I’m delighted to have Ellen Goodlett on the site today to celebrate the release of Rise, the sequel to YA Fantasy Rule! (Yes, one of the three sisters is queer and yes, there’s an f/f relationship!) Ellen did a badass trip around the world that was one of my favorite things ever to follow in the history of Instagram, and she’s here to talk about the process of writing over that year! But first, let’s check out Rise:
Sisters Akeylah, Ren, and Zofi are all a step closer to their dying father’s throne, a step closer to the crown that will allow one of them to rule over Kolonya. But the sisters’ pasts continue to haunt them. Each hides a secret marked with blood and betrayal, and now their blackmailer is holding nothing back. When King Andros discovers the sisters’ traitorous pasts, the consequences will shake the entire kingdom to its core.
As Kolonya’s greatest threat stalks closer and closer, weaving a web of fear and deceit around Ren, Zofi, and Akeylah, even the people they love are under suspicion. If the sisters are going to survive, they’ll have to learn to trust each other above all else and work together, not only to save themselves, but to protect everyone and everything they hold dear.
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And here’s the post!
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I travel for the same reason I read and write books: to escape my world, even if just for a little while, and explore someplace new. So it didn’t surprise my friends and family that at the start of 2017, when I realized I had enough freelance work to write full time, I decided to do it on the road.
I’d signed up for a program called Remote Year, a sort of travel agency-meets-networking organization for location-independent workers like me. Basically, for a monthly fee, Remote Year organizes apartments, office space, and travel to and from a different city each month for a year for you and a whole group of other “digital nomads.”
(Yes, I hate that term too. It sounds so pretentious and weird. But then again, this lifestyle is pretty pretentious and weird, so I guess it fits.)
Before this trip, I thought I’d traveled a lot. But I’d never done it for this long, or with a group this big (Meraki, my travel group, started with 78 people in January 2017, and we ended with 56 in December of that year). I’d also never written full-time, either. I was used to having a 9-5 job and squeezing in writing where I could.
It was a crash course in time management, to say the least.
The first thing I learned was how reliant I had previously been on my work schedule to keep me on a routine. I used to write for 45 minutes on my commute each morning, sneak in an hour at lunch, write for another 45 on my commute home, and if I was on a deadline, keep writing in the evenings once I got there. One would think that with more free hours, I’d be even more productive, but instead I floundered. With nobody watching and no accountability, I’d sleep in later and later, lounging on Twitter for hours at a time or agreeing to go on daytime tours of the cities we were visiting rather than getting my work done.
It actually helped my transition to freelance life to be on the road with so many other “nomads.” Our group had journalists, web developers, video game creators, graphic designers, photographers, business owners, even a perfumer and an architect. Basically any job you can think of that could be done remotely (and some you wouldn’t imagine could be, like the guy who owns a landscaping company).
Nobody else was writing novels, but a decent number had office schedules to stick to, so I wound up copying my friends’ work hours. Admittedly, sometimes I still slept in later than I would’ve liked. But having a coworking space to go to every morning, and knowing there would be other people there, bent over their laptops in their own version of word sprints, motivated me to get my rear in gear.
Starting over fresh in a new city each month also gave me an opportunity to play around with different routines. You know the saying that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with? I’m starting to think the same is true of different cities, too. In Mexico City, where we started in January, I was a night owl—I worked late in the office, and stayed out even later socializing with my new group, on a frantic quest to try every restaurant we could before the month was up. In Lima, our fourth month, I found it unusually easy to wake up around dawn—something about the sea breeze coaxed me into feeling like a morning person for a change. In Córdoba (Argentina), I cooked for myself most days (also admittedly unusual), and in Kuala Lumpur I did my city-exploring during the daytime and worked part of the night shift with a few friends on strict US office hours (a struggle I didn’t envy in an Asian time zone).
To call the year a whirlwind would be an understatement. During our second month, while we were in Bogotá, I sold my debut novel, Rule. I spent the rest of the year—as we traveled throughout South America, Europe and Southeast Asia before finishing our trip in Kyoto—completing the book.
I also still had to do my freelance work, not to mention get to know the 78 other people in my group and explore each new country. (A month in a place sounds like plenty of time, until you get there and realize that a month barely gives you time to scratch the surface.)
