Emma Barry's Blog

Continuing my 2025 reflection posts (see my 2025 in writing post here), I wanted to return to last year’s word: balance.

I tend to have two speeds in life, stop and go. Putting things in proportion, making slow and steady progress, rolling the ball a little further up the hill before calling it a day…this is not how I do things. But it is a better way to do them. It is a healthier way. And in 2025, I was often forced to approach life this manner. I was too busy for anything else.

Particularly in the last third of the year, my schedule was jam packed. So I had to be disciplined just to get through the foundational stuff. But I did. I taught all my classes, and I finished drafting one book and editing another. On top of that, I got my kids to their activities and appointments, and I ran a 5K, and I started knitting a pair of socks, and I read steadily, and I baked a lot of bread. And while I could’ve used more slack at times, I generally felt good.

In that vein, my word for 2026 is sustain. I mean this in the sense of “to give nourishment to” but also “to prolong” and “to give hope.” I want to keep making the choices that allow me to meet my obligations, to create, and to thrive. I feel over the writer’s block that ensnared me from 2017-2020. But once something like that has sunk its claws into you, you can always feel its breath over your shoulder, even when you’ve freed yourself. It’s there, lurking. That asshole.

So for next year, I want to think long-term and to make the choices that allow me be in this for the duration. I’m too proud of what I’ve built for anything else.

My nudge word for 2025 was balance. It’s difficult for me to remember a year that’s been so divided between moments when, in a cold sweat, I’ve thought, “I have no idea what I’m doing” and those when, in tears and triumph, I’ve thought, “I absolutely know what I’m doing.”

Is that balance? Who can say! Let’s review.

In 2025, I:

Wrote 11k words and then edited and formatted “Double Take,” a bonus story for Bad Reputation. I shared it with my newsletter subscribers on Valentine’s Day, as promised.Revised You, Me, and the Conspiracy in response to my agent’s notes and then my editor’s notes. I wrote approximately 18K new words for it this year.Promoted and released Bold Moves, which ended up on the New York Times’s list of the Best Romances of 2025.Bit my nails and refreshed my inbox continuously while You, Me, and the Conspiracy was out on submission. Spoiler alert, we sold it, and it’ll be released on November 10, 2026. Pre-order links to come!Wrote 5K for two book proposals.Wrote 80K drafting one of those books, followed by 12K on the first revision of it. It’s with my agent now, and all I can say is that it’s soft and experimental. I’m excited to see what, if anything, will come of this one.Wrote 11K words and then edited and formatted “A Casual Thing,” the Bold Moves bonus story. This one hit your inboxes in August.Read 49 new-to-me books, and I’m certain I’ll get through more in the next two weeks.

In terms of my 2024 goals, I did sign a new contract, I was more chill about my release, and I mostly spent less time on social media. I only wrote 1 new book plus some bonus material this year (about 135K total), but I signed with film and TV representation, which wasn’t something I would’ve even thought to hope for myself. As terrible as the world was in 2025, I found sustenance and purpose in my work.

In 2026, I’d like to write another book and to research the one that’s been bouncing around my head for years. I want to stay focused on what matters to me–telling stories I love–and to let go of the things I have no control over. Most of all, I want to celebrate the wins. Losses are inevitable and failure happens daily, but that’s more reason to be present for joy and success. My instinct is to doubt or second guess the good things, but instead, I have to invite them in.

May 2026 bring many such moments to us all. They’re the only thing that’s going to keep us going. xo

(I’ve been producing some version of this post for as long as I’ve been blogging about my writing. You can read about my 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013 respectively.)

So I can finally share my vague publishing news with you: I have a forthcoming project, and it’s an academic adventure romance.

My agent and I pitched this book as “National Treasure, but they f*ck.” Which…yes. That is very much what it is.

More seriously, it’s about how we remember the American revolution and about what kind of world it made. It’s about how modern universities can be hostile to knowledge. And it’s also about two extremely different people who go on the run together in a 1970s Winnebago. They’d rather not be crushing on each other, but they are.

Also, can we take a moment and marvel that **I** wrote an adventure romance? What a world! If you’ve read my character- and vibes-driven books and sent me emails about how maybe next time, I might consider adding a—you know—plot, then this book is for you. (Don’t worry, your secret is safe with me. Speaking of which, this is definitely a book about shadowy confederations who’ll do anything to keep control of the levers of power.)

