is a Ship of Theseus metaphor too obvious?

(I turned my draft in)

Happy Friday! Been a weird couple of weeks!! For literally everyone. I’m not even specifically talking here about my own life (though, like—that also). I hope you’re getting through it all alright.

One part of why it’s been weird (for me)—as of last Thursday, Book 2 is officially on my editor’s desk! Nine months late! While I am immensely relieved to have a break from staying up until three every night to work on it, it’s also such a strange feeling. I miss these characters the literal second I’m not living in their world anymore. They feel real to me in a truly indescribable way.

Gene & Luis also always felt very real to me, but it was more like I was writing a fictional story about real people, if that makes sense. I think it’s because The Prospects went through so many iterations of itself—so many genres, so many plots, so many changes—that, by the time I landed on the final, I was very aware that Gene & Luis’s story could’ve gone a lot of different ways while still being theirs. They existed years before their book did. While with Book 2’s characters, it feels like I’m carving out their real lives as I write. For (I think?) the first time, I had the concept before I had the people, and it’s been odd to learn the book in that order—I worried that it would make them feel very cardboard, but it’s been sort of the opposite. I feel like I could look into their closets and already know every piece of clothing I’d find there, and how wrinkly it’d be; I could be walking through Trader Joe’s and see them talking next to the canned tomatoes. You know?

Anyway.

I wanted to write something about my edits, but I can’t really tell you…basically anything about this book just yet. Which is a little tricky!! But everything about this book has been a little tricky, so—whatever, we’ll figure it out. Here’s my little update on draft three of Book 2, and some backstory on why I’m only now turning in a draft, nine months after I intended to do so! Just because sometimes I think it’s nice to hear that it’s normal for this stuff to take real, impossible-to-speed-up time.

(For the record: technically I have a working title, but it’s gotten no approvals from anyone of consequence. Literally just me & my roommate, whom I texted “is this a shitty title??” at midnight, two days before I turned it in. So it will almost certainly change! It really is, for all intents and purposes, just Book 2 for now.)

Some very quick backstory: when we sold The Prospects in May 2022, it was in a two-book deal. My editor had seen some very basic pitches of other ideas I had, so she knew I had other stuff cooking, but there was very little contractually outlined about Book 2. So, I knew it would also be published by Dial, and edited by the same editor who I worked with on The Prospects (hi Katy!), but really none of us knew specifically what that book would be. Exciting/terrifying!

I formally pitched three ideas for Book 2 in April 2023. Of those three books, there was: one that I felt very confident I could write, but that didn’t feel super exciting to me; a second, that I absolutely loved but which didn’t feel like a totally appropriate follow-up to The Prospects, for a few reasons; and a third, that I’d been thinking about basically nonstop for about a year at that point, and which I wanted desperately to write but was not entirely sure I would be able to pull off.

For each of those books, I designed these one-pager pitch documents, including the following details:

• A working title—just something I frantically scribbled before submitting; I hated all three, but whatever, I hate calling things “untitled” (I have since changed Book 2’s working title)

• Genre—two romantic comedies and one romantic dramedy (though genre sure is tricky, isn’t it?? please imagine me making that panicked smiling face that Pearl makes in Pearl, a movie I have exclusively seen through memes)

• Location—two west coast, one east; all cities I’ve lived in

• Time period—have I mentioned I started out a historical fiction writer??

• Statistics/By the Numbers—this was a fun little section where I wrote up fake “stats” for the book, with sliding 1-10 scales/temperature gauges/whatever for things like “T4T” or “friends-to-lovers” or “Portland grunge” (none of these are a hint for Book 2!¹ you can’t trick me!!)

• Premise—a 2-3 paragraph query-style pitch, where I got to expand a little more on the idea and themes beyond a standard elevator pitch

• Characters—little one-paragraph sections where I gave name/age/basic characteristics of the protagonist and the love interest for each book (as a writer, I am a single-POV devotee, so there is always A Protagonist and A Love Interest)

• Art—for one of the books (the one I ended up writing), I got to include preliminary character sketches by Sarah; if you ever need to make a character feel immediately REAL, and you can afford to do it, commission an immensely talented artist to draw them!! Dear god! Sarah is so fucking good at this shit!

Someday, when the book has been announced and I don’t have to redact everything about the project, I’ll show you the one-pager. I still love it.

