I have, generally, not always been good at any of this, but in particular, I think knowing what each book is about is something I don’t fully understand until the book is finished. Even then, I often don’t fully understand a book’s heart until I’ve had some time away from its immediate creation. After edits, after other folks have started reading it, after I’ve been able to sit back and reflect a bit.

So on its release day, at this moment, this is why I think I wrote Among the Wildflowers.

• I wanted to write about the bravery of choosing what’s best for you, what makes you truly happiest, even if that comes with huge consequences/breaks your heart at the same time.

• I just wanted to write a farm book!! Writing about our ecological systems and about our food is what I am pretty much always wanting to write about. And it’s cool to just do what you want!

• My overarching goal with this series is exploring the expansiveness of love, fighting back against the narrative that we are only afforded one great love, one happily ever after in our lifetimes. I want to explore the messy area between monogamy and polyamory because I feel there is so much messiness and so much love that fits between those two, that doesn’t always have perfect labels.

  • In particular for this story: There are so many evil exes in romance, which I’ve thought about a lot and have many queer thoughts about. But what if your ex was great, actually? What if your lives just didn’t fit anymore but everything you went through together is still really important? What if you could find new love while still honoring all the love you’ve already been blessed with? That’s what this book is about, and even if not everyone agrees with the mess I’ve made lol, I really believe in the future of Emerson, Luca, Jayden, Daisy, and everyone and everything else that might ever become part of their world.

• Related to the first bullet point, but also slightly different: all my work lately also revolves around art and the toll it takes, both fiscal and mental, and the strength needed to keep trying anyway. Luca’s a writer; Emerson’s a farmer, but their pursuit of their art is the same: the struggle of knowing that it’s everything they are, while the world does everything it can to try to beat it out of them.

• When I sign books, I try to think of one small phrase from that book that seems to capture the essence of that specific story, that I can scribble down in addition to my signature when the mood strikes. There were probably several I could’ve chosen for this one, but I ended up landing on some of the messages from a speech Luca’s mom gives him when he’s having a wee lil’ dark moment of the soul (or, in his own words, a peak emo moment). I am very cognizant that these messages (which I won’t ruin the surprise of here) veer a little messages-you-might-see-screenprinted-on-pillows-at-Home-Goods. Meaning, part of me wants to cringe about it but I am deciding to stand by it anyway, because Luca’s mom is smart! Is it possible that, as I stumble into my mid-forties, I am simply gravitating more toward messages of gratitude that one might see screen-printed on pillows? Maybe!

• Most romances are most compelling when the main characters are markedly different from each other: different, but complementary. It’s what makes the tension and the romance so sweet. I normally strive for this as well—writing markedly different people coming together is also just fun. But in Wildflowers, I admit that Emerson and Luca are pretty similar to each other in a lot of ways. Because sometimes that’s what you need, too. They are both pretty lonely, a bit sad. They are both extremely hard workers and extremely kind. I think they came out this way because I always envisioned this being a generally soft book, but especially in our current cultural landscape, where cruelty is the point, where individualism is seen as the golden goal no matter what the cost to society’s well-being—I just really needed to spend time with two good people being good to each other. I included so many of my previous characters, I made Luca’s family big and loving, I made Greyfin Bay a safe haven because I needed to spend time in community. A few early reviewers have mentioned this book feeling hopeful, and while hopeful wasn’t necessarily a specific word on my mind while I was drafting (even if it’s likely always subconsciously there, being that hopeful is an inherent quality of romance), only when I saw that word in reviews did I realize it meant a lot to me.

If you get to read it, I hope it provides a few hours of being a soft, hopeful place to land for you, too.

Housekeeping

Okay, some less philosophical things!

• If you pre-ordered a signed paperback from me, they should be in the mail this week—or next week at the very latest. (I was hoping to get them all in the mail last week, but there have been countless delays in shipping/the books actually getting to me; alas, self-publishing is always a wild goose chase.) Once my fine local postal employees take your copy from my hands, I’ll send you a confirmation email with the tracking number.

  • If you receive your order and something is awry: it arrives damaged; I forgot to include the map and sticker; I wrote the wrong name or spelled your name wrong (THE WORST) (these are all things I constantly fear), please please let me know!

  • Feel free to still order one, if you’d like—I’ll keep this order form up for a week or so and then transition to using my Etsy, where you can order signed editions of any of my self-published works.

• If you’re a bookstore owner hoping to order paperbacks (thank you!!), it should become available soon on Ingram; I just cannot guarantee when. I’m so sorry. You can also order directly from me, if you’d like.

• It should also, hopefully, be available to request for purchase from your local library. If you need this info for your request, the print ISBN is 978-1-737229858.

• There is currently no audiobook, but you will be the first to hear if that changes! crosses fingers

• If you happened to read an early copy and enjoyed it (or whenever you read it, if you enjoy it!), the greatest gift to me would be if you could leave a review somewhere! I appreciate your time and care so much.

• If you got an early copy and didn’t get a chance to read it, no worries whatsoever. As often happens, though, I did make some changes after more feedback—nothing that changes the story overall, just some things that make it stronger—so I’d love if you’re able to read the updated, published version instead whenever you get to it!

Want to read the first chapter?

I meant to copy and paste the first chapter into this newsletter in celebration of release day, but then I rambled about all the above first, so now there’s probably not enough room left in my word limit.

But if you want to read the first chapter before you buy, feel free to read it here!

Okay, that’s enough from me for now! Reminder that if you’re in the Portland area and want to hear me talk about Among the Wildflowers and Greyfin Bay in general (the first event I’ve ever done for the series!), I’ll be chatting about it with Alison Cochrun at Grand Gesture Books next Wednesday, June 10th. You can RSVP here.

Thanks so much for all your support,

xo

anita

Another one of those administrative things is pre-order stuff, and I was hoping to have it all physically available for photos before I posted about it. But the postcards likely won’t be delivered for another week and I want to tell you about it NOW, to help me get back to caring about the book itself again. So here we go!

If you pre-order a physical copy, these goodies will come with your copy automatically. I will also have them available at my in-person launch for the book at Grand Gesture Books with Alison Cochrun on June 10th. (Click this link to RSVP and/or order a copy through them!) If you’ve pre-ordered an ebook, or requested purchase from your local library, or really anything else (I won’t be requiring evidence for any of this) and want the swag, fill out this form. This last option will be an until-I-run-out situation, but hopefully I’ll have stuff leftover and can send to as many folks as possible.

First up: a Short King Farms sticker!

The logo is designed by bestie & graphic designer Manda Bednarik, and the stickers are printed by local Portland sticker kings, Sticker Ninja. I always love being able to support other local businesses when I do these things, and Sticker Ninja’s quality and customer service is the best. They always send a few little extra treats with their shipments, one of which this time was a sparkly sticker proclaiming queer joy is a revolution, a central tenet of Heartwaves (and I mean, all my work?) so it felt especially Right!

Next: postcard with a map of Short King Farms!

I had a really clear vision in my head while writing this book of what Short King Farms looked like, and since almost the entirety of this book takes place on the farm, by the end of drafting I knew I should probably include a map for readers to refer to.

Of course, it doesn’t actually matter if how I picture the farm matches how readers picture it—it’s beautiful, in my opinion, when these things differ—but also, I have always really wanted a map. A grayscale version of it will be included in the final version of the book, but this full-color one will only be available via the pre-order postcard.

Not everything is perfectly to scale in this map—I picture the walk from Sally’s Barn to the wildflower field, for instance, taking a good ten-to-fifteen minutes at least, with a lot more forest between the two. But we wouldn’t have been able to express that without squeezing the actual farming beds—which again, take up more space in my head than is expressed here. Just as I picture the animals’ pastures also being quite large, but there wasn’t room for that on the map while still including the hill to the orchard. Anyway, you get it, BUT—for what we are able to fit in a postcard/single picture, this is approximately where everything is located! And it was so, so fun seeing it all drawn out by Nina Tysovska, who was so kind and accommodating with all my tiny tweaks and requests.

I was also proud of myself for including the name of the actual book on the back of the postcard, something I failed to do for the Greyfin Bay postcard I made for Heartwaves. Which in my head made sense at the time—I wanted it to look like a real postcard someone would send to a loved one, not just some marketing gimmick—but have since had several signing events with this postcard out on my table. And when I’ve watched strangers who know nothing about me or my books pick this postcard up and stare at it blankly, it has occurred to me that I am not that good at marketing. (But I’m learning! Maybe!)

Something else I’m proud of accomplishing: I now have an order form for (US) indie bookstores who want to order my indie books directly from me. (So Among the Wildflowers, Heartwaves, and any of Moonlighters.)

If you’re a local Portland, Oregon-area store (which includes pretty much any suburb), I’m happy to drop off any orders in person. For any other store in the US, I’ll ship using USPS media mail (the cheapest way possible). All books will be signed (if you want!) and checked for print quality.

Indie bookstores are one of the few things in our current world that bring me genuine joy and optimism for the future. Thank you for all you do!

While I’m here, here are five things I’ve enjoyed recently:

1. This is a Gardening Show with Zach Galifianakis, on Netflix: Obviously, y’all know this show was made for me simply from the title, but it truly is super charming and pure, and in a dark world, I’ll take all the charming and pure I can get. Each episode is short, about 15 minutes, covering topics from growing tomatoes to foraging. He also interviews kids about whatever the topic of the day is, who are always, of course, super cute, and as an extra bonus for me, I turned it on yesterday afternoon after work when my kid was grounded and super grumpy about being grounded. [He can’t watch his own shows whilst being grounded but is free to watch anything we happen to turn on.] He was, accordingly, grumpy at first about watching a dumb gardening show with his dumb mom (during an argument a few days prior he had declared that all adults are boring because all they do is garden, a point spat angrily in front of three adults when that statement was only true about one of them [me] lol). But soon enough he was laughing at all the kid interviews and—against his will!!!—was super engaged!! I almost floated right off the couch!

2. Wreck, Catherine Newman: I loved Catherine Newman’s Sandwich last year, so much, and I recently finished this follow-up. Her writing is so sharp and funny and observant and voice-y, the tone and content super slice-of-life-y, like literally all of my favorite things. But serious topics are always hidden underneath all the laughs, keeping things almost cleverly propulsive. & I feel like Newman had a much taller order with this one: Sandwich took place during an annual summer vacation to the Cape, while Wreck deals with the family back at home in Western Mass. And well, vacation is always more fun and entertaining than real life back home. In particular in this one, there’s a storyline with Rocky’s son that I find myself still thinking about, weeks after finishing it. In a world where there are such clear sides these days, it tackles what happens when someone you love deeply engages in work/something/ethics you deeply disagree with, and idk—it just made me uncomfortable in this way that I think it was meant to, in a way I can’t clearly articulate just yet, but it’s really lingered with me.

3. Noah Kahan: Out of Body, also on Netflix: Obviously I am (slowly) absorbing Kahan’s newest album, even if the fact that he is now so popular and just Everywhere in all my feeds has made me hesitant to talk about it out loud. Which is weird, and frustrating to myself, because I’ve always hated the “I won’t vocally support a thing because it’s popular” stance, which should be obvious from my love of romance novels. Still, I think it has to do with how personal Kahan’s music has always felt for me, and it’s weird seeing it hyper-consumed because I want to get back to it being Just For Me. Which sounds selfish but I think is actually really important in terms of how we consume art—I am constantly trying to get back to the Just For Me mindset with books, too. But anyway—
   
   Before the release of the album, we watched the documentary on Netflix that was made in the period of time post-Stick Season blowing up, when he was playing Fenway Park and trying to work on this new album. It was really fascinating to me how vulnerable and personal this documentary was, how we got to meet his whole family basically; I also appreciated how open he was about his body dysmorphia. But really, this is a documentary about burnout, and there were so many things I related to. In particular, there’s a moment where he talks about how thoroughly disconnected he feels from music, and another moment when he’s talking about Nashville, how he wants to get away from a place where everyone’s always asking about his streaming numbers. Different, obviously, but that’s how I feel any time I even venture onto Threads lol. I don’t want to know your book sale numbers; I want to know about your dog. How your folks are doing, how your garden’s looking this year. I constantly feel disconnected from writing at the same time that I constantly fear it’s the only thing I’m actually qualified to do.
   
   I also loved how, like his music, this documentary was so firmly centered around place: I really felt like I was in Strafford, Vermont. My life, like everyone’s, also feels so firmly centered in place—I wouldn’t be who I am without Pennsylvania, Boston, or Portland; I think about all three of these places all the time—so setting has always been really important to me in my work, too. It’s made me think about how connected I feel to other work that’s firmly centered in a specific place, something that isn’t always central to music as an art form but when it is, it really pulls me in/matters to me in the same way it does in books. This is likely the topic of another essay entirely so I’ll stop here.
   
   One of my favorite parts about watching the documentary, though, was that my wife watched it, too, who’s not as big of a Noah fan (she doesn’t dislike him, just hasn’t listened to his music as much as I have) and is generally more well-adjusted than the rest of us, and at the end she said, “I’m kind of concerned for him?” lol

4. Books that aren’t out yet: Some of my favorite books I’ve read this year are drafts of friends’ books that aren’t out until 2027. I think I already mentioned Alicia Thompson’s 2027 book, but since then I’ve also read Ari Baran’s next release, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, and Sarah T. Dubb’s 2027 release, and I loved them both so much. They are both so queer, and hot (while dealing with sex in really interesting ways), and feature characters I can’t get out of my head.

5. Go Away, Best Coast & Weezer: This is going to be one of my top jams of the summer; there’s something so beautifully simple and fun and almost throwback-y and just Weezer-ish about it. I love pop music!!!

I also totally forgot until recently that I made a resolution a year or so ago to finish each newsletter with a photo of the garden and a photo of one of the dogs. A resolution I clearly forgot after a few newsletters, but I’m bringing it back (until I inevitably forget about it again)!!

xo

anita

ARC signups are available for Among the Wildflowers!

As I say in the form, ARCs to me are mostly a temperature check, to make sure I and the other folks who have already read this book haven’t missed anything too glaring or offensive. Anyone is free to sign up, as long as you are over 18. I’ll choose a small amount of folks totally randomly next week, and send out the ARCs shortly thereafter!

Release for this one is exactly two months away (6.2.26, what a fun date is THAT), and I’m in the process of doing my final, super-nitpicky read-through, similar to pass pages in trad pub, where I try to cut down all my excessive wordiness and maybe fix some of my commas. (I know some of my commas are incorrect but I choose to keep them for voice! I stand by doing a lot of things “wrong” for voice and rhythm! Your choices are your own! Let yourself stand for your gut and exercise free will whenever you are able!!)

This stage of the writing process is always both fraught and restorative for me. One moment I pick the manuscript up to overanalyze every single sentence, I fucking hate it! Then the very next time I try again, I love it so much I want to cradle it in my arms.

