Never Saw Me Coming Giveaway and some minor updates!

If you’re in the US there is currently a Goodreads giveaway for one of fifteen advanced readers copies of Never Saw Me Coming! The giveaway ends May 31st and the actual book doesn’t come out till September. Click below to enter.

I can’t really talk about it, but we’ve sold a number of foreign rights for the book as well—the book will get translated into quite a few languages and I am very excited to see foreign covers. I’m currently working on a proposal for book 2—I’ll be honest, it’s been hard trying to get back to “normal life” as work has picked up.. my concentration is not the best, but I will power through.

On my iPhone: audiobook of Vivek Shraya's The Subtweet. Podcast: I Hate It But I Love It. Music: megamix of songs from 1994-1995.

On my TV: Mare of Easttown. Goddamn this show is intense.

On my nightstand: U Up? by Catie Disabato and The Other Me by Sarah Zachrich Jeng (one of my fellow 2021 debut authors).

On my couch: editorial dog.

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.

via GIPHY

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:

via GIPHY

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.

Literary Markets for Novellas and Long Short Stories

As someone who has had the misfortune of writing longer short stories/ novellas, I sympathize with anyone who has tried to publish them because I have spent so much time scouring the internet screaming WHY WONT YOU TAKE MY MASSIVE TOME THAT ISNT QUITE MASSIVE ENOUGH TO BE A NOVEL. Below is a working list of literary magazines, contests, and small presses that publish longer short stories and/or novellas. This is a list for literary fiction, not genre fiction and of course those lines can be blurred but if you've written something that can be considered genre you should probably familiarize yourself with the magazine because these markets are indeed different than the stuff I see in genre magazines. This is not a exhaustive list, it is a working list I will update, and mainly includes magazines I know to be well respected and presses I have seen with my own two eyes. (I have submitted to many of these.) [updated 1/20/21]

Magazines and Small Presses

Alaska Quarterly Review, up to 70 pages. One of my white whales! A great magazine that has been beloved for so long. They only take hard copy submissions. 

A Public Space doesn't list an upper length limit, and specifically says "novellas and novel excerpts are always welcome." 

BatCat Press takes stuff of any length. They publish weird, beautiful books; this is not a standard market--I think they are looking for stuff that is "out there." TEMPORARILY CLOSED BC OF COVID

Blackbird is a well-respected online magazine. If you have a piece that is 8k or over, you can query first to see if they're interested. (that said, the magazine sometimes is on the higher end of how long it takes to get back to writers.) 

Big Fiction, 7,500 – 20,000 words, fiction in any genre (except children’s and YA) with a clear literary intent, and essays as narratively straightforward or as experimental as you envision.

Boulevard takes stories up to 8k

Conjunctions is one of the most well-respected magazines out there. under 8k

The Collagist (a magazine run by Dzanc Books) takes stuff up to 8 k

Online magazine failbetter says they publish novellas, but given that it is online, I would page through to see how long their stories actually run. 

Fiction is old-school respectable. Their website says they prefer under 5k, but would consider longer works. (read: long shot)

Gettysburg Review up to 10k. Interpret as you may: "We do not publish genre fiction—mystery, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and the like—but are certainly not opposed to considering work that self-consciously employs the tropes of more formulaic writing for more sophisticated literary ends." They take about half a year to get back to you, but are a great market. 

Malahat Review up to 8 k, Canadian lit mag. simultaneous submissions ok for normal submissions but not contest submissions. They also run a novella competition every other year (10-20k)

Massachusetts Review takes stories up to 8 k, but they also have a digital release program called Working Titles that has a 7-25k limit. 

Missouri Review "While there are no length restrictions, longer manuscripts (9,000 to 12,000 words) or “flash fiction” manuscripts (2,000 words or less) must be truly exceptional to be published." Extremely competitive market. 

One Story 3-8k, this should be one of your top markets. Given that they only publish one story per issue I wish they would take longer stuff :( 

Paris Review does not have length restrictions; and now they finally have electronic submissions!

Ploughshares Solos 7,500-20k, extremely competitive market

New England Review 20k

Nouvella Books 10-40k. They publish beautiful little (literally) books. This isn't run like a standard literary magazine (because it isn't one), but they view their novella line as a way of investing in and launching emerging writers. 

Puerto del Sol, no exact word count listed, but previously it was stated as 10 k

Seattle Review, at least 40 pages. Recently they stopped having a print edition in favor of an electronic edition only.

