New baby, New York Times business section article, new writing class, new book, and more big changes

I'm back and planning a podcast and live event for 2025!

This is 49!

In the four months since I sent my last newsletter about hiking with goats in the Catskills, my life has changed A LOT. First, welcome to new subscribers, especially those who found my via this viral Note about talking to a fellow Harris/Walz supporter on my flight to LA in October to see Joni Mitchell at the Hollywood Bowl (more on that in a future post). Substack Notes is where I’m hanging out the most these days, though I did also join Threads and Bluesky.

The biggest news is that I’m now a mom of a very sweet, adorable baby who consumes most of my time, so this newsletter was on hiatus for a while, but it’s back. I can’t promise how often I’ll be sending it out but I’m aiming for at least once a week. Then they won’t be so long and I won’t constantly feel like I’m missing something.

In the interest of actually sending this one, versus thinking about it on a daily basis, I’m going to give you the highlights of what I’ve been up to in no particular order.

I had an article published in The New York Times business section on personal bankruptcy. I’m branching out in my writing and this was a piece I worked on for several months, turning it in in early August before I became a mom, and editing it afterward. It was also the first time I’ve had a publication send photographers to interview my sources, and it ran on the cover of the business section and got a shoutout on the front page cover too.

I hope to write more about personal finance in the new year, and generally branch out from what I’m known for in my work, namely sex/relationships and books/publishing, though I’ll still be covering those.

I’m teaching my next four-week Zoom small group personal essay writing class on Saturdays in February 2025, from 1-3 pm ET (the third week will be from 1-4 pm ET so everyone can have a turn reading their essay drafts). I taught this class for the first time in September, fresh into motherhood, and you can see what my students had to say in the link above. I’ve continued to think about their essays, encouraging them in a private group online, and making further submission suggestions.

The class is $300 which gets you lifelong access to my curated essay market listings spreadsheet, the class itself, where I’ll be giving personal feedback on an essay draft targeted to your dream publication, and the option of joining a private group afterward. See registration details here. The class is limited to 12 students.

I’m also working very hard on revamping my personal essay magazine

Open Secrets

. I hired

Nan Tepper

of

Style Your Stack

to give the site a redesign and bought the URL opensecretsmagazine.com and if you’re not a subscriber but like personal stories, I highly recommend you subscribe. It’s free (though paid subscriptions and donations go directly to pay writers; I haven’t yet broken even but I believe in the site and its mission strongly enough to keep going with it for as long as I can afford to). On May 3, I’ll be hosting Open Secrets Live, a one-day true storytelling event in NYC. I just finalized the venue and am securing sponsors and speakers now and hope to have tickets up for sale in February. So stay tuned!

We have an advice column, Dear Daddy, at Open Secrets that’s looking for questions to answer! If you have one, email it to deardaddyopensecrets at gmail dot com - it can be about life, work, love, sex, family, or anything else!

And if you write personal essays, the latest Open Secrets Magazine call for submissions is open through December 31, 2024 and is open to all free and paid subscribers. We pay $50/essay for unpublished 1,000-2,000 word personal essays in our subject categories. (Note: Sometimes I get people asking why those are the parameters; there are a multitude of reasons but if they don’t work for you, Substack is an amazing space to host your own publication and you can make any rules you like).

I’m currently reading for essays to publish in June 2025 and beyond, so keep those submissions coming!

I also have my final erotica anthology coming out on Tuesday, December 3! Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 10 is available from The Ripped Bodice, where I’ll be doing a virtual book launch on their Facebook page on Saturday, December 7 at 3 pm PT/6 pm ET with contributors Katrina Jackson, Rebecca Chase, and S.P. Jaffery. Want a reminder? Sign up here.

Other places to order: Bookshop for print and Kindle, or wherever you buy books or ebooks. Reviews are always appreciated! Here’s me doing an unboxing of it on TikTok.

I’ve had a few people ask why it’s my final one, and I should really put “final” in quotes because I may change my mind five or ten or twenty years down the road. But after editing over 70 erotica anthologies, I’m ready to broaden my horizons. It’s still amazing to me that something I started doing on a whim while failing out of law school became such a huge part of my career.

Want all the spice you can handle in romance and erotica? Check out the soon-to-launch suite Theo Reads, where I’m an advisor and many amazing writers are Founding Authors. Learn more from founder Parneet Gosal and check out my free kinky erotica story “Domme’s Games.”

With very limited free time now that I’m a working mom and a caregiver, making me a member of the sandwich generation, I want to work on new projects, which include a podcast related to Open Secrets, the live event, and, hopefully, if I’m lucky, a nonfiction essay anthology.

I’m working on that proposal with my agent now. I’m trying to have low/no expectations so I’m not disappointed, but I’m definitely hopeful on that front. If you want to help my little underdog anthology sell, what’s most helpful is subscribing to Open Secrets Magazine to help us get closer to 5,000 subscribers, my next goal (as of this moment, we’re at 3,767).

What I’m learning is that the sample essays and proposed table of contents is one part of the proposal, but a huge other part is my platform, meaning numbers and statistics and trying to show that there’s a wide audience for my topic, our relationships with and attachments and non-attachments to our belongings. I’ve been doing researchon that for the proposal and my podcast and will keep you posted if and when there’s news. If you’re an independent podcaster or want to start one, check out

Podcast Bestie

by Courtney Kocak, as well as her Podcasting for Writers class. Both have been invaluable to me in my fledgling podcasting journey.

Speaking of which, I recorded my essay “The Craving That Killed My Veganism” for the podcast Writing Class Radio, where the hosts analyze it afterward. I was nervous as I read and reread the essay four times into my phone. I was required to do it twice, then was worried the first go-round wasn’t good enough and recorded it again. It’s a whole different ball game typing words into my laptop vs. saying them out loud,trying to sound confident and not stumbling over them. My deepest respect goes out to all podcasters and anyone dealing in audio. It’s not actually my preferred medium but my podcast won’t be me talking into a mic alone, it will be me interviewing people, which is something I enjoy.

Lastly, I got to have my book nerd dream come true with a member pick on the shelves of Somerville, Massachusetts feminist bookstore All She Wrote Books in November, my birthday month. They have a very cool membership program that I joined and one of the perks, in addition to discounts on orders, is doing this book pick. I chose one of my favorite 2024 reads, the memoir I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This (But I’m Going to Anyway) by Chelsea Devantez, host of the wonderful celebrity memoir podcast Glamorous Trash. If you can’t read it, my blurb says, “This memoir is an impassioned feminist take on friendship, ambition, surviving domestic violence, Hollywood, and being a badass from the host of the Glamorous Trash podcast. It’s my go-to gift for the powerful women in my life.”

I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but in the interest of the perfect being the enemy of the good, I’m sending this off and wishing you a wonderful December. I’ll be back on Tuesday with a book release reminder and Giving Tuesday donation suggestions!