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November 4, 2020

“My brain is broken and I am crazy,” I casually said out loud to no one in particular at 3:30 in the morning, hoping for some convincing reassurance that that wasn’t the case. That I was perfectly fine and it was just the current stressors of my life causing these bizarre swings in my moods and the irrational thoughts that accompanied them. That reassurance never came and I spent the next two hours trying to quiet all the dark thoughts currently plaguing me and force myself into a deep sleep. I’ve had more “bad days” than I care to count recently, and I am mentally and physically exhausted from fighting to get through them.

“This pain is not forever. This moment in time is not forever.”

A quote I have been repeating to myself after hearing Beth from This Is Us so gently and convincingly use those same words to soothe Randall after he admitted that everything going on around him just felt too heavy and too sad to hold.

A few months ago I considered myself lucky.

In the beginning of my pregnancy I thought for sure shit was about to be flipped upside down in my mind at a more rapid pace than it normally did. The world shut down. I finally received my bipolar disorder diagnosis. I had the first trimester from hell and was simultaneously dealing with withdrawal from weaning off an antidepressant that stopped working.

I constantly feared that any day now the weight of it all would be too heavy to continue to hold and it would come tumbling down on top of me.

“Surely I’m about to lose my fucking mind,” a persistent thought that lingered in the background.

But then a mental calm came. Physically though, a different story. I guess because I was so physically ill the first five months of my pregnancy, my brain decided to give itself a break from the mental sickness.

During that time the highs weren’t too high and the lows weren’t completely earth-shattering. I welcomed the relief, immensely grateful for its surprising presence. Though it was sometimes difficult to genuinely feel and express that gratitude because of the lingering anxious thought tapping me every now and again as if to say “you hoo bitch, don’t forget about meee...”

“This pain is not forever. This moment in time is not forever.”

The crash that I dreaded coming is now here.

I guess the physical relief signaled to my brain that is was time to crack its knuckles, say “oh yeah, where was I?” and proceed to wreak havoc. Suddenly, I want to jump out of my skin and run away from the heavy emptiness following me around.

The perpetual state of agitation, aggression and, irritability—every thing and every one is annoying me and getting on my last nerve, myself included.

The paranoia—suddenly every one who claimed to love and care about me was only pretending to do so so that I didn’t kill myself.

The constant urge to just fuck shit up—punch a wall, crash a car, harm myself.

The fatigue, the guilt, the confusion.

And then I think of my daughter and I feel so sad for her. I begin to dread the inevitable moments in time when I am feeling the weight of this and can’t show up for her in the way that she needs me to because I have already expelled too much energy trying to exist. Feeling so ashamed and selfish for choosing to bring her into this terrible world with a mentally ill mother.

And again, I remind myself…

“This pain is not forever. This moment in time is not forever.”

As many times as I have to write, read, and recite those words to remind myself of that fact, I will for I am hopeful that the day will come when I believe them.

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Ashleigh Vaughn is a writer of personal essays centered around her experiences with mental illness. She maintains a newsletter, “here comes the sun,” on mental health and creative writing, reaching a growing audience of readers drawn to candid, intimate essays. With her words, Ashleigh hopes readers feel seen, heard, and less alone in their struggle, and that they can understand themselves and others a bit better.

At AUTHOR & CO., we create tools that bring literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Our collection includes Author Clock, the clock that tells time through quotes from literature.

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Visit our website to learn more.

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Malavika Kannan’s new novel, UNPRECEDENTED TIMES, is a fast-paced “campus novel and community story” set against the apocalyptic background of the COVID-19 pandemic. And it’s out today!

The story follows Rishi and her friends, a group of college freshmen trying to make their way in the world while navigating the existential questions of being young, ambitious, and then suddenly severed from the selves they thought they were becoming.

In a way, the title itself is a timestamp. “Unprecedented times” became one of the phrases of the pandemic, repeated so often it likely lost its meaning for most of us. But in our conversation with Malavika, we discuss how the phrase also belongs to college itself, where every experience can feel without precedent.

“The title is meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, as it’s meant to make a reference to the COVID time period, but also ask these questions about how much of our experiences are new.” —Malavika Kannan

CONFESSIONS AT 2 A.M.

It’s the first day of college at Stanford, and Rishi is asked to write something about herself to display for her dorm room. What she lands on is the following: “I like stories of all forms, novels, movies, confessions at 2AM.”

This isn’t meant to reflect especially well on Rishi. It’s a little pretentious, very much something an eighteen-year-old might write while trying to sound interesting.

But maybe she is earnest in one thing: her desire for the kind of conversation that can only happen when it’s late at night, when most people are asleep.

In her desire, for the kind of closeness that needs the cover of night. Later in the novel, Rishi and Georgia take a long walk and decide to tell each other their life stories. As Malavika puts it, Rishi is hungry to have her brain “completely gobbled up by someone else,” and to do the same for someone else. The best time of night for this is a 2AM, of course.

THE PANDEMIC

For Rishi and her friends, college is supposed to confirm a story they already believe about their lives. They are Stanford students, high achievers, and many of them have been raised to think in terms of a clear progression. Rishi, as the child of immigrants, feels some extra pressure. Her life is supposed to move forward from her parents’, each generation is supposed to go a little further.

Then, in comes the pandemic, and though the future is still there, it’s no longer as straightforward as it once seemed. Rishi starts to see that time might not move in one clean direction, and things may take longer, or move differently, than she expected.

“When the temporal markers of progress kind of just went away, a lot of people began to see how much of the organizing forces of their lives may have actually been arbitrary.” —Malavika Kannan

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TIME ON CAMPUS

In a campus novel, time can feel fast-moving because the world of college is so enclosed. Malavika says she has not experienced anything quite like it since graduating. A few weeks can be enough for a relationship to intensify and change everything.

Rishi and Georgia have only known each other for a few months before they essentially move in together, or “u-haul,” as Malavika says. But in college, a few months can feel like a lot of time. They’ve spent so many hours together that the intensity of their friendship is logical, even if it would look rushed anywhere else.

“There’s a haste and a warp speed of college, and such a rush of exposure to new experiences.” —Malavika Kannan

THE PASSAGE OF SEASONS

Malavika thought carefully about how to show time passing in the novel. Seasons eventually made the most sense, partly because they’re already associated with the structure of college. A school year is divided that way, and the feeling of each term can become a memory of its own.

Because the seasons repeat, they also let the reader feel how much has changed. By the time the book reaches a second autumn, the first autumn already feels far away, even though not that much time has passed. Malavika wanted the character arcs to feel long inside a relatively short span of time, which is essentially the experience of college, and also, perhaps, the experience of the pandemic.

“There are moments that kind of… rhyme.” —Malavika Kannan

Watch our full conversation here.

MALAVIKA KANNAN is the author of Unprecedented Times and All the Yellow Suns. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, New York, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere.

At the heart of AUTHOR & CO. is a love of reading, so we create tools that bring literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Our collection includes Author Clock, the clock that tells time through quotes from literature.

In the next Author Clock quote update, Unprecedented Times will appear at 2 a.m., the hour of conversations that feel possible only after dark.

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THE NEW PEOPLE introduces Emma and Rachel, a newly married couple who have just arrived to their new home in a conservative college town in Indiana. They’ve left Chicago for academic jobs and bought a house that they hope will support the steadier routine of work and marriage.

Their house is a renovated foreclosure, freshly painted and cleaned. It’s new, at least in most senses of the word. Except for one thing: upstairs, in the garage attic, the previous owners, Charlotte and Dirk, are still there. What looks like a fresh start for Emma and Rachel is a space already occupied by someone else’s unfinished life.

“What happens when everything that you cherish is gone? And what do you do when you’re trying to hold onto it?” —Andrea Uptmor

METAPHORICAL GHOSTS appear as soon as Emma enters the house, on the first page of the novel. Though the floors, carpet, and fixtures are brand new, Emma can feel that someone else’s life has been lived there first.

Andrea shared that she once imagined a version of the book where Emma believed the house was literally haunted. But that idea pulled the story in a direction too far away from what interested her. Of course, pieces of the ghost story stayed, but in a more domestic form.

“She immediately identifies the lingering emotional residue of the previous owners.” —Andrea Uptmor

In 2008, during the housing market crash, people who had spent their lives moving toward retirement found themselves losing the homes and savings they had counted on. In the same year, Barack Obama was elected, and Proposition 8 passed in California. This left thousands of same-sex couples who had recently married in a state of uncertainty.

Andrea saw those instabilities reaching into the most personal parts of life: a house, a marriage, a savings account, the future. In The New People, we see that the things that are supposed to make life feel secure can suddenly disappear, and we can’t help but sympathize—unexpectedly, even with Charlotte and Dirk.

“When you’re writing fiction, you really need to put your characters at the point of desperation.” —Andrea Uptmor

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THE TIME IT TAKES TO BELONG isn’t the same as the time it takes to buy a house. Emma and Rachel quickly sign the papers, move in, but they still feel like strangers in their new community. They’re living somewhere Emma can’t assume she’ll be welcomed, and because she’s unsure who’s on her side, the fear she feels inside the house is only made stronger.

Charlotte has the opposite problem. The house is connected to her family, her son, and the future she had always imagined living there. The legal relationship to the property has changed, but her attachment to it hasn’t gone anywhere. She can’t let go of the house because in her mind, it still contains the life that was meant to be hers.

“Where do you belong? Most people would describe that as home.” —Andrea Uptmor

TIME AS A CHARACTER, Andrea explains, is ever-present in the novel. So much of The New People is about a “ticking clock.” Emma tentatively begins the process of having a baby, and IVF would put her on a strict medical schedule. Emma and Rachel’s days are dictated by the academic calendar, while Charlotte and Dirk’s days depend on whether Emma and Rachel are home, and at what time.

Ironically, routine is exactly makes Emma vulnerable. She and Rachel keep a consistent schedule, which provides some stability. But Charlotte studies their movements and habits. She knows when they leave, when they come home, and when the house will be open to her.

“Time is a very big character in the book, you wonder, at what moment is all of this going to implode?” —Andrea Uptmor

LIFE IS A CONTINUUM, and in the morning hours, Andrea is writing. With four kids and a busy house, she finds the time to write before everyone else is awake. Around 5:30 a.m., the house is quiet, the sun is coming in, and at the end of the day, no matter what happens, she knows she wrote, at the very least.

She likes to walk first, passing the same neighbors and the same morning scenes. That daily repetition gives her the right headspace to write. Routine becomes a way of starting the day, and maybe that is the continuum: the day beginning again and continuing the story.

