Yes, we have no Dear Writer...

...we have no Dear Writer today!

Dear Writer,

I really wanted to write a fresh newsletter for you today, but things have been a little wild here.

First, the re-drafting (a combination of revision and drafting) for the book is going along like gangbusters. I sat down to write this morning at six o’clock, and didn’t look up until almost eleven.

I’m having so much fun. And I think it’s really good… although also very weird. I wrote a hook (what you send in a query letter) as an example for the Year of Writing Magically class on publishing this past weekend, and…

…well… it’s weird.

NOTHING IS EVER ALWAYS is an 80,000 word humorous women’s fiction/philosophical sci-fi novel about a humanities professor in upstate New York who accidentally broke the matrix of her world when she tried to bring her sister back from the dead, and now has to clean up the mess she made, which includes dragons, vampires, cranky wood sprites and the former best friend who betrayed her downloading into her world as the sexy town priest.

That’s rough as hell, which was kind of the point for the lecture—i.e., write a rough one and refine, refine, refine—but I think it’s a decent start. It sounds a lot more romance-y than I think the book delivers on, but all of that is absolutely true of how the story plays out

Let me know in the comments if y’all want to read the opening scene. It is wholly different from the original one I dropped earlier this year, and a lot more fun (I think!)

In addition to the book, I’m heavily promoting the 2024 Year of Writing Magically workshop (you can apply right here if you want!) and preparing for my free pre-workshop workshop tomorrow night, where I’ll be giving the first Year of Writing Magically lecture for free, along with a year-long schedule for anyone who wants to try out the structure to write their novel, screenplay, or other long-form fiction project.

There’s still time to register for the free workshop if you’re interested!

Add in seasonal changes making everything weird (did you know that it’s normal to get hungrier when the weather gets cold?), various expensive failures of the vehicular kind, and family medical shit (no worries, everything’s fine… but still) and I just found myself hitting noon today and realizing I was not going to be able to get a regular Dear Writer in under the buzzer this week.

But that’s okay. Life is full of unexpected twists and turns. And you’ve probably got lots of newsletters eating a hole in your Substack app; share your favorites in the comments!

Hope your week is going well, and I hope to see some of you tomorrow night!

Everything,

L