August and Other Minor Inconveniences

 

The good news is that, against all odds, I’m actually posting this one on time. The bad news is that punctuality appears to be the main achievement here, because there really isn’t much else to report.

Let’s start with the HarperCollins Virtual Insight Days. I’d applied twice before, and on my third attempt, I finally got selected. The irony is that this was also the application I put the least effort into. I filled it in during the quiet moments and work breaks, apparently proving that my best strategy for getting what I want is to care slightly less about getting it.

It’s a dangerous precedent to set.

If you want the full story, I wrote about it on LinkedIn, which you can find here.

The day itself was... fine. Not life-altering, not exactly a cinematic turning point, but it did give me two things: confirmation that my instinct for publishing departments is still intact, and, perhaps more importantly, the determination to keep pursuing it.

The unfortunate news was that, despite having what felt like all the help in the world, I didn’t get shortlisted for the Commercial Assistant role at Bookouture.

So naturally, I responded in the most measured and professional way possible: I emailed everyone at Hachette asking for feedback and publicly called them out on LinkedIn until someone gave me some.

In my defence, the number one piece of advice we got during the Virtual Insight Days was to ask for feedback.

Ha.

They said it as though this were a perfectly simple thing to do. Just ask! Easy! What they neglected to mention was the part where you have to overcome the small matter of your dignity, send the email, and then apparently start campaigning on LinkedIn.

In more directly bookish news, Ana Huang’s The Keeper is coming out soon, I managed to get the special hardback edition of Hook, Line & Sinker by Tessa Bailey using the discount we got through the HarperCollins Virtual Insight Days, and, most importantly, the trailer for The Love Hypothesis dropped a couple of days ago.

And I would like to formally retract everything I said in my last blog post.

It looks amazing.

The film lands on Amazon Prime on September 23rd, and I am already preparing myself for what I sincerely hope will be the rom-com to end all rom-coms. My expectations are probably unreasonable, but at this point, that feels like someone else’s problem.

I never picked up Fever Dream by Elsie Silver, and I never will. The casting for the Rose Hill series is just as baffling to me as the casting for It Happened One Summer by Tessa Bailey. At this point, I’m beginning to suspect that casting directors and I simply have fundamentally different ideas about what these characters are supposed to look like.

On the complete opposite end of the literary spectrum, I’ve pre-ordered Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley. Which is, frankly, very out of character for me. I have spent years happily living in the romance section, so voluntarily purchasing a crime thriller feels like I’ve briefly wandered into someone else’s bookshop.

But Lucy Foley got me. I couldn’t help myself.

I was initially quite excited about H.D. Carlton’s Haunting Adeline movie, but after seeing some of the Instagram posts, I’m no longer quite sure what to make of it.

I’m not going to say anything else.

Let’s just... wait and see.

My current job has revealed a few unfortunate truths, but the skills it’s giving me are proving to be the much-needed comedown from the sugar rush. It may not always be what I want, but I can’t deny that I’m learning a lot—and, unfortunately for my plans to complain about it, that makes it rather useful.

August has been a month of realisations, revelations, resilience and, apparently, several other words beginning with ‘re’ that I’m sure will make sense eventually.

And I suppose that’s August: a month of figuring things out, changing my mind, occasionally making questionable decisions, and trying to convince myself that all of it is part of some grander plan. I’m not entirely sure what the plan is yet, but I’ve learnt that clarity rarely arrives on schedule. Much like this blog post, apparently. Still, I’m here, I’m reading, I’m applying, I’m learning, and, most importantly, I’m somehow still posting on time. At this point, I’ll take the win.

As always, My Let’s Connect page is where it always is, so don’t forget to give it a quick look to see where else I’m active.

See you between the pages,

Vivian