I first described You, Me, and the Conspiracy to a friend in late 2019. Yeah, it’ll be seven whole years from the concept to the publication. A passel of people helped me with it. So while we’re celebrating the announcement, allow me a few acknowledgements:

I’m so grateful to Genevieve Turner who read about a floppity zillion drafts of this book as it grew and changed. She is a saint, and I never would’ve finished without her. I did a lot of writing during virtual hangouts with Olivia Dade, who is a dear friend and a wonderful cheerleader.

The spring 2025 NYLA interns, Deme and Sofia, gave me super helpful and encouraging notes: thank you!! Miranda Dubner talked through the plotting with me and offered some excellent suggestions.

I’m massively indebted to my agent, Sarah E. Younger, for believing in me and in this project and for going beyond the call of duty to sell it. (She literally phoned me with an offer when she was on vacation.) She’s a phenomenon.

As soon as SEY and I got on a call with Norma Perez-Hernandez, I knew that I wanted to work with Norma. She instantly understood my vision for this story, and her notes were incredible. I’m monumentally pumped to bring this book into the world with her and the entire team at Atria.

If you’re desperate for a taste, the book’s playlist is here. You, Me, & the Conspiracy has LOADS of autumn in New England, cabled sweaters, and dusty library shelves vibes, and it’s slate for release next September.

And if you want updates as I soon as I have them, please be sure to sign up for my mailing list!

FYI, the ebook of Bold Moves is on sale for the first time in North America. Until the end of August, you can get it for $2.49 at Amazon. It’s also available in KU, in paperback, and on audio, where it’s read wonderfully by Savannah Peachwood and Jeremy York. There’s a full list of buy links at Books2Read.

Additionally, the ebooks for Chick Magnet and Bad Reputation are both $1.99 this month, so it’s a great time to stock up on Emma Barry titles for cheap.

A few months ago, I asked my newsletter subscribers what bonus material they wanted to see for Bold Moves, and the consensus was Jaime and Scarlett’s high school love affair.

I had several pages of notes with snippets of conversations and ghosts of scenes, the kinds of things that I worked into exposition and memory in Bold Moves. So I picked out a few that felt most important to me–and which could give the thing some kind of narrative coherence–and I started writing. And I kept writing. And then I wrote some more.

Finally, I had an 11,000-word prequel sketch. I’m planning to send it out to my newsletter on August 1; if you aren’t subscribed, you can fix that here. I will eventually add a link to the extra to the book page, but subscribing to my newsletter is the fastest way to get the prequel.

A few notes: given that the novel is a second-chance romance, don’t go looking for a happy ending here. It doesn’t have one. It does have profanity, on-page kissing, and references to poverty, homelessness, and drug trafficking.

Do you remember when I used to blog? Ah, those were the days!

With the decline of the Google Reader and RSS feeds and as it became harder to balance my day job with my parenting responsibilities and my writing, it became more difficult for me to justify spending time on blogging. Each post would only get a few dozen hits, and so it made more sense to save those ideas, and that time, for my newsletter. (Which you can sign up for here, if you’re inclined.)

But I just finished drafting a book, and I realized that I have some interesting data, or at least some data that I found to be interesting. For my last three projects, I tracked my writing progress in spreadsheets, meaning that I can take a granular look at my productivity. What follows is a peek into my–wildly disparate and probably dysfunctional–writing process.

The first book in my data set is Bold Moves. This book started life as a proposal to be the follow-up to Chick Magnet in 2022. My publisher decided they wanted me to go a different way, but I knew that I wanted to write an angsty second-chance small town romance eventually. So the characters festered in the back of my head.

After Bad Reputation, I revised this proposal, shifting the focus from small town politics (the working title for the first proposal is Mr. Mayor) to chess, and I eventually sold my editor on the concept in the fall of 2023.

I drafted Bold Moves between January and May 2024. In that period, I clocked 58 writing days. The first draft weighed in at 94,665 words, yielding an average daily word count of 1632. But the range is WILD. My best day was March 19, when I wrote 3230 words. My worst day was April 28, when I only wrote 119 words.

Our second contestant is Super Secret Project #1. I first emailed a friend and described this book in December 2019, when I was still grappling with writer’s block. I ended up drafting it in three bursts, fitting it in between other (contracted) projects in summer 2022, May 2023, and winter 2024, with a few random days or weeks sprinkled in.

