I’ll start by assuming everybody reading this is on relatively the same page regarding the idea that books change people. It isn’t one-to-one of course. Nobody reads a book about gay people when they’re 12 and turns gay, like the book banners fear, nobody reads a book about serial killers when they’re 12 and starts killing people. But a kid who’s already some brand of queer might read about queer people and grow a little bit braver, a little bit more confident, a little bit more willing to stick around. (Hopefully this doesn’t also happen to burgeoning serial killers.) A kid who doesn’t think they’re queer reads about queer people and grows a little less willing to use a slur. The intergalactic war is about fascism and fascism hurts people and hurting people is bad. Etc. You all know this. Books change people by creating empathy, instilling curiosity, asking questions, being fun.

In graduate school I focused on policy and global feminism, and before I threw it all away I was writing a thesis about changing attitudes over time regarding “culture war” topics like abortion and gay marriage, to get at how to change people better and/or faster. Pretty much all the data said that the most important thing that changed people’s minds from anti-gay marriage to pro-gay marriage was direct empathy. Usually it was because they found out their favorite cousin was gay or their best friend came out or their grandma and her roommate of fifty years were actually oh my god they’re roommates. Sometimes it was a very poignant second hand story that really tugged at their heartstrings and pulled their attitudes along for the ride. Essentially nobody changed their minds when presented with intellectual arguments about fairness and civil rights. It took personal connection and empathy.

Connection, empathy, that’s something books do by describing the truths of the world whether they’re true truths or story truths, and that’s why they’re amazing and dangerous.

I believe with my entire being that books can change people. They changed me, they still change me. And there was a time in my life when I chose that belief over everything else.

So back to grad school, circa the 2004-2005 academic year, I wanted to change the world. I wanted to be a feminist lobbyist or maybe a teacher though I don’t think I’m very good at that. I wanted to argue and fight and make people change for the better. It was easy to argue and fight because I was pissed off about anything. My mom told me back then that I couldn’t like anything because all I did was critique—I didn’t manage to convince her that rage and critique could be part of liking and loving the world and art. (Probably because I was yelling too loudly.)

The problem was that I was so angry and fighty that I couldn’t let anybody else like anything either. I refused to back down ever about anything for any reason except me winning. I was even (especially) hyper-critical of the education I was getting, of my department and teachers and in my defense a lot of it was second wave White Feminism, but going in hot and aggressive was no way to really learn even in the best circumstances. It was no way to make or keep friends, family, colleagues, connection.

I’m going to make it sound like a direct narrative, but really that year was a fucking mess and it’s only in retrospect that I can draw anything like a curving line from point A to point X. I was going through major gender issues and mental health wreckage (partly due to some of the books I was reading!), my dad was being sent to Iraq with the Marines and everybody over there was dying, the country reelected GWB in my first real political heartbreak, Natalie and I lived on pennies, my favorite professor betrayed me by making me read Wuthering Heights a-fucking-gain, etc. Everything was terrible, and I was terrible, too.

Whatever the actual thought-process was, I realized I had to stop. The path of politics and argument was turning me into an ulcer. That’s all I was spreading. Not change, but a burn. (If you think I’m melodramatic now, you should have met me at 25!)

But I needed to keep trying to make the world better, because what else was the point of living in it?

I thought, what changed me, what made me like this? Well, my parents and the books I read.

So naturally, I rearranged the whole trajectory of my life to write books. That was twenty-plus years ago and I’ve never looked back.

Just kidding, I look back all the time. I still believe in the ability of books, of story, of art to change people because I’ve experienced the evidence personally as well as seen it in my career, in my peers, in my readers.

The thing is… sometimes—OK almost all the time—it feels like books aren’t changing people fast enough.

I ask myself, would the world be a little bit better if I’d stuck to that other path? If I’d learned to fight better, fought differently, if I joined some think tank or got my law degree or founded a protest organization or did all those things and then ran for office? If I hadn’t given up in 2005, would I have affected greater change? Saved more lives in the twenty years since? Isn’t it arrogant to think I’ve saved anybody at all? Arrogant to hope that my books have made the world better by nudging the arc of justice the way I want?

These thoughts used to attack in the middle of the night, especially after my book went out of print or was cancelled or even when a book earned out but only because the advance was very small and the audience was limited. Once, shamefully, it happened after a reader told me one of my books got her through the worst year of her life. I was so grateful she lived, awed to be considered part of that, and then there was that tiny, awful voice that whispered, but is that enough? how can that be enough? Especially compared to what might-have-been.

