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Not Quite Ready
Reading proof pages hopefully for the last time. So that has been the work this weekend.
I’ve also been busy on my work-in-progress Looking For Home. I’ve got the last third as far as I can take it without having the other parts written. And knowing me, I’ll do something in the other two sections that will necessitate more changes in that last third section. So I am pushing along!
It’s been a little difficult doing the switch because that old talk in my head about wasting my time is still there! I was hoping that having a published book would quell that voice forever. But apparently in my mind, I’m still not allowed to write just because I enjoy it and I’m good at it.
I have to remind myself that I don’t have competing priorities anymore. I work for an employer and that’s important. I do some housework and cook meals at night. But otherwise, my free time is for me to work on what I feel led to do. My writing is one way I feel that I can reach out to people and make them think about things they might would rather not. And that’s important. No matter what else needs doing–my writing is important, and I can spend time on it without guilt.
Back to proofreading! Onward!
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Hurricane Baby – Press
Price Caldwell Visiting Writer Julie Liddell Whitehead-20260407 2336-1 – Webex, Mississippi State University, April 7, 2026.
From the Eye of the Storm: New accounts of Katrina shared at MSU Price Caldwell Lecture | Mississippi State University, MSU Media, March 26, 2026.
Dixon Books Signing, Natchez Democrat, December 13, 2025.
Tombigbee Tales | 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with Rod Davis and Julie Liddell Whitehead | August 29, 2025
Daily ‘Sip with Walt Grayson, WJTV, August 27, 2025.
Lunch and Learn, Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights, August 26, 2025
Julie Liddell Whitehead’s Hurricane Baby: Stories, Studio 3 with Jessica Wilkinson, WLBT-Jackson, MS, August 18, 2025.
Possumtown Book Fest, Columbus Dispatch, August 17, 2025.
How Being a Good Literary Citizen Leads to Stronger Book Launches, The Bottom Line with Jane Friedman, August 14, 2025.
“What to do When You Don’t Know What to Do”: A Conversation with Julie Liddell Whitehead by Katharine Armbrester, Southern Review of Books, August 6, 2025.
Video podcast of Writers Drinking Whiskey with Bill Hincy posted July 23, 2025.
Second Possumtown Book Fest welcomes 19 authors to Columbus, Columbus Dispatch, July 20, 2025
Oh My Word by Katie Ginn Podcast on Apple, Spotify, and Amazon Music on June 5, 2025.
Podcast with Fine Beats and Cheeses, “Music as Inspiration with Julie Whitehead,” March 11, 2025
Lunching with Books Set at the Library Jan. 9, Pontotoc Progress, January 8, 2025.
Video of Alec Hawkins’ channel on YouTube: “How to write and publish your first book” January 7, 2025
Video of Louisiana Book Festival’s Madville Press panel, November 2024
Video of Mississippi Book Festival panel “Mad About Madville” September 2024
Podcast on Tombigbee Tales with Shannon Evans, Mississippi Author Julie Liddell Whitehead, W Girl Turned Novelist, October 18, 2024.
Hurricane Baby: Stories made a list! Thank you to the Southern Review of Books!
Authors Guild Member Spotlight, October 8, 2024
Magnolia Tribune, syndicated across the state, September 4, 2024
Good Things with Rebecca Turner, SuperTalk Mississippi, August 29, 2024
First Person Singular “To Live For” with Sari Botton, August 28, 2024
Studio 3 WLBT, television appearance, Jackson, MS August 23, 2024
Mississippi Arts Hour interview, Mississippi Public Broadcasting, August 18, 2024
Hurricane Baby: Stories, Mississippi Books Page, The Clarion-Ledger, Jackson MS, August 18, 2024.
Rooted Magazine, August 14, 2024
Mississippi Christian Living, August 2024:
Starkville Daily News, July 29, 2024.
I’m listening to Tombigbee Tales | Mississippi Author Julie Liddell Whitehead Hurricane Baby Interview on Podbean, check it out!
Julie Liddell Whitehead Images
Download this image. 
