Y'all, I was going to make this an updates-only newsletter, because I have a bunch of them, and I'm behind on everything (it's summer, which means everything is moving slower, but also I have a kid starting college in a month and a book coming out in a few weeks, which means that everything is also moving at the speed of light).

But, well, now I have something I want to talk about after all, despite having no time to do so, so we're going to do that instead.

But first, the updates

Instead of making this the whole newsletter, it's just going to be some rapid-fire bullet points before we get into the main event.

• ​You Shouldn't Be Here releases wherever books are sold in just three weeks, on August 1! If you haven't preordered your copy yet, I'd love if you would, for several reasons:
  • I'll send you stickers! Just fill out this form to let me know where to send them.
  • If you order from either Parnassus Books or The Bookshop here in Nashville, your book(s) will be signed!
  • Preorders count as first-week sales, no matter how far in advance you place your order. That means that once all those sales are finally tallied up at publication, it increases the chances of the book hitting a bestseller list (such as New York Times, USA Today, etc.), which can be a huge boost for any author's career. All you have to do is hit a list once, and you get to claim "bestseller" status forever.
  • Preorders indicate demand to booksellers and publishers, which make them more likely to carry the book or buy more books from that author in the future. It also helps increase visibility for other customers, since bookstores are more likely to promote books that people are already asking for to their other customers.
• Barnes & Noble is running a 25% off preorders sale for members (membership is free) through July 17 with the code PREORDER25. So if you're a B&N person, grab your copy at a discount here.

• You Shouldn't Be Here is also an Amazon First Reads pick for the month of July (more on this in a minute)! That means that through the end of the month, Prime members can download the Kindle version of the book for free, and non-members can buy it for the discounted price of $1.99. This is the exact same digital version of the book that will be available on August 1 for $5.99, so it's a great deal either way.
• The Kindle version of I'll Stop the World is also on sale for the month of July for the reduced price of $2.99, a savings of 50%.
• Everyone is invited to the You Shouldn't Be Here launch party at Parnassus Books on July 24! I'll be in conversation with my lovely friend and fellow author Court Stevens. There will be refreshments, giveaways, and maybe even a dog or two to snuggle! The event is free to attend, but advance registration is required since space is limited. RSVP for the launch party here.
• I'm going on tour! I'm so excited to be visiting bookstores in Cincinnati, Lexington, Atlanta, and Asheville to meet readers and talk about You Shouldn't Be Here over the next couple months. For details, and to check out my other scheduled appearances this fall, check out my events page.

So, about First Reads...

Amazon First Reads is a bit of a weird beast. It's great for visibility, especially for new authors, as it gets your book in front of a ton of readers who would otherwise probably not know about it. And it gets you a whole bunch of reviews and ratings really quickly, which helps feed the algorithm so that your book can reach even more readers. Plus you're almost guaranteed a shiny orange banner or two (or in my case, five!), which isn't really useful for much but I've got to be honest—it doesn't suck.

However, all of that lovely visibility has a downside, especially when the book is free and one of only a few options. It means that people will pick up the book based on little more than the fact that it was there, without the typical interest and surface investment that we might expect when someone purchases it, or checks it out from the library, or even scrolls through all of the offerings on Kindle Unlimited and decides to download and read this book instead of all the other options.

This can translate to a deluge of quick, low ratings, when those folks open up the book and find something they didn't expect to see. With I'll Stop the World, it was that there were teenagers in a book that wasn't marketed as YA. I kind of saw that coming, even though the book description clearly says that the main characters are teens. After all, until I was informed by one of my lovely local booksellers that the book was being marketed as adult, I thought it was YA (although I do see now why it's not)! But there's always something; I've heard this from numerous First Reads authors, so I didn't take those reviews personally. It was just the tradeoff for the higher level of exposure, and the book was still well-received by most readers, so I felt like it was still a good experience overall.

With You Shouldn't Be Here, I knew to expect a similar experience, so I braced myself for all the things readers may not be prepared to find in its pages. They may not love that, once again, one of my main characters is a teenager (although this time, the main protagonist, Madelyn, is an adult, albeit a young one at 23). They may not love that there's a chapter featuring an intruder drill, or that my villain is a vocal proponent of the Second Amendment, or that my main characters are biracial. They may not like that some characters use profanity, or that Madelyn's coping mechanism of choice is boxed red wine, or that she has still not finished processing the emotionally abusive relationship that she leaves before the book begins.

