i cry a lot but i am so productive

here i am being emo again

Months until MIDNIGHTS WITH YOU comes out: Six

Every spring for the past three years around this time, I’ve been working on MIDNIGHTS WITH YOU in some capacity. 

In May 2021, I was just in the daydreaming stages of starting on a full rewrite. After thinking the book died in the query trenches, I was considering whether to start on something new, but the characters from MWY just wouldn’t leave me alone, so I tore up the story and rewrote it top to bottom. I remember lying in bed thinking, I love these characters and I just want to give them their best chance. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was filled with hope and learning a lot, devouring craft books, listening to every publishing podcast I could find, excited to wake up early every morning to write.

In May 2022, I was newly agented and deep in the thick of my third full rewrite in the span of a year. I remember this time fondly—I was tired from reworking this story so many times, but I believed in my agent’s notes, and I love the stage of writing where you have a lot of the basic pieces of the story down and you know the characters well and you get to go through and work on telling it right instead of telling it at all. When I think back on that time, one day in particular sticks in my memory—I was rewriting one of my favorite scenes, and I was filled up with this sense of actually loving my own writing. 

(Redacted to remove a mention of a plot point lol)

I was scared of going on submission to editors, because I knew a lot of books don’t advance past that stage. So I was trying to enjoy the process of revising and spending time with the story, before I might (I thought then) have to say goodbye to it. (Surprise! I’d have another year of living inside that story ahead of me).

In May 2023, with a book deal announced and my first set of notes from my editor in hand, I was starting in on a big revision—not a full rewrite this time, but an overhaul that required cutting a lot of scenes and writing new ones but still keeping the heart of it and the emotional arcs, just amplified. I was so stressed about breaking whatever good things I’d accomplished with this book so far in pursuit of making these improvements—but in the end, I was so, so proud of this revision, and I felt like all the heart I’d intended since the beginning made it through intact.  

In May 2024, things are … weird. I am, in a sense, done working on this book—like, it has been sent off to its final printing! For real for real, I can never make editorial changes to it again! 

And at the same time, I’m still working on it, in the sense that I’m constantly thinking about new ways to pitch the story I’ve been living inside for almost four years—a story that feels like it might as well be one of my internal organs—in little videos and posts on the internet. 

It’s deeply weird to shift into selling something that feels so personal and close to me. Perhaps it was even…a bad idea? At least that’s how I’m feeling some of the time these days, in an Oh my God what was I thinking, why did I think I could do this, what have I done kind of way. I don’t want to sound ungrateful—I’m still amazed that any of this has happened at all. And I’ve been dreaming since I was literally four years old of publishing a novel one day. 

That’s all true, and, at the same time, I am not having a great time at the moment lol! Most days I feel pretty foolish and ashamed, like I’m in that dream where you’re standing in front of class naked, or something. In a weird way, I feel less hopeful than I did in spring 2021, even though I’ve accomplished some things I was only dreaming about then. And it feels increasingly impossible to explain to anyone why I feel this way. So I have my stock answers, when people ask how I’m feeling about the book coming out in six months: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” or “I’m on a journey 🤠” (the smiling cowboy emoji is silent) because I want to believe this is going to be character-building somehow.

In years past, I’ve gotten some of my best story ideas in the shower, or right before I go to sleep—but in spring 2024, half of the time, my shower ideas are about videos I could make, and when I reach for my notes app to jot down an idea before bed, it’s for a carousel I could put together or a caption I’m going to write.

On the positive side, half of the time is not all of the time, and I’m still drafting something new! I’m about 30,000 words into OFFICE GHOST WIP, and it’s a hot mess, but hey, to me, writing at all is life-affirming. For the first 20,000 words, I was kind of in a fugue state. I felt head over heels for this idea, giddy, a little crazed. Now I’m feeling more embarrassed and filled with doubt—like Why is this weird book what’s coming out of me? But I’m trying to muddle through anyway. 

Also! I went on a podcast for the first time—my friends at Rooting for U Pod had me on to talk about how to protect your mental health while querying. I told the whole story of my path from first draft to book deal, and shared some practical things I do to protect my sensitive heart in this weird industry. 

Another bright spot: For the past few years, around this time, I’ve gone to the LA Times Festival of Books and YALLWEST, and it’s heart-warming to see some of the same friends year after year, and to make new ones.

The craft department: Things that are keeping me drafting

I mentioned earlier that I have the most fun revising, when I already know the characters and the general shape of the story. Drafting, on the other hand—man, it can be rough when you don’t know the characters well yet, and you know you want growth to be happening or you want there to be an intense emotional scene, but you’re still basically working with stick-figure people. It usually takes me till the end of a first draft to start to know who the characters really are, and to understand what the story I want to tell should look like, even if the way I just wrote it is completely not that. I feel like a big part of the challenge for me in this stage is to just keep the momentum going to finish.

Here are a few things that are helping me keep going:

—Fifteen-minute sprints, inspired by Jesse Q. Sutanto. I don’t think I can ever hope to be as prolific as her, but the fifteen-minute sprints are helping me so far—lowering the barrier to starting a writing session, and giving me less time to overthink. When I started drafting MWY, I liked to do one unbroken ninety-minute sprint in the early morning. It worked for me then, somehow, but now I’m like: Wow, who was that person? Lately my head is just too full of noise for that, but I can push the noise away for fifteen minute intervals, at least.

