In my experience, publishing is an industry that elicits big feelings. Maybe it’s because I’ve got the tender soul of an artiste. Maybe it’s because there are so many unknowns. Even now, I don’t always know what’s normal. I don’t always have a concrete sense of how well I’m doing (or not). I don’t always know what lessons I should be taking—if any—from whatever is going with sales or buzz or trends or anything else I should or shouldn’t be paying attention to. Maybe it’s because the intersection of art and business is a tricky place to inhabit, and turning your passion into a source of income on which you depend for survival is necessarily fraught. Maybe it's because I am actively chasing my wildest, most ambitious dreams, so the emotional stakes are always going to feel sky-high.
The question, at least for me, is what to do about these big feelings so I can focus on the thing that I love, which is the work. I’ve written about managing dreams, setting goals, and turning doubt into more art, and today I’d like to share with you something I’ve done only once, because only once have I felt a feeling big enough to require it. But it’s something I recommend to almost everyone struggling with huge, overwhelming, incapacitating emotions around their art.
A ritual.
Specifically, a ritual of fire.
To begin, please allow me to take you back to the fall of 2018, when the last book in the Reader Trilogy, The Storyteller was due to come out, and I was struggling.
I’ll preface this next bit by saying I love the Reader Trilogy, and I am proud of it. The Reader is the first novel I ever finished. The trilogy is the first series I ever wrote. I love that it’s ambitious both in craft and in scope. I love that it’s meta. I love that I got to write about magic and assassins and pirates and the power of the written word. I love that it includes songs and puzzles and playful formatting. I love that among all the epic, battle-based drama, it’s also a deeply intimate, deeply personal story—at its heart, it’s about what we do when the people we love most dearly are taken from us. The Reader got me a literary agent. It launched my career. It allowed me to experience so many things I’d only dreamed about and some things I didn’t even know to dream.
At the same time—and I think it’s okay to admit this now—the Reader Trilogy wasn’t a runaway hit. It’s no Harry Potter, Hunger Games, or Twilight, which seems like an outrageous comparison in retrospect (because what is?), but it’s also what so many people said, back then, when I told them I wrote YA fantasy. “Oh, like Harry Potter?” “So you’re going to be the next J.K. Rowling, right?” “When do we get to see the movie?” It was an impossible standard to live up to, but I wanted so badly to live up to it (because who wouldn’t?), and while the Reader Trilogy performed wonderfully, I think it’s fair to say it didn’t set the world on fire.
And, as the launch of The Storyteller approached, I was feeling it. A lot. I felt sad, upset, dispirited, insecure. I felt like I’d failed. My third novel was coming out, and I was wracked with shame and insecurity. Would anyone care? Would read it? Would these words that I’d spent ten years of my life working towards reach anyone at all?
But, and you might have guessed this after reading my last post on doubts, as I was feeling all this, a little spark of defiance flared up in me.
I didn’t want to feel that way. I didn’t think I should feel that way. I’d worked so hard, and so had so many other people: my agent, who believed in me; my editor, whose support and guidance had made me a better writer with every revision pass; the entire team at Penguin Random House who had rallied behind me and my books; my friends and family, who had been there for me at every turn. The launch of my third novel, the completion of my first series, shouldn’t have felt like a failure. And when I sat down and separated out all the external noise around expectations, buzz, sales, and so on... the bottom line was that I still loved what I had made.
I’ve mentioned the following questions before—in my post on dreams and on doubts—and these are the questions that felt important to me then, as they are now:
Did I write the story I needed to write in the best way I knew how? Did I push myself to grow as an artist? Did I tell a story that I believe was worth telling? Did I do it in a way consistent with my values?
And the answers were, resoundingly, yes and yes and yes and yes. With the publication of the Reader Trilogy, I had done something that hardly anybody gets to do, and I had done it to the best of my ability, and I wanted to love what I had made and feel proud of it.
So, then. What to do?
I was having big, dramatic feelings, so I knew I needed to do something big and dramatic.
I needed to purge away all those unnecessary, unhelpful negative emotions.
I needed a ritual.
I needed to burn things.
And burn things I did.
First, I wrote down on separate index cards all the negative thoughts I was having around the launch of The Storyteller. I wrote out my sadness, my frustration, my insecurity, my fear and my doubt. I wrote out all my petty grievances and my embarrassments and my disappointed aspirations. I was brutally honest with myself. I didn’t let myself look away, no matter how ugly or pathetic or irrational my feelings were. I wrote out everything, and by the time I was done, I’d gone through maybe twenty or thirty cards.
Then I got some matches, a metal trash can, and a bucket of water (for safety!), and I took everything to a safe location.
And I burned every last one of those cards.
One by one, I struck a match, and I lit each card, and I watched the flames consume each of my negative thoughts, and as I did, I really let myself feel them. I let myself feel defeated. And sad. And afraid. And like a failure.
And as each card burned away and turned to ash, I also let each feeling go.