You will be shocked to know that this book and the book I currently have on sub both deal with how weird/embarrassing/excruciating making art is. Something I didn’t actually even fully realize until I sat down with both manuscripts recently and was like…huh. Guess I’ve been going through it!! lol (everyone knows I’ve been going through it)

(Although, while it’s a bit louder of a theme in these two recent books, this isn’t a new theme for me at all, really: Mateo in Donut Summer angsts about their art; Aiden in Our Favorite Songs is my tortured poet; and it’s the same emotion, really, for any character who both loves something and is hurt by it: Elle and basketball in How You Get the Girl; Dahlia and cooking in Love & Other Disasters. I know complaining about making art is a common theme throughout all art, which I’m sure many see as annoyingly meta and/or navel-gaze-y, but I don’t know. I’m certainly grateful for all the characters who have helped me work through things, who have taught me things, who have told me things I needed to hear. Isn’t that the point of all this?)

In seriousness, lots of things have been stressing me out lately: THE WORLD; job hunting; dealing with the current day job; parenting and generally surviving as a human; juggling various writing projects and responsibilities; even other media. (I’m reading Atmosphere and watching Pluribus and catching brief bits of when my wife watches The Pitt and I know everything is very good and I’m glad people are making good things but also sometimes it feels like I need a Xanax for consuming anything in this world lol.) But in the midst of it all, any time I am able to work on this read-through and return to the world of Short King Farms again, my whole psyche kind of sighs in relief and says OH THANK GOD.

Which is all to say—working on this book has been very comforting, and I hope reading it is the same for you, too.

Also: it’s not officially announced yet/there’s no RSVP link or anything, but I will be chatting with Alison Cochrun about Among the Wildflowers at Grand Gesture Books here in Portland on Wednesday, June 10th at 6 PM.

This is the first event I’ll have done for anything in the Greyfin Bay universe, so I’m both excited and nervous! Please come and chat about queer love on the Oregon Coast with me. Thank you as always to Grand Gesture’s Katherine for always supporting and encouraging me.

Reminder that you can pre-order a signed & personalized paperback copy of Among the Wildflowers (if you live in the US) using this form. And pre-order the ebook pretty much anywhere! (The paperback will also be more widely available for purchase on release day.)

Lastly, I just threw up an AMA over on Instagram, but you can also ask me anything right here. :)

Okay, off to get more work done! Much love to you all,

anita

First up: How You Get the Girl is on sale (ebook) for $2.99 all March!

Next up: I have an entry in the Lit for Queer Liberation auction. It’s your choice of whatever three of my books you’d like, signed and personalized (if you’d like), along with a guaranteed eARC of Among the Wildflowers when I have those ready.

Next: I have a couple chill events coming up! This Saturday, I’ll be celebrating the first birthday of Portland’s queer indie bookstore, Always Here! Rosiee Thor and I will be hanging out from 12-2, signing our own books but also playing guest booksellers as we recommend lots of other books, too.

Also, looking a bit ahead, I’ll be celebrating Indie Bookstore Day on April 25th with Endless Wonders, a new queer-owned bookshop in the Montavilla neighborhood. I’ll be hanging out and signing books from 2 - 3 PM.

I also now have a form available for signed & personalized paperback pre-orders of Among the Wildflowers. I’m doing it the same way I did pre-orders of Heartwaves because it worked well for me, even though I’m sure there are better ways to do it. Just fill out the form—while paying careful attention that you type your full mailing address and correct email address—and I’ll send you an invoice via PayPal for $23 ($18 for the book, $5 for shipping). Once that’s paid, I’ll send you your book + swag whenever I have final copies available!

Unfortunately due to costs I can only ship books to US readers right now, but readers from other countries are also free to fill out the form and I’ll mail you the swag and a bookplate (no charge). (Hopefully I’ll have details about what the swag will be soon.)

I’ll hopefully also have a form to sign up for ARCs, as well as an order form for any indie bookstore who might want to order copies directly from me, in the coming months.

Reminder that Among the Wildflowers is my let’s-fall-in-love-and-have-lots-of-sex-on-a-farm m/m romance set on the Oregon Coast. It’s out June 2nd. Ebook pre-order links should now also be up on all platforms, including Kobo and Bookshop.org.

Okay, I think that was all the news I had to share. While I’m here, here are five things I’ve been enjoying lately:

• I didn’t know 2026 would be my year of Gay Tennis Romance, but I am so very down for it. So far I have loved both The Open Era by Edward Schmit (coming in June) and In Your Court by Kit Haley (coming in May), and I’m just as equally looking forward to reading Thirty Love by Tom Vellner (just out!).

• I also can’t stop thinking about how much I loved The Shots You Take by Rachel Reid. This book is everything I want (to both read and write), and finding a book like that in the wild/outside of my own head is the most comforting thing in the world.

• I recently read Fredrik Bachman’s newest, My Friends, and while I’ve read a couple others of his (My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: I liked it!; Anxious People: didn’t love it), wow wow wow did I love this one. Again, it’s kind of made for me: all about art and sadness (sad gay people in particular) and youth and love, so yeah, I ate it up.

• I have also been making my way through Avon Gale’s Scoring Chances series and having a wonderful time. Last year I read historical romance almost exclusively to save my sanity; you can see what this year’s theme so far has been. I do not apologize. Actually, I do for how fuckin’ white these bullet points are; I’ll do better next time; but I don’t apologize for gay sports and/or sad gay people.

• I’m also currently enjoying a draft of Alicia Thompson’s 2027 project which I can’t tell you anything about since she hasn’t yet but sometimes I like to brag.

Okay love you all, sorry to every other country in the world about the United States,

anita

Among the Wildflowers is the second book in my Greyfin Bay series, the sequel to Heartwaves.

Like all my books, though, each should be able to stand alone; you do not have to read Heartwaves to read this one. Reading Heartwaves, in this specific case, will definitely give you more context, as one of the main characters of Among the Wildflowers is Luca Yaeger, who features somewhat prominently in Heartwaves as the guy one of the main characters of that book was in a situationship with. This is my series about mess!!

I will say, though, that I think Heartwaves is a much heavier book than Among the Wildflowers, and as such, if you haven’t read either and aren’t in the mood for heavier themes, you can feel free to skip Heartwaves and jump right into Wildflowers! (While I do, of course, hope you go back and visit Mae and Dell someday.) I was really excited, in the first book, to build out the town of Greyfin Bay and get into all my queers-in-small-town feelings, particularly being queer in small American towns during the era of Trump, and I also put a lot of grief in there, and I love that book a lot but this one is pretty much just two dudes falling in love on a farm without too much trauma at all, if that’s more your style. (Well, I should say that there is still some trauma, of course; this is still me we’re talking about; it’s still a romance novel with fucked up people who need to heal; but there’s not too much of it on page in this one is what I’m saying.)

Here’s an official summary that I hope isn’t too embarrassing:

Owning a farm is Emerson King’s lifelong dream come true—even if achieving it has cost him his marriage.

Now, a year after his divorce, Short King Farms is in dire financial straits. One bright spot on the horizon? Money from his friends Ben and Alexei, who are renting out the farm for their wedding. But even that might be in jeopardy: the farm is a mess, not at all ready for a hundred person wedding. Emerson needs help, desperately—if only he could afford it.

Luca Yaeger has spent his life as a fisherman with only one problem: he’s never actually wanted to be one. What he truly wants to do is write, but all that’s brought him is pain. When he receives his hundredth rejection for his novel, he decides it’s time to give up the ghost for good. After, of course, he heads to the local brewery for a small pity party first.

There he finds a sad farmer—and an opportunity for a new life.

In exchange for room and board, Luca offers to work at Short King Farms for free so Emerson can better prepare for the wedding. The farm is beautiful, the fresh start Luca has been looking for—even if his growing feelings for his new boss are useless, being that Emerson is definitely still in love with his ex.

But when it comes to all the stress Emerson is still under—maybe Luca could help with that in other ways, too…

As the wedding approaches, Luca and Emerson grow more and more attached. But when the past comes calling, they must decide what the future holds—for the farm and for themselves—after the final wedding bells toll.

Among the Wildflowers is a gentle gay small-town romance that explores the costs and rewards of following our dreams, and the messiness in expanding our expectations of love.

My much shorter tagline I’ve been saying to make myself laugh is:

Among the Wildflowers: sex pact to save the farm

Is that a phrase that makes sense?? I’m sure reviewers will figure out the answer to that; hopefully they don’t tag me.

Another thing to know that I couldn’t fit in the synopsis: Emerson King is also a single dad, if you like that trope, but he amicably co-parents with his ex, so sometimes I feel kind of weird calling him that? Like he’s technically single but he’s not doing this all on his own, you know? And these are the kind of thoughts that make me bad at listing tropes.

Anyway, there is also a very good cow named Sally.

Among the Wildflowers will be out on June 2nd. Next time we chat, I’ll put out a call for ARC readers, but I need my shit a little more put-together first. There will also be paperbacks eventually, and hopefully one day there will be audio for both this one and Heartwaves but I don’t have any news for you on that front yet. For now, I’d love if you added Wildflowers on Goodreads.

And yes, the title obviously alludes to the Tom Petty song. Which has long been one of my most steadfast writing songs, so it was inevitable it ended up as a title of mine—it first showed up on my writing playlist for Dahlia Woodson back in the day. (Who, wouldn’t you know, briefly shows up in this book.) It’s not just a throwaway title, though; there is an actual wildflower field on the farm that takes up a lot of oxygen in the book. I just did a search through the manuscript in its current form to see, and “wildflower” currently shows up 31 times, which—I almost thought it would be more, but still. Lotta flower talk in this gentle gay ass book.

I am very nervous about this one, as I am always nervous about books, but I really hope at least some of you like it.

More soon,

xo

anita

This is mostly a personal project for me, but subscribe if you’d like to follow along.

With love and solidarity,

anita

My Greyfin Bay/Heartwaves world, while set on the Oregon Coast, exists in the same universe as my first series, even if the first series mostly takes place in California and Nashville. At the same time that I want each book to stand on their own, I like to picture all of my books taking place in the same universe, really: there is something comforting about it to me, something that tethers each book to the other that helps ground me. I’m sure this has something to do with historical romance, and the way it frequently functions in series of interconnected characters, being one of my first true loves/gateways into the genre. (See also: contemporary series like Game Changers!)

Especially in Greyfin Bay, as I’m self-pubbing and can do whatever I want, I like playing around with previous characters and worlds. Mae and Dell, in Heartwaves, in addition to having a connection to my Nashville characters, also visit Moonie’s, the karaoke bar from my Moonlighters novella series. The karaoke scene in their book was pivotal to their plot, but it also just made me happy.

I have written what I think are three true stand-alones: Donut Summer (which I was truly honored to see on School Library Journal’s Best Books of 2025, as well as on this stunning list of 100 trans debuts from 2025 from Jen St. Jude and the Chicago Review of Books [as this was my first young adult book it can technically be considered a debut]); the comic shop romance that died on sub last year (although I technically have not finished writing this one, but I hope to someday); and the book I currently have on sub (which I love, and which is fully finished, so I’ll definitely get it to you someday, even if it doesn’t sell). (Sorry for that truly horrifying construction of a sentence. If one could call it that.) Even these though, while not explicitly connected to any of my previous books, I like to picture in the same universe: that Penny Dexter could walk by Dahlia Woodson on the street someday, or maybe take a college class with Ben’s younger sister Carolina.

The current WIP is especially intertwined because the plot of Farm Book (as I have been calling it) largely revolves around the wedding of Alexei Lebedev and Ben Caravalho, which is to take place on said farm. (I should note that this really is just a catalyst for the actual MCs, largely the farmer who is completely unprepared to actually host a wedding at his small farm and who desperately needs help, which arrives in the form of the fisherman who doesn’t want to be a fisherman anymore and has been searching for a fresh start. It’s their book, not Lex and Ben’s, but Lex and Ben do show up.) And there was a certain point in drafting a month or so ago when I was trying to remember some details about Ben and Lex’s life, and wondering timeline-wise what all the other people on their wedding guest list would be up to at this moment in time, and it was at that point I realized:

1) I have really written about a lot of characters these last few years, and

2) I had forgotten a lot of shit.

And so, I took a complete break from drafting to sit down and make a definitive timeline of my universe. Starting off with Love & Other Disasters, presuming that it took place in 2022, the year it was published, followed by each subsequent book and set of characters until I had a somewhat steadier vision of where everyone is now. This was extremely helpful for drafting the current WIP, but also ended up being helpful for me, as I have struggled so much both writing and mental health-wise after two years of rejection. Of having my previous body of work dismissed so casually on phone calls that made me feel so small. It was nice to look through all my previous books again just for me, to remember these people that I had created, that it turns out, I still love. But of course I do. You don’t make something out of nothing without a lot of love.

It also occurred to me that it might make a nice end-of-year tradition for my readers, too—catching up with where my characters are now, at this current moment in time.

It does occur to me, of course, that doing so will be a major spoiler fest if you have not read all of the books!! (And I know sometimes even readers who have read books don’t like knowing what happens to the characters within later on, that it can ruin a bit of the magic and the completeness of the book, which I also understand.) It’s possible this idea in general is not a good one, but—I love when an author has a yearly tradition (I used to so look forward to Cat Sebastian’s Christmas epilogues), and I think this one will make me happy, so here I am.

Accordingly, feel free to skip the rest of this email entirely, especially for any brand new readers who may have made their way here recently, or to scan to only the characters you know and care about. But you’re all adults who can handle this newsletter however you want; I think that’s enough disclaimers for now, yeah? Here’s what’s going on with my people.

As seen in the epilogue for How You Get the Girl, Dahlia and London have just gotten married this fall. It was beautiful and wonderful: Julie and Hank gave speeches; Barbara was their officiant; London’s top surgery scars were well-healed and they felt very much themself on their wedding day; Dahlia wore peach-colored roses in her voluminous hair.

They are currently planning on taking their honeymoon in spring of 2026, a meandering tour through Spain, France, and Italy. Basically, all the places with the food they most want to eat. They still live in Nashville with Schnitzel the ugly one-eyed dog in their apartment in 12 South. London still works in the music studio and Dahlia does her food writing and cooking videos, including her original channel on YouTube, though she’s experimenting more with TikTok. She’s also trying to think of more ways to push her platform and her work beyond just recipes and reviews and personal essays, maybe working on series that highlight the stories of local farmers or food production, or food origins and evolutions.

QueerOut celebrated its third summer in 2025 as a camp for queer youth, focused mostly on cooking and other real-life skills meant to empower. London, and Dahlia, are still involved, especially when it comes to fundraising as they’re the ones who still have a glimmer of star power, but mostly they leave its operation to its talented staff.