All told, I spent 54 days working on the first draft of this book, which was 83,164 words long. So my average daily word count was only 1433. My most productive day was December 1, 2024, when I wrote 2532 words. My worst? June 7, 2024, when I wrote just 78 words.

(More news on Super Secret Project #1 is forthcoming!)

Our third (and final) contestant is Super Secret Project #2. I emailed a friend to describe this idea in October 2024. I wrote a short proposal of about a thousand words that week. In the spring 2025, I expanded my mini proposal into a 3500-word version with character notes and a chapter outline.

I drafted this book between May 8 and July 3, 2025, and my first draft weighs in at 79973 words. I wrote for 46 of the 56 days in that period, averaging 1738 words a day. My single best day was May 14, when I wrote 2877 words, and my worst was May 23, when I only wrote 225 words.

So we have three books written in three wildly different fashions. Super Secret Project #2, my most recent first draft, was obviously my most efficient, but I only have limited pockets of time when I can write with such focus and abandon. I was averaging 4 to 5 hours a day on writing; it was A LOT.

Also writing that way–for me–requires having an incredibly detailed outline and little to no deviation from my plan. If things had started to go wrong and I had needed to rethink the characterizations or the plot, I never would’ve finished the first draft so quickly. In fact, of the two dozen books and novellas I’ve written, I’ve only managed to draft three of them in ~2 months (the other two being The One You Need and Earth Bound). It also helps that Super Secret Project #2 is the shortest of these drafts. It’s obvious, but fewer words means less typing.

The hardest of these books to draft was Super Secret Project #1 because every time I was forced to step away from it and return later, I had to find a way back into the head space of the book. As a result, I’ve had to do substantial revisions, and more are on the horizon. While I know why I had to approach this project the way I did, I would resist drafting in a spotty, patchwork manner again unless it was absolutely necessary.

Therefore the drafting process that’s most representative of how I do and should work is Bold Moves. But I would caution that staying focused on a draft for five months is almost as difficult as blasting one out in two months.

It’s also interesting to me that I only logged a single 3000 word+ day over these three projects. While I aim for 2000 words a day, I don’t always hit that. And I never, ever manage to write every day, not even when I have periods when I can write more or less full time. Slow and steady (with days of rest) really does win the race, at least where my productivity and creativity are concerned.

And my final takeaway is that writing is hard. It just is. But I’m still riding the high of having finished another book.

If you’re a creative writer, what does your process look like? What lessons have you learned about how to hack your brain and do your best work?

The world is on fire in a hundred ways. But I can offer you more than 1600 free books. Yes, that’s right: more than a thousand books that are totally free can now be yours! Visit www.romancebookworms.com to browse the incredible selection. It includes The One You Hate (by moi). This title has never been free before, so click fast if you don’t have it.

Some other participating authors whose work I would recommend that you check out are Tara Lush, Zara Keane, Nicola Davidson, Aydra Richards, Edie Cay, Kate Pearce, Asa Maria Bradley, Rachel Grant, Karen Grey, Mia Heintzelman, Jackie Lau, N.R. Walker, Valerie Pepper, Brighton Walsh, Genevieve Turner, Kate Meader, Reese Ryan, Annabeth Albert, Chelsea Cameron, Zoe York, Sadie Haller, and Ainsley Booth.

Meanwhile, I am sitting on some good /vague publishing news/, but I can’t share it yet (sorry!). But someday soon I should get the green light.

In the last two months, spurred by a desire to disappear into something, I have managed to write 60K words of a completely ridiculous book. It is truly the silliest thing I have ever imagined. It’s simultaneously very me and absolutely unlike anything I’ve done before. The thing is, I’m drafting it on speculation (as in, it hasn’t been sold to a publisher yet), but in the moments when I can get lost in my world and my characters, I’m having a good time. It’s a relief to attempt something different and to discover that I can still surprise myself.

Anyhow, if you would like this kind of update delivered straight to your inbox, consider subscribing to my newsletter. It’s free and infrequent.

It’s release day for BOLD MOVES, my second chance romance about a chess grand master adapting her memoir with the director whose heart she broke in high school. It can now be yours on Kindle (and in KU) and in paperback; the wonderful audiobook—read by Savannah Peachwood and Jeremy York—is available at Audible; and there are additional buy links at Books2Read.

