Believe in yourself. Bleh. Is there a motivational phrase more hackneyed? Do you suppose, for instance, that if I really, really believed it I could make it as a principal dancer in the American Ballet Theatre I could do it starting now at 33? I could not, reader, because believing in yourself without the goods to back it up (goods: talent, discipline, years of hard work) isn’t inspiring, it’s delusional and annoying to the people who do have the goods. Take, for example, the roughly one billion people I’ve met who—despite not having read a book since high school—really, truly, deeply believe that can write one. And yet…believing in yourself doesn’t mean you negate the hard work, it means you double down on it. The belief is what makes the work seem worthwhile. For the long road to convincing anyone else to give a fig about your art begins with your giving baskets upon baskets of figs about it. All the figs. You might be encouraged and helped along by moms, coaches, professors, and Facebook friends, but if you don’t believe in you, you’ll find a thousand tiny ways to sabotage yourself before you ever get where you want to go. You must take you to bed each night and rise with you each morning, if you are determined to thwart you, you will succeed. I found this in myself by knowing that long after others gave up, I wouldn’t. And I won’t. What have you found the audacity to believe about yourself?

Overdrive

Somewhere between the blitz of pie, family, and football of the long Thanksgiving weekend, I hit a wall. Writing my weekly blog post—something I usually look forward to—felt like an insurmountable task. And though the months bringing us to year’s end have flown by, suddenly the weeks until Christmas stretch long before me.

2016, you see, is meant to be my year. Easily the two biggest events of my adult life thus far—the publication of my first novel and my wedding—are respectively slated for February 23rd and August 20th of 2016. With all of that coming at me, I’m gearing up, trying to prepare myself for changes that might not be entirely possible to prepare oneself for. I go back and forth between a heady mix of joy and adrenaline and a giddy nervousness that I will somehow muck it all up.

Fortunately my fiancé and I have hired a miraculous woman named Michelle to help us plan the wedding. But the bigness of such a step still looms. I temper the anxiety by remembering that at the end, I’ll be a married to my beloved, so even if my dress gets drenched in red wine, an uncle makes an inappropriate toast, and someone’s underage cousin gets drunk and pukes on the dancefloor, it will all turn out alright.

The book release—happening in February—is in the foreground and God knows what state I’d be in if I didn’t have so many other distractions (including a busy full-time job). It’s a great advantage to me that I’ve worked in books all these years, but knowing everything that I could be doing to support the book creates a constant thrum in the back of my mind that I’m not doing enough. There’s an ambient fear that I am letting my moment pass me by, that just when the crucial bend in the road appears, I’ll find myself asleep at the wheel.

Does it sound like I’m complaining? I don’t mean to. There are many days I wake up overcome by the good fortune that’s befallen me. But good stress is still stress. The closer you get to what you want, the higher the stakes become.

Underneath the noise there is this: all my life the one thing I’ve been sure of is that I wanted to be a novelist. And now there is something else I’m sure of—or someone rather—and he’ll be beside me every step of the way.

NaNoWriMo Chapter Four: Keeping the Faith

Here it is, the last week of NaNoWriMo. That went by fast didn’t it? If you’ve been keeping pace—or at least continuing to write, even if you’ve fallen behind—you probably have a lovely pile of pages of by now, and are perhaps barreling towards a completed first draft of your novel. The daily task of writing seems more daunting in the abstract than it does once you’ve made a habit of it, doesn’t it? Once it’s in your daily routine, it seems as though the words accumulate like so much snow falling outside your window.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it, Nano-ers, if your goal is to get your book published someday, the road ahead of you is long. You likely have years—perhaps many—ahead of you before you’re going to see your book in print (by traditional means anyway). I know this journey, and so I hope to end my little NaNoWrite series with some words of wisdom to keep you company on the difficult, but ever so worthwhile, road ahead.

