February 24, 2026
Standing on the Edge
I’m writing this post from the airport where I’ve arrived much too early for my flight to Pittsburgh, where I’ll be attending the American Booksellers’ Association’s Winter Institute, an opportunity I’m so excited about—can you think of better company? And for me, this is the beginning of Book Promo season, a season that’s actually going to be pretty busy. We’re also taking a family trip to the UK in early April, a trip I booked around potential book events, which I felt a little embarrassed about at the time, because who was to say that such events would even come to pass? But they have, they really have, a string of occasions that I could (and no doubt will) line up in a row and call my “book tour,” as though I were R.F. Kuang or Sarah J. Maas. And I feel lucky for all these things to look forward to, for all these opportunities to meet readers and sell books. When I published my first novel almost ten years ago, I just took for granted that these were the sorts of things that just happened, but they don’t always. (And to be honest, even when they do, readers and book sales are never guaranteed. It’s a crapshoot.) I feel really lucky for the marketing and publicity push my publisher has put behind my book—the creativity, intelligence, and care has been astounding. Every author should be this fortunate.
And being able to line up events like this, a quasi book tour—of course celebrating these opportunities is important, but underlying this celebration is an uncomfortable feeling like I’m trying to prove something with them. Look at me, here’s living proof of my substance and importance, that I’m legit. Posting my “Book Tour” schedule like it’s no big thang, as though I’m the kind of person this sort of opportunity happens to (but oh, it’s such a big thang. I’m so so grateful and so so pleased, because I’ve experienced a book launch to CRICKETS and it wasn’t great.) The same way I feel compelled to line up my four published novels (my fourth novel is not officially out YET, but it’s slowly trickling its way into the world. Official pub date is March 17!) and exclaim to the world, “Look what I’ve done! Four entire novels. Maybe this author thing is not just a ridiculous fluke after all.”
As though the four books and the list of events add up to something more than what they are, as though they prove something about my worth, my worthiness—as a writer and a human both. And this is what I’m resisting, what I’ve been working on shrugging off since my last book came out three years ago and it almost wrecked me. All these things are wonderful, but they also mean nothing. This is my moment to shine, but also nobody cares, and neither point necessarily cancels the other, and being able to hold all of this at the very same time might very well be the key to not losing my mind.
February 17, 2026
How to Stay Humble
(This essay was first published in my latest Pickle Me This Digest ENTHUSIASMS newsletter, along with a lot of other great stuff. If you’d like to receive the newsletter free to your inbox every month, sign up here!)
I went to a bookshop a couple of weeks ago, and brought along an advance copy of Definitely Thriving to pass to the bookseller behind the counter, which might not be the done thing, but why not, I thought? And so after buying a stack of books, I handed her mine, and said, “I’m an author. You’ve stocked my books in the past, and I wanted to let you know about my latest.” She visibly recoiled, and shouted, “NO!” “I mean, you don’t have to take it,” I said. “I just thought somebody here might like to read it.” This back and forth went on for what felt like 500 years, and then she seemed to realize that it was an advanced copy, and consented to accept it. “I can’t sell this in the shop though,” she said, and I replied, “Well, I kind of hope that you wouldn’t?”
“Wow, that was rough,” said my kids, once we were out of the shop and back in the car. “Are you okay?” my husband asked, but I’ve been an author long enough to know that being brought down to size on a regular basis is part of the job description. Authors are not special. Authors are a dime a dozen. Authors are basically an infestation, and booksellers have to contend with our demented desperate egos on the regular. That bookseller didn’t care about my ARC, and I know where she was coming from.
If you’ve ever had authorial dreams, I would advise you to not have these be the foundation of your self-esteem—and believe me, I’m speaking from experience.
I launched this newsletter just over two years ago during a disappointing season following the lacklustre reception of my third novel, and ever since I’ve been trying to figure out to be a creative person who will never be so tripped up and shattered by such an experience again. Initially I thought the key was to have zero hopes or expectations thereby bypassing the possibility of disappointment altogether, and then my therapist and I had to have yet another conversation about there in fact being no shortcut around having feelings, even tough ones. And then I started thinking about how important it was to want things, including success, and how to hold this balance (and not have said success be the foundation of my self-esteem). Another layer was trying to avoid the trick of convincing myself that by not hitching myself to meteoric dreams of success, such a thing would finally happen.
