I'm Taking a Break

Something I am very, very bad at

Fun sale happening right now! Barnes & Noble Premium & Rewards Members get 25% off all upcoming releases (like Parisian Heist) through the end of today. The promo code for the sale is PREORDER25.

Our pre-order sales are less than stellar right now. This is something I wish authors didn’t have to obsess over but alas we do. In full transparency we are only at 1,228 right now, half ebooks and half hardcovers. I’m sharing that because I always promise transparency throughout the publishing process and also because it’s one of the reasons I really need a break right now!

Reminder that to celebrate the release of The Parisian Heist, I’m offering a live writing and publishing masterclass on June 30th at noon ET.

This one will be an hour long with plenty of time for Q&A and the only price of admission is that you buy the book. You will also get a free year of this substack.

» REGISTER HERE «

I took the Parisian Heist to the Philadelphia Museum of Art today to visit the their new Sunflowers exhibit.

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting in the Philly Art Museum were one of the inspirations for the book. I have loved them since I was little and Emma, one of my main characters is as enchanted with them as I have always been. Here’s that scene from the book:

The Sunflowers have been lodged in my brain since the first time I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art with my mom. I was only three. I tried to grab at the painting because the petals on the twelve stems seemed real enough to touch. Each flower had its own personality. I still remember the sharp rebuke from the museum guard.

Back then I assumed there was only one painting of the flowers. I only learned how many van Gogh painted years later in school. He did three of them while he was in Paris, maybe more. When he moved to the countryside in Arles he had plans to paint a group of models one day out in the fields, but they never showed up. It was unbearably hot, and not wanting to waste a burst of inspiration, he gathered a bunch of newly grown Provençal sunflowers and brought them inside, where he placed them in a locally made ceramic pot and started painting as many as he could to welcome his friend Paul Gauguin to paint with him in the South of France. The exact number he made has never really been known.

They inspire her to become an art and travel to Paris. There is also a lost van Gogh Sunflowers in the book. I’m telling you guys, this novel has it all. Here is a tantalizing excerpt of that part:

Inside is a painting in an orange wooden frame that complements the riot of colors and thick brushstrokes that take up more than two dimensions. The images swirl, entirely alive in front of me. The background is an intense blue, a color found nowhere in nature. The flowers too are somehow intensely realistic and yet also fantastical. I feel like I could pluck out a seed and pop the salty fruit into my mouth. I gasp slightly as I count the number of sunflowers. The number is important. I glance behind me and see Stella’s face, now a bare canvas.

“Stella, what is this?”

She smiles at me slowly. “I think you know. And right now, we’re the only ones alive who know it exists.”

Anyway, I took a copy of Parisian to visit Van Gogh's Sunflowers: A Symphony in Blue and Yellow. It brings together two of Van Gogh's sunflower paintings side by side for the first time in Philadelphia since 1954. The museum's own version—painted in 1889 with that striking turquoise background—has been part of the collection since 1963, and it's paired with the 1888 yellow-background version on loan from the National Gallery in London.

I have to tell you that seeing them together was pure magic. I’m hoping we can collaborate with the museum to do something fun with the book and do a field trip to view the sunflowers.

In other fun news my Lingua Franca Parisian tour sweater has arrived and I may never take it off. I wore it on NY CBS this morning and everyone loved it.

Starting tomorrow morning I will be on vacation.

I keep having to repeat that to myself over and over again because I am very, very bad at taking a break. I am not proud of this but I was still editing a manuscript while in labor…twice.

We’re heading out to a dude ranch in Wyoming and going on a fossil hunt in Colorado with all the kids and my mom. And yes, I am writing a dude ranch murder mystery and a middle grade fossil hunter book, but research is all part of the adventure. It’s not WORK. I keep telling myself that.

I have a few things scheduled, but I won’t be writing this newsletter. I will try to stay off social media as much as I can (I’ll post promo reels once a day and get off) and I’m not taking any meetings.

I will not check my sales or my Amazon number.

Thinking about that is making me break out in hives a little, but I definitely need it.

I’m currently in the manic phase of book promotion where it feels like I am screaming into the void about The Parisian Heist. I know we are still three weeks out, but checking pre-sales (which are low) and my Amazon number every day is giving me massive anxiety and making me truly depressed. So I’m going cold turkey for a week.

And Nick Aster shall be enforcing this. Or at least he will be trying his best :)

I used to think I was just wired this way. That the inability to stop was some quirk of my personality, maybe even a feature. But it turns out it’s basically an epidemic. Women are burning out at record rates, and we’re also the least likely to take the vacation days we’re owed, the least likely to fully disconnect when we do, and the most likely to feel guilty about it the whole time anyway. One Gallup report found that women are 32% more likely than men to experience burnout regularly. So if you also feel like you are running on fumes and spite: hi, same, and apparently we’re in very good company.

I’m also not recording any more podcasts until September (I recorded the entire summer in the past month). But I have a ton of good ones for you to listen to.

Sad Beige Babies and Sad Beige Parents

Diving into the internet aesthetic that convinced an entire generation of mothers that parenting should look like a luxury hotel lobby in Denmark. We talk with Hayley DeRoche, aka The Official Sad Beige and author of Dress Your Baby in Sage and Taupe, about how influencer culture turned motherhood into a perfectly curated performance built on guilt, consumption, and extremely expensive neutral-toned stacking cups.

Girls Gone Wild Go Feral—Behind the Scenes of the Show That Shaped a Generation

What if the women from Girls Gone Wild finally got the mic?

We go all the way back to the horrifyingly normalized misogyny of the early 2000s with author and podcaster Courtney Kocak, who spent seven deeply unsettling weeks working on the actual Girls Gone Wild tour bus.

Courtney takes us inside the world Joe Francis built: drunk college girls signing contracts they didn’t understand, creepy power dynamics disguised as “fun,” and the moment she realized the entire machine was designed to separate women from their agency while making terrible men rich.

Royals Were the Original Reality Television Stars

Before there were influencers, there were royals.

For centuries, the British royal family has provided the world with fashion trends, family feuds, public scandals, doomed romances, and enough gossip to fuel generations of headlines. Long before social media, people were obsessing over what royals wore, who they married, and what happened behind palace walls.

Bestselling author Melanie Benjamin joins us to talk about her new novel, The Windsor Affair, which revisits one of the most consequential scandals in modern history: King Edward VIII’s decision to give up the throne for Wallis Simpson.

Together we unpack why we’re still fascinated by the royals, how the monarchy became the blueprint for celebrity culture, and what really happened between Wallis Simpson and the future Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. They also dig into the parallels between Wallis and Meghan Markle, the media’s obsession with pitting women against one another, and why history keeps recycling the same female archetypes.

And that’s it. I’m turning off. I swear.

EEEEEEEK.

Order the book guys. If everyone reading right now ordered, requested it at the library, told a friend about it, or did all three then I think we would be in a good place to get the word of mouth going.

Ok…now I’m really done. I feel like Ferris Bueller at the end of the movie when the camera just won’t turn off.