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.
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.
How I Wrote My Book (literally)
Building off of last post where I showed you my notebook, this post will discuss the actual process of writing Never Saw Me Coming. This might be interesting for curious readers or may be informative to other writers. Everyone has a different process, so take with a grain of salt—there is no “right” way. There is no magical thing if you just do it, you will finish your book and it will be great and you will get a huge book deal. There are people who take 10 years to write a book, and people who take 10 weeks. There are various recommended processes and programs and books about writing, but ultimately, you have to do what works for you.
I don’t think of writing as a grueling process, which some writers make it out to be. Working at a chicken processing plant, an Amazon warehouse, or as a doctor or nurse right now in COVID is grueling. Maybe it’s because I don’t do autofiction, but writing has never felt like I was tearing out a piece of myself, or processing my trauma. For me it was always fun, even the more difficult parts like revising feel like solving a puzzle. That doesn’t mean that related aspects of the business of writing weren’t hard— getting an agent was emotionally difficult, watching other people succeed when I felt like I was failing was difficult (but not like chicken processing plant difficult).
I am a weird mixture of crazy efficient, lazy, and practical. When I have a project to get done and it is clearly delineated, I will go after it having lots of “flow” moments, losing track of time, and get it done. When I’m not actively working on a project (ie, I’ve just finished a book) I often spend months at a time watching mind-numbingly stupid TV, listening to podcasts, and generally dicking around. It’s all or nothing for me. And that’s fine.
I have a career, which I don’t intend to give up, and writing will continue to be my hobby. So when I wrote this book, I was working about 40 hours a week, sometimes a smidge more. But I have very, very strong boundaries between different things. If I am doing career stuff, I am not on social media poking around book-related stuff. If I am with my friends, I am not checking my phone. It is entirely possible to write a novel and have a full time job. And you don’t have to wake up at 5 in the morning to have the time. You don’t have to stay up till 3 am. You don’t have to kill yourself to be an artist. I wrote the first draft of this novel very quickly (about six weeks) and this typically involved writing for about an hour after dinner but before I went to the gym, and maybe writing 1-4 hours on the weekend. I guess I’m being very specific about saying this because I want to point out that 1) you don’t need a special “thing” to write- like an MFA or a computer program or something 2) you don’t need enormous blocks of time 3) you don’t need a special place, like a writing cabin in the woods away from everything else 4) you don’t need a mentor, guru, or person to hold you accountable because you could just hold yourself accountable.
I will say that the two things you do need are 1) efficiency and 2) a map.
I’ve met a lot of writers who say they can’t write unless they have a big block of time- like 3 or 4 hours. It’s my belief that this is a “won’t” and not a “can’t.” You’ve convinced yourself that you can only write under these specific conditions.. but you made those conditions, so you can change them. If you need a big block of time and don’t have one, then you’re not going to write, or you’re going to learn to write with smaller blocks of time. Can’t write while the kids are screaming? Then learn to write while the kids are screaming or get noise cancelling headphones or introduce the kids to colorful, sparkly bits of yarn. There is no magical formula thing, you just have to sit your ass in a chair. And I had, max, about an hour at a time on weekdays, because I had work, a dog to take care of, meals to cook, gym to go to, friends to see—only an hour. So pragmatically speaking, with only an hour to spare, was I going to spend it dicking around? There’s a time and a place for day dreaming, for researching about agents or publishers, poking around literary gossip, but that time was not when I was sitting down to write.
Maybe you’ve heard of “pantsers” vs “plotters.” ie, people who make up where they’re going as they go along vs people who outline. I am in the latter camp and I will die on this hill. Pantsers always seem to have more severe rewrites and I don’t have time for that. Imagine an architect who just sort of.. builds whatever he feels, whenever he feels it, and then goes back to fix it later lamenting about how much work it is. I don’t think its an efficient use of one’s time, nor do I feel that outlining in anyway holds back my creativity. By the time I’ve outlined something, I’ve spent a lot of time working over the plot in my head, and my subconscious has been mulling over things for even longer than that. I do some plotting exercises before I even get to the outlining stage. This doesn’t mean that the outline is never shifted or significantly altered. Or that it’s even entirely complete. Sometimes I have A B C D F G K L and I sort of fill in the blanks as I go or after the fact. Or I know I need to get to L and I have to figure out how. Now I tend to write more in order because I’m working on two books, still work full time, am starting to have to do various publicity things for NSMC as pub date approaches, and spend approximately 20% of my day washing my hands. So now I work from more detailed outlines.
I really like this. It’s the difference between being hungry and opening the fridge to see raw chicken, yogurt, and celery, and being hungry and having a box that has all the ingredients you need and detailed instructions on what to do with them. (is this an ad for Hello Fresh?) In this case, having a detailed plot outline is like having a sous chef (past me) who’s prepared everything for current-me and all I have to do is provide the labor. Perhaps I’m missing some inherent value in pantsing! But I will say that once you move away from the “I could take as long as I want to write my first novel” into territory that has more strict deadlines and others depending on you, I highly recommend the more structured way of doing it.
Writer's Notebook
Some readers like to see how the sausage is made, and some don’t. I’m the former. I used to love the long author’s notes in Stephen King’s books where you heard a lot about where he was at when he wrote the book, what he was feeling at the time (ie, which stage of drug abuse, in his specific case). Writers, of course, love this kind of stuff (craft), and I’m told that bookstagram people do too..? So I’m going to include a post or two on the sausage factory, with stuff redacted out to avoid spoilers, of course.
