Balancing Breaking News, Toddler Chaos, and Late-Night Writing —Writer Diary
Holly Baxter is a journalist, author and purveyor of clicks on both sides of the Atlantic. She has worked as an editor and staff writer on the politics, opinion and features teams for newspapers since 2012. Her first book — a non-fiction feminist satire called THE VAGENDA — came out in the UK a decade ago, when she was living in her friend and co-author's closet. These days, she lives in a real apartment in Brooklyn, with her husband and her baby son. CLICKBAIT is her debut novel.
This diary represents a week in Holly’s life—from the controlled chaos of motherhood to the endless scroll of the newsroom and the thrill (and nerves) of her book’s release.
MONDAY, October 28
6 am - Wake up because the toddler is yelling at me about breakfast and kicking me in the face. Get out of bed, and he immediately grabs a broom and starts attacking me with it.
7 am - Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.
8:30 am - Childcare! I quickly type some sentences I thought would fit nicely in my second novel in my Notes app while I wrestle baby Zachary into a jacket and kiss him goodbye. It’s one week before the election, and I’m the head of politics for The Independent, so my phone is now being blown up by politics reporters eager to pitch me stories and other editors trying to work out our publishing schedule.
9:45 am - First editorial meeting of the day. We discuss Trump’s big rally in MSG on Sunday and how the reporters did (the Trump campaign turned down our outlet for press passes, so our intrepid journalists had to line up outside for hours. They did well!). We talk through some Senate races and which party is likely to take Congress and hammer out the rota for our 24-hour coverage.
11 am - My DC correspondent has been offered presidential pooling, which sounds like exciting access but basically means he has to accompany Biden on a trip that could be anything at all. We get the details through, and it’s… trick-or-treating. While the country is on fire around us, we’ll be sending a political reporter to watch Biden and the First Lady hand out candy. It’s kind of delightful in its absurdity.
12 pm - Lunch break, which means two things: writing the 500 words a day I’ve committed to for my second novel and picking out a reading from my debut novel Clickbait that I can read at a literary salon tomorrow night. As an awkward Brit in her mid-thirties with a baby, I do not feel cool enough to saunter into a Bushwick literary salon right now, but I will put on an Anthropologie dress and try to seem halfway presentable.
Try to pick parts of the book that do not have sex in them, as that would be far too much for my British sensibilities. I settle on a chapter where my extremely dislikeable protagonist attends a job interview that goes terribly, terribly wrong.
4 pm - Evening handover editorial meeting. Election week is next week, so we’re all trying and failing to make predictions.
9 pm - Fall asleep while putting the toddler to bed. Rock and roll.
TUESDAY, October 29
6:30 am - Toddler wake-up call. Coffeeeeeee.
9 am - At work, we discuss the swing states and Kamala Harris’s upcoming speech at the Ellipse in DC tonight. She’s making her closing argument as Trump tries to navigate controversy surrounding the Puerto Rico “island of garbage” joke at his MSG rally. The election feels like it’s rapidly getting out of hand.
12 pm - I use my lunch hour to teach journalism to adult learners trying to change careers. We workshop pitches, and I talk to them a little about how I published a book. I try and maximize the time my son is at childcare to make as much money as I can so that, for the next novel, I can afford to take some time away.
5 pm - Wrapping up work, I get changed and slap on some makeup in time for a reading of Clickbait at Les Bleus Literary Salon in Bushwick. I consider that a navy blue jumpsuit might be the vibe; it looked edgy on me a couple of years ago, before I got knocked up. My husband passes me by, wriggling toddler in hand, and says, “You look like a mechanic.”
6:45 pm - I arrive unforgivably early for the reading and almost get hit by a truck outside a beautiful antiques store. I reflect on how my tragic and untimely demise might have affected book sales.
7 pm - I chat with the other authors at the salon and watch the audience file in. Everyone is very interesting and literary.
7:30 pm - I’m the final speaker. The four people before me just read out beautiful, heartrending pieces of tender narrative. I take the stage to read out my deeply sarcastic novel as told through the lens of a dislikeable protagonist. I tell the audience that, after 15 years in journalism, I wrote Clickbait knowing it would be heavily informed by both my career and my life as a deeply dislikeable person.
