What’s the one single thing that if you never, ever had to do it again would make you deliriously happy?
For me, it’s cooking.
My wife and I joke all the time about a time in the future where we’re earning enough money to be able to hire a chef to cook our meals for us.
Not baking, though - I love baking!
Having to think about what we’re going to have and then buy the stuff to make it and then prep the food and then cook the food and then clean up after the cooking…
But!
Since we don’t earn enough money to hire a chef (yet!), I got to thinking about what else I’d love to push to the side for someone else to do.
The reason I started thinking about it?
I had a conversation with a literary agent (!! I know! I never thought I’d get to say that in a sentence, and although I can’t say too much right now, I’ll fill you in soon, I promise).
He said ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could just concentrate on writing?’
We’d been having a conversation about all the things I do to keep my publishing business running.
And to be honest, it’s exhausting sometimes.
And when the agent made that comment, I sank back into the lounge chair and thought ‘Wouldn’t it, though?’
Since then, I’ve been thinking about my writing in a new way.
I’ll be totally honest with you right now - up until July, when I found out Crush had been shortlisted for the inaugural Matilda Children’s Literature Prize run by Harper Collins Australia, I was considering putting my young adult fiction to the side.
I love writing those books, but they are a hard sell, I’ll tell you.
I know those books have readers - Crush alone has over 530,000 chapter reads on Wattpad, which equates to over 17,500 full book reads (imagine if I sold that many!)
But writing queer YA, especially on the younger side that could almost go into upper-middle grade territory is extremely hard to get in front of readers.
So anyway, all this is a long-winded way of saying I am NOT giving up on my YA, and in fact, have decided to go for a slight change of direction and try writing a queer middle grade story.
It will be in the same vein as my current books, so girls will still get the girls, but I’ll explore slightly different subject matter.
I have two ideas competing for attention at the moment, which is great and my plan over the next week is to nail one down to get written.
So. Stay tuned.
Oh, and you’ll notice I’ve switched platforms from Mailerlite to Substack. I’m not sure if this will be a permanent change yet, but I wanted an email platform that let me just send you an email without all the bells and whistles.
I had good intentions of sending regular emails when I set up this newsletter a few years ago, but the platforms make it complicated to send regular updates.
The thing is, I just want to drop by and say hi to you and let you know what I’m up to, and see what you’re up to and how you’re going.
I’m hoping using Substack makes it easier to do that.
The great thing about Substack, too, is if you have a look at the top of this email (and at the bottom) you’ll see a heart and a speech bubble. You can click on those to interact directly with each email I send you, and I can interact with you.
How cool is that?
And if you click through on the headline, you’ll go to the post page where (once I have more posts/emails sent), you can check out the archives.
Before I go, so that I can see how this new system is working, I’d love it if you could either click the heart or the speech bubble and leave a comment (both if you like!)
I’ll talk to you soon,
SR xx