THE HACIENDA Cover Reveal and Exclusive Excerpts! New Short Story Publication! (And, as a treat: a brief essay on discomfort in writing)
Hello, dear newsletter! It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? I have so much to fill you in on—so let’s dive right in!
You can now preorder The Hacienda on the Penguin Random House website or wherever fine books are sold. If you’re in the UK—as many of my dearest friends are!—I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little bit longer to preorder. I’ll let you know ASAP when it goes live on UK retailers!
And I sold another flash story to Lightspeed Magazine! My flash story “Stay” will appear sometime in the near future.
In September, I will be on a panel at FIYAHCON called Sink Your Teeth Into it: Vampire Mythology from Around the World. Man, I love vampires. Always have, since I first read Dracula at age 16 under the desk at school, all day every day until I finished it. Read me gush unabashedly about our fanged, fictional friends here. Read my stories featuring vampires in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire here and in late medieval Anatolia here. I have so many more vampire stories to tell (including Book 2… *secretive eyebrow waggle*). I can’t wait to gush with other vampire enthusiasts at FIYAHCON!
On September 23, I will also be speaking at the Library Journal Day of Dialog on a panel called “Visceral Thrills.” The lineup isn’t yet set in stone, but I'm absolutely beside myself with excitement. Unfortunately for most laypeople, it’s a librarians-only event, but if you’re a librarian, I hope to see you there!
I have, however, really been enjoying reading Brandon Taylor’s newsletter. I highly recommend it.
I’ve also been going on lots of long runs and listening to podcasts like The Golden Ghouls, Monstras, and the evergreen favorite of my 2021 attention span, How Do You Write?
So it's been a minute since we last caught up. What’s been going on over here? To wit: DEADLINES.
I told my agent I would have a working draft of Book 2 in her inbox by September 3rd. That’s actually been going super well—I’ve written a little over 50,000 words over the last few weeks! I feel heady, giddy, and excited. This has been one of those glorious experiences where the characters stepped onto the page almost fully-formed, with all their opinions and grudges and desires so viscerally real I’ve been struggling to keep up with them. On one glorious day last week I wrote 7,200 words without batting an eye. Lately, I've been cranking out 4k a day no sweat. I also completely overwrote the first act, sketched in most of the second act, and last Friday, hit the breaks on drafting to go back and fix the beginning. I definitely need to do that before writing the ending. Always have.
But my PhD drafting writing group continues. For me, this means that every three weeks, I have a deadline before which I must produce new dissertation writing. One of those deadlines was yesterday. The middle chapter of my dissertation has gotten yet another facelift. She’s looking much better now, but she’s still only half-written. (lolsob)
I also got my first pass pages from my publisher! For the uninitiated, first pass pages is the step that comes after copyediting. It’s ye olde finale check of the typeset manuscript before hardcover copies get printed—this means everything is set in stone, but if you need to change the placement of a comma, squeeze in a dropped word, delete an accidentally doubled word, or correct a misspelling, now is the last and only time to do it. So… uh… no pressure, right? The upside: The Hacienda is now beautifully typeset, from dedication to the last acknowledgement, and man, I can confirm that she is a beaut. I absolutely cannot wait until you all see it. Unfortunately, pass pages also meant another deadline. That was also today. I got it bumped back to Friday, so I should actually wrap this up and get back to it!
I’m actually a bit sheepish that it’s taken me until the *checks notes* 26th of the month to send out the newsletter that I originally intended for the first of the month. Every time I so much as thought about working on it, I felt exhausted. Even when I had a cover reveal to share. Even when I had short story sales to crow about.
Why is that? I could blame it on deadlines. I could blame it on summer heat. I could blame it on the fact that I’ve been at my in-laws’ on beautiful Vancouver Island and have had a lot of family time and day-trips sucking up my energy in the happiest way possible.
But if I’m being honest with myself? 2021 has been brutal for everyone. Summer is usually the time of year when my energy is at its lowest to begin with, and the last few weeks have not always been easy. The news and rapidly shifting trajectory of the pandemic press down on me like a physical weight some days. I’m worried about family members and breakthrough cases. I’m both excited and illogically scared about upcoming international travel. I worry daily about my own ability to pull off the biggest con there ever was: finishing my PhD dissertation in a subject I love and defending it literal days before my debut novel is published. I’m smack-dab in the middle of the dissertation beast, and some days, it’s really hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As I keep walking through the dark, paso a paso, I remind myself that I’ve been learning invaluable lessons along the way.
