Writes
The answer was a witch in the attic eating crackers. Obviously. I solved a three-week creative crisis by inventing a woman who fakes her own death and then just… doesn’t leave. She moves into the attic. She stays there. Nobody tells her to. It is, weirdly, the most well-adjusted decision anyone in this book makes. Anyway. Let me back up.… Continue reading I Figured Out the Fern
Colette & Valentyne I’ve been working on a book for a while now. I have a full outline, twenty-one chapters, every beat mapped out. I know exactly what happens. I know who the characters are. I know how it ends. And I still don’t know what it is. Here’s the premise: Colette is a government archivist with a rare kind… Continue reading The Story That Doesn’t Know What It Is
I am figuring it out and you get to watch Here is something I have learned about myself recently: I contain multitudes. Specifically, I contain two very different writers who apparently share a brain and a coffee habit but not much else. Let me back up. The pause on book three Inconveniently Haunted was always going to be a trilogy.… Continue reading Two Writers Walk Into a Substack
Building books, finding people Hey folks. So I got my ketamine infusion this week, which means I spent Friday being chemically reorganized in a medical setting. The experience was: approximately as disorienting as advertised, and also clarifying in the way that things are clarifying when your brain chemistry gets properly adjusted. I don’t recommend the process casually. I also don’t… Continue reading Still Standing
The one where I actually did it The Museum of Ephemeral Arts: A Mel Jones Mystery is live on Amazon. I need a moment with that sentence because I have been working toward it for a long time and it still doesn’t feel entirely real. Here is what I can tell you about the book: It is a paranormal cozy… Continue reading It's Here. The Museum is Open.
The one where I finally hit publish I finished the book. I mean I actually finished it. Edited it, formatted it, wrote the copyright page and the dedication and the about the author and the book description and figured out KDP categories and keywords and royalty percentages. I did all of it. The book is done and it is sitting… Continue reading I Drew My Own Cover and I'm Terrified to Show You
A newsletter about writing, not having it together, and the books that happen anyway I have a confession to make. I have been writing a cozy mystery and telling almost no one. Not because I’m ashamed of it. Not because I don’t think it’s good. But because telling people means it’s real, and real things can fail, and I have… Continue reading The Museum, The Mess, and Mel Tate
Introducing a Mel Jones Mystery I said more soon and here I am. A gold star for follow-through. A few things have happened since I last wrote. The tribunal is still deliberating on Last Knight. I am still not obsessively refreshing my messages. (I am still obsessively refreshing my messages.) And somewhere in the background of all of this, while… Continue reading Everything Is Out of My Hands Now and I Am Fine
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… Continue reading Several Stories in Various Stages of Undress
