who lived in New York. I wanted to bring my laptop to bright plant-filled cafes and go on meditative walks through Central Park. After doing further research into the matter, I got a reality check. New York is expensive and book advances are, on average, small and unpredictable. I also never go to cafes. I'd rather work from the comfort of my desk at home than gather everything I need for a writing session and then brave the elements on my way to a cafe that may or may not have outlets, seats, or wifi.

That ideal, though, became my north star. The word author went up on the walls of my brain in neon lights. No matter what I did with my life, this dream persisted. Sometimes it slumbered. Sometimes I became ashamed of it and covered it with a shroud. But it never went away.

Ideal is not fantasy, no matter what people might say to you. It can be true. You can make it so. I have chosen to use this word to describe what I wanted instead of a dream, because there was something very particular in my head when I imagined being an author. I was striving towards my own ideal of authorly perfection. In some ways, I got to live that ideal. Ideal crystallized for me on my book launch day, when I got to celebrate with all my friends and sit in front of a fat stack of my books.

But ideal is also only the tip of the iceberg. It belies everything that goes into that one snapshot of perfection. Contrast my glorious book launch where everyone knew my name to that time when I went to a writers' cocktail hour where I didn't know a single person and was surrounded by people who'd published 5+ books, made lists, and won awards. The day I got my book deal felt like a dream, but it was buttressed by the hard reality of rejections, deleting thousands of shoddy words, and spending two hours every night for months working on something that maybe nobody would ever want.

Ideals don’t exist in perpetuity, and they don’t exist in isolation. Oftentimes, when I was living out one of those ideal moments, I was too overwhelmed and adrenaline-drunk to even properly appreciate it. I was so tied up over the pressure of debut that I needed others to tell me, “You’ve made it. You got everything you ever wanted,” and even then it didn’t really sink in. In the weeks after my book launch, I realized I had accomplished what once felt totally impossible. Yet I could not fully internalize the accomplishment, the objective success that is launching a book (a big blanket statement to include writing, editing, promoting, etc.). All I felt was… empty. I had to constantly remind myself of where I’d been 2 years ago to give myself a reference point of what I had achieved. Why did I need reference points? Why could I not stand still in this moment and appreciate it for what it was? I started having the scary feeling that maybe my joy and fulfillment had peaked somewhere between getting a book deal and seeing my cover.

That stress consumed me for a long while. Maybe writing was not my thing after all. I wrote and rewrote, and nothing felt right. I was frustrated with myself for not achieving this ideal I’d had. I was not the perfectly inspired writer producing golden sentences. I was still a fearful girl who thought she’d merely stumbled into a patch of good luck.

Then… I took a break. I traveled. I enjoyed being around friends, and when the guilt that I wasn’t writing knocked at my door, I didn’t answer. I set a 5 minute limit on Instagram so I wouldn’t get my emotions tangled up with others’ success. I suppose I learned a bit of self care. When I returned to my desk in August, I felt lighter, farther away from my identity as a writer. As much as this ideal had driven my thoughts and actions from 2020-2024, it was not my whole life.

I started working on new characters and a story, and I was a little less impatient with myself. Sometimes, I accessed the past version of myself. The naive one who wrote without caring that much what others thought, who had a story and simply wanted to get it out because it was too loud trapped in my head. One night, after toiling away on my draft, I sat back and felt at peace and happier with my writing than I had in a long time. This was the ideal, I thought. The ideal was the process itself. Of loving something while I’m in the middle of it. This time, I had a renewed respect for the time and discipline that completing something requires. My process says far more about me than the single moment that it leads to.

What do I really want now? I don’t really have an ideal in my head anymore, and I’m grateful for that. It means I’ve had a good life. I’ve gotten to experience a range of emotions and events and form some opinions about them. Most importantly, I have stopped internalizing (as much) what is happening to other people as something I want too. I’m sure I will start feeling greedy and ambitious again soon, but for now, all I want is to write.

P.S. Once, I put on a dress and makeup and managed to parallel park in one try. A gift to my teenage self.

Something I wrote today:

The colors. They punch her in the gut with their vividness. The ocean washing up against the white shore of the beach, bright turquoise transitioning into mysterious, deep blue, dotted with smaller islands. A halo of clouds floats around the peaks of one of the nearby mountains, an ethereal necklace on the throat of a great goddess. She can see now how this place inspired such wild myths. “Damn. That’s a view worth dying for.”  

The days of fiction books being a distraction are gone forever, I think. If I stop writing books, I might be able to go back to the times when I put no thought towards the resources that go into a book being published and I could simply admire a good story or scoff at a bad one. I doubt it, though. I can see all the way to the bottom now.

I don’t mean to make this sound like a terrible thing. I’ve lost one thing and gained clarity in its place. I can see the stitching running beneath the masterpiece and admire all the threads that hold it all together. After publishing my first book:

1. I can borrow the eye of an editor: After working with an editor and going through the cycle of developing story, brainstorming character arcs, arranging scenes, and agonizing over the wording of particular sentences, I notice small things now. I notice words that are repeated too often, details about a scene that are not completely filled in, characters that aren’t fleshed out enough to deserve their endings. Reading a not-very-edited book is like driving on a poorly paved road. It’s not bad enough that you will fly off the shoulder, but it’s bumpy and uncomfortable. Even as I write, I find myself stopping in the middle sometimes because I know that my editor’s going to have something to say about this, and I better fix it. I think it’s made me a slightly cleaner drafter. Editors fill in the potholes. Sometimes they’ll even redirect you onto a new road.

