Ugh, money 🤑

It’s so cold in New York, and I’m in bed with a hot cup of coffee and “Let it Snow” playing in the background, so basically what I’m saying is I am living my best holiday life today!

Have y’all seen the Liquid S’mores on TikTok or Insta? I had one on Friday night, and it was just magical. I don’t even like marshmallows that much, but this was delicious!

If you’re new and/or just missed it, earlier in December I created what I’m calling a masterdoc of publishing information — links to resources, tips from personal experience, etc! Take a look, maybe share it with a friend? Thank you, you’re a doll ;)

From the heart 💗

Let’s talk about money 🥴1

God, this is gonna be embarrassing.

Money talk tends to be frowned upon in polite society. It’s why things like the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag and spreadsheet were so groundbreaking a few years ago — because talking about money, and how much of it we make for our work, is considered so uncouth.

And I think that leads to a lot of shame. Hand in hand with the idea that we shouldn’t discuss money is the idea that we should understand money. Financial literacy isn’t necessarily taught in schools, but if you don’t have it, you will be mocked on the Internet2. And probably also by bankers in person, I dunno, I haven’t met a banker in a professional setting.

This country hates poverty but also does absolutely nothing to help people get out of it; and that’s not to say that understanding money is the cure to poverty, cause the cure to poverty is huge systemic changes that I don’t have the know-how to get into here3; but it is to say, that we’re kinda shitty when it comes to talking about money.

And I bring all this up because I’m in a bad money place right now. You see, in July of 2021 I quit a well-paying ($72,800/year) job without a backup. I had some savings, one credit card with a $7,500 credit limit, and no next job lined up.

It took me 14 months — until September 2022 — to find a new full-time job. During those 14 months, I blew through my savings, maxed out that credit card, and opened another, $6,000 limit card. When I found a new job, it paid a little more than $14,000 less per year than the one I’d left. And in the meantime I’d developed a bit of a bad habit about credit cards. And Uber Eats. And Uber to get around the city.

A lot of things also happened in that time. I started grad school again, which made my student debt balloon from about $35,000 to $70,000. I opened a new credit card, with a $10,500 limit, because I was broke and (thought I) needed it. My other credit cards increased their credit limit.

Which is how I wound up where I am today: with $31,000 of credit card debt, a paycheck that barely covers my monthly necessities + bare-minimum card payments, and a low-grade permanent panic in the back of my mind that something terrible is going to happen and I’ll be shit out of luck.

And I don’t know how to get out of this hole. Every option sucks (unless that option is a mid-six figure book deal that I can use to pay down my debt while keeping my day job, in which case publishing, I am available for a $500,000 book deal, thank you good-bye), and I’m scared of what this means for my future.

I’ve spent months carrying this as a shame. In addition to my fear and panic about the state of my finances, I was embarrassed, feeling like I’d gotten myself into this situation, so I needed to shut up and get myself out of it. Feeling like I was alone in the world in my poor finances. Worried that my friends would judge me if they knew how bad my situation was.

But I dunno. I’m beginning to think that shame and silence doesn’t help me. So I’m writing all of this because, idk, transparency and whatever. I’m trying to confront my shame and name it and claim that I don’t need to host it anymore. Maybe that’ll help you, too. One can only hope!

From the camera roll 📸

The making of a liquid s’more

From the page ✍️

I’m writing outside of YA, and it’s terrifying

The project that I’m currently revising is an adult romance. It’s about two women, a famous actress and an aspiring, ambitious artist, who both get screwed over by the same man, who team up to make him pay. And of course, they fall in love in the process. It’s been such a fun journey to work on — I’m so close to being done with the second draft, and I think it’s shaping up to be a pretty solid book!

But there’s one thing that keeps freaking me out about it: that it’s adult.

See, the first seven books I wrote and revised — and the five I queried — were all young adult (YA). That’s 10 years of my writing life that I spent in the young adult age category. I read YA, I made friends who also wrote YA, I learned all about the YA awards, I even have a whole MFA that specializes in kidlit.

