*As Defined by Publishing Terms, so probably 15 months or so

This is the “thing I couldn’t mention yet” in my previous newsletter. I can now mention it, much sooner than I thought. :D

My weirdo cross-genre cosmic horror/murder mystery/corporate satire novella THE UPPER TENTACLE will be published by Union Square & Co.! The editor, Mika Kasuga, really understands what I was trying to do with this novella (a big part of which was “have a lot of fun”) and I’m thrilled I get to work with her to bring it to the shelves. And to your ereader; hopefully also to your favorite listening device, but it will most definitely exist in a form other than a Word document living solely on my computer. Yay!

A few months ago, I mentioned in one my various writer spaces that while these days I enjoy reading a lot of escapist literature, I haven’t been able to write it, at least not purely. There are many things in the U.S. and the world that I’m upset about, too many to fit into any one writing project. But what I’ve started doing with my art is pick one thing from the list of “things I’m upset about” and work it into my fiction.  

I wrote the first draft of THE UPPER TENTACLE in the spring of 2025. Know what one of the terrible things happening in the spring of 2025 was? DOGE was ramping up. Headed by a billionaire who was not an elected official and whose political campaign donations and ruination of a particular social media platform are significant contributors as to why the U.S. is in its current disaster.

I took great joy in having my eldritch horror, self-identified god-aliens eat a bunch of billionaires. Incredibly cathartic; highly recommended as a visualization technique for relaxation.

Yet that’s just the novella’s backstory. In the world of my protagonist, Khearozoth, and their human executive assistant ally, things remain terrible even after the billionaires get eaten. (At least from the perspective of the corporate drones still beholden to the vagaries of megalomaniac entities; it’s just now the megalomaniac entities have a lot of tentacles and can split their bodies apart.) Admittedly, Khearozoth is one of the eldritch horror body-splitting aliens. They’re also pretty low in the pecking order, which brings me to the corporate satire angle.

The novella is set during a corporate retreat for an educational publishing company. I used to work as an editor in educational publishing, and while my bosses were much better people than what I’ve presented in the novella (whether human boss or betentacled alien boss), I nevertheless experienced my share of the capitalistic, corporate nonsense you get with publicly traded businesses of a certain size. (Admittedly I never rated highly enough to attend a corporate retreat; to be fair I wouldn’t have wanted to.)   

THE UPPER TENTACLE is my unhinged response to all that. I hope that once it’s out, you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Till next time,

Amanda