And other truths about publishing
After I completed my first novel, I had dreams of a beautiful black book, its ivory pages sewn into the binding, the title embossed in gold leaf, a single red ribbon denoting the place where a reader might pause in their reading, adrift in another world.
Perhaps, if I was lucky enough, more than a few readers would love it. Perhaps, in my wildest dreams, Reese Witherspoon would even recommend it to her book club. Perhaps it would go on to become a New York Times bestseller and Hello Sunshine would adapt it into a series for HBO. …
Can’t I make plans and then back out at the last minute and we just all accept that that’s a thing we all do?
Can’t I say something in a group setting and then obsess over it the entire next day wondering whether I just offended someone and, if so, whether I should apologize or whether they even noticed (or cared) that I said that something-so I would either be legitimately apologizing or else apologizing for nothing-until I finally convince myself that we are all adults here so none of us should ever be offended and, in fact, I am…
I am obsessed with Broadway musicals. I listen to the soundtracks and have season tickets to the Broadway theater in Salt Lake City and I go to New York City whenever there is a new show to see — my sister and I even had plans to go see Hadestown, Moulin Rouge, and Beetlejuice before the whole thing shut down.
During the pandemic, my Broadway musical obsession took a hit. Not just because my tickets to Dear Evan Hanson and Frozen were canceled, but also because my commute — when I usually rap the Hamilton soundtrack to pump myself up…
I once went full-send on Instagram to the point where I had 25k followers. Then one day I decided I hated it all and deleted everything.
It was around the same time that I was the owner of my own magazine and everyone knew everything about me and I was disrupting my enjoyment of life by always taking pictures of it and I wasn’t convinced any of it would actually help my writing career at all.
It didn’t — as I discussed here — but I’m still enticed by the idea that it could. That armed with the right technology…
January went by in the fevered haze of a COVID-induced quarantine during which, exactly two weeks after my husband got the virus, I got the virus, and we had to do the whole thing all over again.
Not to be deterred by complete and utter boredom and the sheer absurdity that comes from watching The Truman Show immediately followed by EDtv, I emerged from my fevered state much like Mozart in the final scene of Amadeus — that is to say, not dead exactly, but rather having written something.
It’s a blog! Only not a blog, because we don’t really…
What we are witnessing could be evidence that we live in a multi-dimensional universe. That we are not alone. That we may be interacting with other entities, other intelligence,” says Brandon Fugal, real estate mogul and investor in the now infamous Skinwalker Ranch.
Once owned by hotel financier and billionaire Robert Bigelow, the ranch is a 512-acre parcel of land in Utah’s Uinta Basin long reputed to be rife with paranormal activity. …
This will be my sixth year living in a place with winter, and I now know what I didn’t at first: that something about my biology doesn’t enjoy the cold. That the happiness that comes with ease during the warm summer months is harder won during the colder winter ones. That the anxiety and depression I so thoroughly removed from myself long ago tries to seep back in once the snow settles in.
Every year I get stronger. I have gathered the tools I need to survive—the almond oil that drenches my bath every morning, the stair-stepper that keeps me…
Rebecca Zimmermann recently decided to move to Hawaii. She’d been working as an account coordinator for Double Forte, a creative agency out of San Francisco, when stay-at-home orders forced the company’s six office spaces to close. One month into closures Double Forte decided to allow it’s employees to work remotely indefinitely.
Zimmermann jumped at the opportunity. “I began thinking of places I could relocate to that would support my lifestyle,” she says. “That’s when I started considering Hawaii. …
When we started working from home we stopped using our cars and for a brief moment, the clouds parted. We saw a world in which the air we breathe became cleaner and we clung, for a moment, to the hope of a smog-free future. Maybe that could be our future, we thought, if we changed all our gas-powered cars out for electric ones.
Indeed, as carbon emissions plummeted by up to 30 percent worldwide, stock in electric vehicle manufacturers soared by up to 616 percent ―the inverse correlation implying a sort of aspirational environmentalism: The idea that electrification could save…
Elle Griffin
Author of a newsletter about writing (and other things) called The Novelleist. About to release my novel via Substack. Subscribe at ellegriffin.substack.com.