“There is just something magical about that time of day, like 5:30 in the morning, everyone you love is like asleep in their beds.” —Andrea Uptmor

Watch our full conversation here.

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ANDREA UPTMOR received her MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota, and her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, PANK, and The Masters Review, among others. She lives in the Chicago area with her family.

At the heart of AUTHOR & CO. is a love of reading, so we create tools that bring literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Currently, our collection includes Author Clock, the clock that tells time through quotes from literature.

In the next Author Clock quote update, The New People will appear at 8:30 a.m.!

Learn more at authorandco.com

The phrase “youth is wasted on the young” carries the same greeting card-triteness as my most recent co-star notification: “not every door needs to be opened”. Okay. I delete the app and yank open the time machine gate. I am not taking cosmic advice from a notification I share with four million other Scorpio risings.

I find myself making eye contact with the girl in the mirror. Wide-eyed with a reflex soft pout that make my lips appear a little fuller—an all-too familiar insecurity at the time, sat in the same boat as the genetic creases of my neck and the not-so-genetic stitch mark at the bottom of my chin (souvenir of an elementary school fall, the funny rubbery scent of anesthetic still accessible if I think about it too hard). At 80, I lost count of the story of every wrinkle and scar.

I note the eleven white hairs. Yes, eleven, and yes, at 24. I keep plucking them out despite everybody’s warnings about double the amount growing back. I am undeniably stubborn. I come by it honestly.

If the human lifespan were a 24-hour clock, I am looking at 7:12am in the morning of my life.

How did I get here? I don’t know. Someone probably threw a mix of Nietzsche, a coin flip, a routine doctors appointment that lead to a complete nervous breakdown about mortality into a blender and viola. Or perhaps a whooping DMT trip. Anything more complex than this to do with the space-time continuum, I fear my still very human brain cannot handle; it seems no amount of time or wisdom could grant me the powers of understanding any math or physics in the end.

I look in the mirror and think I know her, but she doesn’t know me. A transient thought. Not to fret, we have much to do.

Dr. Sanskriti Srivastava is a UK-based doctor and writer. She writes Mindscape, a Substack publication exploring the intersection of psychology, medicine, culture, and the art of being human.

At AUTHOR & CO., we create tools that bring literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Our collection includes Author Clock, the clock that tells time through quotes from literature.

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Visit our website to learn more.

Meet Author Asks, the conversation card game that transforms real questions from books into absorbing conversations.

Letter from the Editor

For the past few years, a lot of my work at Author & Co. has meant reading with very specific goals in mind, locating the strange and unexpected places literature enters daily life.

For Author Clock, I was looking for exact minutes of the day. For Author Forecast, I searched for descriptions of weather.

And lately, I’ve been looking for something new: questions!

Honestly, I thought the task would be easier...

There were days when I found myself searching every question in a book and still not finding one that worked for the game.

Some were too tied to plot. Some needed the whole scene around them. Others were questions only in the grammatical sense: “Hello?” “Would you like tea?” “Where are you going?”

The best questions would need to leave the book and still feel worth answering.

When one worked, I usually knew it right away. It had the exact feeling I was looking for: literary, and a bit irresistible.

The idea for Author Asks came to the team as we were thinking about how literature might enter daily life in a more social way.

Our first two products, Author Clock and Author Forecast, are both, in a way, private experiences.

At home, I pass my Author Clock on my desk and catch a quote at 1:17 p.m., or look at Author Forecast and see the sunny day outside reframed through a passage from literature. I love reflecting on the current moment and my surroundings through literature as the day passes. But, like much of my reading, this is usually a solo activity.

Now, Author Asks brings literature into a conversation. A question is read aloud, and suddenly, the quote has company.

Author Asks includes 200 Question Cards, split into two decks: 100 Classic and 100 Contemporary. Each card includes the question, the author, and the book it came from. You can play with the decks separately or mix them together.

To start the game, a player draws a Question Card and reads it aloud. Everyone takes a turn answering. There are no wrong answers, just opportunities to start a conversation, tell a story, hear someone differently, or get to know a friend on a deeper level.

The game also includes 10 Character Cards, which add a “plot twist” to the round. You might answer as The Poet, The Unreliable Narrator, or another literary persona when the table needs more drama, humor, or a new direction.

One of my favorite elements of the final version is the packaging.

The box looks like a book, so it can sit on a bookshelf with the novels, stories, and authors that inspired it. Inside are the Classic and Contemporary decks, along with the Character Cards and the white oak stand.

Oh, and how could I forget? The white oak stand is an especially nice touch because it has two purposes.

During gameplay, it holds one question upright, elevating the card being played.

And between games, the stand gives the question an opportunity to have another life.

If you’re particularly enchanted by a quote, any Question Card can be displayed on a desk, a coffee table, a nightstand, or a bookshelf, like a sentence you haven’t finished answering yet.

One of my favorite Question Cards is from Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

He asks, “Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?”

So, what do you think?

Let’s play a round of Author Asks and find out.

-Yasmin

We’re bringing literature to daily life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Subscribe below to be part of the story.

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Yasmin is Head of Content & Community, where she curates the quote libraries for all Author & Co. products. .

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into your everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

For inquiries about Author Asks, please email us at info@authorandco.com

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From THE WALK BOOK

Day 21: Cumberland

A mile or so out of Cumberland, a guy pulls over, offers me a ride into town. Sort of hippy-looking, rocking a dirty knit cap over natty, near-dreaded hair. Cartilage piercing. Says he hitchhiked to the Southwest back in the day, five or so years ago, before getting stuck down there. “Sucked into the Phoenix meth world.” Since, he’s just been working, paying child support for his two kids who stayed in Phoenix with their mothers. Is also paying off bills for over $2,000 in dental work. Fuck meth, he tells me.

Takes me right into downtown Cumberland. Nice little area, he says, take a sec to check it out. Before adding, You get really stuck, what I’d do is, check out this mission, this homeless shelter, right there in town.

Word, I say. Just might. It is supposed to rain tonight.

Find a McDonald’s, post up for a good while. Charge the flip-phone, check the emails. First internet in almost a week. When it starts getting dark, figure Might linger awhile. Might not skip town just yet.

Start walking towards the rescue mission. It’s across the tracks, literally but also proverbially, based on the ramshackle crew I come upon on the other side: four, five guys, two girls, paper bag-covered beverages, cigarettes, a few other smoking implements containing I don’t even know what. A skinhead guy with a sunburned face goes Hey man, wanna get high? C’mere, c’mere! Wanna get high? I’m all, Eh, pro’ly good. He goes Hey man, you a hopper? You a hopper, huh? We take care of our own!

I’m like Nah. I’m a walker.

The entrance to the rescue mission, turns out, is right next door to this crew, so figure Hm, maybe not really digging the shelter vibes after all. I got gear, I’m probably good.

Head back over the tracks, thinking exploring the outskirts of town is the move, although also not entirely sure what my plan is for tonight. No need to panic though. While I’m here, in a city, might as well hop into a bar.

Enter the first one I come across. The Canal Bar. A little divey, big rectangular bar surrounding a central countertop. Two pairs of flat screens back-to-back, facing out. Men drinking alone, watching the Orioles game. Have a seat, order a $2 PBR. Thinking, Just drink a bit, I’ll figure out where to sleep when the time comes. It’s all good.

Guy to my right, middle-aged, balding, stocky, sees my pack. Starts rambling on and on about this trip he took back in the day. Like, Lemme tell you, me and my buddies, we flew into fucking Utah. Camped out for months! Eating nothing but bacon grease! Makin’ fires! Look at my pack, bro, my pack was sick—showing me on his iPhone—how sick was my pack?! My friend Jeb from Nebraska, he was my bro! We were badass!

The thing he keeps repeating is: You don’t even know, man. You don’t even know!

Finally, I’m all, Well, as it turns out, I might actually have some idea—

But then he cuts in like You don’t even know man, we were big time! My friend Jeb from Nebraska, not even gonna lie, sometimes I’d be scared, it’d be cold and dark, and I’d sleep next to Jeb. I’d be like, Jeb, no homo, I’m not gay! But gonna sleep next to you because I’m kinda scared right now.

When I finally redirect the convo out of this redundant loop, he tells me his name is John and he works for the Department of Defense, is basically an auditor, focusing on military businesses. From Pittsburgh. Just here for the night. “A couple Cumberland businesses are fucking up, gotta go handle them in the morning.”

Finish my beer, roll a cig, and am about to make moves, to look for somewhere to sleep, when he’s like Wait! Don’t leave! Let me buy you a drink! I go, Okay, sure. He buys another round.

It’s not until we go out for a cigarette that he finally starts listening to what I’ve been saying. He’s like, You walked here from Philly? Yeah right, I don’t believe you. He starts smelling me, going Nope, nope, you didn’t do that.

A few more beers in, I’m like, Look man, gotta make moves, figure out my shit for tonight. I’m getting up to go, when he’s like Hold on, you want a place to stay tonight? I’m like, Really? Not asking. He’s like, Yeah man, got a suite with two queen beds all to myself. You could crash!

Talking to him more, it turns out he’s got a wife, who’s currently pregnant with their second child.

We’re out on the sidewalk when this scraggly couple comes by. The guy’s got emo bangs, is in a hoodie; the girl, dark black eye shadow, also hooded. Teenagers. John, out of nowhere, goes Heyyy fatty! Here fatty! Barking at the girl. The guy she’s with turns and goes, The fuck you say? You’re seriously gonna talk to a 17-year-old girl like that? John’s like, What are you gonna do about it? I tell the kid, Dude’s wilding, he’s drunk, sorry.

The couple shuffles off into the night. John’s giddy, like Oh man, we woulda kicked their asses! I’m all, Okay bud, settle the fuck—

Like 11 p.m. by this point.

—

We leave the bar, walk beneath this underpass. There’s a gas station right there. John says he wants “real” cigarettes, asks what I smoke, then goes inside.

I’m sitting out front, watching over the half-full pint glass he snuck out of the bar and stashed in the grass, when I see him come out. He’s hunched over, like running down the street.

I’m all, What the fuck is this guy doing? Almost call out to him, before realizing.

I look over to where he’s running, and there’s a Marriott right there.

Dude got shifty. Ditched me!

Stand there beneath the dimly lit underpass in disbelief, laughing out loud but also wanting to cry a bit.

I snap out of it, wander behind the Marriott, where I find this little boardwalk. I can tell it’s gonna rain, and there’s a bridge there, so thinking maybe I can crash beneath it.