Once I’d finished, I sent all three documents to my agent and told her which one I was most excited about. She agreed, my editor agreed, and we set January 1, 2024 as the tentative first draft due date. That gave me about eight months, which felt eminently doable to me at the time. I’ve written full novels in a lot shorter time frames than eight months, I’ll tell you that much.

But then circumstances circumstanced, and that deadline started feeling a lot less doable. Even with the delays, I was determined to finish before The Prospects published, which meant I had to finish by the time April rolled around. I went to Seattle for a few days to catch a Mariners game² before my book launch in Oregon, and I really wanted to just enjoy those last moments before my book was out. Also, I knew that Being Published was going to fuck with my head (it did! and also it didn’t! that’s a whole other newsletter!), and I wanted Book 2 to exist, in some form, completely separate from that “I know what it’s like to have a published novel” feeling.

That first draft finally landed April 1, three months late, the day before I flew to Seattle, on Gene’s birthday/sort of the day The Prospects canonically starts.³ It felt right to finish that day. But I was also painfully aware that that draft was not fully cooked.

You see, no matter how much I outline—and I outline a fair deal, do not come lecture me!—I never fully know what a book is truly about until I’m about 80% of the way finished with a first draft. Honestly, almost nothing at all changed from that pitch document to the actual draft—yes, a couple little details got tweaked, but all of the scaffolding is there. If I showed you that pitch, you’d have a great idea of what Book 2 is about.

The problem is, a pitch or an outline can really only cover so much. All of the details hadn’t yet fallen into place, and, as it always happens, I just couldn’t know all the things I didn’t know about this book and these characters until—80000 or so words later—I knew them.

So I asked if I could sit on the book for a bit, while I launched The Prospects. I did just that, putting Book 2 largely out of my mind for the remainder of April.

By May, I could identify a few very key elements I wanted to edit before my team read the book. I sent bullet points to my agent, summing those edits up, and we agreed that I should try to spend the month tackling those goals before sending the draft in.

These weren’t huge changes—I find it’s kind of hard to make those when almost no one has read the book and you can’t talk things through much at all, but some changes really are necessary to make before other people dive in!—and by June 1, the document comparison looked like this:

can you tell where I realized that a month really is not that long, lolol

The edits are super front-loaded! The first few chapters got changed pretty significantly, in those places where I’m trying to really set the book up right. Then you can see one chapter in the middle that I wholesale rewrote. A few spots here and there, elsewhere, with EDIT-edits, but mostly tweaks. Basically, I was just trying to make it good enough that my agent (and a couple friends who had kindly offered to read) would be able to see the shape of the thing I was trying to do here.

On June 1, I sent the book in; I got notes back from my agent a bit later, had a check-in, and we ended up deciding to do another round of edits before my editor saw it.

I compiled every note and comment that my agent and her assistant gave me, in my own words, in a bullet point list, separated out by category (“character,” “plot/structure,” “craft,” and “miscellaneous”; imperfect categories as obviously they have a lot of overlap, but I did my best), then I added any comments my friends had made/questions they’d asked/things we’d discussed, then finally I added my own edits that I’d been stewing on for about a month.

From that list, I made a twenty-thousand-word revision plan, complete with a TABLE OF CONTENTS (redacted here):

I hear you saying “hey maybe your edits could’ve been done a day earlier if you hadn’t been so anal about the formatting,” and I’m ignoring you.

I could write a whole newsletter on literally any of these sub-sections. Except, admittedly, when I got to the actual chapter outlines, I was like, I AM RUNNING OUT OF TIME, and I didn’t actually do them. This book barely changed in a structural sense, though, so (I think) it was okay for me to skip the nitty-gritty “here is every single event that happens, every character that appears, every character that is mentioned, everything that every character is thinking/feeling, every subplot that gets hit and how it moves forward, etc. etc., for every single chapter” stuff this time around.

I then spent August and September editing again, by which I mean: I rewrote a huge portion of this book, and re-typed all the sections I didn’t rewrite, so I could change/cut/revise/restructure/rewrite sentences and full paragraphs as I went. I was trying to make sure each piece felt like it was serving the story in the way I wanted it to. THIS TOOK A LOT OF TIME!! I will still undoubtedly change a lot of this stuff again! But these things have a way of snowballing, and in the end, the document comparison from draft 2 to draft 3 is kind of a bloodbath:

in the midst of it, I often felt like, “Wow, could you possibly be working any slower?” but now that I look at this, honestly…two months feels more than fair. it was a lot of work!

