April Arising: Rewrites & Wasteland, Baby!

A Monthly Brief | April 2025 recap

April 2025

Oh April. This is my “blink and you’ll miss it” month. Unlike the rest of the year, it feels like sand slipping through my fingers, time passing between rainstorms and searing hot days.

As I write this, I’m painfully aware that I need to finish edits. I was harried trying to remember every movie I watched and book I read (and my thoughts on them) to make sure the extra bits at the end were interesting enough for people to read. I’m behind on all my deadlines. I found a fortune cookie insert in my hair earlier because it got tangled up in my claw clip.

It read; your optimism will lead to great success.

I’m not sure how optimistic I feel right now, but I can say that I know every other time I’ve reached this point in a project it has felt the same. It has also passed. I’ve made it through.

I do this thing when I’m overwhelmed where I tend to accomplish everything but the task at the source. That’s called procrastination, by the way.

I could wax poetics about how I took a much-needed break, or used my time to enrich myself in other ways than staring at a cursor that I couldn’t find it in me to move. But I don’t really want to act like I’m an author (or a human) who has her shit together, because I — wholly and completely — do not.

Most of my April was spent doing things, but it’s the kind of tasks that everyone hates to accomplish, from finding out you misplaced a bill underneath a stack of junk mail to tapping your foot in waiting rooms because you’re beholden to someone else’s time for a chunk of your own. This month, as much as it was sand that kept falling through the hourglass, was also a lot of compounded time and energy that bubbled over. I had things I needed to address after spending so much of my focus on publishing in March, and in turn, that meant I didn’t really do anything fun.

I did celebrate Indie Bookstore day by going to a local craft fair! It was held next to an old cemetary which was really neat.

I think sometimes in the online sphere we forget that all the pretty photos and writer’s life hashtags are curated. I certainly don’t pose my hands casually like a model over my keyboard or gaze wistfully out a window in a serene coffee shop when I’m working. My work is often done from my bed, scrunched up like a goblin, with a half-flattened squishmallow to support my back because, again, I’m sitting like a hydraulic-pressed mythical creature.

So please know, when I do share my highly curated wrap-up images (or posts on my Instagram) it’s all a farce. Because I am writing this in a pretzel twisted surge of anxiety to avoid the actual work I need to finish.

I am no stranger to wanting to throttle my own characters.

When I sit down to plot, I often flare out the big elements and narrow them down to character reactions for a given scene. I find that when you distill a plot moment to your character’s interpretations of it, it naturally leads to more interesting elements later on. That is why I like it when my characters don’t have cookie cutter reactions.

I see discourse sometimes that characters might lean too heavily on miscommunication, or willfully become ignorant when it’s plot relevant — but as someone with anxiety, I know my brain doesn’t tell the truth a lot of times. Maybe that comes with having anxiety, or maybe it gives me a better understanding of humans and our (sometimes) irrational responses. If every plot to every piece of media had people reacting in the exact ways they should, we wouldn’t have very interesting entertainment to consume.

Take Gold Rush, for example. Light spoilers for the end of book one moving forward — but there is a dynamic that plays out between Theo and June that begins with Theo adamantly against June living in the pack house. This stems from his fears of being like his fathers, who were abusive toward his mother, but in this fear, he has the exact reaction he tried to avoid: he ends up acting just as shitty as they did. I don’t know about anyone else, but having unhealed trauma is a ballache, and it often means responses are not rational, let alone healthy. When Arin (rightfully) calls him out for this behavior, Theo swings hard in the other direction to make up for it.

I made the authorial choice to have the angry passion compound at the end of the novel with the beginning of June’s heat. There is attraction there, despite both characters being angry with each other, and they end up sleeping together after ample consent. But then June goes into heat. Theo panics — he knows his own mother never consented with his fathers and felt trapped by them, and doesn’t want to put June in the same position. So he makes a wrong choice, again, and leaves June in her time of need.

Sure, I could have written a piece where Theo’s navigation of his own problems was smoother, or immediately jumped to him actively seeking professional help (which he needs — love him, he’s a nightmare) but that wouldn’t have been very interesting from a narrative perspective. In Gold Mine, though they are in a better position in their relationship, there is a lot of familial related trauma to unpack between them both in regards to agency and autonomy.

I love a clean plotline as much as the next reader. I also get frustrated when characters seem to be ignorant to their own pitfalls, but at the same time, it just makes a story feel more real to me. There’s a balance, like all things, and I do think that balance largely comes down to personal preference and reader mood — but I find it an interesting aspect of publishing that I could write a whole essay on. Who knows, maybe I will one day!

In an ideal world I would be using this space to talk about how I’m so glad to be finished with the edits for The Felling Cut. This is not an ideal world.

Speaking more on unhealed trauma (I am so dramatic, this is fully in jest) — the moment I opened the document I’ve been using to work on revisions, I felt a little sick. I love the story I crafted all the way back in 2023, but I’m also a fundamentally different person than who I was then. That author hadn’t been published. That author hadn’t yet receiver over 200 rejections. That author hadn’t been told her story had too many unnecessary details, needed major edits, and couldn’t find a home on shelves in its current state.

