Good morning!
Welcome to this week’s edition of Quinn Writes, my weekly newsletter where I’ll be tracking my first novel’s progress as I take it from rough draft to (hopefully) published product. It’s week 23, which sounds like a whole lot of weeks. That’s probably because it has been a whole lot of weeks. We’ve been doing this for a while now.
Whenever I write the first paragraph of this newsletter – or really, copy and paste it from the week before – I think about why I started writing it in the first place. And I think about what happened 23 weeks ago that catalyzed this adventure.
On October 17, 2023, I got laid off from my copy-editing job. Three days later, on October 20, I released the first issue of my newsletter, which you now know as Quinn Writes.
I’m not going to lie – getting laid off from a job is never fun. But I was actually okay with it. My entire family was basically like “How are you not more upset about this?” – I just wasn’t. Maybe it was because I’m on the perfect cocktail of anti-anxiety medications, but I like to believe that my lack of distress upon losing my job came from the fact that I already could see a silver lining in my sudden and startling unemployment.
I am lucky enough to have grown up in a world where people have always told me that I’m good at things. For most of my life, school was the thing I was good at. Standardized tests didn’t faze me, I was an early reader, and I understood what the base 10 system meant – I had all of the things that make someone “smart” (by the book, that is).
But then I graduated college and realized that nobody really cares about the base 10 system, my SAT scores don’t matter at all, and analyzing Shakespearean prose isn’t a life skill. At about that same time, I became fifth grade teacher.
That job was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Every single day, I had to muster up the energy to walk into a building where, by 8:15 a.m., I was probably going to be stabbed with a pencil, called a word (or a series of them) that I’d rather not repeat, and chase a kid down the hallway. I may have known how to multiply fractions, but I was certainly not perceived as an authority figure. My classroom was totally out of control.
I won’t sugarcoat it: I have never felt as incompetent as I did standing in front of a room of 30 ten-year-olds.
I might have been good at participating in school, but I was terrible at teaching it. By the end of those two years, I was so exhausted by teaching that I would’ve taken any job that came my way. And that’s exactly what I did.
I worked for a Baltimore-based financial publication, editing articles about bonds, taxes, saving for retirement, and investment opportunities. It was a little seedy, a little skeevy, and not particularly interesting. (And they didn’t even use the Oxford comma!)
While I was learning a lot about AP style, there wasn’t much room for creativity and self-direction. And when the company started bleeding money, there wasn’t much room for 24-year-old copy editors like me. I was at the bottom of the totem pole.
So when myself and 30-some other employees were called into a Monday morning layoff meeting with the CEO and the HR team, I was shocked and disappointed – but I wasn’t sad. I was finally going to have time to devote to my creative projects. I would get the chance to start a business endeavor of my own. I could be my own boss. I could be great at something again.
And that’s exactly what I did. So here we are, nearly six months later, and I have started a content writing company with more than 10 clients and three employees. I work on my novel and my other creative outlets nearly every day. And I write this weekly newsletter to tell you about it.
So here goes week 23 – and here’s to many more!
What am I reading?
I’m still working my way through Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True. I started it last week, and I’m enjoying it so far – I’m about two-thirds of the way through. It’s a little bit slow and meandering, but in a way that feels artistic and purposeful.
The two memoirs that I’ve read recently have both been written in a sort of piecemeal way – short little sections of text that come together to create a larger picture. It feels like less of a chronological narrative and more like a mosaic or collage of thoughts and ideas. I suppose that structure reflects the way that people’s memories actually work.
Reading Stay True and Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts has inspired me to try out that style of writing for myself. My faux memoir (I say “faux” because it’s currently about three pages long) is yet untitled, but here’s a little sampling:
As a die-hard contrarian, Baltimore was the perfect city for me. Everyone told me that it was horrible and that I was going to hate it. Therefore, I decided to love it.
I moved to so-called “Charm City” when I was twenty-two. Some credit this ironic nickname to writer H.L. Mencken – whose historic home on Union Square I once toured on a third date – but it really took hold around 1975, when mayor William Donald Schaefer approached the city’s top advertising executives with an interesting query. How can we reinvent Baltimore’s image?
The ad executives came up with the concept of “Charm City,” a moniker that ostensibly refers to Baltimore’s centuries of rich history and hidden charm.