Start trolling beneath the bridge. It’s somewhat concealed and enclosed at its base. But it’s a foot bridge, only maybe fifteen feet high, and dotted with circular perforations that, even though nighttime pedestrians are unlikely to be peeking through, still feels too sketchy for comfort. Something suddenly Gollum-y and swamp creaturish about squatting down there, even considering this spot. So book it out of there, terrified by “what I’ve become.”

Walk the twenty-or-so yards back towards the Marriott where John is likely watching TV, or puking his brains out, until the ramp is low enough to hop up onto the bridge.

Consider crossing it, back towards the towpath, before traversing it widthwise, vaulting over the railing, onto soft grass. Book it away from both the town and the woods, high-stepping across the marshy field and into a small copse on its far side, just shy of a highway on-ramp. Crash out. It was supposed to rain hard but ends up not being so bad.

SEAN THOR CONROE is the author of Fuccboi (Little Brown), The Walk Book (Little Engines), and Savior, out next year from Dalkey Archive.

At AUTHOR & CO., we connect literature to everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Our flagship product, Author Clock, tells time through quotes from literature.

Visit our website to learn more.

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IN THE FERVENT WHITES, De’Shawn Charles Winslow places us in the fictional Hudson Valley town of Fervent. Sylvia Upshaw and her best friend and neighbor, Fate Jolly, are holding their breath when their volatile neighbors, Ella and James White, are released from prison after being wrongfully convicted of murder. Their homecoming brings back a secret Sylvia and Fate have been living with, one that may have lead to the death of the Whites’ adopted son.

De’Shawn described the book as “half mystery, half thriller.” The “mystery” is the murder itself: what happened, who knew what, and what Sylvia and Fate may have set in motion. The “thriller” is what happens after Ella and James come home.

“They are on pins and needles about this couple coming home.” —De’Shawn Charles Winslow

THE WAY TIME WORKS in The Fervent Whites is similar to the way memory works. The book begins after the murder, after the conviction, after the secret Sylvia and Fate have kept. Ella and James White come back to town, and suddenly the past is no longer behind anyone.

For Sylvia, that past goes back further than her relationship with the Whites. She is living in the early 1980s, but her fear sends her back to the 1940s, when racist vandalism marked her family’s house. The years have passed but the danger hasn’t gone away.

“Time has moved on, but people and situations have not so much.” —De’Shawn Charles Winslow

THE CREATION OF FERVENT came partly from De’Shawn’s time living in upstate New York. During the pandemic, he moved to a hamlet in Saugerties, while working on another book. He thought of the stay almost as a residency, a stretch of time away from the city to write and spend time with his then-partner. Within a week or two, he realized he was one of very few people of color living there full-time.

On walks, some neighbors greeted him and some did not. At first, he wondered what they were responding to: race, sexuality, being new, being from the city. Then he watched those same neighbors speak easily to visitors from Manhattan. Later, after the Tops grocery store shooting in Buffalo, he found himself thinking more about race in upstate New York, and those observations became part of the foundation for The Fervent Whites.

“I started thinking about race upstate New York and how similar it is to race in the South.” —De’Shawn Charles Winslow

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THE 1980S AS A BACKDROP gave De’Shawn a way to place the characters inside public history without making the book a history lesson. He talked about the early 1980s as a period that could seem freer on the surface, while gay people were still living with secrecy, caution, and very real danger. The AIDS epidemic was beginning to surface, though it had not been given that name yet.

For Fate and Vincent, the novel’s two gay characters, the decade affects where they can go, what they can say, who they can trust, and what kind of community they build in private. De’Shawn wanted to show the secrecy and caution of the period, while also showing gay people with agency, desire, rooms of their own, and ways of protecting one another.

“Gay people have their own secret communities. And even though there may not be a lot of establishments, public establishments, they are having salons and stuff at their houses.” —De’Shawn Charles Winslow

DOES TIME HEAL? In The Fervent Whites, the question begins with Ella and James White. Their conviction has been overturned, but the years they spent in prison are still gone, never to be reclaimed.

Several characters reach for the idea that years can soften what happened, or give a town permission to move on. De’Shawn is more skeptical. Fervent may find moments of peace and generosity, but no one will ever forget what happened in 1981 and 1982.

The ending leaves room for hope and community. People gather, eat, make plans, raise children, buy land, and keep living. Still, the years between one event and the next have not repaired the damage. Time doesn’t fix the larger problems the characters, and we, are living with.

“Time only heals things temporarily, until the scab gets torn off.” —De’Shawn Charles Winslow

Watch the full conversation here.

DE’SHAWN CHARLES WINSLOW is the author of In West Mills, which won a Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, an American Book Award, a Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and was a finalist for other awards and prizes. His other novels include Decent People (2023) and The Fervent Whites (2026). De’Shawn was born and raised in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in the New York City area.

At the heart of AUTHOR & CO. is a love of reading, so we create tools that bring literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Our collection includes Author Clock, the clock that tells time through quotes from literature.

In the next quote update, you’ll find The Fervent Whites at 10:00 a.m., a new minute from a novel where time passes but the past is still close.

Learn more at authorandco.com

Together, these moments form a portrait of life, one minute at a time.

In today’s Timepiece, returns to the early days of the pandemic, when two weeks stretched into an unknowable future…

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I REMEMBER THE EARLY DAYS of the COVID-19 pandemic when I felt grateful to have the one-day-at-a-time axiom tattooed inside my brain. The tools I learned in my early recovery have become my saving grace when life happens on life’s terms.

“Two weeks to flatten the curve!” they said, assuring us that everything would be back to normal soon.

Non-essential workers stayed home to “stop the spread,” catching up on hobbies and binging Tiger King because we’ll all go back to normal soon… right? I spent those two weeks mastering my frittata recipe while watching Melrose Place and listening to the Moana soundtrack on repeat until I knew Maui’s rap in “You’re Welcome” by heart.

Two weeks quickly turned into three weeks, then a month, then summer, then the foreseeable future. One day, one hour, one minute at a time, I told myself on repeat. Like clockwork, 1:59 p.m., became 2 p.m., which then became 2:01 p.m., which miraculously turned into 2:02 p.m.

My husband and I had vastly different pandemic experiences. He was managing a restaurant, so he was considered an essential worker. My day job went remote, giving me the flexibility to finish my book proposal and ultimately sell my first book. He navigated the subway chaos to sell “essential” tapas to Upper West Siders.

In the words of Queen Madonna, time went by… so slowly. The groundhog days felt simultaneously endless and fleeting, reminding me that life moves in increments I can rarely control. My only option is to show up for it moment by moment.

Now, six years later, that same gratitude reminds me that even when life slows, speeds up, or turns upside down, time continues to pass, and with it, opportunity, healing, and perspective.

One day at a time still works, even when the calendar refuses to cooperate. And my frittata? It gets better every time.

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Tawny Lara, AKA The Sober Sexpert, has reported on the sober curious and non-alcoholic drink movement since 2015. She is the author of Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze, co-author of The Sobriety Deck, and co-founder of the non-alc botanical spirit (parentheses). She teaches virtual courses and writes a newsletter, , about writing, publishing, media strategy, and DIY PR.

At the heart of AUTHOR & CO. is a love of reading, so we create tools that bring literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Our current collection includes Author Clock—the clock that tells time through quotes from literature, and Author Forecast, which pairs real-time weather conditions with passages from books.

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IN NATURAL DISASTER, twenty-four hours pass in the life of a woman on her final day of maternity leave. The mother, unnamed but all too recognizable, sets out to give her two young children a perfect day: playground, a café, maybe even swimming, and proof that she has been “present” enough—putting almost every hope she has for herself onto this unit of time. Through “the prism of a day,” Lisa Owens captures one life at a particular moment, with children, in a marriage, with work waiting for her, and the private thoughts that make the day so relatable.

“Inevitably, things begin to go off the rails from almost the beginning.” —Lisa Owens

MOTHERHOOD RESETS THE CLOCK, quite literally. In our conversation, Owens described parenthood as a “radical change” in a person’s relationship to time: before children, a day can be organized around work, errands, plans, and a general sense of choice. With a child, time is responsive. The day is still made of minutes, but those minutes look different, and answer to someone else’s hunger, curiosity, exhaustion, delight.

In Natural Disaster, the final day of maternity leave exists between two kinds of time: the scheduled time she is about to return to in the office, and the slow yet immediate time dictated by young children. But, to her dismay, she can’t seem to fully stay “in the moment.” She is with her children and also in her head. She’s full of worries about her marriage, her career, and the rules, real and imagined, of being a mother in the world.

“You go from having this very independent existence to suddenly being at the behest of this tiny creature.” —Lisa Owens

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THE TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR FORMAT gives Lisa the practical structure of a day while still leaving room for everything happening in the narrator’s head. She said the book began as a short story around the scene where the double stroller gets stuck in a shop. As she kept writing, she realized the story was the whole day: waking up, breakfast, getting everyone ready, making a plan, the minutes in between, and the internal monologue running through it all.

The connection to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is in this structure, and it’s made explicit by the epigraph: “She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” In both novels, a day is just a day, a party just a party, but inside it, the narrators are moving through memory, self-consciousness, and private fears. In Natural Disaster, the narrator wants to be present with her boys, but keeps finding herself moving inward instead: thinking about her marriage, her career, other mothers, and all the ways she might be getting the day wrong.

“If I can just, for this one day, get it all correct, that’s the one that will count.” —Lisa Owens

REAL TIME is obscured with young children, and the phone makes it easier to lose track of what kind of time we’re in. The narrator reaches for it to check the hour and can end up in messages, half-formed texts to her husband, or social media full of parenting advice and images of mothers who seem to have the day better arranged. As Lisa, and many of us, have experienced, picking up the phone to check the time can lead to WhatsApp or email or Instagram, with ten minutes gone and the original question still unanswered. In Natural Disaster, the phone becomes another source of divided attention, of marriage, work, motherhood, and all the facets of identity that don’t necessarily fit together like a puzzle.

“I’ve wasted a lot of time, and I still don’t know the actual fact that I had gone to seek out in the first place.” —Lisa Owens

SLOWING DOWN complicates the narrator’s mission to make one perfect day. Children keep their own time, which can be beautiful in theory but exasperating in practice. Even getting to the store can take two hours because every dandelion has to be examined. The day must move, milestones must be reached, memories must be made. The frustration is practical and wrapped up in meals, errands, naps, and the “adult-imposed” schedules that make parents feel as though the day is always behind, even in a phase they already know will pass. Lisa spoke about the strange contradiction of early parenthood: time feels endless while you are inside it, and then suddenly it is gone, leaving the parent to wonder whether she cherished it as much as she was supposed to.

