Know It All

Table of Contents

1. Blue’s Shadow [ expected 2025 ] 

2. Listen Before I Go [ expected 2026 ] 

3. Current Reads

4. Some Thoughts

Blue’s Shadow & Listen Before I Go

My rewrites for Blue’s Shadow are going strong! I think I’ve found a way to reduce the plot points and funnel down the main ideas. Blue and Anna finally seem to have a journey not so tussled with complications.

A very good friend of mine just finished leafing through Listen Before I Go. He pointed out certain quotes he liked, the emotional poignancy that he named “my calling card”, and also my tendency to be overzealous with brutal scenes. “We need relief from the intensity,” he said. Though he isn’t a writer, he gave me a piece of advice I think all writers can use. “I used to race cars,” he said. “If you want to race, first you need to learn the basics. The gears, the inputs, the outputs, etc. Then, and this is what professional racers do very well, they tell you to focus on something far away, be it a blade of grass 100 meters ahead or a water tower in the distance. Focus on where you want to go and the inputs and outputs become muscle memory.” And turns out, it’s the same principle for a writer. Exposition, dialogue, description, plot, sentence structure, grammar— the inputs and outputs— they become muscle memory. But the story you’re trying to tell, the meaning, those are the blades of grass and the water tower. Look to them, don’t get caught up in the inputs, and let the rest fall into place.

Very excited to share both of these novels with you all.

Current Reads

I’m currently reading the highly anticipated Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. Just started out and though I’ve felt a bit starved of prose when reading Rooney, she truly never fails to deliver page-turners and utterly gripping streams of consciousness.

I finished Martyr last week by Kaveh Akbar. Read it. That’s all I can say. Read it, experience it, and fall in love with it.

Some Writing

Alright. So. I have a confession to make.

I am a recovering know-it-all. Much of my childhood was spent with an upright finger jumping at any opportunity to correct those around me. “Wow, look at the beautiful cheetah”, said a friend of mine as we watched Animal Planet. “That’s an African Leopard,” I replied. Mind you, I was ten or something.

To be a recovering know-it-all, you first have to be aware of how insufferable it is to be needlessly corrected. I’m a woman, so, check mark. Next, you have to learn to control your impulses. Exposure therapy. When your mother recounts a story with the wrong date or your boyfriend says something about a topic in which you are disgustingly educated, you hold your tongue. Not easy, but like anything, if you do it enough, you get used to it.

Earliest known use of the term “know-it-all” was in the 1870s by W. Denton. No idea in what context, and no idea who W. Denton is. None of that really matters. What matters is that the term “know-it-all” encompasses two kinds of people. Those who are pedantic and condescending and those who refuse to linger on the surface of conversation.

That’s not to say you can’t be both. I definitely splashed in both puddles. Cheetahs, African Leopards— they’re all cats— and it would’ve probably been better to let David Attenborough inform my friend instead of interrupting the documentary.

But I was obsessed with animals. Children always have schticks. Dinosaurs, trucks, barbies. Mine just happened to be animals and books. And both have kind of stuck. I cared about these things and I wanted to talk about them.

Turns out a lot of people don’t like that. They don’t like being corrected, so, I learned, (after being ten years old) to stop acting like the nerd emoji. But there is another thing people don’t seem to like about know-it-alls.

The surface is comfortable. Swim about the shallow end of a pool and you can see your feet. But dive a little deeper and the sun no longer reaches. It’s dark. You have to stumble about. It’s uncomfortable. And Know-it-alls are divers.

Once, at a party in undergrad, I toyed anxiously with a bottle of beer I wasn’t drinking, peeling the label with my thumbs. Then some girl passing a joint on the couch brought up her psychology course. I happened to know some basic stuff about psychology. I was curious about it, what with watching Frasier reruns and reading Jung for philosophy classes. I asked her what she thought about Jung’s dream analyses, how her dreams might’ve been linked to archetypal theories, what she’d learned. The conversation flowed smoothly, the two us swimming deeper. Connecting through ideas. But the moment we started to really talk— really talk about it— she pulled away. She laughed me off, said she wasn’t really that interested in psychology and was just taking the course cause she had to. I remember thinking she was lying. That she saw the other guys looking at the two of us like we’d grown extra heads for talking about Jungian theory under a smoke cloud and grew self-conscious.

The line of communication once held taut between us went slack. There was no angry spike in her tone. No aggravated sigh. There was only a disconnect. The moment the topic of conversation strayed to a level in which she was not interested, she drifted— leaving me to float in open ocean with my labeless beer.

Third use of the term know-it-all: people who are passionate.

I care too much.

I’ve always known it.

I care most about stories. Novels, poems, movies, art— any medium— stories are the medium through which I choose to experience lives. Lives. S. Multiple. There is not only life for the lecteur, but thousands. Some people credit that quote to V.E Schwab. The statement that “reading is a way to live many lives”. Others say George R.R. Martin said it. But Marcel Proust wrote about that very phenomenon in the 19th century. But then Cicero also said that books provided a soul (translators playing with the idea of the soul as a plural entity) and that was before Jesus Christ.

Sorry. Recovering.

But what’s the use in apologizing? All readers are passionate and I’ve never once heard another reader call someone a know-it-all.

Readers care. We’ve lived enough lives to know the value of caring. Of being passionate. Of connecting.

I’m not telling you to go around correcting people. That would be using your powers of curiosity and passion for evil. No. I’m telling you not to stop caring. Keep being the children who love dinosaurs and Barbies so much you can’t shut up about them.

Care as much and as long as you possibly can about anything and everything. Because when you do, you eventually find the people who speak your language. Fellow know-it-alls, fellow deep divers. And when you find them, there will be no need for effort. The connection will be instantaneous. There will be no need for distraction from the world at large. Instead, you will stare, either with a magnifying glass or telescope, like a couple on a museum bench admiring a painting, at the ideas that bind you.

My closest friends are an eclectic bunch. A middle-aged mentor, an older gentleman with a passion for literature, my overly educated mother, my hilarious, yet poignant and observant boyfriend, my brilliant, at times lazy, long-distance confidant, and many more. What they all have in common is that their relationships with me are rare and vital. They feed the soul. Fill the emptiness. They enrich my spiritual, intellectual, and emotional banks of knowledge. Because we are no more sated than when we are understood.

I choose to remember that whenever hatred crawls about anonymous critics and skeptical expressions. And I choose to remember that passion offends only those who are frightened of what lies beneath the surface.

So here’s to a New Year with my fellow know-it-alls, my friends, and of course, with my critics.