Lately, these thoughts come all the time. Not only at night, but any time I’m trying to write. You’re just writing a silly little book, if you’re lucky it might be what gets somebody through the worst year of their life, sure, but not for at least two years, and what if they don’t make it that long because what they need right now is so much more immediate? Go call more of your useless representatives! Figure out who in KS needs the donations the most right now! Share real news on social media even if you end up doom-scrolling at least you’ll be informed, at least you can keep information alive! Make a protest sign!

I know this is the road to despair, to creative paralysis. I know the real answer is that I can (I must) do all of those things (except doom-scrolling) and still also write a book that matters to me, to somebody, because that is the work I chose. And yet. It’s hard. Not as hard as living in a city being bombed or having your family torn apart if you dare to go to school or your ability to use a public bathroom criminalized or or or. But the constant work of refusing complicity with fascism is exhausting. It’s that way on purpose, meant to achieve compliance through attrition. Starting with the already marginalized and oppressed but never stopping there.

So the draining work of protest, phone calls, understanding the insanely byzantine processes of Congress, sharing information, phone calls, joining boots-on-the-ground orgs, memorizing hotline numbers, constant anger, making a plan for immediate action if ICE is in the neighborhood, constant anxiety, more phone calls, preparing self to help prepare community, all of that has to be done. Not all of it by all of us, but enough of it by enough of us so that in the end everything is covered. That’s the work we have to do. We didn’t choose it, but that’s the fight.

And then you have to write a book, too. Because that’s the work you did choose. (And more phone calls.)

In 2021 I wrote my newsletter #8 and it was called “A Manifesto of Liking.”

That was on the heels of lockdown and the first Trump administration, and like most of us in this business I was struggling with my relationship to writing.

I wrote about choosing new projects, how to find what I wanted to work on, that I used to make the choices based on awe, adoration, this ephemeral knowing deep inside of myself that allowed me to connect to my own work. That was love. I wrote books to change the world and loved it even when (especially when) it was a Struggle. But in 2021 it was too overwhelming to choose that way, to write that way, and sometimes felt like it didn’t matter if I loved my work at all. So I needed a new way to choose:

So five years ago almost to the month I was doing what I’m doing now: struggling with writing. For very different reasons! The solution I found back then was to pull away from the numinous and world-changing, instead to rely on the practical. In that newsletter I made a list of things I like about writing. From toggling between two words over and over to get a sentence right, to wordcount goals and naming characters and surprising myself.

It was a very neat exercise and I recommend it if you’re also struggling because it really worked for me! Since April 2021 when I sent that newsletter I’ve written about 9 books that I really like! (Yes that is too many in such a short time period esp for a long-writer like me but ya gotta pay the bills.) But yay! I found a way to keep working.

Right now I have three active projects—meaning they’re sold and in various stages of writing. One is The Mercy Makers 3, and the other two are IP I can’t talk about yet, one of which I…maybe never will! But all three of them are with editors. I can’t work on them. My life is going to really hurt when they all three come back to me the same week, because that’s how publishing (and life) works. For now though, I’ve been reading and (making phone calls) putting together a pitch deck for my agent so we can decide on some strategies moving forward. And spiraling about how what I write next could possibly matter in the face of waves hands.

It’s too late to go back to law school or run for office (my skeletons have multiplied!) and anyway I still think that kind of direct fight might turn me back into an ulcer. I picked writing, that’s my work for better or worse, I need to do it again.

I think…no, I feel that liking isn’t enough right now. Not when this is the work I chose—the tool I decided was my best weapon in the fight.

And listen, I know that some of the books I’ve written during my “liking only” phase have changed some things. All of us High Republic authors have heard about what THR has meant to some readers. I’m not saying that those books or any books that are mostly meant for fun or adventure or just to get people to read, please read, aren’t important or aren’t just as important as a book I write because I have to do it for love and longing and still it calls me. Books matter, period. And honestly how a book matters is up to readers way more than it’s up to me. I don’t get to choose how my book lands, or if it lands, or who reads it or if it’s read at all.

My only choice is what to write and why to write it. And a little bit how.

Liking has served me. I hope I get to keep writing books I like forever, because they put food on my table and are fun and I’m pretty good at it, and they do reach readers who do need them.

But the truth is that in the face of this exhausting practice of refusing complicity with fascism I need more to urge me to sit to write to create instead of laying on the floor post phone calls to wallow.

I need to love writing again.

So I sat down to make a list of things I love about writing. And…nothing came up. I don’t remember how to love writing.

There are probably more reasons for this than I’ve been able to identify in the week or so since I hit that wall.

I vaguely remember what it felt like, but it’s distant. It’s the echo of love—not the reality of it. Maybe because I’m old now (I turned 45 and for the first time in my life I felt Age). Maybe it’s lingering trauma from lockdown isolation, or unidentified pathways grief rewrote for me after Mom died. Maybe it’s numbness brought on because here we are in 2026 and back at a war we started when I was originally in grad school making all these angry choices in the first place and ok we started this war in like the 1950s at least and it’s been different variations every decade no matter who’s in charge. And the white supremacy and fascism that have lived in the bedrock of our country forever, that can be fought against, that doesn’t always win, seems to have forgotten it’s not inexorable and is acting accordingly to consume eagerly and destroy with glee and the cycles of horror that is America for a brief moment seemed to get better, it seemed like we were watching that arc of justice actually move, well it backslid again and not only are cops still murdering Black people consequence-free but they’re being federally funded to do that and more and right on the news because nobody with power cares, and sure there’s sort of a cure for AIDS but the whole world would prefer that transgender kids don’t make it to adulthood and and

And we’re supposed to write books???

I picked up The Queens of Innis Lear. I wrote it from 2014-2017 and it published in March 2018 with Tor. It’s the last book I remember desperately loving writing.

Not coincidentally I’m sure, it’s the last book I finished before my mom died, the last book of mine she read. It and its companion book Lady Hotspur are the last books I completed before the pandemic lockdown.

I love several of the books I’ve written since then, some stories, too. Night Shine, Moon Dark Smile, Temptation of the Force, Path of Deceit, “Year of Shrines,” “This Whole Angry Ocean,” “A Closed Fist Has No Claws,” The Mercy Makers. The difference is loving a book in it’s entirety after it’s complete, and loving a book while it’s being created. I’m sure I enjoyed writing many if not most of the chapters and scenes in most of those books, but did I love them the way I used to love writing? I can’t say. I don’t think so.

But I can say I loved writing Queens. It was a fucking labor of fucking love. I was obsessed and wild with it and I still have some of the sticky notes I made to remind myself what I was trying to do. And while I reread it this week for the first time since pass pages in the fall of 2017, I felt it. I felt not just distant echoes but that intense, painful feeling of oh shit this. This is why. In lines like “dishonest tenderness” and “she had to feel to fight” and “Regan remembered all their kisses, for they were as close to the stars as she could get” and all the aching terrible decisions everybody made (except for Mars who never did anything wrong in his life) and that line near the end that started it all “here I am at last.”

I used to be raw with love for the act of writing (and the whole furious world), and I’m trying to love it again. To love the act of writing. Of creation. I’m worried that’s the first thing to go when writing is not only the work, but becomes the job. I’m worried I don’t have the stamina and space to let myself love writing when it leads to heartbreak a really awful amount of the time. I have to try, I have to try.

It’s not gonna be easy. Like I said in that quote from Newsletter #8, I can’t just manifest love. But if liking is an ocean I can swim in and love is a universe, then that means love is everywhere because everything is the universe. The ocean of like is love, too. Making phone calls is love, breathing through anxiety is love, choosing art is love, reading is love, writing itself is love because it’s how I connect and how I show myself to this world I’m so desperate to make a little bit better.

I made a few jokes about phone calls above, but I’m also really serious. Right now I’m calling federally about H.R. 7661 which is terrifying as well as the unbelievably hypocritically named SAVE act which will ruin elections and the entire country, and on the Kansas level the Free State is really letting me down every other day with anti-trans, anti-kid, anti-immigrant legislation not to mention a back-door attempt to outlaw abortion again! Please call. Please disrupt. Please share.

I got a Google Alert that THE SHAPE OF MONSTERS is available on Netgalley which means review copies are going out there which means I will struggle every day not to search out early reviews.

I’m very excited to be in conversation with Becca Coffindaffer for their upcoming release THE BLOODY AND THE DAMNED at Rainy Day Books in Kansas City on April 7th!

I read a very early draft of this book like TEN YEARS AGO and have been excited for its publication ever since. The book is different now, but just as great. Here’s what I had to say:

"With gritty, breathtaking world building and lovably dangerous characters, The Bloody and the Damned takes readers on a wild adventure for planetary justice and family ties."

Speaking of Becca, I’m still trying to steal the fave lines meme from their newsletter so have some lines from The Shape of Monsters:

“He is the Vertex Seal; he can be a bitch.”

and

“The part of the tree that is leaves remembers because it witnesses the whole thing, while the part of the tree that is roots is too entertained by the antics of worms and sleeping cicadas and listening to the music of information passing through strands of mycelium under the dirt. The roots simply aren’t paying attention when the human woman roams nearby.”

and

“Holiness can be a monster, too.”

Finally, I’m not done talking about love. It’s going to take me a while to figure this out, so I’ll be subjecting you to it, starting with The Queens of Innis Lear. It’s the 10 year anniversary of selling Queens and Slaughter, aka Strange Grace, so in the upcoming newsletters I’ll tell you the stories of their inception and creations, and maybe find my way back to loving writing, too.

Thanks for reading!

Tessa