A confession: I’m not great at celebrating things, whether they’re birthdays or the completion of a project. I love throwing a party for you, or baking you a cake, or perhaps finding something that will make you feel loved, but being on the receiving end of it isn’t something I seek. No idea why.
I may have found a way around this, however. A DUAL celebration. Recently, my friend Robin* and I met in Washington, DC and spent a few days together for our birthdays, which are just five days apart. Used to be I had bragging rights that between the pair of us I was OLDER than her, now Robin has them as she is YOUNGER than me. We’ve been friends since college and have seen each other through an uncountable number of events, both good and bad. We’re godmothers to each other’s children and helped get each other jobs (some questionable) when we were in Los Angeles. For our dual celebration, Robin snagged tickets to see a comic we both like, Josh Johnson, who was appearing at Magooby’s Joke House in Maryland.
It was fun to take the train up the night before. I got to have a FANTASTIC sushi dinner with my youngest son and his partner at Perry’s, which is located in Adams Morgan. The next morning, I did one of my favorite things and took the Metro to meet Robin at the end of the Green Line, and we drove up to Maryland together. That evening, we had great fish tacos and saw the late set, seated in the VIP section, basically two feet from the man’s knees. Robin does things right. Josh Johnson was hilarious with his observational humor, and it was a treat to go to a live show that started at 9pm, which is usually when I’m climbing into PJs and contemplating which book I’m going to be reading before bed.
The following day we drove into DC. Well, Robin drove and I navigated and focused on not yelling at the other drivers, as that proved to be distracting for her. We both spent years driving in the thick of LA traffic, but the Beltway around DC is quite formidable. I keep thinking people will use their turn signals, but evidently the flick of the wrist required is JUST TOO MUCH for at least half the drivers in that neck of the woods. Bless their hearts.
We both needed reviving after the ordeal and did so with a classy little lunch in the big atrium of the National Portrait Gallery before we wandered through some of the collections. Then it was on to rooftop cocktails in Chinatown on a glorious summer evening**, and then a quick walk to get to our birthday dinner at one of my favorite Indian restaurants, Rasika. Do yourself a favor and go eat there, if only to get the Palak Chaat, which is fried spinach with tamarind. I know, it doesn’t sound delicious, you’ll just have to trust me when I say I hate most vegetables yet dream about when I can go back and eat it again.
No, celebrating a birthday over a series of days is not my norm, just like not really celebrating the end of writing a series, which also happened at the same time we whooped it up on our birthdays. I need to get better about this, because my six-book PA books take me between nine to eleven months to write, depending on life events. A full year, almost, they deserve a bit of hoopla at THE END. It’s a lot of time doled out from an ever-dwindling supply. I think celebrating feels weird because it’s so bittersweet finishing up a long tale like that. I get sort of weepy instead of woo-hoo. Part of it is saying goodbye to the characters and story I’ve been living with daily, but a not insignificant portion is the niggling worry that I’ll never be able to write another story again, that I’m tapped out and had best be grateful I had a good creative run but it’s done, and its perhaps time to turn my sights on something else, like gardening. If I dwell on it too long, the niggling becomes a near-certainty.
Not helpful thoughts. Especially when I’m due to discuss what the next series of six is going to be in a couple of days, the one I’ll be starting to write at the top of August whether I’m ready or not. Honestly, even though I’ve pulled off 30 full-length books and a total of five complete series in a variety of genres over the past few years, I find starting another genuinely daunting. That said, I’m not a cretin. I do use my turn signals when I’m driving, and I love that I get to be a writer for a living nearly all the time. So off I go, hunting for my bootstraps so I can pull myself up and get cracking again on a new world and new characters.
Which brings me to an interesting development that has happened over the past six months. As a writer, I maintain a pair of email lists that total around 3500 subscribers and a website that has a dedicated author email. I send out monthly emails to both my sweet romance and PA/Sci-Fi/Fantasy readers and occasionally a reader writes back, which I love. LOVE. This email account (staceyuptonbracey@eatwriteplay.com in case you want to drop me a line) has been getting more traffic over the past six months but it’s not the kind of communication I envisioned when I set it up.
Back when I just had a couple of books out, I went for months at a time with only one or two emails. Now I get anywhere from 80 to 200 emails a week, but that marker of success doesn’t bring me joy. Instead, it saddens me, because it’s nearly all people looking make a quick buck instead of readers reaching out to an author.
They offer a myriad of “opportunities” for me to engage in helpful services that all cost something, but they don’t mention that, not right away. Creating TikTok and IG videos or reels, honest critiques of my work, speaking engagements, editorial features, translations, movie offers, agent offers, publishing offers, Book Bub advertising placements. NY Times placements, Goodreads placements, providing strategic alignment for my series, which would do so much better, if only I listen to them.
They’re couched in flattering terms, designed to make me feel special, although the ones that start out, “Hi (insert author name),” don’t really work at all. Or the ones written in Korean. Or the ones that start out, “Dear Author,” or “Good Morning staceyuptonbracey.” Others have used AI to scrape my author page on Amazon and the book descriptions, and are a little more compelling, but all want the same thing at the end of it; to part me from my money.
Some are from famous writers (psst, it’s not them!) I’ve gotten multiple emails from JK Rowling, Gillian Flynn, and Stephen King who are interested in collaborations. Others are from “book clubs” that boast about having hundreds of members, and for just fifty or a hundred or three hundred dollars, they’ll read my books. “Teri Gross” from NPR has contacted me privately, to urge me to come on her show. I wish!
It angers me to see these, and they aren’t stopping, no matter how many of them I block and delete. I’m not taken in, but boy oh boy can I see how a just-starting-out writer would be. It’s hard to be a new writer, to strap into the writing chair every day and create things that didn’t exist before. Getting your books seen in our ever-louder world filling with AI written books is even harder. To have someone say your book is great, you’re special, you just need this ONE THING to help you, and I’m offering it to you… whew, it’s a baited hook all right.
They’re just like those phishing calls ageing people get, promising the world or helping you avert a catastrophe as they ravage your life savings. Preying on the less-informed, and vulnerable. I wish I could find a way to make it stop, but sadly it falls into the ‘can’t make ‘em do it’ category, just like I can’t make drivers on the road use their turn signals.
I’m going back to focusing on what I CAN do, which is to try and be better about celebrating the milestones and the wins, and finding those darn bootstraps by Friday.
*Robin is also a writer in several genres. Check out her website: http://www.practicinginpublic.com
**which was where the photo in the blog was taken. See the Washington Monument in the distance?
