The toucan
My higher self is…
A BIRD!?
(That tracks.)
Touks, the toucan
The lore
Touks Made Me Write This — book cover
(cover art TBD.)

Meet Touks.

Listen. It's a long story.

The day before my 20th high school reunion, my mom gifted me a hypnotherapy sesh (normal), and my "higher self" showed up as a toucan — confusi-lovingly dubbed Touks.

Sharp-beaked. Hawk-eyed. Mildly judgmental. Heated in an intimidatingly jungly sorta way.

His assignment? Simple. Horrifying, really:

Keep writing. In public. On LinkedIn (embarrassing).

And also…

Write the book.

So here we are.

The blurb

The fancy version.

After decades of optimizing herself into something polished and performative (puke), a word-obsessed millennial reaches the point where rejection finally feels safer than self-erasure, and detonates her pink-sparkle — the diary-soaked voice of her analog girlhood — onto the least likely of stages.

Gremlin Books · Forthcoming 2027
Vanessa, age 11, 1996
The author in her natural habitat.
What it, like, actually is

(Besides a book.)

“
Her writing reads like the internal monologue so many of us were taught to tone down, but never actually could.
Nicole Reed
Nicole Reed
Founder & Publisher,
Reed Press & Gremlin Books
Fan mail

Reader side effects.

“She is the Kurt Vonnegut for the 90s kid.”
“Your writing is the hatching-dinosaur-egg candy in the LinkedIn feed oatmeal.”
“I’m going to start collecting your confused poetry like a dragon hoarding precious metals.”
“I feel like I just lived a John Hughes film.”
“Your writing is so good I want you to think my thoughts for me.”
“Came for the writing philosophy, stayed for the Alex Mack reference.”
“God, this is electric.”
“You’re a poet and a soothsayer.”
“So good! More. MORE!”
“You’re the reason strangers feel less alone at 2 a.m.”
“When I am dead, my ghost will make a new LinkedIn account just to come back and read this again.”
“I woke my husband laughing out loud. Thank you.”
“Publish! Publish! Publish! And then do it some more!”
“This is raw, hilarious, and profoundly relatable.”
“I am absolutely mesmerized by the way you use words.”
“Allow me to neurodivergently collect you somehow please.”
“Never stop writing like this.”
“OMG what a pure piece of literature.”

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I blame Touks for all of this.
© 2026 Vanessa Childers  ·  site design.
Touks, peeking