BBs: Week of 9/21 Updates
Hiya!
You guys - Kill Your Darlings this go around was AWESOME! Maia, of course, slayed, and the whole afternoon was a total delight. Thanks to those of you that could make it! So nice to be IRL with you when we can make it happen!
A reminder:
I’m looking for Book Buddy volunteers —
to run a special 90 minute sessions for the community. I’m cooking up something special for us starting this December and I need your help. Email me if this is you:
You have recently acquired an agent, sold a book, and/or gotten a hardwon publication and would be willing to host a Q&A session about your experience
You have an idea for a 90 minute writing oriented craft seminar you’d like to host — a close read of a short story, a creative exercise you could lead others through, a guided activity using someone else’s plans like something from George Saunders’ Story Club or a pre-existing youtube video
You would be interested in hosting a zoom “submission party” where BBs gather on zoom to send out their stories, essays, and poems or queries.
You have a creative hobby that is not necessarily writing that you’d be willing to do a zoom sesh about - are you a good knitter and wanna teach some folks something basic? What about collage? Anything is fair game!
You have an outside of the box idea for a 90 min session that you think the Book Buddies would like. Wanna do a 90 minute session about all of David Bowie’s coolest work? Or any musicians? Where my Swifties at?
Thank you! And more about this soon! Thanks to Maia and Nora who’ve already reached out!
Next, I’m getting ready to think about:
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.
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 flash fiction story Pride and Provenance was nominated for the Best Small Fictions contest by South 85 Journal.
Mackenzie Pratt finished the first draft of her novel last weekend!
Rich Buckley turned in his final manuscript to Storyworth last Wednesday!
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 September 30 and Margo and Paul have the floor. Pages due Sunday September 27!
Noon Crew Thursdays 12pm - 1:30: The next meeting is September 24 is our next meeting, and Ezra will have the floor then, pages are in. The meeting after that is October 8, and Bill will have the floor with pages due on October 1.
Weirdlings Wednesdays 12pm - 1:30: Erika will have the floor for the September 30th meeting. Pages due ~Wednesday September 23.
Kool Kids Thursdays at 7pm - 8:30: Our next meeting is September 24 and Hilary has the floor with pages due on September 20!
OG Crew Thursdays at 7:30pm - 9: The next meeting is October 1, and Garth and Danae have the floor. Pages due September 24. Malavika will return to us for that meeting! Hurray!
Saturday besties 12:30pm - 2: The next meeting is September 26! Nora and Georgia have floor time, pages due by the 23rd if possible!
Gen Writing Prompt
September 22 and 26, 2026
Threes
In celebration of NYC Midnight’s most recent Rhyming challenge that our own Johanna knocked out of the park, we’re going to do an NYC Midnight style prompt. Below is a list of genres, emotions, places, professional identities, and objects. If you’d like to use the prompt choose one genre and two other items on the list in the category of your choice then it’s your job to work them into the piece you’re working on.
Genres:
Historical Fiction
Horror
Romance
Drama
Comedy
YA
Poetry
Epistolary (this is form not genre, but still sort of fits in this category!)
Western
List of other stuff:
Sorrow
Sea Horse
Mug
A dense forest
A hot tub
A zoo
A knife
A water gun
A children’s Karate instructor
A pop star
A hibiscus plant
Greece
A jar of marbles
Poison Ivy
Grapes
A landscaper
A maple syrup farmer
Jelly beans
A spitoon
An old revolver that no longer fires
A Dinosaur bone
An astrologer
Melancholy
Mania
Delusional
Ghosts
A TV show host
The ocean
A pair of scissors
Dentures
Coffee
Agoraphobia
A family of ticks
That’s all for now!
Your bestie forever -
Kate
