News:

As I posted earlier this week, Crooked House (Thorns 5) is out in e-book and now trade paperback.

Kindle e-book
Trade paperback
Universal link to all other vendors

I’ll probably put out the playlist as soon as I’m finished with DRI.

It’s mind-blowing to me that a series I’ve worked on and scenes I’ve envisioned since 2012 have been put to page. There are more stories planted in the first five books that seed the way for the next four or five, but the completion of the fifth book is the culmination of everything started from the very beginning. It’s a glorious soft conclusion, although I’m looking forward to the next era of Thorns novels that starts next year with Heart and Heads (Thorns 6).

If you enjoy shows such as Grimm and Once Upon a Time, novels like the Splintered series, the Magic Shop series, and the Lunar Chronicles, and authors like Robin McKinley, Gail Carson Levine, and Donna Jo Napoli, I think you’ll really enjoy the Thorns series. If you’ve been waiting until the series is finished, that might take a while, but the soft conclusion should satisfy you while you wait for the rest.

Works in Progress:

I finished The Damp when I thought I would, on Saturday morning, when I jotted down less than a thousand more words to finish the thing. As a story that’s been knocking about my head for longer than I care to admit and had one failed effort to write it in the previous decade, I’m so immensely relieved that 1) I wrote it and 2) I think it’s good.

It threw me off schedule a bit. I certainly didn’t plan on writing a novella, because it means I have nothing to offer several novelette calls, which are rare and I usually try to take advantage of them when they happen. I had planned on a novelette that took me four to five days to write; I ended up with a novella that took a week and a half. Technically, at 48,202 words (amended from what I reported on social media after some last-minute adjustments), it’s more a short novel by some standards, but I’ll likely cut it down under 40K during edits.

It’s just as gothic as I wanted it, with more body horror than I thought I was going to manage, and more erotic content than I planned, but it was relevant to the story, and I wouldn’t quite call it erotic horror so much as horror with erotic elements.

I took the weekend off, then outlined DRI on Monday. At this point, my perimenopausal uterus decided to give me a heavier period a little over two weeks after my last one (why?!), so Tuesday was tough and I didn’t get much writing done. However, although I usually dislike outlining, I had real fun coming up with all the epistolary pieces for DRI on Monday. This novel is going to be unusual for me in every way, I can tell, not least in that I’m writing it out of order.

I’m normally an Alpha and Omega writer; I write beginning to end, with very little variation. But I tried that the last time I wrote DRI, and I finally had to stop at 75K words (why?!) because the characters became quite different than intended and ruined the trajectory of the story, even though the writing was still flowing. There were some intriguing developments, and I’m not averse to letting characters alter things or making adjustments, but the writing plodded to a halt because it stopped working. So I wrote some notes and put it aside to try again later, as the Magic 8 Ball advises.

I never write out of order, but because this is an epistolary of disparate media, it might be the best format to try, and maybe by writing the destination first, I’ll be better equipped to set up the journey. And that’s exactly what I’ve done this week: I’m writing the end (all but the final final scene, which I’ll save for last). These scenes have been strongest and so significant in my head over the years, and they’re the most important pieces to the puzzle that I wouldn’t have been able to reach in the original effort. Already, I’m more confident with my ability to go backward, knowing what everything should be aiming at.

I’m also not writing to a word count, although I’m trying to write as much as I can. Everything’s being worked on in different documents to put together at the very end. This is a situation when Scrivener might actually serve me, but because this is so atypical for me and I’ve worked in similar ways with poetry collections, I think I’ll be okay. I’m keeping an informal word count in my spreadsheet and update it every time I close a finished document, because that helps me feel like I’ve made Progress (like crossing things off my outline), but I don’t have a word goal per day, which is also new.

I have a good feeling about writing DRI all ‘wrong.’ I’m only at the beginning—the honeymoon—but it’s feeling good, right. I’m concerned it’ll actually be longer than I planned (what a surprise). My original and preferred projection was 60-80K words, but given the length of the outline, I’m wondering if it might push 100K or more. Of course, some of these sections will be so short, I may not have to worry. I’m still aiming for finishing by the end of the month, if possible.

Things I’m Reading:

Needful Things by Stephen King
Why Didn’t You Just Leave edited by Nadia Bulkin and Julia Rios (finished)
Found edited by Gabino Iglesias and Andrew Cull

Things I’m Listening To:

Fleurie
DRI playlist
Dracula collection playlist

Things I’m Watching:

Damaged (2024)
Tamara
Warriors of Virtue
The Blob (1988)
The Ward
Hatchet
The Bone Collector
Twilight
New Moon
Eclipse
American Horror Story: Cult series
Unsolved Mysteries (Netflix) series
Supernatural series
Grey’s Anatomy series

Poem of the Week: (from September 2021)

Sultry the evening
Heavy hanging
In low dark clouds,
In creeping mist
Through the maze
Of verdant weeds
And tall grass
Concealing indolent serpents,
While wheeling above,
Crows call like ravens,
Framed by flashes
Of blue light
In the hungry belly
Of an impending storm.