On the podcast How Do You Write?, the host, Rachael Herron, always asks her guests a question that I have thought about a lot lately: “What thing in your life has impacted your writing in a surprising way?” I’ve often batted around my own answers to this question on long runs, hot showers, or whenever else my mind drifts (read: always). The obvious answer is my large, loud, unruly family—a constant source of inspiration, for better or worse. The sexiest answer is that I broke how my brain approaches syntax and metaphor by studying eight languages and by speaking four of them with decent fluency.
But recently, I’ve realized that writing my dissertation has impacted my fiction writing enormously. That fact surprised me. What could dry, academic work—the kind that privileges long, unwieldy sentences and niche, nitpicky arguments over the swift urgency of fiction—teach me about writing?
Reader, it has taught me humility. It has taught me that some writing just takes longer. That as much as I try, no matter how hard I try to micro-manage and schedule, there are some aspects of the writing process that I cannot control. Gestation time. Idea maturation. And, to be honest, self maturation.
But most importantly?
Writing the dissertation is teaching me to sit with discomfort.
I write fast because I want the ugliness and exhaustion of the first draft to be over as quickly as possible. I am a rip-off-the-bandaid person to the bone. I used to hate revisions and rushed them because they were deeply uncomfortable. To me, there was nothing worse than taking something beloved that I had built over the course of weeks, cracking its spine in two, pulling it apart, and rearranging it in a grisly, sweaty surgery.
For this current dissertation chapter, I have had to do precisely that. Not once, not twice, but four times. And the chapter still isn’t done. (It is so much better than before, though!)
A few weeks ago, in mid-July, I sat down to revise an emotionally difficult story for my Catapult workshop. I had been dreading it, but bowed—as I obediently do—to the siren call of the deadline. As I revised, I realized that while doing so was uncomfortable, while it hurt to write about such deep feelings, I… kept doing it. I kept revising. I moved sentences, tightened threads. Swapped paragraphs around looking for the best flow. And I dug deeper to bring the rawest and most tender parts of the story into the light.
Then I brought it to workshop and sat quietly, Zoom on mute, as a group of relative strangers dissected and pawed around in it.
A year ago, I might have have abandoned the story. Put it off, as I have so many others. Maybe I would have grabbed a different story out of the drawer to bring to workshop, one that was a polished and sleek first draft, all emotional smoke and mirrors, one that did not have the rawness of freshly-harvested feelings. (I was certainly tempted.) But I am slowly learning to sit with discomfort. To face down my work despite it. As with many hard lessons, I wish I could have learned it another way. An easier way. A shorter and less brutal way.
But here we are. The dissertation must be finished. The deadlines must be hit. And we must keep learning to sit with discomfort or forever burn ourselves out running from it.
Oh, one last thing before I go! Guess what? I have a reprint short story coming out next month! "The Kingdom of the Butterflies" will be appearing in The Deadlands' September issue! I’ll pop back in your inboxes to let you know when it’s out, but aside from that, I’m going to give myself a month off from writing this newsletter. I’ll be back in October—refreshed, I hope, as I usually am when temperatures drop and leaves begin to change!
x
News
Cover reveal time! Earlier this month, LitHub’s Crime Reads hosted the exclusive cover reveal of THE HACIENDA, including an sneak peek excerpt of Chapter Two!“Tell me about the hacienda,” I had said.
It was a big house, he replied, sprawling over the low hills north of Apan, overlooking sharp-pointed fields of maguey. Generations of his family had lived there before the war of independence from Spain, cultivating the agave and producing pulque, its sour beer, to be shipped to the capital’s thirsty markets. There were gardens filled with birds of paradise, the air thick with swallows, he said, and broad, bustling kitchens to feed all the tlachiqueros and the servants and family. They celebrated feast days in a capilla on the property, a chapel adorned with paintings of saints and an altar carved by the scion of the family in the seventeenth century and gilded by later, wealthier generations.
“Do you miss it?” I asked.