Or they may just not like my writing. It happens! No writer is to everyone's taste, and it's a rite of passage for every author to get at least a couple reviewers that hate their writing so much that they wonder in their review whether the book was even edited at all. (It was. Many times. By many people. This is true of every traditionally published book out there, and a good portion of self-published books too.)

Somehow, though, in all of that anticipation, it did not even occur to me that the biggest thing readers would take issue with would have nothing to do with the plot or the themes or even my writing style, but simply that I dared to include a supporting character who uses they/them pronouns.

Several of these reviews mention that they wish I hadn't felt the need to get "political" in my writing by including a non-binary character. That they just wanted a happy escapist mystery (the "who" is not really much of a question in this book), and that my insertion of "politics" dragged down what could otherwise have been a "promising" story.

At one point in time, I would've seen their point. I used to think "politics" was this unsightly, boring thing that was rude to bring out at parties and dinner, like showing off the gallstones in a jar your doctor let you keep. It was a subject that only mattered to those who wanted it to matter, like football or hunting. It didn't cost me anything to ignore if I wasn't interested. And for most of my life, let's be clear, I was not interested.

It wasn't until around ten years ago, when I decided to start intentionally diversifying my reading—not just authors, but genres as well, branching out from my comfortable pillow fort of sci-fi and fantasy to memoir, historical fiction and nonfiction, informational nonfiction, contemporary romance, mystery, social commentary, literary fiction, etc.—that I realized how wrong I was. Reading outside my lane opened my eyes to a world of experiences and perspectives to which I'd never even realized I was ignorant, much less thoughtfully considered. And as I learned more about American history and the world in general, and as I listened to voices I'd never paid much attention to before, one thing became very clear:

Existence is political.

"Politics," at its core, is the system of rules that govern how we interact with one another. It determines who we can interact with and what those interactions can look like, which actions are permissible and which are not, what we learn and how we learn it, how we acquire food and clothing and shelter, what we are allowed to think and say, where we go and how we get there, what we read and watch and eat and drink.

There was once a time when I, the biracial daughter of a Chinese immigrant father and a white mother, would have been a political taboo. It was only with Loving v. Virginia in 1967 that interracial marriage was legalized in all 50 states. Years earlier, it would have been very difficult for my grandparents to have immigrated to the U.S. at all, thanks to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. (I highly recommend the documentary The Search for General Tso, which will both educate you on the long-term impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and make you extremely hungry.)

But let's say I was somehow able to exist here legally before then. I wouldn't have been allowed to publish (under my own name, at least) until the late 1800s. And even once I was allowed to publish, I wouldn't have been allowed to be paid into my own bank account until the 1960s, and until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, I would've needed my husband's permission. That's also the legislation that made it possible for me to contribute my own money to retirement, and apply for a credit card earmarked solely for my professional expenses—on the expert advice of my accountant—in my own name. And as far as me being able to voice my support for any of this legislation, well, that wouldn't have been an option for me until the mid-20th century; women may have gained the right to vote in 1920, but Asian women didn't have the right to vote in the U.S. until 1952.

I was educated in public schools, and attended a private university, earning a degree in Music Education. Neither of those options would've been available to me prior to the mid-19th century. I'm currently wearing a sundress (because it is 90 degrees here in Tennessee), but if I wanted to wear pants or shorts, I could. That wouldn't have been the case 100 years ago, and if I'd decided to run for public office and made it all the way to the Senate, I wouldn't have been allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor until 1993.

I grew up thinking of "politics" as this thing that didn't really affect me and therefore didn't matter, but the truth is that the only reason I can live the way I do today—the only reason any of us can—is because so many people—especially women and individuals from racially marginalized groups—fought hard for the rights I take for granted today.

And make no mistake; it was a fight. Plenty of people did not want interracial marriage to ever be a thing. They didn't want immigrants to vote, or to be here legally at all. They didn't want women to be educated or control their own money or establish ourselves professionally. They didn't want anyone who was not a white man to own property.

(There are still plenty of folks who don't want those things. Nothing is ever truly a done deal. Everything that was once given can eventually be taken away. Too many of us forget that.)

