Book updates here, other extras on Substack

Hi, if you are getting this via email because you subscribed to my blog, just wanted to let you know that from now on, content along those lines will be on my substack instead. I will have some basic updates about my book coming out here, but if you are interested in discussions of the craft of writing, musings on pop culture, or extras related to my books, you’ll find that over on substack. I’m hoping to eventually do some cool stuff like interactive fiction or live AMAs.

If you subscribed to my blog, I have your email address, but am not the sort of person to take the liberty and subscribe you to the substack.

Cover Reveal for A STEP PAST DARKNESS

Coming February 20, 2024.

New Book Announcement!!

Well, if you’re wondering why I haven’t posted in forever… 2022 was a rough year for me for many reasons, but somehow (honestly, I do not know how) I was able to write another novel. We had a lot of discussions about how I wanted to follow up Never Saw Me Coming—I was happy with how it hit, but I also wanted to show readers that my interests cross many genres. A Step Past Darkness is a thriller with many creepy (maybe even supernatural…) elements. It has a dual timeline and an ensemble cast I love and in many ways it is a more ambitious novel than my debut. Stay tuned for more news as it comes. You can pop over to Instagram to see a video moodboard I made about the book or check out my second story highlights thing for hints about the book.

Some of my favorite interviews, Part 4

If you are a writer of fiction who is touching on any kind of fact-based thing in their writing (I guess some books do this more than others) at least if you are conscientious you live in fear of really getting something terribly wrong. Luckily I don’t write historical fiction, and while I don’t like to do hundreds of hours of research just to make sure that every thread laid down is correct (because really that is just a form of procrastination), I definitely don’t want anyone rolling their eyes or worse getting offended with something I’ve said because I’ve gotten it wrong (if they’re offended but not because I’ve gotten it wrong, I guess I don’t care..?)

A little while after the book was out, a curious email landed in my inbox—it was from a professor, Abigail Marsh, who studied psychopaths and is currently running a program to help them! And while she was typically skeptical of books that featured psychopaths, she was surprised to read an accurate representation of what life is like for them. I was overjoyed to hear this, and the below is a mutual interview of sorts, where she asks me about the book, and I ask her my burning questions about psychopathy, which include quite a few that readers as me, such as can psychopaths actually get better? Do they fall in love?

Click below or check out PsychopathyIs for more information.

Some of my favorite interviews, Part 3

Here I am on Book Off! with Bella Mackie, author of How To Kill Your Family. This is a great podcast- longform interviews with two authors in conversation, usually ones that have something in common. Bella and I both have a dark sense of humor (as apparent in the title of her book!) Listen to our conversation to hear our takes on horror and humor, America vs. British views of Downton Abbey, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

Never Saw Me Coming: A Novel

By Kurian, Vera

How to Kill Your Family

By Bella Mackie

Some of my favorite interviews, part 2

Here is another interview I really enjoyed, with Katherine Huddle of the Carmel Clay Public Library. When you get interviewed dozens of times in a short period of time, you start to pick up on which interviewers stand out. I don’t know what it was, but I think me and Katherine were just vibing! Link (I can’t embed, sorry)

Some of my favorite interviews, part 1

Not surprisingly, I have spent a lot of the past month plus doing various interviews promoting Never Saw Me Coming. I wanted to highlight a few of my favs in case you missed them.

The below video was from my official launch by Politics and Prose (a local bookstore in DC). If I seem really chummy with the interviewer, it’s because we happen to be very close friends—Everdeen actually read the first draft of this novel, and saw it through several revisions, to my battle to get an agent, all the way through submission to the book deal. (She has been moderating book events for years, and we had a dream of her one day moderating my book event.) During the horrible year of 2020, updates on the book coming out were sometimes the only positive thing we had to share! NB: if the questions at the end seem progressively weirder, it is because 100% of them came from my friends who were attempting to troll me and who may or may not have been drinking in a hotel room ten blocks from my house.)

So you've binged Never Saw Me Coming, what now?

sidebar- is this not the most beautiful cat you have ever seen?

Do you suffer from a pervasive emptiness after having finished my book? Um, sorry. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope the characters stay with you and I hope you had a few laughs. As I’ve written elsewhere, this was very much a pandemic book (it was written before the pandemic, but the entire business end of selling and marketing the book occurred during the pandemic) so if I was able to take you away from it all for a few hours, mission accomplished.

