words, words, words

yeah, i've been writing

Dear readers,

This is the fourth attempt I’ve made at a newsletter in the last two weeks.

Who knows if this too will go in the bin; who knows if I’ll need a fifth, sixth, seventh.

The problem is, this newsletter is called Kate, Lately.

The problem is, it’s meant in part to tell you what I’ve been thinking about.

And what I’ve been thinking about lately—most of the time—is too terrible for words. What I’ve been thinking about has become a crammed-together whirlwind of not-words, not-phrases, not-clear-and-sometimes-contradictory-directives I make to myself: firesfloodsdroughts / billionairesoligarchscriminals / corruptionincompetencecruelty / racismsexismtransphobia / bansstuntsdistractions / farmsflusfoodsupply / workerswageshiringfreezes / DEILGBTQIADACA / historicalnorms /historyrepeating / healthcareabortioncaregenderaffirmingcare / hatecrimeshatespeech / yourfriendsyourfamilyyourcolleaguesyourstudentsyourneighborsyourreaders / getoffsocialmedia / stayonsocialmedia / payattentiontoitall / don’tpayattentiontoitall / pickanissue /oneissuewillnotbeenough /cancelthissubscription / figureouthowtostayinformed / stopusingstopshoppingstopclicking / f*ckaroundfindout / whodeservestofindout / thinklocal / don’tforgetthenationaltheglobal /donateherevolunteerheresignuphere

I could go on. And I bet many of you could, too.

I want to acknowledge that some of you may read this and think: I subscribed to Kate, Lately because I wanted to hear her thoughts on things other than this. That is certainly your right, to think this way. But because it is likely that my books brought you to this newsletter, I want you know that those books you’ve loved do not exist without this brain, this heart, this empathy, this humanity. What you have read in my books, whether you have understood it to be so or not, is a reflection of how I think, of who and what I care about in a very flawed world.

The Kate I have always been, and the Kate I have been lately, cannot be separated from these thoughts and these cares.

And so, the several drafts of this newsletter all felt wrong to me unless I could start, somehow, with what I’ve said above. I could not tell you about what I’ve been writing or reading until I said all this—until I stated plainly that things don’t feel okay to me, that I, like many of you, have been sorting through my not-words/not-phrases/not-easy-directives to find a way to be and be of service, that I am, every day, thinking of everyone who is struggling or suffering in a situation that feels chaotic and cruel and inexplicable.

And I am moving with the forever hope that you and I and all people of good and sound conscience will make a stand against brainlessness, heartlessness, selfishness, indifference.

and so. what have I been writing?

Well, this newsletter for f*cking one, four different f*cking times.

But the reason I had for writing a newsletter was to tell you that I have been writing, and quite a lot, actually. After an unplanned sort-of hiatus, I’m writing the tail end of the book I’ve been working on for awhile now, The Paris Match. While we’d hoped to see this book make its way to you in Fall 2025, some challenges in my personal life made it so I needed more time, and I’m grateful to have (very generously) been given it. This book is becoming all the things I most wanted it to be, and I can’t wait for you to read it.

So, in the spirit of not waiting for spots of joy to show themselves, and in the spirit of some other things I’ll explain below—let me break a longtime rule of mine and share a snippet I’m so proud of, featuring the book’s hero:

But here he was. 5:30 am in the morning on a Paris street.

Pretending.

The church, he imagined, was still a burned out shell of itself, like he’d seen on the news over the last couple of years, still shored up with huge, spidery grafts of scaffolding everywhere, still strangely blackened in some places. He imagined it without its great, Gothic spire, now newly rebuilt.

He pretended it was in ruins. That no one would ever come back to fix it.

If that were true, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to stand this close to it; he knew it would be surrounded by barricades and warning signs and probably French policemen.

But that little hurdle was no match for his apparently still-skilled pretending brain.

It helped that Paris was so sleepy in the dawn hours. He hadn’t passed even one cyclist or runner on his way here, no one trying to frantically squeeze in a half-hour of fresh air before going to sit in a cramped cubicle all day. The few people he had seen—a teenager ducking sheepishly through the glass door of a tiny bakery that beamed a U of gold light onto the street, an older woman clucking affectionately at a small dog, a man maybe Griffin’s own age blowing out a plume of smoke as he passed—seemed not to notice him, and that helped, too.

Because in this game, he wasn’t meant to be seen.

