Coffee Chats ☕ May 10, 2026

Hello again!

Hope you're doing well today—maybe enjoying some lovely spring weather and a leisurely Sunday evening. Whatever the case, I'm sending good vibes and positivity your way!

Sarah and I just returned from a really lovely trip to visit friends in Vienna, Austria (pictures in today's Show & Tell!), so, as I mentioned in the last newsletter, I'm keeping things short today (and for the rest of May).

See below for all the interesting stuff. Hugs in the meantime.

PS – Happy Mother's Day! Love you, Mom!

☕ Project Curses

Despite taking almost two weeks off from the revision of my novel, I'm ahead of schedule! I've officially crossed the halfway point on Draft 3.0, which is, you know, exciting. I'm going to sit with that excitement for 30 seconds.

That was nice.

The slightly less exciting, more daunting bit is that as I'm going through this round of revisions, I've realized that my next passes (Drafts 3.1 & 3.2) will probably need to be more substantial efforts than anticipated. This is mostly because I'm doing more rewriting than anticipated—changing the point of view in several chapters, adding or expanding scenes, and dramatically altering some characters' voices—and all of that new will naturally need extra attention.

The next passes still won't amount to a full revision (i.e., not a Draft 4.0), but I have a feeling they'll require more brain power and time than I'd originally budgeted. My goal is still to finish and query the manuscript by the end of the summer, but I'm proclaiming here, with y'all as my witnesses, that I won't be mean to myself if I get a little off schedule. Thanks, ~~public enforcement mechanism~~ friends!

Novel Progress Bar

% revised

📚 Reading

I finished three books while traveling, all of which I enjoyed, so I'm going to do a rapid fire round and share all of them. Fair warning though—all of these are kind of...a lot. Your mileage may vary.

For Human Use by Sarah G. Pierce | Super weird, super thought provoking. A charismatic tech-genius billionaire develops a swiping app where people match with dead bodies, and the story only gets weirder from there. Is it an odd and unsettling metaphor for how people are choosing to engage with AI? Maybe. Is it an uncomfortable exploration of how we hide away death and dying in our society? Definitely. The prose and plot here are solid, but it’s the world building that kept me reading. I can’t remember who recommended this, but thank you!

Severance by Ling Ma | Not at all related to the show, but that's okay. It's a post-apocalyptic fever-dreamy plague novel exploring memory and loneliness, the immigrant experience, and our relationship to work, and that's enough for me. Really pretty prose, too.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn | A Socratic dialogue between a sentient, telepathic gorilla and a disaffected writer with a vague inclination to make the world better? And the gorilla is critiquing late-stage capitalism and the myth of endless growth through an anthropological investigation of the Bible? Sure, yeah, sign me up. Seriously, though—this made me think a lot. Thanks for the rec, Jared!

“Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be. Except for a few thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. This is the story man was born to enact, and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself, is to venture into oblivion. Your place is here, participating in this story, putting your shoulder to the wheel, and as a reward, being fed. There is no ‘something else.’ To step out of this story is to fall off the edge of the world. There’s no way out of it except through death.”