It’s week seventeen of 2026. How’s the writing going? Everything feels like a roller-coaster—the news, the economy, the season. It’s okay if you can’t settle into a routine right now. Keep opening the document, scribbling notes for new ideas, polishing a sentence. Keep the writing work alive in your brain until the day you discover you can lock in and focus.
I’m on the downslope now of the roller-coaster of work I built for myself this spring, getting ready to glide into a slower summer. I’ve enjoyed pushing my limits just a little bit, writing Novel Study posts most weekends and squeezing in a trip to NYC this week. I got to experience spring whiplash—warm sunshine and the last tulips in Central Park one day and cold gray wintry rain the next. I spent those days wandering around the city and stuffing myself with art and food. (Sorry to the NYC-area friends, clients, and colleagues I didn’t call—I was in desperate need of some solo introvert time!)
In between, I gave a talk on revision at IPA BookCAMP, showing writers how to make the process more manageable and effective by tackling it in three different passes: one to focus on story and structure, one to focus on chapters, and finally one to focus on sentences. My favorite piece of advice from the talk though is to try to let your creativity loose during the revision process rather than feeling constrained by the words you’ve already written. Here are my favorite slides from the deck:
Who knew there were chickens like these in the world? How fun would it be if you went into the revision process expecting a standard barnyard fowl at the other end and instead ended up with this extravagant creature? If you can approach revision as an adventure rather than a task to be checked off, you might find that you do your very best thinking and creating during this stage.
In my ten-plus years of editing, I’ve seen all kinds of magic happen during the revision phase: The birth of new POV characters, a POV shift that unlocked exactly the right voice for a protagonist, many entirely new subplots, and new endings that surprised both me and the author but were hiding in the character arcs all along. But to let these new ideas and shapes come into focus, the authors had to loosen their grip on the pages and words they already had. It’s a scary step! It feels like all of your work is going to be scattered into the wind, and sometimes there are pages and entire chapters that do get blown away. But fresh air brings new ideas to fill those holes with the material that was meant to be there all along. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to witness—I hope you’ll get to experience it as a writer too.
I’m working on another Novel Study piece on the structure of Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life, focusing on where exactly she positions the romance beats and how they interact with all of the many other plot and character arcs she builds in this novel. I’ll have that for you next time (with, yes, another gorgeous graph!).
But for now I can officially announce that I’ll be running a free pop-up Novel Study Book Club for Freida McFadden’s most recent bestseller, The Intruder, from May 11 through June 13. You’ll get all of my analytical posts on the novel (opening, scene study, and structure) as they are ready, as well as access to my scene-by-scene craft notes as I read, discussion threads, and two live Zoom discussion calls.
Do you want to join The Intruder Book Club?
I was on the Indy Author Podcast again this week, talking about writing rules you can break. Host Matty Dalrymple is such a good interviewer, and we went deep on many topics. Want to know when and how you can shift POVs within a scene, when to use passive voice, when to tell rather than show? Give the episode a listen, and then go out and break rules with glee and knowledge! (We also talk about some extra nerdy topics like adverbs, passive voice, and progressive verbs.)
You may have to pay your taxes, but you are allowed to use passive voice and the occasional adverb when needed, damnit!
For readers who want to extend their skills and find support and community: My brilliant colleague and friend Tanya Gold is running a sale on their courses. Use SPRING5 for 5 percent off through May 10. I’ve taken two of Tanya’s courses and still draw on what I’ve learned, and Tanya has only continued to hone their teaching skills and materials since then. They have courses for both editors and writers, including a DIY Developmental Editing course that could help you find the weird fancy chicken lurking in your own manuscript 🐓 (I love this metaphor and am never letting it go.)
Book birthdays!
Pain, by Beth Ball
Some vows were made to be broken. Others span centuries, awaiting their moment to hold true.
AN HEIR ON THE RUN
The wolf waiting in Natalya’s blood has answered her call, just like her mother promised. With her wolf comes her inheritance as the trâesa, the savior of her people. But first, she must survive the soldiers who hunt her and find the one they took.
AN ASSASSIN IN CHAINS
Steel bars and a bellemancer’s schemes hold Silas as bait, dangled to lure Natalya into the rescue she won’t be able to resist. Silas is not one to wait, but his captors have magical secrets in store for the negata nobleman, the sort of secrets that only blood and souls can tell.
Bones of the Deep, by J.F. Penn
Some graves are meant to stay underwater.
Marine archaeologist Eve Calder has built her career salvaging what the sea tried to keep. When a secretive London collector offers her the find of a lifetime — the preserved skeleton of a non-human saint, hidden in a shrine on a South Pacific seamount — she takes the job and tells herself it's research, not theft.
The bones now lie sealed in the hold of the SV Southern Crosswind, a historic tall ship running paying tourists across two thousand miles of open Pacific from Fiji to Vanuatu.
Three days out of port, something begins to move beneath the keel. Shadows circle in the bioluminescent dark. Hull-shuddering impacts echo through the timbers. The local crew whisper about sea spirits and start counting the nights.
Then the first body hits the water.
Upcoming appearances
I love speaking to writers and editors—check out my Speaking page or reply to this email if you are interested in having me speak to your group.
Sisters in Crime, NorCal chapter, June 13, virtual: Reading the EKG of the Novel – I’ll include the registration link when I have it
Sonoma County Writers Conference, October 17, Santa Rosa, CA: topic TBD
Our Thing of Joy this week: Baseball is back! And even though my SF Giants are having an atrocious start, they managed to win a series against the Dodgers last week. One of the things I love about baseball is that there are just so many games that pretty much any weird thing you can think of will eventually happen during a game – for example (to stay with the bird theme I didn’t know I had when I started this newsletter), a goose calmly strolling around Wrigley Field while the game continued around it.
Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.
Kristen
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