“It is actually a complete gift to see the world in those terms, to see a child literally experiencing things for the first ever time.” —Lisa Owens

Watch our full conversation here.

LISA OWENS is a novelist and screenwriter. Her debut novel, Not Working, was published in 2016. She lives in London with her family.

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Currently, our collection includes Author Clock, the clock that tells time through quotes from literature.

Soon, Natural Disaster will join Author Clock at 5:30 a.m., bringing Lisa Owens’s long morning off the page and into the first hours of the day.

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IN SHAKEN TO THE CORE, Joy is a Miami photographer whose “carefully curated life” is interrupted by loss, and soon after, by circumstances that change the future she thought she had chosen. In conversation, Dara Levan is interested in how people keep living after loss, and how joy and grief can exist simultaneously without canceling each other out.

“What do we do with the time we have left?” Dara asks, a question that runs through the novel—through motherhood, marriage, loss, and love, asking us to remain present and to stay open to joy.

“What are we doing with these moments when it could just be our last? And I mean that in a really uplifting, present way.”

A GOODBYE AT SUNSET is where Dara perfectly encapsulates grief, memory, and the present moment. On the first page of Shaken to the Core, we’re on a Miami beach at sunset, Joy’s mother’s favorite time of day. Dara said the choice came partially from the “tapestry of shared experiences” drawn from her podcast, her work as a speech therapist, and her own life. “Salt is cleansing,” Dara explained, and healing comes in waves, “just like the waves of an ocean.” The scene is a goodbye, but Dara intended it to be uplifting, because for her, honoring the people we have lost also means honoring what they loved.

“I love sunsets. I find them soothing. I also think sunsets are metaphorical. It’s an ending.”

GRIEF HAS SEASONS, Dara says, and that is why she structures the book that way. She talked about the ways grief can make people act unlike themselves, whether it be making choices that seem irrational, or wondering why they haven’t cried yet. Winter is an inward season, and in the novel, winter gives Joy’s emotional state a visable reference point. Joy is “wintering, literally and figuratively,” but winter is not only darkness. Dara tells us that a dark, snowy day is still magical and uplifting, and we believe her.

“Everybody grieves differently at every phase, at every stage, at every season.”

TAKING TIME TO BE PRESENT is Dara’s way of thinking about the clock in her own life. She joked that she’s “perpetually late” and doesn’t wear a watch, but her relationship to time isn’t so much about punctuality. She wants to be fully present, fully there for a friend, a child’s accomplishment, or moments with her husband that feel sacred.

We see this perspective infused in the novel, and the lessons learned by Joy after her relationship to time changes after loss. Because the future is different than what she imagined, it becomes even more important for her to use the present as an opportunity to choose how to live. Dara’s answer to “What do we do with the time we have left?” is presence: choosing joy without pretending grief has disappeared.

“That’s what life’s about, it’s about living. And living, to me, is about being as present as we can.”

DARA LEVAN is an award-winning author, speaker, and the founder of Every Soul Has a Story, an inspiring podcast in which she interviews guests from around the globe. Shaken to the Core is her latest novel, published yesterday, on June 23rd!

At the heart of AUTHOR & CO. is a love of reading, and we’re bringing literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Our collection includes Author Clock—the clock that tells time through quotes from literature.

And now, Shaken to the Core will join Author Clock at 11:55 a.m., bringing Dara Levan’s words into an everyday minute her novel encourages us not to miss.

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IN BABYLON, SOUTH DAKOTA, Saul and Mei Hsiu are Chinese immigrants trying to make a life for their family on a South Dakota homestead they’ve inherited. The seasons change, and the family grows older in a place where time is felt in the weather and in the land. But the Hsius have not moved to just any piece of land. Part of their property is taken over by the U.S. government, and a nuclear missile silo is built beneath it. Above ground, daily life on the homestead continues. Underground, something secret is keeping another kind of time.

“Ultimately, it’s a book about death, but also about what it means to spend time with one another, to mark the hour, and to know that we’re all kind of getting old at the same time.”

HOW NATURE KEEPS TIME became clearest to Tom in the difference between the city and the homestead. He grew up in New York City, where weather is moved through quickly, from a subway platform to an office lobby, to a heated apartment. On a farm, there isn’t the same degree of separation. Weather changes what the day can be. Rain can cause delays, heat can exhaust the body. “Nature can keep time,” Tom says. The year becomes physical: visible in the crops, the air, and felt in the different modes of labor required by each season.

“Everything feels so permeable to nature and to time.”

IMPOSSIBLE AND IMPROBABLE conditions are easier to imagine once a story has already been told. Tom spoke about early missile engineers who had grown up reading stories like Buck Rogers, and how science fiction gave them “a common language” for technologies that didn’t exist yet. In Babylon, South Dakota, that impossibility becomes concrete: a nuclear missile silo beneath the Hsius’ land. The farm is still a farm, but it now belongs to two kinds of reality at once.

“There’s only really one mode of cognition that we have when we think about things that are impossible or improbable or far future… And that’s the mode of science fiction.”

FORCES OF NATURE and of forces of government become intertwined in Babylon, South Dakota, and both make the Hsiu family feel small in the face of something larger than themselves. Tom defines the sublime as the feeling of being “very small next to a very large thing.” Weather can be unforgiving and brutal, but at least it makes itself known. Government power is guarded, spoken in a language the family can’t fully understand. The Hsius live under the weather and over the silo, affected by forces that can change their lives without ever fully explaining themselves.

“You, along with everyone else, along with all of the world, is drawn along by these forces that are kind of beyond your control or understanding.”

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SEASONS OF GRIEF arrive on the homestead after Mei disappears, when Saul loses his place in time. Tom spoke about grief as a state in which “the world seems to stop,” followed by the shock of realizing that “everyone else has kept going.” For Saul, the farm’s greening is painful because it means continuation. The seasons have moved on, as they always do, and no amount of feeling can stop time or slow it down.

“No one has waited for you. And no one has kind of put their hand on the throttle and given you a break.”

THE TRANSLOCATION OF STORIES is what happens when family stories travel through enough time. A story from a parent or grandparent, especially one carried across countries and generations, is met with some willing suspension of disbelief. The story itself has crossed so much distance that its survival becomes part of its meaning. Time can “calcify” stories, but it can also “forgive narrative sins.” And at a certain point, the fact that the story survived becomes part of its power.

“It matters that it made it. Not even that it’s true, or that it’s verifiable, it’s simply powerful because it is a narrative fragment which has lived for so long.”

THE LIE OF NARRATIVE is also the comfort of narrative. Tom described it as the belief that one thing happened because of another, and that life can be understood as a chain of causes and consequences. Without that, life can feel like “Class IV rapids” we are “white-knuckling” through, moved forward by events we can’t control. Stories help us look back at the rush and find a current. They turn coincidence into pattern, and pattern into meaning. Similarly, science fiction gives the impossible a language, and with enough time, what once seemed impossible can start to feel real.

“Everything seems magical if you wait long enough.”

Watch our full conversation here.

TOM LIN is the author of Babylon, South Dakota and The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, which won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

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At the heart of AUTHOR & CO. is a love of reading, so we create tools that bring literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

Currently, our collection includes Author Forecast, which pairs real-time weather conditions with passages from books.

Soon, when the weather calls for it, Babylon, South Dakota will appear on Author Forecast, bringing the novel’s stormy weather off the page and onto your bookshelf.

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Together, these moments form a portrait of life, one minute at a time.

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I SPEND MY AFTERNOONS sitting on my back porch. I read. I write. I check emails. I open the Merlin app to identify the birds singing in the trees. I watch the pollinators flit among the wild patch of Spanish needle and tasselflower on the side of the yard. I listen to the leaves speak to each other through the mouth of the wind.

In the early afternoon, there are no shadows. The light blankets everything evenly, without dimension. But as the sun falls, certain portions of scrub are illuminated while others are thrown into darkness. The bare trunk of the Brazilian pepper tree in my neighbor’s yard begins to glow. At first, it is silvery-white, but as the sun continues its descent, the bark becomes yellow. It drips with golden light. I think it is after six, but we’ve just sprung forward and lost an hour. It is 7:04. But the hour is only different if you think about time the way humans do, as a way to place ourselves within an exacting frame. To the Brazilian pepper tree, numbers on a clock are meaningless. It knows only that the sun is shining from its last angle of the day. It feels the air cooling and it sighs into the coming night.

I stop what I’m doing to watch the changing shades of the Brazilian pepper. I hate this tree. It is invasive, dominating the natives through sheer force of will. It crowds out the longleaf pine, which still tries valiantly to hold its ground even as the Brazilian pepper drops black beads of misfortune that will take root and multiply. In the days of old, fire would have solved this problem. It would destroy the invaders and replenish the soil, inviting native grasses and rare flora to reemerge from the ashes. This once-great pine forest was cleared for orange groves decades ago. Now, even the oranges are gone, replaced by houses and asphalt. I don’t want to hate humanity for what we’ve done to this place, so instead, I hate this tree.

And yet, this tree is golden. This horrible Brazilian pepper is precious metal brought to life by the sunset. I am enamored with my enemy. I rip its offspring from the ground in protest, but my eyes feast on it all the same. Both of these truths exist together. It is after six. It is after seven. The number is irrelevant. The golden light is the truth.

Later, when the sun finally buries itself in the horizon, the Brazilian pepper tree turns grey and becomes a foe once more, dull and impenetrable. The sky dims but for one cloud, a cumulus giant still scattering the last of the sun’s gaze. The gold shifts from tree to cloud, retreating farther from my grasp. The cloud shines through the still-whispering leaves. Now, it is nearly seven. Or rather, it is nearly eight. Time shifts at humanity’s whim. Lose an hour. Gain it back again. But the time doesn’t matter; only the light matters. The gold continues to flee, but pink remains in the growing darkness. It softens the sky. It softens my heart. All of this has happened before and will happen again, although never in quite the same way. This single pink cloud settles into my consciousness. I think it will remain there every evening from now on. The clock can say whatever it wants, but all the sunsets I’ve seen are layered behind my eyes, existing in conversation with one another. It is all happening at once, forever.

YARDENA SCHWERSKY is from Florida’s Gulf Coast. She writes the Substack .

