and now I have a lettuce

                May 9, 2016

            and now I have a lettuce

            Excerpt from an email I sent to my friend Logan on November 11, 2014:

anyway the good news is that I had the best ever idea for a book the other day: a Blow Up meets Fangirl situation, in which some tin-hat Larry Stylinson-esque believer realizes that she has evidence of some kind of SERIOUS CONSPIRACY going on (the band are being used as drug mules, maybe? right, like, they fly private, they travel with a zillion lbs of luggage, there are so many people coming and going, it would be a great way to hide in plain sight) but of course NO ONE BELIEVES HER because, you know, teenage girl with a history of delusional internet yelling. and then she has to take matters into her own hands and take down the management co. by herself. 

Excerpt from another email to Logan, written March 23, 2015:

as you know I reserve judgement on the issue of our friend larry stylinson but I will say that it is the fondest wish of my heart that boyband member louis tomlinson grew a symbolic beard in protest of his actual one. [In case you, reading this Tinyletter, don't know about Larry Stylinson, all I meant by this was: a member of One Direction broke up with his girlfriend and shaved his face the same week, and a lot of people took this as a prelude to his coming out.] the commitment to metaphor might be the finest artifact that 21st century pop culture has yet produced. someday I will write a novel about it. in the mean time I started writing a different one this weekend.

Here is what I looked like the first week I was writing the book:

I started doing this thing where I took a selfie every time I worked on it. I wanted to have some kind of document of the sheer number of hours and days that goes into writing something that long-- to have a record of all of the coffee shops and friends' couches and various waiting rooms where I'd sat with my head down, making up this story. Like many creative projects, it didn't do what I expected it to do. Mostly it taught me that my bangs don't look the way I think they do, and that I am compulsive about writing with some kind of beverage in hand. Anyway, here is what I looked like the morning I woke up early on vacation in Palm Springs to finish the final read-through on the draft we ultimately sent to my editor:

And here, best of all, is the Publisher's Weekly announcement that she bought it.

Soon I will write more about this book and how much I love it and how much it means to me and how lucky I feel that I got to write it and sell it, and how hysterically hard my twelve year old self would laugh if she could somehow know that the fan fiction she was writing with her friends and compiling into actual physical binders would, in fact, lay the foundations for her paid professional work someday. For right now, though, all I can say is that I'm so happy, so happy, just so, so happy.

(If you're curious about the subject line, here you go. Harry Styles <3 <3 <3)

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