NEVER BEEN SHIPPED is here!!!!

if this flops i stg

You know that feeling when you’re at a show, and the lights dim, they cut the playlist that’s been playing in the background, the crowd gets quiet, and then everyone starts to cheer because you just KNOW the band is about to come out? You’re craning to see their silhouettes as they cross the stage and pick up their instruments, you hear a drum beat, a repetitive loop on guitar, you’re wondering what song is this, what are they about to play, then there’s a blast of colored stage lights and a familiar riff and you’re like oh FUCK YEAH IT’S HAPPENING for the next two hours you know you’ve given yourself completely over to this experience?

That’s a bit how I feel today. After all this time (to me!), Never Been Shipped is finally here!

The dedication to this book reads if this flops i stg and I wanted to unpack that a little for you in this newsletter, so you’d know what I was feeling when I wrote that. I’ve already told you that this book is a LOT of me working out my own feelings around art + commerce and what happens when they intersect. On the one hand, there’s such an amazing joy in being able to create something where there wasn’t anything before — just for yourself, to express whatever you needed to say, to exorcise whatever personal demon or write a love letter to whatever fills your heart. And it’s so cool to be able to share that with other people. I think art is a lot about connection, and god knows we need that now more than ever. We’ve always needed that, which is why I think art persists and survives no matter what censorship or changing values or challenges it comes up against.

On the other hand, making a living off your art can get quite fraught! Rail against capitalism all you want, but there you are, completely in its throes! Suddenly your sales numbers matter, marketplace trends matter, critics’ opinions matter, and you can’t escape that no matter how much you tell yourself to just put your head down and do the work.

In Never Been Shipped, John and Micah were in a successful band as teenagers, where they had a hit song and performed on a TV show and got to tour the world. Music was always a core part of their friendship since they were kids listening to albums in Micah’s room, but the dynamics all changed once the band got big. And then the band broke up, John and Micah’s friendship fractured, and they retreated away from the spotlight.

Now, over a decade later, their band has been invited to perform on a fandom cruise for the TV show they performed on. John and Micah have never forgotten each other, and neither has ever been the same since leaving each other’s lives. Now they have five days on a cruise ship together — the forced proximity, the tension, the years and years of pent-up yearning — to find their way back.

if this flops i stg

This dedication is a little meta, in that you’ll find it directly in the book when Micah is scrolling through ElectricOh! fan accounts on social media and finds one that regularly posts old pictures of the band with the caption if this flops i stg.

Before Love in the Time of Serial Killers came out, my Instagram use was very pure! I mostly just followed friends, family, some artists I liked, and fan accounts for a few of my favorite bands. One fan account I especially liked would use this caption on its posts all the time, to where it became a running joke in my house. There was just something so funny to me about being preemptively frustrated about a post’s assumed poor performance, and about saying that over and over almost no matter what you were posting.

Now that my social media use is as professional as it is personal, it hasn’t always been as fun for me. Suddenly I do have to care (kind of) if a post “flops.” I never used to worry about that before. I’d post a picture of a sign that said “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” I’d add a caption that said don’t tell me what to do, and then I’d let the 15 people who like every single thing that I post go to town. If I took a break or stepped away it wasn’t a big deal, who cares.

Now I feel a lot of pressure to post regularly, to make my content more engaging, to respond to comments, to engage with other people’s content, to try to make it explicitly clear when I’m not checking DMs or tags or am otherwise away from social media, lest people get mad at me, or worse, have their feelings hurt.

I think it used to be easier to say “well, get off the internet then, it’s not real life” but I think increasingly the internet IS real life and that’s something I struggle with. So in this way, the dedication if this flops i stg is a little homage to that one fan account I followed in simpler times, a reminder that at some point this all is supposed to be fun.

if this flops i stg

On that note, I love being DEEPLY unserious about something, and this dedication is meant in that vein. Tongue in cheek, lol at the end of a sentence, take a meme and build an entire inside joke structure around it, there’s really not much to this other than that. I thought it would be hilarious to make if this flops i stg one of the first things you saw when you opened the book, so I did it.

This was the same reason I pretended to smoke a Barbie arm in high school (I brought an ash tray with me to class and everything); the same reason I have a tattoo of the number “15” on my arm because I said if Josh Lowe hit a home run in a particular game I’d get a tattoo of his jersey number; the same reason that I like making up business cards to reflect my status as one of Third Eye Blind’s Top 100 Listeners in 2023 or to invite you to ask me about any Dakota Johnson film because I’ve seen them all. There is no greater motivation to me than doing something that will make ME laugh, and at some point I don’t really care if anyone else finds it funny.

