Becky Allen Books

Writing by a neurotic New Yorker

  • Two selfies of me, one from 2015 and one from 2025.

    Pride & Pronouns

    I’m nonbinary.

  • A simple cup made of red clay. It's been glazed in dark blue, but a diagonal section has been left bare with the clay showing.

    I found a pocket dimension

    It turns out I have a literal extra hour in my day.

  • A collage of photos of a very ugly mug: it's slightly collapsed and lopsided, and slathered with bright colors (dark blue, red, pink, yellow, green, an lighter blue).

    Capitalism is Weird (No Duh)

    March was a long and weird month for me: I changed jobs, took a week off, took a 48-hour trip to Texas for a wedding, and wrote 10,000 words of a new project. Plus the weather was nuts. Now here we are in April and it’s finally spring. The weather is still a little nuts,…

  • A close up of a dirty wooden desk. Barely legible words in something like chalk are pressed into it in different colors, mostly white. A few phrases are readable: "first try", "background", "I will try..." ("again" is smudged out after that one).

    Something I’m Good At, Something I’m Bad At

    We have somehow defeated February — the shortest, but somehow also usually the worst, month. Slowly but surely, the days are getting longer again, and soon we’ll change the clocks and then hopefully I can resume being a functional human, after a long, extra-snowy winter. Where I’m At I’m at the beginning of a new…

  • Map of the United States with the names blanked out

    Learning Things is Fun, Actually

    January is finally over, after what felt like about five years. It was a long slog of a month with horrific news throughout, brightened only by incredible communities taking action to protect themselves and their neighbors. (If you are able to, please stand with Minnesota; if you’re in the US, you can also look for…

  • An old 2025 planner and a new 2026 planner

    Looking back, and gentle goals

    New year, new me? Absolutely not. New year, new format for newsletters with the hope of maybe sending them out more often? Sure! (With a lot of thanks to my BFF Jess who encouraged me, whose format I am more or less stealing, and whose newsletter you should read.) Where I’m At Well, it’s January.…

  • Teenage Passion Projects

    I can’t stop thinking about Audra Winter. My BFF Jess was the first person who told me about her and since then I’ve watched… a few reactions. To say the least. For those who aren’t in online book spaces that have become obsessed with this, the short version is: Audra Winter is a 22-year-old indie…

  • A Boox e-reader with Bound by Blood and Sand's title screen

    ONYX BOOX Go 6 Review

    I wanted an e-reader that wasn’t a Kindle and would let me access my Nook books and library apps. I ended up with the Onyx Boox Go 6.

  • An image of large, messy bookshelves, stuffed full of all kinds of novels

    Lessons Learned from Reading Bad Books

    I have read some bad books over the last few years, and I’m pretty glad I did, because I definitely got a lot out of them. Not things the writers intended, but enough to make them valuable experiences.

  • Several notebooks and pens in different colors sprawled across a wooden desk

    On writing as play, 2024 wins, and 2025 goals

    It’s that time! The one time a year I reliably send a newsletter or write a blog post, to update with what all I did last year. Here’s an archive of word counts from the last, gosh, decade. I’ve focused less on word count stats in recent years, though — I know I consistently draft…