The new episode of The Culture Study Podcast features me and Lilah Raptopoulos trying to parse the reaction to the new Netflix show from Meghan Markle (‘You Know It’s Sussex Now’). Read the intro so you know what our goals were going in, but if you’re also trying to figure out how you feel about it (or just want to hear me hold forth about early television discourses of glamour, I dunno) this is the episode for you:
Also, if you haven’t checked out the Genre Book Concierge from earlier this week, it’s BONKERS.
Earlier this week, I submitted approximately 87,000 words of a first draft of my fifth book to my editor. Over the next six months, that’ll get tightened and rearranged and tweaked in all sorts of clarifying ways: I’ll go through a first round of edits, then do some follow-up interviews, then another round of edits, then I’ll personally pay for a fact checker to go through and confirm details, then it’ll go to copy editing and legal review and I’ll have a chance to make final FINAL edits before it goes to the printer. There’s a lot left to do, but none of it is nearly as arduous and brain-emptying as that first draft.
You’d think, at this point in my book-writing career, that I’d know how to do it without feeling like absolute dog shit at the end, but you’d be wrong — even though I very intentionally tried to make this book’s process different in every way. To understand why, you have to understand how I managed to write my four previous books (and yes, I’m paywalling this one; descriptions of my self-inflected misery aren’t free)