Denver Airport

Me, 16 hours into my flights from California to Utah. “Wait!” you say, “that’s longer than driving.” And yes, dear reader, you are correct. 

Reading books about writers

There are a handful of things I don’t like in the books I read. For example, I don’t like reading books where a young female narrator meets up with an older woman to interview her or write her life story or whatever and then blah blah intertwining plots and somehow they are connected to each other. The Alice Network and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo are examples of this. 

Something even worse is reading a book about someone writing a book. It’s just so meta.  Jo March in Little Women is the perfect example. It’s a book about a woman writing a book about her life. I think this comes from the whole “write what you know” concept that creative writing teachers and also Gabriel Byrne’s character in little women (Frederick?) like to teach. 

I’m currently reading two books. If you know me well, you will be thinking, “only two?” Which is the correct response, honestly. 

On The Road by Jack Kerouac is about a young man who in between writing books and articles and maybe screenplays goes on a series of road trips. 

Beach Read by Emily Henry is about a woman with writer’s block who moves to a beach town in order to write her next romance novel. 

Can I just be done reading about writers? No. Because all the great writers have written about writing. 

They’ve also written about New York.

Because the setting for 79.78% of both fiction and Taylor Swift’s 1989 is….you guessed it, New York. 

When I write a book it will be about a young writer living in New York interviewing or getting to know an older woman as she figures out what to write. 

I just described the plot of how many novels? Cate probably knows.