2. I have a greater appreciation for the writer’s voice and elements of their craft:

   I used to aspire to be certain authors. I wanted to mimic their style or create characters just like theirs. I have begun to realize that the things I wanted to copy were not craft. They are the writer’s own voice, the thing that separates their writing from someone else writing the same kind of story. There were times when I’d read something and think “psh, I can do that.” Now, I know that’s not true. Instead, I have learned to look more closely at a writing and try to understand how they are so good at what they do, to parse it into more understandable elements like dialogue, exposition, and prose. It’s cool to be able to be able to appreciate the specific things that authors do.

3. I can see the author behind the book: It’s hard for me to see a book now without perceiving the shadow of the author behind it. I used to think it was an insult to write from your own life. I believed it signified a lack of imagination, an inability to create without lived experience to back it up. That was a complete misconception. It’s our experiences that bring a unique perspective to what we write. In fact, it’s a big marketing angle when you can draw on some element of your life and connect it to the story you’re telling; why else do people always ask what inspired a book? When I read multiple books written by the same author, I can start identifying their signature in the set-up of certain characters, in particular scenes, even in the rhythm of dialogue. We have a brand, whether we like it or not.

4. I always read the acknowledgments: You can learn a lot from the acknowledgments section of a book. It’s a little look into the person behind the work, the only section where they are writing in their true voice, without disguising or lending it in some way to the story. During querying, everyone always says to read the acknowledgments to find out who someone’s agent is, but I find it fascinating for so many other reasons. It’s a look into what was important to the author in getting their book out there. Sometimes it’s the writer’s writing group, the experts who helped them conduct research, or some random thing a stranger on a train said to them that somehow inspired their entire novel. Almost always, you discover how many people were involved in getting their book to publication. It’s uplifting and reminds me that we’re all just human beings struggling to tell a story the right way.

5. I know how the sausage is made (somewhat): Now I can see every book and its place in the capitalist publishing machine. I pay attention to things I used to never look at, like imprints, blurbs, and book box / book club selections, as if either of those things can tell me anything about the quality of a book. It’s annoying how all these arbitrary stickers and inclusions now have significance, that I even know what they all mean. What has been another damning realization is that the books I thought I chose myself were actually chosen for me. The ones I chose because I saw them on Goodreads, or because it felt like everyone was reading it—most of the time, that was because these books were picked by the publisher to succeed. All of those things—giveaways, placements, mentions on press outlets—cost something from the publisher, whether it is cash or the time and attention of a marketing team and a publicist. Even shelf placement, something that I thought was guaranteed if you were being published by a big 5, is determined by the sales team. It is a rough thing to learn that even after you’ve gotten the book deal, there are still so many more people you have to convince.

Publishing is eye-opening, fascinating, and a lesson in letting go. But if I could tell my old self, the one who was desperately striving to be part of this world, I would say: enjoy being on the outside.

Something I wrote today:

They lapse into silence, although it’s not really. Not with the lap of the waves, the intermittent calls of seabirds, the sound as one of them readjusts their positioning. It’s comfortable, she realizes, in a way that it wasn’t when she first got here. Familiar. 

However, ever since I wrapped up classes a few weeks ago, life has been in flux. I’ve been slowly shedding furniture, and now there is only a mattress on the floor of my bedroom. Because Philly apartments are somehow allowed to build rooms without any lighting fixtures, I have only the meager light of my desk lamp. I no longer have a desk or a monitor, so I do my work either in libraries or with my laptop propped up on my thighs. Back pain, I greet you as a dear friend. Without the responsibilities of classes to attend, I’ve lost all semblance of a routine, and I float through every day doing things but ultimately feeling unproductive. My diet has also regressed to that of a child because I’m trying to get rid of everything in my fridge. So I’ve been eating a lot of peas, chocolate, and Lao Gan Ma.

At the same time, I’ve been having conversations with my editor about book 2, and there is a major rewrite on the horizon. I have not started yet because we’re still hammering out the outline, but this process is really different in many ways from how I typically write. The very existence of an outline is already a huge shift from my typical pantsing approach, and part of me is afraid that all the agonizing over plot, setting, and character development will take the magic out of the drafting process. I fear that because so much of this story has been written out in plain language, I will not be able to breathe life into it. Also, having stakeholders in the creative process is hard. There are outside expectations and the fledgling “author brand” that I’ve created, and somehow this book has to operate within these guardrails.

The combination of all these things has made it difficult to write. Writing is something I have to build into my routine, and I do it best when life is stable. But the current upheaval that I’m experiencing with my outline and with moving means that I haven’t been doing much writing at all. The natural planner in me wanted to work towards something and believe that I would finish another draft by X date. But then I realized that there are other factors at play besides my own inspiration, and that setting deadlines for myself when I’m not the only one controlling this timeline is as useful as trying to build a house on quicksand.

