As you probably all know, publishing is a long game, with protracted timelines. And you’ve probably all been told that the best thing to do while waiting on news for one project is “start another project.”

I’m never hurting for projects. Right now, in addition to regular writing and editing duties for DIS/MEMBER, I’m working on three interlinked poems for an upcoming collaborative zine and I’ve also started 2025’s hallowzine. This year I’ve been back in a more regular swing of writing short fiction and sending it into the world. But after completing a novella draft for my publisher in June, I was feeling like I had too much time on my hands. /s

So I decided to return to Barrenkill.

The Kill is a project I started two summers ago and almost immediately abandoned for reasons of “I just can’t get into it.” Upon reading back through the initial three chapters, though, I found it really fun and was glad it had been there in my Scrivener files, waiting for me. So I picked it up again and now have a goal of completing a 65-70,000 word draft by December. It’s been a long time since I drafted a novel. A novel-novel. I’ve been in novella mode for several years, and I respect the formats’ differences. Drafting a novel is an invitation to think about what the long form is for. Why you choose it. What specific joys and charms it holds.

When was the last time you read a novel that made you go, This novel absolutely should have been a novel, perfect use of the form, a novel that reveled in being a novel? What novel was it?

Does the word “novel” look weird yet?

Did you know when you’re drafting a novel, you can have as many chapters as you want? 3, 4, 5,000 words a chapter, maybe more? What do you do with all those words?

For some of The Kill’s words, I decided to let the narrator lie, a lot. For some others, I decided—about four chapters into drafting—to add chapter epigraphs and several short sections of historical diary. Why not? I decided to write a gold-digger who’s very bald about being a gold-digger. Why not? To set it in my favorite New York countryside and roll around in what I love about that countryside—all the best times I’ve had in those trees and towns, and the worst ones too, all my feelings about being an eternal outsider. To give my gold-digger a fiance with a dark past and darker future; to bestow on her an acid tongue, a textbook knowledge of nail art, a checkered childhood in my home state. Why not? To drop in a power lesbian in denial, a hectic academic with too many theories and too much riding on them, a best friend with all the skeletons (are those all the same person? Maybe!). To sink a body in the local creek, of course. To skin a ghost across everything and let her speak from the tops of the first pages, the pages in between, for her body… and the bodies she accumulated… to rest just below the text. Why not!!

Shakers. Spiritualism. Unreliable narrators. Private investigators. The devout and the faithless. The stupid-hot and the calculated cool. Magic, maybe, a little. Most of all, the foothills between Albany and Hudson, the shift in landscape and the haunts crawling beneath marble crags, the belief still burning like Centralia’s flame and all the kills.

If there was ever a time to write indulgently, it’s ours. I’d love to bring you to Barrenkill someday, and maybe I’ll get to. For now, it’s enough that I go there myself.