Becky Allen's Blog

March was a long and weird month for me: I changed jobs, took a week off, took a 48-hour trip to Texas for a wedding, and wrote 10,000 words of a new project. Plus the weather was nuts.

Now here we are in April and it’s finally spring. The weather is still a little nuts, bouncing between temperatures in the 70s and the 40s this week, but I’ll take it.

So like I said, I changed jobs in March.

I’ve been lucky, employment-wise, for a millennial. I’ve mostly had stable jobs,...

We have somehow defeated February — the shortest, but somehow also usually the worst, month. Slowly but surely, the days are getting longer again, and soon we’ll change the clocks and then hopefully I can resume being a functional human, after a long, extra-snowy winter.

I’m at the beginning of a new project, and mostly having fun with it. That’s a pretty big relief, since last year was rough — burnout, health challenges, the world being on fire… it meant writing did n...

January is finally over, after what felt like about five years. It was a long slog of a month with horrific news throughout, brightened only by incredible communities taking action to protect themselves and their neighbors. (If you are able to, please stand with Minnesota; if you’re in the US, you can also look for events and opportunities to get involved near you.)

I continue to try to limit my doomscrolling and news intake (while also trying to stay informed, a bit of a tricky balance) so I...

New year, new me? Absolutely not. New year, new format for newsletters with the hope of maybe sending them out more often? Sure!

(With a lot of thanks to my BFF Jess who encouraged me, whose format I am more or less stealing, and whose newsletter you should read.)

Well, it’s January. Time to look back at 2025, and look ahead at the year that’s just starting. I even have a shiny new planner.

Without getting too far into the details, it was not a particularly good year. Th...

I can’t stop thinking about Audra Winter.

My BFF Jess was the first person who told me about her and since then I’ve watched… a few reactions. To say the least.

For those who aren’t in online book spaces that have become obsessed with this, the short version is: Audra Winter is a 22-year-old indie author who managed to get massive hype around her debut novel on TikTok — a fantasy novel that she first came up with when she was 12, and has been diligently working on ever since. It’s got a qu...

Hi! I’m writing this review because it’s information I would have liked but couldn’t find before I purchased this e-reader, so perhaps the dark arts of SEO will work in favor of other potential buyers. I’m sharing my experience, I bought this with my own money, I’m not making a commission, etc.

The Background

Many years ago — like, almost 15 — I had a Nook from B&N. I got a Nook because I was very early on the bandwagon of not wanting to be trapped in Amazon’s ecosystem… not that I’m not ...

I watch too much youtube, and today found myself musing about a video I would make if I were an authortuber, which I’m not. So then I thought, hey, I could record it if I were a podcaster! Which I’m not. (I was briefly but that was awhile ago now.) And then I remembered that I could just write it down, because I am a writer, and oh yeah, I have a newsletter.

Anyway, what I was thinking about was this: I have read some bad books over the last few years, and I’m pretty glad I did, because I def...

It’s that time! The one time a year I reliably send a newsletter or write a blog post, to update with what all I did last year. Here’s an archive of word counts from the last, gosh, decade. I’ve focused less on word count stats in recent years, though — I know I consistently draft about 1,000 words in a 30-minute sprint, and I know that if I focus only on how many words I write in a year I feel crappy about times when I’m not producing words… even if I’m doing something equally important, like e...

It has been a long time. I started writing a newsletter many months ago and then couldn’t get it exactly perfect, let that be the enemy of the good, threw a temper tantrum about it, and never logged in here again. I am a mature grown up. Anyway, now I’m emailing you about coping.

You know what I’m coping with, right? I’m not going to say it. My main coping mechanism is trying not to let it take up too much space in my brain.

Let me get a little more specific with that. I have Anxiety, capi...

Quick check in: with the demise of Tinyletter, I’ve moved my newsletter over to Buttondown. If you subscribed previously you don’t have to subscribe again, and I’m going to continue cross-posting here, too, since I think this version looks nicer than the Buttondown archives.

(And if you haven’t subscribed yet: please do!)

It’s February, which means three things: 1) I meant to write and send this last month because it made more sense as a January newsletter, whoops; 2) it’s time for my annu...