July 24, 2023

it's getting hot in here

happy july! that’s not something I say often, both for personal reasons and because the july weather usually does me in, but this one has been better than usual. or maybe that’s the camp nano talking.

for those of you who don’t know, nanowrimo, or national novel writing month, is a writing challenge in which writers around the world try to write 50,000 words in a month. the big event is in november, but more laid back “camp” sessions take place in april and july.

nanowrimo isn’t for everyone, but it’s the reason I can finish a draft. my first nano back in november 2010 helped me shut up my internal editor and taught me to grit my teeth and get through a first draft like “it’s a first draft it, doesn’t have to be good, it’s a first draft, it doesn’t have to be good, it’s a—”

of course, then I hit revisions. and now my mantra doesn’t work. because the point of revisions is that it kinda does have to be good now.

but as ever, that is a problem for Future E.

it started off with a kiss joke how did it end up like this

idk why I’m referencing songs today, but

camp nano came with some urgency for me this year. Buried Things is on sub now, which is slightly unreal, slightly exciting, and slightly terrifying. I haven’t finished a first draft of anything since this book, back in 2021, so if it doesn’t sell, I have nothing else ready to go.

(plenty of trunked projects, but very little interest in resurrecting most of them and no idea how to revise the few I do want to revisit.)

I do have some future ideas—my singular, ghosty middle grades book, which is plotted and ready to go whenever I’m ready to write it (but I’m not); a grounded, woodsy, vaguely historical fantasy with an MC and LI heavily inspired by Our Flag Means Death; a mortal x death contemporary fantasy romance that’s actually 30k into a draft—but nothing’s ready to be written and nothing’s done. so I’ve been worried about what happens if Buried Things doesn’t sell (even though it’s really too early to worry about that yet).

and then…

I made a joke in a group chat and now here we are

we were talking pen names in 2023 Debuts. apparently, publishing likes you to have separate pen names for separate genres, even if your pen names are ridiculously similar. everyone misreads my social media handle, elizmanderson, as Eli Z. Manderson for reasons I do not understand, so my friend Isa jokingly suggested that could be my hardboiled detective crime fiction pen name.

I jokingly agreed and launched into a description of a FAKE BOOK I WAS NOT INTENDING TO WRITE, but by the end of the paragraph I was like …dammit, I think I have to write this now.

originally, NettieWIP was supposed to be a cozy mystery fantasy, with the murder of a magical scholar taking place in a village of witches.

…but then my brain did the thing, again, 9,000 words into the first draft, leading me to wonder: why tf am I like this lmao

my friend Victoria made a throwaway comment in DMs about wanting to write a seaside book. which I have also been wanting to do for ages but haven’t yet. and I had just seen The Little Mermaid (2023) and loved it, and that Guardian article had just come out about the U.S. government decommissioning all remaining lighthouses and giving them away or auctioning them off…so naturally my brain went like

it was maddening, not least because my brain was all excited like CHANGING THE SETTING TO A LIGHTHOUSE WILL SOLVE ALL OUR PLOT PROBLEMS, and I was like girl please no it will not?? that is not how it works??

but I could tell I wouldn’t be able to press on with the original witchy version, because my brain had decided that THIS WAS THE ANSWER.

and dammit it turns out that mf was right

I don’t know why changing Nettie from a grumpy old lesbian witch to a grumpy old lesbian lighthouse keeper (on Lake Huron, not the seaside) solved a bunch of plot problems, but it did.

I mean, I’m still having problems, because I don’t know how tf to write a mystery, but. at least words are getting down lol.

my goal for camp nano was 30,000 words, which I hit in just ten days. I’ve slowed down since then (unsurprisingly, since ADHD brain is like “why rush, goal met, deadline exceeded, can stop now 😌), but I’m vaguely hoping to finish this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad draft by the end of the month so I can turn my attention to revising.

hopefully I can revise a murder mystery, even if I can’t really write one.

Edna is three months old!

am I going to simply announce how old The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher is every month until I’m like a parent going “she’s thirty-six months old now—”? probably.

in my defense, I’m also gonna do some cool giveaways and stuff at six months.

and cooler giveaways and stuff at a year.

but for now, my book about an 83-year-old leaving the nursing home to go on a fantastical adventure is three months old. I’ve received some lovely reviews on Goodreads, long and excited messages from readers, and tags in social media posts, which I save in a document called “nice things people say about the book” for easy access on bad days.

if you haven’t already, add The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher on Goodreads or TheStoryGraph, or buy now! the hardcover currently costs just fifty cents more than the paperback on Amazon.

odds & ends

• recent reads

  • finally finished Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, of which I read 2/3 on a weekend away in like…2019 lol and then never picked up again once we came home—until a couple weeks ago!

  • Sonia Hartl’s Have a Little Faith in Me, which was recommended by a fellow AMMR9 mentee. I wouldn’t have known what to expect without that recommendation, but it’s full of consent talk. and even though it’s a YA romance, the found family cabin eight group is so central to the story!

• recent watches

  • …The Woman in White, 2018 PBS adaptation, because after finally finishing the book I was feral for more 19th-century Gothic type stuff lol. Walter my sweet baby-faced boy oh my god he’s so baby.

  • you’d think Elemental, Into the Spiderverse, or Barbie would be on here, but they’re not a l a s . because despite my moviepass membership I cannot bring myself to either (a) leave the house to go to the movies on weekends or (b) be at the movies for 2+ hours after a day of work :,) surely I will watch them one of these days.

• recent birds

  • not that I’ve updated my 2023 bird list yet, but recently I saw a rose-breasted grosbeak, which is a gorgeous bird in the cardinal family that I don’t see that often

    

• other random doodads

  • this month was the first-ever Columbus Book Festival, hosted by the Columbus Metropolitan Library System! expected visitors were 25,000; actual visitors were totaled at 33,000. so while officially they still have to have a meeting about it, I think it’s safe to say this event will happen again in the future! I sold books in Indie Author Alley, met readers, collected merch from some author friends who attended as panelists, and met up with my fellow 2023 debuts for a Saturday-evening hangout. I don’t know if I’d do it again except as a panelist simply because of the expense (books, table space, gas, & hotel), but I did have a lot of fun and I really hope the event is repeated in the future.

    

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until next time!