Thank you for being a friend!
I’m so excited to be able to share (finally, and on my birthday week!) the cover reveal for Rachel’s adult fiction debut, Murder by Cheesecake: A Golden Girls Cozy Mystery!
I’ve been able to hint about her Young Adult novel for a while now—more on that soon!—but this one has been a secret for a long time, so it was super-exciting to see all the reactions when the cover was posted on the Golden Girls instagram feed.
I think everyone I know has some kind of special connection with the girls (mine: I remember watching them with my grandmother in Miami when I was a kid!) and I can’t wait for this book to publish because it’s so fun and pitch-perfect, and I just know it’s going to bring a lot of smiles to a lot of faces :)
Now available to preorder where books are sold!
Rachel’s going to be posting more updates in her own newsletter:
But I’ve had the Golden Girls theme song stuck in my head for over a year now, so I just wanted to take a second to thank everyone who’s reading this for being a friend!
So many of you have been here with me since the beginning—before Courage Literary and school visits and Storm Blown. Some of you were at the poetry readings in Brooklyn, or were the only two people to show up for a book signing for The Loudness. A couple of you are friends I haven’t seen since elementary school!
And I’m so glad you’re all here, because publishing isn’t always easy—and with two writers in the house, it can get a little quiet sometimes—but it’s so much sweeter when you can celebrate with friends who’ve been there for the journey!
One of the recent highlights of this particular journey was getting to sneak Chaely into a shoot with the photographer Kathryn Stabile (who photographed two very different headshots for Rachel, one for her Young Adult novel and another one that’s a little bit of a period piece for the Golden Girls book):
I’ve never been that comfortable in front of a camera and author pics have always been a little hard for me—I don’t think I’m alone in that one!—so when Kathryn offered to take a couple of me, I told her that I didn’t think I photographed that well… and she dropped some knowledge that’s going to stick with me forever.
Paraphrased: “Nobody blames the moon when it doesn’t look good in iPhone pictures.” The wisdom of a professional photographer with a Serious Camera and a white-hot Hollywood lighting rig from the 40s!
I also got to dust off my CSS and HTML to make a fun author website for Rachel (www.rachelekstromcourage.com) where you can see a couple of her pics—I’ll be adding more soon, along with blurbs as they come in. The cover reveal for her YA is going live in the next week and change… and Rachel has so much cool stuff lined up for that book, so you’ll be hearing again from me again really soon!
If you have friends or family who might be excited to hear about her Golden Girls mystery, please forward them this email to help spread the word!
Little Free Library Update! 🎉
Now that I’m not really on Twitter or posting our #LittleFreeLibrary updates anymore, I’ve been getting some messages from friends asking for an update… and don’t worry, the little free library is still going strong!
I recently bought a bunch of stickers (like: hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stickers, in bulk) to mix things up because we have a couple of kids who check back for new books a couple of times a day now that it’s summer… and even though we’re on the one-in, one-out system these days, we can’t restock *quite* that often.
But: Star Wars! Dinosaurs! Pokémon! Hello Kitty! Superheroes! Assorted Weirdly Drawn Animals! A gross of those little foam gliders!
Bonus: I took a tithe for my laptop… maybe you can tell that I’m a big fan of Disney (aka Rachel’s Golden Girls publisher) these days? :)
What I’ve Been Reading:
I’ve been mostly reading client manuscripts for Courage Literary these days… but Rachel got me a copy of Too Much Too Young, the 2 Tone Records Story: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of a Generation for my birthday!
And I also recently attended two book parties for author friends with new books. The first was for the Roman Holiday-inspired All Roads Lead to Rome by Sabrina Fedel, which was one of the best and most genuine author talks I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing (there was laughter, there were tears, there were pizzelles at the signing table)!
The other event was for my friend Caroline Carlson, who has a new book for middle graders called Wicked Marigold that reads like a kid lit classic (if you loved Howl’s Moving Castle, this one’s for you)!
On top of writing top-tier kid lit, Caroline is the children’s literature columnist for Literary Hub and I could’ve literally talked with her for hours and hours. But Chaely was waiting patiently on the front porch with Rachel and wouldn’t let me…
Here’s an excellent piece Caroline wrote for Lit Hub about writing “escapist children’s literature,” and you can sign up for her Substack here:
Until the next cover reveal,
Your friend,
Previously:
