Sober January (YA-Style)

sober januarySo here we all are, another New Year before us. My youngest daughter is five months old now, I’m another year older and I’ve actually charged my laptop and made it out of the house for a few hours.

Due to the exorbitant cost of childcare in NYC, it doesn’t make much financial sense for me to return to work right now just to spend my entire paycheck so someone else can raise our children 8 AM-6 PM. So my husband and I have an agreement: I get these four years, until both of our daughters are in school full-time, to try to achieve a reasonable level of profitability with my writing. If, by then, I’m not making a reasonable income from it I will go back to a day job to help to financially support our family.

Which is totally, completely fair. And also terrifying.

Let me just break down the numbers very roughly so you too can know my terror:

Let’s say I sell my first book on Kindle for $3.99. The current Amazon self-publishing platform lets you keep 70% of all proceeds, which equals $2.79 per book. So in order to even make $20,000 a year self-publishing, I will have to sell about 7200 books a year by year-end 2023.


And that doesn’t even factor in the overhead. Which between forming an LLC, hiring a professional editor and cover artist, I’m thinking will cost around $4000. So add that in…


And it’s already almost the end of January of Year One and I am still likely an entire year away (at minimum) from having a first book to even offer at market.

I decided to write YA, in large part, because I realized that was what I was already writing. My two finished plays are both about 17-year-old girls. But the other part of my decision was that, unlike playwriting, YA was a genre that can actually make money.

Although that’s still true, according to a Slate piece on the YA decade in review, young adult fiction sales reached an 11-year low in 2019. This is not entirely terrible news–the market became ridiculously popular, then oversaturated, then the attempts to enter the market became more and more ridiculous to get the attention of new readers to the point that those readers started to leave and so the money followed them. So now all the get-rich-quick writers seem to be moving to middle-grade fiction. Fine.

But add to that, social media, which is the primary marketing tool for self-published authors, seems to be on the decline. The me that believes in goodness and decency and the joy of being alive could not be happier about that! I mean, my Facebook birthday greetings this year barely topped 20, after peaking years ago somewhere around…100?

I was thrilled!

Until I remembered that the only way to become a successful writer is by having people who love your book tell their friends who love to read about your book and on and on. And with a less powerful social media, and no publishing house to boost my signal even a little bit, the first-wave readers are now going to be even harder to find, which amplifies out exponentially and becomes incredibly important when decisions will have to be made on whether or not this is profitable enough for me to continue doing by a certain month. So:

Step 1: Extend my sphere of influence beyond my mother, mother-in-law, and aunt. (Haha I kid, I kid…just not by as much as I would like.)

How am I going to accomplish Step 1? I’ve rejoined Twitter to start with. Even if it is on the decline (is it?) it’s still the go-to place for self-published authors to network so I have no reason not to try to achieve my natural saturation point there.

I’m also going to start blogging again. I experimented with frequency when I started my blog back when and I’m now convinced no one “follows blogs” anymore (did they ever?). Writing frequent blog posts burned me out, the content was middling at best, and readership was low. Last year when I had less-frequent, higher-quality posts, I got substantially more hits per post. So I’m going to aim for one blog post per month. I love the idea that people have an expectation that when they click on my blog they’re going to get some interesting, well-written content.

Which brings me to Step 2 for 2020:

Build my brand.

And if that wasn’t enough to keep me busy, we haven’t even gotten to the Most Important Step 3:

Finish my first novel!

Then, there are so many more things to do this year. I have a ton of research on the self-publishing business left to do to try to maximize my first effort to enter the market (hard deadline: year-end 2021, hoping for sooner). I’m going to start an LLC. Once I finish the second (or third?) draft, I’ll need to find beta readers and hire an editor and a cover artist. There’s also a never-ending myriad of smaller tangential tasks, like selling some stuff on eBay to create some money for this so I don’t put my family of six in the hole for something that has no actual guarantee of making back the initial investment. All while raising two tiny, adorable children (and more immediately, getting the tiniest one to sleep past 5:30 AM).

As sobering as all this is, there is a silver lining. The greater the strides I can make this year, the more each subsequent year will build on/benefit from them and there will be better news around each corner. For instance, I’m not just writing a stand-alone novel. I’m building an entire world that can hopefully sustain a series of novels. So goals like selling 8600+ books a year would seem a bit less daunting if by that time I have multiple books out…not to get ahead of myself.


Also, unlike 2019 (which I spent the entirety of pregnant and newly postpartum), at least now I can drink again.🍷






A pregnant pause



Hahahahahahahaha, laughed the universe. Hahahahahahahahaha.








Surveying the damage





So? That shouldn’t be so hard.











Surviving the Fire













on killing my novel











week two: life gets in the way


Remember week one? That was so great.
















Thank you for reading along, and stay tuned! 🙂

the sensitive curmudgeon’s guide to one-off friendships





During that time, I Facebooked her.






(long beat)

“Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”







bored by your female protagonist? get rid of her boyfriend and give her an axe.

axeAt least, that worked for me.

This is the first excerpt I’m posting on my blog–smelly, fresh, and straight-from-my-fingers-this week first draft from my novel-in-progress, “The Last House in Levittown”. I am not sure why it is indenting some paragraphs and not others, but I’m still new at this and I’ll look into it. Would love to hear your thoughts.:

Twenty minutes later, she heard a car pull up, jolted off of the floor and splashed some cold water from the decanter on her face. Her general policy these days was not to look in the mirror—a girl could only take so much bad news—but visits from Lew called for a lapse in protocol.