I am writing this on Monday, September 6th, the day before my book officially goes on sale tomorrow. My launch event happens to fall on Saturday, September 11th, the 20 year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. The past two years have been very strange: my little fictional book with its made up characters and problems feels tiny compared the the huge, daunting problems that face us in real life: political instability, climate change, COVID, I could go on. I don’t think of myself as an “important” writer, someone who has profound things to say about the zeitgeist or whatever—I am a popcorn writer who leans towards intelligent. During the pandemic I was not reading War and Peace, learning a new language, or getting into the best shape of my life. I went for long, meandering walks while listening to podcasts. I stared at clouds. When I did consume media, it was comfort watches that took me away: rewatching Breaking Bad for the 100th time, rewatching Lost for inexplicable reasons, becoming obsessed with Full Metal Alchemist and The Expanse. I am not a gamer, but I obsessively played and consumed Skyrim material for most of the summer of 2020. I could not really leave my house as COVID was spiking, but at least in that fictional world I could wander around gathering flowers to make potions, defeat enemies, and stand less than 6 feet away from someone at a tavern (actually I couldn’t if I was wearing Ebony Mail, which poisons people if you stand too close shout out to the one person reading this who’s played Skyrim.) There is nothing wrong in wanting to get lost in a fictional world.

Well, when can you next enter one of my fictional worlds? Um.. I’m not sure? I’m not currently under contract, but I am working on another book. If you want a book exactly like Never Saw Me Coming I will inevitably disappoint you. If the book felt fresh it was because I was doing things with characters and tropes you weren’t expecting. I’m not ever going to be a writer who keeps hitting the same notes over and over to make “different” songs. If you like my actual style of writing, my humor, my focus on characters, you’re going to like my next book. I promise. It will surprise you because it’s different. When exactly you’ll get to read it, I have no idea. It’s going to take me a while to write and then, you know, it has to be edited and printed and stuff.

In the meanwhile, I have a backlog of other stuff you can read right now, which I will tee up here!

Guava Summer

Guava Summer is a chapbook (novella—a very long short story) published by Radix Media as part of their Futures science fiction boxed set of chapbooks. You can buy it singularly or as part of the set. (This novella is only available in print.) The picture doesn’t quite do it justice, but each chapbook was individually designed, and each has their own personal touches (mine has an inset of colorful guavas). In fact, Radix won an award for Book and Cover design from AIGA’s 50 Books 50 Covers 2019 competition.

The story focuses on an unnamed, schlubby detective living with a sexy android (yes there’s a backstory there) in a totalitarian society where the government sees all, people are carted off in the dead of night, and corruption abounds. When Sebastian Black, a corrupt mobster-turned-politician and former client emerges as the leading presidential candidate, the detective prepares for another sham election. But with the summer heat comes the unexpected…

Guava Summer is one of my most favorite things I have written. If you’re a regular thriller reader, but not a sci fi reader, give it a chance; all of my stories are fundamentally about character, but this one is also strongly about creating a new and interesting world, and the political context within it. It also has the best ending I have ever written. (Sadly, because the story is too long, I will never get to read it out loud for an audience.)

Twelve Years, Eight-hundred and Seventy-two Miles

Twelve Years, Eight-Hundred and Seventy-Two Miles is literary fiction, a novella about two brothers going on a road trip to see their father executed on death row. Here’s the blurb:

For twelve years, Zeke Honeycutt has been waiting for his father to be executed on death row.

Haunted by the crime he witnessed as a child, he has been scraping together a living to raise his brother, Will—now fifteen years old—ever since they left foster care. Unlike Zeke, Will, an oddball budding filmmaker, was too young to remember their parents, and to him their mother’s murder is just a case file. Nonetheless, Zeke takes his brother on a road trip across the eight-hundred and seventy-two miles that stretch between LA and the Eyman Prison complex in Arizona to view the execution. As they drive through the desert in their beat-up car, they keep up a steady banter about the mundane—school, girls, and everything in between. But as they move closer to their destination, each must confront the family history that left an indelible imprint on their lives.