Download this image. Hurricane Baby Q&A with Julie Liddell Whitehead
Q: What is the main point or purpose of the book?
A: I always write to answer a question I have. In the case of Hurricane Baby, I wondered: What would happen to someone who endured Hurricane Katrina without suffering physical losses but was destroyed psychologically? That’s where the crux of the book lies for me.
Q: What was the most surprising or shocking thing you learned from writing the book? How did it make you feel?
A: How much darkness spilled out of me. So much destruction and death and sin just came pouring out. And happy endings were very elusive. I couldn’t think of any way for events to end happily ever after. All the moral choices that presented themselves seemed to lead to the character having to decide between the frying pan and the fire.
Q: How did your choices of how to frame and organize the book impact your writing?
A: I framed it first as a novel with Wendy and Judd’s indiscretion being the action that gets events moving, and all the subsequent action revolved around that. In 2022, when I picked it back up again, I decided to keep the most emotionally impactful scenes and rewrite them as short stories. About half of the original novel remains—some scenes were rewritten to apply to other characters than were in the original, while I wrote several brand-new sections to explore all these new characters.
Q: What are some of the ethical, moral, or social implications of the book? How did it challenge you as a writer?
A: One important theme of the book is the fragility of conventional morality when faced with traumatic situations. In this book, the trauma causes all the characters to do things they would never dream of doing under normal circumstances. Wendy can’t articulate why she gave in to Judd. Tommy had never taken a drink in his life until after he learned that Amy Thompson didn’t make it. Dinah is helpless in the face of what’s happening to Mike. James and Lori’s relationship was doomed because of the trauma each had to face alone.
Q: Which character did you relate to or empathize with the most as a writer and why?
A: Actually, I think Dinah Seabrook is the most appealing character in the book. I know I felt very protective of her as I was writing about her. She stayed strong in circumstances that certainly would have sent me around the bend had I been her. She’s watching her world and life and marriage and husband fall apart, and all she has to hold on to is her faith. Writing her made for some bright spots in the book.
Q: Which character did you dislike the most and why?
A: Jack Rawson, for sure. His dismissive attitude towards Wendy in the labor room and her dislike of him points to some history between them we don’t get to see. And his acting so possessive of her after Ray dies and Judd comes back to Hattiesburg comes off as him thinking he’s in charge of her now? Ugh.
Q: What was the most memorable or shocking scene or twist in the story when you were writing it?
A: Actually it came pretty early. I had only planned to write a short story about Wendy and Judd’s encounter during the hurricane. After I finished it, I thought I was done. But a few days after I thought I finished it, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be a kick in the pants for Judd to find out she was pregnant and wonder for the rest of his life if it was his baby?” And that question led to more questions, and pretty soon, I had a book.
Q: How did writing this book impact you? It has so many dark elements; how did you handle writing some of the more difficult sections?
A: In some ways, it was very exciting; I felt I was stretching myself as a writer and telling an important story that showed how the storm affected people not on the coast or in New Orleans. The challenge came this last time through to match what I was writing now with what I had written then. This time, I was choosing to put the characters in impossible situations and choosing to keep twisting the knife and raising the stakes. I used to be a very binary thinker—right was right and wrong was wrong. Writing Hurricane Baby taught me nuance—that sometimes all the choices people face are bad choices.
Selected Links to Julie Liddell Whitehead’s Journalism
Bipolar Disorder & Coping with Indirect Trauma, bpHope, January 9, 2023.
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Single-Digit Fidget
My publishing company keeps saying we go to print six months before publication.
You know what?
That’s this week on February 20!
So I am nervously anticipating that I get to put up pre-order links and my new website page this week as well!
I have been reading about all the emotional whiplash that happens to new authors with an eye to moderating my expectations and all that. I like being prepared. Because I don’t want this whole wonderful accomplishment to throw me off emotionally. Because my stability is worth a lot to me.
But it’s up to me to manage that–so I am trying to keep my expectations in line with the fact that I’m a new author, I don’t have a big pre-made audience to sell to, and I have to understand all that I can control is my reaction to events. I can’t control what others do or say. I can’t control what kind of reviews i get or anything like that. I can just put it out and do what I can to move the needle–and leave the rest up to God.
