BB Updates July 6 - 12
Hi Book buds:
Guess what? Book club is TONIGHT: July 6, Monday, at 7pm. We’re reading Heart the Lover by Lily King. Here is the publisher’s write up about it:
“You knew I’d write a book about you someday.
Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.
In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.
Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.”
See you there! Here is the zoom link in case you missed it when I sent this morning!
Mark Your Calendars! Summer Book Buddy Weekend is BOOKED!
Last year in August we had a lovely weekend extravaganza here in Easthampton starting with a daylong retreat on a Saturday then we gathered at Nonotuck Park for a little party on Sunday. Good news! We’re doing it again! I’ve just booked our usual retreat space for Saturday August 8th! Remember, you get a discount using the BOOKBUDDY10 code upon check out (10%), and if you’re itching to register early you can do so using this link.
E-vite for August 9 celebration are forthcoming, BUT Darlings in Easthampton is officially our spot. We’ll hang out from 2-6pm. There will be cake. You can order drinks and snacks off the menu. AND we’ll do an open mic, reading series style. More details ASAP!
If you hope to come that weekend and are traveling from outside of western MA, let me know! I might be able to help you find lodging.
Feedback Group Submission Schedules!
IRL Group Wednesdays @ beautyland 6:30-8:30: The next meeting is July 8, when Chris will be joining us again! Johanna and Rich have floor time. Pages are in! We’ll set the next leg of submissions when we’re together!
Noon Crew Thursdays 12pm - 1:30: The next meeting is July 9 and Sara is up with pages in already! We meet again on 7/23 and Jill has a slot for that one.
Weirdlings Wednesdays 12pm - 1:30: We’ll meet again on July 8 and Erika has her stuff in for us! Ed is up for next meeting on 7/22!
Kool Kids Thursdays at 7pm - 8:30: Our next meeting is July 24! Morgan and Elli have floor time with pages due on Sunday 7/19.
OG Crew Thursdays at 7:30pm - 9: The next meeting is July 9 and Kristina and Garth are up. Pages are in! The following meeting is July 23 and Danae will definitely have floor time.
Saturday besties 12:30pm - 2: The next meeting is July 11. TBD. But when we do meet Nora and Georgia have floor time. Georgia’s pages are already in. We meet again in a week, on 7/18, and Helen and Ali will have floor time.
Gen Writing Prompt for July 7 and 11
July 7 and 11, 2026
Dreams
Fleetwood Mac - Dreams (Official Music Video) [4K]
The Cranberries - Dreams (Dir: Peter Scammell) (Official Music Video)
Experts say that dreams help you do the emotional processing work that’s difficult to do when you’re awake, or maybe it’s just that dreams help you sort through your experiences — a sort of squeegee cleaning for your brain. I think this idea could be useful for us in our writing in a few ways. Let’s try one of these exercises:
Do you have a recurring dream? Or maybe you’ve had a dream that was so moving, vivid, or just plain you think about it a lot. Recently, I dreamt I lived in a cottage on a prairie. My real mother had disappeared and my dream father had adopted a new wife, but my sixteen siblings and all of the animals we lived with (mostly they were dogs but there were a few chipmunks, foxes, and horses) who could all talk kept her existence a secret from me by casting an invisibility spell on her whenever we were in the same physical space together. When the dream began, I was walking through a field when I stumbled upon dream dad and fake mom kissing which was the inciting incident for the sleuthing I did for the rest of the dream — who’s dumb idea was it to keep this secret and what happened to my real mom? You can steal the specific blueprint of this dream and make it your own, using whatever parts of it will help you begin a new story if you need an idea; however, you might have more luck breaking down a dream of your own. Try to write it out by hand so you can see all of the moving parts, and then you can choose which elements of the dream you want to use in a story. It could be just the rules of the world, or the combination of people in the dream, for example.
Spend some time reading this list of dream interpretations and pick a few elements to weave into your new story. You can insert them anywhere, it doesn’t have to be the inciting incident.
Deprive your character of sleep, or condemn them to only be able to sleep and not wake. In this circumstance, the dream world and the real world merge. This can mean anything you want - flying rabbits, a world turned upside down, a moment that repeats itself over and over until the dreamer figures out how to break free of it - but the point of the story should be that the character needs to break the merging of dream and reality somehow.
Use the above songs - Dreams by the Cranberries or Fleetwood Mac as their own prompt!
Revising?
Use any of the three exercises to shock some energy into a scene that is feeling flat, or as its own creative character exploration exercise.
You’re the best around, I swear it.
Your bestie for life -
Kate
