Why is it the best month? Because it’s my BIRTHDAY MONTH, obviously!!!! And my birthday is only the best day of the month, the 20th, where it’s also shared with the moon landing and Natalie Wood’s birthday.

Yep, I’m one of those obnoxious people who says things like “birthday month.” You know why? Because summer birthdays kind of SUCK as a kid. You’re not in school, so you can’t have a cupcake party in class. It’s summer so a lot of your friends are away maybe. And if you grow up in Florida, it’s just too damn hot to do anything other than go to the movies, anyway. So yeah, I’m gonna claim the whole damn month.

✨ = Five Stars | 🎧 = audiobook

Places We’ll Go is Cait Waynelovich’s debut novel, lightly inspired by her own travels around the world. It follows Kate, a travel advisor who’s never left her small town bubble to actually go to any of the places she sends others to. When a disastrous and public breakup gives her the opportunity to visit Barcelona, Tangier, and Paris, she finds out that the wide world is different (and better) than she could have imagined.

Kate’s journey will resonate with any millennial who’s found themselves in a life of inertia, doomscrolling to watch the exciting lives of others. I highlighted SO many passages that just hit me in the feels. The descriptions of Kate’s travels will have you itching to jump on a plane and go explore yourself. And the characters Kate meets along the way will make you laugh, cry, and even roll your eyes.

No updates to share on the submissions front at the moment (I did warn this would be kind of a quiet time). I’ve been trucking away on the YA romance. I’m writing mostly chronologically, but in isolated scenes, rather than chapters currently. My plan is to get the bulk of the story down and then work on the transitions between scenes.

My friend Megan offered to do some body doubling with me recently. As we are wont to do, we talked for a good hour before we actually began working, but that hour was the most useful and productive hour of my past few weeks. In talking out the “plot” for the sapphic YA romance I’m working on, I realized that I didn’t, in fact, have a plot. My friend Annika wrote about this the same week, coincidentally. [Side note: if you don’t know Annika, you should go subscribe and follow her on every platform because she is an amazing writer / human being and everyone should know her.]

Anyway, I realized what I actually had was three plot points in a trenchcoat (a phrase which makes everyone laugh when I say it so I’m trademarking it). In talking the story out with Megan, I was able to break it into an actual, full plot and outline, which means I’m up, up, and away with progress on it and it’s feeling really good.

See you next month! Don’t forget to enter the giveaway!