✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨

@thecrumpet

Legally non-blonde / writer of minor repute (I'm in the Congressional record!) / querying 1st novel THIS ENDS NOW / noodlings at meagantheauthor.com / co-host of podcast BAD LIT FRIENDS (@badlitfriends.bsky.social‬) / recovering English major / Nutmegger

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✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· 12d

August 1 #WIPsnips: “coherent” VIBES! Sort of! Solid logic is coherent, and Babe’s slam of Dr. Hugo Boyard’s inability to keep his dick in his pants and his hands on the keyboard is, um, as coherent and solid as the thump to Jenny’s back. Sure, why not? A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· 12d

Hello #WIP, what's that? I shouldn't finish that last chapter? But but I only have like 2000 words left in you! Huh? You think it's more like 4000 words and I should abandon all hope and go read the book I'm #querying instead because that one's actually good and this one is utter PANTS?? Okay then!

It's that graphic again! I'm so predictable. The famous optical illusion: a line drawing of a duck, it's bill facing the left of the frame but maybe it's also a rabbit facing the right of the frame, its ears outstretched behind it.

In red neon-style letters in the upper left hand corner are the words: MY BOOK IS THE SHIT

In bubbly, dark brown letters outlined in light tan are the words: My book is shit.

I am feeling both these things. Again.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· 15d

An hour kicking back at my desk, learning narrative construction and storytelling during working hours? Count me in!

The skills of a successful litigator share significant overlap with those of a successful Dungeons and Dragons player. Knowing the rules, Developing plans, reading the room, adapting strategy when a plan collapses, and persuading others to follow your lead are as central to litigation as they are to a night of Dungeons and Dragons. This program uses the mechanics and storytelling of the game to teach practical litigation skills, from case theory and narrative construction to negotiation, improvisation under pressure, and managing competing personalities. [REDACTED] draws on both worlds to show how strategic thinking at the table translates directly to the courtroom. Attendees will leave with a way of thinking about their cases as well as strategies for sharpening preparation, persuasion, and adaptability in their own practice

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· 15d

I need to do this, right? It's an hour CLE!

Promotional email for a Continuing Legal Education event from the Beverly Hills Bar Association:

Litigation Section Presents
Using Dungeons and Dragons to Become a Better Litigator
Live Webinar: Tuesday, August 11 at 10 AM Pacific

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· 19d

July 25 #WIPsnips: “double” A girl should be practical, and shouldn’t feel guilty about snatching away gifts freely given. But not all gifts have the price tags taken off, and Jenny’s pretending she can’t see the little white sticker on the bottom of this one. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

“I won’t take your money,” she said flatly, but she didn’t shake off his hand.

“I can help with your studies, which will be far more useful. A second set of eyes for your senior thesis. And I can help you with grad school applications. I know people, Jenny. I have friends at NYU, Penn, Columbia. I can open doors for you.”

So that was the bait, the exquisite Fabergé egg she had no right to reach for and roll between her dampening palms, letting its jewels dig into her skin. Not money, not more silk scarves and dinners like this one, but something far rarer, something that did not call for the slap of his platinum Amex on a little plastic tray. Access. Privilege. A chance to step on someone else’s back for a leg up.

She bit the side of her lip. Gigi would do it, she thought, and she’s loaded. Without shame, her best friend never turned down a treat, never hesitated to grab hold of a handrail or clamber up a bookcase to grab anything shiny, anything that would put her one pace ahead. What was that thing she’d said last year?

“How do you think the rich stay so rich, Jenny? They don’t act like they’re above picking diamonds out of the trash.”

If she could muck out a pigsty and dress a stag, she could pick a diamond or two out of Gregory’s trash heap. “And what do you get out of it?”

His chest rose; she fancied she could see his heart double-thrum below his trim linen shirt. “You. I get you.”