At the heart of AUTHOR & CO. is a love of reading, so we create tools that bring literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

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When reading The Weekend Crashers, we find ourselves in autumn, at an inn in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where a knitting retreat and a bachelor party have accidentally been booked for the same weekend.

Maggie Hodges and her daughter Piper leave their homes in New York City and arrive at the retreat at different points in their lives. Both are contemplating what comes next in their careers and love lives. For as long as she can remember, Maggie has scheduled her days around responsibility and routine, while Piper is overwhelmed by the circumstances of her modeling career, where her sense of time is urgent and unstable.

“When we leave our home setting, and the structures of time that we’ve built into our lives, then people get in touch with their feelings, things slow down.”
—Jamie Brenner

At the inn, away from the fast pace of the city and the unrelenting presence of responsibility, both women are brought into a different experience of time, and a new way to notice the questions that day-to-day life doesn’t give them a moment to consider.

Jamie finds herself drawn to vacation fiction, where a change of setting also becomes a change of pace. Day to day, time can feel like something that “happens” to us. We can run out of time, or be late. The tension comes from the way the clock turns life into a series of expectations, keeping us in line with whatever our calendar says we should be doing. A weekend away pauses those demands, and sometimes changes what those demands mean to us.

“It’s like we’re always fighting with time to stay in lockstep with what we’re supposed to be doing,”
—Jamie Brenner

In the novel, Piper, at a pivotal point in her career, can finally reevaluate her future. And as Maggie realizes her daughter is an adult who doesn’t need her in the same way, Maggie feels more free to imagine what she wants for herself. On vacation, people become more aware of what their minds are doing when they are no longer, as Jamie puts it, “in service to the structure of time.”

Jamie has experienced a version of that shift as well. After living in New York City for twenty-five years, she moved to Pennsylvania. Of course, deadlines and responsibilities remain, but the daily noise of wrestling with the clock has quieted.

In the city, it can feel like everyone is moving according to an internal ticking clock. There is the train to catch, an errand to fit in, an appointment to make, and the unpredictability of everything in between. Simultaneously, New York offers the freedom to walk for miles, to change plans halfway through the day. It’s a mix of intensity and possibility.

Jamie had written many summer novels before The Weekend Crashers, and summer had given her a familiar sense of escape. Especially from Manhattan, summer means leaving the ticking clock of the city for somewhere more open: the beach, a brief suspension of urban life. Autumn is different, it’s colorful, but it is also moving toward winter. The changing leaves are beautiful because the color is only temporary. In the novel, Maggie and Piper arrive at the New Hope Inn already in transition, at crossroads in their own lives.

“When I left New York, I really fell in love with autumn again.”
—Jamie Brenner

In The Weekend Crashers, autumn is a backdrop perfect for the uncertainty the characters are plagued with. The leaves are falling and the light is fading; this change is temporary, it’s part of the cycle ahead. At the knitting retreat, the women gather each year in the same place, around the same tradition. For Maggie and Piper, autumn becomes a way to think about change without treating it as loss.

The bachelor party, meanwhile, introduces another form of loss: the absence of the phone. The men burst into the inn for a bushcraft weekend, which is intended to help them step away from the familiar tools of contemporary life. And for Jamie, taking phones away opened up new possibilities for storytelling.

“It was an excuse for me to get phones off the page for short periods of time, and be able to see what happens there.”
—Jamie Brenner

Phones solve too much, too quickly, she explains. They collapse the time between confusion and answer. Without them, Jamie could return to a slower narrative clock, where problems have to be worked through in real time and characters are left alone with their thoughts before the world rushes in with a solution.

The women at the retreat experience a different kind of release from the clock. Their relationship to time comes through the comfort of working with their hands. Maggie knits to pass the time, turning the passive experience of waiting into something active and absorbing. Belinda, who runs the retreat, understands knitting as a flow state. For Jamie, that kind of concentration is rare because it subdues her awareness of time.

“Think about how many times during the day are you not aware of time. And it’s shockingly small.”
—Jamie Brenner

Most of the day, we are hyper aware of time, and the present is understood in relation to what came before it and what’s waiting after it. But making something by hand gives the mind a place to settle. While our hands are moving, we can take our eyes off the clock and notice the progress of the thing being made.

Jamie is a knitter herself, and she spoke about wanting to normalize public knitting. On Instagram, you’ll often find her speaking directly to the camera while needle and yarn move steadily in her hands. Knitting gives her something physical to do while she speaks, and that small, repeated motion makes the present moment feel easier to access.

She started knitting later in life. Writing was already her profession, and with work, the final result matters very much, but knitting offered Jamie the pleasure of accepting imperfection. And now, bedazzling book covers, her latest hobby, provides a similar feeling of doing something playful, free from the expectations of usefulness.

In The Weekend Crashers, Maggie and Piper leave New York for only a few autumn days. And though it’s a short span of time, this distance from their everyday lives changes the pace at which they can understand themselves. The city is close enough to get back to, but far enough away for its demands to lose some of their weight.

Autumn makes change impossible to ignore. The leaves turn, fall, and gather on the ground. The season is beautiful partly because it is already becoming something else. At the New Hope Inn, Maggie and Piper experience their own version of that shift. They have not gone very far, and their lives in New York are still waiting. But for a weekend, the change in the air gives them enough distance to see those lives differently. The world does not stop moving on vacation, but for a weekend, it can be experienced at another pace.

Watch the full interview here.

Jamie Brenner is the USA TODAY bestselling author of women’s fiction and romance including The Forever Summer, Blush, and the erotic trilogy Blue Angel. Jamie grew up reading the scandalous heroines of Jackie Collins, the family dramas of Danielle Steele, and epic sagas by Judith Krantz. Jamie pays homage to these classics in her free weekly e-serial, The Lovely and The Damned, available via newsletter signup and Substack

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THERE WAS A TIME in my early 20s when I exercised as late as 10 p.m. I’d moved to Philadelphia, gotten a job as an editor at an alt-weekly newspaper, and had the requisite energy to walk to work, report and write all day, have dinner or happy hour with friends, and then do an at-home workout DVD in the confines of my living room before showering and hitting the sack.

This is unimaginable to me now, at 37. It’s become abundantly clear to me over the years that if the workout isn’t happening in the morning, it’s almost certainly not happening at all. It’s not only a matter of energy reserves – though it is that, too – but also a matter of psychology. I want the thing that takes the most energy done first; I want to eat the frog, as they say. If the workout is relegated to the back half of the day on the to-do list, it hangs over my head in such a way that it becomes something I don’t want to do even though exercise has become one of my favorite things to do. So morning exercise it is, despite my natural and circadian inclination to stay up past midnight and lie in past 9:30.

It causes me a flicker of embarrassment to observe and admit what a battle this has been. I know people with children or dogs or early-shift jobs who are out the door at 5 a.m. – heroes, all – and here I am, fighting every biological impulse and lifestyle preference to just get to the gym in my neighborhood by 7:30 a.m. so I can be home to start my remote work by 9. Champagne problems, to be sure. But this comparison has no utility beyond pointless self-shaming: that’s them, I’m me, and I’m simply no good in the mornings. Alas.

What else I’ve learned is that my morning personhood requires what I think of as “ramp-up time.” I’ve heard the advice that the thing to do is set the alarm, launch myself into my gym clothes and go rocketing out the door before my brain and body have a chance to protest. The longer you linger, they say, the more likely it is you won’t make it out the door at all. As someone who has the luxury of a flexible, relatively fancy-free schedule, this risk looms large. What’s crucial to me, though, is keeping exercise as something I want to do, because it has in so many ways saved my life. It pulled me out of the depths of a binge eating disorder and the associated disconnection with my body, and strength training in particular gave me a new and profound lens through which to view my body and a thrilling new internal language I use to communicate with it. I cannot resent it. I will not make it a thing I dread, as I did for too many years.

The slamming, launching, rocketing entry to daily exercise makes the routine too frantic, too frenzied, too much like an emergency. For some people this is the only option, and I wish they had others because I despise the rush-required nature of modern life. So long as I have the schedule and autonomy I do, though, I will take my ramp-up time.

6:20 a.m. is when it begins.

I used to wake up from a series of thunderous phone alarms, bonging and crashing like circus music, that bolted me out of the depths of a REM cycle every morning. To do this to myself if I don’t need to, in a world that’s determined to otherwise dysregulate my nervous system at every turn? No, thank you. I will go gently into that good morning, instead.

From 6:20 a.m., I have about an hour. It is up to me how I make use of it, but I will be at the gym by 7:30 a.m. come hell or high water. How this hour passes is a matter of relativity, as ol’ Einstein has explained: “An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.” For me, it’s something more like this: “An hour scrolling on your phone passes like a minute, but an hour sipping cold brew while reading a book, petting your cat, or simply staring out the window passes like at least a true hour.” The ramp-up time is sacred; the world requires nothing of me and no one would expect a text back. It is how I ease into the hardest, and yet best, part of my day, so I’d better make it last. No scrolling.

On my best days, I rise easily, throw on my fluffy robe, float to the kitchen, and choke down some water before reaching for the caffeine. Then, I sit. I don’t really do anything, which is something I almost never do. Sometimes I look at the clock and see how 6:40 a.m. to 7 a.m. can somehow feel like a long time indeed, and at the end of it, all I have to do is slowly get dressed, glide out the door, and arrive at the place I so love to be.

There was a time when setting an alarm so early was foreboding. I’d climb into bed, anticipating how miserable, how tired, how resentful I’d be when the waking hour barged its way into my life. Now, I set the little fake sun in my room to nearly a quarter past six and anticipate how when I rise, it’ll somehow feel like I have all the time in the world.

MIKALA JAMISON is the creator and writer of the Body Type newsletter on Substack, and is the author of the forthcoming book, The Forever Project.

At the heart of AUTHOR & CO. is a love of reading, so we create tools that bring literature into everyday life in wonderfully unexpected ways.

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As the story goes, four people were trapped at Lake Geneva during the summer of 1816: Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron’s personal physician. When writing about that season, Mary Shelley described it as “wet and ungenial,” referencing one dark night in particular, when Byron proposed that they each “write a ghost story.” That was the night that inspired the idea that would become Frankenstein. From there, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley would all move securely into the literary canon.

But in reality, there was one more person there, on the shores of Lake Geneva, and Mary Shelley wrote her out of the story.

She was Mary’s stepsister, Lord Byron’s lover, and she was the person who helped bring the group together in the first place! She was seventeen years old, and her name was Claire Clairmont. Despite her erasure, traces of Claire’s perspective still survive through her journals. However, one journal was never found: the one from the summer of 1816.

