Writing date in Philly
I had this Amtrak credit that was about to expire, so I booked a last-minute, round-trip-in-one-day ticket to Philadelphia. A day to myself to begin a final pass at Leave before sending the latest version to Michael Wheaton for his edits. A train ride to read the manuscript all the way through and mark it up with all the little ways to make it better. Amtrak goes a lot of places from New York City, but I chose Philly on the off-chance that Jiordan Castle would be up for lunch, and to my great happiness, she was.
Jiordan is part of my agent family, which is what I lovingly call all the writers who are represented by my agent, Ashley Lopez. (Ashley knows how to pick ‘em because our agent family is 🔥🔥🔥 — Krys Malcolm Belc, Christopher Gonzalez, Ursula Villarreal-Moura, M.M. Carrigan, Lydia Kim, I could go on.)
I loved Jiordan’s YA memoir-in-verse Disappearing Act and the other thing I love about Jiordan is Jiordan. She has warm energy that makes you feel instantly comfortable in her presence, along with the kind of playful sense of humor that only comes from having been through some tough stuff and made it to the other side. I am going to embarrass her with my gushing, but basically I feel very lucky to know Jiordan and when I realized that I wouldn’t see her at AWP but that I could travel (on 2023 money!) to have lunch with her while also working on my book, I threw my laptop in my backpack and set off for Penn Station.
I’ve been a little nervous about reading Leave again. I last read it almost two years ago. What if I felt too distant from it now? What if it was crap?
I started reading at Penn Station, continued on the train, and wrapped it up at the La Colombe near Rittenhouse Square. I love that it’s a book you can read in a day.
I cried once, at a part I wouldn’t have predicted. I made lots of notes to myself about small things to add or cut. I think I want to change the way the opening is done, formally. I used the word “magic” too many times. I found two typos. (I read this thing so many times in 2021 and 2022 — how are there still typos? This is why we have copy editors, and bless them for their work.)
I noted every time a person from my life appears in the book, because I want to give them all a heads up and cut/anonymize anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable with it. There are different approaches to this, but this is the approach I’m taking.
I got to the end and… I’m really happy with it. I don’t want to revise as much as I thought I would. There are improvements I think I can make purely because I’m a better writer today than I was in 2019 and 2020, but I’m not going to touch it too much.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief and then went to meet Jiordan for lunch, where I filled her in on AWP and she filled me in on how the rest of her book tour went and we caught up on writing and life over a brunch that included beet hummus, one of my favorite foods of all time. (The beet hummus was good, but mine is better. My secret ingredient: cumin.)
And now I am on the Amtrak back to New York. It was so helpful to be able to temporarily remove myself from my regular day-to-day so I could get into the right headspace for this revision. Today did the trick. I’m there. Many thanks to Daniel for solo parenting today to make it happen.
This week in writing
Aside from today, I’ve still been writing around the edges of Leave. Maybe these new fragments will wind up in the finished manuscript, or maybe they’ll become separate but related essays that I try to place around the launch of book. Over the last few weeks I have been thinking of them less and less as the latter, more and more as the former, and I have taken this to mean I am ready to go back into the book.
This week in reading
The reading lately has been good! Leading up to AWP, I finished Mike Nagel’s Culdesac (loved it) and Kristine Langley Mahler’s A Calendar is a Snakeskin (v. witchy), and then this week I read Holly Pelesky’s Cleave, a book of letters to the daughter she gave up for adoption at 21. All so good! Now I’m reading The New Animals by Pip Adam and am both fully engrossed and incredibly nervous about where things are going for these characters…
This week in listening
After reading Holly’s book, I had to go back and listen to the interview with her on The Lives of Writers. What a thoughtful conversation about what it means to bring a very personal story into the world. Taking all the notes.