Understand What You’re Up Against

I’ve written numerous times about a conversation I had with the writer Polly Devlin when I was twenty-five. She and I had become friendly through my work at Random House, and after at last confessing my writerly ambitions to her and noting that I was have trouble making progress on my novel, she enumerated the many challenges my life posed to accomplishing this goal. “You live in one of the busiest, most distracting cities in the world, you’re working full time in a stressful job, and you are absolutely terrified, I can see it. Well, let me tell you my dear,” she continued, “that fear isn’t going anywhere, so make peace with it. And of course you need the job. What time do you go to bed at night?” Around midnight, I told her. And what time did I wake up? Eight or so, just enough time to dress and get to work on time. Well, could I go to bed an hour earlier, get up in the morning to write? Somehow, this had never occurred to me, I’d always been an avowed night owl. “Let me tell you what will happen if you don’t. You will sitting here in ten years, wondering where the time went, novel still unfinished.” She said this with kindness but also with the certainty of an accomplished older woman who had no time for any excuse I might offer her.  Reader, I got up at 6:30 the very next morning. We may all dream of some isolated garret in which we can write in peace, but this is not the world we live in. You probably have a day job, friends, perhaps children, a life full of obligations. Find a way to carve out some time in your real life rather than fantasizing about more time magically appearing. It may not be as much time as you’d wish to spend on your writing, perhaps it’s only a half an hour a day, but if it’s regular, it’s enough.    

Enjoy Your Apprenticeship

Gifted writer and wise advice-giver Cheryl Strayed said something I loved during the most recent Dear Sugar podcast. She was asked what advice she’d give to her twenty-eight year old self. She recalled being obsessed with the idea of getting published while she was still in her twenties. She now knows, of course, that she had a ways to go; her first novel Torch would not be published until 2007, making Strayed nearly forty when it came out. She told the audience that she would tell her twenty-eight year old self to chill out, that had many years of being an apprentice to the craft left. In many ways, we writers stay apprentices of the craft all our lives: and this is a beautiful thing. Something my mentor, Pat Geary, told my senior seminar class (a group of bright eyed twenty-one year olds) has always stuck with me. She told us we should feel lucky to be writers, because it was something—barring loss of mental faculties—that we could do forever. Reading and writing are truly lifelong passions: unlike athletes or dancers, you don’t age out of your chance to make it as a writer. And perhaps the view from the road is a bit better after you have some success, but make no mistake, it is the same road.

Find Your People   

You may have noticed that in my both of my above points I reference conversations with mentors—a crucial element of you writing team, especially when you’re young and all this writing business feels so life and death. Writing can be lonely, and though you must indeed learn to enjoy your own company as a writer, the group of people you surround yourself with is crucial. Finding a mentor, fellow writers to share work with, the right agent, the right editor—these are the people who will bring your best work to fruition. Just as importantly, you have to know how to separate yourself from the people who are not helpful to you. Not every friend who is also a writer, for instance, will make the ideal reader for you. Not every professor is made to be a mentor, and not every agent is the right one to represent you. Be choosy with this group, because much depends on them. Finding people you can share your unfinished work with, and trust that they’ll help you improve upon it, is as rare as finding true love.

NaNoWriMo Chapter Three: Finding Momentum

Here we are Nano-ers (Nanophites? Nanophiles?), the third week of November. It went by fast, didn’t it? How is it going out there? Are you keeping up with your word count? Getting sleep? Staying healthy? Are your friends and family still speaking to you? I hope so. I’ve been thinking about you. We’ve loved hearing from you over on the Girl Friday Twitter (just a reminder that it’s not too late to join our awesome contest for a chance to win a free edit with GFP, details here).

If you’re still in it now, you’re serious. The lightweights dropped out after one week of trying to write over a thousand words a day, but not you, you came to win, you mean business. Even so, dear reader, you might be feeling like you could use a little wind in your sails, right? I mean, the days are getting really short, and work is really busy, and Thanksgiving is right around the corner. And it turns out that fifty thousand words is a lot of words (never mind the thirty thousand or so more you’ll probably write to finish out your first draft, you can worry about those in December). But this is what it’s all about, my friend, getting a whole bunch of words on the page and then weeding out a lot of those and replacing them with others until you have 80,000 good ones. Give or take. Maybe you made it through the past two weeks on sheer adrenaline, but that can’t last. What you need is momentum, something you can ride all the way to the shore. So how do you keep it up?

Let it Go. Let yourself write bad sentences, bad paragraphs, bad pages. Revel in the filth of your own worst writing! No one needs to see this (or should see it, really) until you’ve spent many months polishing what you joyfully, blithely spit out onto the pages today. Writing with abandon, rather than with precision, is the whole fun of working on a first draft, so let it fly! 