So, I’ve decided to let it go for the time being. I’m focusing on packing things up, the last few trips with friends, and preparing for a new chapter of life. I’ve also been watching movies with astonishing speed, searching for stories that will once again inspire me to want to bottle the emotions they make me feel and turn them into something of my own. I’ve given myself permission to lie flat on the couch and not get up for at least three hours, or go to a happy hour that somehow bleeds into closing time. Unfortunately, I’m in a bit of a reading rut lately. I’ve been reading, but the stories are blurring together, and nothing really stands out. I also am now cursed to read books as someone who has written one, meaning that I spend too much time deconstructing them instead of losing myself in the story. So if you have recommendations, please send them my way!

In lieu of sharing something I’ve written (because the only writing I have done in this past week is this newsletter), I’ll share a few movies that I’ve really enjoyed in the past week:

Cast Away - I grew up listening to my dad quote the “Wilson, I’m sorry” scene. I don’t know why it took me so long to watch this, but wow what a well-paced movie that displays the resilience of the human spirit.

The Bridges of Madison County - The chemistry, the yearning, the idea that some loves can only exist within the parentheses of a sentence. I’m still thinking about it.

Lust, Caution - The highest-grossing NC-17 film of all time. I had to see what that was about. Boy, did I see. Besides the sexiness, there’s betrayal, espionage, big jewels, and 1940s Shanghai.

Pretty Woman - After trying a couple of recently released, lackluster rom-coms, I went back to this old classic. I think the problem with movies nowadays is that they rarely convince me that two people are right for each other, but with this one, I could believe it.

Challengers - I was expecting the love triangle, but not the hot and heavy bromance. I like.

I hope you get out there and find some inspiration for yourself. If you do, let me know.

It also felt like really great timing. I was initially concerned that the launch was coming 2 weeks after the official publication date, but it was the perfect amount of time for me to get over all the angst of having my book out there (more on that later) and felt like a fitting send-off. In short, I discarded my perpetual worrying and just let the tides of enthusiasm and joy carry me away, and I had a spectacular time. I have tried to maintain that attitude by not reading my reviews, not looking at how many ratings I have, and really soaking in every positive DM or post that I get tagged in. The result has been very positive.

Anyway, get yourself a copy of this book! It’s out now and you can probably find it at your local bookstore!

Buy Women of Good Fortune!

For anyone reading this who hasn’t published a book, it must sound so ridiculous that I’m caught up in these things when I’ve achieved the big thing! I got my book published! But publishing has brought to the fore many ideas and misconceptions I’ve carried my whole life about writing and my own abilities.

One of the big beliefs I used to have about writing is that my writing ability was capped. I would read some authors’ writing and despair at ever being able to construct worlds as expansive and detailed at theirs, or at being able to capture the humor and malaise of living the way they did through their dialogue. I could never do that, I thought, and consequentially, I believed that I would just never be able to arrive at some universally accepted level of good.

Sometimes I get comments telling me how “talented” I am. These comments make me feel like a chosen one who has lucked out with some indescribable ability that has allowed my writing to rise above others. I have never thought of myself as talented because nothing has ever come naturally to me. I’m the girl who swings the bat and misses, who studies twice as hard for an exam but ends up scoring the same as the people who started the night before, and who adds a little too much salt to cookies and ruins the whole batch. It’s preparation, practice, and recipes that have helped me.

That’s not to say that I don’t feel a bit of magic when I write. Describing it to a friend, I wasn’t really able to explain why, when I begin typing, I am able to think up dialogue on the spot or feel like I’m flying behind my characters as they drag me to places unknown. I once heard from an artist that she must begin painting on her canvas in order to figure out what her piece is going to be, or else she will never finish anything. That’s how I feel, sitting in front of a blank page. I need to start typing in order to see the path. Is that what “talent” is? It feels utterly arbitrary, trusting in a fickle muse who can desert you at any moment. Also, I usually axe eighty percent of a first draft anyway. Most of my process is committing to sitting down, not getting distracted by anything, and fighting self-doubt. I have to think critically, research, make spreadsheets, gather feedback, and prioritize in order to arrive at a coherent draft, and those are things that take practice.

Now, after seeing Women of Good Fortune join the ranks of other published books, I am wondering again how much of writing is talent and how much is the honing of craft. Since it was acquired, the question that I was terrified of having answered was: how will this book be received by the public? Its popularity, its online rating, its mentions on social media, its SALES; suddenly, there were a multitude of ways to measure this book quantitatively, which is definitely worse because you can argue with some bad reviews, but you can’t argue with cold, hard numbers. I let myself believe that it was these numbers that would determine how good, how talented a writer I was.

I was also fully aware of the other books that published at the same time, and from there, I could chart their parallel paths and find new ways to make myself miserable. Up until now, I had been on the inside of this journey, but now I had reached this diverging point where I was both experiencing everything as an author yet aware of how I would observe books like mine as a reader and reviewer. To give you an example, as a reader, I would often go on Goodreads and look for books with over 1,000 reviews and a 4+ star rating. That was how I decided what to read. And to learn that my own book didn’t fit the bar I had set as a reader was a bitter pill to swallow. My strategy as a reader was not the fairest. I have definitely picked up books I’ve loved that didn’t fit the standards I’d set. Now, I have to remind myself that reader Sophie would have picked up Women of Good Fortune, purely for relatable characters and the promise of a good time.

