A Release Day Thank You Note! 🥳

Dear Love and Laundry Readers,

I promise we will return to our regularly scheduled Love and Laundry programming later this month. But until then please allow me to celebrate today’s release of Behind White Picket Fences with a big thank you.

Thank you for buying and reading my first book, which made this second book possible.

Thank you for inviting me into your book clubs and into your homes both in person and by Zoom.

Thank you for the ratings or reviews that helped other readers find my books.

Thank you for signing up for this newsletter. So many of you started as strangers and have now become friends. And thank you to those who started as friends and gave me the encouragement to keep going when I was ready to give up.

As Behind White Picket Fences makes it’s way into the world, I will admit to being nervous about what the future holds for authors, and also for billions of other people, because of artificial intelligence.

AI is capable of writing an entire novel. It’s a bad novel, but it’s still a novel. And there are greedy “writers” out there who have no compunction about flooding the world with AI generated slop in an effort to make a buck. And the faster they “write,” the more money they earn.

In contrast, it takes me a full year to write a book. My publisher takes another year to exhaustively edit and format that book, design the cover, send it out for blurbs and early reviews, market the book and launch it into the world.

Some days I feel like the guy who makes wagon wheels or top hats. I feel like a craftsman who spent a long time learning a trade, and now someone has invented a machine that renders my craft obsolete. In fact, sometimes I fear that my writer friends and I are the last generation of authors.

And then I get an email from one of you. And I realize that as long as there are readers who love good books there will be a job for those of us who love the hard work of writing them. I cling to this hope as the world around me becomes a little more unrecognizable with each passing day.

In light of all this impending change, I’m trying to support the things I love so they don’t disappear.

Two of the three movie theatres near my home have now closed and I’m determined to help keep the last one open by going to movies in person this summer and buying a giant tub of buttered popcorn while I’m there.

There’s a tiny specialty bakery in Falls Church, Virginia dedicated to gluten free pastries, cakes and pies. I would weep (and be much skinnier) if they closed, so I get on the Beltway and trek out there for gluten free apple tarts whenever I can.

And after 29 years as a faithful reader, I finally cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post because it is now a skinny, typo-riddled shadow of its former self. But then I felt guilty and re-subscribed (at a lower price!) because I want the reporters who are still doing good work to have a paycheck. I doubt my lone subscription will save the Post, but I sleep better at night knowing I’m still doing what I can to support credible news gathering. Plus I missed the advice column.

So thank you for being the kind of people who value books written with painstaking care by a slow craftsman of average intelligence with a very human heart.

Thank you finding value in good writing, relatable characters, humor and a well-crafted plot. Thank you for supporting me on this long and crazy writing journey. Two books in, I still can’t believe this is my job.

Thank you for reading so I can be a writer.

All my love,

Christine

Housekeeping Items

*If you pre-ordered Behind White Picket Fences, THANK YOU!!!! It should arrive today.

*If you’d like to give a signed copy of Behind White Picket Fences as a gift, just hit reply and give me your address and the name of your recipient. I’ll send you a signed bookplate to insert on the title page, plus some fun bookish swag to include with your gift.

*Book club meetings: I am SO EXCITED to do book club meetings again! If your book club or library group would like to read and discuss Behind White Picket Fences, shoot me an email and we will get it on the schedule, either in person or by Zoom.

*If you are a social media kind of person, I’d love to see your pictures of Behind White Picket Fences “in the wild” as it makes a new home on your kitchen table, at the beach, on your nightstand, or wherever you read. Or you can hit reply and email me :-) I like to imagine it with soggy pages sitting on a beach chair as you relax on vacation :-)

I leave you today with a Gunderson family portrait from the opening night of The Mandalorian. My husband, (who believes Star Trek is infinitely superior and thinks there should be actual science in science fiction) is behind the camera taking the picture.

Till later this month!

Christine