The Fraught Before

My book comes out in 2 weeks and I'm chewing the walls.

Dear friends,

To be a professional writer is to learn to cohabitate with a massive amount of uncertainty. Will I meet this deadline? Is this character arc working? Will this forced hallucination I’ve been putting years of time and faith into ever make a return on that investment? Will this sentence make anyone else cry, or just me?

To be a published writer is still to be asking yourself all of those questions, but also, your kids might be mildly impressed by the ability to search your name in the public library catalog.

To be a two-weeks-out from publication writer is to be chewing your fucking nails off, hoping preorders are going okay, following up on five potential events, elder-millennially puzzling over the difference between a reel and a story, anxiety-vacuuming, snickering to yourself about the gay-ass terminology of “coming out” for publishing a book, and wondering what you’re forgetting. In my experience, there is no harder time to access the sensation of I’ve Done Enough than in the moments just before or just after a big project goes live.

In the early 2010s the prophet Cheryl Strayed wrote a free online advice column in which the advice was so devastatingly good that it made her famous. In its most famous entry, she wrote:

Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.

And:

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

Synthesizing these two excerpts: your book has a birthday, and the stamina and courage it will require to reach it premise themselves upon a certain measure of faith in the cumulative power of seemingly useless days. Also, there is no more Minnesotan writing advice than “Keep writing and quit your bitching.”

As I write in PITCH CRAFT, it’s ironic that I started teaching pitching and publishing, essentially a practice of performing confidence, when I was on-the-floor devastated by rejection. When my faith in my own gumption was at its lowest. The 2017-18 moment when I began to teach others how to trust in the creative accrual of useless days was the same moment I struggled most to believe in my own. I look back at that time now and I see a lot of things that were harder to perceive then: I didn’t feel seen or safe in my marriage, I was overwhelmed and underslept with two children under age 5, I was doing far more than my fair share of domestic labor, and I was still committed to making sure other people saw none of this. And as I look back, I can see how all these things, painful as they were, contributed to my becoming.

As I anxiously, messily await the imminent arrival of this book birthday, when I feel most unhinged and Not Enough, I remind myself of the many years in which I had no idea if such a happy occasion would ever arrive again. In which I had to locate the chutzpah to keep typing toward no particular outcome. In which nobody regarded me as an expert on anything. In which I struggled mightily to quit my bitching and keep writing, or at the very least to turn the bitching into writing.

For example, in a 2017 TinyLetter (RIP) edition in which I also quoted Cheryl Strayed, after an especially gutting rejection, I wrote:

I've written before, often here, that there is no overnight success. That every delighted, exponentially-Liked Facebook announcement—I'm beyond thrilled to announce—is underpinned by or foreshadows years of disappointments, of near-misses, of real late-game heartbreakers, of choosing to get up off the mat even as you doubt that you can. I feel a strange, urgent obligation to be very honest and detailed about those years here, because I'm living them. I want to tell you that I feel fucking delusional sometimes, believing that I will publish this book into which I've poured years of my life, or achieve really any of my most intricately woven dreams, but I also want to tell you that I still believe it. That even as I'm fighting back tears in triangle pose, I believe it. That as I'm falling asleep, I believe it. That believing it is a button I press when I need a shot of something, my morphine drip or shock therapy. That my faithful finger remains on that button even as it presses these keys.

Are you disappointed today? I am too. Are you at your desk, on your beat, finger on the button, still in motion? So am I. I'm beyond thrilled to announce that my next book will be published by X in 201Y. In 202Z. In 203A. I can't wait for you to read it.

But I'm willing to try.

As I write this in late August 2025, I’m beyond thrilled to announce (again) that my next book will be published by Ten Speed Press/Penguin Random House on September 16, 2025. It represents years of fucking delusions, disappointments, useless days, late-game heartbreakers in both literature and life, and the obstinance to keep getting up off the mat. It represents the distance between quoting Cheryl Strayed and interviewing Cheryl Strayed. It represents sheer love of the game.

I can’t wait for you to read it. But I’m willing to try.

---

TCOBEDD (Taking Care of Business Every Damn Day):

Hey, did you know you can also preorder the PITCH CRAFT…..AUDIOBOOK?!?! I’ll give you one guess who narrates it. (Nothing in the world has ever been more fun than recording an audiobook.)

Green Apple Books on the Park made this cute-ass graphic for my 9/16/25 pub day RAGER with local queen Inkoo Kang. RSVP here and join us IRL or on YouTube! You can also preorder PITCH CRAFT directly from GAB, which helps both to feed my children (they eat so much) and to keep independent bookstores thriving.

Speaking of geniuses I’ve gotten to interview on the airwaves, check out The Feminist Present’s recent episodes with Melissa Febos, Caro de Robertis, and Chloé Caldwell. New episode coming soon in which Adrian and I discuss the never-before-revealed story of how the inception of our friendship led directly to the gestation of PITCH CRAFT!

Finally, if anyone dares to doubt how much my children eat, I would love to report the total food consumption for a recent playdate at my home with two of their friends. In about three hours, these hungry little caterpillars hoovered:

Twenty-five (25) dinosaur nuggets

Four (4) bowls of ramen

One entire pepperoni pizza

Five (5) oranges

One cucumber

2 full bowls of popcorn

Like half a tub of ice cream

Four (4) oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

I still think I might be forgetting something.