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· 25d

July 19 #WIPsnips: “divine” What’s in a name? Jenny’s been dunked in the rough rude sea of Gregory’s affection and emerged like Botticelli’s Venus on the half shell, now bearing the title “girlfriend.” Some titles are brands, and some brand you. Permanently. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

Girlfriend. The word had tripped down his tongue as if he’d said it ten times before. A hundred times before. As if that was what she was to him now, nothing strange about it. Though she parted her lips, she didn’t correct him. She was her mother’s child, and she wasn’t about to embarrass him in front of a stranger like Muttonchops. A girl with a white cotton bed skirt wouldn’t do that, even if its eyelet trim was hiding a sordid secret like an Alexander McQueen dress that was closer to couture than she liked to think about.

Because what was she supposed to say? “No, Gregory. I’m not your girlfriend. I’m just the person you’ve been fucking in a variety of hotel rooms for the past six weeks and buying ten grand of gifts for and parading about at museums”?

No, that sounded insane. He’d think she was insane. Girlfriend made more sense, so she said nothing, and let him anoint her with the title like he’d dabbed his thumb in sacred oil and smeared it across her brow. The word lingered, curling around her like incense, sanctifying something that wasn’t holy.

Thing is, she thought as he explained how he was more of a Sapporo man than a Kirin one, once you’ve been consecrated—dedicated to some force greater than yourself—there’s no turning back. The divine mystery would always cling to you. Shakespeare had gotten it right:

Not all the water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm off an anointed king.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jul 12

July 12 #WIPSnips: “extra” The Beech Tree’s not exactly the Connaught Bar, but people don’t go there for atmosphere. It does, however, offer drinks strong enough to take the edge off confessing to certain crimes of the heart, as Jenny’s doing here in a snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

The Beech Tree was where you ended up if you wanted a drink without running into half your senior seminar, and didn’t mind paying an extra dollar a pint for the privilege. It sat on Collegeview Avenue, barely more than a quarter mile from Jenny’s dorm, one in a row of shops and storefronts in a singularly homely, Gothic-cum-half-timbered Tudor development that some architect must have considered stately back in the Thirties. The bar itself was a little less pretentious than the building that housed it: one brick-walled room with a dark red ceiling, exposed wood beams, and faux-Tiffany lampshades dangling cockeyed over mismatched tables. A long oak bar bent in an L toward the back where the postcard-sized, eponymous grill pumped out burgers and plates of risotto.

Jenny spotted Kit in the far corner at one of the high-top tables, his back to the wall so he could watch the door. He’d made a minor effort to spruce himself up, swapping his thrift store T-shirt and grandma cardigan for a worn chambray shirt she knew he’d paid three bucks for at the Salvation Army, but at least it had a collar. A faint foam mustache from the Guinness he’d nearly finished lingered above his upper lip, and he was leafing through a copy of Granta, which he claimed was alluring to the right kind of women. (It was not.)

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jul 10

How it started (2011) ➡️ How it's going (2026) Happy one month wedding anniversary to my beloved @kimjongillectro.bsky.social !

Bathroom mirror selfie (circa October 2011) of a dark-haired woman in a maroon cardigan making a skeptical side-eye while a man behind her has his mouth wide open, hands cupped around her face like he's about to bite her head (this was funny at the time). Pump soap bottles and bathroom clutter crowd the counter in the foreground because this was a man's bachelor studio apartment.

The woman and man from the other pic, 15 years later, as a bride and groom. The woman (ME) is mid-spin on a San Franisco Chinatown street, black tulle wedding gown flaring out dramatically around her legs. Red lanterns and strings of flags crisscross overhead against a clear blue sky, with shopfronts lining both sides of the street. The groom is fucking adorable.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jul 10

July 10 #WIPSnips: “substitute” Jenny thought she’d be a dead cert for Shipp’s Wordsworth seminar after her grade in his Romantic Poetry class. Excluded, she tracks him down at home to plead her case. Very normal behavior for a student who can’t stand losing in a snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension”

“You need to look at me when we’re talking, or I’ll think you’re being rude.”

Her head shot up. “Oh God, Dr. Shipp—”

“Gregory.” He ran one of his large hands through his dark blond hair and tweaked his smile one degree brighter. “And like I told you before, I don’t bite. Tell me why you belong in my class and Ted Cosgrave doesn’t.”

As snow sifted down to fill the corners of the windowpanes, teacher and pupil spoke, beyond the final bleed of daylight into the January dark. Jenny pushed, framing her position as one of equity, of allowing female voices in a room that (from her quick scan of the class list) contained none, which seemed strange at a former women’s college. Gregory pushed back, harder, remarking that equity by headcount alone was a poor substitute for the equity of accomplishment. There was also the matter of Jenny’s final grade in the Romantic Poetry seminar, an A-, which neither disputed was both a mark of distinction and demonstrably higher than a B+, which Ted himself had bragged to Jenny about as a “great grade from a hardass like Shipp.” (Gregory would neither confirm nor deny Ted’s characterization of his grade or assessment of the instructor who awarded it to him.)

Back, forth, lob and volley, game, game, set, yet no match as snow piled on snow outside the three windows. Gregory would not budge on his decision, nor smash the ball and declare the matter concluded. What’s worse, the more of Jenny’s arguments he swatted away, the more she could not ignore the amusement flickering in his brown eyes and the upturned left corner of his mouth.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jul 8

July 8 #WIPSnips: “humid” Ugh, summer in Manhattan really does a number on your hair and demands way too much from your antiperspirant. Kayla’s right: Jenny’s gonna need some luck to extricate herself from this mishigas. Oh shit indeed. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

Kayla stopped short, nearly causing Tessa to stumble into her. “I’m not lecturing you. I’m reminding you that what you’re calling ‘just for the summer’ probably isn’t going to stay in a tidy little box all tied up with a Barneys ribbon. He’s going to want more. And you know what?”

Jenny had paused too, right in front of a restaurant supply store with freshly painted “going out of business sale” placards slumped in its plate glass windows. Whatever Kayla was about to say, she didn’t want to hear it. It was likely to be true.

“No, Kayla,” she said anyway, resting a hand on each hip of her pin-thin cigarette pants. “Educate me.”

“Oh, shit,” Tessa murmured.

In this humidity, Kayla’s hourlong efforts with her ceramic-plated straightening iron had vanished entirely; the yellow streetlamps above illuminated a halo of her fine brown frizz. “You don’t want to keep it in a box, do you? You’re going to keep seeing him when you get back to campus, and I bet you think you can have it all under control. Good luck.”

“You think I don’t have it under control already? You didn’t know a single thing about him until this afternoon.”

Kayla smoothed the front of her sleeveless black jumpsuit, plucking off a stray hair. “I knew from the Becker event that he was hot,” she said, meeting Jenny’s burning cheeks with her level gaze. “Hot and slimy. I saw how he looked at you, like he’d bend you over the sign-in table and fuck you from behind if he thought he could get away with it.”

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jul 7

July 7 #WIPSnips: “quarter” A fashion emergency requires Jenny’s attendance in men’s accessories. For a man like Gregory, indecision can be a parlous condition, especially when he’s suffering from a case of strategic incompetence requiring a woman’s assistance. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension”

Though several sharply suited and booted clerks offered their assistance, Gregory dismissed them to listen to Jenny explain why one tie was trying too hard to be clever (deep navy, scattered miniature typewriter keys) and another would make him look like “your name is Beauregarde, you own a tasteful brothel in the French Quarter, and you’d much rather be wearing a cravat” (plum silk, charcoal and copper micro-paisley).

“You can read that much in a tie?” he asked, as she dropped a glossy black Dolce & Gabbana number back onto the Lucite display. She’d been holding it between her fingertips, as if letting any more of the silk touch her might transfer the faint tonal floral print to her skin, leaving a permanent stain.

“Mm-hmm.” Jenny was impressing herself with how eagerly Gregory chowed down on the bullshit she was making up.

“And what does this one say?” he asked, leaning across to retrieve the offending slip of black silk, his body close to hers.

“That tie says, ‘I exclusively date bottle girls and live in a chrome and glass bachelor lair in Midtown.’”

Gregory burst out laughing. “That’s highly specific.”

“New York guys can be highly specific.”

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jul 5

July 5 #WIPSnips: “bench” If you’re lucky, you’ve had a Rachel Perez in your life. I’ve had a couple, women who were generous enough to hold me to account while giving me enough space to fail and learn from it. Jenny should have learned more from hers. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

If Jenny were to name her favorite place on campus, it wouldn’t be in the Cushing House parlor, where late afternoon light pooled like drizzled honey in the open pages of her books, her legs tucked beneath her on one of the battered sofas. It wasn’t beneath the low-sweeping boughs of the mammoth London plane tree on the library lawn, or on one of the benches dotted around the banks of Sunset Lake. Those were easy choices, and Jenny preferred to think she didn’t like things easy.

No, it would be here, in Seminar Room 301 in Rockefeller Hall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, where nothing was easy and Professor Rachel Perez wouldn’t let her get away with anything. Well, not without a fight. She’d learned that in Perez’s class on material culture and feminine identity last semester, back when the most complicated thing going on in her life was deciding if she wanted to stay on the East Coast for grad school.

Perez taught with the expectation that everyone wanted to be there and everyone present—Perez included—was responsible for themselves. After a polite round of day one introductions, you either showed up having done all the reading or you prepared to be read yourself. Perez had a talent for flipping over students’ inchoate thoughts to expose their soft underbellies, and then poking and squishing until the ideas took form or collapsed under pressure.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jul 4

July 4 #WIPSnips: “round” Impressive that the mention of Dorothy Wordsworth doesn’t push the horny-off button on either of these two, but the English department can really do a number on amorous brains. Mild smuttishness for these two weirdos in this snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

“Gregory—”

“I wanted this the night you knocked on my door in the snow.” He kissed the corner of her mouth at last. “You think I was satisfied making you hot cocoa and arguing about Dorothy fucking Wordsworth? Or that our kiss was a mistake that went too far? That I didn’t want to shut you up by making you come again and again? That I was more than just a man?”

He pressed his lips to her shoulder. Fleet-footed lust sped through her body, flickering and hot; she arched her back, exposing her neck. She should tell him she was wrong, to go faster, to ease the ache between her legs, that she changed her mind about going slow. Had she insisted on that only because that’s what a nice girl should say?

Before she could decide, his mouth was at her ear. “I was very, very good that night,” he whispered. “But I don’t want to be good right now.”

Rocking forward, Jenny ground against his lap, seeking release against the hardness beneath his khakis like she was some idiot teenager who was happy enough with a furtive dry hump on a basement couch. No, she was an idiot who could legally buy a drink at a bar, a whole fucking round at the Beech Tree if she could afford it. An idiot who wanted this unsuitable man to just get on with it already. She could want, too. Nobody told her she couldn’t.

She reached for his hands, bringing them to her waist. “I don’t want to be good either.”

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jul 1

July 1 #WIPSnips: "scarf” Rivers in Egypt, yadda yadda yadda. Jenny didn’t ask for real talk as an add-on to her mani-pedi, but her NYC summer sublet roommates are providing some anyway on the house. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” she said over the chirp of another message. “I’m having fun.”

“Sure. ‘Fun.’” Kayla made scare quotes with her bright blue fingernails. “Looks super fun from where I’m sitting.”

Jenny blew at her own nails. Hurry up and dry already. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe it’s just me,” Kayla said. “But I don’t need silk scarves and expensive perfume from the guys I’m sleeping with to feel better about how fucked up the situation I’m in is.”

Jenny looked to Hallie on her left for backup, but her roommate shook out a no.

On her other side, Tessa tapped her on the forearm. “Look. I am all for you shaking down this man enough that a G-Wagon falls out of his pockets. But Jenny. Jenny. Gregory is acting like summer isn’t going to be enough, like he expects you to stay with him back on campus. I know he’s only a postdoc, but be realistic. This is going to be a disaster.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” What a lie. “And I don’t think we should be having this conversation here.”

“Where should we do it?” Kayla snapped. “At the apartment where you never are? The Library Bar where you show up for one drink before you’re off to fuck Lord Byron in a hotel room? Where exactly can we have this conversation?”

“My nails are done.” Jenny eased herself from the overpadded salon chair and plucked her phone from the cupholder. “I’m going home.”

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 26

June 26 #WIPSnips: "fox” There should not be a “what happens next” for these two, but some attractions can be as sticky as a cocklebur or a foxtail, and just as difficult to dislodge. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

Gregory poked his head around the doorframe before strolling back inside. “Hey.”

She pulled herself up against the bed frame. “Hey back.”

Perched on the side of the bed, Gregory watched her with a crooked grin as she drained the glass he’d fetched for her. “I should have mentioned,” he said, plucking the empty glass from her grip. “I make a mean water. Better?”

“Much.” Jenny scratched a small scab on her shoulder. When the sheet slipped down her arm, she didn’t pull it back up. “So, what happens now?”

“Now?” He trailed one of his fingers along her jawline to tap twice on her lips. “Now we see what happens next.”

That didn’t sound good, not at all, filled with an assumption that there would be something beyond this bed, these walls, tonight. Something that would trail them from Ludlow Street to campus, like those ghost stories where the haunting’s not of a place but a person, clinging like a foxtail to a cuff.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 23

June 23 #WIPSnips: "penalty” Confession time: like Jenny, I also wasn’t a Wordsworth fan in college. In my defense, I tried to like his poetry! Sometimes! Unlike Jenny, I didn’t have a smarmy postdoc pouring me glass upon glass of champagne to change my mind. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

Outside, the winter air slapped her face and shocked her lungs. The moon hung heavy above the naked, gnarled treetops, flooding blue-white light across the Benedettos’ back garden. Side by side, their shoes ground down the thin skim of snow, leaving parallel tracks.

Gregory tilted back his head like a sunbather luxuriating in the noonday heat. “‘When she I loved looked every day / Fresh as a rose in June,’” he began, “‘I to her cottage bent my way, / Beneath an evening moon.’ But you don’t like Wordsworth much, do you?”

Jenny shook her head. On the page, she’d found Wordsworth tedious and turgid. Like the words were a penalty assessed against her for wanting something racier, speedier. Sexier. She’d never tell Gregory this, but she thought all the Romantics were shitty men in their own ways, alcoholics and womanizers and drug addicts and bad fathers. Still, as Gigi once pointed out during a freshman English seminar, they were kind of hot, at least when they were young.

But in Gregory’s voice, under the low-hanging moon, the familiar lines transformed into something else entirely, immediate but occluded, like an ancient mystery deciphered by a prophet. She swayed again, steadying herself against the snow-coated sundial to her right, and wondered how many glasses he’d pressed into her hand over the past hour.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 19

June 19 #WIPSnips: "group” Posted in solidarity with my comrades who have flicked through stacks of GRE quant flashcards and chosen violence instead. If I give any former grad students flashbacks with this snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension,” please accept my sincere(ish) apologies.

She plucked another GRE prep flashcard from the box Gregory had bought her toward the start of the semester; he’d tried to pass the thing off as a present, but her raised eyebrow convinced him otherwise. The glossy cards bore the marks of two months of indifferent handling: burger grease on the ones covering congruence and similarity, angry red pen dots jabbed into the chunk on standard deviation. Two cards on factorization clung to each other like star-crossed lovers, glued tight by droplets of the frozen strawberry margarita Gigi forced her to drink on the last night of fall break.

The question on the card she grabbed wasn’t a hard one, according to the green dot in the corner:

A committee of three political science students must be selected from a group of eight. How many different committees are possible?

Jenny chewed the side of her ballpoint, its soft plastic giving way beneath her teeth in a satisfying smoosh. Through Kit, she knew enough poli sci majors to understand that putting three of them in charge of running anything was a terrible idea. Everyone would claim the chair, the libertarian would insist on being the treasurer and defund everything on principle, and the Marxist would call them all tools of the state and demand the five excluded students be admitted to the membership posthaste.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 18

June 18 #WIPSnips: "resume” In which Jenny learns Gregory has been telling big, fat whoppers about his job description all summer long, and that enough of her classmates put cheese sandwiches in the recycling bin to warrant mention in the department bulletin. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

There was only one email she was looking for, the one with final exam dates so she could start budgeting for a ticket back to Iowa for Christmas. Between a message from the IT department begging students not to click on suspicious links and what had to be the fifty-fifth plea from Harper’s to resume her subscription, she found it.

