New year, new project?

Oh, hi!

Bear with me through some necessary housekeeping. It’s the first week of pub year, and there are lists afoot. The Great Wherever publishes in July (July 7, 2026, to be precise), and I was trying to keep my expectations realistic vis-à-vis January’s many “most anticipated” lists, which tend to focus on titles releasing in the first half of the year. So I am very excited to share that TGW has been named among the most anticipated of its pub season by Publisher’s Weekly, Debutiful, and BookPage (you’ll have to scroll through each of those lists to find it, but I hope you do; there are a TON of exciting books to look forward to this year!). I’m thrilled about all of them but quite personally tickled by Debutiful, which I’ve cherished as a supporter of my career since its very early days.

You can preorder the book here!

Today one of my best friends asked me this: “With the book finished [she meant including the multiple rounds of edits I did in 2025, some more challenging than others], what’s the next big thing?” Which is a funny question, because my big thing of 2026 will be the book publishing, and that isn’t happening for another six months. It reminded me a little bit of the way some people start asking you when you’ll try for another baby while you’ve still got the peri bottle sitting on the bathroom sink.

My friend didn’t mean it that way, and I know she didn’t mean it that way (and she knows I know she didn’t mean it that way, hi B!!). She is very aware that I can be, shall we say, an intense person when it comes to certain things. She remembers going to the gym with me at the stupidest times in the Skinny Bitch era of my early 20s, saw me take on the most brutal commutes to work concurrent full- and part-time jobs on opposite ends of town after law school. She also watched me train a very determined eye on figuring out how to get published while papering my walls with litmag rejections (and was one of the loudest cheerleaders when I finally started seeing acceptances). She knows I don’t do a lot of sitting quietly, that What’s next? is one of the omnipresent questions of my life.

But when I answered her—Honestly, I said, this is the time to start the next book—B herself was incredulous, landing on the exact same comparison I had: “You don’t get a break?! Writing a book is like having a baby!”

Well yes, but. And then I reminded her that it was July 2024 when I got to type the magic words at the bottom of my first draft. By the time the book comes out, it will have been two years since I drafted a single scene from scratch. (I did do some generative* stuff in revision to address questions from my editor, but that felt more like solving a puzzle with preexisting pieces; it didn’t involve the wild thrill of the 100% blank page.) At the point when my loved ones are meeting these characters for the first time, I will probably have started to forget exactly what it was like to dream them up (though I sure hope to God I remember enough to talk about it intelligently at book events).

And on top of that, I am one of those people who feels physically unwell when I’m not doing the thing that turns my gears. The lack of a long-term project, a second world to slip into when this one starts sucking too badly, is a hole in the chest. Nighttimes are when I feel most haunted by ideas, including the half-baked or half-forgotten ones. Whereas when I was deep in my last project, I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing the second the kids went to bed.

So yes, it’s time to start something new.

I had been thinking my next project would be short stories again, because I missed them terribly during the novel years. Or at least I missed their short feedback loop: write - workshop - submit - rejection wallpaper - repeat. I do have a concept for another collection in mind, and the seeds of a few stories. But I’ve spent a little over the past year trying to get one ambitious story draft going, and that has plodded along. I think it’s a good story, and I think I can get it published, but having one foot still in the novel draft (while editing) was making it a confusing slog. I’ve tried opening that draft every night of 2026 so far and each time have resentfully sucked my teeth and then slammed it shut again.

But then, I might also have an idea for a novel again, or maybe even two novels. Which seems indefensible. I am not a novel-churning machine, and I don’t write the kind of work that lends itself to that. Starting another novel would mean a commitment to years of investing in something that would then compete with all the other things in my life for my like 20 minutes of nightly free time. I’m convinced that TGW basically self-wrote, assembling itself from a bunch of my scattered ideas, because how else to explain its taking shape during a time when I had twinfants and twoddlers and usually didn’t get five uninterrupted hours of nightly sleep? And since I have no confidence that there is some other novel hiding out in my brain and waiting to burst free on its own, I assume I would have to brute-force my way through this one. This time with more regular sleep but also more of a life outside than I had back then.

So that’s where I am: nowhere, but ready to be somewhere. If you’ve been through this, will you tell me how you determined where to start your next thing? Or how you parlayed the noisy desire to be writing into permission to actually start writing? 

*I have to trust that you know this if you’re reading this, but just in case: generative as in I wrote new things. Not genAI. Never genAI. I’ll quit writing one hundred times and throw every copy of my books into the ocean before yada yada you get the idea.

Thumbnail photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash