Hi ;

What's new? I remember when I was trying to keep up with writing every week and letting that stress me out. My last email to this list was April 18 - almost one full month. That's my new self-imposed deadline... forget one week, let's get one out monthly and go from there.

Part of the problem was that nothing new was happening to me to share. Every day, every week was looking the same. It would rain, be pretty cold, we'd try to get the kids outside, survive three meals and two baths and bed. There would be good days with the kids and bad ones.

The other part? Work took over. My wife would be on the phone for hours, managing clients and meeting deadlines and dealing with her team. Then we'd trade off and I'd jump on calls talking to leads, building proposals, and working on our website. And like that, our toddler will have watched two movies... on a good day. We'd put the kids to bed and get back on our laptops to fit in another three hours of work before crashing, waking up early, and doing it all again. There was no extra time where I'd sit here to write you.

But this all comes with upside. I will never ever have this much consistent ever-present time with my family. My infant son started crawling. My older daughter can manage to hike two miles with us. I may have wanted this newsletter as a communication point with all of you to share how my new job was going, but life gets in the way. And rather than wanting a break from work, I really just want to get back to doing work when I can (but because I'm trying to make the work week feel different from the weekend, I'm REALLY trying not to open Google Docs right now... so hence this email).

Technically my last email to you all was a focus group ask for help in choosing our new logo. And now we've got one, as of the end of last week. We got lots of great advice, feedback, and outside input, but most importantly got internal buy-in and even though it's the design I liked best from the beginning, it feels really good to have explored all these different options. It almost feels like naming a child... when you're writing it on the hospital form you're still up in the air, but it's not long before you can't imagine any other name fitting as perfectly.

And what I'm loving about the job, besides getting to build out a menu of services from scratch and get to pitch them directly to authors to see what's actually resonating, is where Book Highlight actually fits in. Publishers need sales revenue and long-term franchise growth. Publicity firms care about the media hit, but not necessarily what the author gets out of it. And BH is the third arm of the tripod - we're working with mostly first time authors to do for them what they would do if they had the time or experience or idea in the first place. We align ourselves directly with their interests, not their publisher's or publicist's. Whatever they want us doing, we're doing at this point (and of course we have some suggestion of our own).

So we're pretty close to finalizing our public list of services. Heck, we already took down the old website. I'm wordsmithing website copy every day with the team, testing out what's working in the proposals we're sending out along the way. But I know many people getting this email are authors or work in the publishing world. So help me out: What would YOU want done for your book/author if they had a team behind them? Reply to this email. If we can do it and authors want it, then I want to make it happen.

In the meantime, things are working. I had a launch team (600+ people!) help an author hit the WSJ Bestseller list. I worked with an author, his head of marketing, a live video production team, and our designer to put together a run of show, collect/edit/show video guests, and put on a live virtual book launch event that reached 17,000 people and now the author gets to have to look back on forever. And that's how May started! Awesome. OK - enough about work, it's the weekend! Let's get into it.

act one

Oh, it's easy. I can tell you who didn't make it out. It was the optimists.

Admiral Stockdale, The Stockdale Paradox

Didn't use lyrics this time, trying something new! Click that link and read that short story. This was linked to from a Will Leitch newsletters (publishes every Saturday without fail! and always so good!) that I'm glad I clicked through and read. It's something during this time of uncertainty that I continue to return to in my head again and again.

It's because I'm an optimist at heart! I don't know any other way to be. It's how I've always been. Looking forward to better things, to things working out, to my team winning the championship, to that book hitting the bestseller list, to finding that item on sale, to everything being ok - is how I operate. It would get me up in the morning before children.

Heck, I bought TWO tickets for a concert at Radio City that was 6 months away and I didn't find anyone to invite to go with me until I met Andrea ONE week before the show. And that was our first date. OK? That's optimism. It's a part of who I am.

But reading The Stockdale Paradox? Optimism is no longer as healthy a mindset as it was pre-pandemic. BC, Before Covid, it worked for me! But now? We're not going to be done with this by Memorial Day. Or Fourth of July. Or my Birthday. Or Labor Day. Frankly not even Thanksgiving. And if you didn't read the link yet, I'm going to put the kicker right here anyway (so you can read it again):

He said, “Oh, it’s easy. I can tell you who didn’t make it out. It was the optimists.”

And I said, “I’m really confused, Admiral Stockdale.”  

He said, “The optimists. Yes. They were the ones who always said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ Christmas would come and it would go. And there would be another Christmas. And they died of a broken heart.” Then he grabbed me by the shoulders and he said, “This is what I learned from those years in the prison camp, where all those constraints just were oppressive. You must never ever ever confuse, on the one hand, the need for absolute, unwavering faith that you can prevail despite those constraints with, on the other hand, the need for the discipline to begin by confronting the brutal facts, whatever they are. We’re not getting out of here by Christmas.”

We're not getting out of here by Christmas. But we ARE getting out. That's a mindset/attitude shift. I'm adjusting and offering this story up in case you want to adjust as well.

act two

To that end, there's been a lot of talk about TESTING and anti-body testing. What I wasn't sharing widely mid-March was that my first week in my new job, I was actually as sick as I've been in as long as I could remember.

I had a low-grade fever for an entire week, chills, fatigue, and chest tightness. It sucked. It was also nothing but red flags for Coronavirus, of course. March 15th I went to a City MD in Park Slope Brooklyn, took and put on a mask, sat down, and was examined. I don't have a history of chest tightness.

Because I didn't have a fever and tests were extremely restricted, I wasn't tested. I tried again once I landed upstate, but unless you had a fever over 104, you weren't going to get a test. That's fine.

Symptoms lasted a week, but subsided. We moved on, but I simply assumed I had The Thing. I was going to volunteer as tribute anyway for my family (my children do love me, but if they had to pick - Mom wins) for grocery runs, etc. But I confident that I had the antibody edge. My wife's work is contemplating how, if, and when to reopen the office. We needed to know.

So now anti-body tests are on the market. I checked out Quest Diagnostics and got an appointment for a center down the road from here. They take appointments and walk ins. There were a few people waiting when I got there, but they saw me right away at my appointed time (a day later, no one was waiting when my wife walked in).

Pro Tip: pay for the test online ahead of your appointment. Insurance will only pay if you've got a doctor prescription/referral, which I didn't have. It cost $120, fine. I regularly donate blood and this was a one second pin prick compared to that. Then five days later I got an email: NEGATIVE for antibodies.

My friend Kevin, who works in PR, spun it perfectly: Now you know you didn't infect and possibly kill anyone!

Which is certainly a way of looking at it (and actually reassuring when you can put aside your selfishness). It's weird to have wanted to have had this horrible disease - to have briefly mildly suffered symptoms without the conferred super powers. But there's no shortcut here.

So I'm still the designated store shopper. But now I'm feeling a little less bold. I'm sorry - but I don't want to get sick. Of course even if I did test positive for the anti-bodies, there's no proven case of immunity yet.

There are no shortcuts.

act three

We drove back to Brooklyn. It was the day before Mother's Day and my parents drove up to be with our kids. After 60 days of sharing the same space with our two young children 24/7/60, we were headed home to check on our apartment, pick up our mail, clean out the fridge, and see what New York was like these days.

You can video chat with friends and read all the NYT you want, but until you walk around wearing a mask and see every single person also wearing a mask (it's only about 1/3 of the outdoors crowd actually mask-wearing upstate) then you haven't actually been to Brooklyn these days.

Man did we miss home. And the food we eat there. We got takeout tacos from our favorite place (no tables or chairs, big plexiglass screen between you and the cashier - you have to call ahead), fresh coffee beans from our local cafe, four packs of craft beer from our local bar, sushi delivery for dinner, and fresh bagels in the morning.

But it wasn't until after the sushi dinner, that I really wanted a slice of pizza and set out to get one. However, it was 9:30pm Saturday Night in New York and every single storefront was closed. We finally found a pizza place that was closing up and not happy to see us, but still let us in to trade them cash for two of the last slices they had leftover. Then we watched a movie on DVD (because I have the internet on seasonal-hold in Brooklyn while we're not there).

So that's tough. This pandemic has weaponized all of the things I love about the city and the reasons I'm most happy there: live sporting events, live theater on stage, live concerts big and small, crowded and lonely bars alike, restaurants, food markets, spontaneous gatherings on every corner and in every park, having friends over, playgrounds, day care, bowling alleys, movie theaters, and sweaty subway cars. (Ok, maybe not that last one honestly, but it IS part of my experience there).

I know I'm not saying anything new. And that I'm now sharing my depressing thoughts with you. But this isn't to say I'm quitting the city. Just that I can't make it work right now and I'm not missing anything, because those things I love aren't happening right now anyway. We can't survive in a one room apartment without childcare and still try to get any work done.

Yet I can't wait to be back. We will prevail. But I'm not putting a date on it.

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So I may not have been writing you, but I have been reading more. I loved Writers & Lovers by Lily King (felt like a more grown up / more literary Sweetbitter) and The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel (same structural style as Station Eleven with changes in chronology and perspective) and Run Studio Run by Eli Atlman (since BH is really my first ever 'creative agency' job and this book is exactly what I needed). Full reviews are at my Goodreads. Need to find that next book. You read anything good lately?

This has been great to reconnect like this. Hope you're doing well and hanging in there. We're going to get through this together. Keep reading.

Staying Socially Distant - Peter

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Miss any of the first five emails? Here they are to read (or forward) again.

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