An offshoot of Charm City is the “Charm’tastic Mile,” a 1.3-mile stretch of Pratt Street that connects Downtown West to the Inner Harbor to Harbor East. Let me start by saying this: Downtown West is not a place. Nobody has ever called any part of Baltimore “Downtown West.”
Pratt Street west of the Inner Harbor is simply “Pratt Street west of the Inner Harbor” or “the ugly part of Pratt Street” or “Pratt Street up to MLK” – that is, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the road that decimated a number of Black neighborhoods and yet is named for last century’s civil rights hero.
To me, this sample feels like it enters into conversation with writers like Hsu and Nelson. It employs the same sort of short, choppy paragraphs that combine subjective real life with objective (or close to it) facts and research. For instance, Nelson’s book involves a section on Proposition 8, the 2008 California constitutional amendment that disallowed gay marriage. Hsu’s memoir similarly covers Prop 209, the 1996 amendment to the state’s constitution that eliminated affirmative action policies.
Memoir is fascinating to me in the way that it blends personal experience with real-world events and captures moments in time. To quote from an excellent article about Stay True in The Nation, “a memoir promises to be singular, relayed through personal experience so that only the one who lived it can write it.” And yet, if it was totally singular, nobody else would be able to read and relate to it. By anchoring their stories in time and place, both Nelson and Hsu create something universal. I would hope that my faux memoir might one day do the same.
What am I writing?
In addition to short sections of my so-far-incomplete memoir, I have been continuing rewriting and editing Part Two of my novel. This week, my focus has been on Chapter 14. It’s a short chapter that has a LOT of big events in it, so my mission was to flesh it out and make it feel more complete, giving those plot points the time that they deserve.
I’ve also been back on the bandwagon of creating mood boards for the scenes and settings covered in each chapter. For instance, here are some of the settings that I imagined as a wrote Chapter 12. I have been treating Instagram like Pinterest and posting these constantly, so you should probably go check it out if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
I’ll keep this section short and sweet for now – the chapters I’ve been working on might give away too much if I put an excerpt in here, and I wouldn’t want to spoil my own novel for any future readers!
What am I doing?
As many of you know, I have a penchant for taking on more projects than I can handle. So of course, I’ve been working on my podcast as well as sending query letters for my children’s book, Scarlett’s Countdown to Christmas.
In fact, I got my first rejection response this week. Take a look:
I thought that I was going to feel incredibly disappointed when I (inevitably) heard back from some agents that they didn’t want to represent me and my book. But the thing is, I didn’t expect everyone to like it. My plan is that I’m going to query 100 people and then, if I can’t find a publisher after that, go ahead and self-publish. So all I need is one person who’s interested – or 1% of my querying sample.
While it’s always disheartening to hear a “no” when you want to hear a “yes,” that doesn’t mean you should stop trying. I’ve sent eight query letters so far for Scarlett’s Countdown to Christmas, meaning I have 92 more to go. I’ll keep you updated on whether or not I find someone to rep it. And if not, I’ll still publish it myself and maybe even get some copies printed. Even if nobody else likes my children’s book, I think it’s pretty cool.
In other news, my podcast has been chugging along as usual. If you didn’t listen last week, definitely go back and check out the episode titled “The Last Podcast in Cleveland.” It’s an excellent one on which I get to chat with author Danny O’Dea about his debut novel, The Last Man in Cleveland.
This week on the pod, I’m covering the multiverse. I just so happened to read Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Maybe In Another Life around the same time that I watched the acclaimed movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, so of course I had to share my theories and philosophize a little bit about the cosmos. It’s a wild ride but a good one – you should definitely tune in.
You can listen to “Books on Books on Books” anywhere you get your podcasts – Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and many more.
TLDR…
It’s lunchtime and I’m hungry. And if I get this sent out by a reasonable hour, maybe you all can take a read during your lunch breaks. Which means it’s time to wrap this up.
Another fun activity to do during your lunch break? Leave a review for the podcast! I would love to hear what you think! And might I suggest… five stars?
As always, thank you so much for reading week 23 of Quinn Writes! Knowing that there are people out there reading my newsletters is part of what keeps me excited to write them. See you back here next Thursday!
Happy reading,
Quinn