This Was Not The Post I Planned On Sharing Today

Welcome to Five On Fridays, my weekly straight-no-chaser newsletter where I help demystify the publishing industry for new writers and early-career authors.

This was not the post I was going to share today.

I had planned on sharing something helpful about the various roles at a publishing house and why all authors should be familiar with them. It’s an informative piece, and I will post it sometime in the future, but writing about publishing roles after the week we’ve all just had, well, it felt … wrong.

Last week, Target joined the chorus of companies rolling back on DEI because … well, the president told them to.

On Wednesday night, an American Airlines plane and an Army helicopter collided outside Reagan National Airport. Sixty-seven souls were tragically lost. On Thursday morning, Donald Trump blamed the crash on DEI.

And then I saw this memo from the Defense Intelligence Agency, sent to their staff on January 28. The memo instructs staff to suspend observing events related to Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, Juneteenth, Women’s History Month, Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, National Disability Awareness Month, and on, and on, and on. People of color, the disabled, and the LGBTQI+ community are all under governmental attack in ways I haven’t seen in my lifetime.

So, as you can imagine, after ingesting all of that this week, suddenly, helping y’all understand the various roles at a publishing house just didn’t feel as important. But this is a newsletter about writing and publishing, so I knew I needed to write something.

I need to write something.

We need to write something.

And so this is what this post is about. Writing something.

From Homer’s The Iliad, to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the spoken word and books have been shaping culture and advocating understanding and change since the beginning of time.

Writing can provide comfort, shelter, representation. It bares our souls to our readers and implores them to put themselves in our characters’ shoes, pushing them to examine everything they think they know about the world.

Shortly after Donald Trump’s first election, I began writing my YA speculative fiction thriller. It’s changed a lot over the intervening years, but a few things remain the same. It tells the story of a young, Black, Jamaican American woman who, after her best friend’s death, puts her own life on the line to find her friend’s killer. The story is a fast-paced whodunit, but at its core, it tackles themes of classism, caste, and social structure. It asks who gets what, who doesn’t, and why, and it wonders how long people can take it all before they revolt.

But what’s striking, even to me, is that the story I started writing seven years ago has always begun with an Executive Order issued by a president. The executive order is titled Protecting The Nation From Foreign Nationals, and much of the story takes place in a government-created district in the remote western United States that houses people with Caribbean ancestry who were born in the US but who were denied birthright citizenship. In my book’s world, districts like the one at the center of my story exist around the globe, housing society’s “lesser classes.” But spurred by the action of one young woman and the community around her, the world slowly begins to change.

This is the book I am currently on submission with in this political climate. Gotta love my timing. That same timing will tell how the industry responds to the story. But regardless of the response, my story exists.

And I guess that’s what I’m trying to remind us of, the beauty and power of writing. Books can be banned, they can be burned. A government can remove official remembrances and reshape history for its own machinations. But it can’t erase our words. Not all of them and not forever. Not if we keep writing.

So my Five for Friday today are:

1. Keep writing

2. Keep writing

3. Keep writing

4. Keep writing

5. Keep hoping

That wraps up this week’s Five On Fridays. Thank you for subscribing and reading. If you found this newsletter helpful, please share it on social media and forward it to your writer friends.

-Grace