He did not answer, not directly. Instead, he described the way the sun set in the valley of Apan: first rich golden, deepening to amber, and then, with a swift, sure strike, night overtook the sun like the extinguishing of a candle. The darkness in the valley was so deep it was almost blue, and when thunderstorms slinked over steep hills into the valley, lightning spilled like mercury across the fields of maguey, silvering the plants’ sharp tips like the peaked helmets of conquistadors.
It will be mine, I thought then. A flash of intuition that swept me with the strong, trusting arm of a lover into the next steps of the dance.
And mine it became.
You can now preorder The Hacienda on the Penguin Random House website or wherever fine books are sold. If you’re in the UK—as many of my dearest friends are!—I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little bit longer to preorder. I’ll let you know ASAP when it goes live on UK retailers!
Story Publications
As of today, “My Sister Is a Scorpion” is free to read on the Lightspeed Magazine website and to listen to on the Lightspeed podcast!And I sold another flash story to Lightspeed Magazine! My flash story “Stay” will appear sometime in the near future.
Appearances
(Wait, this section of the newsletter exists now?! Apparently it does!)In September, I will be on a panel at FIYAHCON called Sink Your Teeth Into it: Vampire Mythology from Around the World. Man, I love vampires. Always have, since I first read Dracula at age 16 under the desk at school, all day every day until I finished it. Read me gush unabashedly about our fanged, fictional friends here. Read my stories featuring vampires in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire here and in late medieval Anatolia here. I have so many more vampire stories to tell (including Book 2… *secretive eyebrow waggle*). I can’t wait to gush with other vampire enthusiasts at FIYAHCON!
On September 23, I will also be speaking at the Library Journal Day of Dialog on a panel called “Visceral Thrills.” The lineup isn’t yet set in stone, but I'm absolutely beside myself with excitement. Unfortunately for most laypeople, it’s a librarians-only event, but if you’re a librarian, I hope to see you there!
July and August Favorites
Over the end of July and all of August, I have been caught up in a whirlwind of workshopping for my Catapult class, dissertation writing, and Book 2 writing. Outside of workshop stories, I barely read at all. Yikes. I read Digital Minimalism (along with deadlines, this is the reason I haven’t been on Instagram since early July), rolled around in the velvet Gothic wonderland that was S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood, feasted on K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary, and devoured a nonfiction book called Tejano Empire for Book 2 research. But otherwise? My god, I have picked up and put down so many excellent books. I will pick many of them back up again… probably in the fall, when I have more bandwidth. I’ve just been so tired. More on that below.I have, however, really been enjoying reading Brandon Taylor’s newsletter. I highly recommend it.
I’ve also been going on lots of long runs and listening to podcasts like The Golden Ghouls, Monstras, and the evergreen favorite of my 2021 attention span, How Do You Write?
So it's been a minute since we last caught up. What’s been going on over here? To wit: DEADLINES.
I told my agent I would have a working draft of Book 2 in her inbox by September 3rd. That’s actually been going super well—I’ve written a little over 50,000 words over the last few weeks! I feel heady, giddy, and excited. This has been one of those glorious experiences where the characters stepped onto the page almost fully-formed, with all their opinions and grudges and desires so viscerally real I’ve been struggling to keep up with them. On one glorious day last week I wrote 7,200 words without batting an eye. Lately, I've been cranking out 4k a day no sweat. I also completely overwrote the first act, sketched in most of the second act, and last Friday, hit the breaks on drafting to go back and fix the beginning. I definitely need to do that before writing the ending. Always have.
But my PhD drafting writing group continues. For me, this means that every three weeks, I have a deadline before which I must produce new dissertation writing. One of those deadlines was yesterday. The middle chapter of my dissertation has gotten yet another facelift. She’s looking much better now, but she’s still only half-written. (lolsob)
I also got my first pass pages from my publisher! For the uninitiated, first pass pages is the step that comes after copyediting. It’s ye olde finale check of the typeset manuscript before hardcover copies get printed—this means everything is set in stone, but if you need to change the placement of a comma, squeeze in a dropped word, delete an accidentally doubled word, or correct a misspelling, now is the last and only time to do it. So… uh… no pressure, right? The upside: The Hacienda is now beautifully typeset, from dedication to the last acknowledgement, and man, I can confirm that she is a beaut. I absolutely cannot wait until you all see it. Unfortunately, pass pages also meant another deadline. That was also today. I got it bumped back to Friday, so I should actually wrap this up and get back to it!
