Chloe Cullen's Blog

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I walked down the stairs and into the downstairs bathroom. In the mirror, I spotted dark clouds of sweat stained my jumpsuit’s armpits. I bought this jumpsuit from a thrift store a year or two ago. It had a stitched logo for ...

Yesterday, I submitted my first piece for workshop.

Next Thursday, my classmates and professor will tell me what about this first chapter I need to revise. It will also be the first time I’ve let anyone (beside Luke) read any of this book!!?

Before this goes through another evolution of changes, I wanted to share it here in its current draft. Because it’s come a long way.

The premise of my novel, as a brush-up: Dream Big, Inc. focuses on Ryan, a bartender at a grass-roots comedy theater set on th...

On Monday through Friday, I nanny a 15-month-old baby who calls me “Shoes.” I feed her, read her a book, then throw her in socks and velcro sneakers to dump her into a stroller. We walk for miles, go on swings, and say hi to my cats through the screened window facing the street.

As Shoes, my life has been nonstop. Before Baby’s lunch ends on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I slip on my sneakers and run, hefty laptop-laden purse on my shoulder, to catch the Broad Street SEPTA. I sit, shining with sweat, a...

Your sister Tatum calls as you push someone else’s baby in a stroller. Your neighborhood in Philadelphia, it turns out, absorbs heat with its wide treeless sidewalks. Even in the early morning hours, you shirt collects a constellation of condensation off your back.

Before Tatum could say as much as hello, you yap about this spontaneous nanny job. A 13-month-old who loves animal noises and whose parents lived in New York and migrated to Philly to raise her, people from big families and creative b...

As JFK once said, we don’t write listicles because they’re easy; we write them because we came up against a self-imposed deadline with nothing substantial on our mind.

Because July’s theme is brain soup. Too many life events in my life! A move, another stint of unemployment before returning to school, a wedding! Champagne problems, I know. I think I like this little life.

And yet, it’s giving me old woman knees. I need long periods to sit. I spend too much time in grocery stores to turn my brain ...

You pack boxes, run laundry, and pack those clothes newly cleaned into boxes. Odd items emerge from the ignored corners of your apartment. Square vases. A wicker basket. Cat fur and tangled wires congregate everywhere the light cannot reach. And you miss the version of yourself that you are when you’re at someone else’s bachelorette.

On one of these girls’ trips this month, your friend’s friend said, “What’s your fiancée like? Is he funny like you?” (Her words; your flex.) You had been in full gi...

You’re in a rented house in the Hamptons. The house has white walls, triangular windows to match the A-frame of the house, and a long porch with a pool that encroaches on the surrounding forest. When you came in yesterday, your friend pointed out a rabbit in the yard. You had taken the Long Island Rail Road across the aisle from an open-container rabbit sitting in a gingham carrier on top of a pee pad.

This house has a wine fridge and a microwave hidden behind a cabinet door and expansive honeyed...

I’ve talked about my novel, Dream Big, Inc., via the newsletter before.

Today, I crossed 300 pages in the first draft.

(And I’m still going on wrapping up the climax while feeling out character gaps as draft two problems.)

As you all know, I’m reading classic novels to pick up stylistic and structural tips on how to write better.

But in my recreational reading, I’ve accidentally been drawn to the same ideas, topics, and storylines I’m untangling in my novel-writing process.

My novel feels like a ...

The first time I saw Olivia Colman on my screen, I wanted to punch her.

In the Fleabag pilot, Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, obviously) shows up drunk at her father’s house. Fleabag is not doing so hot. In fact, she has never known the joy of lukewarm. Bad dates, dead best friends, a guinea pig-themed café. Her dad, sheepish with outbursts, hides behind his live-in girlfriend, Fleabag’s Godmother (Colman).

When you first heard about Proust, it had nothing to do with Madeleines and everything to do with your Uncle Ned.

How can you best describe Ned to someone who doesn’t know him?

Ned may be more myth than man. The closest thing to Paul Bunyan you will ever meet. He drinks vodka out of glass skulls and loves Infinite Jest. He does something in advertising that warrants a Manhattan corner office. A bucket list item, someday, would be a weekday martini lunch in a steakhouse with Ned. (You both, accordi...