8 pm - The reading seems to have gone down well, and I get to sign a couple of books. I strike up a conversation with a Russian-American political refugee about what it was like fleeing her country with her young son when Putin first got into power. I ask her to email me and to write me a piece for the paper.
9:30 pm - Get home and help clean up the mayhem our toddler unleashed on the house while my husband was putting him to bed. Sit down and write a quick guide to the US election for Cosmopolitan magazine. Put on my best “how do you do, fellow kids” Gen Z voice to do so.
11 pm - Doom-scrolling and bed. I try to read before sleep — at the moment, I’m obsessed with The Rachel Incident — but the election has made me a bit more prone to social media anxiety than normal.
WEDNESDAY, October 30
9 am - Joe Rogan has just begun podcasting with JD Vance, God help us. I ask a DC reporter to keep an eye on it so I don’t have to.
11 am - We take a look at some more polls showing the election neck-and-neck. It’s tense in the newsroom. We’re pre-writing a lot of copy in the event of both a Harris win and a Trump win. Existing in this strange doublethink world is normal for a newspaper during an election, but it does something strange to your head. Meanwhile, the UK’s Conservative Party has just voted Kemi Badenoch — a far-right anti-immigrant warrior — in as their leader. Doesn’t feel like a great sign.
3 pm - I take a late lunch break and write some more of the second novel. It’s told from two different viewpoints, and until now, I’ve really struggled with the middle-aged woman. All of a sudden, she’s come alive for me — she’s biblical, over-the-top, ideological, and delightfully mad. I quickly get 1,000 words down during a pause in the newsroom flow.
7 pm - I finish up work at the newspaper and go straight into teaching a journalism class. This is a side hustle and a good way of soliciting new pitches for my department. I have a good back-and-forth with a few wannabe hacks for an hour or so while my husband handles toddler bedtime.
9 pm - Finish off the class, eat leftovers out of the pot on the stove, and tidy the apartment before heading to bed early.
THURSDAY, October 31
9 am - The Russian-American writer who I met at the literary salon sends an incredibly well-written and intriguing essay to me about her life and the upcoming election. I ask her to translate some Russian media sources for me so I can get more insight into what people in Moscow think about what’s going on in the US, and she does. This is my favorite part of journalism — getting to ask questions and satiate my curiosity about lots of different subjects from experts across the world — and it’s very useful for informing my books, which have international characters, too.
2 pm - Childcare closes early for Halloween, and my husband is insistent we dress up as a family. He has gone to Spirit Halloween and bought Hogwarts outfits for us all, including a horrific Hermione outfit for me. I protest.
4 pm - I do the final news meeting dressed in a Hermione outfit, with a wand.
4:30 pm - Go out trick-or-treating with the family. Husband is Snape, and my son is Harry. Luckily, he’s old enough to grab things but not old enough to eat candy, so he collects a load of chocolate in a bucket, and then I eat it all.
8 pm - Toddler meltdown. Too many pumpkins and ghosts.
10 pm - I write a chapter of the new manuscript in bed while breastfeeding.
FRIDAY, November 1
7 am - I have today off work, so I get up with Toddler and head out to Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It’s unseasonably warm for November, and we’re dressed in shorts and T-shirts.
1 pm - Take the toddler into the Brooklyn Museum. He immediately barrels into the gift shop, picks up two large rolls of Christmas paper, and uses them to try and smash every single piece of china in the place. When I eventually disarm him, he stands in front of a full-length mirror and dances to Evanescence for half an hour.
3 pm - Bad mom alert - I give the whiny baby some ice cream. While he’s enjoying it, I take the opportunity to write down a few pithy phrases I’ve decided I want to shoehorn into the next book. Then work calls, and we have a discussion about where to send the DC reporters on Election Night; we decide on Texas, just in case Ted Cruz loses, and Florida, just in case Trump wins. Our other journalists stay on the ground in Washington, following Harris and Walz. Polls are looking good for Harris, so we talk about how optimistic we are (we all know how this turns out.)
5 pm - Get home and talk to my husband about existential dread, career futures, and whether we should stay in America forever. You know, the light-hearted stuff.
10 pm - Bedtime, because there’s a long week ahead for me next week with the election. The emotional labor of dealing with it all feels like a lot right now — but also gives me a lot of motivation to disappear into writing every now and then. Are we okay, America? Probably not. But being not okay is okay. Especially when you’re a fiction writer.