If there were a PhD in ways to make yourself feel bad, I think I would graduate with flying colors. After everything—writing and finishing a book, revising said book, querying literary agents, going on submission TWICE, editing a book with a professional editor within an inch of its life—I still felt like a hack.

After a week of this angst, though, I realized that I was confusing talent with my ability to imitate other authors. I cannot take another writer’s voice, and I have spent a lifetime defining my own. My “talent” might be static, but it’s given me a starting point. Everything else is a product of my own work and my appetite for experimentation, and there’s something liberating about not being constrained by some innate thing I was supposed to be possess. I found that when I pulled away from the online discourse and started working on something else, my body relaxed. I felt at peace for the first time in a long time. It was the peace of creation, of doing something familiar yet new. For the first time in a while, I realized I would not want to switch places with anyone else, because that would mean I’d lose my voice, and that is the one thing that is undeniably me.

Something I wrote today:

If they asked for my identity, I would show them my student ID. I’d already passed the first test of showing up at the bookstore and getting it printed. Afterwards, I’d examined the blue plastic card, marveling at how such a cheap object so easily given would now guarantee my passage into forbidden places. 

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This newsletter is all about Women of Good Fortune. I would love for you to buy the book, to read it, to talk about it. Those of you who read my newsletter know about the swirl of doubt, overanalyzing, and opacity that publication is, and how much can ride on a debut novel. Anything you can do means the world to me.

Here are some ways you can support me!

• Pre-order the book: Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get your books. Pre-orders count towards the first week of sales and can signal strong interest in a book to a publisher.

• Attend my launch event: it’ll be March 21st at the Philly Barnes & Noble and you can register now!

• Talk about it on social media: tag me if it’s nice. If you write mean things and then force me to read the mean thing, I will be sad.

For those who are in it for the writing advice and the insider look at publication, I’ll be writing a later installment about the publicity and marketing efforts that went into Women of Good Fortune and what the timeline looks like.

Pre-Order Women of Good Fortune!

WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE LAUNCH EVENT: 3/21/24, 6pm

I do get a launch event, and it is in the beautiful new Philadelphia Barnes & Noble near Rittenhouse Square. I have been to this bookstore many times, and I love the tall bookshelves and the way they display books here. It truly is choice overload in the best way. You can register to attend on Eventbrite. I’ll be in conversation with Jo Piazza, whose book The Sicilian Inheritance is out this year. This is exciting and a relief because I doubt I can just carry on a talk by myself. If you want your book signed, you can order a copy for pick-up at Barnes & Noble or bring your pre-ordered B&N copy to the event.

This event is happening after the book officially releases, which brings an additional fun element of meeting people who’ve already read it. I’m ready to talk weddings, familial expectations, badass women, Shanghai shenanigans. Bring on the questions, which I may reward with fun treats!

WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE COVERAGE

Since January, coverage of Women of Good Fortune has picked up. One thing I was warned out when starting on this treacherous journey is that you will notice all the lists you don’t end up on, and no matter how irrelevant they may be to your book, it will rankle you anyway. I can confirm this is true, but that I am also so thrilled by the places that have picked up this book and so honored by the company I’ve been in.

A list of places where she’s been spotted:

Elle’s Best Romances of 2024

NPR’s WHYY Studio 2 Jan 25th episode

Crimereads Most Anticipated Crime Fiction of 2024

BookBub’s 16 Uplifting Books Coming Out in 2024

Goodreads’s 87 New Debut Novels to Check Out This Season

Goodreads’s 96 On-Trend Mysteries and Thrillers for You to Read

GenTwenty’s 60+ Can’t Miss Books to Read in 2024

Beyond the Bookends 98 Fantastic New Winter 2024 Book Releases

Zibby Mag’s Most Anticipated Debuts of 2024

SHARING ABOUT WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE

I’m starting to see WOGF show up in people’s Instagram stories and it makes my heart so, so full to see people reading it and connecting with the characters. I am an avid reader, but I also know how many books are published at any given time, so I know how special it is for someone to choose to give WOGF the time of day. Among the things people have said that have made me incredibly happy:

The whole idea and execution feels like something straight out of an Ocean’s Eleven movie.

Perfect for fans of books about strong, clever women who work hard to make their own happiness no matter the cost.

Combine hot women with heists that subtly go against patriarchal values and I am sold.

Some amazing romance side plots that had me swooning.

When you receive the next installment of this newsletter, I will be a published author. I am so excited for this book to finally be available to readers. And thank you, my newsletter readers, for being along for the ride.

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Something I wrote today:

“Will you take a vacation when this is over?” Maggie asks him.

He laughs as if she’s told a particularly funny joke. “Now’s when the real work begins.”

As writers, we sometimes cling to emotional highs and lows because we think that’s the only way we can write. How can our words be powerful if they are not injected with the full force of our despair or rage? I was concerned about that, for a time. The belief that I could only write certain things if I had experienced them myself. But the more in tune I’ve gotten with my emotions, the more I’ve realized that being in a bad mental place is not good for my writing. It hurts my consistency, and while it may lead to a quick burst of inspiration for a few scenes, it will not culminate in a full book. That requires patience, perseverance, and a surgeon’s scalpel.

