Several Stories in Various Stages of Undress

Last Knight, a neurodivergent vampire, and why editing is the part where the fun leaves the room

Here is a thing I know about myself: I do not recover from writing sprints gracefully.

I crawl out the other side, blinking, slightly feral, having made a mess of my sleep schedule and my kitchen — usually in equal measure. The 24-hour sprint is behind me now, and I’m sitting in that particular aftermath where everything I wrote feels both brilliant and suspect, and I am not yet prepared to look at it closely enough to find out which.

What I can tell you is where things stand. Or at least where I think they stand. Reality may vary.

Last Knight

This one is done.

I think.

Last Knight is the story I did not see coming, which is the kindest thing I can say about it and also the truest. If you’ve been here a while, you know my wheelhouse: found family, fight the power, queer people protecting each other with their whole chests and occasionally their fists. Warmth. Chosen kin. The stubborn insistence that love is a form of resistance.

Last Knight is… different. It lives somewhere darker and wetter, down in the bayou mud, in the gothic South, where grief has a pulse and the air is thick enough to chew. Detective Nicola Knight comes home the way ghosts do: quiet, uninvited, carrying three years of unfinished business in a single duffel bag. It is a story about haunting and being haunted. About the violence you do to yourself by running from the thing that broke you.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Some of you have watched this story try on different outfits.

It started here on Substack as The Collective — an underground system of knowledge, ancient and protected, kept alive by supernatural beings who had been guarding it longer than most civilizations had been keeping records. There was something in that version I loved. The mythology of it. The idea that some information is too dangerous to live in the open and so it gets handed down through creatures who don’t die in the normal way.

Then it became Knights of Menaera, which took a different direction entirely — one where two characters who had absolutely no narrative business being romantically interested in each other became very romantically interested in each other. Long story. It didn’t feel right. The heart of it was pulling somewhere else and I kept trying to make it stay put, which is the fastest way to kill a story’s momentum. So I let it go.

What survived all of that — the mythology, the weight of it, the characters who kept insisting on their own shape — became Last Knight. Nicola Knight came home. The bayou came with her. The rest sorted itself out.

It is also — and this is where I get nervous — spicier than anything I have written before. Considerably spicier. We are talking a different category of heat. My usual work has warmth and tenderness and some romantic tension, but Last Knight has chapters I wrote with my door closed.

So naturally, I sent it to the two people most likely to have completely opposite reactions to it.

The Tribunal

My wife and my best friend/editor are reading it right now. Together? No. Simultaneously? Probably not. In parallel? Yes, and I think about this constantly.

Here is what you need to understand about these two people:

My wife is a librarian — which means she approaches everything she reads with genuine curiosity, care, and a particular kind of expertise in knowing what a story is trying to do. She is also relentlessly, constitutionally, magnificently positive. Not in an empty way. In the way of someone who has read enough books to know that effort and intention matter, and who will find what is working even when other things are not. She was largely off the hook for reading my work. She offered herself up for this one. That terrifies me, actually. That means she meant it.

My best friend, who is also my editor, is a different creature entirely. She is the kind of reader who loves something by making it bleed first. Cynical in the best sense — she does not tell you what you want to hear, she tells you what the story needs. She has talked me off ledges and pushed me off different ones. She is invaluable and occasionally infuriating and exactly who this manuscript needs to survive.

If it gets through both of them — her skepticism and her scrutiny — then maybe it’s ready.

The problem is that “maybe” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I am not great at waiting.

Shadow Pine Lodge (Or: What I Am Supposed to Be Working On)

While the tribunal deliberates, I’m supposed to be working on Shadow Pine Lodge.

I am, technically, working on it. I open the document. I read what I wrote last. I stare at it with the focused intensity of someone who is absolutely not thinking about what is happening in my wife’s and my editor’s reading queues right now.

The Lodge has my attention in the way a thing has your attention when something else has your actual attention. It deserves better. I know this. We’ll get there.

I have created a neurodivergent vampire who I genuinely enjoy putting in uncomfortable situations. That alone should be enough to pull me back in. And it is, a little. But then I remember I’m supposed to be editing, and editing is the part where you have to reckon with every decision you made when you were having fun, and the fun drains right out of the room.

The Real Problem

I have too many open projects, and I’m not built to leave things unfinished.

There’s Last Knight, waiting on its verdict. There’s Shadow Pine Lodge, half-built and patient. There are other things — drafts and outlines and the document titled “THIS ONE” that I haven’t opened in three weeks. All of them sitting in various stages of undress, none of them quite ready to leave the house.

My instinct is always to start something new. Creation is the part I love most — that first reckless chapter where nothing has to be consistent yet, where the characters are still surprising me. Revision is necessary and important and, if I am being honest, a little bit like returning to a crime scene. I see every choice I made. I see the ones that didn’t work. I understand why I made them, and I still have to reckon with them.

I know myself well enough to know that if I abandon these projects for the thrill of something new, I will be furious at myself later. I will have three almost-books where I could have had three actual ones. So I’m staying the course. Revision. Patience. Waiting for feedback from the world’s most opposite readers.

My mental health does not need another war. I have enough of those already.

What I Keep Coming Back To

I never feel like a story is finished. Every draft has seams where you can still see the original idea trying to escape. There are always places for improvement. Sentences that are almost right. Paragraphs I would rewrite if I looked at them one more time, and one more time after that.

At some point you have to let other people hold it.

So I did. I sent Last Knight to two people who care enough to be honest with me, in their very different ways, and now I wait. I work on Shadow Pine Lodge. I do not obsessively refresh my messages.

(I obsessively refresh my messages.)

More soon.