Week 19: New book club *and* a new novel study piece

It’s week nineteen of 2026. How’s the writing been treating you these days? Are you slowing down after a spring sprint, like me? Or are you gearing up to make a lot of progress during a more-spacious summer? (Or during a less-distracting winter, for my southern hemisphere readers.) Wherever you are, remember to build in time for rest and recovery, even if that means an hour between writing sprints.

This is going to be a very newsy newsletter, so let’s get right into it – I have many things I’m excited to tell you.

First, I’m kicking off a free month-long Novel Study Book Club to read Freida McFadden’s The Intruder starting tomorrow and running through June 13. McFadden absolutely dominated the bestseller lists last year, often with multiple books at a time. My next Novel Study book focuses on bestsellers, so I wanted to make sure to include a book by McFadden.

If you want to read along, you can chat with me and other participants on two threads, one without spoilers and one with all the spoilers, plus there will be two live Zoom discussions in June. You’ll also get access to my story spreadsheet and craft notes as I read, plus notifications about my analytical posts as soon as they are up. And – naturally – there will be some new charts and graphs to analyze.

I also circled back around to one of last year’s Novel Study Book Club picks, Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life, and did a very thorough analysis of the way she balances (and maybe sometimes doesn’t balance) her rom-com plot with her family saga plot. This novel hit the bestseller lists just like her previous rom-coms, but it didn’t stay on as long and it has lower and fewer reviews than some of her other books. (To put this in context though, it still has a stunning number of reviews: nearing 800k on Goodreads and 80k on Amazon. EmHen is doing just fine.) If you are working on a manuscript with multiple subplots, I think this piece will show you some of the opportunities as well as some of the pitfalls.

Finally, those of you who follow me on social media might have already seen that I posted a long story about my family, in support of a fundraising drive my sister is doing to support Blood Cancers United. There are some sad bits, some happy bits, and some inspiring bits – plus a photo of me at age 15 with a perm, braces, and Dirty Dancing–inspired rolled-up jean shorts, if that’s something you need to see. (We are all currently healthy and happy, so don’t worry!) You can read it here on Instagram and I’ll include it below as a PS for those of you not on social media.

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.

Our Thing of Joy this week: One great joy here in San Francisco is that the beautiful 1920s-era Castro Theater has been remodeled and reopened. I’ve already been there once to see Father John Misty and I’m excited to keep coming back. On Friday I was there for part of the SF Silent Film Festival, which was a remarkable collection of short Japanese films from the 1930s made on paper. They were accompanied by gorgeous live music composed for the pieces. You can learn more about the project here – it’s a really inspiring story of so many resources used to rescue soon-to-be-lost artworks, truly a good thing – and see a trailer with snippets from many of the films here on YouTube.

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.

Kristen

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TL;DR: My sister is raising money for Blood Cancers United. There’s a sad story, then a happy story, then an ask.

I rarely talk about this and never online, but I’m doing it today for a good cause, which I’ll tell you about in a minute. First, I’m going to talk about these photos of my dad, Chuck Tate – that's him there in the tie (with me and my uncle). He died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma when he was just 42. I was 16 and my sister was 13.

I was so lucky to have him as a dad – I remember his patience, his encouragement, and the way he was always learning new things. Losing him was a terrible tragedy for our family, one that still strikes me at times that surprise me: When I was 32 and had lived half my life without him; when I had my kids and he couldn't meet them; when I turned 43, the birthday he never reached; when my kids were the ages my sister and I were when we lost him. Okay, that was the sad part – and, yeah, it's really sad.

But here's the happy part. It's going to start out sad, but I promise it has a happy ending! About 15 years after my dad's death, my sister learned that her father-in-law had been diagnosed with the same cancer. I remember the pit in my stomach when I heard. Ben had just started to meet all of his grandkids and there were more to come, more weddings and family gatherings and just life waiting for him – he was only 55.

But 15 years had made a huge difference in the kind of treatment he was able to get. Because of research and breakthroughs, he recovered and has been cancer-free for over 20 years! He's gotten to meet all of his grandbabies and see them grow up too.

I believe that if my dad was diagnosed today, he would have had a good chance to survive. The only way that happens, though, is with slow, expensive, painstaking science – and we know what has happened to science funding this year.

I am so proud of my sister Karen Tate Crawford for stepping up to lead a massive fundraising campaign this spring for Blood Cancers United. If you have donation dollars to spare, I hope you'll consider allocating some of them here.