—Writing myself notes about how I’m feeling about the draft. It helps me to get the feelings I’m having about the process out—to get the negative ones out of my head and make it easier to step back and assess them, and also to note when things go right, because otherwise I’ll just immediately forget it later. I do this in a running Google doc at the start of a session, between sprints, and at the end, and I find overall it helps make those feelings less distracting when I’m in the middle of writing.

—Taking chaotic notes about later scenes I’m excited to write, which motivates me to write toward them. (This is Susan Dennard’s magic cookies thing, basically). I let myself write little bits of dialogue and plan scenes all throughout the story whenever inspiration strikes me, but since I separate the brainstorming and writing-through-as-real-sentences steps anyway (I talked about this more in another newsletter), I brainstorm out of order and write through chronologically.

—Switching up the time I write. For three years, I was an early-morning writer—a member of the 5 a.m. writers club, or more often, 4 a.m. But maybe different books want to be written at different times of day, or maybe I’m just getting tired and changing, I don’t know. I’m more of an after-work writer for this new project, so I’m trying out different times and seeing how they feel. I’ve been doing way more 7 p.m. coffee-shop writing than I ever imagined I would.

—Having a few friends who are kind enough to remind me that I am not actually too stupid to write this book, and also that I should not be ashamed that it has somehow acquired a love triangle and a hot villain ?? (Truly the wonders of being a discovery writer never cease). Also reminding myself it’s a first draft, and I generally have to write it the wrong way to find out what it’s supposed to be, and worst case I can always just take the hot villain out when I (perhaps inevitably) rewrite it.

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 I’m challenging myself to tell you five things I honestly love about MWY every month until it comes out.

1. I love the ending. The pacing, the cadence, the weight, the emotion. I rewrote it so many times and struggled for a long time to get it right, and I’m so happy with how it finally turned out. Getting through the ending of the first draft felt like an exorcism. I cried when I wrote it, and I cried pretty much every time I rewrote it, and many of the times I’ve edited it since then.

2. I love how messy and chaotic and impulsive Deedee, the main character, is. She’s different from me in how bold she can be despite the ways she struggles with herself. She cracks me up a little bit.

3. It’s a story about a girl learning to overcome her self-loathing, and…that’s hard to do lol! I’m proud of her.

4. This story contains a lot of my real feelings about being a mixed-race Asian American, about being imperfectly and liminally Filipino, about growing up cut off from my culture. It was such a relief to put those feelings into words somewhere, because when I was a teenager, I felt so deeply illegible to everyone around me. So if nothing else—if I’d never gotten an agent or a book deal—I’d still love this book for helping me make a little more sense to myself.

5. People who’ve read it have said it’s beautiful, and also, secretly, even though I’ll flinch away from saying it too loud, I actually think it’s beautiful. It’s one of the things I feel like I was raised to think only other people can give you—like deciding you’re funny, or that your own face is beautiful. But having an independent sense of what your work might be is helpful—maybe even necessary?—for surviving an industry filled with so much rejection. And when I lie awake at night worrying that the performance of my latest social media post is a bellwether for how the market will receive my book or whatever, I try to remind myself, I wrote something beautiful.

April-May listening / reading / watching

Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie — I thought the prose was gorgeous, and the way this painful mother-daughter dynamic was rendered was incisive, challenging, sometimes ugly, other times unexpectedly tender. When I reached page 250, I was glad I had read the entire book, just to be able to read that scene.

With Love, From Cold World by Alicia Thompson — It took a little while for both main characters to grow on me, but once they did, I was hooked. The exhilaration that comes through in the parts where they’re falling for each other!! The build of their relationship has such a satisfying payoff. (Warning to any teenagers who might be reading this: this book is quite spicy, wait till you’re older to read it okay!!)

The Dark We Know by Wen-yi Lee — I was making my way slowly through this book because the prose is so gorgeous—it was a story I needed more time to soak in. I loved how everything culminated in the end, and how the speculative/horror elements were rendered so poetically. Made me cry and left my heart feeling so full.

Saltburn (2023) — Somehow from reviews and friends’ takes, my vague impression of Saltburn was “dark and serious weird sex movie.” I didn’t expect it to be so funny?? But the dialogue and comic timing were great, and some parts had me hooting and hollering. (The turnover in footmen!) I also appreciated the commitment to making a 2006 period piece that came through in the music and clothing choices.

Wall Street (1987) — I watched this for research and I liked it way more than I was expecting. I appreciated the overall arc of the story, and the very ‘80s aesthetic. Weird to see Charlie Sheen looking like such a fresh-faced youth. I loved that Martin Sheen played his dad—more actual parent-child duos should play parents and children in movies.

Single’s Inferno Season 3 — LOOK, I am shocked to be saying this, but this was basically a perfect season of television. I always get bored with reality dating shows and how fake and unromantic they feel, but somehow this one had me riveted from start to finish? I was so emotionally invested in all of these people! Impressed that Gwan-hee was an agent of chaos all the way to the end, and that a reality TV show where the most anyone does is hold hands could feel so much more romantic than any of the other ones I’ve seen.

White Lotus Season 2 — I’m late to this, but I binged it this month and found it so satisfying and well written, especially the way all the different plot threads tie up together at the end.

“we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” by Ariana Grande — Yes, like everyone else, I was also listening to TTPD this month (as the title of this newsletter suggests lol). But this is the song I listened to on loop the most consistently, because it fits the romance dynamic I’m currently trying to write. 

The Zo “Good Luck Babe” video — Possibly the most delightful thing I have seen in a while.

Thanks so much for reading! Let’s do it again next month 💜

Love always,

Clare