Names in Their Blood- out now!
For the first time in the very nearly 3 years I’ve had this newsletter, I’m going to use it to do the thing author newsletters are supposedly for; I’m going to tell you about my new book, which is out now!
The best marketing advice I ever got was not to try to sell people the thing itself. Instead, you promise people a specific emotional experience they’ll get from the thing. I don’t know if that’s actually good advice, but I understand feelings better than I understand most things, so I’ve clung to it for at least 10 years now.
I think I wrote the book to transmit feelings from myself to other people at least as much as I wrote it for any other reason, anyways.
But it’s not a brand name beer I’m trying to convince you will fill you with swagger, or a cookie I want you to believe will deliver warm chocolate chip nostalgia. it’s a big damn brick of a novel, with a lot of different feelings inside it.
I keep reaching for food metaphors here. I think that’s because one of the things I like about stories is that as you take them in you change them. When I read a book all in one rush I say I’ve eaten it whole. Or sometimes I’ve taken it in, bite after bite. I chew on the ideas, and then, if the story is good enough to stay with me, I digest it and it becomes a part of me.
If I’m very lucky and if I’ve done my job right, the book I’m offering you won’t just be the thing I made anymore, it’ll become a little part of other people, out walking around in the world.
Please forgive me if that sounds arrogant. I guess since changing people, at their request, is the career I’ve trained for, that puts bread on the table and mediates my every interaction, I can get away with making a declaration like that without cringing. People change all the time. That’s my day job and it’s what I write.
All right, I’m navel-gazing. This moment has been a long time coming and I want to savor it.
Let me promise you some feelings.
The book is about all the feelings tangled up in reunions, Faustian bargains, family, gender, several horror and mystery tropes, disability, being brand new to a career. It’s bursting with insecurity, fear, love, rage, betrayal, shame, repulsion, and ambition.
I wrote the feelings big and lingering in the hopes of offering catharsis and the sense of being seen to the people who read it, knowing every person who reads it will take in those feelings in a different way.
So.
If you’ve wondered if you really know anything about yourself when people who see you seem to be seeing someone else, then Yael’s experience with xyr family’s history with that genetic engineering cult, and xyr worries about xyr gender, are likely to strike a chord. If you’ve ever felt too far behind your peers to ever catch up or too far outside of the communities you need to ever belong, then you’ll have Opal’s experience trying to actually make it as a pro hero. If you’ve ever worried that your envy or bitterness would leave you alone, then Jamie’s willingness to take risks that scare the people who love her will make intimate sense to you. If you’ve ever been brave enough to reach past what seem like obvious signs of rejection to try to heal, even when you suspected that that bravery might be stupidity, then Issac’s attempts to fix what’s been broken may ache.
If you’ve ever worried that you are simply not enough, then all my efforts to attach my words to those memories and show you how four fictional, deeply imperfect characters lived through it are for you.
So it’s a book about superheroes, and missing people, and the US’s only full service hospital for genetically altered people. And it’s a coming of age story and a family drama and a deeply Midwestern period piece for a period that hasn’t happened yet.
But mostly it’s feelings. I’ve dredged them up, sifted through them, prepared them, and laid them out for your consumption.
I hope you enjoy it.
After a spring they barely survived, the superhero team/family the Sentinels, head to rural Minnesota for long awaited reunions and a chance to finally start to heal at the countries only full hospital for genetically altered people. But, when they realize that alterds have been going missing from the area it’s clear that someone’s kept the Sentinels from being sent in. They need to decide who they can trust- and fast, or thousands of people could die.
For sale now in ebook or paperback formats- more purchase options to come!
And of course, book 1, Secondhand Origin Stories is also available as an ebook here, here, or here, in paperback on Amazon on your preferred independent shop, and audiobook available on Audible.
And as a final notice- if you’re going to be at CONvergence this coming weekend you can see me on a panel on eugenics and scifi on Thursday, and hosting a room party book launch Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights! I look forward to seeing some of you there!
With all my thanks for joining me this far,
Lee Brontide