June 2026

Hello Friends. Happy first day of summer. Big summer plans? Hope you are doing something fun. Me? What am I doing this summer? Thanks for asking. I am writing the final installment of The Austen Chronicles. The book is titled Regardless of You and is my take on my favorite Jane Austen book, Persuasion. 

Persuasion is one of the “other” three Austen books that non-Janeites generally forget about.

I understand why people are smitten with Lizzy Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. I get the earnest appeal of Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. I get why people love to hate Emma Woodhouse as the only character in all of Austen’s six adult works to have her name in the title. They are all great in their own way, and I enjoy my time with them when I visit them, but to me, Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion, is now, and will always be, the best of the best.

The main reason the book works is that Anne Elliot is a classic “straight man.” Depending on your age or your relationship to those words, you may not know exactly what that means. In short, the “straight man” is a character who has a firm grasp on reality while everyone around them lives in flights of fancy. Think Bea Arthur as Dorothy on The Golden Girls, Will Ferrell as Alex Trebek on the “Celebrity Jeopardy” segments on Saturday Night Live, Rashida Jones as Ann Perkins on Parks and Recreation, or Jason Bateman in…pretty much everything he’s done. All those things work because there is one person who is incredulous to the madness that unfolds around them. Those characters act as our surrogates in the action of the show.

Anne Elliot is “old” by Austen standards. She is 27 (gasp) and unmarried (gasp). According to her vain father, snobby older sister, and clueless younger sister, she might as well have one foot in the grave. It doesn’t matter that her older sister is also unmarried. It doesn’t matter that her younger sister married a man only after Anne turned down his marriage proposal. It absolutely doesn’t matter that her father, a bumbling Baronet in his mid-fifties, has an entire room full of mirrors so he can check himself out from all angles to make sure he looks youthful and bright. Austen describes it this way. She “was nobody with either father or sister; her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give way—she was only Anne.” She is essentially persona non grata. She might as well be furniture. Yet, the narrator reminds us that “she was looking remarkably well; her very regular, very pretty features, having the bloom and freshness of youth.” 

It is here, as the main character in the novel, but a supporting character in her own life, that Anne can live free of the constraints that the rest of her family and friends have to deal with. Sure, as an unmarried woman, she is a victim of the patriarchy, and so she is often directed where to live and for how long. However, once she is situated, be it in Lyme, Bath, or Somersetshire, she can wander around wherever she pleases, reading whatever she wants to read, and talking to whomever she wishes. By being removed from the fray, she can observe it and point out the absurdity of humanity. 

I’ve had the pleasure of doing multiple interviews about my writing since Welcome to Mansfield was published. Every time I have the chance to talk about Austen, I remind the interviewer that Jane was not only a brilliant writer and observer of the human condition, she was also incredibly funny. No book in the Austen canon, in my humble opinion, is funnier than Persuasion. 

If you haven’t read it recently, or at all, do yourself the favor and pick it up. To be fair, my take on it won’t come out until 2028, so if you are reading along, you have plenty of time. Honestly, the book is so good that even if you read it now, you will want to read it again. 

Notes from my Headphones

Walt Musgrove, the main character in my version of Persuasion (who is the nephew of Anne Elliot in the original text), seems to really, really like thoughtful, introspective, indie-rock. Luckily, I have plenty of that in my music collection, so I’ve been bingeing on it while doing my pre-writing, which really means listening to music and having full conversations with fictional people in my head. 

It turns out that Walt really likes Aimee Mann. It doesn’t matter if it is her band Til’ Tuesday or her other band The Both; it all works. However, her solo work has been quite inspiring. The haunting ballad, “How am I Different,” has always been a favorite of mine, but it turns out that this song may just be the door I need to walk through whenever I need to talk to Walt. 

Notes from my Bookshelf

Obviously, I reread Persuasion recently. No reason to get into that more here. In the category of “Now for something completely different,” I read Sarah Gailey’s River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow. They are the primary works in Gailey’s American Hippo series. It is set in an alternate USA where Hippos run wild throughout the American South and have taken over most of the Mississippi River. It is wild. I loved it. 

While it sounds like a crazy idea (which it is, it turns out),  it is based on something real. No. Don’t worry. There are no hippos running wild in the American South. However, it was once suggested that Americans import hippos to let them clean up an invasive plant species that was released into the swamplands of the South. Not only that, the idea was that the hippos could be farmed like cattle and served as food. You can read all about it here. 

Notes from my Keyboard

I am nearing 10,000 words of Regardless of You. I have a good sense of the pace of Walt’s story. Who the villains are, and when to do the time jump. This book really hinges on that time jump, as is the case with Persuasion. I have spent a lot of time making sure the smallest details about life in Northern Minnesota are spot on. Those little background details are super important to me. It makes the world really feel lived in. Of course, the towns where all of my characters live are not real; they are all near real places in the world. The characters occasionally go to real places. Austen did it too. When you “borrow,” Always borrow from the best. While it won’t be out in the world for quite a while, it is nice to share these updates with you. Thank you for reading to the end. 

As I mentioned last month,  award-winning comic writer Eric Grissom has agreed to write the foreword to Comics Lit Vol 2. He sent it over. It gave me goosebumps because it is so good. Things are coming together!

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