Don’t Edit. I repeat do not edit. Editing is a wonderful and necessary skill to have as a writer, but it is separate from writing: and the former can stifle the later in a heartbeat. Tell your inner editor to take a seat for now, you’ll see her sometime early next year, and boy will you need her. When I’m editing a draft of my work, I always print it out. I find it easier to get some space from it this way, and it’s a little trick to tell my brain, “Okay, Editrix, you’re up!” But she’s off the clock during first draft time, she’s at the bar drinking martinis with the copyeditor and the cover designer, and I don’t want to disturb her. She’s really sassy when she drinks.

Be Kind. Now is the time for encouraging self-talk. The voices of doubt can get loud at this point, trying to keep you from every finishing a draft. Maybe you read the first paragraph of this post, and thought, “Oh no! I’m behind on Nano! I’m not the real thing. I’ve let myself down, I’ve let everyone down!” But take heart! There is still time. And if you end up with 40K instead of 50K (or 30K for that matter), you still win as long as you keeping going. The world is going to tell you no plenty of times with your writing, you’ll learn that soon enough if you haven’t already. Use this time to practice telling yourself yes.

NaNoWriMo Chapter One: Getting Motivated

Even though I’ve never officially participated, I’m a fan of NaNoWriMo because it celebrates something I love: writers supporting each other and building community.  

Writing is a lonely journey as it mostly involves being by oneself, butt in chair, typing away. One of the best arguments for workshops—either in an MFA program or otherwise—is that they can be a great place to pick up mentors and writing buddies. Beta readers and writing groups have their perils but a sense of connection is important to seeing you through the many years you’ll likely be working on your book before anyone in the professional realm (agents, editors) gets involved. Having a second (perhaps third and fourth) pair of eyes on your work is crucial, but moreover, you need the support, the shoulder to cry on during the difficult moments of writing your book, and the perhaps even more challenging process of trying to get published.

In celebration of NaNo this month, I’m going to be sharing my thoughts on four of the pillars of my writing life: getting motivated, building habits, finding momentum, and keeping the faith. I hope to inspire you and make you feel less alone: which is, incidentally, what I believe all good writing does.

I’ll start with a simple question: why bother writing?

No really, why? There are a million things you could do that would be more immediately gratifying than sitting in your chair making things up, including but not limited to: hanging out with your friends, exercising, sleeping, cuddling your dog, catching up on Empire, or reading a book that some other hard working soul has already written. Here is a harsh truth for you: no one will care if you don’t write today. Unless you are currently under contract, it is unlikely anyone will even notice. I say this not to be harsh—I’m on your side—but this is the bargain.

Your reason for writing doesn’t have to be eloquent or noble, it’s okay if you never even tell anyone else what it is. It just has to be deeply meaningful to you or it won’t see you though the hours and weeks and years between the beginning of your writing journey, and that magical transformative moment when someone else—publishing professionals, readers—will actually care whether or not you write today. And even then, you will need to care ten times as much, because even if you become a bestselling, prize-winning author, everyone’s life will go on if you never write another word, I promise you.

I should say here too that your reason needn’t have anything to do with commercial success, recognition, or even readers. Perhaps you want to write because it helps you sort out your thoughts, or to record your memories for future generations. These are fine reasons, so long as you feel inspired by them. Writing has excellent side benefits, after all: it can make you more empathetic and thoughtful, and in our overstimulated beeping buzzing world, it can carve out space for those two rare treasures: quiet and solitude.

Know why you write. Answer the question, and hold onto that answer in the days to come, days that will test you with the world’s indifference. Think of this as your personal mission statement, the few crucial words to carry you through as you make your way to the 50K mark.

Chasing Thirty Redux

In the fall of 2011, I made a list: thirty things I wanted to do before I turned thirty. I was twenty eight at the time. I’d just gone through a breakup that I was more relieved than sad about, I was living with my parents after a big move back from New York, and was feeling generally stalled out. Nothing was happening with my career, nothing was happening with my writing, and I no longer had the distinction of living in New York. So I started a blog, which I pitched as a column to a site I’d just begun reading and loved: The Gloss. I chronicled my adventures and reflections in a weekly column called Chasing Thirty, which I’ve now collected and made available as an e-book that you can download for free on Noisetrade Books.

I had great fun with the list and the column. During that year, I travelled to Argentina, joined a salsa dancing team, published one of my collecting-dust novels on the site in serial format, learned Spanish, and hosted a fake bachelorette party, among other adventures.

