A Little Bit About My Novel BLANK

Dispatches from the Ocean House

Seagulls are my soundtrack right now. It’s sunrise and I’m lying on a couch at the Ocean House, author Deborah Goodrich Royce’s hotel in Watch Hill, RI. The terrace door is cracked open, the sound of waves crashing on the beach on repeat.

Deborah hosted and moderated a fabulous panel event last night with four Zibby Books authors — Michelle Wildgen, Wine People; Jane Delury, Hedge; Sandra A. Miller, the USA Today bestseller (!!) Wednesdays at One; Megan Tady, Super Bloom — and Lauren Edmondson, Wedding of the Season, which partially takes place at the Ocean House. Lauren was a guest on my podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books who felt like an immediate friend.

Late last night we all crowded around the fireplace in Deborah’s suite, chatting, laughing, and popping chocolate malt balls like popcorn.

Thanks for the dress, J. McLaughlin!

If you’ve never been to the Ocean House, you must, even just for breakfast on the veranda, a drink at the bar, or a cup of coffee by the beach. The yellow behemoth is straight out of another era with nods to history throughout, especially in the art collection on the walls and the books in the rooms. It’s a place that makes you don your finest and stand up a little taller in the hallways. It commands respect. Sandra said it felt like being on the Titanic — on land.

I’m only here for 18 hours total — including sleep — but already feel restored and rebooted. Isn’t there just something about older, beautiful things that feels oddly reassuring, like, oh yes, we’re going to be okay because look, this place has made it. I’m not opening the newspaper this morning. I prefer to be cocooned in the illusion of innocence. Like I might just become one of the parasol-twirling maidens of old if I stay here long enough.

(Wait: book idea! A hotel that turns back time, where every room has the power, overnight, to turn its guests into people living in different eras who were past guests. You go to sleep in 2023 and wake up in 1923. I don’t know. Could be fun. Hotel Time. Should I try it?!)

Speaking of novels, I revealed the cover of my own upcoming novel BLANK this week — on my birthday! Any other Leos out there?

BLANK is being marketed as my “debut novel” which feels misleading because I wrote so many others that never saw the light of day. But that’s the way it goes with writing. After all, how do you learn to do something well unless you’ve first learned how to do it at all? The first novel is the training ground. The second is refinement. It’s only by the third that you can really enter the fray.

In my cabinet, bound at Staples and collecting dust, are Off Balance from 2004 and Forty Love from 2019. But I also have full-length prose poems, novels I tried in the third person, first person, present tense and past tense, and more that I discarded. BLANK is the first time I let go off all the pretense, of everything I thought a novel should be, and just wrote to have fun.

Before my memoir Bookends came out last summer, my editor Carmen said we should talk about my novel. All throughout the Bookends writing and editing process I kept sending Carmen different novel ideas, short emails like, “Idea! What about….?” The one that stuck was actually an idea my son had about handing in a blank book. I took it and ran with it.

Carmen bought the idea and we signed the deal in July 2022 with a due date 8 months later. I could totally do that, I thought. I wrote early in the morning, on planes, or anytime I was staying in a new place. Somehow new environments always inspire me to write. And I finished. Early! In October! The only hitch is that it was only 30,000 words instead of the full 60,000. I sent it to Carmen and was like, “I’m done!” I’d gotten to the end of the story. Um, no. Carmen politely suggested that perhaps I think of a subplot?!

“Maybe I should just cancel my contract,” I told my husband Kyle going to sleep that night. “I don’t have time for this!”

“Honey, don’t give up now,” he said. “I think you’ll really regret it.”

I even emailed my agent, Joe Veltre, to discuss the idea of canceling the contract. How was I going to pull it off?!

It wasn’t until Thanksgiving dinner in Montana when I was telling my extended family the plot of the book when I thought, Wait, this actually sounds good. How had I come up with all that? No clue. It had just happened as I’d written.

So I made a deal with myself. If I was going to continue with the novel, I was going to write to have fun. There was too much on my to-do list running Zibby Books, opening Zibby’s Bookshop, and everything else to add another “have to.” This would be an “I want to.” After all, I’d been trying to publish a novel since I was a little girl fantasizing about being the youngest person ever to release a book.

I would make myself laugh. I wouldn’t try to make it literary or impressive or artsy or anything I thought people might want. I would write in my own voice and amuse myself. If no one else found it funny, so be it. But I would enjoy the process and that would be worth my time.

And it was.

GMA Book Club revealed the cover of BLANK on Tuesday, my 47th birthday.  Eleni’s Cookies launched a giveaway. I didn’t quite make my original childhood timeline but I didn’t give up, even all the times I wanted to. BLANK comes out March 1st, 2024 and is now available for pre-order. A humor conference invited me to speak about it. Humor! Who knew!? Turns out when I made myself laugh, others joined in. It isn’t all funny. It’s poignant and real and makes a statement about publishing itself. But most of all, it’s fun. I hope you’ll agree.

And now I’m shutting my laptop so I can wind my way through the historic Ocean House hallways in search of coffee, ghosts of visitors past and stories yet to be written swirling around me. Hotel Time: A Novel? Carmen did just ask me for ideas for my next novel….