What I'm working on now
Some updates...
I don’t know why I thought writing a newsletter once a week (or every other week) was a reasonable expectation. I was inspired to start this Substack to encourage myself to write more. “The more you write, the more you have to say.” But I write and say things all day long, and then at night I attempt to work on creative writing. The will to produce runneth dry.
When I was kicking around possible themes to post about, I kept coming back to the excuse that I didn’t have time to write a blog because I had too much else going on. So I’ll be meta about things and make a post about the things stopping me from posting.
This is also an update to the now page on my personal website, hannahwastyk.co/now
More often than not, my life falls into the pattern of being able to focus my attention on three meaningful things at a time. For the past year or two the three things have been the same.
My people. I’m spending a lot of time hanging out with my partner and friends. I moved to San Francisco last year and absolutely love everything there is to do. SF is a soft city (relative to say, NYC), but compared to the dead zone that is Palo Alto, this feels like a bustling metropolis. I’m soaking in all the coffee shops, incredible food, parks, and parties with my favorite people.
My job as CEO and co-founder at Interface Bio. Work is so busy. I know I say this all the time, but it actually has a huge chokehold on my time and mental state right now. We are meaningfully raising our next round and it’s a hard time to be a seed company. We are too early to have expensive de-risking data like mouse work, but too late to be floating on just vision and vibes. But as is true time and time again, the people make it all worth it. We have 6 full time employees now, which feels surreal. When my co-founder and I run lab meeting and direct operations for a vision we have been dreaming about for a collective 10+ years, I have to remind myself that through all the stress and challenges, this is very, very cool. Most importantly, the people we hired are some of the kindest, most intelligent, and hardest working scientists I’ve ever met. We are all passionate, slightly unhinged, and huge nerds. The best recipe for success.
Writing. Because of my first two priorities, I am not able to spend as much time writing as I would like. But I’m still making passive progress because I’m officially in the querying trenches! The edits on my last draft nearly killed me. Can’t wait to do it again if I’m lucky enough to land an agent! :D The response rate for full and partial requests has been encouraging and well above average. Still, response rate doesn’t mean anything until an offer is made, so until then I will be patient and slowly (so slowly, I don’t understand how/why I am the slowest querier on earth) send out more letters to agents.
I’m also writing my new book! I’ll save the details for another time, but it’s an adult sci-fi dark academia following a grad student investigating a fraud (and possible murder) in his lab at Stanford. The first chapter is one of the best things I’ve ever written. The stakes, intrigue, and clarity are so much cleaner than any other first draft I’ve done. The entire writing process of this second book already feels so different from the first. I’m more methodical with it. Less emotional. There’s significantly less compulsion to write my soul onto the page. I have themes I want to discuss, characters I want to explore, and twists I want to spin, but it’s going to take time. The story is less Personal and because of that, I have more space to think and breathe. I am able to make decisions that deviate from the original sketch I had in my head, which will ultimately lead to a better story.