April flowers bring a May newsletter 💐

featuring poems, lists, and a launch month in review!

Hello all, and welcome to my first attempt at a substack newsletter! There is absolutely no reason for ~98% of you to care that I’m trying a new platform, but if things look a little different, that is why. One cool feature that I know of off the bat is that you can now leave comments on anything I send out here! And everyone knows comment sections are the most fun places on the internet, right?? Eagerly awaiting your glowing feedback for every edition of Kaitlyn’s Stream of Consciousness 😇 Anyhoo, let’s get to catching up on everything, starting with…

Not Here to Stay Friends is one month old!

They sure do grow up fast!

a one-month-old book baby, plus some of the April flowers to which the subject line refers

If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, you can find one wherever books are sold, including here:

Now for a lil highlight collage~

These are from various events over the last month, including (l-r):

1. dual book launch with the delightful Mazey Eddings at Malaprop’s in Asheville

2. Joseph-Beth launch in Lexington, where my friend Lee brought freeze pops as a book-themed photo prop 🥰

3. hasty selfie with Gwenda Bond, my friend and Lexington conversation partner who brought me a rose (aka carnation, close enough) to start our event

4. signing books at Union Ave in Knoxville - we sold out their stock! 🥲

5. another from the Union Ave launch with Lauren Morrill, my conversation partner and an author I’ve admired for a long time

6. school visit at Great Crossing High School, where I got to talk to students (and some very cool teachers + librarians!) about writing and publishing

This book release season has been such a whirlwind!! I’ve been overwhelmed thinking about how I would sum it up in writing. The feeling reminds me a little bit of being in 5th grade, when I didn’t think I liked to write (ha) but for homework, I had to make a one-page journal entry in my composition notebook every night. One page! Inhumane. But I quickly discovered the clever workaround of filling a page with either an a) acrostic poem (ie K A I T L Y N written vertically with an adjective starting with each letter) or b) list (ie “things I could be when I grow up” - obviously “writer” was never on that list). Because my brain is a little mushy at the end of a busy book launch month, I am going to regress to 5th grade journal entry methods to recap things for you in a minimally overwhelming way! Starting with…

Book Title Acronym Acrostic

a poem by Kaitlyn Hill

N ow I am a twice published author
H appy they're still letting me do this writing thing
T ouring for the first time is cool and also tiring
S igning books + serving #looks at a bookstore near you
F luctuations in my mood every hour (but what else is new)

Please hold your applause for the end.

Other scattered thoughts relevant to Not Here to Stay Friends release month

a list by Kaitlyn Hill

• I’m looking at my pictures to remind me what all happened because I think April 4th, 2023 was actually 7 years ago.

• NHTSF is already in its third printing! This has been some of the coolest, most surprising news for me, and basically means that before it had even been out for a month, the demand from bookstores/libraries/individual readers was enough for the publisher to print more copies two times over. !!! As an author, it’s very hard to gauge how book sales are going until you see a royalty statement (every six months-ish)(+ in general if anyone asks “how are book sales,” my eye will twitch), so it was genuinely a shock to hear things are surpassing expectations by so much haha. I feel really really grateful, and a lot of that is because of *PBS ad voice* viewers readers like you, so THANK YOU 💜

• You all are also very nice to me and have said very nice things about the book, so thank you for that, too!!

• I got to do some fun interviews with Culturess and The Honey Pop about Not Here to Stay Friends, and The Nerd Daily shared an excerpt!

• NHTSF was on “most anticipated” lists from Seventeen, Girl’s Life, and Barnes & Noble! Still pinching myself about all of these. 🥹

• All three of my event dresses came from online thrift store ThredUp and I love them so much/am way too proud of myself for the deal$. Ask me about my promo code 🤪

• Some of my family and friends got cute matching NHTSF Tour t-shirts and sweatshirts! I got one of each for myself and have been wearing the sweatshirt a lot, like a very cozy lil narcissist. At least it doesn’t say my name on it?

A very attractive man and his superfan modeling the tour apparel

• I knew this already, but my husband is an absolute angel!! He drove me hours and hours up and down the interstate for this self-directed tour, missed work at an especially busy time to be present for me, and has (as always) rolled with the many, many ups and downs of his author roomie’s book release emotions. Maybe someday I’ll be a big enough deal to fly him to book events in first class and we can sip complimentary champagne and reminisce on our hustle in our Prius back in the days when we were small potatoes. But I digress! So about those emotions…

• Book launches are such strange mental/emotional experiences! This calls for a list within the list.

