WIP: How's It Going?
For You and For Me
Hello friends!
I'm attempting, again, to do Jami Attenberg's #1000wordsofsummer, where I aim to write 1000 words every day from May 30 to June 12. I am....1.5 days behind but this is ok. The only person I am accountable to is myself, and I am still confident I can do good work in this time frame. That's the point, not perfection. Check out Jami's great book, #1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. It's a bevy of good advice and inspiration.
Right now, on top of my agency work and continuing to promote my books and my clients' books and sit on softball fields for three hours to watch my kid play, I'm writing a book. I'm kinda always writing a book, so this doesn't feel particularly notable to me. I wish I had more time to write, but to be honest, I can only focus on a project like this for a few hours at a time, if that, so I don't have the dream of running away to a cottage and writing all day. (Clients, I have no intensions of quitting my job and being a full-time writer, lol.) In fact, I've had a LOT of luck writing on my phone on my subway commutes recently. I am rarely on the train for more than 30ish minutes and tbh, I've been able to get 500 words or so on a single trip. I'm sure they'll be heavily edited in the next round, but you can't edit what you don't write.
I have about 26,000 of this draft. The antagonists just showed up. There might be a beauty pageant in it, a la Miss Congeniality, but on the moon in the '60s. (Did you know that when women started working at JPL they had a beauty pageant called Miss Guided Missile??) This project's working title is Secretaries on the Moon and I am having tremendous fun with it.
At the suggestion of my writer's group, I am also completely pantsing it. (Counterpoint, lol.) No outline, which is a real first for me. I don't know what's going to happen in the end, and instead of feeling buckets of anxiety about this...I am kinda loving it? I get to play around! I get to be inspired by random things, like reading about that beauty pageant in Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt. I get to skip over details like how does the moon orbit and rotate in relation to Earth again? and how are they going to count days on the Moon? with ample tks tks tks tks. That's future Kate's problem and I'm actually looking forward to having separate time to research and figure things out when I am not actively drafting. Will future Kate be annoyed at past Kate? I'm sure of it. But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. We'll both live.
Somehow, I have shaken off the anxiety of omg this is going to take so long to edit in the next round. I used to feel that way while drafting and I was determined to do it "right" the first time to avoid it. But there is no "right." There is just "first." Everything needs editing and you only know what that entails when you get there. I follow this bot on Bluesky that posts how far we are into the year as a percentage. And it's honestly one of the most stressful accounts I follow.
Year Progress Bot
What do you mean 41.79% of this year has already gone by?????? But I want to write a book "this year" and now we're almost halfway done??????? I am not halfway done with my book. And it's not going to be done done in December. I could unfollow but this is just the right amount of anxiety to keep me on my toes. I will not write a book this year by worrying about not being able to write a book this year. I will only write a book this year by writing a book this year.
This book is not under contract. No one has read it, including me. (I haven't gone back and reread those 26,000 words at all.) I am having the MOST fun with it, though, and even if nothing comes of it in the end, I will have learned so much about what I am capable of (working without an outline), if that works for me (we'll see!) and how I can take these lessons into what I do for the next book. I will not write the next book this way because that book will need to be written its own way. I am not perfecting a single writing plan that I can activate every time I want to make a book. It doesn't work that way for me. It might work that way for you. If you think you just have to figure out the one true way to be a writer and everything will be easy, then you're on the wrong path. Feeling like a newbie every time you open the document is normal. Having everything figured out all the time is not.
It's possible the newness of this approach is what is keeping me interested and I'll have to figure out a new new approach next time, and well, ok. That's how it works for me, I guess. How is it working for you? How's your WIP going? Tell me in the comments.
Want to ask a question for Q&A Thursday this week? Paid members can fill out this form!
Join me June 10th at 7pm at Liz's Book Bar in Carroll Gardens for an IRL AMA where you can ask me anything in the wonderful and low-key setting of Brooklyn's best wine bar bookstore. RSVP here! It's going to be a great, low-pressure time, I promise. It's the actual one year anniversary of WRITE THROUGH IT so maybe there will be a surprise.
And hey: want me to come to your book club/on your podcast/to your conference/speak at your event? I'm great at that kind of stuff.
Don't forget to check out all the new subscriber benefits we debuted a few weeks ago. Fun stuff! Giveaways! Query Critiques! AMAs!
XOXOOXOXOXOX,
Kate
Who am I and what is this? This is Agents & Books, a twice-weekly newsletter about writing, publishing, and the creative life. I've been an agent for almost 20 years, most of it at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, and I'm the author of two books: Write Through It: An Insider's Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life (Simon Element, 2025) and a picture book called Pay Attention to Me!, with illustrations by Rob Justus (Sourcebooks, 2026). If you haven't already, become a subscriber today. $5 a month or $50 a year. Same price since 2019!
Comments ()