Hi and welcome back to Out of Practice! Thanks for being here.

AWP, the largest annual literary conference & book fair in North America, was earlier this month in Baltimore. The last few AWP conferences have been held in LA, Kansas City, and Seattle, so while I was aware of the conference I also didn’t have the budget to travel that far. Since the conference came to me this year, I signed up.

Honestly, I was feeling pretty nervous about attending. I don’t have any publication credits to my name yet, I’m not much of a networker, and—this cannot be overstated—I love staying home. But! I’m so glad I purchased the pass before I could talk myself out of it. I got to spend time with my dear friend Ariane, attend some incredible panels and readings, and meet so many amazing writers. And I proved to myself I can do the in-person stuff that comes with being a writer.

The first panel I attended (“I Wish to Speak to the Dead: The Craft of Historical Imagination”) really set the tone for the rest of the conference. Despite being at 9am, the room was packed and the panelists were energetic. I took furious notes on methodology, got inspired about setting, and met a longtime mutual, fellow novelist Megan Okonsky, who had chosen the same 9am panel.

AWP is in Chicago next year, and I’m hoping to attend again. If anyone is on the fence about going, feel free to reach out! I’m happy to answer specific questions.

And, before we move on, the obligatory cat update. Oscar and Emerald continue to be perfect. I suspect they are even aware of the fact.

I have been reading some fantastic books lately, which I will share more about next month, but for now, here are some upcoming debuts that should be on your radar!

If you aren’t aware, pre-orders are really important to authors, particularly when it comes to debuts. Pre-order sales count toward publication day sales, so more pre-orders can lead to books making bestseller lists. Higher pre-order sales can also indicate to booksellers how many copies they should stock, and show publishers that the market interest in a book merits dedicated support. These sales contribute to authors earning out their advances more quickly, generating royalties, and even securing a better deal for the next book.

I am SO excited for the debuts listed below, and I’m sure anyone reading will find at least one or two that strike their fancy. If you’re able, consider pre-ordering through bookshop.org (linked below for all titles), or from your local indie bookstore.

Saturn Returning, Kim Narby (May 5)

A smoldering, soul-splitting debut that tracks three friends through the celestial chaos of adulthood, love, and queer identity.

Beloved Disciples by Mario Elías (May 12)

A dazzling gay love story where devotion sparkles in memory, obsession dances on the edge of reality, and a young man discovers the power of first love.

Double Happiness, Heather Eng (May 19)

Caught between a relentless tech job, her adoring fiancé, and an unexpected new flame, Mei must learn what it means to choose herself.

The Maidenheads, Benny B Peterson (May 26)

A bighearted debut novel about queer yearning, indie musicians, and bushwacking a thorny path back to your first love.

Girl’s Girl, Sonia Feldman (June 2)

A hypnotic debut about the pivotal summer that shatters the delicate balance between three best friends.

They All Fall in Love at the End, Haili Blassingame (June 2)

Cat St. Clair is ready for her messy love triangle era now that she’s in an open relationship. But she didn’t foresee a forbidden love triangle with the only two people who are off-limits: her boyfriend’s best friend and his girlfriend. Being a twenty-something writer who lives for plot, she falls for them anyway, with deliciously disastrous consequences.

The Lake Club, Lina Patton (June 16)

A sizzling, soapy summer debut, in which two women in a wealthy lakeside suburb clash over a cute male nanny, pulling the town’s darker secrets to the surface.

Names Have Been Changed, Yu-Mei Balasingamchow (June 23)

Catch Me If You Can meets Counterfeit in this thrilling debut novel about Ophir—not her real name—who starts a confessional podcast about her years on the run around the globe, in an unforgettable story about the costs of freedom and the inescapable pull of home.

False Prophet, Afsheen Farhadi (July 7)

A grieving actor-turned-memoirist reimagines his mother’s encounter with Jim Jones, the deadliest cult leader of all time—the only problem is, it’s mostly all lies . . .

Living, Together, Samantha Paige Rosen (July 14)

21 writers and organizers on chosen family, hacking adulthood, and other lessons communal living can teach us about the future of housing in America.

And, of course, you can preorder my debut novel too, out June 30!

My main goal for the next couple months is to make it to pub day with as few meltdowns as possible. My non-writing life is pretty hectic right now, so I’m leaning into joy as much as possible when it comes to my writing.

I’ve continued working on Midwest WIP and it’s been lovely. I’m doing a little drafting here and there, developing a synopsis (genuinely a helpful exercise for me in the early stages, as painful as it always is), and playing around with a pitch deck.

I'm not sure if I’ve talked about how I use a pitch deck for novel writing before. It was something I picked up from a screenwriter friend (hi, Nicky!) and it’s been such a fun way to get inspired—and organized—about setting and characters. If people are interested, I can share more about how I use that tool in a future newsletter.

I had a breakthrough on the last day of AWP.

Earlier that week, I realized the last two books I worked on (and set aside) had similar timelines. Sibling WIP was set over a calendar year, and Campus WIP was primarily set over a school year. I wondered if the timelines were part of why I stepped away from those projects. There were other factors of course, but in both cases I started to feel a lack of urgency within the stories themselves. This was something I could only clearly identify in retrospect. At the time, I could feel my interest fizzling, but I wasn’t sure why.

I compared those recent abandoned projects to WASP’S NEST (the book I finished writing! and revising! and actually sold! the proof I could do this thing I was trying to do again!) in the interest of pre-empting similar fizzling in future projects—not to mention overcoming my fear of the sophomore novel slump.

WASP’S NEST is set over a week leading up to a wedding. This structure was a huge part of the fun of writing it. Plotting the ways in which I could escalate the tension for each character within a few days, the choices they could make (and then regret), the threads from their past I could pull on…this all provided a consistently rewarding challenge.

Previously I’d been considering a months-long timeline for Midwest WIP. But the familiar nagging feeling about structure returned. I knew I needed to address it before moving forward. I like to have a sense of a novel’s shape to hang scenes on, and I can’t do that if the structure feels unwieldily or vague, which this structure definitely did. ¹

Sitting on the floor of the conference center after a panel (“Environment, Identity, Locale: Setting in Contemporary American Literature”) and before a 2026 Debut Author Meetup, I decided I was going figure this out. I opened my notebook and started by asking myself (in writing, the pages of my notebooks are filled with questions): is there was a way to tell the story I want to tell along a different timeline? A shorter timeline?

The structure of my current WIP isn’t super plot-dependent at the moment, so I started considering how I could use the setting to increase tension. Is there an event that the main characters are planning? Why does this event matter to them? What does it say about their relationships with their parents? (I promise that is a very relevant question in context, I’m just trying not to share too much at this early stage).

This series of questions unlocked some really exciting ideas for me regarding the main characters, their dynamic with each other, their self-concepts. There’s definitely a different version of the story I could tell along a different timeline. But it’s clear the version I’m most interested in takes place over a shorter span of time. So I’m going to keep following that inclination as long as it serves me.

Maybe in a few weeks or months I’ll realize the story actually demands to expand. Maybe it will even reveal itself to be a multi-generational epic (if you know me, you know this is very very unlikely, but never say never). As long as I keep writing forward, I can give myself the time and space to figure that out.

My book comes out in just over THREE MONTHS! The Celadon team has been amazing to work with and they’re getting book launch events set up for the summer. I can’t wait to share more details! If you want to hear about events first, you can join my email list.

Until next time,

Kat