I posted the below the day after I got the idea—it’s the entire hook.
(Please note that 6 turned into 7 when I wrote the actual book). I kinda got a lot of the idea at once, more or less—I’ve always been interested in psychopaths but one of the main dyads had been floating around in my head for a while, one scene in particular. But by the time I posted this on Facebook to a small group of writer friends I had a fair amount of the first-draft plot figured out. (the plot changed fairly significantly over time.) I’m not including it but the discussion that followed basically had me saying “What if [insert the very ending of the book]?” I’m assuming that most people reading this don’t know me as a writer but I am ARDENTLY, ZEALOUSLY pro-outlining (as opposed to “pantsing”—writing as you go and assuming that it will work itself out somehow). I think it’s really hard to write a mystery without starting backwards. You know who did it, then weave the threads from right to left in order to drop clues in all the right places. It also saves you a lot of time and heartache on revisions. I always write with an outline. This doesn’t mean I 100% know what’s going to happen in every single chapter, but typically I know the end and some key beats, and then I go through and fill in the beats. Inasmuch as I can show you, here are the tools of the trade:
I’m a big fan of bullet journals (as is Chloe, but ironically, she has pin-perfect handwriting and I have (as you will see) serial killer handwriting that I am physically incapable of improving.) I like Leuchtturm softcover notebooks, but I do carry a small hardcover one when I’m at writing-related events. I like how they have numbered pages, an index, and dots rather than lines, which leaves room for drawing.
This is an aerial view of John Adams University. It was really important for the college in NSMC to feel real. Not just that it would feel like college because it’s a college, but that feeling you get when you’re reading that a thing is real—verisimilitude. This comes from a writer having a strong sense of what that place is. For anything I write of substantial length, I like to make maps. It helps me visualize what the entirely fictional place looks like, but also gives the reader a sense that I know where things are, which then gives them that sense.
Below is a (highly redacted) pic of a calendar of events. It has both the literal date but also the daily countdown that Chloe keeps referring to—in the first draft of the book, the countdown was 1 to 60, not 60 to 1— with 60 days to kill Will. When I was doing revisions with my editor at Park Row we talked a lot about keeping the book filled with tension and keeping things pretty taut— one of the things I thought of that was pretty obvious was that a count DOWN was better than a count UP. It doesn’t really matter if the 5th of September is on a Wednesday or Tuesday or whatever, but I’ve found that I like working with calendars and am doing one with my current work in progress. But the actual day, at least for the first 60 days of this book, was really important because I had a countdown going. I wanted to make sure that the progression of events made sense and were fairly paced out over those first 60 days. In the process, you can consider, well if X happened, how soon after would you follow up on that issue? How long would that take? I also think in some books time just sort of bleeds away which takes away from the feeling of reality. Chloe and friends are still in college, still going to classes. It’s August into September in DC, which means you’re moving from sweltering ass-heat to a couple weeks of beautiful fall before an unpretty winter.
Below you can see a picture of the original first draft first page of the book, awfully titled “Dark Triad” back then. A bit about titles, I knew that title wasn’t going to stick, had a different working title when I secured an agent, and when the agent and I went on submission had a third title, which also didn’t stick…
If you’re not familiar with how book titles work, there’s a really high probability that the title an author walks in with isn’t the title that you end up with. The publisher works with their marketing and sales team to see if the title makes sense. You need a title that sounds like whatever genre it is. You can’t have a gory horror novel with a title that sounds like a HEA romance and more than you can have a HEA romance that has a cover like a gory horror novel. You need something that makes sense and hasn’t been used recently by someone big or someone in the same genre. (I believe you can’t copyright an actual title, but someone correct me if I’m wrong.) So I wasn’t super attached to the title we went on submission with but boy did it take a lot of brainstorming to come up with a title everyone liked (this included both my US and UK publishers!) There were multiple rounds of brainstorming lists going around- I think the below is one of my first lists typed out on my phone (probably while waiting for the subway.) You could see how some of these just wouldn’t work. Still kinda fond of “Student Bodies.” I really thought “The Last Thing You See” would stick—it sounds very much like your basic thriller. I think on the third or fourth list, I came up with Never Saw Me Coming, which everyone liked, including me! It sounded thriller-y but most important to me, had a hint of Chloe’s tone/voice to it, her sort of smug confidence. Or maybe… the title doesn’t refer to Chloe..? ?
Five Strange Things About Living in DC
Embassy of the Republic of the Congo (1)
Ah, seeing Chloe walk around and attend a frat party at a corner rowhouse just instantly brings to mind what DC streets are like at the end of summer, or in the fall (which in my opinion is DC at its prettiest.) It’s a small, walkable city with a lot of nightlife. I spent a lot of my nights walking to/from various bars, restaurants, and when I was younger, nightclubs. While many people have been to DC as part of a 8th grade trip, I can assure you that living here is radically different than just visiting here. Much like I was sort of “meh” about the beach when I lived in LA, I often don’t even see the main tourist attractions anymore: the Lincoln Memorial is just a place I run by, the Washington Monument is just a good way of orienting which direction you’re standing in. Funny thing about COVID, I’ve spent a ridiculous among of time walking around and looking at architecture, and yes, returning for a close look at the Lincoln. (I went there a lot in my 20s, but this time around found myself reading the speeches engraved on the inside walls, all around the time of mass protests in DC about racial equality. His second inaugural address—delivered a month and change before his assassination—contains this historical dunk:)
Anyhow, here are some weird aspects of living in DC you might not know about if your only experience has been an 8th grade trip where you took a chartered bus but you got your period and it was a nightmare.