She tousled her hair and pinched her cheeks—did that even work? Or was it just to give herself the illusion of control? No matter, the illusion of control might be all she had going for her at this point, so she smoothed her hands over her unwashed button-down shirt, took a deep breath, and walked to the front door.

Her heart sank and fear pricked her senses when she saw Lew’s car with a different driver, a man she had never seen before. She grabbed the axe next to the door and tried to rationalize that the fact he was here at the scheduled time must make him Lew’s emissary, or at least a colleague—not a killer.

She brandished her axe in a way that she hoped did not convey that she’d never actually picked one up until the night before. She had done a dry run of how murdering her father would go and had found the axe surprisingly heavy. Her muscles now ached from the presentation and she tried to look cavalier about it. This was her modus operandi, she told herself. She was the Axe Lady.

She took a frightened breath, blinked her eyes open and closed, and opened the screen door.

The man was still idling in the driveway that used to belong to the house next door, which used to belong to the Sanchezes, Tony and Luz, who had been one of the first families to move indoors. The demolition crews—known colloquially as dozer squads—had razed the house but left the driveway. It had been bizarre and terrifying to watch from her kitchen window as the entire 125 year old subdivision had become nothing but driveways in a matter of months. She closed her eyes again, knowing this was terrifying, and reminded herself that adaptation was the mother of survival.

Her tongue was dry as she stepped out to greet this threat idling in her neighbor’s driveway behind the wheel of Lew’s beat up Chrysler Nemesis.

“You’ll waste your gas.” Penny asserted as she walked slowly towards the car, willing her eyes to look steely.

“Hasn’t been starting.” The man grunted. “Wouldn’t want to get stuck here.”

She took in the man. Maybe fifty, corpulent in that sloppy way—dirty John Deere baseball cap, flecks of gray in a beard that was only a few days old. Bloodshot, hound dog eyes. Most moonshiners tended to be drunks. It made sense. Hell, drinking up to your gills with whatever elixir you could manage was one of the only things that still made sense. Even Penny had battled her own struggles with it—Lew was the exception.

“Where’s Lew?” Penny asked, feeling her grip tighten on the smooth, steel handle of the axe. The illusion of control.

            “Dead.” The word carried no more heft in his tone than if he had offered her a Slim Jim.

“Who killed him?”

“How’d you know he was killed?” The man rubbed his chin stubble and eyed her warily. Everyone was an enemy until proven otherwise, now. But just because someone regarded you as as their enemy didn’t mean they weren’t still yours.

“He seemed healthy.” Penny shrugged. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Wayne. I’m one of the Dogs. Knew Lew pretty well. He was one of the good guys, it’s a damn shame.”

“What about you? Are you one of the good guys?”

“When it behooves me.” When it behooves him? “It’s a dangerous world anymore. ‘Specially for a pretty young lady like yourself. You here all alone?”

Penny swallowed her fear for the hundredth time in ten minutes and stared the man—Wayne—down. The illusion of control. Fake it ‘til you make it.

“My dad’s coming home soon from hunting at dawn, be here any minute. Why?”

“No reason. You seem to handle yourself fairly well, even if you are out here all by yourself.”

“Well, I’m not.” She gulped dry, and thought to her dwindling supply of clean water. She had always braved the wells when Jimmy was still around, but now it seemed too dangerous. But was it more dangerous to buy it from Wayne and let him know she needed even water? “What happened to Lew?”

“Rumor is someone came upon him in the woods—he was on night duty, guarding the shine. His face was burned off but there weren’t more than a jug or two missing. Whoever killed him must have been after something else.”

Rumors used to be things to discount, but now that word of mouth was the only source for information, they had become indiscernible from facts.

“Wasn’t he armed?” Penny asked.

“Dagger and pistol, most assuredly. Standard issue for the Watch Dogs.”


In this delayed moment, Penny’s heart sank as fear eroded momentarily into grief. She blinked away a lone tear, hoping Wayne hadn’t noticed. A lone tear for a cold beer and a game of Chinese Checkers and a man who had given Penny hope. In this lonely and barren new world, hope seemed to blow out before it even had a chance to take shape, and that grief now got one tear.

“You sweet on him, huh?” Damn. She really had to work on her poker face. One tear was one too many.

“Nah.” She looked away, then reconsidering: “Maybe a little. Hardly knew him, really. But.”

“Well, if it means anything to you, seems it was mutual at least. Seems according to his books, he was still accepting Old World cash.” He closed what she took to be Lew’s accounting ledger, a black book she had never seen. “We don’t do that anymore. Haven’t for months now.”

Penny willed herself not to panic but if she had been hooked up to electrodes at that very moment, they might have guessed she’d already fainted. She steadied herself and hoped she didn’t look woozy, but was starting to fear her cover had been blown since she had mistaken it for a cover to begin with.

She emptied this thought from her mind, tightened her grip on the axe handle and remembered to breathe. Cash was all she had. It was how she had survived for ten years and how she had planned to survive forever. This is why religion was flourishing again on the Perimeter.