Subject: English Department Fall Bulletin

Click.

She skimmed over the dry wall of text, the minutiae of office hours, new course offerings, the opening of a new Twentieth Century subject library (really only a couple of bookshelves in Dr. Friedberg’s office), and a reminder to use the blue recycling barrels for cans and bottles only and “please no food, including cheese sandwiches.”

Yawn. Under the subheading “New Faces, New Places” the Dean welcomed a new Chaucerian, the incoming doctoral candidates, and a Jazz Age scholar. Double, triple yawn. Then:

“We are delighted to announce that Dr. Gregory Shipp has joined the English Department as Assistant Professor of English Literature. He joins us from Vassar’s own postdoctoral fellowship program with a distinguished publication record and a commitment to mentorship and undergraduate pedagogy.”

There was more, but the rest of the paragraph dissolved into static on the page.

Assistant Professor. Assistant. Professor.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 18

As you may know, I decided "why the fuck not?" and got married to the awesome @kimjongillectro.bsky.social a week ago today. (Tax below.) And after a bunch (okay, a modicum) of thought, I have decided that while I am decidedly NOT changing my legal name, it's about damn time I take a pen name. (1/3)

Meagan and Shane get married! Here they're standing hand-in-hand on the sidewalk in front of San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore storefront. The bride wears a dramatic black-and-blush tulle gown with a full skirt, and the groom wears a navy suit with a boutonniere. They're smiling and framed by large bookstore windows filled with books.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 15

June 15 #WIPSnips: "era” Jenny adores Rachel Perez, whose class on the economics of the 19th century marriage plot she’s taking in the fall. Gregory has opinions on this course selection: Rachel's his ex and her feminist convictions are, shall we say, robust. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

She tugged the sheet higher, tucking it firmly under her armpits. “Why were you talking about me with Dr. Perez?”

“Isn’t a better question,” he said, reaching over the side of the bed with one arm for his boxers, “why was Rachel talking about you with me?”

Jenny opened her mouth, but no words arrived. She watched as he slung his long legs over the side of her bed to sit up, punctuating the movement with an ostentatious yawn.

“It’s an interesting choice, that class.” He slid on his boxers and raked his hands through his hair in an attempt to unmuss it. “Not what I would have picked, but an interesting choice.”

Heat rose in Jenny’s cheeks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Mmm, nothing much. Just that Rachel has some… fascinating ideas about gender-based power dynamics in the literature of that era. Literature, and elsewhere.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe that’s why I want to take it.”

For a second, his mouth twisted before his easy smile returned. “Well then,” he said, his voice airy. “Sounds like mademoiselle knows what she wants.”

“I do,” she lied.

He tweaked her nose, as if she were a recalcitrant child. “Then we won’t have any complications when we get back, will we? Now, let me get you some water.”

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 11

Reader, I married him. #writingcommunity #writesky #justmarried #blackdress #wedding

Two people who just got married stand in an alley in San Francisco's Chinatown. She's in a black ball gown with lace appliqués and a train that's absolutely collecting filth and debris, he's in a blue suit, and behind them is a maximalist mural in San Francisco: red lanterns, a giant pink lotus, and some multicolored figures posing. The couple are so fucking happy.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 8

June 8 #WIPSnips: "smell” Which stinks the most: the moth ball perfume or the Slim Jim? Perhaps it's Kit after an evening performing naked charades with the Sacerdotal Sinners secret society. Or maybe the big ol’ secret Jenny’s keeping from everyone? A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

“Fucking Amtrak.” Ted reached down for his backpack and slung it across his shoulder. “I thought it would be cool to take the train back from Montreal after my interview at McGill, but nobody told me it was bus service between Port Henry and Rensselaer. Nothing like a hundred twenty miles on a fucking bus next to an old lady who smells like mothballs and the only thing to eat is the extra Slim Jim she’s got in her handbag.”

“You poor dear.” Kit clapped an arm around Ted’s broad shoulders. “Go, get some rest. And something to eat. We won’t hold you up, will we, Jenny?”

Jenny drew her lips tight as Kit slapped Ted on the back and gave him a light push towards the sidewalk. Still mumbling about Amtrak, Ted waved over his shoulder, headed toward the dining hall for something more tempting than beef jerky.

Kit turned back to Jenny, cocking his head. “Hello, dollface. Let’s try this again.”

“We’re not trying anything again.” She glanced toward the library’s dark windows, then back down Raymond. At this time of the morning, she couldn’t hide anywhere that wasn’t her room, not without a possible charge of breaking and entering. “And you stink. Take a shower.”

“Not yet. I’ve got one scheduled at eleven with a Sinner named Gisele.” Kit grinned. “Now, wanna tell me why Ted Cosgrave and I saw you getting out of a taxi with what I know is your overnight bag?”

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 7

Thank you!! It's going to be hectic but I am so excited. One of the places we're having wedding pictures taken is inside City Lights Books in San Francisco and in Jack Kerouac Alley behind it -- the pics are going to be amazing.

The interior of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco with floor-to-ceiling shelves of books flanking an arched doorway. A woman in a beige coat browses the back room with its black-and-white checkered floor.

Jack Kerouac Alleyway: a narrow alleyway linking San Francisco's Chinatown and North Beach. The alley lined with bright red, yellow and green murals, with red and yellow banners bearing Chinese characters strung overhead between the buildings.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 6

June 6 #WIPSnips: "happen” Some merry widows are born before they are made; Gigi just happens to be one of them. <<insert billionaire here>> A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

“There’s my two favorite emotional disasters!”

Jenny turned to see Gigi picking her way through the crowd of drinkers, apologizing to the every one of the seated diners she managed to bop in the head with the oversized bag on her arm. She was in her favorite dark skinny jeans and a new silk blouse in a color she insisted was “vintage champagne,” not “beige.” She’d blown out her long bob and tousled it into windswept perfection, like she’d just been dockside, waving off her billionaire husband as he sailed their thirty-foot schooner toward an early and not entirely regrettable demise. A pair of small silver hoops caught the low light of the lamp above as she leaned in to kiss Jenny’s cheek.

“Hello, gorgeous,” she said, sliding onto a seat Kit had managed to wheedle out of the man waiting at the other high-top, whose date it seemed clear was not going to arrive.

“Who invited you?” Kit crossed his arms over his chest and scowled.

Gigi whipped around and held out her arms for an embrace Kit stepped away from. “And hello, Christopher. What fine manners, as always. Make mine a martini. Grey Goose, none of that Absolut nonsense. Oh!” Her manicured fingers flew to her pillarbox-red lips. “I made a joke! Get it? Absolut? Nonsense?”

Kit groaned. “Do you just sit around like this, waiting to be summoned from your demon lair? Because you look like you’re dressed to go boyfriend-stealing on the Upper East Side.”

She patted her hair. “Fortuitous timing. Jenny happened to catch me when I was working on a new look. I call it, Riviera-on-the-Hudson, Casual Friday Edition.”

“You look cheap,” he yelled over his shoulder as he shoved his way to the bar.

As Kit vanished into the crowd of patrons, Gigi tucked her chin to her chest, smoothing the front of her blouse. “Do I really look cheap?

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 5

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Happy birthday in advance -- it is my own today. I am a tiny child of 53!

The poster at 4. She has a long dark braid and is wearing a grey turtleneck sweater and a red parka with a faux-fur trimmed hood. She is smiling and there is a shit ton of snow in the back ground because it was a 1970s winter in Connecticut.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 3

June 3 #WIPSnips: "nectar” No nectar, but some honey alongside the lemon and fancy gin in Jenny’s Bee’s Knees cocktail. Surely nothing bad can come of a lovely cocktail that reminds her too much of Alice’s tipple? Absolutely not. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

“Macallan 18,” she heard Gregory say as she bit down on a cashew that was on the harder side than she anticipated. “On the rocks. And whatever Jenny’s having.”

“Lemon drop? Or…” She thought of the blonde whose ass had warmed this seat minutes before. “Maybe a martini? Gin. But I don’t like olives. Or those little cocktail onions. Maybe I don’t want a martini.”