I’m actually a bit sheepish that it’s taken me until the *checks notes* 26th of the month to send out the newsletter that I originally intended for the first of the month. Every time I so much as thought about working on it, I felt exhausted. Even when I had a cover reveal to share. Even when I had short story sales to crow about.
Why is that? I could blame it on deadlines. I could blame it on summer heat. I could blame it on the fact that I’ve been at my in-laws’ on beautiful Vancouver Island and have had a lot of family time and day-trips sucking up my energy in the happiest way possible.
But if I’m being honest with myself? 2021 has been brutal for everyone. Summer is usually the time of year when my energy is at its lowest to begin with, and the last few weeks have not always been easy. The news and rapidly shifting trajectory of the pandemic press down on me like a physical weight some days. I’m worried about family members and breakthrough cases. I’m both excited and illogically scared about upcoming international travel. I worry daily about my own ability to pull off the biggest con there ever was: finishing my PhD dissertation in a subject I love and defending it literal days before my debut novel is published. I’m smack-dab in the middle of the dissertation beast, and some days, it’s really hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As I keep walking through the dark, paso a paso, I remind myself that I’ve been learning invaluable lessons along the way.
On the podcast How Do You Write?, the host, Rachael Herron, always asks her guests a question that I have thought about a lot lately: “What thing in your life has impacted your writing in a surprising way?” I’ve often batted around my own answers to this question on long runs, hot showers, or whenever else my mind drifts (read: always). The obvious answer is my large, loud, unruly family—a constant source of inspiration, for better or worse. The sexiest answer is that I broke how my brain approaches syntax and metaphor by studying eight languages and by speaking four of them with decent fluency.
But recently, I’ve realized that writing my dissertation has impacted my fiction writing enormously. That fact surprised me. What could dry, academic work—the kind that privileges long, unwieldy sentences and niche, nitpicky arguments over the swift urgency of fiction—teach me about writing?
Reader, it has taught me humility. It has taught me that some writing just takes longer. That as much as I try, no matter how hard I try to micro-manage and schedule, there are some aspects of the writing process that I cannot control. Gestation time. Idea maturation. And, to be honest, self maturation.
But most importantly?
Writing the dissertation is teaching me to sit with discomfort.
I write fast because I want the ugliness and exhaustion of the first draft to be over as quickly as possible. I am a rip-off-the-bandaid person to the bone. I used to hate revisions and rushed them because they were deeply uncomfortable. To me, there was nothing worse than taking something beloved that I had built over the course of weeks, cracking its spine in two, pulling it apart, and rearranging it in a grisly, sweaty surgery.
For this current dissertation chapter, I have had to do precisely that. Not once, not twice, but four times. And the chapter still isn’t done. (It is so much better than before, though!)
A few weeks ago, in mid-July, I sat down to revise an emotionally difficult story for my Catapult workshop. I had been dreading it, but bowed—as I obediently do—to the siren call of the deadline. As I revised, I realized that while doing so was uncomfortable, while it hurt to write about such deep feelings, I… kept doing it. I kept revising. I moved sentences, tightened threads. Swapped paragraphs around looking for the best flow. And I dug deeper to bring the rawest and most tender parts of the story into the light.
Then I brought it to workshop and sat quietly, Zoom on mute, as a group of relative strangers dissected and pawed around in it.
A year ago, I might have have abandoned the story. Put it off, as I have so many others. Maybe I would have grabbed a different story out of the drawer to bring to workshop, one that was a polished and sleek first draft, all emotional smoke and mirrors, one that did not have the rawness of freshly-harvested feelings. (I was certainly tempted.) But I am slowly learning to sit with discomfort. To face down my work despite it. As with many hard lessons, I wish I could have learned it another way. An easier way. A shorter and less brutal way.
But here we are. The dissertation must be finished. The deadlines must be hit. And we must keep learning to sit with discomfort or forever burn ourselves out running from it.
Oh, one last thing before I go! Guess what? I have a reprint short story coming out next month! "The Kingdom of the Butterflies" will be appearing in The Deadlands' September issue! I’ll pop back in your inboxes to let you know when it’s out, but aside from that, I’m going to give myself a month off from writing this newsletter. I’ll be back in October—refreshed, I hope, as I usually am when temperatures drop and leaves begin to change!
x
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