Split Lip Press open for novella submissions July 1 - September 1

Yemassee, up to 8 k

Incidentally, and I'm thinking of one magazine in particular, don't submit anywhere that has a $20 or higher submission or reading fee. Magazine submission fees and contests are two different things. Submission fees are controversial, but a few bucks doesn't seem unreasonable to me given how literary magazines are struggling. For more than a few bucks--you do the math, it isn't ethical.

Prizes

All of these prizes are yearly or close to it and have entry fees. There are of course more contests than just these, but these are the ones I know of that I would call good. (ie, the entry fee/ prize ratio isn't eyebrow-raising, the judges are well known literary writers, the winners go on to do well in their careers). Maybe this is an obvious tip, but if you're submitting to a contest you should wait until a few days before the deadline. When submitting simultaneously, if you submit to a contest in January that doesn't have a deadline until March, there's a chance your piece will get picked up somewhere else first and then you can't get your entry fee back from the contest when you withdraw. Submitting early doesn't help you in any way. 

Heritage Future Great Story Project (formerly 1888, formerly Black Hill Press) check back periodically to see if this opens up. In the past they accepted novels, novellas, and short story collections. They publish beautiful books--I love the artwork they use. 

Black Lawerence Press  small press that publishes full length novels, poetry, collections, anthologies, etc. The Big Moose prize is for "novels" but their submission guidelines say 90 to 1,000 pages--90 pages would put you within the range of a novella. 

Calvino Prize: up to 25 pages, but note that this prize is specifically a prize in honor of Italo Calvino, and is intended for works along those lines.

Driftwood Press this is a new listing: they are currently open for novella submissions (10-30k) with the intended publication date of 2020

Dzanc books currently not accepting, but in the past has run a novella contest, 18-40k

Gold Line Press June to August in the past, check back for a chapbook competition 7 - 15k

The Juniper Prize for Fiction has one prize annually for a short story collection, and one for a novel, but their definition of a novel apparently runs from 150 to 350 pages. (under 300 is pretty short for a Big 5 produced novel, and 150 is nearly never done for nonfamous people)/

Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction (Sarabande Books): 150-250 pages. Sarabande is a really well respected literary small press.

Miami University Press novella contest 18-40k

Newfound Prose Prize: 15 to 60 double-spaced pages of prose (fiction or nonfiction).

Texas Review Press Clay Reynolds Novella contest 20-50k

My experiences getting longer stuff published.

1) You need to be really patient and 2) you need to have your eyes peeled for random opportunities that pop up that aren’t necessarily regularly run literary magazines. Of my 7 fiction publications, 3 of them are in the “long to the point of being hard to place” category. The longest, "Twelve Years, Eight-hundred and Seventy-two Miles," had an 18 k word count, which meant really limited markets that would take it—I had to hunt and did so persistently; I started submitting it in 2013 and got it accepted in 2015. “The Bleeding Room” was 8,600 words—I submitted it to half a dozen places in 2002, stopped for 10 years, then submitted it to one magazine and placed in a contest. Note that both these markets—Day One and Glimmer Train—no longer exist; the market changes constantly. I have another long one coming out at the end of this month from Radix Media, which resulted from me seeing a random call for submissions, probably via either Facebook or Submittable’s newsletter. There are a lot of these one-off opportunities that you might not find out about if you aren’t subscribed to newsletters or don’t poke around on social media occasionally. Incidentally, I’ve never found Duotrope to be particularly useful for the one-off stuff, just the regular lit mag data. Where does this leave me? With one unpublished 8,600 word story that has my second-highest “we liked this but no, please submit again” rate—I’ve pretty much come to the realization that that particular story will probably only find its home in a collection. The other is a 10k sci fi story—the Venn diagram between “sci fi” and “leans literary” and “long ass” is quite small—but this would be a good story for one of these one-off opportunities. In sum— keep your eyes open and your chin up. Also make sure that your word count is worth it—that 10k story was trimmed down from 11,200 and those were only surgical line edits.

Happy hunting.

PS, this post gets a lot of traffic. If you’d like to support me, my novel, Never Saw Me Coming, is out this fall— check it out here.

Harvill Secker Acquires UK Rights to Never Saw Me Coming!

Extremely happy to announce that Vintage/ Harvill Secker will simultaneously be publishing Never Saw Me Coming in the UK and Commonwealth. I was still processing the US deal when my agent told me that Vintage had approached us about my book. [If you’re not familiar with the life of a writer, I would say that the business side is a lot like sending out hundreds of politely worded inquiries (to magazines, agents, conferences, etc) and having 1%, if you’re lucky, send back a positive response. Being approached by Harvill Secker was like a handsome man chasing me out of a coffee shop yelling EXCUSE ME I ALSO LIKE DECAF SOY LATTES.] We had focused first on making an American deal and were hoping to eventually make a separate UK deal, although with the caveat that we (read: my agent) knew that the UK thriller market is hard for US authors to break into. But somehow, Vintage had heard buzz about the book (via network of secret literary spies..?) so we attempted to submit early to UK markets, except Harvill Secker came in hot, like real hot and in between the deal and my being outrageously flattered that they would want me to join their menagerie of extremely well-respected authors, I happily excepted. I don’t know what the COVID situation will be next year, but if things are considerably better, I’d love to get out to the UK next year to help bring the book out. It’s been a difficult year, but hearing that NSMC brought so much excitement and happiness in the midst of lockdown to the team at Vintage genuinely touched me.

Announcing my book deal!!!!

Here she is, at long last!!

I HAVE HAD TO KEEP THIS SECRET SINCE JUNE!! Early June! How?! Why??! But at long last, it’s here! I’m super psyched (no pun intended..) to get this book out into the world, and am excited to work with my publishers to get this baby into your hands. I dug through my email to find the very first time I showed anyone this book, in November of 2017 when I sent a cryptic email to my writing group. I was supposed to be working on a revision of a science fiction novel I had been working on but instead this book popped out of me unexpectedly.

This is unrelated to all my other things. It's a thriller--that's all I would say. I put some of my concerns/ questions after the last page. it's kind of a quick read-- only 77 k and i wouldn't call it a dense book. 

The book has uh.. grown considerably but I’m told it’s still a page-turner :)

The road to publication was a long one, and I will do another post about that. This is a very, very happy occasion in a very dark year—I had always kind of hoped for a book deal but would have never predicted that it occur during the crazy vortex that is Summer 2020. But the book deal has given me a lot to look forward to, and I hope you look forward to adding it to your shelf.

I’ve included a bit more about the book on its main page.

Guess the Book from its Cover Quiz (more or less contemporary addition)

Review of Doctor Sleep (major spoilers)

While I was waiting to be let into the theater for this movie, the woman sitting next to me opened a newspaper and there was a full-page review of Doctor Sleep, a negative one, and I thought, Oh great. I was already walking in with bad expectations—the trailer for this movie doesn’t do it any favors. It felt a bit like, LOVE THE LITTLE MERMAID? GUESS WHAT WE MADE THE LITTLE MERMAID 2!! Included were some reshots of iconic parts of The Shining, which only pointed out the impossible task set up by making a sequel to The Shining: how do you follow up on a Kubrick film that is one of the most classic horror movies out there? A movie beloved by pretty much everyone (excepting Stephen King himself). Add to that that the villain appeared to be a hot, female version of Slash from Guns N Roses—I didn’t really think the movie would be any good, but found that over time, the movie kept winning me over.

When Doctor Sleep the novel came out, I had the same reaction—did we really need a sequel to The Shining? But several people insisted, no, it’s good, it’s actually very much about alcoholism. (I never read the book—my reading of horror trickled to almost nothing since the 2000s—the alcoholism thing was a hard sell for me). But what I admired about this movie is not just that it’s well plotted, that the shotguns that are hung over the mantel do in fact satisfyingly go off, but also that it did interrogate some interesting thematic content that a lot of horror movies are lacking.

Well let me first say this, I’m not sure Doctor Sleep is actually a horror movie. It’s not scary—maybe the last act is a little, and there’ s a scene of a kid getting killed that’s a bit intense, but the overall feel of the movie was something more like dark fantasy. During my initial negative feelings of the movie, you see this cold opening that is similar to It. A little girl off on her own encounters Rose the Hat, who seems to want to be friends/ eat her. The thing is, Pennywise is scary, even when he’s being friendly—Rose the Hat just isn’t. What is up, I thought, with a villain with an occasional Irish accent and a black hat and a band of random carnies. Rose isn’t really the villain of the movie though.

We grow to learn that Danny Torrance, after surviving the events at the Overlook Hotel, has not surprisingly been traumatized by those events. Drinking blunts both the trauma and tamps down his shining. He moves to a new town where he befriends a man literally named Bill who gets him a job, a room for rent, and an introduction to AA. (If you’re not familiar, AA was founded by a man named Bill W and AA attendees sometimes refer to themselves as “Friends of Bill W.”) Dan forms a cute pen pan relationship with another person with the shining—this turns out to be Abra, a kid living a thousand miles away (played very effectively by Kyliegh Curran—in particular during the eye-changing scene).

Rose and her band of merry assholes are basically psychic vampires who have been hunting kids to “eat”—this is never really as scary as Pennywise, but ultimately I was fine with this. Where I started to really like this movie is when it took turns I wasn’t necessarily expecting. And if you’ve consumed a lot of Stephen King, you can definitely feel the Stephen King in it. When things really start going to shit—Rose detects Abra’s existence and is out to get her, prompting Dan and Abra to finally meet—I was surprised to see Dan and Abra decide to tell Abra’s father everything (casting aside the often tiresome trope of “we can’t tell anyone for reasons/or they’ll think we’re crazy!”) Dan also tells Billy the whole deal—Billy who is basically the most solid, bestest friend you could ever ask for—and the two embark on a mission together. I loved these scenes of them together and was super sad to (SPOILER) see Billy get killed. But it never felt like Dick Hallorann’s death in Kubrick’s Shining (who basically shows up to get killed so that Danny and his mom can have a giant snowmobile to get out of Dodge.) It felt really appropriate—when things get really bad, Dan doesn’t have a sponsor who is always going to be there. Really, really bad things are going to happen, and he’s going to have to get through it on his own.

Particularly after recently rewatching the new version of It and its second chapter, it was satisfying to see a psychic battle between Abra and Rose visually depicted in a way that made sense. Not only did it make sense, but it was both visually interesting and tense. (One of the significant failures of It Chapter Two was its inability to depict the whole Ritual of Chud in any way that made sense— it just didn’t translate well from the novel, and ultimately felt a little ridiculous). Not so here—Abra and Rose have a confrontation that I think in lesser hands would not have worked.

A really satisfying element of this movie was Abra herself. Most often, horror movies have children for the sole purpose of being innocent victims of potential violence—the stakes are raised just based on our fear of bad things happening to small humans. I found myself very satisfied with a character like Abra: she’s incredibly psychically strong and knows it, maybe even revels in it. She’s not hapless—she’s agentic and an active partner in moving the plot forward. I got the impression that she was actually stronger than Rose, but this was never done in a way that didn’t make you lose a sense of stakes.

This movie, unlike what the trailer may imply, is not a rehashing of Kubrick’s Shining, relying on the same old elements for cheap scares. There are hints of music and occasional shots, but the director (Mike Flanagan, who directed an episode of The Haunting of Hill House—which I loved—in addition to Hush, another solid horror movie) was pointedly not making The Shining 2—which was the only way to make this movie successfully, I think. Despite the fact that the trailer is filled with familiar images (the blood getting off the elevator, the creepy twins), that’s not at all what this movie is. It’s a movie in its own right.

But yes, there is a part where you go back to the Overlook Hotel—and this is not done cheaply—the storytelling earns it. (This is the only point in the movie where they go all in on musical callbacks to The Shining—and because the movie earned it, I found myself smiling. It also earns the long, overhead shots of the windy drive up to the hotel—this time in winter rather than the summer opening of the first movie.) Dan is fucked up because of everything he’s seen, and he has spent years trying to avoid that trauma by drinking. For supernatural reasons, it makes sense for the final confrontation of Dan + Abra vs Rose to take place at The Overlook: Dan knows it to be a place where hungry entities await their next meal. The hotel itself is very powerful—perhaps more powerful than all of them. But going back to the hotel provides the most satisfying moments of the movie because Dan is finally going back to confront the trauma he never did previously. After turning various valves in the boiler room (a nod to the novel—a key element left out of Kubrick’s version), he wanders the rotting hotel, finally coming to an oddly immaculate ballroom in a recreation of the above scene. Dan really wants a drink. Floyd the bartending ghost is only happy to provide one. We don’t see Floyd at first, but Dan immediately addresses him as if he is Jack Torrance. Finally, decades after his father’s death, he confronts his father not just about his own trauma, but about Jack’s trauma. And much like how Dan’s “Floyd” is Jack, who is Jack’s “Floyd”?

The novel The Shining is far more about alcoholism than the original movie version (let’s just set aside the TV remake, starring the guy from Wings, which, while more faithful, starred the guy from Wings.) Stephen King is often writing about his own addiction issues, and was often writing while actively being addicted, and Doctor Sleep might be the closest thing to being directly about his own monsters. (Rose literally survives as a semi-immortal being by consuming something that you have to kill others to get—when she consumes it, her wounds are healed, and she can live a bit longer). I think if others don’t like this movie, it might be because they wanted more horror elements, or The Shining 2, or maybe they object to the down-home sensibilities of King’s storytelling—but for those of us who like him, this style of storytelling is something familiar while also sometimes being surprising and satisfying.

