Before you get defensive, listen to this one argument. The Hero’s journey structure assumes transformation is linear. It assumes clarity. There is a defining obstacle and a triumphant resolution. But many women’s experiences, both life and on the page, are cyclical, relational and deeply internal. There are contradictions. What I’m saying is, growth happens more in fragments and it is not often measurable.

What many of us want to read, which recently has become more apparent, isn’t a symbolic heroine. We want real women placed in extraordinary circumstances. Or real women navigating situations we recognize from our own lives. The common denominator is realism, not likeability, not archetype, not some shorthand narrative.

We don’t need manic pixie dream girls eating breakfast for dinner and blasting The Shins. We don’t need commedia dell’arte caricatures of the femme fetale. We don’t need to label women as “messy” when they’re complex, or “imperfect” when they’re just human, awkward and evolving. Those labels soften women into palatable metaphors when what we are craving is dimensionality.

Layered is the goal. Because most women contain multitudes. Sometimes we are strategic. Sometimes naive. Sometimes magnetic. We can be the clown, the mastermind and the ingenue all in the same chapter. Or even in the same conversation.

The work we have when we write women isn’t about selecting the right archetype or correcting her toward something more likable. It’s more about resisting simplification. We can trust our readers to be okay with complexity.

This all stems from the first time I felt myself forcing a female character into an arc that didn’t quite belong to her.

My protagonist begins her story working at a humble travel agency, selling dream vacations to retirees while never having taken one herself. She’s 27 and she’s never left Cape Cod. Unless you count a HomeGoods run over the bridge.

When I shared early query drafts, I heard the same note again and again: she needed a reason. A dramatic one. An ailing parent. A death. Childhood trauma involving bridges. Some defining event that justified her never leaving. And I couldn’t understand why.

It was treated as totally implausible, even lazy, that a woman her age had simply never gone anywhere. But people get stuck all the time. Not metaphorically. Literally. Financially. Logistically. Emotionally. Life can stack up and just every day responsibilities are enough. Comfort zones happen. Suddenly, staying put isn’t some narrative mystery, it’s just a Tuesday on Cape Cod. Ordinary limitation is often shaped by a mundane reality rather than some cinematic backstory.

There is a pressure in storytelling, particularly in writing women, to justify their positions or feelings. But realism doesn’t always arrive with dramatic inciting incidents. Sometimes it arrives through…. inertia? Is that the right word? Through routine? And transformation doesn’t always have to begin with trauma.

This is where I keep coming back to the idea that we might enjoy recognition over spectacle.

I get it. Spectacle is impressive. It entertains. But if we can see ourselves, our ambitions, our contradictions, stalled ambitions and longings, reflected back without exaggeration, that might stay with us way after the plot of the book resolves. To me, spectacle has the tendency to position characters as symbols whereas recognition allows them to be people, it invites empathy. And empathy in fiction is truly the most valuable currency.

Cheers,

Cait

You can listen to our, slightly more unhinged, episode on FMC’s HERE.

It was going to be something practical, responsible. Something about the various money-grab ecosystems currently circling authors like seagulls around a beach snack. The writer-y content we love. We’ve also got a podcast episode dropping this week about female main characters. It’s fun, slightly tipsy and just in time for Galentine’s Day.

Before writing this, however, I finished The Correspondent and now I’m inconveniently emotional and nostalgic.

No, I’m not in the luteal phase. Imagine if I were. I’d be Alice, swimming in a sea of my own tears.

For the record, I don’t usually seek out books that do this to me. Since becoming a mother, I’ve especially avoided anything involving motherhood, loss or elderly women reflecting on their lives with devastating clarity. Protecting my emotional stability is important.

So anyway, I won’t be seeing Hamnet. I choose peace.

But I am also deeply impressionable and highly susceptible to Bookstagram influence, so here we are, me crying at my keyboard after finishing this witty and quietly beautiful novel.

There’s a quote on the cover from Anne Patchett calling it “A cause for celebration,” and I kept thinking about that while I read. Because I don’t think we’re just celebrating a good book. I think we’re celebrating the continued existence of art that surprises us.

What I mean is that there is a low grade cultural anxiety that has been humming in the background and it is starting to get louder. The one telling us that AI will flatten creativity, that stories are just tropes on repeat, that everything meaningful has already been written. And then something comes along that feels completely human in a way that you can’t fake. It is intimate and alive.

It reminds me that art isn’t losing. Not even close.

If you haven’t read it, I won’t spoil anything. But the novel unfolds through letters written by and to a woman who spends much of her life communicating this way. She reaches out to people through, well, correspondence instead of conversation. She writes to everyone: family members, old friends, George Lucas, Joan Didion and receives replies. These letters more or less form the architecture of her life.