Let my eventual gravestone reflect that if nothing else, I COMMIT TO A BIT. But in all seriousness I want my eventual gravestone to read “Here lies Alicia Thompson . . . and why not?” because that’s a Spinal Tap reference and the actual bit I already committed to.

if this flops i stg

And then we come to the ways that this dedication is actually the most sincere, earnest thing I could’ve possibly written. This book means a lot to me — as all my books do! — and it’s hard to send something like that out into the world and wait to see how it will be received. It can change your relationship to the project or to writing, even when you tell yourself it won’t, or that you don’t want it to.

I’ve had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about With Love, from Cold World, for example, because privately I’ve thought of it as kind of a flop. My basis for this: a single sentence in an email from my publisher that “sales were down”; pictures of bookstore shelves where my first and third books are there but not Cold World; the Instagram posts when the book came out that said “why would I want to read a Christmas book in August?!?” and then the ones that came out around Christmas that said “why is no one talking about this Christmas book?!?”

lol

And look, I *know* that book wasn’t a flop! Not to me and not in any way that actually matters. That particular story still feels as important and personal to me as it did back when I wrote it, and I feel good about the way it’s connected with people. I like to call it my Pinkerton mostly because I think a lot about how much Rivers Cuomo lost his mind when he felt like some of his greatest work wasn’t being appreciated, and I think it’s funny to compare myself to Rivers Cuomo. But in that way I’m also acknowledging that *I* think the book is a banger, because we all know Pinkerton is a great fucking record.

But all that baggage did make me very nervous when I first pitched Never Been Shipped to my publisher, because I was like will they even want this? A companion book to a book that . . . underperformed? Maybe? I still can’t tell?

(Part of the problem is that this industry can be very opaque, and sometimes you don’t even know what empirically defines a “flop.” Add to that the fact that I don’t check Goodreads adds or Amazon rankings or preorder numbers or any of it, and whether the book is a flop or not really does get to be a fun little surprise after pub day! It’s like a flop gender reveal! See whether the confetti shoots out of the cannon in a big exuberant way or a little sad wilted way!)

From my writing notebook for this book!

Here’s something I believe very strongly: at some point, when you put any piece of art out into the world, it stops being yours. It’s impossible not to let the outside come in. You’ve invited the outside in. In many ways, that’s a beautiful thing — your work gets to be part of a larger conversation, gets to speak to other people, gets to take on a life the exact scope and shape of which you might not even be able to imagine. And sometimes there are disappointments and hardships and hurt feelings along that path, too. It’s impossible for there not to be.

But here’s something I believe even more strongly: at some point, the art is always yours. And you shouldn’t forget that. There has to be enough integrity in the relationship between you and your work that it’s impossible for it to be a flop, no matter what anyone else says or whatever else happens with it.

Never Been Shipped is my ode to emo music and fandoms and themed cruises and unrequited love and painful crushes and growing up and growing apart and creating in secret and performing for a crowd and wanting things and expressing yourself and finding that one person who makes you brave and gives you a safe place to come back to all at the same time.

I’m really excited for you to meet John and Micah, and go on this journey with them.

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I’m traveling all this week and it’s not too late to get tickets/RSVP/whatever is required to come to any of my events (unless the event is sold out, in which case, I’m sorry!)!

I’m really looking forward to being in conversation with so many amazing people, and I can’t wait to see everyone:

• Tuesday, June 10 at 7:00pm - Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, FL - in conversation with Rachel Knox [SOLD OUT]

• Wednesday, June 11 at 7:00pm - All the Tropes in Atlanta, GA - in conversation with Kate Goldbeck

• Thursday, June 12 at 6:30pm - A Novel Romance in Louisville, KY - in conversation with Xio Axelrod

• Friday, June 13 at 6:00pm - The Novel Neighbor in St. Louis, MO - in conversation with KT Hoffman

• Tuesday, June 17 at 6:00pm - Book + Bottle in St. Petersburg, FL

• Thursday, June 26 at 6:30pm - The Gilded Page in Tarpon Springs, FL - in conversation with Ivy Fairbanks

• Thursday, July 10 at 7:00pm - Flutter Romance Bookstore in Austin, TX - in conversation with Ali Hazelwood

• Thursday, July 17 at 7:00pm - New Romantics in Orlando, FL - a JOINT event with Ashley Poston [SOLD OUT]

• Wednesday, July 30 at 6:30pm - Parnassus Books in Nashville, TN - a JOINT event with Regina Black