I’m Kristen Tate—editor, writer, and proprietor of the Blue Garret. I’m currently chronicling the process of revising and self-publishing my next book in these subscriber-only newsletters. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of this email. Thanks for joining me at the garret!

It is week twenty-eight of 2024. How is the writing going? If you are in the US, you’ve been contending with the distractions of a mid-week Fourth of July holiday and a heat dome smothering most of the country. Maybe you’ve taken a break from your writing, planned or not, and are looking for the way back in. This might be the time to use the old-book-new-location trick: Get yourself to a brand new writing spot, whether that’s in your own home or an air-conditioned library—even the quiet corner of a museum. Getting out of your usual routine can, paradoxically, be your route back to it.

Here at the garret, I’ve spent the past week obsessively focused on the Novel Study book. I even worked straight through the Fourth (with one break for some delicious hamburgers stuffed with goat cheese and another to take a quick peek at the neighborhood fireworks exploding in the fog). My family rallied around and provided me with quiet time and meals and measured doses of Trader Joe’s Scandinavian Swimmers, and my wonderful clients have been patient with my slower-than-usual replies.

I knew I needed a long stretch of days to get this book done, and I finally got them. It’s not quite done, but it’s close enough that now I know it will be done—and done in time for me to commit to a fall publication date. Let’s see what I accomplished:

July 6 snapshot

⏱️ 131 hours to date

☑️ 132 to-do list items

✅ 61 to-do items completed

📑 Draft #5 🎉: 157/262 pages

Previous installments: Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 7, Week 8, Week 10, Week 12, Week 14, Week 22, Week 26

I am finally checking off many more to-do items than I am adding to the list—and they are big items, like drafting entire chapters. But the real victory was the moment I moved from Draft 4 to Draft 5, which happened on Wednesday when I finished writing the last new chapter. Two of the four new chapters I’ve written for the book are rough straggly beasts that will need to be completely rewritten, but at least they exist.

Now I’m in the middle of a last major revision pass to integrate the amazingly helpful comments from my beta readers (a huge THANK YOU to you all again—you have made the book so much better) and generally tighten things up. The book was about 71,000 words when I added that last new chapter on Wednesday; now, after two days of revision, it’s at 69,000.

My to-do list is broken into five sections: writing, editing, production, selling, and marketing. The writing section of the list is now 83% complete, and I’m starting to look ahead to the other lists and identify the items that require advance planning so I can get this whole complex book machine up and running at some point in the fall. The biggest, most important of those steps is getting a cover designed. I’m lucky enough to have a good friend who is a book designer, so we’ve talked about my cover over wine and dinner a couple times, but now it’s time to put together an official brief. She’s also going to advise me on the illustrations for the book, which have turned out to be more central than I’d thought.

Here’s a sneak peek at another of the new illustrations, this one charting the internal versus the external plots of Tana French’s The Searcher. You can see the original graphic with the blog post version; this is a vast improvement, and I’ve tightened up the chapter quite a bit too, which is even more important.

The one to-do item that is making me sweat right now? The book title! I’ve been calling it “Novel Study” since it was just a blog series with one post, and I know that is one component of the title, but now I’m wondering if it is a series title rather than a book title, which has sent me into a bit of a tailspin.

XX: XX XX XX (Novel Study Book 1)

What might the XX’s be? I don’t know! The problem becomes even harder to solve when I add this variable:

XX: XX XX XX (Novel Study Book 1)

XX: XX XX XX (Novel Study Book 2)

XX: XX XX XX (Novel Study Book 3)

I loved writing this book (most of it, anyway), and I could see writing a couple more if it is successful. If I do, I want to have a set of titles that are thematically connected and have a tidy parallel structure. When I try to construct them, however, I quickly find myself out in a stretch of quicksand, sinking fast. I’m going to keep playing around with options for a couple weeks and may ask for opinions—a poll, even!—in the next newsletter.

If my frenzy of to-do list check-offs has made you jealous, this week’s Thing of Joy is for you: a website with infinite scrolling checkboxes to tick off, as others do the same all around you: One Million Checkboxes (which I hear in my head in the same tone as Adventure Time’s Lemongrab saying “One million years dungeon”).

Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.

Kristen

PS: I just noticed that Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, the first book I analyze in Novel Study, is on sale right now for $2.99!

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