The book is getting real

We have an official pub month!

Leave is becoming more and more real. I feel like we’re at 60% real. Once the preorder link is live, it will be 80% real. When I hold it in my hands, 100%.

I received my final edits from my publisher this weekend and they consisted of one big suggestion, two tiny line edits, and a note at the end of the document: “This book is fucking beautiful, Shayne.”

Also this week, my sister read it for the first time. She and my mom were my most important pre-pub readers because they’re both in it, and I wanted to make sure they felt comfortable with the things I shared about them. Some writers don’t give the people who appear in their books a chance to read and respond before the book is published, and I respect that, but that wasn’t the road for me.¹ I would’ve felt more anxious about their responses if I’d waited until the book was out, and I didn’t want them to feel that I couldn’t take something out if they really had a problem with it.

My mom read and responded to an early draft, but I held off on sending it to my sister until last month. I was nervous, and so was she — I’d told her about some of the scenes I’d included — but her reaction to the book was the most supportive, gracious, encouraging, loving response I could have hoped for. She is like that: supportive, gracious, encouraging, loving. Still, it was exactly what I needed to feel like we are out of the draft/manuscript/edit stage and moving into the I-have-a-real-book-coming-out stage.

And perhaps the biggest reason it’s all starting to feel very real is that we have a pub month! February 2025! Exact date still TBD but the month is enough for me at this point. Now I can start planning and giving myself deadlines for all the pre-pub things that need to happen. Because I am a marketer by day and also a little type A, I have a spreadsheet with a whole marketing plan.² I made the spreadsheet like nine months ago and now I can finally start checking things off! (Would that interest you to see? Should I do a newsletter about it?)

I can’t wait for this book to be in the world. I can’t wait to talk to people about it. I can’t wait for it to find its readers, because I know they are out there. Seven months!

This week in reading

Still reading Attachments. Taking this one an essay at a time.

Started All Fours on audio and wow. It’s the type of book where I wish I were both listening so that I could hear the one and only Miranda July read her work while also following along in a print copy so that I could underline and take notes. I would totally buy this book twice, but I don’t want to stop where I am in the audiobook to wait for the print book to arrive and so I will simply have to read it again later!

This week in writing

I’m working on a revision of the essay I’m writing in Chelsea Hodson’s class. (This class has been amazing — I’ll write about it in full after our final session next week.) I’m really excited about my essay, which I never planned to write but rather is a topic that emerged organically from and has been shaped by my participation in the class. The whole essay has been a surprise to me, in the very best way, and it’s a pleasure to work on it.

I’m also letting the one big suggestion my editor had for Leave marinate a bit. The suggestion was to cut the beginning and start on what is currently the second chapter. This is an edit I (and many writers) get a lot because the beginning of a draft is often scaffolding, something I constructed to get where I needed to go, something that can now be dismantled. I’m not sure if I want to cut it altogether or put it somewhere else in the book, so going to play around with it and see what feels best. Once I’ve decided, we move into layout.

I am in Illinois right now, taking advantage of the childcare gap between the end of the school year and beginning of summer camp to give my kid some cousin time. That might mean less time to write this week, or it might mean more. Going with the flow.

This goat has nothing to do with anything except that it’s cute and I took this photo on a different trip to Illinois. (Where my Edwards Apple Orchard fans at?)

1. My wonderful therapist, who is also a memoirist and writing teacher, gave a talk on this choice at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival years ago and I recommend it if this is a conundrum you are facing: The Politics of Writing About Loved Ones.

2. “A little?” I can hear those of you who know me saying.