“This is a novel that is really the untold origin story of Frankenstein.”
—Emily Franklin

In Love & Other Monsters, Emily Franklin imagines the missing journal and uses it to recount one of literature’s most mythologized summers from Claire’s point of view. After reading the novel, Claire isn’t lingering at the edge of Mary’s story. She stands at its center, and now takes her place there in our literary memory.

The summer of 1816 is notoriously referred to as The Year Without Summer. Emily explained that the year before, in 1815, Mount Tambora had erupted in Indonesia, blocking enough sunlight to cause a global climate disaster. Crops failed, resulting in significant food shortages. There were typhoons, earthquakes, and hurricanes. The cause of the strange weather wasn’t identified until over a century later.

“Had it been regular summer weather, we wouldn’t have Frankenstein.”
—Emily Franklin

Through the imagination of Claire’s missing journal, Emily Franklin depicts the volatile weather of 1816, accurately referencing weather records from that year. During that season, Claire and the others understood what was happening no better than the rest of the world did. That kind of uncertainty changes the experience of time, as does the absence of sunlight. The days become slower, and everyone is indoors longer than expected, while something large and confusing unfolds outside.

The weather and conditions it creates work to heighten an already stormy dynamic. Claire is bound to Mary and dependent on Percy Shelley. She’s found herself in a consuming relationship with Byron, whose treatment of her is a combination of fascination and cruelty. They’re a group of young writers, and the mysteriously “topsy-turvy” world around them intensifies their ambition, jealousy, and restlessness.

And though The Year Without Summer was unusual, the human experience around it is not. I couldn’t help but think of the pandemic—the feeling of being trapped in one place, cut off from the world, still trying to live, work, have relationships, and make art in an environment of extreme uncertainty.

For Claire, the weather is felt first in the body, then in the mind. She notices it when she is sent on errands, when she listens to the sounds beyond the window, and when it brings her up against the limits of her own life. She can’t choose the weather any more than she can choose many of the conditions under which she lives. Tethered to Mary and Percy, she spends much of the novel without control. At Lake Geneva, she is surrounded by what Emily describes as the “celebrities” of the era, yet she is not granted the same standing, despite her own desire and aptitude to write.

Over the course of the novel, Claire watches Byron move through the world without restriction, doing exactly what she cannot. “I needed to do as he did and embrace whatever weather was given to us,” she says. Byron moves as though the world has already arranged itself around him. Claire has to adjust herself to whatever arrives, whether it is the weather itself or the desires of the people around her.

Mary Shelley understood what it meant to survive in writing. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and she was raised with an understanding of the connection between publication, reputation, and literary afterlife. When she wrote the Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, she stated that there were only four people there on the night that inspired the story. Of course, we can’t know exactly why Mary removed Claire from the account, but Emily Franklin explores the possibilities in Love & Other Monsters.

“I thought to myself, well, where’s Claire? What happened to make Mary Shelley write Claire out of the story?”
—Emily Franklin

Emily spoke about Mary Shelley going back into Percy Shelley’s poems after his death and changing the dedications that referred to Claire. She changed some of the wording too. “We can see the scratch marks,” Emily said. So, Claire’s absence was not only the result of time passing. There was an effort to remove her from the page, and the evidence of that effort is still visible.

Claire survives only in letters, poems, journals, and traces left in other people’s writing. But she survives there with less authority than Mary Shelley, Byron, or Percy Shelley. As Emily puts it, “she won.”

The competition between sisters in Love & Other Monsters is bound up with recognition and the difficulty of becoming visible to someone whose opinion has helped define you. Claire depends on Mary materially and emotionally, and Mary seems to understand Claire partly as someone she has helped make. They love each other deeply, but they don’t know how to leave room for one another’s full personhood.

“She grew terribly resentful when Claire wasn’t exactly how she wanted her to be or had a life of her own.”
—Emily Franklin

Mary’s time is divided by work and motherhood, while Claire’s time appears looser from the outside, though she experiences that looseness as a lack of standing. She has no clear place to put herself. She is asked to be useful instead: muse, messenger, companion, lover. She lives inside other people’s purposes while trying to become a person to herself.

Mary has helped produce a version of Claire and then cannot bear Claire’s independence from it. This struggle is, at its core, how we understand Frankenstein. A person is brought into being through another’s vision, then becomes intolerable once she begins to exceed it. Claire is written all over this version of the story: the younger woman imagined, formed, relied upon, and then resented for becoming fully herself.

Though Frankenstein remains the most famous creation of that summer, Emily Franklin shows that Claire belongs to its afterlife too. Emily spoke about the way everyone we love becomes “a ghost of memory,” and about the earlier selves that remain inside us. Older Claire looks back on the girl she once was and tries to understand the distance between them.

“All love stories are ghost stories waiting to happen.”
—Emily Franklin

Emily said she wanted older Claire to have that Kierkegaardian sense of life being lived forward and understood backward. In this way, Claire can look again at the version of that summer that literary history preserved, and she can tell us a different version of the truth.

Near the end of Love & Other Monsters, Mary Shelley says, “A story changes. At the time, it is one story. Upon retelling the day after it is another and then years on, it is still another story altogether.” Emily Franklin enters that chain of retellings with Claire at its center. After reading the novel, Claire no longer exists in the margins of someone else’s account. She remains where she should have been all along: at the center of the summer that made the story possible.

-Yasmin

Watch the full interview here.

Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of more than twenty books, including The Lioness of Boston. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, and The Journal of the American Medical Association, among many other places, as well as featured and read aloud on National Public Radio, named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries, and longlisted for The Sunday Times Short Story Award.

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

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Brian Platzer’s The Optimists is narrated by Rod Keating, a man who has suffered a stroke, telling the story of an extraordinary student named Clara, despite his limitations of speech and movement. But Clara reaches us through the meanderings of his own consciousness, and his past continues to live within his present. The story that we get is one that experiments with the conditions of telling: the way memory loops forward and backward, and the fact that we can never fully describe another person without also describing ourselves.

“The Optimists is a book narrated by a man at the end of his life trying to entertain the reader best he can.”
—Brian Platzer

The origin of the novel is direct. Brian’s eighth-grade English teacher, Rod Keating, stayed in his life long after the classroom. They taught together and developed a close friendship that spanned decades. Then, a week after officiating Brian’s wedding, Keating suffered a massive stroke. He lost the ability to speak or use his body. Brian continued to visit him, reading aloud, talking through his life, and sitting with the fact that there would be no response.

Brian described the early drafts of The Optimists as a kind of accumulation, an attempt to capture everything his mentor, Rod Keating, might be thinking. Later, he imposed a more traditional structure, mapping plot and progression onto the pages. That version read more recognizably as a “book,” but something had been lost. As he put it, “it was lacking all of the love and imagination of the first draft.”

“I had this voice that was desperate to be heard, and then I had the playfulness of the real man I remember spending hundreds of hours with.”
—Brian Platzer

Everything changed once Brian gave his narrator permission to interrupt himself. Mr. Keating could pause, digress, revise. The book didn’t need to move step by step from one moment to the next; instead, it could follow and play with the natural movement of the mind, where one memory leads to another. In The Optimists, the story can’t be separated from the consciousness telling it.

The novel’s storytelling mechanism is one of “great pressure.” Though it didn’t work for the real Mr. Keating, the narrator of The Optimists uses an eye-tracking writing device. When “it works, it works,” Brian explains, but only through intense concentration, and it’s exhausting. Every word the narrator communicates takes a lot of effort.

“He wants every detail, even if it’s a joke, to be intentional and focused and precise.”
—Brian Platzer

Despite the exhaustion of communication, Brian writes the fictionalized Rod Keating with such tonal precision that the humor of the earlier man is still fully present. For example, the novel is dotted with jokes. Knock-knock jokes. As Mr. Keating says, “I’m a great believer in knock-knock jokes. Creativity within restrictions.” After the stroke, he lives under severe restriction, in both body and in speech. The jokes preserve the playfulness that defined him before, while also showing that his imagination is still active within those limits.

Mr. Keating remembers moments that wouldn’t have seemed important at the time, such as a brief exchange in a classroom, and other seemingly ordinary occurrences of passing days. Reading The Optimists is a reminder that memory doesn’t preserve a life based on scale and importance. Brian spoke about how “ten or fifteen minutes can have such an impact for the next fifty, sixty, eighty years.” Mr. Keating’s memories suggest that smaller moments that reverberate for years may stay with us just as much as the major milestones.

“Any of these moments could be significant in a way that you don’t anticipate, and that’s very, very exciting, and it’s anxiety producing.”
—Brian Platzer

For many of us, entire stretches of life can disappear while a brief interaction comes back to us in vivid detail. And when we’re young, everything seems urgent, so it remains a mystery why certain moments stick. That’s part of the “magic of childhood,” Brian explains, and it’s also part of the “horror of parenting.” Maybe we don’t spend enough time thinking about the teachers with whom children spend a year of their lives, how lasting that influence can be, or how children, in turn, impact the adults who teach them.

Mr. Keating also reflects on a life spent looking ahead, the tendency to imagine what comes next as a way of giving meaning to the present. Anticipation can make a mundane stretch of time feel tolerable; a person might look forward to Friday, to summer, to a vacation. This act of looking ahead gives momentum and excitement to the present moment—one of the ways people deal with boredom and life’s difficulties.

Still, anticipatory pleasure depends on the sense that something lies ahead. So, what happens when the future is no longer open in the same way? In the present, Mr. Keating isn’t anticipating life as he once did, but his instinct to look ahead doesn’t disappear.

“Although he might not have so many exhilarating episodes ahead of him, he does have a new chapter to write tomorrow.”
—Brian Platzer

Though he’s nearing the end of his life, Mr. Keating still thinks ahead. He continues to live in consideration of what comes next, even when the future no longer offers what it once did. Maybe that’s a form of optimism in itself: still looking forward, even in the simple relief of a summer day with no pressure to go outside and make the most of it.

When Mr. Keating sets out to tell Clara’s story, he also ends up telling his own. He can only approach himself at a distance—through another person and a different set of consequences. Clara remains central but the story is never only about her. Through her, Mr. Keating shares his attachments, limits, and memories. Clara is the subject, but the act of storytelling is a way to communicate the truth about himself.

“The third person is almost always just a narrated first person.”
—Brian Platzer

After all, when we tell stories about other people, our own perspective inadvertently enters the conversation. As Brian says, “We’re really just telling different versions of how the universe is affecting us.” Mr. Keating describes the events of Clara’s life, but in doing so, he also tells the story of Jacob, of himself, of teaching, of legacy.

