First: the next giveaway is here!

This has been A Challenging Year, and so I have been allowing myself to buy and read books from my favorite authors as soon as they are released. As such, I picked up Star Shipped a mere week after it came out and summarily had my socks blown off. My socks are in smithereens somewhere in the stratosphere over the Pacific, my pals. This was not entirely unexpected — I have yet to read a romance from Cat Sebastian which didn’t delight and enthrall — but holy crap.

In case you have not yet encountered Cat Sebastian’s newest book, it is: a contemporary romance between two men who are both actors on a hugely popular Trek-esque scifi show, Simon and Charlie. Simon: Spock. Charlie: Kirk. They irritate the ever-living daylights out of each other, and have correspondingly tremendous chemistry on set. Simon has just decided to leave the show at the end of the season, because he feels like his career has stagnated down to “snarky ship’s doctor,” and he wants to do more varied and challenging roles. Also, he’s truly exhausted. For publicity reasons he embarks on a roadtrip with Charlie to do a wellness check on Charlie’s stepdad.

This book is a master class in how to write a romance from a single person’s point of view without ever sacrificing the complexity of the other character. We pretty quickly understand that Simon is not a reliable narrator (he insists on his own dire unlikeability as a human potato, while we see the people around him go to huge lengths to talk with, care for, and otherwise engage with him), but we don’t understand just how unreliable until the book starts peeling back the layers of his assumptions about how people are and how the world works. The primary engine of this unlayering is Charlie, and the revelation of the very different mechanisms by which he has protected himself from an overwhelming world.

This is where I admit to you that I cried while reading this book, quite a lot. I have read very few books which resonate so painfully with how I move through the world. Simon’s level of anxiety about every single interaction felt normal and even necessary to me. The reveals toward the end hit me so hard because I thought Simon’s assumptions about how people saw him seemed. . . reasonable.

After all, it’s perfectly normal to know you are at your core a deeply unpleasant person who has to work constantly to disguise that fact from everyone you encounter, right? Right?

Apparently not.

The book is also very funny! And fast-paced, even if I had to stop and cry some!

If you would like to enter the giveaway from three copies of Star Shipped, the form for that is here.

As I was thinking about Star Shipped, it struck me that anxiety is absolutely the thing which links the two apparently unconnected parts of this newsletter, about a giveaway and a new release. Yes, a new release!

The King in the Forest, book number four in Goblins and Cheese, will be available on Tuesday, May 26th.

(For those playing along at home, this means you are going to be experiencing a somewhat elevated density of newsletters from me in May, for the cover reveal, pre-order link, and all that. Forgive me, if you can!)

That’s all very exciting — and I am incredibly excited for this book which I have been working on for three years to be out in the world — but I also can’t gloss over the enormous struggle this book was. The despair of facing my first draft and realizing I hated it. The mounting panic of not being able to write more than a couple lines at a sitting for months at a time. The dread and overwhelm which kept mounting as I watched the year calendar tick over, not once, but twice, while still working on revisions. The constant cycling of thoughts whenever I was away from my manuscript about how I don’t have enough time or energy to meet the standards I have set for myself as an artist, a coworker, a friend, or a citizen — standards which feel like the very barest minimum, bar-is-in-hell principles I can hold.

And for all that! Actually writing the book was a very powerful experience. I write for the same reason that I read, in some ways — I want to be able to live elsewhere for a short while. But, truthfully, this book resulted not only from dreams of boars made of fire, deer-men running under the moon, and spooky fairy architecture, but also from what I would guess were hundreds of hours of conversation about the consent of the governed, rebuilding national infrastructure after throwing out a violent head of state, the principles of religious belief, how each of these fantasy societies (human, fairy, goblin) overlay and interact with each other materially.

And — most of all — how different kinds of people think and act when thrown into terrifying and unexpected situations, how they show up for each other or don’t over the course of weeks and months and years, and, because this is a romance, how they work through the fear and pain which separates them from the people they love.

Anxiety is, at its heart, self-protective; it forms a barrier around a person which seeks to keep away harm. It is a deeply normal human reaction to a terrifying world, and the walls it creates are, in my experience, pretty effective at keeping out love, connection, and artistic fulfillment.

Fiction is a way to practice being brave, both in the reading and the writing.

You’ll be hearing much more from me soon!

Best,

Sharon

P.S. What are the books we are reading this month and the next? What’s the most recent book you read which made you think about changes you would like to make it your physical life?