a gift for your future self

a sale! in this economy!

Months until my debut novel comes out: Four

Hi! Hello! It’s been a minute! I said a while back I was going to try to write one newsletter a month until my secret-late-night-driving-lessons romance, MIDNIGHTS WITH YOU, comes out in November. Then June rolled around, and I was in the middle of drafting something new (OFFICE GHOST WIP, for those of you following along), and I thought: Man I just cannot bear to write a newsletter until this project is with my critique partners.

Well! Now it is, and here I am—and I have some exciting news to start!

If you’ve been waiting to buy MIDNIGHTS WITH YOU until it’s on sale somewhere, now is your chance! You can get it for 25% off in the BN.com preorder sale until July 17 using code PREORDER25!

You can grab a copy now at a discount, forget that you ordered it, and then, four months from now, you’ll suddenly have a nice comforting surprise delivered to your door—a week after the U.S. presidential election, when you could maybe use a thoughtful little gift from your past self!

Debut year check-in: No more girlbossing

So what’s been going on for the past two months? Without getting into a lot of emo detail, I realized I needed to release myself from some of the hopes and ideas of publishing success that were mostly just hurting me at this point, and that I can’t take many constructive actions toward achieving. A lot is out of your control when it comes to traditionally publishing a book! So in June, I took a social media break, I dug in on drafting that new thing, and I tried to practice holding my dreams loosely. I was channeling this vibe:

Except swap “girlresting” for “girl-drafting-an-unhinged-workplace-dark-comedy.” And I had so much fun writing it! Whatever happens with it next, I’m holding onto the memory of how gleeful I felt while I was in the thick of it.

What else have I been doing? I went on a writing retreat at an Airbnb with some friends, where the snacks were top-tier and where I wrote a good chunk of OFFICE GHOST WIP. I had some great coffee shop writing dates. I spent time in the sun.

And I was lucky enough to go to the American Library Association’s annual conference in San Diego—thank you so much to the team at Disney-Hyperion for your help in making that happen! It was so wonderful getting to talk to librarians and reviewers, catch up with friends and meet some authors whose work I’ve admired for a long time.

The craft department: Does this note spark joy?

This month’s craft tip is about fighting overwhelm when you get an edit letter. It’s for anyone who’s at that daunting early stage of a big developmental edit where you’re trying to organize your thoughts, take in feedback (whether it’s from critique partners, an agent, an editor, or some combination) and balance that feedback with your own vision and internal sense of what you’re trying to do.

One of my favorite things to do is to walk through every piece of feedback I’ve received and write each discrete, actionable note out on a Post-It note or an index card. This has a couple benefits for me: 1) When I’m staring at everything that needs to be done in one solid block of text, it’s much more overwhelming than when I can face one note at a time, in isolation. And 2) It lets me translate each point into my own words, which forces me to digest each one and helps take the edge off of any note that might have stung a little bit because of the specific way it was phrased. I’ve found, in the past, that doing this brings me around to agreeing with most notes that I might have had a negative reaction to initially.

Once I have every note from every feedback-giver written on a Post-It, I’ll put them in a stack and sort through them one by one. I think of it like I’m Marie Kondo-ing an edit letter—I’ll hold each note in my hands and weigh my reaction to it. Do I feel a tightness in my chest? A sinking feeling in my gut? Or is there a spark of excitement? (Does this note spark joy?)

I go through all of them, consider them as carefully as possible, and sort them into three piles: KEEP (the notes I fully agree with, no reservation), NOTE BENEATH THE NOTE (where there’s something about the suggested implementation I don’t love, but I agree with the diagnosis of the underlying issue), and PUSH BACK (where I’m really just not feeling it and want to make my case about why, if it’s agent or editor feedback). Every time I’ve done this, in the end, the PUSH BACK pile has been just like 2-3 things.

Then I’ll go through the NOTE BENEATH THE NOTE pile again and brainstorm fixes that I think can address the underlying issue the feedback-giver has pinpointed, but in a way that feels more right for the story and characters. I’ll write my solution out on the back of the Post-It with my reasoning.

Then I’ll turn those Post-Its into an editing plan, but this step really helps me calm down and consider each aspect of what I need to do, in a way that makes tackling a big revision much less overwhelming.

Five things I secretly love about my debut novel

In the past, I’ve had a hard time letting myself think good things about my own work, never mind expressing those things in public. So a few months back, I resolved to tell you five things I honestly love about MWY each month until the book comes out.

Here are this month’s five:

1. It’s a story about hurt people learning to love themselves. It takes characters experiencing a pain and a feeling of brokenness that’s familiar to me, and gives them a good ending. It was healing for me to write, and some early readers have said it’s been healing for them to read, and that means the world to me.

2. It’s a story about feeling deeply isolated and misunderstood, and of pushing through your fears to let yourself get close enough to another person that you can actually be understood, for a second, and how that kind of connection can change you.

3. It has a fraught-mother daughter relationship at the heart of it, and I feel like if I’d seen a relationship dynamic like this in fiction when I was a kid, I would have felt a lot less alone. (I wrote more about this aspect of the story on Instagram when I revealed the dedication).

4. The main character, Deedee, is obsessed with the stories of ghosts and monsters from Philippine folklore that her mom tells, and I too am obsessed with these kinds of stories. I’m glad I got to weave them into the texture of the story, even though I got a lot of “what genre is this???” comments on early critiques of my first pages. (It’s realistic fiction, but the preoccupation with ghosts and monsters is part of my real life, okay!)

5. I can’t think of another YA romance that briefly references how the CIA faked monster attacks in the Philippines to further an anti-communist agenda (true story).

June-July recs:

I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue — Mannn I loved this book so much! When I finished, I wanted to hug it to my chest and start reading it all over again. I loved the characters and the way the story peeled back the layers of what everyone in the office was going through, I loved Jolene slowly coming out of her misanthropy, I loved the chaos of the plot and the way her family dynamics came into play. Some of the texts from her mom had me howling with recognition.

Seven Days in June by Tia Williams — This book was so achingly romantic and SO FUNNY. It made me cackle out loud at several points, and it also had so much emotional depth and such complex and vivid characters dealing with traumatic pasts. Top tier second-chance romance.

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang — I can see how the premise is pretty extreme from the jump and how this might not be for everyone! But damn, this book had me transfixed. I loved how jagged and smart and complicated the characters were. I loved their banter and the tangled dynamic between them and how fleshed out they were as individual messy people, and how they were broken in overlapping ways and healed together. Also this was quite possibly the steamiest book I have ever read, fair warning if that is not your thing!

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke — I put off reading this for a while because I stumbled onto it while I was searching around for comps for my current project, and it seemed close in a way where I was like “oh no people will think I copied it!” Well this month I read it in a day and loved it—and also found it is actually quite different than what I was trying to do lol! This book is funny and poignant and bonkers. Highly recommend.

The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind — Also because of the book I’ve been writing, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of reading a lot of business nonfiction, and I’ve become…kind of obsessed with the story of Enron? I did not have that on my 2024 bingo card at the start of this year, but here we are! This book is full of wild details and big personalities. It’s deeply researched and reported and told in an accessible, absorbing way. I went in expecting to learn about one scandal, but in the end I felt like I learned a lot about late 20th century capitalism in general through this story of its extremes.

Paravi’s cover of “We Can’t Be Friends” — I listened to this song on loop because it captures the romance dynamic I was writing in OFFICE GHOST WIP, even better than the original. Such exquisite longing in this cover!

“365” by Charli XCX — This song feels as chaotic as my inner world right now, so it’s also been in heavy rotation.

“TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” by Beyoncé — The entire Cowboy Carter album is so good, but I’ve been listening to this song in particular on repeat, specifically because it was the perfect soundtrack to a chase sequence (yes lol a chase sequence) that I was writing.

Thanks so much for reading! Let’s do it again soon (actually next month this time, hopefully!)

Love always,

Clare