How they celebrate the holidays: They spend most of December in Nashville, celebrating Christmas Day at the Parker family home. But while Dahlia still loves Nashville, even with all its complexities, as she gets older she increasingly misses Massachusetts, where she was born and raised, especially around the holidays. And so London and Dahlia have started a tradition of leaving for New England on Boxing Day. They spend a few days with Dahlia’s parents in New Bedford before spending New Years in Boston with Hank. London feels more attached to New England with each visit too; they are currently crafting a plan of buying a vacation home somewhere in the region to surprise Dahlia with. (Dahlia will feel kind of disgusted at the luxury of having two homes but will also really, really love it.)

2025 marks Ben’s first full year of living with Alexei in Portland, Oregon. Alexei is still working for the Forest Service, although it has been a stressful year with government layoffs: especially as a provisional employee, every day he wakes up holding his breath, praying Russell Vought lets him survive another day. Somehow, by the end of the year, he’s still employed, but it’s been hard, too, watching the Forest Service scrub any mention of diversity, equity, and inclusion from its policies. To go from having his dream job, and being able to be his full self at his dream job, to the world saying jk. Your identity here actually isn’t welcomed at all. But this is the way of any progress in the world, he knows: two steps forward, three steps back. [Sorry to bring Russell Vought into this made-up world; I know, I’m a sick fuck.]

His work life is made manageable, though, by his friend and coworker, Rex, who complains, loudly and inappropriately both at the office and outside of it, about all the changes wrecking their jobs and, accordingly, our nation’s forests and ecosystems. Even though they are really, really not supposed to do so: a small act of rebellion Alexei admires and takes comfort from. And, of course, it’s made better by being able to come home each day to Ben.

Ben has secured a job as a home health nurse, and he is, frankly, rather obsessed with it. He’s honored by the privilege of being able to serve his patients in their homes, to have such intimate access to their lives and communities while helping them be the most comfortable they can; he loves the independence of it, even while still being beholden to his agency, but he likes his boss, and thinks his boss likes him. Even as much as Ben does miss Ted, his old boss in Nashville at Lakeview Hills, and the patients he cared for there.

Ben and Lex still live in their apartment in Southeast Portland (though they often dream of buying a house); they hike every opportunity they can with their dog, Delilah, from the river gorge to the mountain to the high desert to the coast.

What has been most important and life-changing for Alexei in particular this year is the community he and Ben have found. Through the new church Alexei has started attending, he meets Jesús and Steve, an older gay couple. They invite him back to their house for lunch each Sunday post-church, and after only a short amount of time, they feel like both friends and the parental figures Alexei still needs. Eventually, both Ben and Lex fall into Jesús and Steve’s wider friend group, which includes a variety of queers of all ages and identities. Ben particularly clicks with Mae, Jesús’s best friend and co-worker at a local queer community center.

Also. Ben and Lex have been watching Heated Rivalry (the whole gang has, including London and Dahlia), and Alexei is, obviously, having a lot of feelings about Ilya Rozanov’s story. Ilya’s story is not his, of course, but there is enough there to reach inside his guts and twist a bit. (He also wishes the cokehead brother in the show wasn’t named Alexei, but he tries to not take it personally. At the same time, he gets a little thrill whenever he hears Ilya say his name in Russian, so. It’s a whole complex journey.) Ben is increasingly concerned for him as the series continues—Ben kind of crawls out of his skin with anxiety during Episode 5—but Alexei assures him he is fine. And he is. It’s a lot. But things like having Jesús and Steve now, and very sincerely, Heated Rivalry, help Alexei feel better and better each and every day.

How they celebrate the holidays: They fly back to Nashville, staying at Iris and Luiz’s house (they’ve kept Ben’s bed set up in the basement for when they visit), with frequent visits to Julie and Elle’s house as well. Alexei has developed increasing guilt, though, about leaving Alina alone at the holidays; she has been on her own personal journey with their parents, their faith, and herself. Ben and Lex discuss on the plane ride home this year the idea of inviting Alina to Nashville next Christmas.

Ben also spends a lot of the plane ride contemplating how exactly he’s going to propose to Alexei next year. Really, he’s been contemplating it for what feels like forever. He kept wanting to wait until he felt steadier on his own two feet, settled into his new job and life in Portland. But whether he’s steadier or not (he totally is), he’s tired of waiting. 2026 is for finally biting the bullet and planning whatever kind of wedding Alexei Lebedev wants.

Phewwwww, so 2025 has been kind of a LOT for Julie Parker, who has just completed her first fall of being a counselor at East Nashville High while also taking classes at night. The learning curve is STEEP, and is not helped by the fact that she often comes home to an empty house because Elle is also in school several hours away in Chattanooga, and basketball season has just started hahaha and she might be losing her mind!! (A new English teacher at the school, Mr. Tyler, has taken Elle’s place as Julie’s assistant coach; they have become fast friends through 1) their love of basketball, and 2) the bonding stress of surviving a school year as newbies in the building. They are both still absolutely terrified of Dr. Jones, their principal. But Julie is pretty sure Iris Caravalho [who still subs in for the secretaries sometimes] bullied everyone in the office to be nice to her, so at least there’s that.)

And yet: even with the struggle, every day for both Julie and Elle is approximately a hundred times more fulfilling than their days were before they found each other. Even if Elle still occasionally struggles with bad brain days. Vanessa is still living with her mom, but she maintains a close relationship with Julie and Elle. (And she is still on the basketball team.) Elle has learned that a lot of maintaining a relationship with Vanessa and Karly involves biting her tongue: she is constantly worried, does not always approve of choices that are made, but she is still grateful for her relationship with Vanessa and knows she has to be quiet sometimes to hold on to that. Family is complicated, and they’re all navigating as best they can.

Like everyone else this holiday season, Julie and Elle are also all-in on Heated Rivalry; Julie is particularly obsessed and feels like it’s been a gift sent from above for both her brain and her heart after a stressful as hell year. She feels confused about how into both Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander she is, and is considering adding them to her List of Men She Has Definitely Been Attracted To list, bringing the grand total from one (1) [Manny Jacinto] to three (3). She also worries out loud a few times about it being problematic that she’s so into it, at which Elle pats her knee and tells her to stop thinking so hard. It’s a shitshow out there for queer people and they can take their joy where they can get it.

Elle will later ask, out of pure curiosity, if Julie is still attracted to Svetlana most of all, to which Julie will answer without hesitation, “Well, obviously,” and Elle will pat her knee again and smile.

(While Julie obviously contributes to the group chat about the show, she and Ben start a separate private chat where 1) they can share what actual freaks they have become, without revealing the disturbing depths of it to their partners and families; 2) Ben can do so in a space where he can temporarily set his concern for Alexei aside. Even though Ben has kept his word and kept their friendship alive even after moving to Portland, it’s these Heated Rivalry chats that make Julie feel closer to him than she has all year.)

How they spend the holidays: Somewhat chaotically, they split their time at Christmas between the Parker family home, Elle’s mom’s house, Vanessa and Karly’s, and the Caravalhos’. But for the rest of winter break, they savor both being able to breathe together for a little while in Nashville, watching and playing basketball and cuddling with Snoozles. Among other activities.

(Speaking of basketball, they both found it absolute bullshit when the WNBA announced their expansion markets earlier this year and Nashville wasn’t one of them, but in Pat Summitt’s honor, they are still holding out hope. They would also accept an NWSL team. Also, a PWHL team. For the love of god, give the queers of Tennessee something.)

Once I compiled my timeline, I realized that the actions within Heartwaves actually have to take place in 2026. Which is okay! Because for those who haven’t read it, I can now fill you in on the backstory that eventually leads to Mae Kellerman and Dell McCleary meeting.

Mae (she/they) works as a social worker at the queer community center where they’ve been for years, alongside their best friend Jesús. While surviving 2025 has been hard—the center has lost a few essential grants—Mae feels more grateful than ever for their own queer community. They have a particularly warm spot in their heart for the new additions to the friend group, Ben and Alexei, even though they’re like a decade younger than her. There’s something about the earnest sweetness and youth of them that gives her some hope in the middle of our politically dark fucking times.

Mae also spends a decent chunk of the year, what will later feel like an absolutely dumb amount of time, in a relationship with a woman named Eden. Until, after five months, they discover that Eden has been married, to a man—with a kid!—the whole time. Mae’s friends are all concerned for them, after, but the absurdity and the cliché of the betrayal is so huge that somehow Mae’s able to get over it relatively quickly. Or, maybe, she had never been as invested in the relationship as she should have been. She feels tired, in general, these days: burnt out on social work, no matter how much she loves the center. Exhausted by surviving the cruelty of the world. The only things that seem to bring her comfort lately are her friends and her ever-expanding collection of house plants.

Meanwhile, in Greyfin Bay…Dell McCleary is practicing some low-key conservation-focused real estate, building an ADU in his backyard for his mom, and maintaining a once-a-month (or so) sexual relationship with Luca Yaeger, whenever Luca is available in town and not off on a fishing trip. Even though they’ve both agreed to keep it casual, Dell finds himself developing more feelings for Luca each time they meet—as is wont to happen—even though neither men have made any move to actually deepen the relationship. Dell is still suffering from PTSD from a random act of violence that happened to him in Portland years earlier; it’s what prompted him to move to Greyfin Bay. It’s also made him very weary of trusting people. Other than Luca, he spends most of his time in his house or his woodworking workshop with his dogs, Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

Until earlier this year, when Liv Gallagher, the butch lesbian who owns the IGA and Dell’s one possible friend in Greyfin Bay, convinced him to finally add a Young to his pack. Young is a collie mix with entirely too much energy, and Dell spends a lot of the year trying to get her adjusted to the rest of the pack. Still doesn’t trust her enough to bring her on his off-leash runs on the beach, though.

How they spend their holidays: Dell flies to his hometown in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to spend a week or so with his mom. Driving to PDX for these holiday visits are the only times he ever allows himself to get close to Portland city limits now. Mae spends Christmas Day with her parents, who live in an assisted living facility in Lincoln City, before returning to Portland to party (like, in a chill but still joyful way; she’s too old for anything more these days) with her friends for New Years. They end up spending most of it rewatching Episode 6 of Heated Rivalry multiple times while eating treats from Trader Joe’s and crying a little bit together, because at the end of 2025, all of them, like all of us, deserve only soft things.

I have also during this process finally finalized my characters’ birthdays, something that has, for whatever reason, never crossed my brain before to do, even while seeing every other author on the internet posting about their characters’ astrological signs. Which, I should say—while I had reasons for some of these choices, I did not think about astrology at all. So if you totally disagree with whatever signs I have happened to assign to my people, I’m sorry. lol.

But just in case you’re curious, in order of the year:

Dahlia Woodson: January 18th (turned 31 this year)

Elle Cochrane: February 13th (turned 33 this year)

Alexei Lebedev: March 7th (turned 31 this year)

London & Julie Parker: April 6th (turned 29 this year)

Mae Kellerman: June 11th (turned 40 this year)

Dell McCleary: June 29th (turned 41 this year)

Ben Caravalho: October 5th (turned 29 this year)

I didn’t write here about what my Moonie’s characters are up to, as this was already quite long and I worried it’d be too much (but I’d be happy to dive into that next year if folks wanted it).

I also didn’t include Penny or Mateo from Donut Summer. There is something about them being so young that makes me hesitant to ever dive publicly into what I think happens next for them. Their future is so wide open; I want to keep whatever possibilities await them in the minds of their readers.

Thanks for being part of this little writing exercise of mine! I hope your 2026 is full of much more light than we had in 2025. I can’t wait to, hopefully, have even more characters to fill you in on next year.

xo

anita

Buy Love & Other Disasters * Buy Something Wild & Wonderful * Buy How You Get the Girl * Buy Heartwaves * Buy Donut Summer

Fast forward five years: I’ve spent the second half of 2025 trying to separate myself from social media and the publishing world as much as I can. So when I happened to see an ad for the show on HBO Max a few days before it premiered, I was like omg maybe I remember hearing about this happening? And then I thought, wait, do I even want to watch it? Or would I prefer to hold on to my own personal memories of the books and these characters for myself, you know?

But then it started to blow up, so of course I watched it. My first impression was simply being stunned at how faithfully it was adapted. How beautifully and artfully it was adapted. How perfectly it aligned with my experiences of reading the book. Like—I think I actually didn’t know we could even have adaptations like this, that we could have something this good. Imagine having your own work adapted with such care? I literally can’t. It’s aiming too high. And if there’s one thing this industry has certainly beaten out of me, it’s hope and expectations.

By the time Episodes 4 and 5 rolled around, I had become feral. I was anticipating the arrival of Friday (when new episodes drop) all week. I can’t remember the last time I’d experienced that with literally any media. God bless releasing episodes a week at a time. So we could all have that anticipation together. So we could all experience something at the same time. Remember when we used to have those communal cultural experiences all the time? Everything really did used to be better, didn’t it?

I didn’t really have an outlet for my feral-ness, though. I hadn’t felt this way in so long, likely since my fandoms in high school. It made me feel kind of insane. Like, you are kind of insane in high school. I was, anyway. The only social media I’m truly on these days is Bluesky, so I can keep up with the news, which Bluesky is helpful for—but the downside of Bluesky is that it has never become a place for people to be just, like, totally irrational idiots. You have to be smart over there. And by the time I watched Episode 5 and then immediately watched it again, I was an idiot. The adrenaline was surging so hard I could barely focus on anything else. Like, was it possible I had maybe forgotten, until this moment, what it feels like to be alive? I had, approximately, five hundred million thousand thoughts I wanted to SCREAM FROM THE ROOFTOPS. SOMEWHERE. But all I mostly saw on Bluesky were critical takes from people who had clearly 1) not read the books, or 2) did not understand Romance. I just wanted to be dumb and happy about something. I tried finding edits on Tiktok and some of them were good but I don’t truly understand how to use Tiktok and never will. I feel embarrassed about it constantly.

Anyway, then, finally, last night: I re-downloaded Instagram on my phone again. Instagram has always been my real kryptonite, especially after Twitter died; it was the place I had the most interaction with readers about my work but also the place that consistently made me feel like shit the most these last couple years. Stepping away from it had been essential for me this year, even if I did miss that interaction, even if I did miss knowing what was going on with my friends.

And apparently, what was going on with my friends was that they were ALL FEELING THE SAME EXACT THINGS I WAS. THEY WERE ALL DUMB AND HAPPY TOO! THEY WERE FEELING THE SAME ADRENALINE! I DIDN’T KNOW! My entire timeline, exactly what I had been looking for! Inject it into my veins, as we said a decade or so ago!!!

But not only were we all totally irrational idiots, but there were people giving smart, in-depth commentary about why we were all so happy, why this show, specifically, honors Romance. I was filled with such a heady feeling, my own thoughts so fucking validated, I was overwhelmed.