Diplomats And embassies
You sort of forget about it if you live here, and take it for granted that there are going to be nice cars with diplomatic plates parked terribly who are going to get away with it. There are almost two hundred embassies in Washington DC. Some are in what look like lovely old mansions, some in DC’s . . . interesting brutalist architecture, and then there’s Canada, my favorite embassy, which used to be right next to the Newseum, which is unfortunately moving.
Embassy of Canada (2)
When you walk into an embassy, you are considered in the sovereign territory of that country. Embassies regularly have interesting cultural events, and more importantly, are known for giving out good Halloween candy.
2. lack of sovereignty
It’s mentioned a couple times in NSMC and it’s probably hard to understand for people who don’t live here, but basically we do not have local sovereignty. DC is not a state— it is a “federal enclave” which means there are things that voters in say, Kansas, could do that we could not do here. For example, voters here vote for one particular thing. What basically happens is that Congress could then prevent that thing from happening just because legally they can, even though that particular member of Congress represents constituents from a different state. Not surprisingly, this has happened with hot-button issues: abortion, gun control, and the legalization of marijuana. Regardless of how you feel about those particular political issues, as a resident here it’s frustrating because our votes basically get thrown in the garbage because it’s an easy way for politicians to score points back home.. or so they think. Occasionally you come across a story where a reporter mentions that this is a thing to someone living in another state and they say, wait, what? That isn’t fair. In fact, there are organizations in other states standing up for us. (yay Iowa!)
I am pro-DC statehood- although I don’t really care what form that takes. Do I think it needs to literally be another star added to the American flag and what not—who cares, but we would like to have taxation WITH representation and to have our vote counts. Hence our state license plate:
The population of DC is about 700,000. In 2014, we paid about 26,000,000,000 in federal taxes, which is more than the states of Kansas, Nebraska, Alabama, Iowa, South Carolina, Delaware, Utah, Nevada, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Idaho, New Mexico, Hawaii, North Dakota, Maine, West Virginia, South Dakota, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, and Vermont. Our population is in the ballpark of Alaska’s and North Dakota’s, and is actually larger than the population of Vermont and Wyoming. In terms of political representation, you probably know that each state gets two senators— DC does not have a senator. But never fear, we do have a Congresswoman in the House of Representatives: Eleanor Holmes Norton, who in 2018 was the member of Congress who introduced the most number of bills, and cosponsored the most number of bills (this is typical of her). But what you may not know is that as part of the House of Representatives, Holmes Norton cannot vote on final bills, but can vote in Congressional committees—but only if Democrats are in charge of the House. (That’s not a legal quirk—it’s a political quirk. The House votes on whether or not DC gets to vote. When Republicans control the house, they vote to have that right to vote taken away.)
However, there are some Republicans who are in favor of DC statehood, and the movement is gaining some political steam, particularly after the protests which took place in 2020, and then the January 6th attack, and people saw a little about how we have to put up with a lot of shit and don’t even have real budget autonomy in return.
3. Motorcades
I’ve gotten so used to these that I don’t even realize how bizarre they are to experience. There’s Presidential and Vice Presidential motorcades and then there are often police escorts that people mistake for a motorcade. Typically what happens is, you’re innocently driving somewhere and you start hearing sirens in the distance. Police cars or motorcycles will abruptly show up and block off multiple streets at the same time. Then you wait and there are more sirens, then they are a bunch of police cars, police motorcycles, and then a series of anonymous looking black sedans (armored cars) with flashing lights and windows tinted black (you can’t really tell who’s inside.) This can really create a traffic situation if it’s rush hour, but sometimes it’s there and gone so quickly. This is radically different than the motorcade you’d see during Inauguration. You also see Marine One a lot of you live here (this is the helicopter equivalent to Air Force One). I have not personally seen Air Force One flying anywhere (although I have spotted presidential dogs before!)
4. Museums are free
Or at least, museums that are part of the Smithsonian Institution are (these are the ones along the main strip of the National Mall.) There’s only a couple paid museums in DC worth seeing and all the rest are free. It spoils you for when you travel to other cities. My favorite is the Natural History Museum (particularly the gem room) and Modern Art.
5. The city is divided into four quadrants
Maybe everyone knows this, but just to go over some basic geography.. DC is a small city divided into four quadrants, NE, SE, SW, and NW, with the US Capitol marking the dead center. The strip of green you see along the X axis is the National Mall (which has nothing to do with shopping). Along there you’ll find the Smithsonian museums, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial at the far end. NE and SE are heavily residential. SW is partially made up of the Potomac River and used to be known for its fish market, but just before the 2008 market crash, developers started a massive project to develop it into The Wharf. This got put on hold for a while, but The Wharf now exists.. a sort of Disney-like prefab-seeming area with a boardwalk, overpriced apartments, and some restaurants. The NW area dotted in red below is “downtown” where there are large office buildings and a lot of federal buildings—above that part it starts to get residential. (Where the fictional John Adams University is is just north of where it says “Mt Vernon Square” on the map.) If you’re wondering what all these red dots are.. I’m writing this one 1/16/21, or at least the first draft of this post, a few days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, and a few days after the assault on the Capitol and the attempted coup which left (at least) five dead. People often use the word “DC” or “Washington” as a stand-in for “government fat-cats who don’t understand the common man” and maybe don’t think about the fact that people actually live here. The red dots are all the street closures in preparation for Inauguration but more so in preparation for the threats of additional violence that various government agencies have warned of. I just went for a long walk over there and it seemed like the amount of security was a the same level or higher than it was the day of the 9/11 attacks.
