October 5-12 BB Updates!
Book Buddies! Hi! Welcome to October. I hope you all had a great weekend, and are feeling inspired and motivated in your writing lives. I also hope I get to hang with you all at some point this week!
Book club books for 2027!
(I know, that’s insane.) It’s crowdsourcing time! Please enter your book club picks into this document over the coming weeks! I plan to schedule three book clubs at a time so you all will have notice and can plan but also there will still be time to add in a new book at the last minute if something irresistable comes up. If you go in the document to add titles, please ignore any sidebar tabs that might pop up and add your text below to the exsiting text in the document! Thanks to all of you have added stuff so far! SO exciting!
As I said last week, I added one more book club for 2026.
Monday December 7 we’ll discuss George Saunders’ latest, Vigil. Here’s the synopsis:
Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.
She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man’s room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone’s postdeath future.
With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time—the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress—and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.
Calendar invites will show up in your inbox right after I send this out.
The next book club is October 26 7pm - 8:30pm EST with Natalie Lemle as a guest!
We’ll discuss her book, Artifacts! Here’s the publishers’s blurb:
One of The New York Times's Sizzling New Summer Thrillers: “Even now, Lena might be in danger from some of the unscrupulous characters she met all those years ago. Can she put her history behind her?”
For fans of The Cloisters and Counterfeit, Natalie Lemle’s debut novel offers an insider’s view into the world of stolen artifacts and the hidden networks that link museums to organized crime, when a woman is forced to remember the summer she spent on an archaeological dig in Italy, as everyone she knew then may now be in danger.
Successful trusts and estates attorney Lena Connolly is asked by a colleague to assist on a case: the Italian government claims an artifact was looted and sold to a museum illegally and is seeking repatriation. The object in question is a cup made of dichroic glass, which would have been rare even in Ancient Rome, let alone thousands of years later.
Lena has done everything she can to put the study abroad summer she spent on an archaeological dig in the Italian Alps behind her. Her dreams of being an archaeologist shattered when her mentor Cyrille disappeared and her enigmatic boyfriend Giamma went dark, but with this new case, the past comes roaring back.
Told in alternating timelines, Artifacts follows young Lena as she falls in love with both archaeology and Giamma on the streets of Torino while her adult self pieces together what truly happened on the dig, now a fully restored Roman villa with World Heritage status. The dichroic cup, Lena discovers, may have been taken from the very site she helped unearth.
Powerful and exuberant, Natalie Lemle’s Artifacts brings readers behind the museum glass and asks questions about cultural heritage and the historical preservation of our shared sense of humanity.
Book Buddy Accolades!
No surprises, but you all are killing it out there with your projects. Here’s a list of some recent accomplishments!
Casey Liston's story "Lilith" is forthcoming in All This Beauty: An Anthology of Contemporary Florida Writers, out March 2027. Preorder your copy here! PLUS her flash fiction story Pride and Provenance was nominated for the Best Small Fictions contest by South 85 Journal.
And last week’s accolades still deserve some stage time so here we go:
Rebecca Tiger’s story Anosmia (https://hotflashliterary.com/anosmia/) was nominated Best Small Fictions 2027. Her collection “Blood and Guts” is forthcoming with Cowboy Jamboree Press is March 2027. AND her story Smalltown Girl was recently published with Ghost Parachute. https://ghostparachute.com/issue/september-2026-issue/smalltown-girl/. Way to slay Rebecca!
Audrey Alstadt finished a nonfiction manuscript and is now in conversation with an editor!
Mackenzie Pratt finished the first draft of her novel last weekend!
Rich Buckley turned in his final manuscript to Storyworth last week!
Tell me what you’re up to so I can celebrate you here!
Feedback Group Submission Schedules!
IRL Group Wednesdays @ beautyland 6:30-8:30: The next meeting is October 14 and Johanna and Rich are up next. Pages due Sunday AM October 11.
Noon Crew Thursdays 12pm - 1:30: The next meeting is October 8, and Bill will have the floor with pages are in. Allie is joining us for the first time this week, so we will adjust the schedule to integrate her into the rotation when we’re together.
Weirdlings Wednesdays 12pm - 1:30: Erika will have the floor for the October 14th meeting. Elizabeth has the floor, pages due rougly on the 7th. Sumana is joining us for the first time so we will integrate her into the rotation when we’re together
Kool Kids Thursdays at 7pm - 8:30: Our next meeting is October 8 and Kristin has the floor! Pages are in! Hilary is up next for the October 22nd meeting!
OG Crew Thursdays at 7:30pm - 9: The next meeting is October 15, and Kristina has the floor. Pages due October 7ish. Malavika will return to us for that meeting! Hurray!
Saturday besties 12:30pm - 2: The next meeting is October 10 Georgia and Nora have floor time, pages due by the 7th if possible!
Gen Writing Prompt
October 6 and 10, 2026
Place Play
Description of place, in any type of story, is hugely important. Place helps us understand character, grounds us in time and culture, and sometimes eleven dictates what’s possible in terms of action and what is not (ie. when the setting is different than the place and time we live in in reality). This week let’s focus on place as a story driver, and as a vehicle for sharpening some of our sentence level writing skills. Try working with setting in one of these ways:
Write a new piece in the genre and style of your choice in which aspects of a place actively cause the action.
A freak weather event forces a character to move, to change jobs, live without or search for a lost loved one
A place becomes sentient or active in some way: a tree begins stealing from the house it shares property with, the network of plants begins to scheme overthrowing humanity, the earth itself starts speaking to humans
Entering a place (building or whole neighborhood or city/settlement of folks) changes the chemistry in other living things: gives them super powers, makes them sick, makes them grow an extra arm
A place overrides free will and influences human and animal behavior
A quick comprehensive change in a place creates upheaval
Practice rendering sensory details by describing a place in granular language — I’m talking paragraphs about the way a single river moves and looks and feels etc.
Describe the same room or town or building or other place five different ways, changing the details in service of creating atmosphere/emphasizing tone. Describe the beach in a sad way, then that same beach gets described through a hopeful lens etc.
Thanks for being the absolute best around.
Your writing bestie for life -
Kate
