Riding Out 2024

Hi friends.

Greetings from New Orleans, where my tiny dog has gone on strike for taking any walk later than 7 AM because it’s so darn hot out already. (I mean, I get it!) Also the tomato plants, which I was obsessed with all spring long, have fruited their last fruits. And finally, a new baby pig moved into the neighborhood.

You can see the excitement comes in small doses these summer days. But I take note of it all, and even if it’s not grist for the mill, it’s still tangible and deeply felt. I appreciate it when things are physically present in my life. Especially coming out of spending so much time online these past few weeks. It’s good to be here on planet earth. A stabilizing, steadying force.

So we get up extra early in this house now to take our walks. And I trimmed back all the plants this weekend. And obviously I scratched that little pig on the head for a long time when I met it.

Real life always takes us back when we’re ready for it.

Hello to all the new subscribers! There are more than two thousand new folks who signed up in the past month. I wanted to let you know how things tend to work around here. I send out a letter once a week. Sometimes the letters are about questions people ask me about writing, and sometimes they’re about things I observe in the writing world, or conversations I have with other creative people. Sometimes I’m just talking about my own writing process. I also try to do weekend threads for paid subscribers, although I am not always the most consistent with it I must admit. (Please forgive me.)

Where I am at right now with my own work is that I have about 30,000 extremely messy words of a new novel and I’m in the phase of going through them all and trying to get a tight 20,000 out of them by fall. Hopefully then I can show them to a few people (my agent, some first readers) to see if I’m onto anything. I usually sell my books on partial proposal, and I’m hoping to make that happen before the end of the year. We shall see! This shit’s hard and I would like to tell you that it gets easier after ten books but that’s a big nope from me. The only thing that has gotten easier (and I wouldn’t say that it’s actually easy) is knowing how to write regularly no matter what.

So I suspect what I’ll be talking about coming up is how to do revisions of raw material and staying motivated when you’re in the thick of it all. I also have a book coming out in three months so I’ll keep you updated on thoughts on all of that. By “all of that” I guess I mean what my process was when I was writing this book, but also possibly a second topic: the way we promote books now.

I was actually reminiscing this week about how for my fourth book—which came out in 2012—my publisher threw a press luncheon for me, and also another author, a woman who had a bestselling memoir at the time with a second book on the way. And where was the party? At Henri Bendel of all places! They held it in some sort of pretty dining room on a higher floor, and we gave a little talk and met all these different reporters and it definitely felt glamorous.

I had actually never been to Henri Bendel before. Like, why would I go there? It was high-end, like a very Sex and the City-Gossip Girl kind of place and I was a thrift store and pizza slice kind of person—even at the age of 40. And I was so freaking broke then. I remember charging a dress to wear to the party and holding my breath that my credit card would cover it. It was just not even a fantasy I had ever had before to have a book event there, especially since I had had three books come out already that sort of came and went, each one more quietly than the one before. I dreamed only of continuing to be able to write and hopefully be published and make some sort of scrap of a living at it.

But then here was this fancy event. I remember having this feeling in the elevator ride up that it was a dream come true, only it was someone else’s dream, not mine. But I was thrilled! It was just a totally wild vision. I am certain I did a dumb little laugh. And then the elevator dinged, and I walked out and…there was a party for me. It only happened once, this kind of party, but once was enough to have a fun memory.

These days most of us spend more time on social media promoting ourselves then doing events in real life. I’m not so sure about spending your own money on self-promotion, but lots of people are doing that, too. I try to be really careful and thoughtful about how I put myself out there. I want to reach people in a way that feels comfortable for me and also will be fun and entertaining for everyone involved. After eighteen years of this, I want everything to make as much sense as it can. With my writing, with the publishing of my work, and with the promoting of me.

So I’ll try to write about all that too in the coming months. And hopefully we can all arrive at someplace new. God, always, I’ll take whatever tiny revelations I can get. Here, now, forever.

Let’s ride out the rest of 2024 together.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on twitter and instagram.