Wow… I didn’t mean to end on a dark note.. It’s just been a really rough week for everyone (at the time of writing this post). And I am posting this on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a day which really changed me as a person, my outlook on life, and the direction of my career. It is also, weirdly the day that we are officially celebrating the launch of my book, which feels like a small thing in the midst of so many bad things happening at once. I moved to NYC after 9/11, then to California for a while, but I always wanted to come back here because it’s the one that most feels like home to me. I love how there’s the constant variety of things to do—theater, live music, craft shows, things to eat (there is a constantly evolving restaurant scene), people to meet. It’s large enough to be a city, but small enough that you can bump into people you know in random places. I wanted to write a book that took place here because I love it here, despite all the city’s faults, but I really wanted to write a book that took place in DC and specifically wasn’t a political thriller. I hope you can see that it’s a city that is so much more than just the White House.
Photo credits: 1: AgnosticPreachersKid - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9696983. 2: Brunswyk - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20358058
NSMC Chapter 4: In which we meet the mysterious Andre..
I don’t want to say a TON about Andre within the context of the plot specifically, to avoid spoilers, but rest assured, this guy is keeping some secrets.
I did want to talk a bit about writing a Black character while I myself am not Black (although I am a POC). I put a lot of thought into getting Andre’s character right, at every level of writing from conceiving the character, to drafting, to revising with my agent, to revising with my editor. The reason for this is that there have been many, many depictions of characters of a race other than the author that were badly done. Worst case scenario these are racist stereotypes and/or the author is just throwing in a funny Black sidekick (or in the context of other minorities, a gay best friend or insert whatever stereotype) and slapping the label of “diversity” onto their book. In the past few years, there has been a greater push for literary diversity, and this has both taken the form of wanting more books written by different people to reflect a reality that is not all white, not all straight, not all wealthy, etc. (One particular peeve of mine is seeing depictions of cities I have lived in depicted as all white when they are most definitely not.) This has led to some authors writing outside their race and doing it fine, some doing it with good intentions but badly, and some spectacular failures.
This wasn’t a task I took lightly. I’ve felt comfortable writing male and female characters, gay and straight ones, and a smattering of minorities where identity wasn’t central to the story. (As I’ve written elsewhere, I don’t think people who are not a particular identity should write stories that are focused primarily on identity—leave that to the people best suited to do that. However that does mean I’m okay with them if the central through line of their story is not about identity.) For me, it was important to me that my book taking place in DC should reflect the reality of DC—I have seen many, many depictions of my home city as being really white while in reality it is very Black. DC is also not all politics and K street lobbyists—there’s actual normal people who live here, and there are many different subpockets of populations. On any given day you could walk into a restaurant and hear Spanish, Amharic, Arabic, or French, you could be nearly mowed down by a car with diplomatic plates, attend a free event at the Kennedy Center or a very expensive event at the Kennedy Center. (haha except maybe not now because of COVID hell..?)
While I had written Black characters before, this was the first time I had a Black POV. I did not come from a place where I assumed I was well-placed to write a Black narrator because of my background. Yes, I’m a brown person, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I understand what it is to be Black. Yes, I spent six years in graduate school working in a lab that largely focused on racism in America and ethnicity-based conflict, but all that gave me was a very academic understanding of race. I could quote statistics and have arguments about structural racism, but this was not the same as my emotional reaction some years later of watching the Philando Castile video—I knew all the statistics and experimental work behind shooter bias, and I had read stories and seen videos before, but feeling that video is different than reading journal article after journal article. Not knowing at all is bad; only knowing is somewhat better; but you need to both know and feel.
In the absolute worst instances, people writing outside their race will rely on racial stereotypes that are offensive—I hope instances like these become fewer and fewer as people become more well informed and publishing becomes more diverse. But in the middle, you have well-intentioned people who sometimes get it wrong in other more subtle ways. One way is including minority side-characters who are just there to be sounding boards to the real central character, who is white. It was important to me that Andre be a fully-realized, 360 degree, three-dimensional character. That he would have his own motivations—sometimes at odds with other characters—his own background, his own thoughts, and desires—in particular, because I was writing this novel to have a “strong” female lead, who happens to be white. I’m not going to say how many narrators this book has, but I will say that I mapped out every single scene and noted what every single person’s motivation was during that scene and the motivations should never be exactly the same.
