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A short story I’m toying with an idea for a book. So, I wrote a short story to see if it would satisfy the urge, but it made it worse. You’ll see this as a book or at least part of one, one day. Lucky you for getting a preview. Well hopefully lucky…this might be shit and I need to… Continue reading Everything Must Go

Love, Eventually The witch is still in the attic. I’m still writing. That’s the short version. Here’s the slightly longer one. Since the last post, I’ve stopped circling the map and actually started walking it. Obviously is in draft. Real chapters, real prose, nine of them plus two shorter chapters from a different point of view, which belongs to the… Continue reading A Novel in Which Everyone Knows Except the Two People It's Happening To

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

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

This book made me consider a pen name for my pen name. I already have a pen name. This book made me consider a pen name for my pen name. We’ll get to that. In my last post I mentioned, somewhat casually, that I had a manuscript I was thinking about publishing under a different name so that “certain people… Continue reading The Book I’m Scared to Let You Read