Hello friend-os. I did that thing where a blogger is like “I’m on deadline so I’m not gonna be posting for a while,” except I never actually said that, I just went silent. But now that I am coming to the end of this YA novel (Just Happy To Be Here, my third book), I’m feeling an odd urge to do the blogging again. It’s been a pretty wild writing time–I’ve essentially written a novel between Feb 15 and today! Two months?

Scrivener lets you generate a little log of your writing, so I have one here. I did writing on this project in Jan-Feb too, but I ended up scrapping most of that, so this is a log of me writing this actual draft of this actual book–the draft I will email tomorrow or the next day to my editor

That’s a pretty good amount of writing! And as you can see, I didn’t even write much on the weekends. I like the book. I feel good about it. I wrote it while feeling a slight sense of social responsibility occasioned by the fact that trans kids are a topic of such intense persecution these days. Normally I feel like the YA genre is WAYYYY too self-congratulatory–authors are always talking about how kids need their books. I don’t think kids need my books, or that my books will improve lives. I think my books are entertaining, artful, and truthful, which are three qualities that many YA books do not have. And that’s really what I aspire to. But with this one I was like, sigh, the book probably will help some kids or something! Some kid probably does need this dumb book. Was kind of a lot of pressure.

Anyway, it’ll hopefully come out summer 2023, unless something goes disastrously wrong (which is not as unlikely as you might think it would be)–but it’s hard to imagine that someone somewhere won’t want to publish this one, so I hope you’ll eventually get to read it!