  • The Good: On the one hand, it’s the very nicest a large volume of people are ever going to be to you all at once—just so many congratulations and lovely expressions of excitement and joy, and it’s hard to process that much kindness and happiness! Feels kind of like my wedding in that way, but it’s also all way more Fraught than a wedding 😅 like, the lead-up to my wedding was stressful and had plenty of complicated stuff to work through, but once the actual day arrived and onward, it was allll happy happy love vibes. With a book, there’s this incredible sense of pride and accomplishment, feeling the love from so many directions, and being ridiculously grateful for every individual person who’s picked up a copy or otherwise supported you, just so much humbling gratitude…but!

  • The Complicated: Your book is also a product that you’ve just made with a big ol’ corporation and finally put out into the world. Its relative success or failure can determine a lot about your career and future, and as many ways as there are to feel excited and great about it, there are at least as many to feel insecure, inadequate, disappointed, etc. There’s a feeling of constantly needing to do more, hustle harder to sell your own book and make all your work on it pay off, when in reality, so so little of that is actually in your control.

  • The Back and Forth: I’m really not exaggerating much in saying my feelings about it all can change by the hour! Big fluctuations between “everyone is loving this book! I am achieving what I’ve dreamed of and it feels amazing!!” and “no one in the world has heard of my book or me! I am a huge flop!” This is probably true for many authors and different kinds of artists, and probably why we should all have good therapists. So who’s ready to do this again, same time next year??

• All that said, there can be something special about the comedown, when you get home and the dust kind of settles and it’s back to work. In my case, I went right into line edits for my third book, Wild About You, which comes out next year. Working on that has felt surprisingly like a soft landing, post-NHTSF—there hasn’t been as much sense of “well, what now?” as I had after Love from Scratch came out, when I had no immediate deadlines for any projects. It’s reminded me how much I enjoy what I do. Despite all the many non-writing Author Life things I get wrapped up in around publication time, and how much they can mess with my head and heart and make me wonder what I’m doing here, writing books is still my passion. I love taking a story from the tiniest seed of an idea to a whole world of people and places and conflicts and resolutions, all from my own head. I love messing with the wording of a sentence until I have it exactly the way I want it. I love getting to write flirty banter between two characters, even though if I think about it too hard, it’s kind of just Me having flirty banter with Also Me. Publishing and writing are two different sides of the author-career coin, and whatever complicated mental tailspins I get into with the publishing side, the writing side remains largely fun, joyful, and fulfilling like nothing else I’ve done.

• I refrained from ending that long monologue with #blessed but I didn’t refrain from ending the list that way! #blessed

  

  Book Launch Barbie at ur service 🫡

  Once more with feeling—

🤭 pssst: I’m also doing a giveaway for signed, personalized copies of both my books on my Instagram, so be sure to check that out!

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing myself talk

That’s another significant takeaway from the last month, but also specific to this newsletter! So I’ll start wrapping it up. A few things on the horizon in the nearish future, because we love lists right now:

• Turning in Wild About You line edits! …hopefully today lol. Also the author’s note, dedication, and acknowledgments. I’ve been overthinking the latter two something awful, a la “is ___ going to be mad at me for not dedicating a book to them yet? Is it weird if I included ___ in the NHTSF acknowledgments but not WAY? Will they think I hate them now, when it’s actually not that deep? But if I just keep all the same people in the acks and add new ones every time as new people come into my life or get involved in the book process, will they eventually be twelve pages long?? Am I overthinking this because I’m a people pleaser, too conflict-avoidant, a child of divorce, a Virgo, whatever my enneagram type is, all of the above???”

• Anyhoo, again

• Going to Dollywood this weekend with some author friends! Torn between wearing a rainbow shirt or a Jolene shirt. Difficult choices everywhere I look.

• I get to be a guest on a podcast I’m excited about next week 😍 Will let you know when it’s coming out!

• This time next month, I’ll be in Europe! Shoutout to the boo for having a cool job that takes him exciting places and sometimes lets this weirdo join. I am extremely pumped to eat pasta and bread (can you guess where I’m going based on that? Wouldn’t it be funny if I was like “Finland! I just like pasta and bread!”? It is not Finland.)

• Continuing to work on my adult book (pls Kaitlyn Hill get your booty in gear and finish a draft) aaand looking to start YA #4!! WOW I cannot believe it’s about that time.

Finally, an inspiring quote from the main character in one of my favorite books, The Plus One by Mazey Eddings. It really fits the vibe of my book 3 that’s almost complete, Wild About You, and allows me to try out the substack pull quote feature.

Camping is life but harder.

- Indira Papadakis

Thanks for sticking around and for absolutely everything y’all have done for me, for Not Here to Stay Friends, for Love from Scratch, all of it! I am eternally grateful, more than I can say.

xoxo,

Kaitlyn

Photo by Illán Riestra Nava on Unsplash

I’ll work harder to find a Kermit gif next time (for anyone new around here, that’s usually how I end these), but for now, this came up when I searched substack’s free pictures. Really makes you think, doesn’t it?