Brian Platzer’s The Optimists is narrated by Rod Keating, a man who has suffered a stroke, telling the story of an extraordinary student named Clara, despite his limitations of speech and movement. But Clara reaches us through the meanderings of his own consciousness, and his past continues to live within his present. The story that we get is one that experiments with the conditions of telling: the way memory loops forward and backward, and the fact that we can never fully describe another person without also describing ourselves.

“The Optimists is a book narrated by a man at the end of his life trying to entertain the reader best he can.”
—Brian Platzer

The origin of the novel is direct. Brian’s eighth-grade English teacher, Rod Keating, stayed in his life long after the classroom. They taught together and developed a close friendship that spanned decades. Then, a week after officiating Brian’s wedding, Keating suffered a massive stroke. He lost the ability to speak or use his body. Brian continued to visit him, reading aloud, talking through his life, and sitting with the fact that there would be no response.

Brian described the early drafts of The Optimists as a kind of accumulation, an attempt to capture everything his mentor, Rod Keating, might be thinking. Later, he imposed a more traditional structure, mapping plot and progression onto the pages. That version read more recognizably as a “book,” but something had been lost. As he put it, “it was lacking all of the love and imagination of the first draft.”

“I had this voice that was desperate to be heard, and then I had the playfulness of the real man I remember spending hundreds of hours with.”
—Brian Platzer

Everything changed once Brian gave his narrator permission to interrupt himself. Mr. Keating could pause, digress, revise. The book didn’t need to move step by step from one moment to the next; instead, it could follow and play with the natural movement of the mind, where one memory leads to another. In The Optimists, the story can’t be separated from the consciousness telling it.

The novel’s storytelling mechanism is one of “great pressure.” Though it didn’t work for the real Mr. Keating, the narrator of The Optimists uses an eye-tracking writing device. When “it works, it works,” Brian explains, but only through intense concentration, and it’s exhausting. Every word the narrator communicates takes a lot of effort.

“He wants every detail, even if it’s a joke, to be intentional and focused and precise.”
—Brian Platzer

Despite the exhaustion of communication, Brian writes the fictionalized Rod Keating with such tonal precision that the humor of the earlier man is still fully present. For example, the novel is dotted with jokes. Knock-knock jokes. As Mr. Keating says, “I’m a great believer in knock-knock jokes. Creativity within restrictions.” After the stroke, he lives under severe restriction, in both body and in speech. The jokes preserve the playfulness that defined him before, while also showing that his imagination is still active within those limits.

Mr. Keating remembers moments that wouldn’t have seemed important at the time, such as a brief exchange in a classroom, and other seemingly ordinary occurrences of passing days. Reading The Optimists is a reminder that memory doesn’t preserve a life based on scale and importance. Brian spoke about how “ten or fifteen minutes can have such an impact for the next fifty, sixty, eighty years.” Mr. Keating’s memories suggest that smaller moments that reverberate for years may stay with us just as much as the major milestones.

“Any of these moments could be significant in a way that you don’t anticipate, and that’s very, very exciting, and it’s anxiety producing.”
—Brian Platzer

For many of us, entire stretches of life can disappear while a brief interaction comes back to us in vivid detail. And when we’re young, everything seems urgent, so it remains a mystery why certain moments stick. That’s part of the “magic of childhood,” Brian explains, and it’s also part of the “horror of parenting.” Maybe we don’t spend enough time thinking about the teachers with whom children spend a year of their lives, how lasting that influence can be, or how children, in turn, impact the adults who teach them.

Mr. Keating also reflects on a life spent looking ahead, the tendency to imagine what comes next as a way of giving meaning to the present. Anticipation can make a mundane stretch of time feel tolerable; a person might look forward to Friday, to summer, to a vacation. This act of looking ahead gives momentum and excitement to the present moment—one of the ways people deal with boredom and life’s difficulties.

Still, anticipatory pleasure depends on the sense that something lies ahead. So, what happens when the future is no longer open in the same way? In the present, Mr. Keating isn’t anticipating life as he once did, but his instinct to look ahead doesn’t disappear.

“Although he might not have so many exhilarating episodes ahead of him, he does have a new chapter to write tomorrow.”
—Brian Platzer

Though he’s nearing the end of his life, Mr. Keating still thinks ahead. He continues to live in consideration of what comes next, even when the future no longer offers what it once did. Maybe that’s a form of optimism in itself: still looking forward, even in the simple relief of a summer day with no pressure to go outside and make the most of it.

When Mr. Keating sets out to tell Clara’s story, he also ends up telling his own. He can only approach himself at a distance—through another person and a different set of consequences. Clara remains central but the story is never only about her. Through her, Mr. Keating shares his attachments, limits, and memories. Clara is the subject, but the act of storytelling is a way to communicate the truth about himself.

“The third person is almost always just a narrated first person.”
—Brian Platzer

After all, when we tell stories about other people, our own perspective inadvertently enters the conversation. As Brian says, “We’re really just telling different versions of how the universe is affecting us.” Mr. Keating describes the events of Clara’s life, but in doing so, he also tells the story of Jacob, of himself, of teaching, of legacy.

By the end of The Optimists, we have a stronger sense of which parts of a person can survive loss. The narrator’s voice stays with us, along with his memories, even as his present condition places limits on what he can express. The novel doesn’t shy away from the regrets that come with a man looking back over his life, but at the same time, it keeps in view the small memories that continue to matter, and the fact that even now, as we close the book, Mr. Keating is still imagining what comes next.

-Yasmin

Watch the full interview here.

Brian Platzer was the education columnist for The Atlantic and has written frequently for The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and many other publications. He currently teaches and lives with his family in Brooklyn and Paris.

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock, Author Forecast, and more.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

Wayward Girls opens in Buffalo, New York, in the 1960s. Mairin O’Hara is working in an apple orchard with the sun overhead and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” playing on the radio. The work is hard and life isn’t easy, but she’s young. The pleasures of summer surround her, and the freedom of adulthood is beginning to come into view.

That openness vanishes when Mairin is unexpectedly sent to the Home of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform institution modeled on the Magdalene Laundries, part of a system that confined girls and women in forced unpaid labor under the pretense of moral reform.

The chirping birds of the orchard fall away, replaced by dark hallways and days structured by routine and control. But Mairin doesn’t lose herself in her new reality. Even there, she continues to hear the music, and remember that another world still exists beyond the walls that entrap her.

“Every scene in every work of fiction happens somewhere at some time.”
—Susan Wiggs

Wayward Girls spans multiple time periods and moves between different environments. Susan explains that the danger in a book like this is that the reader begins to feel pulled rather than carried. Weather helps solve that problem, guiding us to understand where we are through our senses. We feel where we are before we know it.

We’re also guided by nostalgia, which for Susan, is rooted in place. In our conversation, she described building the setting of Wayward Girls through lived memory, beginning with a very specific landscape. She spoke about growing up near Buffalo, remembering winters when the snow reached the front door, along with the pleasures of childhood and the sounds, smells, and impressions that, until that moment, seemed long forgotten.

Nostalgia colors the novel through sensory detail, so that memory is felt through weather, sound, and light. Even within the confines of the Good Shepherd, Mairin remains able to access something of the world that came before it. That earlier life does not disappear completely. It stays perceptible in the present, and by the end of the novel, we catch up with Mairin’s future and the freedom with which she will eventually move through the world again.

“Mairin found solace by retreating to a time when her world was filled with love and warmth. Back then, life revolved around her father, who shone like the sun.”
—Susan Wiggs, Wayward Girls

The material surrounding the girls is historically grounded and heavy, but Susan still makes room for humor, play, and writes a story that is ultimately about human connection. Mairin and the other girls form bonds and create small pockets of life within the constraints of their confinement. Through friendship and shared feeling, the novel preserves a sense of movement and possibility.

The novel maintains an optimistic tone that balances its darker material. The history behind the Magdalene Laundries is deeply painful, but in Wayward Girls, Susan illustrates that history through Mairin’s time at the Good Shepherd and her growing closeness with the other girls. Their mistreatment is never separated from their intimacy, their humor, or their sense of a future. As the girls approach adulthood, they dream of the lives that might still be possible, if they can hold onto who they are.

“You want it to feel authentic, but you don’t want them to hit themselves in the head with a hammer.”
—Susan Wiggs

For the girls at the Home of the Good Shepherd, access to the outside world is largely removed. One form of punishment is isolation in a dark, enclosed closet. The deprivation is physical, but it also affects perception itself. To be cut off in that way is to lose a sense of orientation altogether.

Susan spoke about The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and the significance of a window, both literally and symbolically, of being able to see beyond the immediate space. A view outward situates a person within a larger world, confirming that time continues beyond the limits of a room.

Weather offers a way of staying connected to the world. It helps locate experience and gives the present a sense of continuity. To know if it’s sunny, drizzling, humid, or cold is to remain oriented in time. That may be part of why Wayward Girls consistently returns to these elements. They keep the present in view, but they also bring the world beyond the institution back into reach.

At the end of our conversation, Susan spoke about the way she writes, which has remained largely unchanged since childhood. She still writes by hand, in notebooks, a practice that reaches back to years spent in paper shops abroad.

Susan’s attachment to writing by hand feels connected to the deeper concerns of the novel. Her latest novel is concerned with what remains accessible when freedom has been restricted, and writing belongs to that same structure of preservation. On the page, experience can still be gathered, recalled, and kept from disappearing entirely.

What Wayward Girls preserves is the act of remembering itself. The novel remains in contact with beauty, friendship, and the elements that keep a person oriented in time. A change in weather, a shift in light, or the presence of another person can still hold experience in place. Even under confinement, these acts of noticing keep memory alive, and with it, the world outside.

—Yasmin

Watch the full interview here.

Susan Wiggs is the author of more than sixty novels, including Wayward Girls, The Lost and Found Bookshop, and The Oysterville Sewing Circle. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared on bestseller lists around the world.

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

Time travel in fiction often requires an elaborate device, like a machine, or a tear in the fabric of reality. In Victor Piñeiro’s middle grade novel Time Villains, it begins with a dinner invitation.

The premise is fun and familiar: if you could invite any three people to dinner, who would they be? When a group of children answer that question for a school assignment, the guests begin to arrive. Historical figures, villains, and characters from across literature suddenly appear at their table.

“I could take anybody, any character from history, fiction, mythology, and bring them into this book.”
—Victor Piñeiro

After speaking with Victor, it became obvious that the structure of the book’s plot tells us something about the way children experience stories. In a child’s imagination, characters from different books and eras can easily share the same space. In Time Villains, that imaginative instinct is translated into a narrative device and a way of exploring how fiction allows readers to move freely through time.

Victor is aware how the structure of time itself acts for the reader as well as the characters inside the story. And as expected, the characters themselves are inevitably led to question the mechanism of time travel. So, he engages directly with that curiosity. “They start nerding out,” Victor said, describing his characters’ reaction to the strange situation they’ve entered.

“Wait, how does time travel work? How does time work?”
—Victor Piñeiro

This same impulse is familiar to anyone who reads speculative fiction. Once time becomes flexible, we begin asking the essential questions: Can the past be changed? Does the future split into multiple timelines? Does history resist interference?

One theory Victor encountered while researching the genre proposes an interesting possibility: Even if someone changed the past, the future would still arrive exactly as it had before. The implications of this can be both comforting and unsettling. If the future cannot be changed, what does that mean for fate, responsibility, and daily decision-making?

Victor also thinks about time structurally, particularly in relation to his readership. When writing for kids, he’s constantly trying to figure out how to move the plot and add tension in a way that “constantly commands attention,” keeping in mind the “ticking clock” in any given situation.

The elasticity of time becomes especially visible when comparing childhood and adulthood. As responsibilities accumulate and schedules begin to fragment the day, the hours that once felt expansive begin to contract. The possibilities are no longer endless.

“When you’re a kid, half an hour is infinity. As an adult, thirty minutes is thirty seconds.”
—Victor Piñeiro

He wants his characters to feel as though the story could go in “a billion directions,” which mirrors the imaginative freedom of childhood, when the future still feels wide open and our own stories have not yet settled into fixed paths.

Writing alters time in a different way. Many writers describe entering a state of intense concentration where the clock seems to disappear entirely. For Victor, time doesn’t stop so much as split. Daily life occupies one side of his mind, while the novel creates another mental space alongside it. A narrative in progress exists beside ordinary life, and time moves forward in both places at once.

“If I’m working on a book, my brain carves out a second half. It’s almost like having an extra room in your brain.”
—Victor Piñeiro

As a writer with young children, Victor has adapted his writing routine to whatever hours remain available. “The best writing you’re going to do is the second you wake up for about two hours,” but parenthood reshapes that ideal schedule. “Writing in the early morning is absolutely impossible with kids.” So, Victor often finds himself writing during his commute on the Long Island Railroad. Over time, this routine has trained his mind to recognize the train ride as creative time.

“Okay, you’re about to sit in the chair on the Long Island Railroad. You know where your brain’s got to go.”
—Victor Piñeiro

The train becomes a kind of in-between space. Around him, passengers scroll through their phones, read the news, or stare out the window, everyone absorbed in their own routines. Victor enters the world he’s building on the page. The ride exists outside the usual demands of the day. It’s separate from the small interruptions and responsibilities waiting at home or work. For that stretch of time, he can sit, write, and stay inside the story.

If writing offers disruptions in time, then Author Clock compounds this. When a quote appears on Author Clock, time briefly folds in on itself. The present moment becomes crowded with other moments, like the year the book was written or the minute inside the scene.

“Author Clock has changed how I relate to time itself. It’s also changed how I write.”
—Victor Piñeiro

Part of the writing process often involves turning to other books for inspiration. And now, for Victor, those encounters arrive unintentionally. Instead of opening a book, passages appear unexpectedly on Victor’s desk throughout the day. With Author Clock, the present moment brushes against other moments in literary history.

Reading, it occurs to me, works in a similar way. Books allow readers to sit in the same room with writers from other centuries, a scene written long ago becoming present again the moment it is read.

A reader may move across centuries in a single afternoon or read one hundred pages that span a single day within a story. When we’re curled up with a book, the clock continues forward, minute by minute, while the experience of time becomes unfixed.

In Time Villains, characters travel through time by inviting figures from the past into the same room. When we read, we experience something similar. The past remains accessible, returning each time it’s read.

-Yasmin

Watch the full interview here.

Victor Piñeiro is the author of the Pura Belpré Honor Book The Island of Forgotten Gods, and the International Latino Book Award winner, Time Villains. His books have also been named Kirkus Best Book of the Year and Amazon Book of the Month.

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into your everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

It was a cold afternoon in January when I spoke with Rebecca Mix. Snow had been threatening all morning, the kind of winter light that makes it hard to tell what time it is. Our conversation focused on I Killed the King, the novel she co-wrote with Andrea Hannah, a book built on pressure and the narrowing of space and time.

We spoke about weather as an antagonist, the mechanics of a countdown, the way pacing reshapes intimacy, and what it means to write a story this tightly wound, whether alone or in partnership. The energy in Rebecca’s voice felt aligned with the book itself: alert, quick, and breathless.

I’d read I Killed the King in my car, over the course of a week, during the short windows of my toddler’s moving naps. I would park and sit perfectly still, aware that the clock started the moment the engine turned off. The book is about confinement, so it made sense that I felt confined too.

“The characters don’t get a break, and neither do you.”
—Rebecca Mix

I was on edge from the very first page. No longer in the driver’s seat, I was dropped directly in a palace, in a single room, with six other characters. I knew there was a deadline until dawn for a prince to marry a princess and sign a peace treaty that would end a decade-long war, but I didn’t know much else. The King was clearly worried, stressed to the point of unraveling. Everyone felt slightly off. I was as unfamiliar with these characters as they were with each other, and that was a genuinely fun position to occupy as a reader.

In the novel, even before anything really happens plot-wise, the weather establishes that something is off. It’s spring, after all! There should be warmth, sunshine, or at least the promise of it. Instead, the book begins with a snowstorm. The story opens with a sense of wrongness, putting the reader in a state of doubt and suspicion.

A locked room mystery, Rebecca explained, traps characters in place, and she needed a way to show escalation without explaining it away. A clock ticking down and a storm crushing the castle is a perfect way to do that. Escalation becomes structural rather than emotional, making it that much harder for the characters—and the reader—to escape.

“Here you go, welcome to the terrible time.”
—Rebecca Mix

She spoke about the awareness that comes near the end of a book, when you can feel the remaining pages in your hand. You know exactly how much is left, and that knowledge changes the way you read. Dialogue feels more weighted, and every choice a character makes feels like it could be potentially final. Rebecca smartly writes toward that awareness, aligning the story’s countdown with the reader’s own internal clock. The novel makes you conscious of how close you are to dawn, to the last page, to what cannot be undone.

The breathlessness of the novel shapes how characters form relationships. Because I Killed the King unfolds over a single day, there’s no time for gradual friendship. Trust has to build quickly, or it won’t happen at all. The characters have to decide who they are to one another almost instantly.

That acceleration makes one of the novel’s most interesting choices: friendship becomes central. There is romance in the book, and it matters, but it isn’t the sole emotional anchor. Rebecca explained that she wanted the characters to be connected to one another, not only to the person they might love. On a practical level, if the only real bonds were romantic, it would be too easy for the couples to prioritize each other and leave everyone else behind. She wanted reliance to be messier and more realistic. In this way, everyone’s safety would be entangled.

“There is something inherently romantic about being like, I don’t know you, but my life is in your hands.”
—Rebecca Mix

With that framing in mind, intimacy isn’t inherently romantic; rather, it’s tied to exposure and reliance. The relationships that form under pressure may not resemble courtship, but they’re not less real or less valuable. Rebecca described experiencing that same immediacy in her own life, meeting someone and recognizing the connection before there’s history to explain it. Instead of love at first sight, we have friends at first sight.

It was friends at first sight for Rebecca Mix and Andrea Hannah, too. Both living in Michigan, they had talked about writing a book together for years. When Rebecca texted Andrea the loose premise of I Killed the King, writing it alone didn’t even occur to her. When reflecting on the co-writing process, she said with a smile, “We had so much fun writing that book. I’ve never laughed that much before.”

Drafting felt loose. They outlined together, then split the cast, each taking three characters and dropping chapters into a shared document. One would surprise the other; the next scene would respond. Then came revision. “Timing is more fluid when you’re just playing,” she said. Once the structure existed, time hardened. Every adjustment required agreement. Every micro decision had to be voiced, weighed, aligned. In a way, drafting moved fluidly, like weather, while revising moved more rigidly, like a clock.

When writing solo, Rebecca typically loves going for a walk when it’s raining or snowing heavily. She said bad weather “turns something on” in her brain. She described taking a stroll during a recent Michigan snowstorm, figuring out something major, and going home to change the work immediately.

“It’s gloomy and rainy, I’m cancelling my plans, I’m writing today!”
—Rebecca Mix

For Rebecca, rainy weather feels like permission to stay inside. Fall and winter are her happiest working seasons because the world already feels narrowed and inward. She views a snowstorm not as an inconvenience but an opportunity to solve a problem. Perhaps gloomy weather makes the world feel smaller, and concentration comes more easily.

“To be a writer, you need to read,” Rebecca stated confidently when I asked what it’s been like living with Author Clock. She was looking for something that would introduce her to language she wouldn’t necessarily choose on her own, a means to encounter books outside her usual orbit—something that could live naturally in her day and still surprise her. When she came across Author Clock, her reaction was immediate: “This is perfect. I’m going to read a bunch of things I wouldn’t otherwise on accident.”

What she didn’t anticipate was the pleasure of recognition. Beyond discovering unfamiliar authors, there’s the thrill of seeing a book she’s read appear unexpectedly. She takes photos and sends them to friends: “We read this for book club, remember? It’s on my clock!” The device becomes less about productivity and more about shared memory. The pleasure is in seeing something familiar surface unexpectedly. I can relate.

Even after we’d finished talking about Author Clock, the conversation kept returning to weather. Of course, I couldn’t help but think of Author Forecast in connection to how closely Rebecca’s own imagination tracks real conditions. Of course, I knew she would need Author Forecast in her office as well.

In I Killed the King, weather is specific and intentional. At one point, there’s thundersnow, a detail that I underlined as soon as I read it. That particular condition has been notoriously difficult to fill in the Author Forecast library. It’s rare. Seeing it appear so confidently inside a contemporary fantasy novel was an exciting moment. I texted a photo to the team immediately.

Rebecca likes to write about weather and time because these elements set mood instantly, and in I Killed the King, they actively dictate the movement of the story. The storm restricts where the characters can go, the countdown dictates what they can afford to hesitate over, and combined, they create a kind of compression that changes how the people inside the story behave.

That awareness doesn’t only exist in the space of her writing. She gardens and pays close attention to native plants. She writes early in the summer before the heat settles in and goes for long walks in heavy snow when she needs to think something through. Weather shifts her schedule, her concentration, even her mood. That lived sensitivity carries directly into the framing of her fiction, where environment and time are active forces.

When I mentioned the Snow w/ T-Storms quote we’d be adding to the Author Forecast library, Rebecca noted that she was born during a thundersnow. Hearing that, the storm in I Killed the King settled into place for me. Even within a fantasy setting, it never feels exaggerated or ornamental. The weather carries weight because it comes from familiarity; Rebecca has lived inside those conditions rather than imagined them from a distance.

As I write this, snow is falling outside my window. The day has quieted and the world feels momentarily contained. It’s the same kind of compression I Killed the King handles so well, where circumstance shapes what becomes possible inside it.

-Yasmin

Watch the full interview here.

Rebecca Mix is the New York Times bestselling author of many weird magical books, including The Ones We Burn, The Mossheart’s Promise duology, the I Killed The King duology, Neopets graphic novels, and the upcoming Milo and the Monstrous Betwixt. Rebecca lives in Michigan. If you can’t find her, she’s probably on a long walk, talking to bugs in her garden, or attempting to brew the perfect cup of jasmine tea.

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into your everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

Weather forecasts are usually delivered as data, but under the surface is something more subjective. Two meteorologists can study the same model and arrive at different conclusions, and two writers can look at the same sky and describe entirely different scenes. Both rely on the ability to turn observation into language, and that overlap is where our conversation with meteorologist Britney Truempy begins.

“When I sit down to do a forecast on the front end, it’s very science, it’s very facts, figures, and numbers. But as soon as I go to present those facts, figures, and numbers, I have to become a storyteller.”
— Britney Truempy

Britney is a meteorologist whose career has taken her through several regions of the United States, including South Carolina, Texas, Rhode Island, and Colorado. She moved deliberately, choosing location that would expose her to different climates and weather systems. Each setting sharpened her understanding of how the atmosphere behaves, how storms organize, how air shifts, and how fragile certain patterns can be. She’s truly a weather enthusiast; long before forecasting became her profession, she had an early fascination with weather, including a childhood obsession with Groundhog Day.

When Britney explained how she constructs a forecast, the process sounded surprisingly close to the work writers often describe. The analytical foundation comes first: models, temperature profiles, pressure gradients, and the signals that suggest whether a system will build or fall apart. But the moment that information needs to be communicated, the work changes. A forecast only works if people understand it, and that depends on phrasing and vocabulary.

When posed with the conundrum that we’ve all experienced in one way or another—three weather apps giving three different predictions—Britney compared it to asking three people the same question and expecting the same answer. She explains how forecasting models prioritize different inputs, and meteorologists trust different patterns. Basically, every source interprets the same information through a slightly different lens. Variation might be viewed by us as a flaw, but it’s actually the natural outcome of interpretation.

Britney is also a self-proclaimed bookworm, so our conversation naturally turned to literary weather, the point where her two interests intersect. When asked about her favorite literary weather event, she pointed to a passage from A Gentleman in Moscow, where a character reflects on how a small shift in temperature can redirect the course of a life.

“He believed in the influence of early frosts and lingering summers, of ominous clouds and delicate rains, of fog and sunshine and snowfall. And he believed, most especially, in the reshaping of destinies by the slightest change in the thermometer.”
— Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

In Britney’s work, the “slightest change in the thermometer” is literally the thing she watches all day long. A few degrees can alter a system, affect safety, or change how a day feels when someone steps outside. This adds up, redirecting decisions and affecting the course of a life. Listening to her talk through the passage, the idea didn’t sound like a metaphor. Instead, it landed as an accurate description of how weather is tied to experience, even before we notice it happening.

Britney keeps Author Forecast close while she works, glancing at it throughout the day. She checks it for accuracy, but she also checks it for language. Forecasting, she explained, begins with data, but as soon as those numbers are presented, she becomes a storyteller. In this way, the challenge is not as much the science as it is finding ways to describe the same conditions day after day without flattening them into repetition.

“There’s nothing that drives me crazier than trying to come up with another way to say bright and sunny,” Britney admits. Sunny is sunny, until it needs to be something more precise. Sometimes she looks to Author Forecast and asks, “What does that author use to describe bright and sunny?” The answer might be luminous, or brilliant, or an adjective she would never have thought to reach for on her own. “Great,” she laughed. “I’m going to use the word luminous in my forecast today.” For a meteorologist whose work depends on accuracy, the shift is meaningful. The data remains unchanged, but language opens it up.

Something essential about the overlap between the work of a meteorologist and what we do at Author & Co. is captured through this discussion: even in a field that relies on measurement, words matter! A forecast is a form of interpretation, and through language, we can better understand the day ahead.

So, the next time you turn on your local weather forecast, you may hear familiar conditions described in unfamiliar ways. And this shift points to something exciting: Author Forecast is beginning to change the language of weather itself.

Britney Truempy is a broadcast meteorologist currently delivering local forecasts in South Jersey for the NorCast Weather Team. She holds a degree in meteorology from Rutgers University and has worked in television weather across multiple U.S. regions.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into your everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com

We talk about time as if it’s fixed, but most of us know it’s anything but. An hour can stretch or disappear depending on what life asks of us, and very few novelists make that instability feel as precise as Ann Napolitano.

Curating the quote library for Author Clock has focused my attention to how writers render all 1,440 minutes of the day. So when I sat down to talk with author Ann Napolitano, our conversation naturally gravitated toward the subject of time, especially how she builds it into her fiction and what it means for a character to live inside it. And the more she talked about writing, the more her sense of time revealed itself to be elastic, interior, and inseparable from both her process and how her characters move through the worlds she creates.

“Writing is basically all I ever want to do. It’s this place that I get to go to where time disappears.”
—Ann Napolitano

In her novels Hello Beautiful and Dear Edward, clocks, injuries, flights, and ordinary minutes all color how a life can be lived or altered. Our conversation covered the strange hours of airplane travel, the way illness can seem to knock time off its axis, and what it means for writing itself to make the clock disappear. Napolitano now keeps both an Author Clock and an Author Forecast at home, which made her an ideal person to ask what it means to live and write inside a life where time both governs everything and still has the power to vanish.

When we turned to her process, she began at the beginning. Ann’s work on her novel Hello Beautiful started with an image she couldn’t shake: “a lonely little boy dribbling a basketball.” Before she wrote a single sentence, she set what she calls an “invisible timer,” nine months in which she isn’t allowed to write anything “pretty.” During that stretch she researches, takes notes, interviews experts, reads obsessively, and slowly understands who will inhabit the book. When she finally begins writing, she no longer needs an outline. She has what she calls her “tent poles”: fixed points she needs to reach, including the moment William arrives in the Padavano sisters’ world, and later, the loss that will forever change their family.

Reaching those poles required collapsing and expanding time constantly. She had to cover eighteen years in the first chapter alone. “The story has these things that I have to get to,” she told me, and each one changes the speed of the narrative. In her words, “the engines” inside each character move differently. Julia’s is quick and forward-driving. William’s, especially after his early injury, slows to a near-halt.

“He thought about her gone-ness, which he didn’t understand, but as the clock hand labored from one minute to the next, he wished that he were gone too.”
—Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

When I mentioned the above quote, she connected it directly to William’s altered state. “When you’re sick or injured, time is disabled. You aren’t participating in life, so an hour isn’t an hour.” What interests her is what those suspended hours reveal. William, stuck in bed and unable to move forward, becomes “blurry and kind of gone.” Stripped of routine, he encounters the emotional structure that formed him. The Padavano sisters, raised with connection and care, would experience a similar pause differently. “There’s still like a pulsing love inside of them because everything that’s been fed into them. And that’s not what William has.”

That sensitivity to interior time runs through Dear Edward as well. The flight chapters each begin with a timestamp do more than mark the time of day, they exist as a way of reminding the reader that the minutes are leading somewhere. “I wanted the clock to be ticking literally for these people,” she said. On a plane, time behaves strangely anyway.

“I think time on a plane is really weird.”
-Ann Napolitano

She described long-haul flights as a kind of suspended reality: people watching movies they wouldn’t normally watch, reading things they never read anywhere else, and trying to escape the awareness of being in the air. In Dear Edward, time on an airplane is described as monotonous, and still, a single minute on Edward’s flight weighs heavier than the rest. Even on a plane, one minute has the power to change everything.

That tension of long stretches where minutes repeat themselves, interrupted by moments that divide a life, is something she returns to again and again. It’s also part of why she prefers to read her manuscripts on planes. “There’s nothing holding any of me back,” she said. With no interruptions, she can fall completely into the work.

The idea of time disappearing first came to Ann as a child. When she was ten, she wrote a vocabulary assignment and looked up to find that forty-five minutes had passed. “It was the fact that time disappeared that made me think, ‘Oh my god, I want to do this.’” Decades later, that feeling remains. Her writing days aren’t defined by minutes passing but by what she calls “expansion,” a state where time stops working the way it does anywhere else. That doesn’t mean the rest of life slows down. She writes every day, always in the morning, after exercise, when her mind is clearest.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked what it’s like to live with Author Clock. Her answer felt like a circle closing: “What’s great about it is it’s reflective of my sense of time.” She listens to audiobooks constantly. She reads. She writes. “I really exist in prose and in fiction. That is my music.” Seeing the time through a sentence, especially a sentence she didn’t expect to notice, fits her life exactly.

“It keeps me constantly in fiction, which is where I want to be. So, it feels perfect.”
—Ann Napolitano

Ann spoke about time with a directness that stayed with me, the way it slows when you’re sick, speeds up when you’re frightened, disappears when you’re doing the thing you’re meant to do. Listening to her, it became clear why her novels carry time so distinctly: she pays attention to it.

As we wrapped up, she noted that no one had ever asked her this many questions about time. As the editor of the Author Clock quote library, I couldn’t help but smile, thinking: of course I would ask this much about the subject! At Author & Co., our work is built on the idea that our experience of time is inseparable from the language we use to name it, and conversations like this one remind us why literature belongs in the everyday.

After all, literature is one of the few places where our experience of time isn’t flattened. The minutes of a day are not interchangeable because they feel different, and they belong to different versions of ourselves. And through fiction, those minutes become legible in an entirely new way.

- Yasmin

Watch the full interview here.

Ann Napolitano is the New York Times best-selling author of Hello Beautiful, Dear Edward, A Good Hard Look, and Within Arm’s Reach. Her work has been selected for Oprah’s Book Club and has sold more than a million copies worldwide. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Yasmin Gruss is Head of Content & Community at Author & Co., where she curates the quote libraries for Author Clock and Author Forecast.

At Author & Co., we combine design, function, and our love of reading to create tools that bring literature into your everyday life.

Learn more at authorandco.com