May Writerly Things
A monthly dispatch from the trenches, the drafts, and the general chaos
May has been one of those months where I have decided, as a woman showing clear signs of early onset insanity, that I can do everything at once. Here is a partial inventory of things I’m currently juggling. Please don’t ask me how any of them are going. I don’t know. Nobody knows.
Listen, I may not be fancy or glamorous, or particularly pretty even, but subscribe to this already, will you?
The querying update on what I’m calling Schrödinger’s manuscript
Which I’m going to keep very short. Three fulls out, and I still have more than 60% of my list to send out letters to.
I’m going slow, and doing it in teeny tiny batches, but I won’t pretend the slow-going doesn’t sting. It does. There’s a specific kind of madness that sets in around a couple of months into the process, where you start checking your email in the middle of the night as if literary agents are famously known for sending replies at 3am.
They are not. I checked.
But the manuscript is out there, doing its rounds, and I’m doing the only thing I can do in the meantime, which is everything else.
Novel number two…or three, or four…depending on how we’re counting
Second novel is going surprisingly well.
I say “second” because it is the second one I’m taking seriously enough to finish, but in truth there are at least two abandoned manuscripts before Half Written—skeletons in the Google Drive, locked away in folders I have named things like “OLD STORIES”.
Are you a writer and do you have a folder like that?
No?
Are you lying?
So this is technically novel four-ish. But emotionally it is novel two, because it’s the second time I’ve sat down at the beginning of a book knowing exactly how painful the whole process will be and choosing to do it anyway. Which is either courage or a personality disorder.
My first one was a do-your-head-in political literary fiction with a brown girl and a white boy stuck in a disastrous love story. The new novel is about a matriarchal family where every woman is more or less (or more) deranged. Which means I am currently deep in research about matrilineal kinship systems, inheritance structures, mother-daughter power dynamics, and the very specific way Indian grandmothers can communicate absolute devastation through a single raised eyebrow. My browser history is such:
matrilineal succession south asia
can you inherit temperament from female relatives
canary wharf greggs opening hours
how long can a grudge last across generations
places to visit in Norfolk over the long weekend
poisons killing humans popular in the 70s
I contain multitudes.
The first draft is in that extremely early, extremely ugly stage where every sentence I write feels like it was produced by someone who has never encountered the English language before. I wrote 88,000 words of Half Written and more, if you count what was edited out, and apparently none of that practice transferred to the new project. My brain has reset to factory settings.
The short story that I’m pretending is going well
In between drafting the novel and refreshing my inbox, I have also decided to write a short story. My last one was Captain Asterix that was published early last year (unsatisfying love story again where one of them end up dead. I don’t think I can write happy stories) and I have decided one whole year is quite a gap given the fact I do have the capability to finish at least one of my seven unfinished short fictions. Because clearly I don’t think I have enough problems in my life.
I don’t have much to report on this except that it exists, in the way that a pile of disconnected paragraphs and three different opening lines can be said to exist.
The Critique Partner Match-Up
This was the most successful thing to come out of this month that I have been most excited about. I ran a Critique Partner Match-Up program (for free) and ended up with organizing 14 groups of 3-8 people in varied genres ready to look through each other’s works and provide critique and swap feedback without the usual chaos of online critique groups. And besides just feedback, the idea is to stay accountable and inspired.
To be honest, I didn’t think the program through before launching the sign up form. Good beta readers are genuinely difficult to find. I’ve been through the online groups, the Reddit threads, the Discord servers, the “swap with me!” posts that go nowhere. Time zone mismatches. Genre mismatches. People who ghost after receiving your feedback but before giving theirs. People who are lovely and enthusiastic but haven’t read in your genre since 2014. I started this because I wanted to build something small and practical that solves the matching problem without requiring anyone to join yet another platform or commit to yet another group that will probably fizzle out by week three. I also wanted my offline writing friends who were struggling to find beta readers who were willing to provide comments on working drafts. And that’s where my thought process ended. But a handful of writers who signed up asked about group writing sessions for accountability and inspiration and that’s where I want the program to head next!
The May round closed on the 10th and the groups have been sent out. The next round will be in July 2026—if you’re new (or old) to writing and you’d like to be reminded, drop me an email and I’ll make sure you know when sign-ups open.
Here’s another reminder to subscribe if you want me to show up crying and whining in your inbox. Exciting, eh?
The PR and marketing strategy (or the part where I pretend to be a professional)
Build your brand, build your brand, build your brand. No stranger to this. When I was designing books as a side hustle, some ten years ago, I knew exactly what to blog or post about to build an audience, and did a decent amount of “building” too.
And then life happened.
By the time you clean things up that you need to clean, try and clear your head of the stories that buzz around and distract by pinning them down in black and white and peddle them to literary journals and agents, your social media accounts have died and gone to heaven. So now this is like starting from scratch. What I have is this Substack, an X account where I post intermittently about writing and the weather, a Bluesky presence, and a vague sense that I should probably be doing more.
So I’ve been putting together something resembling a PR and marketing strategy for Half Written.
And by “putting together” I mean I have a Google Doc with the heading “PLAN” in bold followed by several bullet points, some of which are actual ideas and some of which just say things like “Instagram???” and “figure out reels” and “DO NOT make a BookTok, you are 40 years old and will embarrass yourself.”
I’m taking it seriously, though. The reality of publishing in 2026 is that even traditionally published authors are expected to show up with some kind of audience and a coherent sense of who they’re writing for. I’d rather build that now, on my own terms, writing things I actually want to write—like this newsletter for you in all its randomness—than scramble to manufacture a personality six months after a book deal that may or may not materialise.
More on this as the strategy evolves from Google-Doc-with-anxious-bullet-points to something resembling an actual plan.
What I’m reading/eating/surviving on
The Upstairs Delicatessen. Because food and Dwight Garner’s writing.
A beautiful rendition of relationships by Alexandra Hidalgo.
Phuchka at Kolapata. If you’re ever in London, bounce down to Whitechapel for this unassuming Bangladeshi outlet where the food is unbeatable.
That’s May. June will presumably be more of the same, but with better weather. Allegedly.
Happy writing!
Amrita
Follow along with my eating, cooking and writing adventures here, where I promise to document both the triumphs and the failures.