On Making Art When You’re at Capacity

An Alicia Thompson-style Newsletter

Hello, friend. Thank you for joining me on this virtual coffee date.

Today’s Drink Special: Using this newsletter to talk about my feelings about self promotion (among other things) instead of actual self promotion.

I was feeling inspired by fellow rom-traum-com author Alicia Thompson’s newsletter (highly recommend) to share some of the thoughts that quite literally keep me up at night.

On being an author, not a writer

Having sent off my reviewed pass pages for Whenever You’re Ready a few weeks ago, my relationship to this book is in a new stage. I no longer have the power to change it. My relationship to this work becomes one of promotion and discussion, but the work itself is a fixed entity. This is something every author must accept, and it’s something that can be deeply painful.

I wrote the very first draft of Thank You for Sharing in 2021, and now in 2024, I’m still doing events to promote and talk about it. I’m not the same person I was at 24/25 years old. I am deeply proud of that work, but there are some choices, big and small, that I may have made differently had I written it now. Some of them for craft reasons, some because my values or understanding of the field in which I’m writing have changed, and some because I’ve learned that a small minority of people will read my work in the worst faith possible. The last one I’m trying to get over, because there’s literally nothing I can do about that. But I’ve never been good at giving up control.

Now, as I move into this new phase of my relationship to my sophomore novel, I am deeply aware that the same thing is bound to happen. I am incredibly proud of this book. Of the way I grew as a writer, of the themes I managed to put into it, of these characters I love so dearly. But I’m already becoming that different person who might have made different decisions and I’ll still have to promote and discuss this book. And I know it will be painful in all of the same ways.

I’m working on something else, now, and while I started it prior to the launch of TYFS, the vast majority of it is being written by Author me. A person who knows that some people will love my work, some people will hate it, and regardless, it’ll have to be sold. My relationship to this one is still entirely about molding it. It’s in my control, where I’m comfortable. And yet, I can’t help but to anticipate the next phase, when I’ll have to ask that people read it. When I’ll be a different person from who I am now and have to promote that old self, even where I disagree with them. How can that not be paralyzing? Knowing that something I now love I may come to hold judgement for? How do I keep making it?

On writing through personal struggle

I, like the majority of authors you know about, have another full time job. Without getting into too much detail, upheaval at work has meant that I very quickly and unexpectedly was given a lot more responsibilities. I also was temporarily physically disabled because of a surgery at the beginning of the year, and then I very suddenly lost someone who meant a lot to me. It was all too much. I stopped writing entirely, and when I came back to it, and I had to change a couple key pieces of the story so that I could bear to engage with it. Have I changed it for the worse? Is the time I spend crafting this story a way to process my life or avoid it?

On writing in a messed-up world

What does it mean to choose to spend so much of my time making art? I often carry a lot of guilt about my choices (that my therapist says has to do with my issues around black-and-white thinking). I do cancer research in my day job because given that I have to work to live, I want to do something I feel can help people. I’ve been involved in solidarity projects and political organizing because I want to work toward collective liberation.

I write romance because I love it. Because I want to bring others the joy I feel when reading a good book, because I want to represent people who don’t always get to have their love stories told, because I want more romance novels out there that better reflect my politics and worldview. That has its own pressures - if my work doesn’t “succeed” in the eyes of my publisher, what does that mean for other stories like mine? If my work is part of a small sliver of work that speaks to someone’s identity, and they don’t resonate with it, does that mean I’ve failed in some way? How do I, as a teeny cog in the large machine that is publishing, make space for more folks like me and lift some of that pressure?

But mostly, I write for that first reason: I love it. And that makes the amount of time I devote to it feel selfish. Would it not be better spent elsewhere? If I want to do good in the world, should I not spend every moment of my time doing the most good I possibly can? Being the most selfless? Is the fact that I’m worrying about this at all reflective of my internalized American hyper-individualism?

The only answer I’ve come to so far

I need the art I consume. I need the art I make. Occasionally, I get a message from someone who tells me that they needed the art that I made. So I keep writing.

In everything else, I keep trying my best and trying to do better. And I try to be okay with whatever that is.

Mwah,

Rachel Runya Katz

P.S. I have deleted Instagram from my phone again. Sorry for any messages missed. I’ll be back on socials full time soon because WYR comes out in less than six months and it’ll be time for self promotion once again.