Today, different topics are at the forefront of political debates. I put a bunch of them into You Shouldn't Be Here: corporate governance, income inequality, gun control, housing prices, teacher salaries, political donations, school board policies, the list goes on. At the very bottom of that list is Syzygy's pronouns. Their gender identity gets absolutely zero fanfare in You Shouldn't Be Here. I don't think I mentioned it even once, and it doesn't factor into the plot in the slightest. Definitely not to the degree those other topics do. That's the main reason I was surprised at the pushback; there were so many other reasons to not like the book's politics that, to me, the inclusion of a non-binary character felt almost trivial in comparison.

Yet I should have known that their existence would be political, because the existence and autonomy of people who are not white, male, and straight has always been political.

So getting back to the subject of this newsletter, should books be political? I would argue they already are. The stories we think of as "not political" just tend to reinforce rather than challenge the status quo. Their stance is, "the way things are is fine." But just because you may agree with that stance, or because it is a passive stance rather than an active one, does not make it apolitical. Further, remember that the status quo of today was, at one point in time, a hotly contested political issue. Everything we think of as "not political" now—attending public schools, riding the subway, going out on dates, attending church, reading the news over imported coffee—was at one point in time extremely political, and easily could be again.

When it comes to my books, I will always write diverse casts of characters acting with agency and autonomy, because that is the world I see around me. What's more, that's the type of world I want to live in. I don't want to go back to a time when there was only one acceptable way to exist in this world, when people like me wouldn't have been able to have the life I live today. I want to move forward, not backward, and not stuck in the same place. That will always inform my writing, the way the worldview and values of any writer will always seep into the stories they create in a thousand different ways, both explicit and subtle.

With Syzygy, I was never trying to be "political;" I was just trying to be authentic to the type of person I thought Madelyn would want in her life: someone kind and clever and funny, protective and honest, insightful and interesting and brave and loyal. And I wanted someone who was unique yet always unabashedly themselves, to help inspire Madelyn to be more comfortable being herself. I approached them as I do all my characters: I tried to figure out who they were, what they cared about, what motivated them, what kept them up at night. They may not be real people, but they're real to me, and I tried to be true to the whole person I knew so well in my head.

It makes me sad that so many people can't see that. Not for me and my book—we'll be fine, I'm sure—but for all the Syzygys out there, and Madelyns and Angies and Alexes, who have so much to offer, but get written off because their very existence makes people uncomfortable. Who get boiled down to their gender or pronouns or the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes or the money in their bank account, and never get seen for the complete, dynamic individual that they are.

There was once a time when my existence would've provoked a similar reaction. Maybe yours, too. Not because we would've been trying to be "political." But just because we were there at all.

A periodic plea for reviews

So. All that being said, if you've read You Shouldn't Be Here already, I'd love if you'd leave a review, especially if you enjoyed the book. The situation isn't as dire anymore as it was within the first couple days of the First Reads release, but the rating is still lower than I'd like it to be (currently 3.9 on Amazon and 3.76 on Goodreads; prior to First Reads, it was at around 4.2 on Goodreads), which can affect how the book shows up in searches, since folks often will filter by star rating.

Someday I'll talk about how I approach star ratings (TL;DR, I'm a five-stars-or-nothing person, but I wasn't always), but for now, I'll just say that if you are comfortable giving a five-star rating, I would appreciate it tremendously. Please do not do so if it doesn't sit right with you—I would never, ever want you to give a rating you don't believe is earned—but there are a lot of folks who have no qualms whatsoever about slapping one- or two-star ratings on books they haven't read or finished, and the only way those get diluted in the aggregate is if people who liked it take it upon themselves to balance the scales.

So if you enjoyed the book and would recommend it, it would be amazing if you'd write a sentence or two explaining why. Reviews can be left in any of the following places (copy and pasting the same one is fine), although the top two are the main ones at the moment.

​Amazon​

​Goodreads​

​BookBub​

​StoryGraph

​Barnes & Noble​

​Target​

(And just as a technical point of order, if we know each other in real life, don't mention that in your review; those tend to get taken down.)

Okay, this was a long one, and heavy (I've been pecking away at it all week and it is now Friday afternoon). So I'll wrap it up here, and leave you with a picture of our newest foster, Mouse, who looks like a muppet and will only be with us for a week before she goes back to her main foster (we're filling in while she's out of town). But I hear Mouse already has a forever family waiting in the wings, so hopefully she will be adopted soon! Everyone please send all your best wishes her way, and I'll update you on her journey next time!

I hope to see some of you at Parnassus Books on the 24th for the launch of You Shouldn't Be Here, or at one of my events later this summer or fall! Until then, be kind, stay curious, and always check your sources.