By the end of twenty or thirty cards, I felt relieved—relieved of those negative thoughts, relieved of the baggage. Maybe, in some small way, those feelings were still there, but they didn’t weigh so heavily on me anymore. I’d felt them. I’d allowed myself to feel them. But they didn’t need to cause me pain anymore. They felt distant, more like a dull throbbing rather than a freshly opened wound.
And as I sat there, looking at the ashes of those emotions, I thought about what I wanted to take with me. How did I want to feel, moving forward?
Without the mess of my negative thinking cluttering up my mind, at that moment, a few emotions became really clear to me:
Happiness. Fulfillment. Gratitude. Pride.
So I took a blank index card, and on it I wrote three little words: I DID IT.
Out of all the cards I wrote that day, that’s the only one I kept. I taped it into my journal as a reminder of how I wanted to frame this moment for myself as I moved forward to the launch of The Storyteller and all the books that would follow: The release of the Reader Trilogy and the culmination of ten years of my life was an accomplishment. It was a victory. I loved it. I treasured it. I was grateful for everything the series had done for me and for all the people who had joined me on its journey into the world. And I was proud.
In case you missed it
Kindling is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Young Adult Literature! I’m so thrilled to see this novel included in such a compelling line-up alongside titles like Looking for Smoke by K.A. Cobell, Bright Red Fruit by Safia Elhillo, Shut up, This is Serious by Carolina Ixta, and The Color of a Lie by Kim Johnson. Congrats to all the finalists, and huge thanks to the LA Times and the panel of judges for this amazing honor! If you’re looking for more great reads, be sure to check out the full list of finalists. A limited number of tickets are available for the awards ceremony on April 25, but general admission to the LA Times Festival of Books April 26-27 is free, so mark your calendars if you’re in SoCal for a wonderful lineup of events!
The Rainbow Round Table of the American Library Association named Kindling as one of their 2025 Rainbow Book List Top 10 Books for Teen Readers. I feel so honored to see Kindling on this list, because I believe in the power of representation to help readers feel seen, heard, validated, and hopeful, and it feels especially important, at this moment, to, in the words of the Rainbow Round Table, “reflect and celebrate the existence of all genders and sexual identities.” Thank you to the librarians who curated this list, and thank you to anyone using this list to share and uplift. The full list can be found here, and I’ll leave you with a quote from the introduction below:
With the attacks against and removal of so many queer stories from public and school libraries, the existence of this list is vital to continue to assist librarians, educators, caregivers, LGBTQIA+ members, and community allies in selecting quality LGBTQIA+ stories to include in their collections. Over the last few years, our job as librarians to fight for the inclusion of stories that reflect and celebrate the existence of all genders and sexual identities has become increasingly difficult. Unfortunately, the fact that this list exists will anger those individuals who wish to erase and censor queer identities and challenge titles in library collections.
And through it all, we remain encouraged that so many queer stories are continuing to be told. The experiences of LGBTQIA+ youth and families deserve to be represented and included in ALL library collections. It is our hope that the work of this committee will help stakeholders be intentional about including these stories in their collections and libraries. And to those who support and use this list, we thank you.
What I’m into these days
How about some more poetry? I’ve somehow never read any Mary Oliver, but this month I’m making up for it. “Of the Empire” and “On Traveling to Beautiful Places” both feel of the moment. The haiku, “Before the white chrysanthemum” by Yosa Buson is a stunner. And I’m finally finishing up the collection As She Appears by Shelley Wong—some of my favorites include “Monolids” and “The Ocean Will Take Us One Day.”
I have been in the mood for science fiction lately. Some titles I’ve loved recently include Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada (translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani), about language, a woman from a vanished country, and a rag-tag group of people who come together to help her find someone who speaks her native tongue; Afterword by Nina Schuyler, about a woman who crafts a large language model AI with the personality of her husband only to discover that the AI has started to act like a stranger, and perhaps she did not truly know her husband at all; and The Salvation Gambit by Emily Skrutskie, about a hacker trapped on a warship with a godlike AI that wants to turn her into one of its most devoted disciples.
I’m making my way through all the back episodes of Scriptnotes, and I was listening to an interview with Lawrence Kasdan (Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Force Awakens) from Episode 247 in which he’s asked, “What are some of the touchstones that keep you rooted to a really good story even within a franchise, and what are some of the pitfalls that you can see writers falling into when they’re trying to create the perfect franchise movie?” And he says,
When we’re done here today, go home, sit at your computer and say, “What is the story I most want to tell? And I know it's going to be really hard to get it made, and everyone's going to tell me I'm crazy, because it's not a franchise, and it's not a brand, but I really want to tell this story.” And then work as hard as you can to tell that story. That's actually how you do good work, and if you are charged with creating a franchise movie, it's the same process. What's the best way we can do this? Without cynicism? Without the presumption that people already like it when they don't? How can I make this particular movie honorable? How can I make it true? How can I make it worth people's time and money?
I love those questions at the end. How can I make it honorable? How can I make it true? How can I make it a story worth telling?