Gregory’s lips twisted up once more, there and gone, as light and fleeting as a mayfly’s beating wings. “She’ll have a Bee’s Knees. Martin Miller’s, if you have it back there.”

She opened her mouth to protest; Margaret would not approve of a man ordering for her. Babe would not approve of this man ordering for her. But she was Jenny, not Margaret or Babe. Maybe Jenny liked a Bee’s Knees.

“You’ll love it,” he promised when the bartender pushed it across the bar to her on a purple cocktail napkin. “Think of it as a grown-up lemon drop. Lemon and gin in there, but some honey to sweeten the proposition. No onions or olives in sight.”

He tinked his glass to hers with a muttered cheers. An image of Alice considering the “drink me” bottle glided past her mind’s eye as if on casters, but she batted it on its way.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· Jun 1

June 1 #WIPSnips: "loss” Perhaps we aren’t all like Carlos, afflicted by the twin curses of family money and a Harvard education, but even we of modest means will know the sting of an ex like Numero Uno, who’s skilled at wriggling money out of our wallets. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

Jenny’s Nokia buzzed against the dented steel of her makeshift desk with the distinctive double chirp of an incoming text. It was the second time the phone had buzzed in the past five minutes. She ignored it. It was probably Kayla again, sending yet another grainy picture snapped at Pianos, where they’d navigated as a crew after only an hour at GoldBar on Saturday night.

“Nobody can dance here anyway,” Carlos had shouted in her ear that night as he hustled her toward the exit and its velvet ropes. “We need more room.”

Dancing, Tessa told her later, had nothing to do with their speedy retreat. Carlos had run into his “Numero Uno Total Disaster Show Ex” from Harvard in the men’s room. Immediate departure was required, lest he fall under Numero Uno’s spell once more and recommence hemorrhaging cash, something he’d sworn to his father would never happen again, on pain of death. Or worse, loss of Amex Platinum privileges

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· May 31

May 31 #WIPSnips: "room” Jenny’s late for a reception honoring visiting prof Dr. Sandra Tang so she could get her teeth cleaned. No harm no foul, right? With Gregory's arrival imminent, there’s bound to be something a little foul on the horizon. A snip from my #WIP “Surface Tension.”

At the top of the stairs, Jenny paused to strip off her gloves and run a finger over her freshly plaque-free front teeth before pulling open the front door. From the sound of it, the party was already in full swing: a low burble of conversation punctuated by bursts of laughter, the scrape of old wooden chair legs over even older wooden floors. As she grew closer to the lecture hall passing itself off as a party venue, she started to make out familiar voices above the general hum—Ted’s adenoidal tenor; Babe’s throaty cackle; Dr. Boyard ranting about what sounded like shallots, or perhaps ballots. The latter made more sense given the election two days before, but Boyard had once spent half of a seminar on The Dream of the Rood bemoaning the scarcity of decent ramps at the Stop & Shop, so she wasn’t assuming anything.

In the hallway, a rack on casters sagged beneath the weight of thirty wool coats and puffer jackets. Jenny slipped her own from her arms and hung it with care between a thick camelhair number and a dark gray motorcycle jacket she recognized as Perez’s. Scooting past a grad student she recognized from the English department lounge scowling in the doorway, she stepped inside and scanned the room.

Babe and Perez were by the bar, laughing over the head of Perez’s graduate assistant, Tatiana Tsirakidis, who refused to wear heels just to bring her to five feet tall, since “high heels are the footwear of the patriarchy.” In the far corner, one of Gregory’s acolytes, Connor Peebles, had commandeered both the charcuterie board and the attention of Professor Hong, whose recommendations had nudged at least five English majors into doctoral programs at Cambridge and Oxford, but whose halitosis could stop a hungry hog midway to the trough. No Gigi, who’d left earlier in the afternoon for a long weekend at home in Coral Gables for her cousin Juan Gabriel’s million-dollar wedding to “some, like, German countess or whatever.”

Also, no Gregory.

✨Meagan Essary is back at the querying (and finishing her WIP)✨@thecrumpet· May 31

His! This is my lil baby bro-friend Jonny, coming down the aisle.