Re-reading these columns four years later has been an entertaining and somewhat sobering experience. It is no exaggeration to say that the very best and the very worst moments of my life have all taken place between now and when I began writing the column. I lost my sister, I met the love of my life and got engaged, I sold a novel, found a job I love. When I re-read these columns, I see harbingers of all of these things and am deeply grateful for the friends, family, and co-workers who’ve been by my side through the highs and lows.

I didn’t do all thirty things on the list. But I can see now that it was never about that. It was about figuring out what I really wanted and finding a way to put that out into the world. To say it aloud, to write it down. Writing the weekly column forced me to reflect on what it meant to be me in that moment. What did I fear? What did I hope for? Who was I and what did I want?

Looking back on the experience is a great reminder that when you feel stuck, the best to do is to start moving and keep moving. Even if you don’t find yourself going in exactly the right direction, you’ll be going somewhere, and sometimes, that’s all you need.

None of it will be perfect, all of it will be wonderful

The above are my words to live by for the next year. Just as life tends to throw its worst at you all at once, it also sometimes heaps so many simultaneous blessings on you that you’re not sure what to do with yourself. As anyone who reads this blog likely knows, I have my debut novel coming out next year and as of a couple of weeks ago, I now have another large, joyful occasion to plan in 2016: a wedding.

As my Facebook page helpfully reminded me, I got my dog, Oliver, almost exactly three years ago. The beginning of my life with Oliver was a marker of sorts for me, the moment I began to emerge from a time when my life was at its worst: with an all-encompassing family tragedy, a stalled career, and a train wreck of a love life. Of course the latter two things were influenced by the first, but it certainly felt like nothing could go my way circa 2011/ 2012. Things slowly got better and then, over the last year and change, took a turn for the awesome. I met my now fiancé, Derek, I got a new agent, and then a book deal. Work started going like gangbusters. Suddenly I was batting a thousand.

I’m not naïve enough to think that good times are here to stay forever and always—that’s not how life is. But as far as game-changing happy events go, true love and a book deal are two pretty big ones.

Anyone who has planned a wedding or a book launch can tell you that they can be as crazy-making as they are joyful. There are so many details, and if you let it, the pressure to do it all perfectly can rob you of the joy of the moment. Hence the mantra.

I never had a particular fantasy around what my wedding day would look like. I’ve had thoughts about what I liked and didn’t like about other people’s special days during the dozen or so that I’ve attended over the last few years. Since Derek and I started talking in earnest about getting married, we’ve discussed some of the details, like where (his parents’ house) and when (next summer). But I suppose I’ve always felt more strongly about the things I didn’t want at my own wedding: no ball gown, no bouquet toss, nothing that says “princess”.

On the other hand, I’ve thought a great deal about what life as a published author might be like: spent nights awake writing my acknowledgements, fantasizing about being interviewed by Terry Gross, or just imagining the simple moment when I walk into one of my favorite bookstores and behold my own work.

Planning can be fun, it can fill your days with dreamy anticipation, but it can also transport you out of the present moment: the one in which, miraculously, your lifelong dream is in the process of coming true, and the man you love is your fiancé. And after all the books have been signed and the canapes have been eaten and the pictures taken, there will be the man and the book: the things that matter most. The things that are here to stay.    

First Comes Love

What is the most important element to writing a book? The one thing you must have?

Is it talent? Knowledge? Marketing chutzpah? Dedicated writing habits?

All of these matter a great deal but they’re nothing without passion.

As my colleague and friend Jenna pointed out in a post on the Girl Friday blog not long ago, the writing process is a long one. And the publishing process—that of bringing the book you labored so hard to create to the world—makes it longer yet. Combined, it can feel relentless and endless: a process that almost certainly takes years, perhaps many of them.

Being a writer is a life’s work. It takes years of practice and study (also known as reading) to hone your craft. Being an author is another deal entirely: this is a the business end of books and many people who write books—memoirists with one extraordinary story to tell, subject matter experts, politicians—are not writers primarily. But one thing all authors must share is an abiding passion for their book.

The good news is that you’re not entirely alone in this: you can and should enlist many people to help you along on your journey. Right now for instance, between my agent, my editor, my in-house marketing and publicity team, my hired publicist, and various industry friends that are offering their support (god bless them), I have a veritable village working with me to bring my book to the world. And that is a beautiful thing. Part of the dream of landing a traditional publishing deal is that other people are investing in your book because they believe in it. Some things didn’t change so much post book deal—I still get up to write in the mornings, I still go to work, I’m still me—but this was one huge thing that did. As I said to a friend recently: after being the only one carrying the lonely torch of my writing aspirations all these years, suddenly having other people care about my book—not about me but about the book itself—is a revelation. In this way my writing life feel markedly different.

