Making a fabulous mess

And the Lammys

Hi friends,

On Tuesday I had the incredible experience of attending the Lambda Literary Awards ceremony at Sony Hall in New York City. It was the honor of my life so far to be nominated for the award in bisexual fiction alongside Ruth Madievsky, Sarah James, Ling Ling Huang, and Haley Jakobson. Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty took the prize (congratulations!!), but I felt like we all won just getting to celebrate the large and growing number of queer books being published every year. It was a fantastic, memorable evening—and also my nineteenth wedding anniversary!

Anniversary at the Lammys!

Now that I’m back home, back to hanging out alone in my PJs and writing, I need to turn my attention back to my novel-in-progress. The one I’ve been thinking about as a queer Handmaid’s Tale meets 9 to 5. I’m looking forward to digging in and returning to #1000WordsOfSummer.

A few weeks ago at the local vegan diner, I saw a toddler eating donuts, chewing away with glee, covered in frosting from their hands to their face. And I thought: this is what writing feels like right now. Working on this novel, I’m making a complete mess, playing carelessly at times with words, and falling in love with writing all over again.

Usually when I’m drafting a novel, my guiding principle is to keep pushing forward, through the first draft and through every revision. No looking back, no getting stalled, for fear I’ll never finish if I let myself get hung up too long in any one place.

But for the current novel revision, this approach doesn’t work. From the start, it’s been dictating how it wants to be written. The first draft refused to come out on my computer, so I gave in and wrote mostly longhand. Now that I’m revising, it’s demanding that I keep returning to the first third of the book, to develop the world down to its most crucial details, get crystal clear on character motivation, and give myself a rock solid foundation to build on before I move forward.

Ideas are coming to me out of order, so I’m writing new material and revising old material however it comes. I’m going with my impulses and trusting whatever my characters want to tell me in the moment.

I’m also reading outside my usual genres and studying craft advice, taking an experimental attitude toward the structure of the novel, the character’s voices, and the possibilities inherent in both. I say attitude because it really does feel more like an experimental attitude than an actual approach at this point.

As a writer, there’s nothing better to me than finding ways to keep falling in love with what I do. So even if much of this experimentation ends up going out the window, I feel that it’s valuable in that it allows me stay motivated and also to go deeper into the story than I could if I left my usual rules in place. I believe something important is happening, even if I can’t see the end result yet. Plus, the process of writing a novel can take years, so why not have fun along the way?

I hope whatever you’re working on is leading you to new discoveries about your work and yourself as a writer. If you’re trying new things, I’d love to hear how it’s going.

Yours from a sticky mountain of frosting,

Jen