Sometimes I hardly slept. Other times, like when we organized a writing retreat to Bali, I slept 12 hours a day, just grateful for the chance to relax.
Over the course of that year, though, I learned so much about myself. I learned what routines work for me (for example, I’ll never be a true morning person, but I do best waking up around 8am, tackling boring menial tasks first, and writing in the late morning/early afternoons). I learned that when I try to push myself too far, I’ll wind up doing an even worse job. I learned how to listen to my body—when it’s healthy, when it’s hurting, what it’s really craving (usually a giant pile of vegetables I’ve forgotten to feed it while buried headfirst in a deadline).
Since Remote Year, I’ve continued the nomadic lifestyle. I started the year in Bali, then visited Australia for a couple months, before I headed back to the US, hopscotching from LA to Denver to Pittsburgh to visit family and friends along the way, until I reached NYC in time for my book launch.
Coming back, too, has taught me something. For me, it’s easier to make freelance life work abroad.
Basic healthcare (when it’s not for anything super specialized) is more accessible and far more affordable in most other countries I’ve been to (even some the US would call “third world”). The nomadic lifestyle, which looks like a pipe dream on Instagram (never believe the Instas, by the way. Guarantee that for every gorgeous beach pic you see, there’s a trash pile cropped just out of sight), is actually more affordable than my previous life at a full-time salaried publishing job in NYC.
There are different concerns to take into consideration: for example, you don’t want to move into a gentrifying neighborhood, where US expats push locals out of their own backyards, nor do you want to move anywhere you’d become a burden on the local economy rather than a benefit to it. Some countries are safer than others, depending on your marginalizations (we spent a month in Belgrade, where LGBTQ people still face a lot of discrimination—although their new prime minister is an openly gay woman, a hopeful sign things might be changing). And in my writing, while I draw a lot of inspiration from the scenery and from friends I make along the way, I need to be careful not to veer out of my lane (you never want to appropriate another person’s culture, beliefs or traditions—learn about them and appreciate them, but don’t shoehorn them into your own work).
Moving around so frequently can take a toll. It can be easy to lose touch with people at home, or even just with everyday life. It can be isolating, especially when you aren’t traveling en masse in a big group. There are language barriers, new cultural rules and norms to learn everywhere you go.
But at the end of the day, what it boils down to for me is: I’ve met who I am on the road. And right now? She’s my favorite version of me.
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ELLEN GOODLETT is a Pittsburgh native and former New Yorker. She wrote Rule while traveling the world with 78 other digital nomads, living in a different country every month. Rule was her debut novel.
When Patsy gets her long-coveted visa to America, it’s the culmination of years of yearning to be reunited with Cicely, her oldest friend and secret love, who left home years before for the “land of opportunity.” Patsy’s plans do not include her religious mother or even her young daughter, Tru, both of whom she leaves behind in a bittersweet trail of sadness and relief. But Brooklyn is not at all what Cicely described in her letters, and to survive as an undocumented immigrant, Patsy is forced to work as a bathroom attendant, and ironically, as a nanny. Meanwhile, back in Jamaica, Tru struggles with her own questions of identity and sexuality, grappling every day with what it means to be abandoned by a mother who has no intention of returning. Passionate, moving, and fiercely urgent, Patsy is a haunting depiction of immigration and womanhood, and the silent threads of love stretching across years and oceans.
When Aidan was born, everyone thought he was a girl. His parents gave him a pretty name, his room looked like a girl’s room, and he wore clothes that other girls liked wearing. After he realized he was a trans boy, Aidan and his parents fixed the parts of life that didn’t fit anymore, and he settled happily into his new life. Then Mom and Dad announce that they’re going to have another baby, and Aidan wants to do everything he can to make things right for his new sibling from the beginning–from choosing the perfect name to creating a beautiful room to picking out the cutest onesie. But what does “making things right” actually mean? And what happens if he messes up? With a little help, Aidan comes to understand that mistakes can be fixed with honesty and communication, and that he already knows the most important thing about being a big brother: how to love with his whole self.
Emma Robledo has a few more responsibilities that the usual high school senior, but then again, she and her friends have left school to lead a fractured Resistance movement against a corrupt Heroes League of Heroes. Emma is the only member of a supercharged team without powers, and she isn’t always taken seriously. A natural leader, Emma is determined to win this battle, and when that’s done, get back to school. As the Resistance moves to challenge the League, Emma realizes where her place is in this fight: at the front.