Most importantly, I am working hard to accept the forces that are within my control versus those which fall outside it—for example, I can indeed try to sell as many tickets as possible for my March 5 book launch, but making my novel a bestseller, say, in a way that requires buy-in by the nation’s big box bookseller entirely is outside of my purview and no amount of rearranging my books at those bookstores so the covers are facing out is going to change that. (If it could, I would have become a national bestseller a long time ago…)
It has helped that lots of lovely things are happening around the launch of Definitely Thriving, things that definitely assuage the humiliation of that bookstore accepting my ARC as though it were a used tampon. I have a packed couple of months ahead of me, and I’m grateful and excited. I’m so glad that my publisher and marketing/publicity team have worked so hard to push the book and support it. There is exciting buzz and possibility, and while I know that none of that is necessarily indicative of anything except the loveliness that it is, I have also been around enough to no that such buzz and possibility is never inevitable, it’s actually so hard to come by, and that I’m incredibly lucky to be where I am right now. (The me who was launching my previous book would have been aching with envy.)
Pema Chödrön writes about the challenge of “being big and small at the same time.” Is she a big deal? Is she small potatoes? “This was a painful experience because I was always being insulted and humiliated by my own expectations. As soon as I was sure how it should be, so I could feel secure, I would get a message that it should be the other way. Finally I said to [her teacher], “This is really hurting. I just don’t know who I’m supposed to be,” and he said, “Well, you have to learn to be big and small at the same time.”
But how does one do that exactly? Pema Chödrön has no answer, although it’s a process that all of us are ever undertaking in our own ways. As my personal fave Courtney R. Martin writes, “‘Big and small at the same time’ is a constant human condition, not an exceptional paradox.”
December 11, 2025
Castaway
“But I don’t know if you can write a book. I don’t know if I can write a book. I don’t know if I can write THIS book… A writing life, I’ve come to believe, is a yearslong process of casting away everything you once believed for sure.”
New nonfiction from Elizabeth McCracken, A LONG GAME: NOTES OF WRITING FICTION. As wonderful to read as any book by Elizabeth McCracken. I loved it so much. The least annoying book on craft you’ll ever encounter. Or maybe it’s just me, and how much I identify when she writes “(The subtext of all my writing is LOVE ME.)”
December 1, 2025
Why I Write?
New essay for paid subscribers. What is the writing life for those of us who aren’t Miriam Toews (which is most of us)? I bared my soul again! Read it here.
October 31, 2025
Dead Books
Happy Halloween! Seems like a good day to talk about DEAD BOOKS.
I went to see Lily King at the Toronto Public Library this week, which was a great experience, although it made me realize I’d been overthinking things a bit when I wrote my October essay about King’s latest, Heart the Lover, but I stand by all my exuberance. (What can I say. I’d just finished my period. It’s always a wild ride.) And one of the parts of King’s conversation with Claire Cameron that I particularly enjoyed was when she mentioned her “dead books,” in particular the novel she’d been writing in 2020 before Heart the Lover walked in and stole the show. It was a book about a dead senator, and it opened with a body, and she’d really loved writing about that dead body…until she didn’t anymore. And she says that there are people who ask her about this book now, “Aren’t you sad?” That she’d put all this work into a project that never went anywhere, a book that will never see the light of the day.
And she said that she wasn’t sad at all. In fact, she was thrilled, because she didn’t want to work on that novel anymore, and this reminded me of the relief I felt at the beginning of this month, having just completed a marathon in September to nearly double the length of my manuscript, writing 2000 words a day. Reaching 70,000 words total, and all I could think when I was finished was, “Oh, wow! I never need to work on that story again.” Which seems a bit foolish, I know, to have spent all that time in September working on the book, but if I hadn’t, I might never have known. And I needed to know. Even though I think I knew already, but I really had to know for sure.
I started writing a new book last week—it’s 1462 words right now. (See more about my mountain here.) And while it’s early days (and early words), and while that word count does seem paltry compared to 70,000, I’m so happy to be writing it, and I’ve got no qualms about the dead book behind me. Which might be resurrected one day when I’m finally ready to write it properly, but it doesn’t have to be. I know that I will learned a thing or two from writing/failing to write that dead book. I know too that I wasn’t in a position to write the book I’m writing now (the fun book, the living book) until I’d spent time going through the final edits of Definitely Thriving, which put me deep into that book and made me realize just how much I want to write another set in the same universe.
Our dead books don’t have to haunt us, is what I’m really saying here. And when they don’t, that only underlines how much they were never meant to be.
March 29, 2024
Katherine Heiny Gave Me Permission
I’m so happy with my latest essay on Substack (which puts me 1/4 of the way toward my goal of writing an essay every month!). It’s called “Katherine Heiny Gave Me Permission”, and I hope you like it too.
