Mae Rossi

Can we make 2026 the year we ditch the cartoon covers for romance books and bring back the lovingly rendered oil painting covers of old?

The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction programme and the book The Boundless Deep by Richard Holmes

Loved the Oscar Wilde quote read out at the start of Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction ceremony this evening:

“If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.”

Yay books!

(book in pic was in my goody bag, not the winner)

I was laid off from Teen Vogue this week, alongside multiple other phenomenal team members.

At our Summit, I was asked how it felt to be 1 of 2 Black women left and what that meant for representation. Now, there are no Black women at Teen Vogue and that is incredibly painful to think about.

ON THE LITERAL EVE OF A DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST MAYOR BEING ELECTED, ANNA WINTOUR KILLS PROGRESSIVE AND PROFITABLE TEEN VOGUE POLITICS DESK WHICH HAD JUST INTERVIEWED HIM

*That’s* the headline.

(Unfortunately there’s hardly any news outlet left to run it 😭)

I was laid off from Teen Vogue today along with multiple other staffers, and today is my last day.

certainly more to come from me when the dust has settled more, but to my knowledge, after today, there will be no politics staffers at Teen Vogue.

I feel like I say this every year but I really need people to hear it. Halloween is the best American holiday. Just kids outside welcomed into their world, marching around together, showing off their costumes to the elderly, parents meeting parents, neighbors catching up with neighbors.

I've never had anyone be that aggressive with me, but when people start to throw mask shade I tell them I'm highly contagious. It's worked well so far tbh

a cartoon drawing of a record player playing a record . ALT: a cartoon drawing of a record player playing a record .

The older I get, the more I appreciate and love physical media of all forms. To put in a CD in a CD-player, a vinyl on a record player, a movie into a blu-ray or DVD-player... It really is the best. To know you own it. You can touch it. Smell it. Display it nicely. 😌

In addition to all the *gestures at everything* I’ve barely been able to write this year and it’s been absolutely soul crushing

Well gosh dangit I have two and a half months left of this godawful year to turn that around and I’m fuckin gonna 💪 let’s fuckin go

My TBR hates to see the fall coming 🧙 🧛 👻 #booksky

Photo of a television screen showing the title card for OVER THE GARDEN WALL, the most perfect show to ever exist

It is once again time

photo of Google News search results for Amazon Prime Day (the second this year)

twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

I just finished a book by one of my favorite authors from a series I started four years ago. FOUR. YEARS. Even though I love her work, I'm a mood reader with an enormous TBR.

It's a long game, folks. The key is just staying in it if you can.

#writingcommunity

Just saw a care home employee post a video of one of her charges dancing when she thought she was alone and care providers, you really need to…well, CARE about your patients’ privacy! My grandma would have been mortified.

Kids, elders, and disabled people aren’t your content.

Supermoon

She's so beautiful GO LOOK AT HER

Some publisher could start a trade newsletter for romance-only bookstores and make a fucking MINT by throwing a few bucks to a freelancer or two and sending a copy to the literal hundreds of new bookstores that will be left rudderless if Tiktok starts suppressing spicy book content.

The "fuck yous" from Dreamspinner Press never stop: Of course they didn't pay the $65 to register copyright for the book I published with them, so I won't be seeing any of the Anthropic settlement. Reminder that DP should have gone under a long time ago but are still accepting new submissions.

About ready to scream. $3000 per work would have been life changing. Any money at all would be helpful. Locked out because $65 per book wasn’t happening at the time they were published. So they just got to steal from me for free and I get to hear that’s what I get for not publishing “right”.

Sigh. So, my publisher only registered one of my books for copyright. So that's only one book that is eligible for the anthropic settlement, despite them having stolen seven. Not only that, but the registration has the book's artist as a co-author, so the settlement will be split.

a man in a suit holds a woman in a red cape Alt: gif of Lestat, Louis, and Claudia from AMC's Interview With the Vampire walking together looking unreasonably gorgeous.

Interview With the Vampire is on Netflix now? Perfect October viewing, treat yourself to some gothically deranged lovesick vampires, they're all unreasonably beautiful and incredibly unwell about each other. It's perfect.

just guess

A therapy or intervention with an 80% success rate would be considered a medical miracle in pretty much any other field, but when it comes to expressing one's gender identity apparently it's an unacceptable low. For, uh, reasons.

Order real books from your local bookstore OR ELSE IT WILL CLOSE AND YOUR TOWN / NEIGHBORHOOD WILL BE SAD AND BORING

Some thoughts on prose:

Gritty prose puts you directly in it

Pretty prose puts you in a bubble observing it

Voice-y prose shows it through a colored lens

Breezy prose moves you right through it

Classic prose lets you choose how to see it

Flaccid prose makes you not care about it

Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.

this exists it is called thinking

You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian; Second Night Stand by Karelia and Fay Stetz-Waters; Band Sinister or The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen by KJ Charles

Sign in front of Little Ghost Books that says Do You Have Your Spooky Season Books Yet?

I made it! 👻

@littleghostsbooks.bsky.social
#booksky

honestly i’m shocked & impressed that they’re allowing the Library of Congress to still select a new US Poet Laureate at all—& that furthermore, it’s a great poet & translator who is explicitly focusing on work in translation

Reading a book by a writer I love and there’s a joy to vibing with someone’s voice especially as a novelization writer. Like they just know how to tell a story.

Who was your copyeditor?