There’s another way that writers sometimes get minorities wrong and I may be treading onto territory that makes people uncomfortable, but whatever. In this instance I am talking about just writing a default white character and saying that they are Black (or insert whatever other minority). While this is (probably?) well-intentioned, I think it comes from the sort of wrong-headed “I don’t see race/ we’re all the same on the inside!” school of thought. The reason this doesn’t work is race consciousness. Black people have Black race consciousness. I have Asian race consciousness. I don’t know what it is exactly that white people have with respect to race consciousness—and this is a fascinating thing that we are confronting as a nation right now—but brown people have a whole other file folder of stuff in their brains, a filter that switches on, a thing inside their heads that is hard to articulate if you don’t have it, and this is why just calling the dude Leroy is not going to work. I imagine its the same for other minorities—that trans people have trans consciousness, gay people have gay consciousness. This is a thing that is hard to fake, particularly if you don’t know that it exists. (or refuse to accept that it does.)
Too often non-Black people writing Black characters means they take a character and have a variety of racial discrimination events happen to them, as if the sum total of being Black is about pain. But there’s also a thing as Black joy. Black family dynamics. Barbershops and church. Humor. The way they talk to each other when no one white is present. DC is riding the subway with cars filled with high school kids trying to outdo each other. Passing the Black church in my neighborhood and hearing the singing through the stained glass windows. It’s Howard girls dressed to the nines for bougie brunch. Yes, I came from a background with a very academic understanding of research on race but that didn’t make me so arrogant as to assume that I could still get it right. Not that I’m assuming I did. But I listened a lot (which IMHO is the fundamental backbone of the problem this country has with respect to race). I consumed Black media, in particular media that was geared toward other Black people. I thought about books I had read where characters or places didn’t “ring true” to me—it was when they didn’t feel specific, or three dimensional, that that much care or attention went into rendering them.
Interestingly in my first draft of NSMW Andre came out… really rabbity? I mean, given that people are getting murdered in this book, it makes sense that there would be situations where one might be rabbity, but I actually think this was a byproduct of my being anxious about getting his character right. As I got more assurances of how much “space” I had to work with in his book, I was able to render him in a way I was satisfied with.
I guess time will tell about whether or not I succeeded. I will say that it’s been interesting for me to see what people’s reactions have been to all the narrators in this book. Andre plays a crucial role for the emotionality in the book, although I won’t say why exactly, right now.
Where did the idea for Never Saw Me Coming come from?
Hello, and welcome to the first of ten behind-the-scenes blog posts about Never Saw Me Coming. I will release the posts, like kraken, over the course of September. The posts won’t have spoilers in them, but some posts will focus on specific content from certain chapters, and you might not get why I am writing about something in particular until you’ve read that chapter (I will note the chapter).
One of the most common questions authors get is “where did the idea for your book come from?”
The entire plotline of Never Saw Me Coming was not an idea that was bubbling in the back of my mind for years. Sometimes I have something simmering on the back burner for a year or so before I start working on it, but sometimes I get ideas in one sudden go—typically this happens more with short stories. What I can remember most specifically is walking back from dinner with one of my friends (we’d had a few…) who I’m working on a project with. He asked me something about where I get ideas for books, and I said something like, “I don’t know, I just think about a good hook. Like what if there was an entire school filled with psychopaths?”
I did have a clear visual scene pop into my head before anything else: (without spoilers) the scene where someone is holding a piece of cloth and sort of snaps it to unfold it. (I love that scene.) I immediately knew who both those people were. And I knew in which ways they could be dangerous to each other.
I definitely knew that a revenge plot was going to permeate the novel, and that Chloe was a methodical, intelligent, and unusual protagonist. But as I started writing the book, she surprised me because she would make these snarky comments that were pretty funny. (I read everything I write aloud during the final editorial process, and there are still some lines she says that make me laugh even though I’m the one who wrote them.) The humor fit in with her character who is judgmental and shallow, but also at times insightful and cynical. Also by nature of being a psychopath there is something weirdly refreshing about it: she is unabashedly selfish in a world where women are constantly asked to be selfless, she’s angry when we’re told that’s unladylike, wildly self-confident when we’re forced to be modest, she’s judgmental when we’re told to be kind.
This is one of those weird books that wrote itself. At the time, I was struggling with a rewrite of a science fiction book—a character driven space opera that was supposed to be a series—but I just wasn’t getting any ideas for how to fix the plot. The idea for NSMC came to me and I wrote the first draft in a wild sprint. To be honest, this did not require toiling in any sense— getting up at 4 in the morning, and writing deep into the night in haze of coffee. (I point this out only because people always act like having a full time job while also being a writer involves some deep sacrifice like waking up at some ungodly hour or going into a cabin in the woods somewhere at the expense of one’s family. It’s not. It’s possible. It can be done if you’re just really efficient.) I typically wrote for an hour before I went to the gym on a weekday, and maybe did a few hours over the weekend. It never felt like work, but the one humbling thing I learned is that there’s such a thing as working too fast. The first draft had some significant plot problems which I didn’t realize until much later when interested agents pointed them out to me (at which point they were so obvious that I facepalmed). So I deliberately and methodically paced out how long I was going to take to do revisions, even though I’m impatient by nature and wanted to hurry through. I do a lot of writing work that technically isn’t writing: color penciled diagrams and post-it notes in a large bullet journal, one per each novel. (You will see some of this in a future blog post.)
I also love college novels and can’t get enough of them. I thought of setting NSMC at a real college (“John Adams University” is a bit of a joke about George Washington University—a very real college in DC) but I wanted the luxury of building Adams to look and be exactly how I wanted it. And I definitely wanted to capture the feel of college: dorm friends and drama, shitty cafeterias, never having enough money, classes, and having embarrassingly earnest conversations. In some ways my own college experiences are reflected in the book, and in other ways also not. (While Chloe would be eager to hit the club on night one, when this was suggested during my Freshman orientation, I wanted to crawl under my extra long twin bed and die).