This one is always interesting to tee up because it is about something awful and tragic, but it’s also a comedy. For me, there’s often an element of comedy in things that are dark, dreadful, or scary. Here are two boys with a different set of memories, and different feelings about the death penalty. One thinks the execution will bring him a resolution—the other doubts this. I love this story for having a lot of heart and a lot of humor (also it would make a good movie cough cough). The greatest compliment I received about it was a friend who told me that it made him “ugly sob” when he was running on a treadmill. (People can read while running???)

Other Short Fiction

If you head over to this section of my website there are a few more short stories (more of the short variety that the above two) that are available online.

Semi-Gone Girl

All of the work and publicity that goes into the later stages of getting a book out there—well, it’s a lot. A lot of what I have counted as “writing” in the past few months has actually been the business end of getting this book out into the world. I am still saying yes to most publicity things (in as much as I can) and supporting the other 2021 debuts who are coming out later this year through the rest of the year, but what I would love to do is get back to writing a new book. I will still be active on social media in support of the above, but maybe not as active. I will still be doing events, and am still open to doing book clubs (see that section of my website if interested—I would love to finally talk about Never Saw Me Coming without having to worry about spoilers.) But really it’s best if writers are left to do what they do best, which is write. I might delete Twitter off my phone or put some strictures on non-writing stuff I do, but that’s because what I need to be doing is sitting my ass down and writing. If you loved my book, great, thank you, please rate and leave a review and mention it to a friend or two. I hope if you loved it, you’ll continue to support my career, wherever that may take us. I promise it will be interesting.

A week out.. it's been a blur.

I have to interrupt regularly scheduled blog posts to scream the following: I got a glowingly positive review in the New York Times and for a brief moment in time, this review was on the front page of the digital edition.

(You can find the review pretty easily, but I won’t link it right now because there might be a spoilery detail or two).

At some later point, I will write a longer post about the emotional roller coaster that is Your Book Is Coming Out, but at the moment I still haven’t processed everything. If you’re someone who bought NSMC, thank you. If you have already read/listened to it, please drop a review on Amazon, B&N, and/or Goodreads, regardless of where you bought it, as reviews affect algorithms. My next post will be on 9/30— see you then.

The McMillan Sand Filtration Site

So.. if you haven’t gotten to this scene of Never Saw Me Coming yet, you probably won’t understand why I am talking about a pre-World War II water treatment facility, but if you have finished the book, I think this will be pretty interesting to see what I was talking about. Once I learned what this thing was, I thought “oh this is the perfect place for something terrible to happen.”

I had lived in DC for years and driven past the McMillan many many times, often wondering what the hell it was. It was just this strange place overgrown with weeds with these bizarre round, mini-silo like buildings—I wondered if they were some form of urban apiary. I learned about it a few years ago, and when I started writing NSMC I knew it was the perfect place for a major “set piece.” The McMillan Sand Filtration Site used to be a place where water was purified before it could be used in households.

From the original McMillan plans in the early 1900s. I had no idea sand could be used to filter water to make it potable. McMillan was a “slow sand" filtration site (as opposed to rapid.) Water was filtered via a layer of biofilm that formed at the top layer of sand. The biofilm is a gelatinous layer of all kinds of living things.

From the original 1902 plans for the site.

Sand storage bin— what I initially mistook for giant apiaries. Early 1900s

From 1910. Note the dude in the bottom left to give you a sense of scale. The “catacombs” are beneath those manholes.

1944

The site is raised up considerably from the road. The black building to the left is Children’s Hospital.

This picture must have been taken during the day, but gives you a sense of just how dark it can get there.

A view of the sand that is still there.

Door to a filter bed around the building of the site. Those train tracks are no longer there, as far as I know.

The same door?? (picture is contemporary)

Actually sort of pretty.

McMillan was featured on Atlas Obscura, if you’d like to see some amazing photos.

The place has remained a nonproductive construction site for years—plans were drawn up to change it into a combination park, historic site, and and housing complex. But then it got tied up in years of litigation. Some people—not clear on exactly who they are—are dead set against the construction plans going through. Pretty much standard NIMBY stuff. DC really needs housing and the site is has been doing nothing since World War II. Below is a video of what they want to build (I do hope they don’t clean the ivy off the storage bins though).

The New Park at McMillan from Interface Multimedia on Vimeo.