In some ways, I think I’m still in a state of mourning. Looking at this document feels like I’m dressing a corpse, reaching for blush to give life to pallid cheeks. I’ve been working in tandem, with both the original manuscript open in one tab and the severely edited one in another. Both manuscripts have merit — I found a lot of good sentences by doing major edits last year and making character actions firmer, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say the extra details of the original don’t make the manuscript feel alive to me.

What I’m left with is a lot of work. It’s work to sit down and go sentence by sentence, expanding, editing, and reworking to make the voice feel as clear as I want it to. It helps that I have cheerleaders who read the original and still love it (hi Silvy 🥲 thanks for being Mrs. Nick Barber), but there’s also a level of trepidation that I feel. Will I obscure or remove something that was beloved before in this new version? Am I muddling the book by combining two manuscripts into one piece?

I don’t know. I don’t have the answers to that. All I do know is that with each sentence I carefully retype, I am only trying to make myself happy. I know more will change when I get feedback from early readers and my editor, but just like Gold Rush and Gold Mine — there reaches a point where the only person I’m trying to satisfy is myself.

At the end of the day, I need to love the work that I share with the world. I need to be proud of it. That concept has kept me going in a world that increasingly loud with others opinions on every topic imaginable.

Unfortunately for you all, I’m in my vague era. But that doesn’t mean silence behind the scenes.

Six weeks after the release of Gold Rush, I passed 1 million pages read for both my books! I’m still reeling from it. Then again I managed to have a million month, where over one million pages have been read since April 1. Thank you so, so much to everyone who has picked up the duet so far. It baffles me that so many eyes have read those words, and each and every time someone tells me they enjoyed them it makes my heart soar.

Mary Elizabeth also wrote a very sweet newsletter review on the duet. Getting that in my email was a lovely surprise!

I hope to have more information about The Felling Cut in June! If all goes well, there will be a lot of news to drop at once, and maybe an extra newsletter to share it.

Media:

• Yellowjackets ended it’s third season and I am bereft. I need a season four renewal right now. Honestly, I haven’t loved a show like this since Hannibal and that says a lot because I’m a little freak who loves cannibalism as a plot device.

• But my heart needed room to be utterly crushed by the beginning of The Last of Us season two. Genuinely some of the best television I’ve ever seen. I’m happy to know they already approved a season three, because that gives me hope all storylines will have some extra love and care given to them.

• I watched Companion (2025) recently and was floored by how much I enjoyed myself. Sophie Thatcher is quickly becoming one of my favorite actresses! It was perfectly creepy and campy. Honestly, just a pleasant watch all around.

• I also saw Elevation (2024) and I want to gently hold Anthony Mackie’s hand and tell him to get a better agent because what was that. It was not what I expected and I was highly disappointed. I watch a lot of objectively bad movies for fun and that one was rough. I think if you drank every time there was bad CGI, you’d need a new liver in 90 minutes.

• Watching American Psycho (2000) for the first time was an absolute trip. Since I’m back in my romantic suspense mindset, I wanted to watch a classic. It was far gorier than I expected (not a bad thing, but definitely interesting!) The writing and direction was solid, but it felt like a 90s cusp film with it’s narrative choices. I did think it had a great ending, though ambiguous, I can see why it’s beloved.

• Finally (and continuing on with the clear Sophie Thatcher theme) — I watched Heretic (2024) and was both baffled and surprised? It kind of left me with the same feeling that Jordan Peele movies do — though I think I prefer Peele as a director. It was incredibly well acted, a little heavy-handed, but generally thought provoking.

• For music: I’ve been putting Hozier’s Wasteland, Baby! on whenever I need background noise. I’ve also loved Yungblud’s new single Hello Heaven, Hello and Lorde’s new release!

Books:

Hello, my name is Rebecca and when I’m stressed I binge-read monster romance.

• I finished Morgan Robinson’s Pleasure Crew series which is very fun. I love sci-fi/alien novellas and these have a lot of world building featuring interesting species and customs!

• Dalia Davies dropped Velvet Folds for April Fool’s which was just as good as Velvet Steel. I would kiss the questionably hot vampire.

• I caught up in the Hollow’s Cove series which is small-town interconnected monster romance from a variety of different authors! I’m so excited for Allegra Hall and Kass O’Shire’s installments.

• My biggest undertaking was binge-reading all of Lily Gold’s books: Faking With Benefits, Three Swedish Mountain Men, Nanny for the Neighbors, and Triple-Duty Bodyguards. My favorite, to no one’s surprise, was Three Swedish Mountain Men, but I honestly loved them all!

---

That was April!

What a variety of topics covered in this newsletter. I hope you all found something fun amongst all the introspection!

Keep an eye out for an extra essay on May 16th. I hope everyone has a lovely May — it’s my birth month, so use this as an excuse to treat yourself!

xx

R.L. Randolph