WHAT THIS IS
Hello, and welcome!
This is, yes, another author newsletter. I have had this on my to-do list since 2013 (whoops) but I strongly believe that it is never too late to get started. (Adult ballet classes, I’m looking at you next.)
This will be a monthly-ish newsletter, delivered to your inbox in a tone and manner that I hope will be cozy and encouraging, as well as satisfying for the curious lot who stay up nights wondering what Lindsay Eagar is up to.
I say “monthly-ish” because one of the reasons I’ve never actually started this newsletter is the discipline required to be that faithful; that little “ish” is my escape clause, and I reserve the right to skip a month here or there if it’s extraordinarily busy on my end. I hope you’ll forgive me. (I hope I’ll forgive me, too.)
I am not always consistent, but I am always persistent.
Mostly, I am in need of a receptacle for other writing and life thoughts that don’t fit perfectly into the other avenues I have available—too long for Twitter, too personal for Instagram, too loud for a journal. So, lucky you! Welcome to the holding cell for my brain!
My vision is that this newsletter will have book recommendations, musings about creativity, a peek into my ambitious writing life, and the occasional wild card.
WHO I AM
If you’re wondering exactly who this person is speaking into your inbox, it’s me! I’m Lindsay Eagar, writer, reader, mom, wife, baker, runner, and general spaz.
I have three books out with Candlewick Press and three more under contract, set to be released between 2022 and 2023. I’ve been puttering around publishing since 2013. I’ve always been a writer, and always wanted to be published.
What else should you know? I love sharks, I love Lord of the Rings, my red hair is dyed, I was a theater geek in high school, my favorite Disneyland ride is the Jungle Cruise, I drink my coffee with a hearty pouring of cream, no sugar.
2020 ROUND-UP
For my inaugural issue, I wanted to give a 2020 postmortem, as well as a list of all the things that gave me comfort, relief, catharsis, and pleasure this year. In case you’re an archivist reading this in the distant future, let me reiterate: this is the year 2020. As in, 2020 in America. And I’m in a conservative state (Utah), so escapism was required.
But first, a work recap.
The year started out with a crack and a bang for me.
In 2019, I spent most of the year ghostwriting romance novels to make money, and I was not happy doing it. So I created my first online writing course (the Fast Draft Method), and had such an incredible response in January of 2020, I was able to quit ghostwriting immediately and be a full-time writer/teacher! Not only was this a godsend to my family for income purposes (especially as we moved into the pandemic), but it was also the perfect validation as I tried to move back into a productive writing phase.
See that word, there? “Tried?”
I have done a lot of writing this year. I have not done a lot of finishing.
This isn’t unusual. 2020 was also the year I received my official ADHD diagnosis and began treating both my ADHD and my anxiety. Suddenly, my tendency to write the first 75% of a novel with breakneck speed, only to drag my feet for six months (or longer!) to get the rest of it finished… well, it makes so much sense in light of my new diagnosis.
I’ve spent this year getting to know my brain on a far more intimate level than I ever expected. It’s been wonderful/heart-breaking.
So here are some of the things that I have completed in 2020:
-two BIG, SCARY revisions of my next MG book with Candlewick Press (code-named Gargoyle Book until I figure out a title)
-one whole messy draft of an adult cozy fantasy novel, plus a revision of the first act
-one half of a messy draft of another adult novel, a queer Edwardian fantasy retelling of my favorite Dickens
-one draft of a weird queer novella
-one chapter book, drafted and revised along with pitches for the rest of the series
-one big non-fiction proposal
-a messy rewrite of my YA debut with Candlewick Press
-various other projects, which I picked at or added to or just pulled out so I could hold them and whisper, “soon”
When I list it all out, it looks like a lot more than it feels, partly because I have extremely high standards for myself (and it is impossible for me to feel satisfied until I have pushed myself to my limits), but also because so few of these projects were finished and buttoned-up. Most of them are still open, still waiting for the bottom line, the moment when I can close the notebooks and say, “Okay, it’s out of my hands now for a while.”