Ultimately, who knows where ideas really came from. Stuff floating around your subconscious or the zeitgeist (I did much of the first major revision of this book during the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh.) There were things I wanted to see in thrillers that were coming out but didn’t—more character driven stuff and less reliance and increasingly crazy plot twists. Dramatic irony. Humor. Write the book you want to see in the market but isn’t there yet, they keep saying.
So, I did. And I hope you enjoy it.
In case you missed it.. more announcements about my book!
Publishers Weekly ran a great preview of Never Saw Me Coming, featuring an interview with me, my agent, and my editor about the book and the acquisition process. In between getting an agent, going on submission during a pandemic, and signing some fantastic deals, it’s been a crazy ride. Not technically my cover reveal, but maybe my cover reveal if you don’t follow me on Twitter. It was also the first time we’ve gotten to publicly announce the TV/Film deal!! I’ve kept this a secret since July, but I had a great phone call with the folks at Universal, who are interested in bringing the book to streaming TV audiences.
We are just a couple of weeks away from physical ARCs existing, and I’m starting to see reviews trickle onto Goodreads and people commenting about the book on Instagram.. yikes!
Rewatching LOST: Season 1
Hello! if you originally subscribed to my blog because you heard about my book, Never Saw Me Coming a brief update: publication date is 9/7/21 in the US, 9/2/21 in the UK. We are currently in the process of cover design, but are not quite yet in the advanced readers copy game. I will be honest and say it’s hard to start seeing “Most Anticipated Books of 2021” lists coming out and you’re not on them, but those tend to be front loaded, and they do them seasonally.
In the meantime, when I’m not attempting to do home workouts, tending to my Literary Assistant (dog), or worrying about the next attempted coup, I’ve been somewhat feverishly been rewatching Lost.
I told a friend I started rewatching Lost and she said WHY in that exact tone of voice of people who are still angry at the ending of the show and how it increasingly unraveled as the seasons wore on. But really.. what else is there to do? I was in the mood for something that had a lot of lore behind it and let’s face it Lost’s ending was better than Game of Thrones’ was. But more important than my existential-level boredom crisis while the world is ending, is the fact that my current work in progress is a large book with an ensemble cast and multiple timelines. I was a HUGE fan of Lost when it came out—an early adopter from the time I started to see the mysterious billboards in LA when I lived there. Love or hate the show, I don’t think you can argue against the first season being really solid for a lot of reasons. Part of the reason the show turned out be a disappointment is just that—it started out so strong that people’s expectations became so high. As much as some writers like to talk down about TV, I think TV teaches us really critical lessons about storytelling, about characters, tropes, and what fans respond to. Clearly this show did some things really really right.. and also some other things really really wrong.
The Good..
Atmosphere/ Setting: Who can complain about a gorgeous island in Hawaii, with beaches, jungle, and plenty of exotic locations to explore. There are a lot of books/films/shows where the setting has as much importance as a “character” as humans do, and this is more true for Lost than anyone. For one, you love to look at the island—whether it’s a beautiful shot of the mountains, the lush-looking jungle, the beach, or some of the more creepy locales, it’s just easy on the eyes, and the show’s creators did a great job of using location to their advantage. You got the sense that they were on an isolated island, but that the island was big enough to hide various mysteries. (To throw in a neg, one of my peeves about the first season is that they never do a thorough survey to explore the entire island. For all they knew, they were actually on peninsula attached to a wholeass country, or there was a resort somewhere on the island [this happened on the The Golden Girls once], or, I don’t know, a whole self-sustained weirdo commune of semi-bad people..?) The setting had so many nooks and crannies that it was perfect for a series of mysteries, but the setting itself was also a mystery that spread out over the course of the entire series—what does “the island” want? What is it exactly? Where even is it?
Ensemble Cast: My recollection, at least, was that at the time it started airing (2004), there just weren’t any shows like it on air—not just that it had huge production costs, and was a weird combination of mystery/scifi/fantasy, but that it had a huge ensemble cast. The cast is at its pinnacle in the first season: almost everyone who’s a major character is explored and is also interesting.
Also consider, Lost was wildly diverse in 2004. Six out of the 20 main characters (ones important enough to get flashbacks and major plot lines) were minorities—that just wasn’t happening back then. Two of those characters, Jin and Sun, are still main characters despite not speaking English at all (Jin) or most of the time (Sun). With the exception of Michael and Walt, they all make if through all six seasons of the show (and TBH, I didn’t need more Michael, although I thought they could have answered more questions about Walt—I never knew if that was just bad writing, a lack of time, or the fact that Malcolm David Kelley had hit puberty at a rate too rapid to make sense for the show’s timeline). It also had a significantly overweight character, Hugo, who is not just a sidekick or there to be someone’s best friend. They lean hard on him for comic relief (the main sphere of influence for any overweight character) but to be fair Jorge Garcia is a funny actor, and often times he’s the stand-in for the viewer, expressing how crazy something that just happened was. (Rewatching this show reminded me of the now-forgotten trend of saying Dude when something objectionable happened). But on to address a diversity elephant in the room: Naveen Andrews. I like Naveen Andrews. He’s a good actor and a handsome fellow (and shout out for promoting my exact brand of curly hair). But it’s super cringeworthy that they cast an Indian to play an Arab. It falls under the “any brown guy will do” line of casting, ala “Jimmy Smitts can play this guy, right?” type of thinking. It’s not like there weren’t Arab actors back then—plenty of them got cast to play minor roles in Sayid’s flashbacks. Did viwers look at Naveen Andrews and think that he passed as Arab? (He 100% didn’t for me, but perhaps I’m saying that as an Indian and as a somewhat Arabic speaker.)
