☁️👴🏻☁️ Old man yelling at clouds

Also the bisexual vampires got a nice review!

Hello again friends and readers. This is just a cute note up top to tell you No Such Thing As Duty got a ✨starred review in Publisher’s Weekly✨that warmed the cockles of my shriveled, blackened, withered little heart*:

”Donnelly wows with this intimate, genre-bending novella that is at once a World War I spy thriller and a supernatural alternate history pulled from true events.”

Intimate! Genre-bending! What more could you ask for? Pre-order that pretty little sucker right here, and keep an eye on the Neon Hemlock kickstarter here to get ahold of the other novellas they’re releasing this year.

Promo done. But because I feel like newsletters shouldn’t simply be about promo, I guess I can tell you this little story from last night—

My partner and I have been doing little writing dates, where we take whatever we’re working on and go out after dinner to a local bar to write in a fun third space. There’s one place we particularly like, where we have a very productive evening about a month back, but recently I noticed they have a sign on the bar that says “No laptops after four p.m.”

Nobody kicked us out that first time, so we thought, well, might as well try again! Note that I am the only one using a laptop in this situation; my partner is a notebook writer. I should also say: I can write in a notebook! But I’m in the middle of revising a 125k manuscript that’s all annotated with emojis in Scrivener. So that’s…not exactly notebookable.

Anyway. We get there, I set my laptop on the bar, and the bartender takes our order. And then, after he takes our order, he tells us no laptops. So now we’re stuck! And I am already feeling slightly fucked-with! But fine. I’ll do some work on scrap paper, figuring out character stuff. It’s helpful! But I notice there are two people at the bar with their noses in their (enormous! do we still say “phablet?”) phones and a third wearing noise-canceling headphones, and I start to get cranky and stew over it.

And here is the hot take I developed while simmering:

“No laptops” is all about a romantic aesthetic of creative work.** And I get it! Sometimes you just want a cute little café where nobody is taking a Zoom call. But also…I mean, they were totally fine with us heads down over pen and paper, silent and concentrating and ignoring the world. Even though it meant that I didn’t get any measurable work done on my actual creative project. Because for the cute little café, the appearance of creative work is more important than the reality of creative work.

Creative work has changed in a lot of ways. This isn’t Hemingway’s Paris. Artists and writers work on computers and tablets as well as notebooks and sketchbooks. We do use those things—I love physical media!!—but often (mostly) our actual professional work is finished, edited, and transmitted to our agents/editors/etc digitally.

This isn’t me being like “FREE THE LAPTOP, ALL CAFES AND BARS MUST ALLOW THEM AT ALL TIMES!” but it is me being like, people really have a romantic picture of creative diligence in their heads, huh? They’re okay with people texting and reading and swiping on their little glowing screens (and listening to things out loud on them!?) instead of engaging with their environment, but slightly larger glowing screens on which someone is actually doing creative work? Absolutely not.

I got so cranky about all of it that my normally extremely chill and accommodating partner was like “omg will you LET THIS GO!” and I had to stick my nose into my two sad sheets of scrap paper and scribble with the pen I borrowed from a waitress.

At this point I have 10000% become an old man yelling at the clouds. You’re the clouds. Feel free to float on by. But if you know of any cool bars in Harlem that will let me sit in a corner and work on my revisions after 8 p.m. please share; the best one closed during lockdown.

*My heart is in fact none of these things, but I am a very dramatic person.

** “All about” is hyperbole, a particularly beloved vice of mine. I know there are a lot of other reasons not to want laptops in your café / bar. But like I said, I’m a dramatic person, and I was, as stated, VERY CRANKY. Honestly, I REMAIN very cranky!!!