I hope for more of this in 2021.
Other things that happened in 2020?
I homeschooled my kids. I’m still homeschooling my kids. When the pandemic started, online school with my eleven-year-old daughter’s teacher was frustrating for both of us, so I withdrew her and resorted to teaching both her and her four-year-old sister, something I swore up and down I would NEVER, EVER do in a million years. (I’m in Utah, surrounded by many parents who do feel both capable and excited about the idea of educating their children, and if not for my high-risk Type-1 husband, I would snub my pioneer ancestors and send my kiddos to school. But we wanted to make sure we were as safe as we could be, and I was in a privileged position to work from home and write curriculum materials entitled “Bride of Frankenstein week” or “musical Mondays.”
I mentioned the ADHD diagnosis, which was huge. I’ve been part of a new group ADHD coaching program, which has been (for me) better than any therapy I’ve attempted. I’ve been treating my anxiety with medication for five months now, and sometimes I still can’t believe how I was functioning without it.
I reestablished my running base. I started running in 2012, ran a half-marathon in 2014, then got in a car wreck that popped one of my lungs and set back my endurance threshold for years. Now that my baby is four, I’ve been able to work my way back up to running every other day, between thirty and sixty minutes, and I’m so happy. Running is so important for my mental health, and it’s also been an important part of balancing my health in 2020, because I baked and cooked A LOT.
Some of my favorite things I made: pumpkin oat cookies, Thai chicken noodle soup, cinnamon spice cake, really good stirfry, apple cider donuts, a freaking Thanksgiving turkey, maple and walnut glazed salmon with acorn squash, soft ginger molasses cookies, and a New Year’s Eve parsnip cake with cream cheese frosting and walnuts that is dear to my heart.
I also watched lots of good movies this year for the first time: Top Gun, Die Hard, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Spotlight, Dirty Dancing, the Craft, Crimson Peak, Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, I, Tonya, and Ocean’s 8.
Some of the movies I rewatched for comfort this year: Jumanji (old and new), Labyrinth, Ever After, The Family Stone, October Sky, Clueless, Romancing the Stone, Almost Famous, Waiting for Guffman, Death Becomes Her, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Dan in Real Life with the record-breaking six watches this year.
And now for the best part—the books I read.
Oh, I read so many books this year! I know for many people it was a tough task, getting their minds to focus on words on a page, but I was very fortunate to have this old comfort, and I’ll list my favorites here, and implore that you seek them out and read them! (I’m not including any rereads. These are all new-to-me 2020 reads only!)
Gideon the Ninth
Plain Bad Heroines
The Once and Future Witches
The Golden Compass (yes, I’ve never read His Dark Materials but I’m hooked)
Anna-Marie McLemore’s upcoming The Mirror Season
All Thirteen
Untamed
What Kind of Woman
If We Were Villains
The Sisters of Straygarden Place
Shirley and Jamila Save Their Summer
City of Secrets
Burn Our Bodies Down
Eva Evergreen, Semi-Magical witch
The Soul of an Octopus
Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans
The Derby Daredevils
The House in the Cerulean Sea
Snapdragon
Strange Birds
Riot Baby
Such a Fun Age
Catherine House
REALLY DEEP THOUGHTS
It’s the end of one year and the beginning of another, and for me this brings a strange mix of delight (the dark winter months are my absolute favorites) and also urgency, discomfort, extreme optimism. I do my tabulations about what worked the previous year, I make big plans for the upcoming year, and somewhere in the gap between, I almost always have a meltdown.
Turns out 2020 just exacerbated this habit. It has not been a great year for anyone who measures their lives in gold stars and check lists. I didn’t even bother ordering a new planner for 2021—why tempt fate that way?
But I did want to tell you about something that is bringing me some comfort as I closed out a year that was both a triumph in some ways and also devastating in others.