This is my last free substack essay—beginning in April, they’re available to paid subscribers only. Because I really appreciate my blog readers for being here all along, I have three free one year paid subscriptions to give away, and two are still available. If you’d like to receive one, email me at klclare AT gmail DOT com and let me know!
February 29, 2024
My February Substack Essay
As you know already, if you’ve been following along, I’ve set myself a challenge of writing a long-form essay every month this year. The second one went live this morning and I am really proud of it—“In Praise of Pieces: Commonplace Books, Friendship Quotes, and Our Bookless Book Club.” I’m posting these essays on Substack, because the opportunity to monetize my writing is something I want to explore, because I want to try something new, and also because Substack offers podcast hosting (the teaser for my new podcast came out yesterday!).
It’s funny though because Substack is working very hard to embrace elements of social media platforms (they just introduced direct messaging, their “notes” is like a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook) and I’m just not interested in any of it. As always, I keep coming back to my blog, to the opportunity to be read in semi-obscurity. And I appreciate the readers who show up here so much.
My first three Substack essays will be available for everyone to read, but thereafter (beginning in April) will be for paid subscribers only. To show my gratitude to the readers who show up for me here, I’d like to give away paid subscriptions to the first three people who get in touch to claim them. Drop me an email at klclare AT gmail DOT com! (I’ll put a note here when they’re gone.)
February 26, 2024
Reading and Writing
If you receive my newsletter (February edition went out last week!), then you already know that I’ve had a rich and fulfilling month in terms of reading and writing, and creating. And if you don’t receive my newsletter, well, you’re now officially up to date, since you’re already here on my blog and my newsletter is a digested version of my blog posts and book reviews anyway. EXCEPT for my new creative project of writing a long form essay every month, of course. (Last month’s was about the delights of rereading Danielle Steele—have you read it yet?) I have taken exquisite pleasure in writing these pieces, and my next one will be arriving in inboxes on THURSDAY. It’s called “In Praise of Pieces: Commonplace Books, Friendship Quotes, and Our Bookless Book Club” and I’m really excited to share it with you. As with last month’s essay, and like next month’s, these essays will be available for all subscribers, and thereafter for paid subscribers only. As I wrote in my newsletter, “I entered into this enterprise with the lowest expectations, with the intention of finding a different way to be online and channelling my thoughts and ideas into long-form projects whose composition seemed like it might help to further mend my brain after more than a decade of fragmentation on social media. And let me tell you, it has felt so good to write these longer pieces, so rich and satisfying. And it has felt even better to have so many of you become paid subscribers to receive these pieces.” Thanks to everybody who has read, shared, or supported. Challenging myself in this way has been so satisfying. It has also meant that I got to spend part of last week rereading Katherine Heiny’s EARLY MORNING RISER, because my March essay is going to be all about her work and what it means to me.
If you’re not on my newsletter list yet, you can sign up here.
January 25, 2024
The Writing is the Point
I texted my husband a few months ago with an idea I had for a new novel. He replied with a comment about how he was excited that I was excited about writing something new. “I bet you are, ha ha,” I wrote back, because he’d been the one to console me through my months of post-publication ennui, but he affirmed that he really meant it, because he knows that writing is a thing I do, even if it’s not a wise thing, and certainly not a financially lucrative thing, even if publication itself is not a destination that delivers me much in the way of satisfaction and contentment. And that is why I love him, and this is what love is, I think, someone who gives you permission to make bad choices that are the right choices, because even though they might know better, they also understand.
Towards the end of December, I was feeling paralyzed creatively, any confidence I’d felt in my abilities and expertise totally zapped by how hard it had been to publish my latest novel. I felt like a fraud. It was painful, and dispiriting, and I’m so grateful for the long break I took over the holidays, to retreat from the FOMO of the online world and take solace in actual real life people (to quote a certain Anna) and a huge pile of books, to feel my soul grow back, and begin to feel creative and inspired again.
In 2021, I hadn’t been without a project in years. I started Mitzi Bytes in 2014, I started Asking for a Friend in 2015, published Mitzi Bytes in 2017, and started Waiting for a Star to Fall in 2018. That makes for almost a decade with something creative waiting in my back pocket, an easy answer to the question, are you working on something new? Plus there was a global pandemic still going on and, though I didn’t know it at the time, I was well on my way to a mental health crisis that was going to break my brain, so it’s not so surprising that I was having some trouble thinking up a new idea for a book.