I took a meditation class this semester, and the course equipped me with some useful tools for dealing with these hurricanes of brief but sharp emotion. One of them has gotten me to reflect more on the individual moments of each day. Essentially, you sit down with a partner, who asks you to “tell me something true” for 3-5 minutes. That is a long time to be thinking of truths, and you can surprise yourself with the things that come out of your mouth. In the mix of more surface-level comments about how I was sleepy and wanted a hot bowl of soup, were deeper themes: my constant worrying about my family, my constant state of confusion about what I’m supposed to be doing with my life, that sort of fun, light stuff. I realized when you take the time to reflect, that can energize creativity in different ways and help you uncover the things that you deeply care about. You don’t need to go through a terrible breakup or a death to be able to write it into a book. You certainly don’t need to murder someone to write a thriller. The understanding will come slower, and you’ll have to do the hard work and research. But that can be part of the fun.

As the year comes to an end, I want to reflect on the things that are true for me now:

1. Reading and writing are still the two things that help me lose track of time, and nothing compares to the feeling of holding a physical book and rubbing pages between your fingers. I am lucky enough to have read several incredible books in a row: The Vanishing Half, Demon Copperhead, Tom Lake. It’s reinvigorated my love for storytelling.

2. After being plunged back in the Hunger Games world with the release of Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I miss the younger me whose emotions were so much squishier and malleable, and how some of the books I read while young had the power to move me deeply.

3. Philadelphia in the autumn was truly beautiful. There’s nothing quite like running in the crisp coolness and seeing the yellow trees lurching up around you. The Schuylkill is kind of dirty but there’s something soothing about having a body of water to pace you.

4. I’m so used to supermarket apples (I splurge and get Honeycrisps sometimes), but recently I bought a variety of apples from a farmer’s market, and the crunch and tartness were beyond compare. I wonder if I’ve been missing out on something extraordinary and delightful my whole life.

5. I do not know how to celebrate success. I feel as if I cannot live without achievement, but even when I have it, I don’t know what to do with it.

6. The future feels more unstable than ever. I see so many paths unfurling in front of me, and I don’t think I am at a point in my life anymore where I can just choose the most convenient thing and expect that the trajectory of my life will be unaltered.

7. I’m grateful for my friends, and I think I have reached a point where I am no longer overthinking where I rank on someone’s “favorite people” list. But I still want to know how I can be better. I want to be able to ask them better questions and be fully present in the time we have together.

8. Nights out are fun, but the morning after can make the whole thing not worth it. I wonder if having a few brief, glittering hours is sufficient recompense for my brain melting.

9. I crave stability. I constantly think about having a home that is more than a short-term stay and all the appliances I can fill it with. Also, non-IKEA furniture.

10. No matter what, I will keep writing. This, of all things, I hope to be true.

    Now, it’s your turn. Tell me something true.

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WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE UPDATES

We are finalizing book launch details, and I’m trying and failing to imagine being surrounded by copies of my book and officially being a published author. One of the random and wild things about being an author is watching as more and more people end up CC’d on your emails. Also, the idea that people will know who I am before I know who they are.

Pre-order WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE

Something I wrote today:

“She’s here!” Kimberly calls, and suddenly she’s rising up, up, above the heads, and then jolting down the walkway to be next to Priya. Now, she’s looking at a bunch of faces. She recognizes every one of them. She and Priya sat down with every single new hire, learned about their lives, and made sure they understood what OurSpot was really for. This time, she would not waste the chance to bring on people who truly cared. 

I think, if I had the amount of knowledge I had now about the industry, I would have approached querying with considerably less zeal and far more apprehension. It wasn’t until later that I realized how lucky I was to have gotten an agent during the Great Flood of Covid books, and how the volume of querying had increased. The only reality check was when I was checking the FAQs of DG&B’s page and saw this:

Hahahahaaa WHAT. Less than 1%??? No way was I getting picked. As you can see from these messages I exchanged with my friend (who is wise beyond compare), I had 0 faith in myself. Warning, cursing ahead:

Reader, I was picked. To be fair, 1% is still higher than 0.000001%.

I am going to write another newsletter later about confidence and how much it affects creativity, but what I should’ve thought then was: why NOT me? Which is probably what people who buy lottery tickets tell themselves, too. And you know what? Sometimes you happen to have the winning ticket. And unlike the lottery, there are things you can do here to improve your chances. You can write a solid book. You can revise it and get opinions. You can get people to give you feedback on your query. You can query agents whose MSWLs might be a match.

By the time I went on submission, I thought I knew how things worked. You get an agent, said agent pitches the book to editors, an editor likes your book and buys it.

Oh, but the variations! The exceptions, the edge cases, the statistics! When I get anxious, I think that I’ll alleviate my stress by doing as much research as I can about something. The more I read about it, the less scary it is. Yet, the more I learned about the range of advances, the number of people who could not sell a book past their debut, and all the flavors of success, the greater my imposter syndrome became. Those numbers piled up inside my brain and dammed up my creativity. You can read more about it in this post, but the amount of mental energy I expended over thinking I was not good enough, the amount of time I spent poring over Sub Stories and Submission Hell, looking for a story that resembled mine, was astronomical.