By the end of The Optimists, we have a stronger sense of which parts of a person can survive loss. The narrator’s voice stays with us, along with his memories, even as his present condition places limits on what he can express. The novel doesn’t shy away from the regrets that come with a man looking back over his life, but at the same time, it keeps in view the small memories that continue to matter, and the fact that even now, as we close the book, Mr. Keating is still imagining what comes next.

-Yasmin

Watch the full interview here.

Brian Platzer was the education columnist for The Atlantic and has written frequently for The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and many other publications. He currently teaches and lives with his family in Brooklyn and Paris.

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock, Author Forecast, and more.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

Wayward Girls opens in Buffalo, New York, in the 1960s. Mairin O’Hara is working in an apple orchard with the sun overhead and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” playing on the radio. The work is hard and life isn’t easy, but she’s young. The pleasures of summer surround her, and the freedom of adulthood is beginning to come into view.

That openness vanishes when Mairin is unexpectedly sent to the Home of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform institution modeled on the Magdalene Laundries, part of a system that confined girls and women in forced unpaid labor under the pretense of moral reform.

The chirping birds of the orchard fall away, replaced by dark hallways and days structured by routine and control. But Mairin doesn’t lose herself in her new reality. Even there, she continues to hear the music, and remember that another world still exists beyond the walls that entrap her.

“Every scene in every work of fiction happens somewhere at some time.”
—Susan Wiggs

Wayward Girls spans multiple time periods and moves between different environments. Susan explains that the danger in a book like this is that the reader begins to feel pulled rather than carried. Weather helps solve that problem, guiding us to understand where we are through our senses. We feel where we are before we know it.

We’re also guided by nostalgia, which for Susan, is rooted in place. In our conversation, she described building the setting of Wayward Girls through lived memory, beginning with a very specific landscape. She spoke about growing up near Buffalo, remembering winters when the snow reached the front door, along with the pleasures of childhood and the sounds, smells, and impressions that, until that moment, seemed long forgotten.

Nostalgia colors the novel through sensory detail, so that memory is felt through weather, sound, and light. Even within the confines of the Good Shepherd, Mairin remains able to access something of the world that came before it. That earlier life does not disappear completely. It stays perceptible in the present, and by the end of the novel, we catch up with Mairin’s future and the freedom with which she will eventually move through the world again.

“Mairin found solace by retreating to a time when her world was filled with love and warmth. Back then, life revolved around her father, who shone like the sun.”
—Susan Wiggs, Wayward Girls

The material surrounding the girls is historically grounded and heavy, but Susan still makes room for humor, play, and writes a story that is ultimately about human connection. Mairin and the other girls form bonds and create small pockets of life within the constraints of their confinement. Through friendship and shared feeling, the novel preserves a sense of movement and possibility.

The novel maintains an optimistic tone that balances its darker material. The history behind the Magdalene Laundries is deeply painful, but in Wayward Girls, Susan illustrates that history through Mairin’s time at the Good Shepherd and her growing closeness with the other girls. Their mistreatment is never separated from their intimacy, their humor, or their sense of a future. As the girls approach adulthood, they dream of the lives that might still be possible, if they can hold onto who they are.

“You want it to feel authentic, but you don’t want them to hit themselves in the head with a hammer.”
—Susan Wiggs

For the girls at the Home of the Good Shepherd, access to the outside world is largely removed. One form of punishment is isolation in a dark, enclosed closet. The deprivation is physical, but it also affects perception itself. To be cut off in that way is to lose a sense of orientation altogether.

Susan spoke about The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and the significance of a window, both literally and symbolically, of being able to see beyond the immediate space. A view outward situates a person within a larger world, confirming that time continues beyond the limits of a room.

Weather offers a way of staying connected to the world. It helps locate experience and gives the present a sense of continuity. To know if it’s sunny, drizzling, humid, or cold is to remain oriented in time. That may be part of why Wayward Girls consistently returns to these elements. They keep the present in view, but they also bring the world beyond the institution back into reach.

At the end of our conversation, Susan spoke about the way she writes, which has remained largely unchanged since childhood. She still writes by hand, in notebooks, a practice that reaches back to years spent in paper shops abroad.

Susan’s attachment to writing by hand feels connected to the deeper concerns of the novel. Her latest novel is concerned with what remains accessible when freedom has been restricted, and writing belongs to that same structure of preservation. On the page, experience can still be gathered, recalled, and kept from disappearing entirely.

What Wayward Girls preserves is the act of remembering itself. The novel remains in contact with beauty, friendship, and the elements that keep a person oriented in time. A change in weather, a shift in light, or the presence of another person can still hold experience in place. Even under confinement, these acts of noticing keep memory alive, and with it, the world outside.

—Yasmin

Watch the full interview here.

Susan Wiggs is the author of more than sixty novels, including Wayward Girls, The Lost and Found Bookshop, and The Oysterville Sewing Circle. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared on bestseller lists around the world.

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

Time travel in fiction often requires an elaborate device, like a machine, or a tear in the fabric of reality. In Victor Piñeiro’s middle grade novel Time Villains, it begins with a dinner invitation.

The premise is fun and familiar: if you could invite any three people to dinner, who would they be? When a group of children answer that question for a school assignment, the guests begin to arrive. Historical figures, villains, and characters from across literature suddenly appear at their table.

“I could take anybody, any character from history, fiction, mythology, and bring them into this book.”
—Victor Piñeiro

After speaking with Victor, it became obvious that the structure of the book’s plot tells us something about the way children experience stories. In a child’s imagination, characters from different books and eras can easily share the same space. In Time Villains, that imaginative instinct is translated into a narrative device and a way of exploring how fiction allows readers to move freely through time.

Victor is aware how the structure of time itself acts for the reader as well as the characters inside the story. And as expected, the characters themselves are inevitably led to question the mechanism of time travel. So, he engages directly with that curiosity. “They start nerding out,” Victor said, describing his characters’ reaction to the strange situation they’ve entered.

“Wait, how does time travel work? How does time work?”
—Victor Piñeiro

This same impulse is familiar to anyone who reads speculative fiction. Once time becomes flexible, we begin asking the essential questions: Can the past be changed? Does the future split into multiple timelines? Does history resist interference?

One theory Victor encountered while researching the genre proposes an interesting possibility: Even if someone changed the past, the future would still arrive exactly as it had before. The implications of this can be both comforting and unsettling. If the future cannot be changed, what does that mean for fate, responsibility, and daily decision-making?

Victor also thinks about time structurally, particularly in relation to his readership. When writing for kids, he’s constantly trying to figure out how to move the plot and add tension in a way that “constantly commands attention,” keeping in mind the “ticking clock” in any given situation.

The elasticity of time becomes especially visible when comparing childhood and adulthood. As responsibilities accumulate and schedules begin to fragment the day, the hours that once felt expansive begin to contract. The possibilities are no longer endless.

“When you’re a kid, half an hour is infinity. As an adult, thirty minutes is thirty seconds.”
—Victor Piñeiro

He wants his characters to feel as though the story could go in “a billion directions,” which mirrors the imaginative freedom of childhood, when the future still feels wide open and our own stories have not yet settled into fixed paths.

Writing alters time in a different way. Many writers describe entering a state of intense concentration where the clock seems to disappear entirely. For Victor, time doesn’t stop so much as split. Daily life occupies one side of his mind, while the novel creates another mental space alongside it. A narrative in progress exists beside ordinary life, and time moves forward in both places at once.

“If I’m working on a book, my brain carves out a second half. It’s almost like having an extra room in your brain.”
—Victor Piñeiro

As a writer with young children, Victor has adapted his writing routine to whatever hours remain available. “The best writing you’re going to do is the second you wake up for about two hours,” but parenthood reshapes that ideal schedule. “Writing in the early morning is absolutely impossible with kids.” So, Victor often finds himself writing during his commute on the Long Island Railroad. Over time, this routine has trained his mind to recognize the train ride as creative time.

“Okay, you’re about to sit in the chair on the Long Island Railroad. You know where your brain’s got to go.”
—Victor Piñeiro

The train becomes a kind of in-between space. Around him, passengers scroll through their phones, read the news, or stare out the window, everyone absorbed in their own routines. Victor enters the world he’s building on the page. The ride exists outside the usual demands of the day. It’s separate from the small interruptions and responsibilities waiting at home or work. For that stretch of time, he can sit, write, and stay inside the story.

If writing offers disruptions in time, then Author Clock compounds this. When a quote appears on Author Clock, time briefly folds in on itself. The present moment becomes crowded with other moments, like the year the book was written or the minute inside the scene.

“Author Clock has changed how I relate to time itself. It’s also changed how I write.”
—Victor Piñeiro

Part of the writing process often involves turning to other books for inspiration. And now, for Victor, those encounters arrive unintentionally. Instead of opening a book, passages appear unexpectedly on Victor’s desk throughout the day. With Author Clock, the present moment brushes against other moments in literary history.

Reading, it occurs to me, works in a similar way. Books allow readers to sit in the same room with writers from other centuries, a scene written long ago becoming present again the moment it is read.

A reader may move across centuries in a single afternoon or read one hundred pages that span a single day within a story. When we’re curled up with a book, the clock continues forward, minute by minute, while the experience of time becomes unfixed.

In Time Villains, characters travel through time by inviting figures from the past into the same room. When we read, we experience something similar. The past remains accessible, returning each time it’s read.

-Yasmin

Watch the full interview here.

Victor Piñeiro is the author of the Pura Belpré Honor Book The Island of Forgotten Gods, and the International Latino Book Award winner, Time Villains. His books have also been named Kirkus Best Book of the Year and Amazon Book of the Month.

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into your everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

It was a cold afternoon in January when I spoke with Rebecca Mix. Snow had been threatening all morning, the kind of winter light that makes it hard to tell what time it is. Our conversation focused on I Killed the King, the novel she co-wrote with Andrea Hannah, a book built on pressure and the narrowing of space and time.

We spoke about weather as an antagonist, the mechanics of a countdown, the way pacing reshapes intimacy, and what it means to write a story this tightly wound, whether alone or in partnership. The energy in Rebecca’s voice felt aligned with the book itself: alert, quick, and breathless.

I’d read I Killed the King in my car, over the course of a week, during the short windows of my toddler’s moving naps. I would park and sit perfectly still, aware that the clock started the moment the engine turned off. The book is about confinement, so it made sense that I felt confined too.