Like I said when I prayed that day to give my pledge to the church. It’s all up to him. I’m just to give him the glory that is his. I gave the book my best shot for success revising and sending it out. I plan to keep doing that with events and publicity where I can get them. I’m going to start to introduce the book the first weekend of March at the Mississippi Philological Association at my alma mater, the Mississippi University for Women.
I’ll be reading what I can of Still Waters, the first story in the collection, at a panel of other creative writers. I’ll attend other panels while I’m there, probably just the creative writing ones. It’s kind of a full-circle moment for me–when I was in my last year of grad school at Mississippi State University, I read a paper I had written on James Thurber, the great American comic writer, at the MPA Conference that year–also at the W. So I will mention that before I start reading.
(My parents were at that conference since it was only a few miles away from their house. My daddy later asked me was my paper supposed to be funny? I said yes sir, it was. He was scared the audience was laughing at me in a mean way so he decided to check.)
So that’s what I’m preparing for this week. Wish me well!
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Final Proof (I Hope)
Did a final (maybe?) read-through of Hurricane Baby, and hopefully we’re set to go to print soon.
YAY!
Closer every day!
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Success?
So last week I told you about my pitch meeting with a publisher at the HOMEGROWN festival. I told you I looked up his email address and sent him a thank-you note for listening to my pitch and taking my materials and being so encouraging. I told you I didn’t know what was going to happen as a result of the meeting, but I felt good about it.
So Monday I got an email back from the gentleman, and he said for when it’s finished for me to send it through the regular submission channel but be sure to specify in my query letter that I had pitched it to him and what event I had pitched at! So that’s a connection I would not have made had I not stepped out and just did the thing. I’d never done an in-person pitch before, but I was calm and confident in my story, and now I feel so much further ahead of the game than I did for Hurricane Baby!
So now I am starting a list of who this book is going to go to first once it’s finished, beta read, edited, and revised. One is my current publishing company, another is the group that published the original novella, another is this company, another is a contest where Hurricane Baby was a semi-finalist, and another is one where I got the very kind personalized rejection. That’s five for the first shot of it. I hope to start sending it out in January 2025.
Just goes to show where you have to put in the work, be persistent, and believe in yourself. I am learning more and more about this process and what all effort goes into a finished book. I don’t have all the answers, certainly. But I am committed to share my journey with you all and be as transparent as possible about how things are working (or not working) for me. Makes me feel less alone in the journey and makes me feel good that i can provide information that I wish I had known when I was starting out.
Happy writing!
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HOMEGROWN: A Writer’s Exchange
I went to a new literary festival this weekend with my friend Mary Jane in–of all places–Kiln, Mississippi. Jami Attenberg was there. Lee Durkee was there. Margaret McMullen was there. And Mary Miller and Ellen Ann Fentress, my MFA thesis supervisors. and I met people I only knew by reputation. So that was super cool!
It was structured a lot like the Mississippi Book Festival–there were panels on various topics–cookbooks, memoir, short stories, novels, publishing, the writing life, etc., etc. A really cool feature was that there were three presses (one of them was University Press of Mississippi) soliciting book pitch meetings directly from authors!
I only found out about this event on Wednesday of last week, and the trip came together really quickly. So I sent in a request to have a pitch meeting with Looking for Home. I really wasn’t expecting to get in to one because of how late i was signing up–but I did! Pelican Publishing picked me up and wanted to hear my story! I didn’t find out until late Friday afternoon, so I didn’t have long to prepare. But prepare I did!
I took my computer and printed out a writing sample of my book, my CV, and a very generic query letter in the hotel’s business center after we got there Friday night. So when I got to the pitch meeting, he asked about the book, and I handed him the letter and talked about the structure and the story. Then I asked if I could read my writing sample aloud, and he said that would be great. So I did, then i handed him my CV with all my publications on it. Then he asked me about myself, hobbies, etc. (That was the hardest part; trying to make myself sound interesting has never been my strong suit.)
