Love, Lindsey - March 21st 2025
Dear Diary
As I mentioned on Wednesday, I’ve been in Savannah this week and it’s been a delight. In theory, I was here on a writing retreat to get a billion words on the page and I SWEAR I DID THAT but more importantly, I also let my brain wander a little bit and I can’t stress enough as to how important that was. I don’t know about you but as someone who works from home, I find it incredibly difficult to separate my work brain from my home brain, which is to say there is only the work brain. I am my Innie, there is no Outie.
But for a couple of days at least, I was able to sleep in, eat out and mooch about, three things that always help me disconnect at the very least. As I said, it was a working trip, not a vacation so even when I wasn’t at a laptop, I was walking around town, recording bits and pieces for The Bell Witches (and The Witch And The Wolf), and generally soaking in the atmosphere. It’s such a cliché to say the location is a character in book but for this trilogy, it's very, very true. I had the idea for Emily’s story years ago but it really only sprang to life after my first visit to Savannah, and now I can’t imagine it taking place anywhere else.
For the most part, I’ve been so lucky with the weather, sunny, breezy and beautiful, until this afternoon while I’m writing this and it’s chucking it down. But it works because, hurrah, here I am writing to you instead of gadding around the Byrd’s biscuit factory or tiptoeing through the tombstones at Bonaventure. The writing gods always come to collect… But back to Savannah. I had a couple of notes asking for travel recs after the last newsletter so if that’s something you’d be interested in, say the word and I’ll make it happen. This is your newsletter!
What I’m Reading
So, I spent my travel day (Los Angeles to Savannah is annoyingly a bear of a trip) listening to the podcast, Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, which is ostensibly an oral history of Bennington College – if you can believe it – and the careers of some of the school’s most famous students, Jonathan Lethem, Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt. Obviously this then lead to me downloading the audiobook of The Secret History, as read by Donna. Even though I’ve read the book at least a dozen times, I’ve never listened to the audio which seems insane.
Maybe it’s because my appetite for audiobooks never really blew up until I moved to LA and spent so much time in the car, and even then I’ll usually opt for a podcast first. While I’m a massive proponent of audiobooks and, yes, they absolutely count as reading FFS, I struggle with them because I’m a very fast reader by nature and listening to an audiobook at 1.5, 2 or even 2.5 times speed doesn’t hit the same way and I know this is going to sound silly because I wouldn’t care if someone listened to my books that way but part of me always feels as though I’m being disrespectful. While Sarah J Maas probably couldn’t give a shit how quickly I burned through ACOTAR, I’m pretty sure Donna Tartt, who went to the trouble of recording the entire audiobook herself, would have feelings.
So, I’m halfway through The Secret History and I’ve also got Sunrise On The Reaping queued up. Cancel me if you must* but I didn’t love The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and wasn’t sure I’d bother with this one. Maybe it’s just me but there was no feasible way to make President Snow a sympathetic character. I admire Suzanne Collins for trying but I couldn’t push his future out of my mind well enough to emotionally invest myself in his past, a frequent issue with prequels. The film was better, I thought, probably because Tom Blyth was great but I could’ve lived without it.
Cut to two years later and my 99c Audible credit burning a hole in my digital pocket and we’ll see. If you’ve read it, do let me know what you think, I’m absolutely down to crowdsource opinions on this one before I dive in.
Next up on the block, hopefully Human Rites, but if anything else comes in sooner, it may jump the queue. I AM A FICKLE BEAST.
PS All typos my own because no one edits this and I’m dreadful