reckoning by my natal day
insert clever subtitle here
Happy Friday! Two pieces of housekeping up front: first, at noon EST today (Friday, October 7th) I’ll be live on Instagram with Rebecca Heyman doing First Line Frenzy! #FLF is a Becca creation: every day on her Instagram she gives feedback on first lines submitted by followers, and we’ll be doing that together. Join us for a fun and hopefully informative time! Pardon me while I dig out my ring light.
Second, I extended the back-to-school special until the 10th (of October, not December. I somehow skipped spooky season and went straight on to Christmas when I sent my update. Thanks Katie!) So if you’d like to have your query and the first ten pages of your manuscript critiqued by moi for $25, skip to the end of the email for details.
On to this week’s nonsense!
I dragged myself away from Alexandra Rowland’s excellent new novel A Taste of Gold and Iron to write this this morning, which felt like the universe being cruel to me, personally, in the week of my birth’s anniversary. But I’m happy to be doing this newsletter again, and the response to A Faster No’s reappearance has been incredibly gratifying. I’m so happy that so many people have reached out to say that they enjoy it and I hope that I can hold up my end of the bargain for a long time.
This week I had had some plans for talking about BookTok and the recent fracas around the YA novel Lightlark by Alex Aster. Then my entire For You page was taken up with drama involving a group of former Buzzfeed men, the Try Guys. For those unfamiliar, TikTok is the app equivalent of a water bottle with heroin in it; a dopamine dispenser that will see into your soul in under forty minutes and deliver a pitch-perfect series of videos tailored to your interests. Had I been aware of the Try Guys before? Yes, in that tangential way that many white millennials are aware of the Buzzfeed Youtube Universe. What began as four near-strangers trying things they’d never done before has grown into an entire media ecosystem, now separate from Buzzfeed, involving all the Guys and their wives and partners in cookbooks, podcasts, and spinoff shows on the Food network. The Guys are all rich as a result.
Some time in the last month three of the Guys found out that the fourth Guy was having an affair. Not only that, but he was having an affair with an employee. Just a real bad look all around. That Guy—Ned—has been kicked out of the company, edited out of recent videos, and now has a marriage on the rocks. To say he fumbled the bag is the understatement of the century.
I feel like I now know more facts about the Try Guys than I do about my own family. I’ve watched their video announcing that he was leaving. I’ve listened to their podcast episode, where two of them go into more detail about the process behind them finding out and separating themselves from this dude. I’ve seen so many memes I’ve started to mix them up. The thing that I kept coming back to, though, is that it’s so weird that I saw all this unfold on TikTok in real time.
One minute everyone was talking about that other cheating white man, Adam Levine from Maroon Five. And then over what felt like eight hours almost every other video was talking about this man I hadn’t given a second though tto in years. The giddiness and speed with which people dissected grainy paparazzi photos, parsed meaning from stills of youtube videos, and generally behaved like freelance private detectives was pretty astounding.
The three remaining Guys have handled this whole situation just about as well as they could, but listening to their podcast, the conclusion I came to was that the minute you involve your personal life in any part of an outward-facing “brand,” your personal life is no longer your own. Ned in particular: he and his wife have children, yes, but they also have a cookbook together and a line at Target. His infidelity isn’t just a personal betrayal — it’s a catastrophic blow to their shared source of income. No one is going to buy a cookbook called Date Night from a dude caught canoodling with an employee at a Harry Styles concert. (AN EMPLOYEE!) (Also: HARRY STYLES??)
Fans of the Try Guys had expectations for Ned’s behavior, created by Ned himself when he made being a Wife Guy his entire public persona. And when Ariel (his wife) joined the Try Guys media universe, the fans got a chance to know her as well as they thought they knew Ned. Open your private life to the public and you put yourself in a situation where people feel as though they have a stake in your relationships.
What does this have to do with books? I don’t know. I tried to connect the Try Guys to Alex Aster, and I think there’s something there—something about delivering on expectations—but I couldn’t quite make it fit. It’s relevant, though, because a healthy number of you are aspiring novelists, and there is an expectation for authors to put themselves out there, to create the kind of relationships with fans that will lead to investment on their part. What to share and how much is always a hard line to toe, even harder now when everyone has access to everyone else through their pocket computer 24/7. I guess the takeaway this week is to keep some things for yourself. And if you don’t, just don’t pull a Ned. Don’t fumble the bag!
HOUSEKEEPING
For $25 you can get a critique of your query and the first ten pages of your novel, from today through midnight on Monday, December 10th. To take advantage of this limited-time offer:
Pay the $25 fee using Venmo (linked here). Paypal is also an option if you’re based overseas and have access. Use the email below for that.
Snap a screenshot of your receipt.
Send the screenshot and your query + 10 pages to me at jsudden@gmail.com.
I’ll confirm receipt of your payment and materials. All critiques will be returned within two weeks of receipt.
THIS WEEK IN HOCKEY
Alex Ovechkin scored a preseason goal against the Red Wings, a feat he has not accomplished in four years, apparently. Everyone else on the Caps roster is broken (Everyone being TJ Oshie and Dmitry Orlov) and elsewhere, I’m still mourning P.K. Subban’s retirement from professional hockey. Someone, hire him to be a handsome and charming commentator!
LINKS
What Can Novels Do? by Alex Pabán Freed (Gawker)
Let’s try it out. The world’s structural problems require structural solutions: the novel’s pretty good at revealing the former and not really a part of the latter. We could do a bit of what the journal Chuang calls Scooby-Doo Marxism — where we take the mask off of whatever problems we have with contemporary literature and find capitalism lurking behind — but you probably live under capitalism, so unless you’re engaging in near-Olympic levels of denial, you already know it’s bad — if not for you, then certainly for other people. Follow these thoughts to their logical conclusion, of course, and you’re probably wondering: what can the novel possibly do to help bring about the end of all exploitation? What can the novel do at all?
Try Guys Detail Ned Fulmer’s Ousting in New Podcast Episode: ‘We went through every stage of grief’ by Katcy Stephen (Variety)
“We processed this almost like a trauma,” Kornfeld explained. “It really rocked our word, but also the ramifications were so clear. I don’t think that I really ever stopped to emotionally process it. Even still, I don’t know that I have. Because it was just, ‘OK, we have to act. We have to go. This thing happened, how do we react accordingly?’ I understood the severity of the accusations against Ned, but also the laundry list of steps ahead.”
READING: A Taste of Gold and Iron by Alexandra Rowland
WATCHING: Ocean’s Thirteen
LISTENING: “Angel” by First Aid Kit
WORDS WRITTEN: 2500
This has been A Faster No, a dispatch on publishing, writing, books, and beyond. Is there something you’d like me to talk about? Leave it in the comments or reply to the email! You can support the newsletter here. If you purchase a book from any of the links to Bookshop.org I get a small commission at no cost to you. I am available for developmental editing and editorial assessment services via Reedsy.
I read articles about Alex Aster, because some publications were claiming her to be some kind of pioneer for being discovered via TikTok, and...that isn't what happened? She may have got more attention, but she'd already had agents and had traditionally published a middle-grade novel, so she didn't come out of TikTok alone. (Also, I think her sister has nothing to do with her being signed up.) Haven't been able to determine if Aster already had an agent for her YA novel and publishers weren't biting, or if she was between agents.