And yet.

I continue to care more than all of them, and that’s exactly as it should be. Being a writer is tough stuff, it almost certainly involves quite a lot of rejection and disappointment before any kind of real success can be found. And life will always try to crowd writing out. I’m busy, you’re busy, we’re all busy. Can we just agree on that? America is too busy and too obsessed by being busy, so it’s not likely to change anytime soon. This is a topic for another day—but it’s a certainty that you will have many demands on your time other than writing. So what will bring you there? What will inspire you to wake up earlier than you need to? Devote hours of your weekend? The world is indifferent to whether you write or not, I promise you.

And this is the thing you can never outsource. Even if you’re one of those authors I mentioned—the non-writer authors—you still need to have a passionate drive to see your story told. The author is at the molten core of any book project: and if they lose steam at any point in the process that Jenna so elegantly laid out? That project is doomed.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many experts you hire, how much fancy software you purchase, or impressive degrees you amass: You absolutely must feel the love.  

The Wild Horses of Overwhelm

I have this particular image that comes to mind when my life starts to feel out of control. I’m on a horse galloping off through a field. I’m not sure where I’m going or if I’m coming back, the crucial thing is, I’m getting away from everything. On a horse. There are often other horses with us, a stampede of sorts, and we are getting the hell out of there. The horse is usually chestnut or black: not to be confused with a white horse or the accompanying prince, the fact that I am the only human in this fantasy is central.

When this image starts popping up, I know I’ve hit a wall. Because, while I do love horses, I don’t truly wish to leave any part of my life behind. I love my work, my life, and most definitely my prince. But sometimes it’s suddenly just all too much.

The wild horses are a consequence of the hyper-drive that I spend a lot of my time in, the escape fantasy that emerges from the desperation of not knowing how to slow down. One minute, I’m so into it. I want to be a bad, boss bitch and do all the things. I’m leaning in, I’m daring greatly, working and writing, eating, praying, and loving my heart out and then BAM! Wild horses.

Maybe the horse imagery doesn’t do it for you, but my guess is there isn’t a person reading this who can’t relate to this feeling of hands-in-the-air I give up. We live in a stressed-out, demanding, overwhelmed kind of world. A lot of these factors may be out of our control at any given time. Here’s a little four-step process I use to sort through what is:

1.      Make a list.

Stress can be most pernicious when it’s a nebulous black cloud following you everywhere you go. So write down everything that is stressing you out. Maybe it won’t look as bad once you have it all down on paper, maybe it will look worse! Deep breath! That’s what the next steps are for.

2.      Ask: What can you delegate?

“If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself” Ha! Words to die by right there. Don’t be a martyr to your own inner control freak; mine tends to reach for the wheel the more stressed out I get. Have the humility to ask for and accept help from your partner, your co-workers, your friends, whomever.

3.      Ask: What can you let go of?

If you’re life feels like a closet that’s bursting at the seams with a whole lot of nothing to wear then it’s time to do some sorting. Much like those jean shorts buried in the back your closet, there’s bound to be something on your list that is neither rewarding nor necessary. If so? Toss it!

4.      Cut yourself a break.

I’ve realized that this busy year ahead is the perfect time to ditch my habit of going into a downward spiral when I’m feeling stressed out. I simply don’t have time for the pouting and doubting and self-recrimination that I’m apt to go into when I get really overwhelmed. What better time to learn to be kind to myself?

How do you cope when it’s all too much?

The Dream Lives

Walking to the Atria offices from the subway last Thursday to meet the team who’d be working on my book, I was suddenly struck that this, exactly this, was what I had worked so hard and held out so long for. I was an author now.

There are many ways to bring a book to the world—from self-publishing to hybrid to traditional presses small and large—and at Girl Friday we work with people every day who are making ingenious use of this dazzling array of options. But when I dreamed of being an author—when I was little girl, when I was a teenager, when I was a college writing major, and most of all when I was a twenty-five year old getting up early in the morning to write before heading to work at the Random House building in midtown—this was the dream. Me in a snappy blue wrap dress heading to a sleek office building in Manhattan (Simon & Schuster in this case) to meet with a group of bright, enthusiastic twenty-somethings who’d be working on my book; followed, of course, by a fancy lunch with my lovely editor.

