Once You’ve Finished Reading This Email

THEN October will officially be over. It is one of my favorite months, so I don’t mind holding onto it for another day. The leaves on our street glow in the dark, we go cider pressing and carve pumpkins, it’s my firstborn’s birthday, and we have our kick-off residency for the new Camperdown year.

This October was particularly fun because I got to take my daughter to New York City on a work trip. Ever since The Second Greatest Thief sold last December (almost a year ago now!), my husband has been encouraging me to go meet my editor, Jenny Bak, in person. And since the best time for me to go happened to coincide with my daughter’s 15th birthday, I brought her along so we could both experience the city for the first time. We ate pastries and pizza, wandered through museums, rode the wrong subway trains, and experienced many of the big tourist destinations. I was shocked by how much we accomplished in just three days.

Having lunch with Jenny and touring the Penguin offices was such a treat; it can be easy to forget just how many people are involved in publishing, so I loved getting to meet the team that works behind-the-scenes to launch a story.

Also- I love details (it feeds the world-building corner of my soul), so this tree grate with the skyscraper design really made my day. I could see the Mechanica Barons in The Second Greatest Thief designing gilded grates with airship designs on them.

What I’m Working On:

First, a huge thank you to everyone who filled out the survey from my last email! I haven’t had a chance to respond yet, but I read each of the entries, and I’m saving the information for when I start marketing this novel in earnest.

If you missed the survey, it was a chance to let me know if you have any publishing connections OR would like to be on a future street team to help promote the book when it comes out. If you want to add your information, here is the link. Feel free to leave any parts blank if they don’t apply!

I’m still waiting to get edits back on Thief. My editor let me know that she’s behind, so I knew I wouldn’t get them back this month. Instead, I’ve been busy giving feedback on students’ assignments from the kickoff residency week and also fighting my way through a monster cold that hit almost as soon as I got back from New York. The last few weeks have not been particularly productive, and I’ve struggled with feeling bad about missed deadlines and vanished writing goals. But I’m thankful this illness didn’t hit during residency week or New York. And there’s always next month!

Joe Rigney and I did manage to film a four-part series on Frankenstein last week (and my voice held through the whole recording, woohoo!), so that should be on the Canon+ app soon. Since this is now the third book we’ve done an in-depth discussion on, we decided we needed a name for our program.

I suggested You Should Read This.

Joe suggested The Joe and Christine Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good (and Want to Do Other Stuff Good Too).

Jake suggested Read Good with Joe and Christine.

We still don’t have a name.

What I’m Reading:

See above, where I was ill.

I reread Frankenstein one more time in preparation for our talk. And I read Dracula for book group. It was wild reading two Gothic novels from authors in the throes of Romanticism. Lots of feels, much temperamental weather. And I’ve about had it with men fainting.

I also rebooted my short story club for the undergraduate students, so I read through two anthologies of short stories to find ones I wanted to study with them. The first one was called Modern Short Stories: A Critical Anthology (and by modern they meant 1950). That one had several great stories to choose from. The other one was the Scribner anthology of contemporary short fiction (lots of content warnings on that one).

A Writing Tip:

A reader wrote in saying they struggled with wanting to write witty dialogue but not feeling inspired.

I feel this in my bones.

A few suggestions. The first is that my dialogue is often very overwritten and on-the-nose in early drafts. I don’t have the time to add the nuance that I want, or I’d never get through the scene (or chapter or novel). So, I cut myself slack in draft one and just make sure the flow of the scene is working (are the characters saying the gist of what they need to say in order to get us where we need to go). Then later, I’ll go back and add subtly and nuance. Instead of a character directly saying what they think or feel or want (which we rarely do), I’ll have them hint at it or be indirect. Sometimes I take out a line altogether and give them an action beat that conveys the same thing. Always, always, I cut out at least a third of the dialogue, because we don’t speak in complete sentences. And the more concise it is, the smarter it is.

Another fantastic exercise is to read screenplays. A really good screenplay will teach you so much about how dialogue works. You can find scripts online for free and read them on your own or while you’re watching the movie.

Sometimes when we write dialogue, we are tempted to write the first thing that comes into our mind. “Hi Jane, how are you?” “Doing fine, Tom. And you?” “Oh, not too bad, thanks for asking.” BLEH. YAWN. Instead, see if your character can say something surprising or unexpected, and chase down how the other characters respond. If it’s the first thing you thought of, then it’s probably the first thing your readers will think of too, and if they’re mouthing the dialogue along with the character, then they won’t be nearly as captivated.

Lastly, steal from your environment. If you hear someone say something particularly funny or smart, write it down! Have a commonplace section in your notes on your phone where you record these things, and see if you can work them into your own stories.

That’s all for October 32nd. See you next month!