It is hard to overstate how poor my mental health has become when it comes to publishing. It has not affected my love of reading (so far, I’ve read 20 more books this year than I did last year!), but it has certainly affected my relationship with writing—my confidence in doing it at all, really—and how I feel about Romance and my place within it.

But then here is this show, based on books I’ve loved, and everyone is connecting to it for the reasons I’ve always loved it here: character work, character work, character work. Intimacy. Sensuality and tension and vulnerability. Queerness, and joy. Not ten tropes in a trench coat or whatever trend is popular at this very minute. But the basic shit, the real shit, that apparently not even capitalism can fully destroy.

I don’t want to give Heated Rivalry exclusive credit for the fact that my own writing has suddenly also felt easier this week than it has for months. I think there are a number of things that have come together at this exact moment in this current draft that are making the way forward smoother.

But there have been a lot of things this week that helped me remember what this all felt like when it was fun, when it didn’t make me hate myself. And I think remembering that, remembering what I actually love about this genre—the same things I have always loved; knowing the real ones still love those same things too—has certainly helped.

And so, sincerely, every person who has put together edits and memes and reaction videos and podcasts and analyses about these two idiots: thank you. I feel at home for the first time in a long time.

It is a cruel world out there. It has been a tough fucking year. But as long as I have Ilya Rozanov in my heart, no one can hurt me.

xo

anita

There are a few different things that have helped me. I’m trying to mentally separate myself from publishing, thinking of myself once again as more of a reader than an Author. Being a reader first has always been most important to me, but it does take conscious work to not view every single book I even casually see a cover of through my jaded publishing lens. Stepping way back from social media has been the biggest component in helping with this goal. (The other is just a lot of mental reflection. In addition to things like stepping back from participating in as many events or blurbing other people’s books, etc. Although book events are one of the few things that do still bring me joy, and the local community here has been very kind to me, so I’ll likely continue to be part of those, at least locally.)

Being on social media less has led to a lot more reading, ie. succeeding at least a bit in this goal of my identity as a reader. It’s been great! I’ll likely reflect on my year of reading somewhere that isn’t here, but reading more always helps me in every way.

Another thing I’ve been doing is writing on paper a lot more. Not writing my books, although I might get there eventually, but writing in a perhaps absurd number of journals. I already feel self-conscious about this post, because it feels very personal, but I know I always love hearing about other people’s journaling habits, so on the off-chance it’s helpful or interesting to someone else—[talking to my near-future self staring at the Publish button] I’m going through with it!!

I know there have been multiple studies about the act of putting pen or pencil to paper in our digital age—I would find them to cite if I was less lazy, but the essence is that doing so literally activates different areas of our brain than just typing on a screen. For me, it is extremely grounding. I also find myself referencing older things in my various journals all the time when I want to remember something: it’s easier, at least for me, to flip through a series of physical pages as opposed to trying to remember which digital folder I saved something in or when it was I made that one Instagram post where I shared that thing one time. It’s helped me feel healthier as a writer, probably because it makes me feel healthier as a person.

And so, here are the various journals that have helped me stay sane through 2025. (I know it’s a bit early for a 2025 reflection post, but I’m planning on sending a different newsletter at the end of December, so thanks for indulging me.)

This has been my primary journal for most of 2025, my main squeeze. I have always, since I was a kid, kept a journal to document my thoughts/feelings/life; they now fill boxes in my basement. As I’ve gotten older, though, it’s gotten harder for me to keep up with such a journal consistently. Too much time will go by, and then when I finally open to a blank page, trying to summarize everything that’s been in my head since the last time I wrote feels overwhelming. I started this particular journal (gifted to me by a dear friend) in 2022, and for the first quarter or so of its pages, I continued in this traditional vein: big blocks of text, full sentences.

But somewhere over the last year or so, I’ve freed myself from having to document my life in a series of essays. My main squeeze journals are now a combination of whatever I want to put in them. Sometimes that’s writing out full thoughts in complete sentences and paragraphs, but more often than not, it’s a series of lists.

I have always loved lists; I used to have a different journal solely dedicated to them, but I am currently really loving my collage-of-whatever in my regular journaling. More often than not, my traditional journal entries are now written in lists; I start with Things lately: and then it’s easy to flow. But there are now a whole bunch of other lists scattered throughout, some of which are actually useful. Every Saturday night is family movie night in my household; we alternate each week between Our Choice and Kiddo’s Choice. I have a list in my journal keeping track of all the movies we’ve watched, and I frequently have to reference it on Saturday nights to remember whose turn it is and what we have or haven’t watched yet. I keep a list of all the books I’ve read, which again, I find easier to look through and analyze, for whatever reason, than looking at my Goodreads. I keep track of new words in languages I’m learning that I want to remember; lists of new restaurants I’ve tried, lists of goals, of National Geographic articles I’ve liked. I’ve started writing quotes from books that really struck me. Some of the lists are silly! They all make me happy.

I technically hit the last page of this journal several months ago (which was what originally inspired me to want to write about it here—it’s such an accomplishment, filling a journal!), but because of these constantly-in-progress lists, it’s not fully finished yet. Almost there, though.

One of those as-yet unfinished lists that I would recommend for everyone, but particularly those who struggle with depression: I saw advice from a therapist once about working on a list of a hundred things that make you truly happy no matter what. I add to mine slowly (I’ve worked on it about a year now), but it is definitely helpful to look through, no matter how small the things. (The first item on my list is “slightly burnt cheese” lol.) I’m currently on #53.

My new main squeeze!! Whenever I leave the house I always have at least one journal on me (often more); for the last few months this is always one of them. It makes me very happy, partly because at least two of the flowers on the front are ones that grew in my garden this year.

I’ve also, gleefully, started using my main squeeze journals as a space to put all the stickers I have somehow gathered as a 42 year old lol, as my laptop case has been full up for a while now. But all those book pre-order stickers and bookstore stickers and stickers given to me by readers that used to haphazardly sprinkle my bookshelves/dresser/floor—they now fill these journals! I don’t know why this is so satisfying to me, even when it sometimes makes the pages kind of fat and uneven—but it is.

My writing journal. I started this one in 2023, inspired by Alicia Thompson’s writing journals, and I’m so grateful for this practice because for the couple years prior, all my regular journaling in my main squeeze was starting to be consumed by writing/publishing thoughts, leaving little space for, you know, my wife and my kid and my life, and I knew the imbalance wasn’t healthy. It’s nice having one spot to concentrate my neuroses!

In truth, while I’ve had this journal for two years now, Alicia’s notebooks about her works-in-progress are much more disciplined than mine. I still don’t have a perfect routine with it; I don’t journal every time I write, normally just every time I’ve hit a big word count or goal, like I don’t deserve to write in the writing journal otherwise. And while it would make even more sense here to write in lists—things I still have to work on in the book, timelines, plot outlines, character questions, etc.—more often than not I only write long tortured paragraphs in here, mostly detailing all the ways I feel like shit about what I’m doing lol. There are some positive entries, I should be clear!! But I know I could likely still be using this one smarter.

As this is a full-size, college-ruled notebook, I fill it a lot slower than my others; it’s currently about half-full and follows my thoughts while I:

• edited How You Get the Girl

• drafted Heartwaves

• edited Donut Summer

• drafted (and then revised with my agent) the book I currently have on sub

• currently, am drafting my WIP

I’m hopeful to finish the notebook someday, hopefully full of thoughts about other unknown stories.

I should note that, also inspired by Alicia, I have stickers for this journal too, but stickers I purchase on purpose for each book, to be included as a little reward for writing. Here’s a small assortment from my last four projects.

Clockwise from upper left: Donuts, obviously, for Donut Summer revisions; sea creatures + flowers for Heartwaves; a pig driving a tractor lololol for my current WIP which takes place on a farm (most of my stickers for this book are like vegetables and stuff but I used this one when I really needed a laugh), even though there are no pigs on Short King Farms (currently…this sticker made me re-think, though) and since it’s a sustainable microfarm Emerson doesn’t even use a big motorized tractor like this, but anyway; and for the book on sub, which includes a letter-writing element—I had letter stickers for any time I worked on those, and strawberry stickers for the rest, since one of the main characters smells like strawberries (of course).

I picked this up on a whim for $5 at a Kohl’s last year, and despite feeling somewhat cringey sometimes about using a “gratitude journal,” I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed it, and how much it lets me document my life. While it’s organized by weeks, like a planner, everything is undated (you fill in the dates yourself), so if I go a week without picking it up, I don’t have to feel bad; I can just pick up where I left off. And since I’m just writing one thing I’m grateful for, I don’t have to worry about like, documenting every single thing that happened that day.

And while I know this is the obvious point of a gratitude journal—it is indeed helpful, on a day where, say, some teenagers at Day Job have been shitty to me, or I’ve spent an absolutely criminal amount of time thinking about JD Vance saying we shouldn’t love our neighbors, actually, if they speak a different language (a real, actual thing he said; the amount of sleep I’ve lost thinking about it)—it’s helpful to think of one good thing on those days. Even if it’s just, like, a good snack I had. Still helps.

This is also nice and slim; if you wrote in it every week, it’d cover one year. Which makes it, again, more approachable and feasible than those clunky one-line-a-day five year journal things that I’ve tried so many times. Will definitely look into ordering more when I’m done with this one, which I almost am.

The regular ol’ annual daily planner, which I’m including here because I think it definitely counts as a journal. Unlike my other journals, though, I always struggle with what to do with them when the year is done. I obviously keep every other journal I ever finish, like the weirdo with hoarding tendencies that I am, but I live in a very small house and even I grow skeptical of keeping old planners. So I usually do end up tossing them. But whenever I do, and look back at a year’s worth of to-do lists and appointments and work schedules—it often feels like I’m throwing away the best documentation of them all. But then again…maybe that’s just the hoarder talking.

Obviously, I also have a gardening journal. I’ve had this one a long time, way more than five years so the title is a lie. It’s pretty (it’s a Chronicle Books book, so iykyk), and organized by season which I like, but every entry is extremely structured in what it wants you to document, which doesn’t necessarily work with my brain. It’s great for documenting data, essentially—what I’ve planted and when—but I only recently freed myself to write Gardening Thoughts/Lists in my main squeeze journal too, NOT just the pretty gardening journal, and I can’t tell you how free that truly made me feel! Haha wow I am really just saying things in this newsletter that are maybe concerning, huh!

So…that’s me! *nervous laughter*

If you’re curious, I also use Pilot G-2 gel pens exclusively when I’m journaling, and using up a pen feels as monumental as filling up a journal. I started out 2025 writing everything in green, and then purple, and aquamarine, and now, a navy that’s kind of boring but I’ve already run through the fun colors of my last pack so now I have to get through the basic ones before I order myself a new bundle. But what an exciting day it’ll be when I get to!

Hope your holiday season is full of good pens and good books,

xo

anita

Some writerly news to start: first, there are some ebook sales going on this month. Currently, Love & Other Disasters is on sale for $2.99, and How You Get the Girl is on sale for $1.99.

I know the L&OD sale runs all month; I’m not sure how long the HYGTG one will last. Better buy it RIGHT NOW, probably! Linked are the Amazon editions, but the sale should also be running on other ebook retailers, as well.

Upcoming Events! (all Oregon based)

• TODAY, the 13th! Signing at Clackamas Barnes & Noble alongside Alison Cochrun at 2 PM

• Next Saturday, the 20th! Joint event with Karelia & Fay Stetz-Waters in Corvallis at Grassroots Bookstore at 2 PM

• Saturday, November 8th: Portland Book Festival—I’m not sure if I’m supposed to announce the actual event yet, since the festival won’t be announcing the full event lineup until early October and I am a RULE FOLLOWER. However, I will be moderating a discussion between two amazing authors!! And we’ll all have signing time after. See the lineup of other authors/get more information here.

Other writerly things!

I was pleased as punch this week to learn that Donut Summer received a starred review from School Library Journal. Here’s the abbreviated review:

Kelly’s young adult debut is a hugely relatable forced proximity queer romance that sees two estranged friends working in the same beloved donut shop for the summer and bonding as they fight to save the store from corporate takeover…Kelly delivers a big-hearted story about queer love, small town pride, and youth activism that has excellent mental health and anxiety representation. VERDICT: A perfect addition to libraries looking to expand their LGBTQIA+ and mental health collections that is sure to resonate with fans of authors like Lynn Painter and Jennifer Dugan.

(They also recommended it for 10th grade and up, if that’s helpful to you!)

This meant a lot to me, as I was merely hoping SLJ would review it at all. Here’s my confession-of-the-newsletter: Library recognition is my author kryptonite. There are a myriad of things out there in the publishing world that can hurt authors’ feelings. It varies, of course, depending on the author and the thickness of their skin, what hurts the most, although the general answer is that we’re all neurotic oversensitive messes so it all hurts.

But as a former school librarian and big-fan-of-libraries in general, the one thing I’ve never accomplished that, of course, it feels like I see other authors accomplishing all the time, is a place on the Library Reads list. This is a list that comes out every month of the favorite new releases of librarians around the country, and it likely means very little to anyone other than librarians and authors, but ooooooh boy! Any time I see an announcement about someone making this list! Even if the author is like, MY BEST FRIEND, and I am obviously HAPPY FOR THEM because they DESERVE IT, the way my little librarian heart hurts! It’s gotten to the point where I am so hyperaware of this particular sensitivity that it’s almost funny to me! I’ve heard other authors dream of say, hitting a best-seller list (which I have also never done lol), or getting starred reviews, or getting into the big book boxes, or on the shelves at Target, etc. etc. I have literally never heard anyone else ever cry about the Library Reads list. It’s just me! What a truly useless thing to care about!!

In my time as an actual librarian though, as I served The Youth and the Library Reads list is only for adult titles, the resource I actually used the most in terms of my collection development was School Library Journal. So for my YA debut to receive a starred review from them—it really did place a pretty large balm over my author-librarian heart. Maybe next time I see a post about Library Reads it won’t hurt my feelings as much. (It will.)

Wow, I truly did not intend to write that much about librarian reviews, so anyway!

In terms of what I am actually writing right now/what comes next for me: I have nothing currently under contract. The plan is to shop around a new, completed project of mine to traditional publishers this fall, but even if that’s successful (outlook: trying to be pessimistic while obviously also hoping for the best?), it wouldn’t be released for quite a while. So whatever comes next from me will likely be self-published in 2026, but I’d like to wait until I have things more solid before I say anything else.