“The characters don’t get a break, and neither do you.”
—Rebecca Mix

I was on edge from the very first page. No longer in the driver’s seat, I was dropped directly in a palace, in a single room, with six other characters. I knew there was a deadline until dawn for a prince to marry a princess and sign a peace treaty that would end a decade-long war, but I didn’t know much else. The King was clearly worried, stressed to the point of unraveling. Everyone felt slightly off. I was as unfamiliar with these characters as they were with each other, and that was a genuinely fun position to occupy as a reader.

In the novel, even before anything really happens plot-wise, the weather establishes that something is off. It’s spring, after all! There should be warmth, sunshine, or at least the promise of it. Instead, the book begins with a snowstorm. The story opens with a sense of wrongness, putting the reader in a state of doubt and suspicion.

A locked room mystery, Rebecca explained, traps characters in place, and she needed a way to show escalation without explaining it away. A clock ticking down and a storm crushing the castle is a perfect way to do that. Escalation becomes structural rather than emotional, making it that much harder for the characters—and the reader—to escape.

“Here you go, welcome to the terrible time.”
—Rebecca Mix

She spoke about the awareness that comes near the end of a book, when you can feel the remaining pages in your hand. You know exactly how much is left, and that knowledge changes the way you read. Dialogue feels more weighted, and every choice a character makes feels like it could be potentially final. Rebecca smartly writes toward that awareness, aligning the story’s countdown with the reader’s own internal clock. The novel makes you conscious of how close you are to dawn, to the last page, to what cannot be undone.

The breathlessness of the novel shapes how characters form relationships. Because I Killed the King unfolds over a single day, there’s no time for gradual friendship. Trust has to build quickly, or it won’t happen at all. The characters have to decide who they are to one another almost instantly.

That acceleration makes one of the novel’s most interesting choices: friendship becomes central. There is romance in the book, and it matters, but it isn’t the sole emotional anchor. Rebecca explained that she wanted the characters to be connected to one another, not only to the person they might love. On a practical level, if the only real bonds were romantic, it would be too easy for the couples to prioritize each other and leave everyone else behind. She wanted reliance to be messier and more realistic. In this way, everyone’s safety would be entangled.

“There is something inherently romantic about being like, I don’t know you, but my life is in your hands.”
—Rebecca Mix

With that framing in mind, intimacy isn’t inherently romantic; rather, it’s tied to exposure and reliance. The relationships that form under pressure may not resemble courtship, but they’re not less real or less valuable. Rebecca described experiencing that same immediacy in her own life, meeting someone and recognizing the connection before there’s history to explain it. Instead of love at first sight, we have friends at first sight.

It was friends at first sight for Rebecca Mix and Andrea Hannah, too. Both living in Michigan, they had talked about writing a book together for years. When Rebecca texted Andrea the loose premise of I Killed the King, writing it alone didn’t even occur to her. When reflecting on the co-writing process, she said with a smile, “We had so much fun writing that book. I’ve never laughed that much before.”

Drafting felt loose. They outlined together, then split the cast, each taking three characters and dropping chapters into a shared document. One would surprise the other; the next scene would respond. Then came revision. “Timing is more fluid when you’re just playing,” she said. Once the structure existed, time hardened. Every adjustment required agreement. Every micro decision had to be voiced, weighed, aligned. In a way, drafting moved fluidly, like weather, while revising moved more rigidly, like a clock.

When writing solo, Rebecca typically loves going for a walk when it’s raining or snowing heavily. She said bad weather “turns something on” in her brain. She described taking a stroll during a recent Michigan snowstorm, figuring out something major, and going home to change the work immediately.

“It’s gloomy and rainy, I’m cancelling my plans, I’m writing today!”
—Rebecca Mix

For Rebecca, rainy weather feels like permission to stay inside. Fall and winter are her happiest working seasons because the world already feels narrowed and inward. She views a snowstorm not as an inconvenience but an opportunity to solve a problem. Perhaps gloomy weather makes the world feel smaller, and concentration comes more easily.

“To be a writer, you need to read,” Rebecca stated confidently when I asked what it’s been like living with Author Clock. She was looking for something that would introduce her to language she wouldn’t necessarily choose on her own, a means to encounter books outside her usual orbit—something that could live naturally in her day and still surprise her. When she came across Author Clock, her reaction was immediate: “This is perfect. I’m going to read a bunch of things I wouldn’t otherwise on accident.”

What she didn’t anticipate was the pleasure of recognition. Beyond discovering unfamiliar authors, there’s the thrill of seeing a book she’s read appear unexpectedly. She takes photos and sends them to friends: “We read this for book club, remember? It’s on my clock!” The device becomes less about productivity and more about shared memory. The pleasure is in seeing something familiar surface unexpectedly. I can relate.

Even after we’d finished talking about Author Clock, the conversation kept returning to weather. Of course, I couldn’t help but think of Author Forecast in connection to how closely Rebecca’s own imagination tracks real conditions. Of course, I knew she would need Author Forecast in her office as well.

In I Killed the King, weather is specific and intentional. At one point, there’s thundersnow, a detail that I underlined as soon as I read it. That particular condition has been notoriously difficult to fill in the Author Forecast library. It’s rare. Seeing it appear so confidently inside a contemporary fantasy novel was an exciting moment. I texted a photo to the team immediately.

Rebecca likes to write about weather and time because these elements set mood instantly, and in I Killed the King, they actively dictate the movement of the story. The storm restricts where the characters can go, the countdown dictates what they can afford to hesitate over, and combined, they create a kind of compression that changes how the people inside the story behave.

That awareness doesn’t only exist in the space of her writing. She gardens and pays close attention to native plants. She writes early in the summer before the heat settles in and goes for long walks in heavy snow when she needs to think something through. Weather shifts her schedule, her concentration, even her mood. That lived sensitivity carries directly into the framing of her fiction, where environment and time are active forces.

When I mentioned the Snow w/ T-Storms quote we’d be adding to the Author Forecast library, Rebecca noted that she was born during a thundersnow. Hearing that, the storm in I Killed the King settled into place for me. Even within a fantasy setting, it never feels exaggerated or ornamental. The weather carries weight because it comes from familiarity; Rebecca has lived inside those conditions rather than imagined them from a distance.

As I write this, snow is falling outside my window. The day has quieted and the world feels momentarily contained. It’s the same kind of compression I Killed the King handles so well, where circumstance shapes what becomes possible inside it.

-Yasmin

Watch the full interview here.

Rebecca Mix is the New York Times bestselling author of many weird magical books, including The Ones We Burn, The Mossheart’s Promise duology, the I Killed The King duology, Neopets graphic novels, and the upcoming Milo and the Monstrous Betwixt. Rebecca lives in Michigan. If you can’t find her, she’s probably on a long walk, talking to bugs in her garden, or attempting to brew the perfect cup of jasmine tea.

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into your everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

Lately, I’ve been seeking out weather conditions—any and all of them, searching for thunderstorms, blizzards, and sticky, sunny days.

I’ve spent rainy days inside, investigating descriptions of the sky, inside novels, short stories, poems, and plays, in search of language that captures what’s happening outside.

I’ve spent cloudy days scrutinizing the shadows, deciphering the difference between mostly cloudy and partly cloudy.

Seasons have passed, and over time, I’ve narrowed the list, selected the best translations,

Meet Author Forecast: your local weather shown through literary quotes, with passages selected to match the conditions outside your window.

There’s a scientific vocabulary when it comes to weather, but, I discovered, there’s also a literary one: poetic, sensory, regional. The variety of expressions of the natural world are depicted through thousands of years, from the earliest texts in recorded history to novels published this very year.

While creating Author Forecast, the team narrowed our search to twenty-seven distinct weather conditions, from Overcast and Partly Cloudy to Sleet and the rare Snow with Thunderstorms. In literature, these conditions become story settings, a forecast of Rain is weighty and dramatic.

“The rain was blowing sideways now, beating against the window like a creature trying to come in.”
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

When I really got started on building the Author Forecast quote library, it was winter, a season of grey skies and early dusk. I read for language that could establish the feeling of snow, sleet, and freezing rain. I began to identify the kind of sentence Author Forecast needed: language that emulated both the appearance and feeling of weather.

“The snow goes whirling, invisible tattooing needles against the nerveless window glass behind the green shades.”
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

I could feel the snow, see the glass. I could imagine the scene. And so, the snow kept falling, and I kept reading.

Over time, my daily routines began to reflect my research. As the seasons changed, from my desk, I found myself turning toward the window more often. I watched the light change in the flower beds, tracked the trees behind our house as they moved from bud to bloom to shade.

“Being happy is rather melancholy—like the most beautiful landscape, like those trees and the grass and the clouds and the sunshine to‑day.”
— Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop

When I walked through the woods with my dog, I took the imagery with me. Sometimes it fit the day perfectly, and sometimes it took me somewhere else, to a different scene, even in the same weather. No matter what, though, it made me pay attention.

At around 5 p.m., I’d drive across the Hudson River to pick up my one‑year‑old son. The drive itself became a kind of sky‑reading in it of itself.

In February, it was still dark when I left the house. The skies shifted between snow and mostly cloudy.

In March, the weather turned erratic. Freezing rain fell often, coating everything in a thin layer of ice. It wasn’t a condition I had thought much about before, but now it kept appearing.

April gave us low skies and fog, and I could barely see past my windshield.

By May, I began to notice subtler distinctions in cloud cover. I read about them during the day, and I looked for them in the sky on my drive across the bridge. A perfectly clear sky: sunny. If there were just a few clouds behind me but none ahead: mostly sunny. And when the light dappled through scattered clouds: partly sunny.

By June, the weather shifted again to brief showers, wide temperature swings, and a sky that often lingered in the realm of overcast. And all the while, I kept driving; I kept noticing.

And the same is true of Author Clock, which has influenced my sense of time for years. It sits on my desk, changing minute by minute, each new quote a view into a different world. Some are familiar, some surprise me, and every now and then, I’ll glance at the clock and see a quote like this one:

“Now it was five o’clock, and although he didn’t have a watch and couldn’t tell time too well yet anyway, he was aware of passing time by the lengthening of the shadows, and by the golden cast that now tinged the afternoon light.”
— Stephen King, The Shining

I recognize both the narrative urgency and my own. It’s time to gather my things, leave the house, and cross the Hudson River. The quote pushes me into motion with language, carrying me from desk to car, from story to sky, into evening, into darkness.

—Yasmin

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into your everyday life.

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