I had a tarot reading just after Halloween. Someday I’ll talk more about my relationship with tarot, which is extremely new—but for today, you should know that the final card was Death reversed.
DEATH.
It’s a dramatic card, and of course it doesn’t symbolize an actual, physical death—there are lots of deaths we experience every day, and something I am constantly working on is removing my white, Western-European model of catastrophic thought from the concept of death.
Death symbolizes an ending. A transformation. A transition, a change—all things that would be fairly welcome at the end of this year.
And yet my card was reversed, and so the brilliant woman who read for me (Saint Gibson, link to her wonderful tarot practice HERE) gave me this stunning interpretation: time to let some things go so you can clear room for new life.
New life.
I don’t know about you, but I am absolutely ready for the kind of growth that feels like roots pushing to the surface, damp soil, fresh rainstorms, standing up a little taller.
So I am holding a space for death at the beginning of 2021, and here are some of the things I want to let go of:
-Shame—for negative emotions, for failing, for being excited about something dumb
-Looking to the past to decide how I want to be in the future (such shitty blueprints, and yet I always want to look backwards instead of forwards)
-Self-judgment about my time frames, my pace, my output, my schedule
-Trashy thoughts that actively hurt me
-Disliking my body because of how it looks
-Guilt for creating emotions in someone else
-Fear of taking up space that I think I don’t deserve
-Embarrassment that I need attention sometimes
-Anger (not all anger; I want to keep some of it)
-Reading comments sections (I don’t need to keep turning over these rocks to look at the gross underside of our world; I know it’s there.)
-The constant need to be needed
I am letting all of those things run back into the wild. They are no longer in my grip. I’m sure some of them will linger, because I am an excellent caretaker, but I’ll stop filling up the food dishes.
In my next newsletter, I’ll tell you about some of the things I’m making space for as the world spins and we mark our arbitrary calendars, pretending that December 31st and January 1st are so different. Don’t you love being human? I adore it.
COMING UP FOR ME
Deadlines and courses! Deadlines and courses!
The big deadline: for a rewrite of Circus Book, due to my editor, specifically, ASAP (hoping to get it in just after the new year) (I’m sure I’ll talk about this project soon)
After that, it’s time for the next session of the Creative Revisionist! Enrollment is open and the class starts on January 19th. For more information or to enroll, go here!
And I just opened up a new workshop called STORYTELLER, all about developing your craft as a writer so you can tell the stories you want to tell YOUR WAY. More information about it here!
TIDBITS
WHAT I’M WORKING ON
Circus Book by day, Nutcracker Book by night (I could literally time-travel back to 2014 and this would be the same, whoops)
WHAT I’M READING
The Subtle Knife by Phillip Pullman! It’s my first time reading His Dark Materials, and I’m shocked that I’ve been resistant for so long, and for no good reason other than I’m a rebel and a contrarian and as soon as everyone is into something, I am 99% more likely to ignore it because I can’t handle the hype, but this is worth the hype. They’re such Lindsay books, fantasy and turn of the century feelings mixed with that edge of steampunk and technology—plus winter, wintry things and magic. I adore these books so far.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO
Lots of wintry and Christmas-y stuff! (Yes, even after Christmas because it was just barely 2020, OKAY.) My favorites are Sufjan Stevens, Enya, Ingrid Michaelson, The Nutcracker (obviously), and all the Disneyland Christmas music (link here)
WHAT I’M WATCHING
The Family Stone whenever I can trick my husband into watching it again, and also Moonstruck, PEN15, and Modern Family.
WHAT I’M DOING
Running outside when it’s not snowing and inside on our treadmill (basically torture) when it is.
Brainstorming a passion project for 2021 (spoiler: a podcast).
Watching my daughters play their new favorite game of pretend, Fairy Animal Doctor.
Thank you so much for letting me land in your inbox! See you next time!