What is your Wild Dark Shore? 🌊

On the Joy of Collaborating, Dinner with Didion, and Hot Shrinks 😂

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Hello, Lovelies. How the hell are you?

Greetings from Deadline Land amid our steep slide into autocracy. Maybe we should focus on happy things?

Here’s one: The AbFab ladies were right! Drinking Champagne is good for you—it reduces the likelihood of a sudden heart attack (or so I want to believe)—as this is something all the more likely under Trump 2.0. Huzzah!

And here’s another: I love collaborating on writing.

I show up for every Zoom with full-on Troll Doll sex hair—even though I haven’t had sex in forever. Not because I can’t. Mostly because it’s too much bother, and it turns out that publishing books is, frankly, far more orgasmic than trying to wrench my jaw open for some gray-pubed oldster.

Still, the hair is unfair.

But there we are: the three of us—my co-writer, my hair, and me.

We’re writing a midlife romantasy—think female 007, magical MI6, Alias meets Outlander.

Sunday nights are for reading scenes aloud. I write the Jennifer-Garner-in-Alias parts: magical knife fights, and roundhouse kicks to the patriarchal balls. My co-writer, bless her, swoops in and rewrites it all in lush, velvety language—world-building so vivid it feels like you could fall into it and sprain your ankle. We hoot and howl the whole way through. It’s such a joyful process of ideation and building on each other’s work—I can’t even tell you. I have never had so much fun with my clothes on. None of it would be possible without Substack.

Now do you see why my hair looks like this?

Who wore it better? Def, the troll.

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This weekend was a marvelously gray, rainy one here in Cambridge—perfect for tucking up solo on the sofa with enough emotional support cocoa to flood a small village and the breathtaking new novel by Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore.

Now, hundreds of lightning seizures—and the charming cocktail of meds designed to quell them—have given me what I’ll politely call emotional blue balls. I’m not much of a crier. My tears simmer just under the surface, waiting for some cosmic memo that never comes. The last book that cracked me open was Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

But Wild Dark Shore...

If you’ve ever loved your children and yet felt cut off from them by your own grief and ghosts, you will come away from this novel whispering to yourself: I will love my children expansively and shamelessly, even when the world—and men—are too much.

As a thriller, the pacing, the tension, the gut-wrenching twists—flawless.

As a novel, it absolutely wrecked me.

Charlotte McConaghy captures the intricate, aching connection between place and the human heart better than almost anyone writing today. Her characters—Dominic Salt and his three luminous, precocious kids—are caretakers of the world's last remaining seed vault, clinging to life at the edge of Antarctica.

And the chemistry between the characters—Reader, it will undo you.

The youngest, Orly, broke my heart clean in two. His kinship with the natural world shot me straight back to a night when I was four years old.

My parents had left me at their friends’ house after a dinner party. I woke at two in the morning, slipped out barefoot, and ran over a mile home through a no-man’s-land of thick woods, bear trails, and coyote dens.

When my mother, scrubbing my dirty feet, asked in horror, “Weren’t you afraid?”

I blinked at her and said, “Afraid of what?”

“Bears? Wolves? The dark?”

About to nod off, I said, “Wild things aren’t afraid of other wild things. Unless they’re someone’s dinner. (Cue little kid yawn of annoyance.) I’m not dinner.”

Wild Dark Shore touched that primal part of me—the part that still believes I can outrun the dark. It’s not just a brilliant novel about loss, love, and the end of the world. It’s about the seed of something stubborn and enduring we carry inside us, even now.

Calling it: Best Book of the Year. I wish I had written it. I hope to acquire something like it for Empress Editions.

Speaking of acquisitions—and a few things worth popping a bottle over:

We are beyond thrilled to announce that Empress Editions has acquired the world rights to Come to Dinner: A Fifty-Year Friendship with Joan Didion (!!!)—written by none other than NYT bestselling author Sara Davidson. Details coming soon, but trust me—you’re going to want a VIP seat at this table.

Photo: Jerry Bauer

And, after almost six months of being banned from distribution, our very first Empress book is officially live on Walmart.com.

Our secret mission? To sneak a book about midlife women’s pleasure past the Christian Right. Today? Mission Accomplished. (And hilariously, uber-creepily, Walmart’s algorithm recommends a “Just for Men” ad next to it.) Regardless, we’re completely grateful.

Here be scary comedy gold?

But if big box stores give you the heebie-jeebies, you can also find us at bookshop.org, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and, of course, Amazon.

Oh! And we’re expanding Empress Editions into four sparkling new imprints:

• Empress Voices (Prescriptive nonfiction & memoir)

• Empress Vices (Romance)

• Empress Virtues (Literary fiction)

• Empress Visionaries (Business/Leadership)

Because midlife women contain multitudes. (At least four publishing categories.)

Meanwhile, one final thought and question:

Have you seen Rorschach?

Because I have a new rule:
You cannot have a hot therapist. It has to be against the Geneva Convention.

I mean, how am I supposed to focus on your finger paintings, Mister Doctor, when you look like Alexander Skarsgård in a chunky sweater? Get out of here. I am cured!

But what about you? What is your wild dark shore? Your outermost edge? Is it your writing? Is it Alexander Skarsgård?

Enquiring Substackers want to know!

Back to regularly scheduled programming after May 5th.
Yours in deadlines and cocoa, xoxo, gotham girl

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PS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.