He was meant to be in one of those burned-out bell towers. A crooked monster, hiding from the world below.

A monster who never came down long enough to say something as colossally, short-sightedly stupid as So you’ll look at me, then.

I live in there, he thought desperately, picturing it now. I sit on blackened beams of wood. I talk to sooty gargoyles who never talk back. I draw pictures in the ashes. I crouch on stone buttresses and watch Michael get married from way up high.

Layla Bailey doesn’t think to look at me at all.

One reason (one! there are a few, tbh) I’ve always been cautious about sharing words from my works in progress is, strangely enough, related to how I began this particular newsletter. In general, as a writer and as a reader, I am not a whirlwind-of-words sort of person: I do not write quickly, as I’ve lamented here and elsewhere many times; similarly, I do not read quickly. And while I’m envious of people who do both, I’m also aware that there are huge, important (and ongoing) parts and privileges of my life that trained me—encouraged me—to be slow when it comes to words.

When I say I write and read slowly, I don’t necessarily mean that I am a slow processor of what words are communicating to me in the literal sense, though I am probably that, too—I do go quiet when I’m getting a lot of information at once, and I do tend to need time to process that information before deciding what to do with it. But I suppose more of what I mean is that if there is a calling in my life, it is to be almost compulsively thoughtful about language and what it can do: what sounds it can make when arranged just so, and how those sounds evoke certain emotions. What structures it can be built into, and how those structures say something about characters or settings or themes. What rules it has and why it matters to break them at critical moments. What it can inspire, tear down, rescue, rebuild.

What it can reveal when reviewed, over and over again.

When I write a book, one layer of the work is what the language reveals to me: a speech or thought pattern, for example, that emerges as I develop a character, and the decisions I make on whether to develop it further. But the second layer is what I want the language to reveal to you, the reader, if you happen to be interested: what consonant sounds I want you to hear as you’re picturing a Paris morning, what a habit of pretending and a habit of hiding have to do with each other when it comes to my hero, and why all those I statements at the end tell you about how he does it.

I have always been so afraid of the gap between that first and second layer. It has always made me so cautious to share.

But whether or not I ever share something from a work-in-progress again (lol I probably won’t; this alone probably took a half-decade off my life), what the last couple of weeks has reminded me of, sometimes quite brutally, is how powerful words and the way they are arranged can be. And I want to be a person, in this world, who never forgets that. I want to be a person who knows that words can and will be used to cause harm and panic and chaos, but that that they can also be—they always have been—arranged for change and connection and comfort and good.

I want to be a person who is reminding other people not to forget it, either. I have often tried to be that person in other spaces—on social media, for example—but one never knows, these days, which way the whirlwinds of such platforms will blow.

Obviously, the words you care about most from me have to do with romance: a genre that you know I believe can have transformative power. So, if in the coming months, you see more newsletters from me that take a close look—a not-whirlwind look—at the words in some of my favorite romances and what I notice them doing, I hope you’ll consider reading. Maybe you’ll see in those words something worth slowing down for, and something to be inspired by, especially during a time when words are often being weaponized against you—your personhood, your work, your attention, your safety, your well-being.

As for specific matter of The Paris Match, I’ll have news for you soon on a release date, an official description, and more. Stay tuned!

until then…read any good books lately?

The past few months, I’ve been finding myself alternating between various book formats, and it’s been a pleasure to have different reading “modes.” Right now, I’m deep into the audiobook of Maggie O’Farrell’s gorgeously-written The Marriage Portrait (not! a! romance!, I must warn you) for my commute. On my e-reader, I’ve had the pleasure of reading two ARCs recently: first, my friend Sarah’s brilliant These Summer Storms, which is not out for awhile but OH MY GOD, you have got to preorder; so much happens in this book I CAN’T EVEN. Second, the very-soon-to-be released In A Rush, by Kate Canterbary, which so far has a real giggling-and-kicking-my-feet feeling to it. In print, I just finished a re-read of Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, because I decided to start the TV adaptation and wanted a refresher. And, I am eagerly eagerly eagerly anticipating the arrival of my paperback preorder of Adriana Herrera’s A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke, the third in her Las Leonas series (which, speaking of Paris: have you read A Caribbean Heiress in Paris yet? Because it’s one of my favorite historicals in recent years).

I’d love to hear what you’re reading, so drop me a note in the comments if you’ve got a great rec!

Love y’all, and thanks for hanging in there with me.

xoxo

kate 🖤