It’s finally spring! 💐

It doesn’t currently feel like spring, at least not in my room, where the window is barely letting in the day’s gloom and I have a candle burning and some tea I’m sipping on. But I know in my soul that it is spring, so I’m delighted by that!

As I write this, it’s been exactly four weeks since I began querying, and what a time those four weeks have been! I have had to literally take my email off my phone and my browser bookmarks because otherwise I’d be checking it all the damn time. I’m trying to get my mind off the query (and off Nat & Cami) by working on some new projects: I’m outling a YA sapphic romance, working on a creepy short story, and beginning to draft a middle grade portal fantasy. Speaking of Nat & Cami, though: I commissioned portraits of each of them! Click below to see them ☺️

In today’s newsletter, you’ll find:

• From the heart: a rumination on my love life

• From the shelf: a book I can’t wait to read

• From the page: how I turned myself into a plotter

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From the heart 💗

I’ve been staring at my screen for like five minutes wondering what I actually want to say here. Well, lemme say that differently: I know what I want to say, I just don’t know how to do so, or whether saying it will make me utterly pathetic. You see, what’s on my heart today is the fact that I’m barreling toward 30 without having hit many of the traditional romance milestones I write about in YA books.

I went on my first date at 23, and since then I’ve been on a total of four dates. I have held hands (against my will, I might add) with one person, very briefly and before I managed to extricate my limb from his. I have never kissed anyone. I have never been in a romantic relationship. And, to put it in the words of my first date, I have never “done things” with anyone.

Which, like, okay, I’m not the only nearly 30-year-old in my shoes. But the thing is, when I see people talk about this, it’s always with a nice sheen of, “and I’m okay with that!” or “there’s nothing to be ashamed of!” and the unanticipated result of this attitude is that I feel ashamed of longing for these things. I feel like it’s pathetic and sad that I want a romance, and I feel like if I were truly well-adjusted, I’d be able to shrug my inexperience off and be cavalier about it. It’ll happen when I least expect it! I should think, and merrily go on my way.

I’ve always been something of a hopeless romantic. I was raised on a steady diet of (Christian) romance novels, and I truly believed through high school that all I had to do was be pretty and desirable enough, and I’d attract suitors out the wazoo. So my lack of suitors? Means I’m neither pretty nor desirable.

And that truly hurts. It hurts to feel like there’s something wrong with me, something fundamentally askew with my personality and my looks, that makes me unattractive.

Listen, I know not everyone craves romance and sex, but the truth is, I do. And I think I’m undeserving of both. And you’d think, at my big age of nearly-30, I’d be over all this mess. But I’m not.

I guess the point of this rumination today is to say that, if you, too, are not “over” the things people tell you to be over, it’s okay. You’re not alone in that, and there’s nothing wrong, backward, or immature about it. And maybe someday I’ll believe that for myself, too.

From the shelf 📚

Coming out April 4, 2023, from Tor Teen, I’m highly anticipating Terry J. Benton-Walker’s YA debut, Blood Debts.

I mean, first of all, look at that cover — it’s stunning in a breathtaking way. It’s a contemporary fantasy set in New Orleans and following twins Clement and Cristina, whose family was dethroned 30 years ago, whose mother is cursed, and who may be the targets of the next curse.

I’m so excited to dive into this magical book. To learn more about Blood Debts, check it out on Goodreads.

From the page ✍️

For years, I swore up and down that I was a pantser — and proud of it, too! I wrote six novels without a plan, literally flying by the seat of my pants and just vibing. I wrote at least four partial novels this way, too, stories that hit 12,000, 25,000, even 50,000 words but never reached a conclusion and, usually, went way off the rails before I gave up on them.

In fact, I distinctly remember the book I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2014, which is one of those unfinished manuscripts, because I had no idea where the story was going, so halfway through a best friend’s little sister became his daughter and the best friend became a love interest and suddenly this story that was supposed to be about sisterly jealousy was about, well…something else entirely.

I abandoned that project, and rightfully so.

I would have carried on in my pantser life if not for that pesky thing I learned: story structure. Listen, you’d think that someone who was a creative writing major in college in 2015 would’ve known how to structure a novel before late 2021, but uhh you’d be wrong. I learned about it belatedly and realized that I hadn’t been thinking about acts, character arcs, inciting incident, none of that. I’d just been vibing.

So in late 2021, I adopted the four-act structure for myself, at least in a very basic manner. Once I did this, I began to have an overarching structure to my novels. And as long as I was doing that, I figured, maybe I could just…outline each act?

I’ve outlined three books using this structure since then, and it’s been going pretty well. This is what it looks like for me:

1. I start by doing an “Act Breakdown,” in which I determine what happens in each act:

   1. Act 1 begins with setting up the world, includes the inciting incident, and ends when something changes our characters’ experience of the world.

   2. Act 2 begins as they work to recalibrate themselves to this new experience, and ends on a big turning point — a betrayal, a first kiss, a GSA meeting, something that forces the story to take a new direction.

   3. Act 3 begins well! And ends with things going off the rails pretty badly, kicking off the dark night of the soul

   4. Act 4 is all about recovering from that dark night of the soul, having a story climax, resolution, and then sometimes winding down the story.

2. After I break down my acts, I write detailed outlines for each chapter. When I first started doing this, I broke down each chapter into 2-3 scenes and included a projected word count; I stopped doing that because it was far too detailed for my process. Instead, I just lay out what should happen in each scene in the chapter, and try to end each chapter on something that’ll move the story forward.

3. Then I draft! As I draft, small changes will occur — maybe instead of meeting at the park, the two characters meet at school. This is fine, and I don’t update the outline.

   1. But sometimes as I’m writing along, deep in the outline, I realize — what I planned at the start isn’t going to work with these characters after all! That’s when I redo the whole outline, replotting forward, and follow this new journey.

4. After it’s drafted we get to revising which is a whole other newsletter topic!

So there you have it — I turned this avowed pantser into a plotter and I don’t think I can go back! My middle grade isn’t fully plotted out chapter by chapter, but I do have a good act breakdown, so I think that’ll help me keep going. Maybe in the next newsletter I’ll talk about why I think outlining helps me write better stories…

That’s all for this week! Please let me know if you had any thoughts on this week’s newslsetter, and if you enjoyed it, feel free to share it widely on your preferred social media :) I really appreciate y’all!