It was exhausting, and ultimately, unproductive. And it went on for a year. At some point, my agent said they’d stop sending me weekly email updates on rejections because even the pace of those had slowed down. That was when, in my heart, I put my poor little book to rest. I forgot about the ruthless gauntlet that is traditional publishing and buried myself in the world of my next book, which was a far better diversion. Sometimes, I’d pop my head out of that world and think, But what if this one doesn’t sell either? Then I’d give myself a metaphorical slap in the face, tell myself not to start leaping ahead when the book wasn’t even done yet, and get back to work.

Now, as a 2024 debut, I have access to even more information about the publishing industry. I know about people who got paid bonkers money for a deal, people who get hardcover ARCs, people who have already sold another 3 books. I also hear about people whose publishers do not have it together, people who are left floundering after an imprint closes or an editor leaves. Once again, I found myself looking for numbers to ease my doubt. I looked at the number of reviews I had on NetGalley, the adds I had on Goodreads, my ranking on Amazon. It was not a productive practice.

Even after writing and selling a book, I was choking. I asked myself: What if readers hate it? What if, despite the best efforts of my publishing team, it flops? Most authors don’t sell past book 2, and even more don’t make it past book 3. What if that’s me? And if it does do well, what if everyone thinks my second book sucks in comparison? What if I show it to my editor and she starts to suspect me of plagiarism because it’s just so much worse than my first one?

Are you starting to see how tiring it can be to live in my head?

Everything is so unpredictable. Around every corner is someone who is doing better than you—or at least, that’s what you think. With every accomplishment you have, the ceiling grows higher. And if you do sell a book, you will not only compare yourself to the people around you, but also gain the ability to compare to your past self. Wow, what a great superpower I never wanted to have.

At the end of the day, though, the only two things that matter are you and your work. Not the percentages, not the guesstimates of your chances. Your story is inherently different from everyone else’s, so there will never be a direct way to compare your experience to someone else’s in publishing.

As for comparing to a prior version of yourself? Trust in time, and practice, and experience gained. Trust that those things mean you are growing. Every book is an independent event. If I can accomplish the small goals I’ve set for myself in a book—to write convincingly from a certain perspective, to incorporate a twist successfully, to bring color to a certain setting, to make at least one actually funny joke—then that is more than enough. That is something gained.

Today, here’s my challenge for you. Don’t focus on how small the numbers are. Instead, think: Why NOT me? And get back to work.

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Something I wrote today:

Applause begins, first as a patter, then as a full-on storm. Everyone is looking at Maggie Tang, and Priya feels pride swell in her chest as Maggie crosses the stage, head held high. This is a woman who has, against all odds, returned and faced a world that had forgotten her. She took her pain and loss, and turned it into something good. 

Maggie takes a seat in the armchair on the farthest side of the stage. There’s a slight quaver in her voice as she begins to speak. “Things I learned about friendship. Lesson one.” 

WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE updates

In case you’re curious what’s been up with WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE, I’m going to start including updates in this newsletter. It’s a way for me to celebrate the wins, too. If you still haven’t yet pre-ordered, now’s your chance.

Pre-order WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE

First, this incredible Publishers Weekly review. I particularly like that they say I “pull it off without a hitch” because I don’t think that applies to anything else in my life.

Zibby Owens included WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE as a Most Anticipated Book Coming Out in 2024! So many amazing books in this post, I am in such great company!

WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE in “Most Anticipated Thrillers, Mystery, and Suspense of 2024” by SheReads.

And the cover spotted in “The Most Anticipated March 2024 Book Releases” by Booklist Queen.

pre-order WOGF

Anyway, that’s the update about WOGF, but today’s newsletter is about my second book. I can’t share anything about it yet, but it has been a schlep of epic proportions, and I’m going to be talking about the difficulty of writing it, and why it has been harder than drafting my debut.

There’s an innocence and a hope that comes with drafting without an agent, without an editor, without anything but the dream of maybe one day giving your book to someone to read. Knowing that there is a world of possibility you’ve barely dipped your toe in gives you the courage to write like nobody is watching. I don’t mean to idealize this period; there were many days where I felt like I had just put myself on a treadmill where nobody cared how many miles I walked. I thought that feeling would go away with each book I wrote, as I grew more confident in filling out the bones of a story, but I was surprised at how much I have struggled with my second book, the days where I hit my word count but still felt terrible. That horrible feeling, I’ve realized, is self doubt, and it has hit me so much harder this time around, because I have unlocked a new channel for self-doubt: comparing me, to me.

Everything I have done for this second book, I have compared to my first. I wonder if the writing is as good. If the characters feel too similar. If I am following the same plot, just with different accoutrements. I worry about not being “high concept” or marketable enough, things I had never concerned myself much with until I started reading about traditional publishing. When I had to submit a pitch to my editor, it added a whole layer of complexity and doubt. I used to just come up with something then run with it, but now I needed approval before I could move forward with my ideas.

The only way I ever make it through the first draft of a book is by pushing aside the fear, or just flat-out ignoring it. I am not the same person that I was when I wrote Women of Good Fortune, and the themes and characters I’m exploring this time around are different. I also think that tonally, I am exploring new areas and finding excitement in another world that is not Shanghai, but just as fascinating and complex.