Accordingly, I’ll probably be sending out newsletters more sparsely from here on out, unless I have actual news or Writing Thoughts I’ve been noodling on or other random things I want to talk about. Kind of like—

Five Random Things That Have Been Bringing Me Joy Lately

1. Lisa Kleypas hyperfixation: I ended up having a Lisa Kleypas summer, kind of by accident. It has been a goal of mine for a while now to finish both the Ravenels and Wallflowers series, which I had heretofore been working on at a leisurely pace like a normal person. But for some reason, these books became all I could read this summer. If it wasn’t interconnected historical romance my brain wasn’t having it!! I’ve now accomplished both goals and am moving on to the Hathaways, but I’m going to attempt to actually get back to like, reading other things in between again. Anyway, my conclusions: West Ravenel is my favorite Ravenel!! Obviously! In terms of the books themselves—I think Hello Stranger might be my favorite in the Ravenels. I mean, it starts on a dark dodgy street with the grumpy secretive detective saving the only female doctor in England from a sexual assault by a gang of hooligans, after she’d already done some decent damage herself with her own scalpel! That’s the drama my increasingly fractured mind needs!! As for The Wallflowers, I truly don’t think I can choose a favorite? They all have some level of that kind of drama—explosions! Kidnapping! So much almost dying! (I think it feels like a particular lot-of-almost-dying because Devil in Disguise is obviously also a Wallflowers book no matter what the official series designation says!) idk I just really enjoyed them all, even though it’s clear from The Ravenels series that Kleypas herself has a real soft spot for Evie and Lord St. Vincent (even when it confused me so much when he was no longer Lord St. Vincent, why do the Brits require SO many names), and I like that too! She follows her heart!! Does what she wants!!

2. Watching the garden transition into fall: As might be well-known to anyone who knows me even a little, working in my garden is pretty much the only thing (other than books) that has kept me sane in this truly awful year of our lord, 2025. In addition to being tomato and dahlia season, it’s also the time of year when I start trimming things back for winter, when I watch leaves from my neighbor’s trees and my own fall into the yard, when I treasure the sometimes surprising late blooms and strawberries even more than ever. I spent literally as much time in my backyard this summer as I could (often abandoning my family who wanted to be inside for hours, I’m sorry family), so the transition to earlier sunsets and more unpredictable weather has been hard, but my body’s also starting to adjust to the transition again in gratitude. Like it’s readying itself for rest, but also full of anticipation already: what’s going to grow back even stronger next year, what’s going to pop out of the ground first in the spring, what won’t make it, what will take its place?

3. Guava Berry Waterloo seltzer: We’re a big seltzer household for better or worse, so we’re always trying out different flavors. And this one! This one is it for me at the moment.

4. The Wonder of Stevie: Our good friend Steve (NOT Wonder, but just as wonderful!) recommended this podcast to us a while back, and I’m slowly making my way through it, savoring every episode. I grew up a huge Stevie Wonder fan, probably because my mom was a huge Stevie Wonder fan. She gifted all her old Stevie vinyls to me a few years ago, and they are some of my most treasured possessions. This podcast goes album-by-album through Stevie’s incredibly rich and productive decade of the 1970s, and the host, Wesley Morris, is such a hugely talented storyteller. It’s also executive produced by the Obamas (among others), who both appear on the show as well. And was Obama a perfect president? Of course not, but I have to say that there is something soothing about hearing him talk again, being reminded that it’s possible for leaders to talk with warmth and charisma instead of hatred and bitterness.

5. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign: Speaking of!! Listen, I don’t live in NYC; I have no skin in this game; I’m sure he’s not perfect either because nobody is, but every time this man’s staff posts a new video—it’s always so genuine, and smart, and well-done, and I don’t know what kind of social media savvy wizards are behind it all but thank fucking god for them because they are literally saving my sanity. We are living in such a horrifying state of being right now that it’s so refreshing to just like, watch a nice man being nice! Having nice ideas! Earnestly caring about other people! SMILING! He smiles so much! I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone in federal power smile! Every single time I see him speak it’s like I remember that this can be normal! The world is hell but it’s nice seeing a man mobilizing a city-wide scavenger hunt in the name of education and community, it’s nice seeing him kick around a soccer ball while asking us to fight against dynamic pricing! This is what I want!!

September books!

I’ve generally stopped doing round-ups of new releases I’m excited about because I ended up missing books I wanted to include/worry too much about hurt feelings, but September is a real blockbuster of a month for new releases. In particular, I was sent early copies of a few September releases that I somehow managed to fit in between Lisa Kleypas hyperfixations, and so I’d love to shout them out here:

• Breakout Year, KD Casey: We all know that Casey’s Unwritten Rules trilogy is a masterpiece of sports romance and just general writing skills. This is their first release since that series, and they note that it’s slightly different from their previous releases in a few ways—it’s their first book where one of the MCs *isn’t* a current baseball player (he’s an author’s assistant/ghostwriter for a wonderfully cranky and accomplished mystery writer; I found this whole storyline absolutely fascinating), and where *both* MCs are Jewish. You can tell Casey really enjoyed being able to explore different ways of practicing Judaism/being Jewish in both Eitan and Akiva, and I as a reader always really love when I can tell the author is enjoying exploring things that are important to them. Like all of Casey’s work, the whole book is full of this *tension* that had me honestly just so anxious for both of them the whole time lol but I mean that as the highest compliment! This one’s out now!

• Fun at Parties, Jamie Harrow: I was a massive fan of Harrow’s debut, One on One, probably one of the best basketball romances I’ve ever read (even if neither MCs are actually players!). Sometimes a writer’s work is so assured, so funny and smart and so exactly what I want to read that I know I’ll love anything they ever write, and so it was no surprise that I also loved Fun at Parties, so fucking much. It’s single POV from the perspective of the female main character, who’s a super upbeat (on the outside) cycle instructor, and I particularly love reading books that focus on women like this—who are the opposite of me (but also not!), women who are simultaneously the most adored and the most reviled by society. (The MC in Wild About You by Kaitlyn Hill comes to mind, as well. “Exactly like other girls, actually.”) This book was so perfectly of the moment, too—the powerful storyline of a family being ruined by pyramid schemes (and how pyramid schemes still rule our society); the references to Summer Beach House and the weird sponsor-ruled, always-on, social-media-as-real-life lifestyle of reality TV/influencer fame. The road trip was so epically fun and propulsive, but more than anything, the reason I always love a book most: the romance had me the whole time. This one’s out on Tuesday!

• Every Step She Takes, Alison Cochrun: No one will be at all surprised that I’m also including this one, as Alison never misses: I am always struck each time I read a new one of hers by just how funny and smart she is. There is also a lesbian specificity that she nails that I am always so grateful for: all of her characters are so real, and so gay in a way that rings so true to me specifically. (Clarifying “to me specifically” because there’s no right way to be gay!) I also feel that Alison’s work and mine are in a particular kind of conversation with each other, which is really special to me. Anyone who’s read Something Wild and Wonderful knows that I’m always up for a book about walking for a really long time!! But legit, Alison captures the reality (the pain and the joy and the food and the characters you meet) of walking the Camino so well. (Am I now determined to do it sometime in my lifetime? Obviously.) Anyone who felt seen by Julie’s storyline in How You Get the Girl will also feel so seen by Sadie’s. And now Substack is telling me that this newsletter is too long, which I’m pretty sure is homophobic.

So, more next time! I have a lot to say about events of the last week, and it is of course possible that my author newsletter is not the place to say them, but I might one day anyway.

Love to you all, be good to each other—

xo

anita

It’s Penny and Mateo day!

When I think about this book, I think about how fun it was to write, and to revise, too. Trying to get it published wasn’t necessarily fun, but writing it was. And almost nothing about publishing has felt fun for me in about two years.

So I will be forever grateful to Penny and Mateo for that. I hope it’s fun to read, too.

A big theme of this book is trying. Penny tries so hard: to change the world, to be the best daughter and big sister, to reach for her goals, to understand Mateo della Penna, to save the donut shop. The world sucks. She doesn’t always win. Sometimes she’s naive; sometimes she tries too hard.

But I’m still so grateful to her and everyone else who tries anyway.

Here’s Penny and Mateo’s playlist! I’ve barely edited it since I was drafting; it’s in absolutely no purposeful order and is overall kinda silly lol. But here are some personal highlights that most make me think of Them:

• Send Me On My Way, Rusted Root: I said it was silly!! But I listened to this song a lot when drafting because it was how I wanted Penny to be able to feel—free and fun, things her anxiety doesn’t often let her feel. But every time I listened to it I was just mentally nudging her there so hard. Let go let go let go

• We Don’t Talk About Bruno, Encanto soundtrack: Penny’s little brother’s name is Bruno. He fucking loves this song.

• 30/90, Tick, Tick…Boom! soundtrack: I mention this so briefly in the book, but there’s a scene where Penny and Mateo are taking a drive and listening to Mateo’s theater nerd playlist, and this is one of the songs on it, and I listened to it so much when thinking about this scene and also Penny and Mateo’s summer in general, way more than any other musical number mentioned. I fucking love it.

• Strangers Like Me, Tarzan soundtrack: Also mentioned in this scene. The Tarzan soundtrack is Mateo’s favorite Disney soundtrack, and they’re not wrong!!!

• So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings, Caroline Polachek: Penny’s thoughts about Mateo from Day 1 lol

• Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, Paul Simon: There is one scene that made me cry every single time, from the time I drafted it to every time I read it again in revisions, all the way through pass pages. It involves this song.

• I Feel It All, Feist: Penny’s Song, number one.

• We’re All Gonna Die, Joy Oladokun featuring Noah Kahan: Penny’s Song, number two. We’re all gonna die; we do our best fumbling through anyway.

  ---

  I hope something nice happens to you today.

xo

anita

Reminder that if you’re local, you can also purchase a copy (and get swag) at my launch event at Grand Gesture Books next Tuesday, the 29th, where I’ll be chatting with Alison Cochrun (who has been super kind about this book, because as always, she’s the best/we share the same brain).

If you’re not on Instagram, I’ve been doing a tour of almost every local donut shop in the Portland area I can find, and it’s been fun even if a bit frivolous/silly. Writing overly-long captions about donut shops every day for two weeks in a row has really given me the opportunity to publicly showcase how manic I can be, so that’s also been special.

Today was the first time an employee of a donut shop actually asked about the book/why I was taking pictures of it in their store, and turns out they are also a writer and were SO nice about it and SO excited for me (they gave me a free donut, and these are very expensive donuts) that it almost made me tear up, probably because I’m on a constant razor’s-edge of despair about humanity. Anyway, tune in tomorrow on IG to see what store it was!!! (Although locals might already know from the “very expensive” descriptor.)

In other bookish news, I have items in two different auctions/raffles happening this month.

The first is an auction for the Queer Liberation Network, where I’ll be donating a bundle of signed & personalized copies of my full collection—including Donut Summer, which I didn’t have my author copies of yet when I had to submit this picture! Bidding for this auction starts in a couple days; check out the full collection of available items here.

The other is a fundraiser raffle for flooding victims of Texas Hill Country. For this one I’m donating an annotated edition of Donut Summer, even though I promised myself that I’d never donate an annotated edition of one of my books again—I went overboard with the last one I did (it took me months to complete lol) and afterwards I felt a little embarrassed about the self-indulgence of it. But with some distance from that, I know that annotating something you’ve written—while presumably done for someone else—can also be one of the greatest acts of self-love/a reminder to yourself of what went into this book and that you’re proud of it. And that sounded like something that would be good for me right now.

Since this one’s a raffle and not an auction the set-up’s a little different; see all the details here!

Romance Bookstore Day

I have a couple signings lined up for Romance Bookstore Day on August 9th.

10:00 - 11:30 a.m.: Signing at Annie Bloom’s Books with Jamie Pacton

2:00 - 3:00 p.m.: Signing at Clackamas Barnes & Noble

And in between my own signings, I’ll be squeezing in trying to attend whatever panels I can at Grand Gesture’s amazing lineup!

I know with a book release a week away, I should be thinking a lot about said book, but despite all the donuts I’ve been eating, I’ve really only been able to think about the world. About all the contributing members of our society in America who are being kidnapped and tortured in overcrowded detention facilities, about Gazans starving to death and being bombed to death in the desperation of trying to getting a cup of rice, about the cruelty that abounds every single second.

In relation to that, and since I’d like to include more recommendations in my newsletters in general, I thought I’d highlight some podcasts I’ve been listening to lately that sometimes help.

• OPB’s The Evergreen: Something I’ve been trying to take to heart lately is that when your national government fails you, the most important thing is to participate in and care for your local communities. Actually, scratch that sentence—caring for your local communities is the most important thing always. The Evergreen is a weekly podcast produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting about a variety of topics local to the Pacific Northwest; I have learned something new about the place where I live in literally every episode I’ve listened to.

• This Place from Oregon Humanities: Similarly, I’ve loved discovering This Place, produced by Oregon Humanities. The simplicity of this one is its genius: each episode is only three to five minutes long, featuring a random person talking about why they love the specific place in Oregon where they live.

• Ella Dawson’s Rebel Ever After: I have never been able to listen to many podcasts about writing or publishing—I spend all my time thinking about it anyway; when I listen to podcasts I’d like to escape my own hyperbubble of neuroses for a few minutes. But I’ve made an exception for Rebel Ever After, where Ella Dawson interviews all my favorite authors about progressive and/or problematic themes in romance novels. Ella is such a smart, thoughtful host; I have loved every single episode.

• NPR’s Throughline: Simply put, I think Throughline is one of the best podcasts ever produced. Its tagline asks “How did we get here?”, which it does by tackling a variety of historical issues, and its production/sound editing is just really top notch. I learn a ton in every episode, but have been most helped recently by their three-part series on Iran and the U.S.; The Evolution of Presidential Power; and Edward Said and the Question of Palestine. (If you’re curious, no, I am not very fun at parties.)

• Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace: Nate DiMeo has made my life better for years now, even when almost every (short, perfect) episode makes me cry. I appreciate his humility, his kindness, and his unparalleled storytelling abilities more than ever before. (There is also now a Memory Palace book, which I own but haven’t been able to dive into yet. I thoroughly look forward to crying my way through it as well.)

• Silver Linings with The Old Gays: If there’s ever a time to listen to our gay elders, it’s now.

• WBEZ’s This American Life: An oldie but goodie. I spent a good portion of my twenties and early thirties listening to This American Life religiously, like a true cliché, but have only recently gotten back into it and remembered how excellent it is. In particular, they have covered current events, in their This American Life way, of the last year in a way I haven’t been able to find anywhere else; I feel they’ve specifically done a good job with Gaza, but have appreciated all of their other reporting, too.

• For straight news/analysis, I also listen to NPR’s Up First and Consider This; I find them to be the best balance of informative but not too overwhelming, said of course with a huge grain of salt containing the variability of what “overwhelming” means to you.

Instead of signing off with a photo of my garden and my dogs this month (even though both are, as always, the best), I’ll leave you with this art installation from Michael James Schneider that I spotted at Powell’s last night.

Take care of yourselves as best you can,

anita

Love & Other Disasters, my book about two people falling in love on the set of a cooking competition show, is on sale for $2.99 (all ebook retailers) and Heartwaves, my book about two people falling in love while opening a bookstore on the Oregon Coast, is on sale for $1.99 (Amazon). Looks like there might be some Audible deal going on right now too that all my Nashville Love audiobooks are a part of.

