How to Glow in the Dark

[Nota bene: this week’s newsletter touches on bodies and weight. If you’d rather not engage with all that, olly out after line item one, and see you next week.] Look, says I, sloshing my third martini in your direction.1 If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: outcomes in this industry are like a gut microbiome. We can talk about bacteria common across populations, but in the aggregate, every individual’s colon contents are unique as a fingerprint.

[I’m catching up on post-vacation client work this week. Hope you enjoy this guest column from my friend Sam Ashworth, a wildly talented novelist and writing teacher. -ASL] It’s 1973, and we’re in a suite at the Sherry-Netherland hotel in New York. Three souls have been convened for an all-day meeting: director Herbert Ross—it’s his suite—screenwriter Jay Presson Allen, and composer John Kander. Their job is to break the story for the new Barbra Streisand movie musical, Funny Lady.

If you consume any self help for people pleasers, I’m sure you’ve heard this cliché: No one can get through life without making enemies. Finally set that boundary with Tammy Turmoil, and she’ll spend the rest of her life talking shit behind your back; refuse, and now you’re a villain to every Tammy-trampled innocent you failed. Of course, no one is the villain in every story. No, no: you’re probably a hero in some, too.

I’m just going to make one up: sparginal. Sparginal is what you feel when the brilliant, powerful man who likes you—you!—turns out to be a sex addict on the make with at least a dozen other women. It’s what came with the “handwritten” postcard you got from your hero, nearly bringing you to tears, until you looked closer and realized the card was written in junk-mail ink.

They seemed baffled that I’d driven there. The highlight of my trip to the Netherlands started with three septuagenarian Dutch people standing with a clipboard in a leafy suburban yard, waving cheerfully through the window of my rental SUV. There wasn’t another car in sight. “I’m here for the thing!” I said. “Is there…is there parking?” They conferred amongst themselves. “Ah—” said one lady. “—We’re thinking maybe you try to leave your car by the apartments up the road?” “Uh…will I get towed?” I said.

Hi from the Netherlands. I’m on vacation this week, so I’m re-running a post from 2021. (Well, to be more precise, I’m running a version of it that I’ve just spent an hour obsessively rewriting here in my AirBNB, because it’s raining and I’m a lunatic and—who’d have thought!—my writing has improved with five years of additional practice.) I thought of this post after reading “The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI,” Eve Fairbanks’ latest for The Atlantic.

Publishers Demystified In which I discuss projection, anxiety, and the future of serious nonfiction. Upgrade to paid to play voiceover “Dad Books Are a Dying Breed”—an article published last week in the Wall Street Journal—fills me with complicated, maternal feelings: tenderness, exasperation.

Industry Gripes Or: goodnight, nobody. Upgrade to paid to play voiceover The dead are easy to love; that’s one reason I spend so much time in their Underworld. Deep in the woods with my metal detector, I dig up their possessions and piece them back together. In graveyards, I google their obituaries, posting fun facts on Instagram. I find them in libraries and used bookstores, old newspapers and diaries. I look for authors who tell their stories.

More and more readers rely on BookTok and other video-based social platforms to find their next great read. This is especially true for Gen Z: in a recent UK study, 59% of respondents ages 16-25 said BookTokers and other online book influencers had inspired their passion for reading, and more than half of them turned to video platforms for specific recommendations.

At some point in your publishing career, you might be tempted to turn onanistic wallowing into content, posting about vulnerable things like: your disappointing sales numbers your postmortem beeves with your editor, publicist, agent, or local bookstore the fact that no major outlet reviewed your book the disproportionate amount of attention and Gap advertising revenue that accrued to your rival and not you how Very Online progressives’ support for like-minded authors involves more...