Unpublished

Follow aspiring author Angela Mattes as she drags her fictionally illiterate friend and cohost Daniel Stevens along on the long, bewildering, and occasionally tear-soaked journey of writing a book on the podcast Unpublished. Angela may be unpublished, but she is not beginning from a blank page. She has already completed one original manuscript and written hundreds of thousands of words of fiction read by hundreds of thousands of people online. Along the way, she has developed a process for getting past the obstacles that keep so many aspiring writers from ever beginning: writer’s block, disorganization, self-doubt, too many competing ideas, and the overwhelming question of where to start. As she writes her next manuscript, Angela will break down how she turns the fragments floating around in her head into characters, story arcs, outlines, scenes, chapters, and eventually a finished book. Daniel brings an outsider’s perspective, an addiction to Wikipedia, and the questions of someone who has never understood what writers are actually doing behind their laptops. The journey begins with Eros et Flamingo, Angela’s literary novel about a heartsick assassin who has fallen for one too many of her marks and devises a slightly unhinged plan to find someone capable of loving her back. Part writing diary, part practical guide, part behind-the-scenes look at the publishing process, and part conversation between two friends, Unpublished follows the creativity, uncertainty, obsession, rejection, breakthroughs, and inevitable sobbing involved in turning a flurry of ideas into a fully realized manuscript. The book has not been written yet. There is no literary agent.  Publication is far from guaranteed. For now, it's Unpublished.