I don’t know if I’ll ever hear from him again; I did pull up his email and sent him a thank-you note for the meeting, and I think that was a good idea. I also had another good idea–I printed out copies of my sell-sheet for Hurricane Baby and handed them out strategically–to the guy who organized the event so I could maybe get included in next year’s event, to people who ran publications, to people who do author interviews, etc. And almost everyone I wound up meeting the first time. I handed out about half of what I printed, so that was cool, too.
Anyway. I will be doing a lot of this in the coming months and after publication, I think, so I’m looking forward to that! It felt so good to finally be able to say, “Hey, I have a book coming out, too!” So a good time was had by all.
Hope everyone has a really good week! Thanks for reading!
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Juggling The Work
Well, since I don’t have the final proofs for Hurricane Baby yet, I am working on my three-novella project Looking for Home. I only have two more scenes to write for this POV before I’m finished and can go back further into the past and write the first POV character, Carlton Dixon. Right now I’m working on the POV of Cassie Beck, the adopted teenager that comes to find Carlton, claiming to be his daughter by his teenage girlfriend, Merrilyn Beck. (Cassie’s POV is the part that sold for the novella anthology.) I’ve already outlined what I want to do for Carlton’s POV and Merrilyn’s POV, so that changed a few things that happened in Cassie’s POV. And I’m sure that when I’m finished with the first two parts, I will need to revise Cassie’s part again. But that’s OK.
I want to finish the new draft for this project before Hurricane Baby comes out in August. And I am chipping away, bit by bit, paragraph by paragraph. I am keeping up with my daily word count in a notebook so I can see when I write best and have the best production and figure out what goes well on those days. Is the outlining helping or hurting? Is it better to plan out what I’m writing beforehand or write without a net to catch me if it goes awry? That sort of thing. We will see.
Kicking around ideas of who to pitch publicity opportunities to for Hurricane Baby. I’m looking at book podcasts, regional magazines, radio shows, newspapers, festivals. Once I get to pre-orders, I’ll start sharing that link around. Just getting together my ideas and what all I want to do. I hope I can start getting the word out seriously by then. Wish me well!
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COVER REVEAL!
Finally able to get back to my computer after some illness and traveling and able to reveal . . . the cover for Hurricane Baby: Stories, due out in August 2024!
I want to thank Jacqui Davis for her design work here in realizing exactly what I’ve always had in mind for the cover of this work. Appreciate the whole team at Madville Publishing for taking on this project and awaiting the next proof copy with bated breath! Much love to all!
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First Proof Copy!
So last Friday I got Hurricane Baby’s first proof copy, a preliminary PDF of what the book will look like once it’s printed. I was so moved by the care my publishing company is taking with this book! Art on the title pages, beautiful formatting within, just wonderful work so far!
My job was to proofread it yet again. And guys–I found over a hundred and seventy typos. I was appalled at myself. I have been slaving over this manuscript for almost twenty years. And I found commas that were supposed to be periods and periods that were supposed to be commas and double periods and sentences without periods at the end and a very few spelling errors (thank the Lord). Inconceivable that I even got any kind of hearing from anyone I sent it to. The line-editor before this proof had found over three hundred errors.
I was so embarrassed for little ol’ me, sending something so flawed out into the world. I had checked and rechecked and run grammar and spelling checks over and over. I had read it printed out, onscreen, everything.
But I don’t need to just beat myself up–so now I have a plan. I know my eyesight isn’t good and won’t improve any as I get older. I am going to have to magnify up the font to I guess the size where the manuscript will have 500 pages and read line by line at every stage of writing. I don’t want to embarrass myself like that ever again.
So now it is back in the hands of the publisher, and I will wait patiently to see what comes next. I think it will be a final proof copy that I will read again for errors, then in February it will go to print!
SO EXCITING AND GETTING REAL!
Moral of the story: editors are human, and so are you. But taking the time to re-read is never wasted. Other eyes are a big help, too. Let’s be careful out there!
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Taking a Break!
Merry Christmas, everbody!
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Julie Liddell Whitehead 