It’s 1989 in New York City, and for three teens, the world is changing.
Julia hasn’t had sex in three years. Her roommate has a boyfriend—and their sex noises are audible through the walls, maybe even throughout the neighborhood. Not to mention, she’s treading water in a dead-end job, her know-it-all therapist gives her advice she doesn’t ask for, and the men she is surrounded by are, to be polite, subpar. Enough is enough.
One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife—and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with—walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates—picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose—and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them. 
In Samsboro, Kentucky, Kalyn Spence’s name is inseparable from the brutal murder her father committed when he was a teenager. Forced to return to town, Kalyn must attend school under a pseudonym . . . or face the lingering anger of Samsboro’s citizens, who refuse to forget the crime.
High school finally behind her, Winnie is all set to attend college in the fall. But first she’s spending her summer days working at her granny’s diner and begins spending her midnights with Dallas—the boy she loves to hate and hates that she likes. Winnie lives in Misty Haven, a small town where secrets are impossible to keep—like when Winnie allegedly snaps on Dr. Skinner, which results in everyone feeling compelled to give her weight loss advice for her own good. Because they care that’s she’s “too fat.”
Pretty Little Liars meets People Like Us in this taut, tense thriller about two teens who find their paths intertwined when an anonymous texter threatens to spill their secrets and uproot their lives.
Seventeen-year-old Laurel Graham has a singular, all-consuming ambition in this life: become the most renowned nature photographer and birder in the world. The first step to birding domination is to win the junior nature photographer contest run by prominent Fauna magazine. Winning runs in her blood—her beloved activist and nature-loving grandmother placed when she was a girl.
Ezra Slevin is an anxious, neurotic insomniac who spends his nights questioning his place in the universe and his days obsessing over Imogen, a nerdy girl with gigantic eyebrows and a heart of gold.
A moving exploration of how gay men construct their identities, fight to be themselves, and live authentically
Seventeen-year-old Marisol has always dreamed of being American, learning what Americans and the US are like from television and Mrs. Rosen, an elderly expat who had employed Marisol’s mother as a maid. When she pictured an American life for herself, she dreamed of a life like Aimee and Amber’s, the title characters of her favorite American TV show. She never pictured stealing across the US border from El Salvador as “an illegal”, fleeing for her life, but after her brother is murdered and her younger sister, Gabi’s, life is placed in equal jeopardy, she has no choice, especially because she knows everything is her fault. If she had never fallen for the charms of a beautiful girl named Liliana, Pablo might still be alive, her mother wouldn’t be in hiding and she and Gabi wouldn’t have been caught crossing the border.
Sana Khan is a cheerleader and a straight A student. She’s the classic (somewhat obnoxious) overachiever determined to win.
Ryu Mori has had a stellar season as goalie for the Atlanta Venom. So when he’s called into management’s office, he’s expecting to hear he’s the new starting goalie for the team, not that some new guy—an incredibly hot, annoyingly bratty rookie—is here to compete for his spot.
Upon returning to the city of Khelathra-Ven after five years fighting a war in another universe, Captain John Wyndham finds himself looking for somewhere to live, and expediency forces him to take lodgings at 221b Martyrs Walk. His new housemate is Ms. Shaharazad Haas, a consulting sorceress of mercurial temperament and dark reputation.
Brody Fair feels like nobody gets him: not his overworked parents, not his genius older brother, and definitely not the girls in the projects set on making his life miserable. Then he meets Nico, an art student who takes Brody to Everland, a “knock-off Narnia” that opens its door at 11:21pm each Thursday for Nico and his band of present-day misfits and miscreants.
When a guy named Martin Nathaniel Munroe II texts you, it should be obvious who you’re talking to. Except there’s two of them (it’s a long story), and Haley thinks she’s talking to the one she doesn’t hate.
In the busy city of Smokesburg, Heroes comes in all shapes and sizes. They’re processed through a training facility and given a classification based on their abilities and talents. The best of the best? Those are the faces that grace the newspaper and comic books. And Gemini? Well, Gemini rides the Metrorail because she can’t fly, can’t teleport, and doesn’t qualify for a Hero Mobile. It’s not a great living, but it’s a job, and one that Gemini is good at.