July Events

• July 1st, Grand Gesture Books at 7: In conversation with Hannah Loraine to celebrate the release of her debut, The Best Mess

• July 21st, Powell’s (on Burnside) at 7: In conversation with Karelia & Fay Stetz-Waters in celebration of their new release, Taste the Love

• July 29th, Grand Gesture Books at 7: My launch for Donut Summer, in conversation with Alison Cochrun

  • I know I discussed in my last newsletter the possibility of having other events, but this will likely be my only event for Donut Summer. Sometimes it feels like publishers are organizing big tours for almost everyone these days and I get sad, but I promised myself I’d make this newsletter normal.

Reminder that you can pre-order Donut Summer through my local queer indie, Always Here, or other beloved local indies like Vintage Books or Annie Bloom’s, or you can purchase from Grand Gesture at the launch event.

Booklist recently gave Donut Summer a starred review, which I was really grateful to see. They said:

Adult romance author Kelly’s YA debut unfurls as a delicious slow burn, with similar pacing as Penny takes her time stepping into her leading lady confidence. Never shying away from the hard conversations about queerness, gender, and acceptance (but with great respect for Mateo’s identity and pronouns), Kelly spins a delectable love story with a powerful message.

Thank you too to everyone who’s tagged me in Pride Month posts this month; I know I haven’t been able to interact with most of them but I really do appreciate it.

Hope you’re focusing your time on being kind in a world hellbent on rewarding cruelty,

anita

If you pre-order, I’ll send you this art print and this colorful sticker, both of which make me smile. As I hope this book makes you smile, too!

I just realized the coloring of the sticker in the above graphic got weird, probably because Canva is a lifelong learning experience. But I’m really pleased with the quality of both, and it was particularly fun being able to order the sticker from a local Portland shop, Sticker Ninja. (They were super kind throughout the process and included a Dum Dum lollipop in my package! I was delighted.)

As this is my young adult debut, I thought it would be nice/emo to make the art print in the same style as the print I got done for my adult debut, Love & Other Disasters.

This is the sole print I have left from that L&OD campaign, and you do not even know how proud of myself I am that I have somehow not lost it. I even knew exactly where it was in order to take this photo!

The Penny and Mateo art print is by Bev Johnson; Dahlia and London was by Aishwarya Tandon.

These goodies will be prioritized for pre-orders from my local queer indie, Always Here! I will also have them at my launch event at Grand Gesture, and will gladly bring them to any other local indies that receive preorders, like Vintage Books, Annie Bloom’s, or Broadway Books.

If I have any leftover after that, and you’ve preordered elsewhere, I’ll be happy to mail some out as well. I’ll keep you updated.

I know you’ve likely heard this spiel before from other authors, but allow me to say it one more time: preorders are increasingly important in the publishing world, especially for young adult and middle grade books, and especially for books featuring marginalized characters, both of which many book retailers are choosing to no longer stock, or to stock in severely limited ways. It is a tragedy, really, of both capitalism and democracy (mostly capitalism), but any preorder from any bookstore in the country/world signals that they should stock that book for other readers. It really can make a difference.

Other than the aforementioned event at Grand Gesture on pub day (July 29th), where I’ll be chatting with Alison Cochrun!, I’m working on some other events in support of Donut Summer, likely in early and mid August. Including one on the East Coast!! I’ll keep you updated on that, too.

Events Coming Up in June:

• Monday, June 2nd @ 7: In conversation with Jonny Garza Villa at Literary Arts, Portland: am I internally losing my shit about talking with one of my writing heroes? yes, yes I am

  

• Saturday, June 10th @ 7: In conversation with Alanna Bennett at Grand Gesture, Portland: in celebration of her beautiful YA debut, The Education of Kia Greer

  

• Saturday, June 14th: Signing as part of Charlie’s Queer Book Fair, Seattle: My signing slot is from 2-3 PM on Saturday, but Charlie’s Queer Books will be hosting a whole WEEKEND of queer fun!! I am so excited to be part of this
  

• Tuesday, June 17th @ 7: Author talk at Lake Theater & Cafe, Lake Oswego: I’ve been invited to give a chat as part of Lake Oswego Public Library’s author series, and would love to know—if you were attending an author talk (as opposed to a conversation), what would you most like to hear the author talk about??

I *think* this is all my June events! I keep saying yes to things and then having a hard time keeping track in my head, because I need to execute better organizational routines lol. But, I sincerely hope I get to see some of you soon!

There have been a lot of things going on in my writerly world since I last wrote you all: I finished the first draft of the book I’ve been working on over the last year. I’m looking for a new agent. I went to my first ever writing retreat, and while I could only stay for a brief amount of time because of child care and life duties, I remain kind of in awe about how nice it was. I’ve been doing a lot of conversation partnering, while organizing more of my own events for the summer. There’s a lot I could write about every single one of these things.

In particular, I thought I’d want to talk about the book. In the final stretch of working on the draft, I actually spent a maybe weird amount of mental space drafting a newsletter in my head about what I’d want to tell you about this book. Because I feel like there’s this unspoken rule in publishing that you can’t talk about the books you’re actually actively working on, that you’re killing yourself trying to draft, until that book has a book deal, or a publication date, or until you’re however many approved months away from publication. And while I understand the marketing aspect of this (our brains are small and can only comprehend so much information; tell someone about a book that won’t be available for like two years and it’s likely to get lost), from a creative standpoint: it’s such bullshit.

I know everyone’s experiences are different; maybe I’m the only one who feels this way. But I most want to talk about a book when I’m drafting it. I never feel better about a book in its entire life than I do after finishing that first draft. Because finishing a first draft is fucking HARD. (I should say, while drafting is extremely hard for me, my neuroticism also makes me draft as clean as I can, no matter how often people tell me the first draft should be messy. I felt anxious just writing that!! So. Maybe drafting could, in fact, be easier, but my brain won’t allow it.) We have made a new world, new people, out of nothing.

Yet, I often don’t talk about a book much when I’m drafting it, at least not in detail, even to the people I love most, and I’m honestly not sure if it’s because to do so is vulnerable and embarrassing, or because of these unwritten rules of you’re not supposed to holding me back. Or maybe just because as much as parts of me want to talk about it, bigger parts of me don’t. Because the book is still mine. I don’t want a single other person to look at it. Because once someone else does—it changes. As soon as an agent or editor looks at it, it changes. As soon as readers look at it, it changes. Even letting close loved ones look at it changes it, as much as you want all those people to look at it. Still, each new set of eyes adds another protective layer around my heart, another bandage preparing me for criticism, for misunderstanding, for my people to become marketable commodities instead of friends.

And then, even when everything goes as right as it can, by the time a book is actually published and I’m supposed to talk about this thing I made—even if I still love the book, and I do still love all my books, time combined with all those bandages have kind of dulled my rawest feelings. I’ll think of things to say about it, of course, but it almost feels like analyzing someone else’s book, sometimes. It’s so hard to get back to those feelings I had when I was first drafting, feelings that can mostly be summed up with: I love them I love them I love them, because by the time we get to publication, it has already been made abundantly clear that lots of people didn’t love them. So I bandage bandage bandage and pretend I’m as proud of myself as I was three years ago, or whenever it was that I got to be alone with my characters, alone in my love.

Anyway, this has turned quite maudlin, which wasn’t my hope. But this is all to say that I was going to tell you a little bit about this book as a way to both celebrate myself and say fuck you to those unwritten rules. And then I got to the actual finish line, and what do you know. It’s probably a combination of everything else happening in my writing world, but I started to feel a little fragile about it. Maybe I just want to be alone a little bit longer. I sincerely hope I get to tell you more about this book someday, but for now just know that I am, mostly, I love them I love them I love them. And I am, for now, proud of myself for writing another book.

Before I go! As I want to get more in the habit of shouting about things I love here:

• Two of my favorite YA books of the year released this week! And They Were Roommates by Page Powars is possibly one of the most fun books I have read, ever? Jasper is perhaps one of the best characters I have read, ever? I just enjoyed every second of it. And it comes with a map!! I am so weak for a book with a map—especially when it’s a contemporary!! (Page was also kind enough to blurb Donut Summer in the midst of preparing for his own book release—he called it “heartwarming and authentic” among other nice things. I am, overall, incredibly intimidated by the YA community and accordingly was really touched by every YA author who took the time for me with blurbs.)

• Cecilia Vinesse reached out to me a few months ago to let me know we shared a YA editor, and I am so, so glad she did because it then put All Nighter on my radar, and when I tell you. I am obsessed. With this book. It has so, so many of my favorite things: told entirely over the course of one night! Enemies/rivals to lovers done to perfection! Jokes for days; this book is so fucking funny while also being so beautifully written and poignant. Love for Virginia Woolf!! I love both Tara and Autumn so much, and there is this one moment/theme in particular when you realize that your enemy sees you so much clearer than the people who are closest to you do? And ooooh, as an obvious Autumn, to be seen in that way by a Tara when I was a teen would’ve killed me dead. Anyway, this book is so good and you should read it.

More next month! Here’s a flower and a dog for you.

xo

anita

• I will be having a launch event here in Portland, Oregon at the wonderful Grand Gesture Books on release day, July 29th. More info to come on that, but in case local folks want to mark their calendars. I may be doing more events, if I’m brave enough/mentally well enough to organize them, so! We’ll see!

• While Grand Gesture will obviously have copies available for sale at the event, I’m also partnering with local queer-owned indie Always Here for pre-orders from anywhere! I cannot express how jazzed I am to have both a romance bookstore and a queer bookstore in town now, and Always Here in particular is right down the street from where I live, making it especially easy for me to pop down and sign and personalize your books!

• I am also ALWAYS happy to go sign and personalize orders from legit any Portland area indie who will stock me lol, so some of my other favorites you can choose from include Vintage Books, Annie Bloom’s, or Broadway Books. (All of the above are also wonderful spots to visit for Independent Bookstore Day, coming up this Saturday!)

• Make sure wherever you pre-order from that you include a note about personalization before you press Submit—I’ll write/do whatever you want! (It has just occurred to me people will want me to doodle donuts. I assure you that even my doodles, like my signature, are not cute and whimsical like other authors’ but only embarrassing. But I will do my best.)

• All pre-orders and any book purchased at the event will also come with some Donut Summer-specific swag; I just…haven’t figured out what that will be yet? So, again! More coming soon!

• Reminder that you can add Donut Summer on Goodreads.

This morning, when I realized it was Earth Day, it felt like a good time to noodle in this newsletter about something I’ve been noodling on in my head a lot lately: the fact that I’ve realized I have a thing. A thing I almost always want to write about, or include in my books, and that thing is the earth.

I have other Things, too—mainly, music, and relatedly, dancing; a penchant for fat men with beards (this is more recent lol); characters who are kind of obsessed with not being Good Enough. But including some type of environmental theme, in a way that deeply informs the narrative as opposed to being a repeated quirk, is increasingly and without a doubt the space I feel most comfortable in, most myself.

There are probably several reasons why Something Wild & Wonderful felt (and feels) like the book of my heart, but getting to write a book that almost fully takes place in nature was one of them. Like, if I could write a hundred more books solely about sad people walking through the woods, trust me, I would. In Heartwaves, Mae feels the best way to process her grief is to be by the ocean. In Donut Summer, the main character, Penny, is particularly concerned with climate change. She plants trees with a local non-profit whenever her anxiety is bad, to help herself re-center. She wants to grow up and help save the earth.

I have two works-in-progress I’ve spent the last year mulling over. In the one I’m almost done drafting, the female main character could be a grown-up Penny (something I only realized recently): she works for an environmental non-profit in Berkeley; the main plotline revolves around a dam removal project in Northern California, inspired by the incredible story of the Klamath dams. The other WIP is the follow-up to Heartwaves, which will take place on a small farm on the Oregon Coast. And when I tell you the actual plot of this book is nebulous at best, but yet I already feel so fucking close to it, because I know what my characters’ hurts are, and I really, really want to write about farming.

When I first started writing books, I felt a kind of self-conscious panic about so many things, but particularly when it came to uniqueness: that my books were too like other people’s books, that my own books or characters weren’t different enough from each other. TO BE CLEAR, I am still panicked almost all the time about the dumbest shit. But now that I have more experience writing multiple books, now that I have more experience with publishing and examining other people’s bodies of work from a critical writer standpoint, I’ve accepted some things. Like the fact that there are two types of people. Some people’s brains are just brilliant things, capable of coming up with completely new ideas every year, uniquely distinct from their previous ideas, while still being them, somehow. Man, I fucking love these people. What an honor to get to keep reading their fresh work.

And then there are some people who spend their whole artistic careers noodling over the same themes. Dressed up differently each time, sure, but essentially coming back to the same core questions. Some of my favorite authors do this, even if it takes me quite a few of their books to realize it. What an honor to get to keep reading their work, too.

Realizing that I’m probably one of the latter has been surprisingly comforting to me, a way to almost better focus on what I’m doing, to waste less time being panicked. I have long felt that writing is an opportunity to get to the core of ourselves. When I was in high school, I was deeply split for a long time about whether I wanted to go to college for writing or environmental science. In the end, I likely chose writing because it was the easier choice, in a way, and I’ve always been a bit of a coward. Writing was something I had always desired, deep inside myself, whereas I had no idea if I could hack it as a scientist. (And yeah, I probably couldn’t have.) It was especially decided when I visited the campus of Emerson (where I attended undergrad) and everyone felt like fucking freaks and I was like yeah, yes, this is what I want. (Emerson, being an arts school, did not offer any types of science programs so I did not have the opportunity to change my mind, but I did accomplish a minor in “science” while I was there. Science! JUST “SCIENCE.” Emerson, never change.)

Which is to say—focusing more and more on environmental issues feels like some kind of gift to myself, some kind of penance to that young person who wasn’t quite brave enough to become a scientist. Taking care of the earth, like engaging in healthy romantic relations, like loving ourselves, is a lifelong pursuit, practicing the same shit, over and over again. How lucky I am, to keep writing about that same shit, to keep investigating how to love both each other and the land we live on better.

Of course—while I’ve categorized these two types of writers as totally different, the reality is that nothing is so cut and dry; a lot of the writers who think of completely fresh plots each time will still, by nature of being a person, come back to similar themes over and over, too. And there are books I’ve written that have nothing to do with the environment, and I think those are equally important for my craft: How You Get the Girl, amazingly, doesn’t soliloquize about nature even once, I don’t think; another book I’ve been working on for some time revolves around the world of comic books. Working on something outside my wheelhouse is important to stretch my creative muscles. But more likely than not, a tiny spoke of that wheel will likely butt into those projects, too: Love & Other Disasters takes place almost entirely on a sound stage in Burbank, but my heart sang the most when I got to write about how much Dahlia Woodson loves palm trees.