I don’t have a ton of good advice for dealing with fear when it comes to your craft. But I think the way to deal with it is the same as it is for any other fear (except maybe phobias). You keep doing that thing you’re afraid of until it’s not so scary anymore. For me, it meant getting my butt in front of my laptop every morning for 60 days and writing even if I didn’t feel like it. It also has meant leaning on other people to give me the motivation that I need. This time around, I feel like the stakes are even higher, but some of the things that have helped:

1. Having a routine: this summer, I got up at 7am each day and wrote for 1-2 hours. By the end of it, I had rewritten my book twice. Sometimes it sucked and I couldn’t come up with anything, but I forced myself in front of my computer and got the words out, and I think my brain started expecting to be forced to work in the mornings. The nice part is that if you fulfill this part of the routine, it’s a box you’ve checked, and there’s no need to worry about writing for the rest of the day.

2. Getting energy from others: I ran my idea by many friends. It is not a necessity to get positive reinforcement from others, but I found that even being asked questions about my premise or “what about this?” made me approach my work from another direction and helped me develop new ideas. Of course, I tried to run it by people who I knew would actually be receptive, and not someone who’d just add to my pile of doubt.

3. BELIEVING IN YOURSELF: this is so cheesy but there is so much about this process that is mental. I had a long period where I just stopped believing in myself. I didn’t think I had it in me to write another book that was any good. I think self-confidence is the hardest thing for me to have, and yet it is the top thing that drives my ability to write and my passion to continue. At some point I got annoyed with myself for being so freaked out about everything and was like “SHUT UP AND JUST WRITE THE BEST THING YOU CAN” to that overanalyzing part of my brain.

The other thing? Don’t worry that everything is a waste. You will delete, often and probably in large quantities. I was carving away time on vacations to write something that I ended up scrapping. But it’s also a process of elimination and exploration, and it helped me figure out the shape of the story I wanted.

I’m off to revise now. Wish me luck.

Something I wrote today:

They look nothing alike; Stacy is statuesque with a body sculpted by daily pilates and a peaceful smile no doubt lovingly cultivated with her meditation coach. There is probably more uncontrolled wrath in Maggie’s pinky than there is in her entire body. 

I remember telling my agent about this book on our offer call, and back then, it was a fledgling idea. I did not believe I could write a heist, and it sort of felt like I was making big promises that I couldn’t keep. There were so many points when I would cancel plans one evening or forego watching TV because I knew I had to draft, and during those times, I would sometimes wonder: what am I doing? Am I sinking countless hours into something that will go nowhere? I know I’m excited now about this idea, but when that excitement fades, will there even be a story worth reading? Should I choose the easy life and watch this Korean drama instead (do not be mistaken, some nights I did choose the Korean drama)?

I rewrote this book several times. First, I wrote it from only one point of view, and I got to around 50k words before I realized the structure wasn’t working. Then, I rewrote it with three perspectives. I did a ton of research on current events in China and spent a lot of evenings talking to my parents so that I could form a picture of contemporary Shanghai. My agent told me the heist needed to be more fleshed out. Cue me watching a lot of heist films, outlining every teeny detail of what would happen in the heist (and I am NOT an outliner at all), then spending one feverish day writing that entire section.

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A lot has changed in this book, and so many people have touched it. Along that process, I think I have slowly let go of this story and recognized that it is not just mine anymore. As copies go out into the world, people will read it and have reactions to it. They will interpret it in ways that I may not have intended, or they will see exactly what I was trying to say, with a clarity that I don’t even possess. And what a pleasure that is, to hear someone spend time to read something I wrote, then spend more time to review it and describe how it made them feel. When I got my unsolicited review, it felt funny. Here was someone who I did not need to beg to read my book, reading it and liking it. What a mix of joy and gratitude I felt. I also knew that I would have to depart Goodreads because I would otherwise be unable to restrain myself from reading all the reviews and infringing on a readers-only space. However, I do love praise, so my sister has graciously volunteered to forward positive reviews to me.

I worried about a lot of things when I realized that people are starting to read the book. I worried that they wouldn’t like it, that my rating would tank, or worse, that nobody would pick it up at all, and my author career would vanish in a puff of smoke. But I thought back to my initial goal with this book: write something that’s fun but captures the nuances of Chinese culture in a way that might be new to Western audiences, but hilariously familiar to those of us who grew up in Chinese households. I believe I’ve accomplished that, so regardless of what happens, I’ve fulfilled my original objective. And I’m just so excited about this book reaching people. There’s an audiobook in the works too, so my friends who need something to listen to while Swiffering will get to experience this book too!

Anyway, my mantra while being on submission was to work on something new instead of overthinking what might be happening with my book out there in people’s hands. That has stayed true, so instead of thinking about which people on Netgalley are now reading this story, I’ve been drafting my second book and steadfastly trying to avoid the second book blues (with limited success). More on that later; this newsletter is already long enough.

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Something I wrote today:

“Y’all coming?” their tour guide asks. “I gotta say, I don’t get a lot of married couples here.” 

“We’re not married,” Priya’s quick to correct. “Divorced, actually.” 