Recap of Poldark, Season 5 Episode 1

Season Five opens up right in the midst of a game-changing event: Elizabeth's death. The main question is how will this change Ross and George's relationship? I hope for the better, but we’ll see. The show gets right down to business and I'm not sure why I'm surprised at the emerging plotline: how can we possibly make Ross Poldark, the character who is ALWAYS on the right side of a political issue, even more right? Have him join the abolitionist movement. Initially I was concerned when the show introduced its first black character, Kitty Despard, the wife of one of Ross's good old friends from the war against those pesky Americans (who of course Ross actually supported, even though he fought against them). I've never read/ watched Outlander for reasons, but heard that the show jumped shark once they went to the new world and the writers cringingly handled the topic of race. Here we see Demelza and Kitty bonding over the fact that they were each originally their husband's kitchen maid--but was Kitty his kitchen maid or his slave who worked in the kitchen? It's related later that he purchased her to set her free, but anyhow, it's a little awkward--not the worst, but awkward. So I was set up for what I thought would be a predictable abolitionist storyline for this season and wasn't exactly excited because I can see Ross getting into trouble, but not necessarily getting wrapped into ethically interesting situations. His political problems are always obvious: poor people should have a working wage--somehow he'll end up on the gallows and he'll give a speech so rousing they set him free. But more on that later.

Humming in the background are some C plots. Drake and Morwena are married, and I was "glad" to see that the show didn't gloss over her trauma. Morwena's been through a lot, too much actually, but I fully expect that she'll get a happy ending somewhere down the line. There's some not particularly interesting rabble-rousing in the countryside, with the townsfolk being upset that there isn't work for them. Demelza solves the problem by hiring one of the female rabblerousers, whose main purpose, I anticipate, is to provide a feisty love interest for Demelza's brother, Pious McEyebrows.

Let us turn to George. Oh George. One of the saddest scenes from last season is right after Elizabeth's death with him holding the baby, and tentatively holding Valentine's hand. We open this season with his unsurprisingly cruelty to Valentine--which is just tragic. A new "businessman" arrives in town, Ralph Hanson, with a sassy daughter who I like but who looks too much like Caroline Enys (how many Aryan youngish blonde women with weirdly ethereal skin can you possibly cast?) I started to cringe as soon as Ralph, who bears a weird resemblance to Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh--began to pitch George about his lucrative business in MAHOGANY. So much was said about MAHOGANY.. how good the money is . . how great the trade. So... slavery. George wasn't necessarily taking the bait--either the business relationship or the potential match to the sassy daughter--but I prayed he would not go down this road. As I've written elsewhere, George is dastardly AF, but not necessarily in a way that's clever. I'd love to see a more complex storyline for him--maybe a redemption arc, or maybe a more morally ambiguous argument behind his dastardlyness. Right now he just does bad stuff because he's bad, or because it annoys Ross, and this lacks any sort of nuance. I wish he had more of a Thanos bent--more like the thing he's fighting for almost kind of makes sense, but the way he's going about it is why you have to fight against him. (Ever heard of birth control Thanos? Or environmentalism? Oh well.) If George goes the way of slavery, there's no redeeming him. I can forgive him being really angry about Drake assaulting him with frogs, but not for participating in the Transatlantic slave trade. Of course that would put him in direct opposition to Ross, so maybe that’s where we’re headed ..?

Or maybe not? I expected to see serious psychological effects from Elizabeth's death--mainly in the form of rage, and mainly directed at Ross-- I honestly wasn't expecting him to start calling his maid Bessie “Elizabeth.” The look on her face the second time she does this is priceless. As is the Houston We've Got A Problem look from his uncle. This culminates in a weird scene where Drake and Morwenna discovering George having some sort of weird and very Poe-esque dinner with Elizabeth's portrait. To be fair, Elizabeth's portrait had about as much agency as Elizabeth. George, you definitely need a tincture of some sort, but I would not go to the same doctor as your wife did.

There are some political shenanigans --it's not even a major plotline for Ross to spoil an attempted assassination of the king himself--all of this is really just to put Ross into contact with a shadowy and apparently powerful political figure, essentially an 18th century Smoking Man in leggings. He offers to free Ross's friend in exchange for Ross's . . . services to the crown . . services of a secret nature! Didn't see that coming, but I found it more interesting than a straight "bad guys are bad and good guys are good" abolitionist plotline. In particular, Ross fought in whatever the British call the American war for independence--he fought for the crown, but agreed politically with the Americans. This is more morally complex than everything else he does (I'm not sure how interested the show is in interrogating what he did to Elizabeth as a moral transgression--it was explored with respect to its impact on his relationship with Demelza, but I don't think it was considered independent of that).

Top remaining questions: Is Ross a Mulder or a Scully? Most importantly, where is Horace??