I’ve been contemplating ways to inject a little more joy into these newsletters, since the world fucking needs any bit of joy we can find. One day I WILL find the space to include more personal recommendations, I swear it, but for now—I find joy most often in my dogs and my garden, so I thought I’d start ending each newsletter with a random shot of both. The shot of Angus below has the bonus this month of showing you what an actual nightmare my bookcases (+floor stacks of books) are.

Hope you’re taking care of you as best as you can,

xo

anita

One, the ebook of How You Get the Girl is on sale for all of March for $3.99, from wherever you prefer to buy your ebooks!

Two, Donut Summer is now available to request on NetGalley!

I had a bit of a panic when I learned this, even though I knew it would be going up soon, since I recently received pass pages. This is normally the stage where early reading copies are released, and one of the final proofreading stages of editing, where you can’t actually change anything big but you can make little tweaks and see how it looks as a Real Live Book. Here’s a peek at the title page, for instance!

I always expect pass pages to be this really satisfying event, where like, I’ve done allll the hard work and can now do one final read-through and feel Proud of Myself. Except, in this instance in particular, all I can see are those sentences I approved changes to in copy edits to make more grammatically correct but now don’t sound Like Me? And all those words I still repeated so weirdly often even though I swore I’d already trimmed them down? And in general, I am just kind of sick of myself?

But so far, the big moments that I want to hit still hit, the chapters that always make me cry are still making me cry, those few lines that made me laugh when I wrote them are still at least a little bit funny to me. So I know that, overall, it’s okay that it’s already going out into the world, that the early readers won’t see those few awkward sentences or that one unnecessary word on that one page and want to throw it in the trash like me.

Even if I wasn’t quite ready yet to see those thumbs down about the cover. lol

Reminder that you can preorder Donut Summer from wherever you most like to buy books (more info on an official preorder campaign forthcoming), and add it on Goodreads or StoryGraph any time.

One last bit of Official Author News:

I get to be in conversation with some amazing authors this year, and the next one coming up is Jasmine Guillory, to celebrate her newest (sapphic!) romance, Flirting Lessons. This is such a big deal that the event, while being hosted by Grand Gesture Books, won’t be held at the bookstore but at Portland Center Stage, one of my favorite arts venues in the city! Fancy!! Am I nervous? Yes, but Jasmine is such a star that I’m sure everything will be fine. The date is April 16th at 7PM, and you can purchase tickets (which include a copy of the book) here.

Coming up after that are events with Meryl Wilsner and Ashley Herring Blake! More info about those next time.

In addition to finishing work on Donut Summer, I’ve mostly been spending my time really trying to push forward in my work-in-progress. There are reasons why I’m focusing on this story in particular—one of which is that I love it! Even though writing it has been fucking hard!! I’m now past the 50k mark, which helps me see the light at the end of the drafting tunnel a little bit. But I also have a few other projects I’ve been noodling on for months/years now, and one day this past week, even though I’ve really been trying to hit my daily word counts for this main WIP, I woke up just feeling real horny for two other characters from another book—one that died on sub last year, whose story I’ve never fully finished.

So I opened up their document, and remembered them again, and wrote down what I could before the inspiration left me.

And part of me wants to be frustrated at myself about this: when I’m writing a bunch of different stuff piecemeal, it can feel like I’m working nonstop without getting anything done. My brain has worked this way for a few years now too when it comes to reading: I am now, constantly, reading at least (AT LEAST) three books at the same time. Sometimes one book will really hook into my gut and then I read just that one nonstop until I finish (the best feeling!!) but mostly I am constantly flipping between a bunch of shit at once. And the teacher-librarian in me just CANNOT believe that’s the best way to achieve reading comprehension.

But after I wrote those couple-thousand words this week in the story I hadn’t visited in a long time? I felt so fucking jazzed. It was good to remember these people I still care about, to think about doing them justice again. It made me excited to get back to my main WIP, too. I got to tally both of their word counts in my journal, a reminder that even if I almost always feel restless, like I’m not doing enough—even when I’m drafting multiple books while working on pass pages for another—I am doing enough; I am doing a lot; I am getting words down. It was energizing, revisiting those other characters again, and mostly I just felt blessed that it happened at all.

All of which is to say: if you wake up feeling horny for characters you’re not supposed to be writing, take it as a blessing, and write it the fuck down anyway, before it’s gone.

Speaking of books that hook into my gut—a few recs before I go:

• I read Jamie Harrow’s One on One last week, one of those could-not-put-it-down, consumed-in-almost-24-hours experiences, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it, especially as I’ve been entrenched in March Madness. It’s true that I was probably primed to like this book, what with the college basketball, and being an Eastern PA native (the college the book revolves around is inspired by Villanova), but even without all that, I thought it was just so whip-smart and funny and real while also being so poignant and romantic. Content warning that this deals with sexual assault, but as a fan of sports and college sports in particular, especially when it comes to men’s sports, reading a book that dealt with both the love of the game and the inherent problematic power structures within the business head-on was just…very cathartic. Truly cannot wait to read Harrow’s next one, Fun at Parties, out in September.

• In light of the Trans Rights Readathon happening this week, I also feel the need to mention two trans historical romances that I loved so much (and have also frequently thought about since reading them): TJ Alexander’s recently released A Gentleman’s Gentleman, and Joanna Lowell’s A Shore Thing. Both are beautifully written, fascinating, romantic, and were just deeply comforting and wonderful to me. I read them within the same month last year and it just made me feel so lucky, so big and expansive and happy, to live in a time where we can have these stories traditionally published (and hitting bestseller lists, too!). Also: they both have really wonderfully flamboyant spines. Cannot recommend either enough!

More to say, always, but that’s enough for now. Hope you’re taking care of you as best you can.

xo

anita

I feel like I’m barely hanging in there, some days. Like the news is so overwhelming that I can feel it pushing on my chest at almost all times unless I really consciously try to shove it away (put away my phone, pick up a book, make myself a meal) and even then I’m only, like, 28% effective. I try to use these trying times to remind myself of my privilege—that pressure-on-my-chest is likely what anyone who isn’t white in America feels all the time; what undocumented people feel all the time; what queer and trans people in hostile-to-them places feel all the time. They have survived. I can survive.

Still, it’s a hard time to be a person who cares about other people.

One thing I haven’t doubted at all is that being creative still matters. Like, I feel no guilt about still wanting to sit at my kitchen table and write romance novels; I feel no guilt about reading romance novels instead of my twentieth news article of the day. (If anything, I am reading too many news articles.) And honestly, anyone who spends their time making other people feel bad about promoting their art instead of protesting every hour of the day is just engaging in performative activism. One, because there are so many more important things to yell about, and two, because art is protest. Yes, even romance novels. (I would say especially romance novels, but if you’re reading this newsletter you probably don’t need my high horse about this.)

When it comes to my own art, though, I’m in this kind of strange refraction period. I’ve been spending a lot of time of reflecting on my work and why I haven’t sold any new projects; I can barely read a paragraph of anything these days without thinking about my own writing. Because I know that publishing is all about luck and the whims of the business and it doesn’t reflect on the quality of my work yadda yadda yadda, but also, it kind of does. I am not a bestseller but I like to think my sales have been decent. I’ve gotten a bunch of starred reviews; gotten into a book box; it feels like I have done all the things I was supposed to do. So there has to be something I’m not doing well enough with my new projects, and they’re likely the things I have always not done well enough, but somehow got away with up until this point. I’m not good at concocting hooky hooks, at writing big exciting plots; I increasingly want to write quieter and quieter but I know there’s some way I can insert big into my quiet, too. Somehow. Maybe.

And then sometimes, of course, I get frustrated with myself: there’s thinking about craft, and then there’s just ignoring my own gut of what I want to create. One deserves more space than the other.

I’ve realized a few things, though, in all these reflections about my work, and one of them is this: romance is primarily seen as a form of escapism. I stand behind this 100% as a reader. But I don’t write to escape: I write to process. And I’m not sure this is something I’ll ever be able to change about myself. (See: being unable to start this newsletter without talking about the news.)

I laughed when I realized this truth, because suddenly I was back in my undergrad writing program all over again, sitting in my first (and only) fiction writing course, in a total panic almost every class. I just…wasn’t good at it. I eventually focused on more non-fiction based classes, where I felt at home; my final concentration was creative non-fiction, i.e., writing a lot of essays about my dramatic feelings. I thought, over a decade later, that publishing several novels had healed this sense of failure I still carry from this class. It wasn’t that I was bad at writing fiction; it was just that the set-up of the class that didn’t work with my brain. I will never be able to write a short story on the spot and then be ready to have others critique it twenty minutes later, sorry. Not my jam!

But here I am again, wondering if creative non-fiction is, in fact, all I’ve ever really been good at, or that I have the capacity for. And maybe that’s okay!! This isn’t meant to be self-deprecating. I know there are readers for whom my work really resonates. I just don’t know if it’s work that resonates with Big 5 editors looking for rom-coms with a snappy pitch.

I’m going to keep writing my probably-not-escapist-enough romances, of course; I do believe I’ll sell something again. (Maybe. lol) I’ll keep working on my craft, on trying to insert more big into my quiet. But I think at this turning point of my career, knowing who I am is important, too.

Official Authorly Business

I finished up copyedits on Donut Summer last week—I had a tight deadline on them and some snow days really leant me a hand; I went into a hyper-focus of working on them nonstop for three days, including making up a little song about how I lived at the kitchen table now and no longer spent time with my family, do do dooooo—and guess what! Even with all that shit I just said above, I really love this book! I even said this out loud to my wife, something along the lines of “I think this is a good book,” which is something so out of the ordinary for me to say about my work that it visibly shocked her lol. She was so proud of me! I was proud of me, too!

Anyway, finishing up copyedits is exciting because it’s almost the final stage—pass pages/final proofs come next, which is also typically the stage that advanced reader copies go out into the world for reviewers. I did learn that there won’t be any physical ARCs/galleys of this one, which I was kind of expecting but also slightly sad to learn because I’d planned a whole taking-an-ARC-to-various-donut-shops tour, but now I’ll just have to do that later with a finished copy! But hopefully digital copies will still be available one day on Netgalley and all the regular places; I’ll let you know when that happens.

For now, you can add it on Goodreads and pre-order from your preferred book retailer! I don’t have an official pre-order campaign yet, but these are all local shops that I am always available to go in and sign copies at:

• Grand Gesture Books

• Annie Bloom’s Books

• Vintage Books

• Broadway Books

Other Official Authorly Things

It was How You Get the Girl’s birthday last week! Happy birthday, Julie & Elle!

To celebrate, I posted a short piece on my website highlighting some of my favorite tracks from my writing playlist for this book.

I also recently learned that How You Get the Girl found a spot on the New York Public Library’s Best New Romance list. I also happened to listen to the Fated Mates podcast about how the list is crafted, and these librarians work on this list all fucking year. I fucking love librarians! Anyway, the whole list is truly wonderful if you’re looking for some stellar recommendations.

Okay, I fear this newsletter is already too long so I’m gonna cut myself off now. Take care of yourselves and each other, please please please.

<3

anita

Look at this ridiculously cute cover for Donut Summer.

I love everything about it, Penny’s freckles most especially, along with their little violating-executive-orders pronoun pins and the SPRINKLES and the sheen of the donut box design.

Here’s also a synopsis:

“Relaxing” and “getting a tan” may be high on most teens’ summer activity list, but for chronically freckled and deeply anxious Penny Dexter? Not a chance. Socking money away for college? Of course. Babysitting her siblings? Sure. Becoming a climate scientist and saving the world? She wishes.

At least she can tackle the tuition money with the seasonal gig she landed at her local donut shop. But when she finds out that her genderqueer nemesis Mateo della Penna will also be working behind the counter, Penny’s summer of mindless labor vanishes before her eyes. But their two-and-a-half-year feud takes a backseat when Delicious Donuts is threatened by a corporate takeover.

As their small town confronts changes Penny can’t accept, there’s still one person who remains by her side. And though their taste in donuts is questionable (the apple fritter is clearly superior to the Boston cream), Mateo’s presence manages to calm Penny’s anxiety while opening new possibilities she never allowed herself to contemplate before. Could it be that Penny’s found the perfect, most infuriating person to face the world with?

As a newsletter exclusive, I will share that I actually love BOTH apple fritters and Boston creams. But I do gravitate toward apple fritters first these days. Obviously I am always, ultimately, on Penny’s side.

(Also: Amazon currently lists this as appropriate for 8-12 year olds but that is very wrong! My kid is 8 and I certainly do not want him to read it! But if you have kids of your own/kids in your life and you’re curious, I would recommend it for 12 and up. The main characters are 16; this is a very middle-of-high-school book versus new adult. Sex is discussed but not had; I also curse a fair amount as I tend to do.)

Reminder that Donut Summer is out July 29th and available to pre-order and add on Goodreads.

For one other bit of news—the Moonie’s novellas are now available on Kindle Unlimited.

This is just a bit of an experiment for me—the paperback and audio editions are still available everywhere else, along with the collected edition. But the original ebook novellas are now hanging out in KU! Along with the skiing-in-Switzerland Moonie’s short and that spicy novella I published under a different name once.

Okay that’s all for now!

queer love and donuts,

anita

I’ll still send official author update emails when something Real is happening, and include any tidbits I have whenever I have them. But for all the newsletters in between, I’d love to think of some kind of clever format or theme to link them all together…but haven’t landed on anything yet, and I feel itchy to talk today, so here I am.

Generally, I’d love to give updates about what I’ve been working on writing-wise that month, or whatever general writing thoughts I’m mulling over, followed by other things that I’ve loved/would recommend/have made me think recently. So let’s go!

Writing Life

I’m currently drafting an as-yet-unnamed, as-yet-uncontracted adult romance, and I’d love to talk more about drafting in another newsletter, but today I want to talk about that moment last week when I was trying to come up with a name for a side character, and it struck me that I have reached the point of truly starting to forget half the names I’ve already used. Like, I tried to squint through my memory and realized I couldn’t even remember some of my main characters’ names lolol which is WILD, because when you are in the depths of writing a book, you LIVE with these people. You know their names better than your own. And yet! I have apparently now written so much shit that even my dearest friends are starting to drift away.

So I started a new document, looked through some old manuscripts, and began making an Anita Kelly Universe Character Encyclopedia. I’d heard of other writers doing this for themselves before, but like many things, had never thought about actually doing it myself because why would I take myself seriously.

The document itself is simple: the most detailed I’ve gotten with it is deciding to bold main characters (and include the full book titles in their entries alone; everything else is shorthand). I also decided to alphabetize by first name which went against all of my librarian instincts BUT not everyone has last names! It’s mostly just characters (and animals) right now, along with specific place names if they’re places I made up. It’s still not at all complete; there are quite a few books/novellas/etc I haven’t opened yet to comb through.

