Just heard from my publisher–my full book cover is final, and I have a QR code I can slap on all my marketing materials so people can order just by pointing their phones at it! I just ordered VistaPrint bookmarks that I plan to hand out at events.
I have one event coming up–Hurricane Baby the play is having a staged reading coming up. I’ve got everything ready to go to it all lined up–hotel room, ride, etc. I’m looking forward to that. More details will be available closer to time. But I’m looking forward to it.
My new writing has been on hold lately. We have had a lot going on in my family and in my work life, and I’ve honestly been too exhausted to concentrate on my work-in-progress. I hope to be able to change that soon.
And my publisher has said pre-orders are already coming in. So that made me feel good!
Whew. Will ride already. Wish me well with further info and events to come soon! See code below to order Hurricane Baby: Stories for delivery August 2024!
So I wrote last week about being really excited that Hurricane Baby had opened for pre-orders.
This week I’m writing about the terror.
I started having really high levels of anxiety about the idea of my book in the hands of readers and thinking about “What if they don’t like it? What will people think about me as a person after reading this?”
And I just kept letting my mind spin out of control with those thoughts.
What finally broke the spiral was an email from Lisa Cooper Ellison, an author I admire very much. She wrote about her recent micro nonfiction that had been published in the Tiny Love Stories feature in the New York Times and how she simultaneously felt a surge of pride and a wave of fear. Fear of not handling all the attention in a good way, fear of not being able to leverage the opportunities the publication might give her, etc.
It felt so validating that someone else felt the same kind of feelings I was feeling when something so wonderful had happened in her writing career. I wrote her an email letting her know that she had helped me come to grips with my anxiety.
So now the fear has worn itself out after bedeviling me for several days. I feel much better knowing that those feelings are common to other writers also and can be overcome.
So I am back to normal now (as close as I’ll ever get to that) and am ready to continue this journey. Onward!
Good afternoon! This past Friday night, I got the note from Madville Publishing that my book, Hurricane Baby: Stories, is now LIVE FOR PRE-ORDERS!
Go to the left-hand menu and click on the book’s title to see the brand-new webpage for my book, and you will see a button to click to pre-order my book through Madville Publishing’s site with delivery scheduled for August 20, 2024. As the book goes live in other places like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org, I will add those buttons for you to click on as well. If you want to support your local bookshop as well, you can go and request that they order/stock it.
This page will be updated as I do events, readings, signings, and appearances. If you would like me to come do a reading or speak at your event, school, library, or festival, use the contact form to let me know, and I will see what I can work out!
This past weekend, I went to the annual meeting of the Mississippi Philological Association, which was held by the Mississippi School of Math and Science on the campus of Mississippi University for Women, where I studied for my MFA. I read the first story in the collection, “Still Waters”, and was terrified the whole time. I’ve never read anything as intense as that story out loud in public before this, and it showed. My mouth was so dry I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it. It was well-received by the largely academic crowd, which made me feel good.
But this event, where I know people are going to be spending their hard-earned money on a book I wrote, is momentous. My life is not going to be the same again after this year. But I think that’s good. Keep growing, keep writing, keep learning. That’s my takeaway. Onward and upward!
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.
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 and Interview Appearances
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!
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.
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!
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!
Julie Liddell Whitehead 
