thinking about how words travel

also: my book is up on netgalley

When I started writing the book that would become my debut novel, MIDNIGHTS WITH YOU, it felt like the most intensely private thing. I didn’t tell most people about it. I wrote pretty much exclusively between the hours of 4 a.m. and 6 a.m.—since, you know, no one else was staking a claim to that time anyway. It felt kind of decadent, in a way, having a secret thing just for me.

So it’s so surreal, three and a half years later, that this story I wrote is going out into the world for strangers to . . . start reading it? Because it’s up on Netgalley for request now!

I’ve seen photos of advance review copies out in the wild on Instagram (though I don’t have copies of my own yet—you will hear about it when I do lol!), and people have told me they’ve requested and started reading. My heart swells with gratitude each time someone says that, because—wow, you’re reading something I wrote?? And it’s also lowkey terrifying, thinking about this thing that came out of my soft insides being perceived by other people.

(A lot of people did read it over the course of the years I was revising MWY—friends, critique partners, my agent and editor—and that was terrifying in its own way! But this is a different, new kind of vulnerable feeling. It’s funny how pursuing traditional publishing has introduced all these new shades of emotion I didn’t know about before).

I’ve talked in this newsletter before about how I rewrote MWY from top to bottom several times, and when I was in the thick of some of those overhauls, I had moments of feeling so acutely how difficult it is to communicate through words on a page. Like, it’s kind of wild, when you think about it: That thoughts from one person’s heart and mind coalesce into static words on a page and travel through time and space to get translated into meaning through the prism of a completely different person’s inner life. Now that this book is moving out into the world, I’m scared about the limits of my words in a new way all over again. But I put a lot of my heart into it, over those years I worked on this book, and I hope some of the heart shines through.

I guess I’ll end this with some of those (maybe limited, hopefully heartfelt) words!

I posted some snippets from MWY on Instagram for Valentine’s Day, but here’s a longer one for the newsletter:

It’s going to hurt, it’s going to hurt, the way Mom doesn’t want to buy flowers because they’re just going to die anyway—what do I think is going to happen?

In my head, flowers explode into bloom.

I grab the front of Jay’s shirt and pull him backward into the closet.

“Wow, okay!” He laughs as the door closes.

“Hi,” I say.

For a moment, together in the dark, we’re just voices and thoughts without bodies.

And then my face is buried in his neck, breathing in his smell. His hands are on my back, giving me the goose bumps I want.

Happy belated Valentine’s Day, and thanks so much for reading 💜

Love always,

Clare