This is what I mean when I say I’m not a drafter, but an editor. Perhaps you understand the Ship of Theseus reference in the title now. Aside from a few things, the bones of this book did not change this summer—and yet!

You can see a lot more places where I fully rewrote shit this time, a lot more spots where I did intensive edits. I lost some of my favorite jokes but added better ones. I hacked away at favorite scenes and added new ones to fall in love with. Then, there is still that section of mostly white down at the bottom, about 45-50 pages, where I made comparatively very few changes, but honestly—this time, it wasn’t because I petered out. It was because, by those last few chapters, I knew more or less what this book was, even in that first draft. I didn’t want to change all that much. I just had to fix a lot of pieces ahead of that point to make sure that this book also knew what this book was, you know?

At 106,574 words, this is the longest thing I’ve written since 2018. As an unrepentant Long Book Lover, I’m so happy that this one is a bit chunky. Also, draft two had 178 uses of the word “fuck,” and this one only has 62, which is a very funny number to put the word “only” in front of, I know. 62 is A LOT, objectively. But it’s very few for me!

All of this is to say: I finally turned in a draft of Book 2 to my editor last week. Sarah got me a cake, because they love a Cake Occasion, and I can’t show you that cake because the writing on it is kind of a spoiler, but it was very nice of them. I already miss the characters, and also I am so grateful for this break from working on their story.

This is one of my favorite moments of a project—when it still kind of feels like the book could be anything, but also, I know what it is, and there’s time to make it the best possible iteration of that thing. Edits feel a little magical to me, in that way. How fucking cool, to get to try, and try again! And still find at least one embarrassing typo, every time!⁴

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News & Updates

Should I just re-title this section “reviews of things that you absolutely did not ask for” until I have actual publishing news? Because:

• I thought I wouldn’t care about the 2024 MLB postseason, but at this point if the Mets don’t make it to the World Series, I’m going to be so sad. The soundtrack in our apartment has just been an ongoing refrain of “let’s go Mets, baby, love da Mets, hit a home run!” for the last week+, and it’s been fun to enjoy baseball in a way that feels like it has no lasting stakes.

• It brings me no pleasure to say this, but I do not like the new Zelda game! It’s kind of boring, the mechanics are clunky, and frankly, I think it’s vaguely sexist! Why can’t she even JUMP as high as Link! That’s just silly. If you want to play as Zelda (which—don’t we all??), just get Age of Calamity. That game is underrated.

• Sarah and I watched the first two seasons of Yellowjackets in like three days, and I felt an unshakeable Existential Dread about it for three additional days afterwards. Fuck, dude. I don’t know that I LIKED it, but I sure could not stop watching it!

• Maybe at the end of October, I’ll write up a list of all of our Halloween watches. We got kind of a late start this year, due to the aforementioned edits, but so far we’ve re-watched Little Shop of Horrors, Get Out, Us, Spirited Away, and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. We also watched Alien and The Thing for the first time. HOW DOES KURT RUSSELL’S HAIR LOOK SO GOOD IN THE THING & WHERE CAN I GET THOSE STYLING TIPS.

1. Okay I lied, ONE of those is a hint for Book 2! :-) Don’t guess which one though, please, I’ll feel so silly if you guess the ones that I didn’t write, lol

2. That was my first ever Mariners home game! They lost miserably, it was so cold, I’d gotten off a 6am flight just three hours earlier, and my eyes were bloodshot beyond belief. I had the best fucking time.

3. I say “sort of” because The Prospects doesn’t take place in 2024! It takes place in 2022. It doesn’t really matter, though. It could just as easily take place in 2024, or 2018, or basically any year where smartphones existed. Other than 2020, because the minor league season was cancelled that year. The only thing that makes 2022 canonical is Gene & Luis’s birth years, which are exclusively listed on the preorder incentive baseball cards.

4. Sarah read this draft in chunks as I wrote it, because I needed a) encouragement, and b) someone to tell me if ANY of the changes I was making really landed; I tell you this as backstory, so I can tell you that they caught THE worst typo in this draft, which was that I’d written that the love interest KICKED the protagonist’s elbow, when of course I’d meant KISSED, dear god, talk about one single word setting the wrong tone.