These details, and all the ones to follow—the book launch, the tour, the parties to celebrate—matter for the same reason our thousand little traditions around getting married matter. It’s not that the flowers and the dress and the ring and the pomp and circumstance are what make a marriage, but the rights of passage are still important. They let us pause, look at where we are, mark the important passage of a dream realized.

Meeting the team at Atria was surreal. I’ve spent ten years working, in various capacities, on the other side of the table. Listening to them talk about the book, remark on the characters and the cover, ask me questions about my influences, threw me for a loop. Logically, I knew they’d read it but still my gut reaction was: how do you guys know all of this? It was the first time I’d been in a room full of people I’d never met who’d read my book. If I’m lucky, I suppose this will happen many more times, but this was the first, and it felt miraculous.

When I came by the offices the next day to pick up a galley hot off the presses to take with me to a dinner, I was nearly out of my mind with glee. It looks like a real book now, nearly the final thing. I barely resisted the urge to shout to the security guards: You guys! It’s my BOOK!

I vividly remember watching authors swan through the halls at Random House, with a strange aura of importance around them, and thinking someday that will be me. And now—many years, disappointments, and rejections later—incredibly, wonderfully, it is.     

Treat Yourself

Meet Bianca. 

When I got my book deal last fall, it was naturally a cause for celebration. There’d been years and years of tears, angst, and rejection that had preceded that phone call from my agent Carly, telling me we had an offer.

For a good ten minutes after I put the phone down, I couldn’t stop crying: tears of relief, of joy, of the particular type you cry when the thing you’ve longed for so hard and nearly lost faith would ever happen happens. I hugged my co-workers: who popped a bottle of champagne during the one o’clock meeting in my honor. I called my mom and dad and boyfriend. Later I called a number of friends who had been reassuring me for years that this day would come. I went out to dinner with my boyfriend to our favorite restaurant where yet more champagne was had. It was a great day. So yes, I celebrated. And then, as quickly as I could, I got back to work.

There’s plenty of work that goes into a book once the deal is made, and perhaps even more crucially, I rededicated my efforts to working on the next book. I know all too well what a potentially perilous time the debut book release can be for an author: that thrilling and destabilizing mix of anticipation and fear. Writing is the thing that has always kept me sane; I knew I’d need it now more than ever.

When I saw Judith Curr, president and publisher of Atria, give the keynote address during the San Francisco Writers Conference last February, she made some comments about goal-setting really stuck with me. She advocated being specific about goals and celebrating each milestone along the way, rather than gritting your teeth and losing perspective. She told us that she buys herself a piece of jewelry every time she has a big success, to remind her of what went into it.

I had always planned to do the same when I got my book deal. I’m not much of a jewelry person, but there is one piece I’ve always coveted: the Cartier Love Bracelet. The bracelet actually plays a role in my novel and I’d always imagined that once I sold the book, I’d buy myself one. I envisioned it dangling delicately from my wrist as I typed, reminding me of the journey I’d been on, inspiring me to continue on when I wasn’t feeling so hopeful. But once my advance check was received and stashed away in my savings, taxes begrudgingly paid on it, I just couldn’t do it. The bracelet is obscenely expensive—which is sort of the point, to buy myself something I would normally abstain from—but the money felt too loaded, it felt like I’d worked harder for that money than every other dollar I’ve earned in my life combined.

Then a couple of months ago I got an email from my editor that the audio rights to my book had been sold to Brilliance Audio. I almost didn’t know how to process such news. The idea that something could happen with my work without me having to hustle for it was incomprehensible. And there would be a second smaller advance to boot! Unlike the original advance money—which I felt tempted to convert to gold bars so that I could look at it and keep it forever—this felt so random and unexpected that it was more like winning money from a slot machine than earning it. This money I felt okay spending.

But the bracelet still didn’t feel right. Much like my main character Brooke, I’ve changed a lot during the unfolding of this book. When I was living in New York, the Cartier bracelet would have been just the thing. But now? I wanted something that could take me places, that could help me appreciate how far I’ve come just to end up right back where I started: Seattle.

It turns out the cost of a Cartier bracelet will buy you a really nice road bike. And a week ago, I became the proud owner of a Bianchi Impulso. Feeling the slick carbon frame fly underneath me on my inaugural ride with my boyfriend this weekend, I knew I’d chosen well.  It might have been the best money I’d ever made, but it also feels like the best money I’ve ever spent.