Two things that were really impressive about this first reason with respect to cast. One is that in any series, you have an arc for that season and an arc for the overall entire series. Putting aside the latter for now, within that first season-wide arc, there’s also an arc per character. It’s some pretty impressive planning to consider that just about all the main characters got major arcs in Season 1 and that these were intertwined with the overall mystery of Season 1. Another thing that was really satisfying (and continued to be, even when the show got worse) was seeing new character interactions over time because they had such a large cast of characters to work with. You have standard dyads (Jack vs Lock) or triads (Jack vs Kate vs Sawyer) but then you’d have occasional moments of people who hadn’t spent much time together suddenly forming a group (Lock + Boone on hatch duty, Sawyer + Micheal + Jin on the raft.)
Clue drops as cliffhangers: If I can take you back to 2004.. there was no Netflix. Well, there was, but it was a service that sent you DVDs in the mail in these envelopes and somehow the DVDs never broke. (I remember a friend of mine worked on the streaming side of Netflix and I thought it was weird and not sustainable lol.) Lost was a show that you watched, glued to your TV, and then had to literally wait a week for the next installment. It caused a frenzy of people discussing what various clues meant—I remember getting into heated arguments.
As the author of a thriller (ahem!), one thing I’ve paid sharp attention to is what keeps people turning pages. It’s cheap but it works: drop a “what the fuck” clue and end a chapter/episode—works every time. The first season had the luxury of walking into an entirely blank slate—anything could be on the island.. and they really gave us a smattering of everything. But the first time you heard the smoke monster?? (many thought it was a dinosaur). When Sawyer shoots and kills a polar bear? When we discover that all-around Island Man John Lock was actually in a wheelchair before the plane crash? When the light turns on in the hatch? All moments when viewers yelled WHAT—and there is nothing you want more than that as a mystery writer.
Some really stunning moments:
Plane crash: as someone who is scared of flying, the plane crash (shown over and over across the entire show…) is probably in my top three terrifying fictional plane crashes (along with Flight—a not very good movie with a very good plane crash scene—and Castaway).
Jack telling Shannon that Boone is dead: More on this later, but I hated Shannon as a character and was sort of benignly indifferent about Boone. (It’s shocking how flushed Ian Somerhalder is in Lost vs how pale he is in Vampire Diaries. And the wigs they gave him for later guest appearances on Lost are a TRAVESTY!!) Maybe it’s the COVID-isolation-for-almost-a-year, but this made me cry (along with the below two scenes) even though I knew it was coming. It was just filmed so well—no talking, a great musical score, most of the group celebrating the birth of Claire’s baby, Shannon and Sayid coming back from their date, having absolutely no idea what’s been going on until Jack walks out to tell them. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been in that awful position of catching happy, unexpecting people off guard and having to tell them that someone they loved has died, but it was such a good, good scene.
Sawyer telling Jack about his father: I’m a hardcore sucker for enemies-to-friends stories and also curmudgeons and well, Sawyer in general. But here are two people who didn’t like each other coming to a sort of “we’ve been through enough to respect each other” understanding, Sawyer is going to leave, possibly forever (possibly because he might die), and he finally decides to tell Jack that he’s figured out that the man he talked to in a bar in Australia was actually Jack’s father, and that he (Christian) was sorry but didn’t know how to say it, and was proud of him. Matthew Fox (Jack) is a champion crier. I don’t know of another male actor who does it better while still looking attractive. Here is a just a selection of good cries:
(I’m not 100% sure but I think the last one is a clip from the actual scene I’m talking about.) But the first thing he does when he realizes what Sawyer’s saying is turn away as he starts to cry, which felt extremely real because that is exactly what I do when I cry (I can relate to the whole “trying to pretend I don’t have residual psychological traumas that maybe aren’t entirely dealt with because busy dealing with whole world is on fire stuff” haha 2020 thing).
Season finale: I thought it was masterful, one of the best season finales I’ve ever seen on TV, and some of the very last scenes were ones I thought about long after the show had ended. Think about the fact that they wrangled 20-something characters into three different important threads that all converge within the finale: Rousseau doing the fake-out to take Claire’s baby, the mission to blow the hatch up with dynamite, and the raft crew taking off. You had no idea how the raft crew would do, but between the music and acting, felt elated when they took off with everyone’s help—and then (tears!) Vincent tries to swim out to the raft. For all its faults, I don’t know if a show ever had a better season finale than the quick switch from the raft crew being “rescued” only to have a weird scraggly Gordon’s Fisherman dude say “thing is… we’re going to have to take your boy” right over to the hatch being blown and seeing the long tunnel down and having no idea what was down there. I remember not being able to sleep the night of that finale because I kept thinking about the WTF moment of “we’re going to have to take your boy” and what on earth was in that hatch.