I have to confess something: I am boring. No, really, it’s true. I eat the same thing for lunch almost every day. I love listening to narrative history podcasts. And I think solving the Piano Puzzler is fun.

See, I told you—boring.

But because of that, in real life and in fiction, I have always had a soft spot for people who paint their lives in screaming neon. Those capital-C characters who are loud and audacious and comfortable in the spotlight. Those folks who can crank their emotions up to 11. Jaime and Scarlett are those kinds of people.

This is a book about how the stories we tell become our identities. It’s about making impossible choices when you’re probably going to lose the game. It’s about fate and forgiveness…and the seductiveness of reusable canvas bags, sourdough bread, and chess. Chess above all things.

I had to stretch to write this book, but I believe deeply in Jaime and Scarlett’s great and epic love, and I hope you will too. If you really want to marinate in the world of the book, I made a playlist on Spotify and collected inspiration images on Pinterest.

If you do pick Bold Moves up, I’d appreciate it if you’d consider dropping a rating and a review, particularly at Amazon and Goodreads. I’m trying to convince my publisher to let me write more books for them, and the release week sales and the reader response make a real difference.

I want to shout out some of the folks who helped get Bold Moves into the world. This book would not exist with Genevieve Turner and Olivia Dade. They are the best writing friends I could ever ask for, and I’m so grateful for their support, good humor, and rock-solid advice.

My agent, Sarah Younger, is a force of nature, and I never would’ve sold Bold Moves, or indeed anything, without her.

Lauren Plude and the team at Montlake are incredible, and I’m so humbled that I’ve gotten to make four books with them. Kristi Yanta edited Bold Moves beautifully, going above and beyond to help me wrangle the manuscript into submission.

My husband and son played chess with me daily while I was drafting. While I never managed to beat either of them, they weren’t triumphalist about it, which I appreciated.

There’s an entire list of books and authors whose work informed Bold Moves in the acknowledgements, but I want to highlight the debt I owe to Jennifer Shahade, Irina Krush, and Judit Polgár. I hope that I’ve written thoughtfully about the sexism in international chess, but their legacies, books, interviews, and work is the real deal.

And I’m so grateful for YOU. For all the readers who’ve bought my books, or borrowed them in KU, or checked them out from the library, the ones who’ve listened to my audiobooks and dropped reviews on Goodreads and talked about my work on social media. The last 2.5 years trying to reboot my career have been a whirlwind, and I couldn’t have done it with my readers: so thank you.

I suspect that every author has a list of hopes and dreams for their books. For example, I would love to see my one of mine in an airport bookstore. I mean, I’d love to see them in any bookstore at all, but for reasons that I can’t really explain, the airport bookstore feels like an especially high bar. Probably because the titles you see there tend to be super mega ultra bestsellers, and, well, who wouldn’t want that?

But another goal for me was translations; I desperately wanted to sell foreign language rights to one of my books. And two years ago, the lovely folks at Queen Edizioni bought the rights to Chick Magnet and Funny Guy, and Chick Magnet is going to release on April 22, 2025: the same day that Bold Moves will appear in English.

Isn’t the cover for the Italian translation gorgeous? It’s so bucolic, and I adore that they kept the pink and yellow cover scheme from the English-language version.

Anyhow, if you read in Italian, you can preorder Chick Magnet for Kindle here.

We’re less than a month away from the release of Bold Moves!! If you haven’t yet, you can preorder it for Kindle (it will also be in KU) and in paperback. The audiobook—read by Savannah Peachwood and Jeremy York—will be available at Audible and you can add it to your Goodreads shelves. There are additional preorder links at Books2Read.

I’ve started hearing from folks who’ve read it, and some of them were kind enough to say nice things about it. I was especially touched by these blurbs from Alicia Thompson and Jen Devon. With Love, From Cold World and Bend Toward the Sun are, bar none, some of my favorite romances of the last few years. I was just beyond excited that they read and enjoyed Bold Moves.

Plus, if you’re in the United States, you can enter a giveaway to win one of 100 copies of Bold Moves here. The number of folks who have a book marked “to read” is one of those things (along with preorder numbers) that publishers really pay attention to.

And finally, I went on the Book Besties podcast to talk about Bold Moves! You can listen here and watch on YouTube here. We talked about the book and my writing process and differentiating character voices and a million other things.