And then within months of graduating from said MFA, I was working on an adult project.

Because I am me4, I obviously panicked about this. I’ve had months of very fun identity crises. If I’m not a kidlit author, who even am I? If I debut with a book that isn’t YA, who even am I? If my career doesn’t begin and then pan out like I planned, what will I do?

The last one really gets to me, which is so funny cause no single part of my career to date has panned out the way I planned, hoped, dreamed for it to pan out.

Like, if I’d had my way, I would have gotten an agent with my first book, or at the very least with my fourth. But then I would have debuted with books about straight girls, and I’m very much…not a straight girl. So there’s good in there, too, in the waiting. In the not-panning-out.

Nevertheless, the anxiety is persistent. I don’t know how to shake it off. I don’t know how to see past it.

All I know to do is to put my head down, squeeze my eyes shut, and keep writing the stories that call to my heart at the moment.

For now, that means I’m revising this adult romance; and if all goes well and I can send it off to readers in the next few days, I’ll pivot to working on a YA novel in verse — another departure, as I’ve never completed a novel in verse before. But poetry was my frist writing love, and my brain is buzzing with possibilities as I think about diving back into that project.

I don’t know if I’ll debut with a YA, an adult, a different age category entirely — man, I don’t even know that I’ll ever debut.

What I know is that storytelling is what spurs me onward, day after day, and the urge to share my stories with others is what keeps my head above water when the depression threatens to drown me. So I’m going to keep doing it. Let the plans fall by the wayside.

From the shelf 📚

Book Lovers5, by Emily Henry

I don’t even know how to start this. This was my third Emily Henry (I’m reading through her adult romances in publication order), and I really loved the first two.

I didn’t have high expectations for this one, though.

But it blew me away entirely. Within like 50 pages I was obsessed with Nora and Charlie, and I spent the next two weeks during which I read the book just…thinking about it contstantly. When I wasn’t reading it, I wanted to be reading it; when I was reading it, I could hardly breathe for the way it gripped my heart.

I cried so hard at the end of this book — Nora really hit for me, y’all — that my roommate poked her head into my room to laugh at me because she just kept hearing me “whimpering.” “You’re really going through it,” she said.

Yes. Yes, I really went through it with this book, and I would go through it again for another hit of that good good stuff that it provided.

Alla prossima 👋

The genocide continues

Earlier this week, I read this piece, an op-ed in Teen Vogue by one of the Palestinian students who was shot in Vermont last winter. The piece was published in February 2024, and as I read it, it hit me just how devastating it is that, 10 months later…we’re still here. Bombs are still falling on Gaza, Israel is trying to expand its devastation throughout the region, and the Biden administration is doing nothing to stop it, everything to prolong the suffering.

I thought about all this year has brought — the college student-led protests in spring, and the harsh crackdown on them by the institutions and the state that’s supposedly here to protect them and their rights. I thought about the optimism of mid-July when Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, and I, maybe foolishly, thought she would break from Biden’s example. Yet she didn’t even give Palestinians a voice throughout her campaign, actively silencing protest.

It’s demoralizing. And we face the possibility that things will only get worse after Trump’s inauguration in January.

So in these next weeks, months, and the long years ahead, I hope we’ll turn to community. To lifting each other up, to speaking up for those around us. I’m trying to figure out the best ways for me to make that a reality in my own life, and I’m trying to practice bravery in standing up for my community.

And as Timothy Snyder said in On Tyranny: do not obey in advance.

As Charlie Jane Anders said in her newsletter, we can tell the powers that be: “I do not recognize your authority.”

There’s no backing down. Not for the sake of trans folks in America, or of Palestinians in Gaza, or the Sudanese and Congolese people who are facing their own genocides, or for the sake of anyone who is being oppressed around the world.

We do not obey in advance, and we do not respect their false authority. This is my motto for the new year(s).

That’s all for this week.

— Karis xoxo