A few weeks ago, I noticed that there was a new place in a strip mall semi-near our house, called “Kung Fu Tea.” (This is a chain, but I hadn’t heard of it before.) It was even in walking distance (defined as within 2.5 miles of the house, by my current walking standards).

 

Now this was interesting to me for a number of reasons, mostly because they used the characters 功夫茶 in the logo, easily visible from the outside.

 

A quick aside. I have mentioned gong fu style brewing before here. It involves high tea to water ratio, low brewing times (I start at 10 seconds typically) and paying attention to the tea as you drink it. Gong fu cha, aka 功夫茶, means “tea with skill.”

 

“Gong fu” and “Kung Fu” are both transliterations of the same characters. I tend to call tea brewing gong fu because “I know Kung Fu” does not generally make people think of the method of brewing tea, and I try not to mislead people (except in the subject headings of newsletters).

 

Back to “Kung Fu tea.” I said to myself: 99.999% this random new place in the strip mall is in fact selling bubble tea, but that means that there is a 0.001% chance that we just got an actual gong fu tea experience, and that would have been supremely cool.

 

Anyway, TL;DR this place is not a very cool gong fu tea experience; it is just a bubble tea place. The taro milk bubble tea, which is my go-to for such things, was pretty mediocre to be honest. The flavor was weak; it was too sugary; the boba managed to be both grainy in the middle and overly soft on the edges. I’m never going again, but meh bubble tea is still edible, so I’m not mad.

 

I don’t recommend this particular bubble tea, but the thing I do recommend is letting yourself get very excited about the possibility of someone starting a gong fu tea experience in the wilds of a suburban strip mall. It gives you a sense of adventure to know that maybe, just maybe, something cool will happen.

 

Will it happen? In a suburban strip mall?

 

No. It won’t. We all know that. But sometimes the fun is in the trying.

I have been writing novels now—and this is hard to imagine, because it doesn’t seem like that long—for almost 18 years. Some of those years have been easy. Some have been hard. They’ve all been there.

 

I sometimes devalue myself and my skill, and I actually think this is very common in creative artists. There is a point in every book I have written where I think to myself, “This is just going to be the world’s stupidest book and I don’t know how to fix it.”

 

Gradually, over years and years of experience, I’ve learned that I am in fact capable of fixing it. Despite terrifying myself with the possibility, I feel confident that I have not yet managed to publish the world’s stupidest book. (I do think some of my books are better than others, but it would be a rare author who managed to publish dozens of books, all of which were equally good.) In fact, I think that a large portion of skill in writing is refining the balance between holding a critical eye to what you are doing, so that you never stop pushing yourself, and not making yourself feel so beat down with your critical eye that you fall into paralysis.

 

My characters are never much like me, but they always have something of me in them. One of the reasons I loved writing Lily is that other people see her as incredibly confident; internally, she is wracked by self-doubt.

 

In any event, here, for all of you lovely people, is the first look at the cover for THE EARL WHO ISN’T.

 

I hope you enjoy!

Preorder The Earl who Isn’t on:

One final thing: a huge thank you to everyone who participated in Romancing the Vote, our auction to raise money for voting rights in any way, either by bidding or boosting or donating items. This year marked our third auction (as well as other smaller pushes), and yesterday, we crossed the $1,000,000 mark of money that we gave to groups that focus on voter outreach, voter registration, fighting voter suppression, and helping get people out to vote.

 

This felt especially meaningful to me for those of you who made a donation in Pele’s honor: as of late last night, the amount we’ve exceeded $1,000,000 was almost exactly the size of your donations in honor of Pele.

 

Thank you.

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