industry standard
Last week I went to a party being thrown by one of the publications I write for, where I had the always-surreal experience of meeting in person an editor with whom I've been corresponding digitally for months. We admitted that we had both been picturing each other as the mutual friend who introduced us. I asked her how her days in LA had been. It turned out we had other friends in common. "Everyone I've met who knows you says, Oh, Zan Romanoff. She's busy," the editor told me.
She's busy. As it happened, I had taken a break earlier that afternoon and fallen into one of those dead-black naps that sneak up on you sometimes, thirty minutes of sleep so thorough and disorienting that I woke up and thought it was the next morning already. I had not entirely recovered by the time I arrived at the party. It didn't help that it was in the kind of room filled with the kind of crowd that doesn't even need an Instagram filter: I mean, I was drinking a cocktail with mezcal and turmeric and nasturtium flowers in it. Anyway, I did not feel busy. Harried, yes, and worried, and exhausted, and overwhelmed, but not busy.
The phrase pleased me, though, perhaps because it echoes an LA-ism I grew up with, which is that you say, of someone who manages to keep themselves regularly employed in the movie business, "oh, she works." In a precarious industry that's run on the energy of young hustling full-time freelancers, she works is a statement of steadiness. It means she's turned the dream into a career, that in a town where you have to find someone new to hire you every six months or so, she's well-connected and talented and together enough to make that happen. She works. She's busy. It keeps happening. So far I keep making it happen.
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Am I burying the lede? I buried the fucking lede. My second novel is out today! To be perfectly honest with you, it is very good: fast-paced and fun to read but also deeply felt, intended to be gobbled in an afternoon but also, hopefully, to stay with you when you listen to music and read tabloids and talk to teenagers and remember old crushes. Please buy yourself a copy. I really do think you'll like it.
If you want to help me celebrate GRACE, I'm reading with a bunch of other authors and comedians at The Ripped Bodice on Thursday-- probably some vintage fan fic-- and then I have my very own party at Skylight on 5/25. Then I go all the way east, to launch GRACE in New York at McNally Jackson on June 7. Plus I'm doing an event in July with a bunch of other YA authors in San Francisco! I'm all over the place!! In more ways than one!! (That's me practicing "comedy" for Thursday. It's gonna be rough.)
If you'd like to hear me talk about the book from the comfort of your home, I did an interview with Gina Delvac for Call Your Girlfriend's spring books episode; I've been a fan of Gina's since we were fourteen and a fan of CYG's since she started it, so that was pretty fun. (The ep also features Doree Shafrir's A++++ novel Startup and Amelia Gray's Isadora, which I haven't read but am so looking forward to.) I also got to be on the podcast Fansplaining, talking about my long, dark history of reading, writing, and loving fan fiction.
In non-book news, I wrote a profile of the actress Sofia Boutella, who fled violent civil war in Algeria when she was 10 and is now playing the mummy in The Mummy opposite Tom Cruise. We ate truffle French fries and then I drove her to the dentist! I also profiled Hollywood's favorite crystal healer, Azalea Lee, for Healthyish. Just steadily working towards my goal of someday profiling Harry Styles, which has become intertwined with my goal of eclipsing Cameron Crowe as a music writer, because Almost Famous will always be important to me, but that dude has become a hack in his old age, and also, isn't it time we asked a woman about the romantic fantasies-- romantic, not sexual-- that rock and roll inspires? Anyway, in the mean time I wrote about why women like me want to dress like Haz for Racked.
I never sign these but I feel like I should sign this one:
Love,
Zan