"Wait, you can do that?"

This week: the author takes some advice, embraces constraint, eats a perfect bagel, admires the most sexually-charged magazine cover to ever feature a puppet, and drafts in a Very Weird POV

Welcome to Tender, Thirsty, Ambitious, a bimonthly newsletter from romance author Rosie Danan about savoring the good stuff, looking respectfully 👀, and building a creative practice that embraces unapologetic striving.

Volume 3 — Week of August 7^th, 2023

TENDER– savoring the good stuff

grateful for advice that makes writing long-term feel sustainable. When I asked, a writer friend once attributed her productivity and impressive pace of output to writing from 5-9 every weekday morning.

Another recently told me she combats the isolation and loneliness that can accompany writing as a primarily independent endeavor through sprinting every day at the same time with another writer on a video call. She called this practice, “getting a Zoom coworker,” which I love.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve taken the momentum of moving back to the northeast as an opportunity to reset my writing practice, combining both approaches into one. I don’t think I would have reliably adopted either technique in isolation, but the combination unlocked a bit of alchemy that, so far, has really worked.

It’s pretty simple—I wake up at 5AM (hatefully), make coffee (my one tether in the literal darkness), get on a video call with my friend at 5:30 (sometimes 5:35 depending on our various constitutions), and we write in sprints of 20-30 mins with small breaks (unless we get into a battle about aesthetic preferences in thigh shape which can derail productivity significantly) until 8:30AM.

This approach has removed a lot of the dread I used to battle about having to sit down and make words when I gave myself a longer lead time to getting started. It’s also way more fun to see my friend every day, and to know that we’re in the trenches together. We can ask questions or lament challenges. We push each other when one or both of us slumps. And no matter what, it’s out of the way by 9AM and I enter the rest of my day with the momentum of accomplishment, any pain forgotten in a protective proxy I imagine is akin to that of childbirth.

grateful for the lesson of intentionality my self-imposed 1K limit on word count for this newsletter teaches me every week even though it consistently takes longer than I’d like to be concise and I am NOT a patient woman.

grateful for bagels. And whitefish salad. No elaboration required.

Thirsty – looking respectfully 👀

I am obsessed with this vintage picture of Elliot Gould.

#NEED to know the art direction for this photoshoot #did they tell him to smirk like that?! #the overalls, the chest hair, THE EYEBROWS, the way his hair looks slight DAMP #with a few tweaks, tell me this couldn’t be a clinch cover #quietly mooning over the pretty loops in his signature #le sigh #hear me out, what do we think about throwing him and his chin dimple into the ring as a Rabbi Ethan Cohen facecast?

AMBITIOUS – unapologetic creative striving

This week I’m taking inspiration from 1990’s romance classic—and I am in the school of thought that would also say masterpiece—Flower’s from the Storm.

Image Source: Goodreads

When I read Flowers from the Storm for the first time earlier this year, even though I’d heard about how special it is many times over, I was still taken totally aback by the singular and innovative way the author uses language to present the characters’ evolving points of view.

I’ve read thousands of romance novels across my lifetime, and I can’t remember the last time I was confronted with such a significant disruption in my understanding of the ways you can wield writing as part of the craft. I had moments reading where I was like, “It never even occurred to me that you could do something like that.”

Kinsale’s artistry in this book is one of the inspirations for a POV lens I attempted in the first draft of the manuscript I’m currently working on. True to the title of this newsletter section, the drafted scene is ambitious. There’s a definite possibility what I wrote is Too Weird and will get cut sooner rather than later as I begin working on a second draft next week. But for now, I’m proud of myself for trying something outside my craft comfort zone. I’m counting it as a funky little win!

I used to think that writing something bad made me a bad writer. But I made this deal with myself a while back that I wanted to approach writing as much as possible as an act of joyful exploration. And that means big swings. That means—to continue with a baseball metaphor I will surely ride into the ground—missing the ball. But hey, a successful RBI average is what, .300? Not bad odds, if you can get ‘em.

Further reading:

• For a much deeper and more articulate dive into FftS, I highly recommend this post on Charlotte’s Close Reading blog

• For more on the book including a comprehensive list of content warnings, check out Leigh’s review on Goodread’s

HOUSEKEEPING

• I announced this week that when you order a signed (and personalized if you wish!) copy of my upcoming paranormal romcom Do Your Worst from Towne Book Center (shipping across the US) you’ll receive an exclusive page insert with custom character art and a slightly NSFW vinyl die-cut sticker.  

• For UK readers, THE ROOMMATE audiobook is part of a 2 for 1 sale right now at Audible until 20^th August

Wanna get your hands on an advanced print copy of Do Your Worst before it comes out on November 14^th? Here’s three ways you can:

• NEXT SATURDAY, August 19^th, I’ll be at Reads & Company in Phoenixville, PA for Bookstore Romance Day and I’ll have one of my precious remaining author to giveaway to someone who stops by my signing table at the event (for everyone else I’ll have fun Shameless key-chains!)

• MONDAY, August 14^th, entries open for an online giveaway my publisher is hosting over on Goodreads

• Not in the PA area OR a Goodreads user but still looking for an advanced copy of DYW? I’ll be giving away two (2!!) in the next issue of this newsletter (coming in two weeks!) so keep your eyes on your inbox / maybe tell a friend to subscribe so you have more chances to win and can share a copy between now and November?

Okay I gotta go now because I’m late for something,

Rosie