This act of deliberate communication with its thoughtful pauses, is what actually feels like what has been missing from our culture. Or really, is no longer optimized in a way that it once was. Which is why it probably feels so powerful right now.

I want to write letters again. To friends, to other writers, to people that I love and people I admire. And in that way, this book has rerouted me. It is nudging me toward a version of myself that is a little slower and more intentional.

So yes Anne, that feels worth celebrating.

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This week we ARE doing an episode on writing & reading FMC and you can listen along here!

Cheers,

Cait

Asking other parents what age children start wiping their own butts (more on that later).

Googling where tourists can buy cocaine in Barcelona.

Talking into a camera about how Joe Jonas is the hottest Jonas.

Look. I get it. None of us signed up for this. And many of us have actively tried to avoid it. You might be sitting there thinking, There’s no way I’m putting myself out there like that. I would rather pass away quietly behind my keyboard.

And you know what? Maybe you won’t do it.

But somewhere, buried under your resistance, there’s a flicker of FOMO. The tiny, persistent voice whispering that maybe, just maybe, someone might see what you shared and pick up your book. Or maybe it connects you to writers, readers or industry people in ways that simply don’t happen when you stay silent at home.

Because most of us are introverts by design, aren’t we? Writing is a quiet act. It’s solitary. Observational. We chose to express ourselves privately, from couches, kitchen tables, or aesthetic cafe corners…watching the world instead of performing inside it.

We notice everything. We catalogue traits and dissect flaws. We romanticize. We type, delete, retype and overthink for months… years… sometimes decades. All with the hope that one day our work will actually reach the world, while we sit back, sip coffee and move on to the next story.

Sound familiar?

And before anyone comforts themselves with the fantasy that traditional publishing solves this problem, I will hold your hand and speak softly to you while we gently retire that idea.

Signing with a publisher does not mean a marketing team appears to run your social media while you lounge artistically near a window (preferable in Paris) with a notebook. Actually, that would be a great post.

The hard truth is… only a small percentage of titles receive major marketing budgets. Unless you’re Michelle Obama, then you’re probably on the list with the other thousands of books released each year. Publishing isn’t withholding support from authors, it’s just working within scale.

Visibility? Audience and readership? Those still fall largely on the author.

So whether you want to go trad, indie or hybrid the reality is you have to participate in your book’s existence beyond the page.

Your stories still matter. Craft still matters. But discovery rarely happens in silence. Social media isn’t just noise or vanity metrics, it’s visibility, connection and community. Sure, its occasionally uncomfortable and absurd but it’s also one of the few spaces where emerging authors can build readership before anyone in publishing gives them a second look.

You don’t have to dance or overshare. You don’t have to become someone you’re not. But participating, even imperfectly, gives your work a chance to find its people.

And honestly? If that means sometimes filming a questionable take about a Jonas Brother that my kids will probably find twenty five years in the future (but like, really, where is my MySpace?), if people watch that and think its funny then they will probably like the vibe of my book too.

Cheers!

Cait

For a fun conversation about social media marketing as authors listen to our latest episode HERE

That seems to be the question we get.

Why would two writers, both working on our debut novels, with zero industry clout, learning everything as we go, start a podcast and expect anyone to listen?

Like…fair.

Honestly? On top of all of this, we’re probably two of the most insecure people in the room. Well. I’m the only one in the room right now, technically, but the metaphysical room. You know. Our collective nervous systems are not built for making this type of content.

But the simple answer is: Writing is really freakin’ lonely.

It’s having conversations between your characters out loud while alone at your laptop, inundating your husband with plot hole solutions while he looks at you with vacant eyes, drinking alone to quiet the imposter syndrome and crippling anxiety…kind of lonely. You get it.

Connecting with the online community was great. But we, all of us, are more than just trendy posts set to obscure indie songs. And I didn’t fully understand that until I started meeting other writers in person.

I didn’t know that my insomnia during a writing binge was normal. I didn’t know my disdain for TikTok was normal. And I certainly didn’t know my general gremlin appearance (hair in claw clip, dead eye stare, eating Annies Mac & Cheese from the pan over the sink)… was a universal writing experience.

Look…if we could have the kind of communal magic we get on writing retreats every weekend, then maybe there would be no need for two elder millennials to turn on our cameras and talk for an hour about these ridiculous things to a very niche audience.

But none of us have that kind of money. Well, maybe some of you do, because I’ve seen those book nooks.

So we made our own version of that retreat energy, just cheaper, probably the same amount of drunk and likely less draining of your social battery. We’re here to talk about the questions we all have, explore this crazy thing we’re all doing together, and remind you that you are not alone when you are spiraling over a single sentence for three hours.

And the best part?

You get to stay in that cozy little gremlin hole. Because we support your lifestyle.

Cheers,

Cait

You can join us every Tuesday by subscribing on YouTube or following us wherever you get podcasts!

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