But the ones I have, especially the ones I haven’t looked at in a while? I forgot Aiden’s last name (even though Kai calls him McCarstle a hundred times in the book!), AND the fact that he walked dogs! I forgot Mal had a sister, or that Lily had a group of friends from work she did karaoke with. When I look back at any given book, I always think about the core part of each main relationship—London walking back to the hotel from the studio with Dahlia; Ben and Alexei walking on the trail—but I apparently forget about all the other little details that make up a world, that I had so much fun fleshing out in the moment. I want to remember the name of Mae’s UPS driver! They love their delivery people!

Love & Other Disasters released three years ago this month, an anniversary I meant to commemorate with a giveaway online but forgot to, but the point is: I am always feeling these days like I’m not producing enough fast enough, like I’m failing, maybe because of capitalism, maybe because of my own inherent issues, maybe because that one author just announced another new book and haven’t they already announced at least three this year? But making this document helped me remember all that I have produced over these last three years. And it’s a lot! I think what was so important and fun about creating this document was that there was no value attached to any of it: nothing to indicate how well-crafted any of these characters were; how well-received the books they reside in were; whether readers liked them; whether they were “necessary” to the plot or the pacing.

The only point was: I made them up.

And look at them here now, all together. Look at how many of them there are! Even if they’re only on page once, I want them here. I want all of them at the Google Doc party.

I encourage every writer to do the same, even if you’ve only written one book, or started to write anything, just to have this feeling. It is also, of course, helpful for the original reason I started making it. For instance, I realized I am apparently obsessed with the name Olivia.

I now know I have to change Olivia Carter’s name, which I was already on the fence about since I’m planning on writing a book about Liv from Heartwaves, and while some friends had convinced me that Olivia and Liv had different enough vibes that this would be acceptable, when I remembered that Mal’s ex was also Olivia and a briefly-mentioned store in Donut Summer is named Olivia’s, and I have an Olive thrown in there—enough, Me! Who knew I even liked this name that much! Am I sad about discovering this, yes, because even though none of you have read Where the Light Hits yet I’m already attached to how the love interest says Olivia Carter’s name. But I will persevere.

Now, does it likely matter to literally anyone else if I have multiple Olivias in my books, or re-use certain names, especially side characters? No. I know this. But it matters to me. I want every character on my pages, no matter how briefly they’re there, to be their own.

In Official Author Newsletter Business, Donut Summer has a release date: July 29th! Thank the publishing gods, my summer romance will be released at the HEIGHT of summer. Sometimes things are good.

It should also be available to pre-order on most sites, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local indie…although I will let you know about an official pre-order campaign in the coming months if you’re interested in signed copies/whatever swag I think of from a local indie of my own.

You can also add it on Goodreads!

This month was also notable in my donut world because I recently sent the manuscript to a bunch of authors I admire for possible blurbs, which felt like a Moment to me (that I could probably write about in another newsletter sometime), as I haven’t had the energy to actually ask many folks for blurbs in…a long time. And Ellen O’Clover, an actual author hero of mine, already got back to me with my First Official YA Blurb and her words were so kind that it was one of those “huh, maybe this is worth it” moments that I find myself really needing. So while I won’t share the actual blurb just yet—thanks for that, Ellen.

Reading (& Writing) Life

Holy shit this newsletter is already so long; you don’t even want to know how much else I planned to talk about!! lol but let me at least talk about a book I fuckin’ loved.

(Ideally, I will talk about a book I loved recently in every newsletter from here on out, even if that brings me stress: what if I read a friend’s book in that “recently” stretch of time and then it hurts their feelings if I don’t mention it? I made a “most anticipated books releasing in January” post on Instagram this month and only later realized I missed like, five books from people I admire and am friendly with and I still feel like shit about it! So: I think I will limit the books I discuss in depth to books that inspired my own writing for personal reasons as opposed to just “favorite books” and also books written by people I don’t know whatsoever. Because while it can be surprising how small the writerly world can feel, I do think it’s exceedingly important for me to continue reading books by people I don’t know at all.)

I feel like everyone who has read The Wedding People has loved it, so none of my thoughts are particularly unique here (but why the fuck do I care? why did I even write that sentence? I loved it, so it is personal to me. I’m working on this kind of shit). If you don’t know, it’s about a woman who goes to a fancy hotel in Newport to kill herself, only to be waylaid by all the wedding people who are also temporarily inhabiting the hotel.

As someone who has likely struggled with depression my whole life, I personally loved the frankness with which suicide was discussed here. (That said, I also knew that was the deal going in—hopefully you did, too, if you’ve read it, as that could obviously be a very big trigger.) I liked how often the main character said it out loud, how honestly it was spoken of throughout, at the same time that it wasn’t romanticized as I think certain literary work can sometimes do. Like, Alison Espach didn’t write about a suicidal person because it was poetic or pretty or deep. Alison Espach wrote about a character who was fucking depressed. Depression and suicidal thoughts aren’t deep. They just fucking suck. They’re just fucking sad.

And that sadness came through here. But this book was also funny, and real, and about love, and the beauty of being alive. A literary book that is also funny and earnest and about being alive is the kind of book that has influenced me most throughout my life, that I just can’t get enough of (see also: Steven Rowley). I often have a hard time finding books that really tow that line well, though (the line between beautiful and pretentious), because I think it takes an incredibly talented person to tow it! I know I’ve found that kind of literary book when I get to the last page and I know, I know that the author has ended it at the exact right spot, in the exact right way, but the selfish overindulgent part of me is still SO BUMMED. Because I don’t want to say goodbye to them yet! Because I LOVE THEM. And I want to get to see them live through all the good stuff that comes next! (Which, of course, is why I love romance novels. Romance novels often let me revel in the good stuff, and thank fucking god for that.)

The morning after I finished this book, I sat down and wrote five thousand words of my own. Which is not at all normal for me: I typically feel pretty good if I can get any word count over five hundred in a single stint/day. I knew that this weirdly productive writing day was Alison Espach-inspired, and it made me think about an author panel I was on once, where we were asked about the act of reading-while-writing, which can be a tricky balance: I know a lot of writers who don’t read at all while they’re drafting, so as not to get overly influenced or distracted from their own voice. I remember Alicia Thompson (at least I’m pretty sure it was Alicia; I remember because I sat next to her on a couch and I played with this fun pillow in my lap the whole time and then in every picture from the event I was just like why did I think hugging that pillow the whole time was cute lol but anyway) saying something about how sometimes she likes reading books she really loves while she’s drafting because it helps inspire her to write better. And I said something about how I can’t read authors I know I love while I’m drafting because it just makes me hate myself.

And I think I knew, even in the moment, that Alicia’s answer was better. But I think every self-deprecating answer I can look back on and frown a bit about is a victory, and I’m frowning a bit at myself this week as I think about The Wedding People and my five thousand word day. Is there probably a decent amount of overly-Alison-Espach-inspired prose in those five thousand words? Sure. But who cares? They’re still words I got down on the page. They’re still words I can make more and more my own in the first round of edits, and every round after that.

I think what I’m realizing is that when I’m inspired to write more after reading a book I’ve really loved, it’s not even necessarily about wanting to replicate that author’s style, or do what they did (even if that inevitably seeps in, a little). It’s that it helps me to trust myself. Like fuck, Alison Espach trusted herself to write this whole fucking book and I loved every bit of it. I can trust myself to pour out every bit of my story, too. Because that’s what matters: the story. When I’m opening up a manuscript after just reading a great book, that’s easy to remember. When I’m opening up a manuscript after scrolling social media or reading my emails or looking at Goodreads or feeling despondent about the world, it’s a whole lot murkier. The words come a whole lot slower. I’ve lost my trust with myself.

And if there’s one thing we gotta do in 2025, it’s trusting ourselves.

xo

anita

The only trouble with reflecting about 2024 in terms of this newsletter is that it’s often been a dark year inside my head when it comes to writing and publishing, so I’ve been struggling with figuring out how to talk about it in a way that won’t make my wife sigh or my mom worried about me. At the same time, in many ways, it’s also been a great year for me! A banner year, even!

So, as with most things, thinking about 2024 is a big contradictory mess, but let’s start with the good things.

Things I published & worked on!

1. How You Get the Girl, the final book in what we’re now calling my Nashville Love trilogy, released in February and I remain surprised at how lovely the response to this book has been? Mainly because I still, in my heart, feel like this is kind of a weird book? Like I think it’s a unique book and I really love Julie and Elle but I still cannot pitch what it’s about in one sentence, even though everyone tells you you should be able to do this (even though I am kind of bad about being able to do this with any of my books, which…is likely part of my troubles, but anyway). More than anything, the reception proved to me how hungry and enthusiastic sapphic readers are, which is not a surprise to me, but—power to the sapphics, is what I’m saying.

   What was particularly special for me with this one was getting to go to Nashville to celebrate both this book and the end of the series. Nashville will always have a huge chunk of my heart, largely because of these characters I made up, and that’s just, very neat to me. I was also, again, surprised but pleased to see it show up on a few best-of-the-year lists that I respect a lot, like NPR’s and Autostraddle’s (along with many of yours!).

2. I self-published Heartwaves in June, and my feelings about this one are…way more complicated than my feelings about How You Get the Girl; I probably have more complicated feelings about this book than anything else I’ve published before. Dear friend Alicia Thompson once referred to it as my Pinkerton (which is a Weezer reference for the uninitiated), and (for those who are initiated) that feels about right. What I do know is that any time I allow myself to think about it, or go back and read sections of it, I remember that it is the exact book I wanted to write when I wrote it. And in the end, that’s probably not truly that complicated at all. (Special shoutout to those who have purchased personalized copies of this one from my Etsy! Sending them around the country has been like a little treat for me this year. And, of course, thank you to every indie bookstore and library who decided to order it!)

3. I spent most of this fall working on edits for my YA that’s releasing next year, Donut Summer! This one has been on a long journey, so getting to finalize Penny and Mateo’s story has felt very special. I feel very lucky to have somehow squeezed this little summer romance into a very competitive YA market, and while I don’t have an exact release date yet, it’s currently set for Fall 2025. I have seen a cover, and I love it so much? I love them.

   ---

   Travel, & events galore!

   The best part of this year was that I got to attend so many events, from Tucson to Winston-Salem to Anaheim to the Oregon Coast, including some travel that was paid for, like paid flights and hotel rooms and drivers waiting to pick me up at the airport! Just because I wrote a whole bunch of words about queer people falling in love! I honestly don’t know if this will ever happen for me again lol but the fact that it happened at ALL will always make 2024 very special for me.

   I also got to be the conversation partner here in Portland for so many friends that I adore, which will probably always be my favorite part of this gig. Oh, and I got to be part of an event at the downtown Powell’s for the first time ever (and likely last but I’m okay with that!) And celebrate the opening of Portland’s first romance-only bookstore! I still sometimes have anxiety around author events but this year really was full of so many special moments I’m so grateful I got to be a part of.

   Getting to attend events this year also meant I received more thoughtful gifts from readers, especially at Steamy Lit Con this summer. I’ll never not treasure them all <3

   ---

   Okay, that all sounded pretty good, so…?

   The thing about publishing is that you are always internally living several steps ahead. While you’re celebrating the release of one book, you’ve hopefully already finished the next, and have a plan for the next, and so on and so forth. That’s where things have been hard for me: my next is a bit up in the air.

   
   Like I just mentioned, I do have Donut Summer coming in 2025! And I am so, so grateful for that. But I tried very hard this year (in a variety of ways) to sell another adult project, to have my nexts lined up and ready to go as I’d planned…without success. I heard you’re so great! but no many times. It altered the visions I had for myself for the next few years. Which, creatively, is likely okay, but financially, has been very stressful. If I was independently wealthy, or finally able to figure out the magical combination of writing work and non-writing work that truly works for both my brain and my wallet, I wouldn’t be nearly as…*gestures wildly* unwell lol. But right now, I’m spending a lot of time in the muck of trying to figure out more non-writing work to pay the bills while still carving out time to work on the writing I’ve figured out I actually need to do for my mental health, even if I wasn’t striving for publication at all. (Did any of that make sense? I’m not sure but I’m plowing forward anyway.)
   
   I still don’t know if all the nos I heard this year come down to: 1) a rapidly changing and increasingly overcrowded romance market; 2) me just not being very good at this, actually; or 3) this being a totally normal ebb and flow all midlist authors go through (whatever the fuck midlist author actually means), and I should get over myself and stop being so Charlie Brown about it all. I really do think it’s likely a combination of all three. And if I was minding #3 in particular, I would in fact get over myself and not be writing this part of the newsletter at all. But other writers I love and admire have publicly shared their own struggles they’ve had with publishing this year, and knowing that other folks whom I view to be truly talented writers are also Going Through It has brought me immense comfort. So here I am, chatting about failure, because especially in creative fields, I think we should always chat about failure. And I spent a lot of this year feeling like a failure. It’s hard: it makes all the other negative thoughts that are already lurking in your head, all the things you wanted to achieve but didn’t, all the comparisons you know are not healthy to make, so, so much louder.

   ---

   What next?

   Even if my professional nexts have stalled a bit in my head, I do want to be clear that I am still writing, perhaps even getting back to a much better mental spot with writing itself than I’ve had in a long time. I’ve been spending less time on social media; I’ve been reading more, both of which help immensely with those negative thoughts. My personal life (my wife and kid and dogs and friends and garden) is wonderful, and I’ve gotten a bit better at separating that from my writing life, even if it’s a balance I’ll likely always be negotiating, as my writing is personal, too.

   
   So here’s what’s next: I’m hoping to self-publish something next year—either a long-ish novella I’ve been working on, or Heartwaves #2, although the latter is probably just a pipe dream because I still have so much work to do on it. I’m also working on another adult novel that I’m kind of viewing as my one last stubborn try, for now and I’m in the point of drafting where I feel so absolutely precious over every little part of it lol. I’ll also attempt to pitch another YA, the YA I have actually always wanted to write, but realistically that’s probably another pipe dream (which is also okay).
   
   I’m looking forward to new reading goals: more non-fiction, more historical romance authors I haven’t read before, more litfic and mysteries, and of course, continuing to catch up on my National Geographics. I’m thinking about newslettering more! Using my planner and taking care of my body better. As always, I’m looking forward to spring: another year in the garden and a few new hikes. And I’m looking forward to continuing to appreciate community, to celebrate queer love and learn how to be a better ally to everyone, no matter what the political landscape holds.

   
   Thanks for being with me in 2024! I hope 2025 shows you light. Don’t let the fascists bring you down: save your stories in a safe place and don’t silence yourself before they try to silence you. Wear your love and your feelings proudly, while doing what you need to keep yourself safe. We need all of our voices more than ever. We need you.

xo,

Anita