Sheena Boekweg
A SISTERHOOD OF SECRET AMBITIONS

BIG NEWS! I sold another book! A sisterhood of Secret Ambitions comes out June 1, 2021!
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In 2016 I sat at my laptop and surprised myself.
The words that came out wasn't the idea I'd been playing with, and it wasn't even prose. I sat down and poems came out. I wrote an entire book in verse in about twenty days.
It wasn't the story I was trying to write.
But it was my blood and my secret thoughts, and my heart and my broken pieces.
Because I finished it, I shared it with my critique partners, and some loved it, and a few didn't get it at all. I told my agent and she was nervous about the verse aspect. Verse novels can be trickier to sell.
When it came time to send option pitches to my editor I didn't include it. It was messy, it was too raw, and it was maybe a bit too personal. But then my agent pushed me to try.
And that story, of course, was the one my editor liked. At least the idea of that story. She'd need it in prose. She'd need it in a larger word count. She'd need it to become the story I'd meant to write when I sat down to tell a story and poems came out instead.
This story is the best thing I've written so far. It shouldn't have been so easy. It shouldn't have told itself through me. But I grew up being told two things my entire life, one, that I could do anything, and two, a message only whispered or implied, was that my life would never matter as much as the man that I would marry, or the children I would carry. The world taught me that I was supposed to be small and silent.
And this book I'm big and loud. This story features a fat-positive femme fatale with anxiety and ambitions, a secret society that passes messages through recipe cards, a supportive female friendship to die for, 1927 glam, and while it isn't a romance novel, it does feature a few kissing scenes.
This book is a monument to my grandma, to my mother, to my children, and this book is a monument to me.
For more information, check out this interview with NYGal.Â
Thank you so much to everyone who has cheered with me, or who has supported Glitch Kingdom when it came out in February...my goodness it's been a minute since I last update this website. 2020 has been that year.
Here's hoping that things start to look up.