Happy Friday! I’m sending this newsletter a bit earlier than my usual last-week-of-the-month cadence because:

There’s a sale! And today’s the last day of it.

Preorders are currently 25% off at Barnes & Noble with the code PREORDER25. You’ll need a rewards membership to get the discount, which is free to sign up for! Premium members get an extra 10% off.

You can preorder The Heartbreak Hotel for 25%-35% off by clicking here.

If you prefer a button, here’s one:

Take me to the sale

And if you need convincing, I offer you these words from my beloved Jessica Joyce:

Jessica is so talented, and her books You, With a View and The Ex Vows are among my very tippy top favorite romances. If you haven’t read them, get thee to a bookseller! (Bookshop.org pages linked.)

These Barnes & Noble sales come around a few times a year, which you’ve probably clocked by the cascade of presale graphics on social media each time. Preorders really are so important to authors—for all sorts of reasons—so if you decide to preorder, please know how sincerely much it means to me. Preordering is very much a one-way ticket to being my best friend, if that’s something you’re interested in.

Ok! Let’s get into it.

I’ve been thinking a lot this month about loneliness. (I hear you! Ellen, what a light and joyful topic for my Friday reading!) And its opposite, belonging.

Many writers find themselves circling the same themes in their work over and over, and one of my fixations is the types of people and relationships that make my characters feel seen and known. Belonging.

The Heartbreak Hotel, more than any of my books, is really about this with its whole chest. Recently I’ve been working on something marketing-related for the book that required me to sort of explain it (and while you’d think “what’s your book about?” would be the simplest question for an author, it seems to be, unanimously, the hardest). As I thought about how to answer, my brain kept snagging on something a very dear person in my life shared with me—this line by the inimitable Andrea Gibson:

“Even when the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is.”

Even when things feel hard, even when actually the fact of the matter is shit, just being able to share that with someone else makes it lighter.

Ultimately, this is what The Heartbreak Hotel is about: the healing space created by a group of people navigating loss together. And two people, specifically, who fall in love in the midst of their heartbreak—but I digress.

As I said, I’m always circling this in my writing. The telling of hard truths and what happens when we let ourselves be vulnerable enough to do it. The togetherness of it all.

So why am I so damn committed to doing this writing thing all by myself?

Conventional wisdom says writing is a solitary act, and in many ways it has to be. I know, I know — some people co-write books in teams. These people possess a magic I do not.

I’ve always felt a sort of imperative to figure it out all on my own: what the plot’s going to be, how to get the agent, how to market the book, on and on and on.

But are the things we do actually more valuable when we do them alone?

I recently finished watching the first season of The Last of Us (and haven’t started the second, so don’t say anything to me!!), and was particularly struck by Sam’s episode.

If you haven’t seen it, The Last of Us is about the fallout of a zombie apocalypse; in this episode specifically, we watch two kids—Sam and Ellie—navigating that together.

Sam is deaf, and communicates with non-ASL-speakers using a scratchpad. There’s a moment where the kids are sharing their fears. Ellie admits that hers is ending up alone; Sam’s is a bit more complicated (and a spoiler), but what he asks Ellie for to help soothe it is to stay up with him that night. Not to fall asleep and leave him alone.

I watched this and thought: okay, these kids are being pursued by literal zombies who want to kill them, and still—STILL!—what they want more than anything is just to belong to each other. Not to be alone.

Even if writing itself has to be a solitary covenant between the writer and the page, I’m learning that what I need—what maybe others need, too?—is to be together in it.

For me, lately, finding togetherness in my creative life has looked like:

• Texting an author friend about the overwhelming, career-ruining nature of my plot snarls and being met with such validation and encouragement that by the end of the day I had five new ideas and a rekindled will to carry on

• Beta reading early drafts for other writers; brainstorming together; developing my own craft through the inspiring process of seeing someone else at work

• This email exchange with my editor (sometimes togetherness is just about laughing at the same stuff):

Maybe there’s nothing revolutionary, here. But if you’ve ever thought—this is my book and I need to figure out every aspect of it and also my entire existence all on my own—it’s okay to not do that.

You can ask for help. You can actually just say your feelings at someone and even if they can’t fix your whole deal, they will probably do something to make you laugh or to make you feel known or just to make you feel less alone in whatever it is you’re up against. And that’s worth a lot.

As a final note on this, please behold this gorgeous lettering piece that hangs in my office. This was made by my talented friend Erin, who’s also hand-lettering some beautiful things for The Heartbreak Hotel preorder campaign (more on that soon!). Together really is better.

Finally, a couple things I’ve loved lately

In books, Rachel Runya Katz’s Isn’t It Obvious?, which is so gorgeously written and richly detailed I can’t recommend it more highly. Rachel’s style is so distinct, and her characters so well-drawn. This one’s out in October and up for preorder now!

In TV, The Pitt on HBO. Medical dramas are decidedly not my thing; I produce enough anxiety all by myself without the aid of life-or-death scenarios. But this show is really that girl. I don’t know what they put in here, but the kind of character development happening in this series needs to be studied. I haven’t gone to bed at a reasonable hour since I started it.

Alright, that’s it for today. Thank you for being here. When I talk about doing this whole writing thing together, I mean you, too. Appreciate you more than you know.

See you back here next time. ❤️

xo, Ellen

P.S. Here’s the Barnes & Noble 25% off preorder link one more time. And here’s the link to signed preorders from my local indie, Boulder Bookstore, which will come with the aforementioned but yet-to-be-revealed preorder goodies.