Somehow I broke through that pressure, however, and started writing a novel about a woman who has just left (exploded) her marriage and who begins a new life in a Toronto rooming house, a novel about a character I’d envisioned as a modern day Barbara Pym heroine. I had a framework for the novel, 12 chapters, each one taking place over a month, the entire novel the course of a year. The trouble started, however, when I’d reached 70,000 words and wasn’t even six months in, plus the problem of there being no plot. So I abandoned that project, and decided I would write a thriller, but then that fell apart, and then I fell apart. Speaking of paralyzed.
Imagine my surprise, however, when I reread the modern-day Pym book a year later…and realized it was really good? (It was really good because, though my crippling self-doubt of last fall would tell me otherwise, I’ve figured out a thing or two about writing novels, and also because I started writing it under the influence of Katherine Heiny, whose work has taught essential things about enlivening fiction and highlighting the absurdity of everyday life). I decided to abandon the 12 chapter framework, broke the chapters down into smaller pieces, conceded that a literary arc could be possible in a six month period, and just fell deeper and deeper in love with Clemence Lathbury and her world.
Last year I set to revising the manuscript, in between edits and revisions on Asking for a Friend, preparing for that book’s publication, and working with manuscript consultation clients…and I didn’t get much done. Something was missing, and I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t have the focus. Maybe there’d been nothing there there after all? But the bits of dabbling I was doing over the fall suggested otherwise. At the end of December, as I recovered from a difficult season and prepared to start creating again—remember, I had this idea for another new novel, this one a family saga—I set a goal of first getting Clemence’s story into fighting form by the end of January, if such a thing was even possible. Was it possible?
But reader, I did it! Yesterday I added the final link in the thread that had been missing from my narrative, and today I read the final chapter and the epilogue, and was just absolutely dazzled by the ending, which I’d forgotten altogether, and I was properly impressed with myself for pulling it off. I begin working with manuscript consultation clients for the next two months, but will commit to a read-through in April, after which point I will likely (!) send it off to my agent. The prospect of which terrifies me to no end, because while I think that my agent will like it, and that it’s the best book I’ve ever written (so fun! so smart! so full of humour and light!) I’m also the author of three poor-selling novels, which is not a stellar track record, and the deeper on gets on that path, the harder it becomes to change course. Sigh.
But right now, I’m choosing not to focus on that, instead to celebrate my win of getting to this finish light, amidst global crises, and mental health breakdowns: I have written another novel and I really really love it. I am also having fun putting together my new newsletter, and I’m recording the first interview for my new podcast tomorrow! And at some point in the next few months, I’m going to start writing that family saga, and maybe I won’t be able to pull it off, and maybe no one’s going to want to publish it even if I do, a challenge I’ll face if and when it arrives, but in the meantime I will do what I do, which is write, because I love to write, because the writing is the point.
January 8, 2024
One Hand in My Pocket
I’ve been thinking a lot about Shawna Lemay’s New Year’s post, “Learning to Be Of Two Minds,” mostly because my own personal 2024 quest (which is to be more human) involves precisely that, I think—even if I also struggle with this sense that I possibly might not know my own mind, the voice in my head consistently taking down any coherent narrative I’m offering it, which is exhausting, flip-floppy, though maybe the problem is that I’ve not learned to be of two minds, but rather my two minds are forever in conflict, which is something I need to resolve, to learn to let those two minds be.
Shawna’s post (which quotes Alanis Morissette and Marilynne Robinson) spoke to me in two (of course!) central ways, both creatively stimulating. First, it made me realize that the title of the novel which I’m working to have a new completed draft of by the end of the month needs to be titled ONE HAND IN MY POCKET. Why? Because it’s about a character whose life is a work in progress, a woman for whom it all comes down to that she “hasn’t got it all figured out just yet.”
And second, because of how the idea of having one hand in my pocket (as well as not having it all figured out just yet) really speaks to me in terms of where I’m at personally, and creatively. I feel like I’ve spend the last 10+ years showing all my cards, sharing my process, all the time, and that kind of openness has become unsatisfying.
In a piece in The Toronto Star this week (promoting her new book Let It Go), author Chelene Knight writes: “When I share something painful or heavy, I ask myself what I need in return and ensure I share my pain in spaces where I can receive what I need. I’m grateful for my intentional community. This is why social media is more of a highlight reel for me — the online world doesn’t get to have both my joy and my pain; they receive only the pieces I’m willing to give away because it’s unlikely I’ll get back what I need. But sadly, we don’t always consider social media as an intentional exchange.”
In 2024, I want to be more thoughtful about such transactions, and keep more things—more the joy and the pain—just for me, and the people in my life. Which is to say, I want to keep one hand in my pocket (and the other one is giving a high five. Or gathering sea glass. Probably not flicking a cigarette).