“And you want to spend the end of the world together? I’ve got some throuples and polyamorous folks that’ve come through, but this might be the weirdest thing I’ve heard.”

I won’t spend much space writing about whether social media and audience size is important to a book performing well. If you listen to the Publishing Rodeo, the episode with Nicholas Binge seems to indicate that your newsletter subscribers really don’t care about your book that’s coming out (I hope you all care a teeny bit, though). I more want to talk about how that feeling of community can be hard to find, and how even if writing is thought of as a solitary activity, being a more social creature can work to your benefit.

I didn’t engage with Twitter until after I’d successfully gotten an agent. It is a great place to meet people, and it also trained me to summarize my book, to pitch my ideas, to see what the public was reacting to positively. At the same time, it gave me such anxiety. There were people on there who seemed to know everyone, and I was a latecomer to the party. Over time, I’ve made a few connections through Twitter and received a lot of encouraging support through fellow writers there. I accomplished that through periods of very active engagement and DMing people that I admired, but it was tiring and sometimes led to being ignored. When I consider where I want to devote my energy, I’ll always put it towards writing books rather than maintaining constant dialogue on social media.

Coming from a business background where there’s a vicious cycle of companies requiring “prior experience” for you to get a job, pursuing trad pub seemed refreshing. As long as you’ve written a good story, you could be living in a cave away from civilization and someone will still probably want to buy your book. You don’t have to accompany your query with a list of writing prizes or MFA credentials. And drafting is an activity you can do yourself, without any help from the outside world, no networking necessary. I’ve started hearing some stories lately about fiction editors who seem to consider social media presence as part of a submission package, but this is not the norm.

However, I do want to be honest and say that knowing people helps. Some of the examples where a network works in your favor:

• Blurbing: you have a much better chance of getting blurbs from authors you’ve spoken to before. Your editor and agent might help, but those are the more professional routes of getting a blurb, which are easier to reject.

• Whisper networks: I’ve seen these come into play the most for agents. Up until recently, authors did not publicly call out agents for treating them badly because of the ramifications that can have. And there are many ways that an agent can be terrible: poor communication, machine gun submissions, lack of mentorship, bad agency, etc. If you know other writers, they can share the good and ugly about agents you might be considering, but if you’re not part of this online world, there’s very little to go off.

• Promotion: although there’s no guarantee that a lot of likes will translate to sales, it still helps to have other authors bump your content. Otherwise, announcing writing updates can feel like screaming into the void.

• Best practices: the more you know, the better an idea you have of what the whole world looks like. I’m in a 2024 debuts Slack channel, and the amount of diversity I’ve seen in how edits, promotion, and contracts are treated is mind-boggling. If you’re just going it alone, all you have for reference is your own experience, and it’s helpful to have a baseline so you know when you can ask for more.

• Encouragement: my non-writer friends don’t understand how long the publishing process takes, how you make money, or why you have limited say over how the cover turns out. When I share good writing news with a writing friend, they understand why it’s a big deal. Similarly, when I vent about some aspect of it, they can empathize.

If you’re a writer, it’s okay that you only have one CP, or that you have to pitch your book to potential beta readers because nobody’s banging down your door demanding to read your book based on a moodboard you posted. It’s okay if you don’t have a writing group or a channel that you feel like you belong to. Most of us are antisocial beings, and many of us are still searching for belonging. But the nice thing is that none of that affects your ability to write and finish a book or query an agent.

Now that I’m drafting book 2, I’ve had to step back from social media so that it doesn’t mess with my head and affect my ability to keep writing. I’ve had to distance myself from the polished, copyedited book that I sent back to my editor and return to my humble beginnings, writing crappy sentences and stopping in the middle of a chapter wondering if this story is even working or if all I’m doing is throwing some twigs in a pile hoping it’ll make a house. I’ve tried to cut down the time I spend reading scary threads about publishing on Reddit or scrolling through Twitter because none of that has positively affected my ability to produce. But if you are feeling a little lonely and want to meet more people who are fellow writers, here are some things that you can do, from easiest to hardest:

• Follow people whose content you like

• Comment on a Tweet or Instagram post

• Join a writing Discord. It can take time to find the right one, but be patient! There are ones by genre, geography, or publishing stage. There are also smaller groups, and joining those will require knowing someone else who is a member.

• Attend a local writing convention. I have personally never done this because I find it even scarier to approach strangers in real life, but I have friends who have had great success with these.

Thanks for reading! I will now retreat back into my drafting cave…

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As far as personal writing updates, WOMEN OF GOOD FORTUNE almost has a finalized cover that I hope I can share with everyone soon. I am scared and excited, but I’m looking forward to talking more about this story that I have sweated over for the past year without the looming horror that I will have to edit it even more. Add it on Goodreads!

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Something I wrote today:

That was when I realized that we hadn’t brought our wine opener or cups. The four of us huddled around the bottle as it lay innocently on the grass, studying it like it was encrypted code. Sujesh and Mark threw out different proposals for opening it, from smacking it on one end with a shoe to trying to smashing it against the steps leading up to Doe Library so that only the neck broke off. It was ridiculous; we’d just gotten fifty million dollars of funding and were now running a company of one hundred employees, but none of us could summon the energy to walk to a store and buy a bottle opener.