My favorite characters:
Lock: You can dislike him for sort of being a zealot, or someone who makes decisions without discussing it with others, but the thing I consistently liked about Lock is that he was unpredictable but for real reasons. In badly written fiction, people do shocking things for no purpose other than throwing a twist into the plot. But Lock always did weird things because he had his own agenda and it made sense with his internal logic: the island healed him of his paralysis so he thinks that various things are “supposed” to happen. It was also pretty pleasing to see the contrast between his pre-crash life, where he’s a pathetic loser, to how strong and agentic he is on the island. It’s like he’s written his own fan-fic.. so of course he doesn’t want to leave, and doesn’t want anyone to figure out who he is. I’ve also loved Terry O’Quinn back from when he was on an obscure show called Millennium, a Chris Carter/ X-files-like show which now that I think about it, had some similarities to Lost. I think he’s a great actor who can go from outright creepy, to strong, to vulnerable, and at some really great moments, funny.
Sawyer: Ignore the fact that Josh Holloway is just really hot with killer dimples and just consider how interesting Sawyer’s character is. He’s a person who profoundly hates himself, and wants others to hate him, who has annoying nicknames for everyone, and probably would have voted for Trump (if he wasn’t a felon, which he might be?), but I can’t help but like the guy. Sure, the show is rife with people with daddy issues, but he has these contradictions I find emotionally interesting. If given time to prepare, he will act obnoxious or even cunningly in a self-interested way that makes people dislike him—but when there’s an emergency (a fire at the campsite, when the Others try to take Walt off the raft) he unthinkingly responds by doing the “right” thing. This is far more palatable than what they do with Jack (see below). It also creates lots of fun situations where as a curmudgeon he warms up to others despite his desire to keep himself hated. (One of my favorite music-overplaying-montages from the first season is everyone on the beach, and Sayid throwing him a piece of fruit even though they’ve already fought). Sawyer isn’t trying very hard to be a hero (see: Jack) but sometimes he is one which gives him more complexity.
The Bad..
Jack: The show’s unrelenting focus on Jack (both in the first reason and in general) is a significant problem. I read that the creators/writers originally intended to kill him in the pilot but “You can’t kill the white guy.” Not that I’m complaining that he stays alive, but that the show is so overwhelmingly focused on him that I felt like he was being shoved down our throats. Having a doctor on the island does create a lot of good moments. And in the first season, I was fine with his flashback storylines: his messed up relationship with his dad, his marriage, and how he has trouble with his savior complex. But the show went overboard in its focus on him such that it didn’t make sense in some instances, or took away from other characters. He becomes the de-facto leader of the survivors—but why? Because he’s a doctor? (or the white guy..?) It absolutely would have made sense for him to be one of several main decision makers on the island, but not The Guy. Why was Jack calling the shots so often when Sayid had military experience and Lock is like a literal mountain man? Time and time again there is some dangerous situation where Jack has to go somewhere—and on top of this, typically insisting that someone like Kate doesn’t go—when this doesn’t make sense at all because he’s the only doctor amongst the survivors. Kate’s actually right in every single one of these arguments (which keep happening!!): Jack is too valuable to be carrying around dynamite and to be traipsing through the woods in search of Bad Guys. What he should have been doing is training an army of assistants in his field. (Much like Lock and Sayid should have been as well.) Not only this, every time anything remotely interesting happens, any other cast member has to say, “We have to tell Jack!” “or get Jack!” or “we need Jack!” (when these are not medical emergencies). In fact, the show suffers from people constantly saying Jack’s name. (people on this show in general say people’s names too often, but it’s the worst for Jack.) The cost of this is that a lot of that leadership stuff could have been spread out to other characters and given them more to do plotwise. (see Sayid below). In particular, Kate’s character gets weaker after the first season—as someone who’s really resourceful and scrappy, it would have been interesting to see her as more of a decisionmaker and less of a “No I’m going you can’t stop me”/ love triangle attendee.
Shannon: Shannon is the worst of the survivors. Don’t get me wrong: I liked her weirdass near-incest plotline with Boone. And introducing a character who is so obnoxious and self-centered creates a lot of natural tension for a situation where everyone has to help each other out. But she doesn’t really have an arc, when an obvious, great arc would have been that she grows the fuck up. Her relationship with Sayid is not growing the fuck up; Boone even says to Sayid that she would inevitably find an older guy amongst the survivors to take care of her and do stuff for her, which is exactly what she does. Translating the French maps (as obnoxiously as possible) and being a love object doesn’t redeem her. And later in Season 2, having an episode where we see that her stepmother was mean to her after her father died and cut her off financially doesn’t really make my sympathize with her (compare that to Kate’s childhood, Sawyer’s, or even Hurley’s—or Sun’s terrifying figure of a dad!) The worst part of this is that in no way shape or form did I believe that Sayid would fall in love with Shannon. There’s more substance to him, and he’s still hung up on Nadia. I think the writers knew they were going to kill Shannon off early in Season 2 by one of the tailees accidentally killing her, and they knew that fridging her could make Sayid go into some interesting places emotionally. But this was… not good.
The Ugly…
What do you make of a thing when you have all the right ingredients for a cake—fresh eggs, Guittard chocolate, King Arthur flour—but then the thing you end up with is all kinds of wrong? In the long run, can we still say Season 1 of Lost is good if it eventually declines to a pretty bad place?
Tune in (at some point) for an entry about Season 2, which contains my favorite Lock moment of all time.