The Hacienda earned out!
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
- James Baldwin
I have this quote on a Post-It note on my computer monitor. I look at it daily, because the last few months have required some serious endurance. Everyone in my household was sick from the middle of February until past Easter. I sprained my knee (picking my kid up from the floor, no less). There was a death in the family. Travel for work. More travel. Sleep regressions. Deadlines on deadlines. Phew. There’s a reason it’s been a minute since you last heard from me.
But I owe you a nice long catch up, so let’s get going without further ado!
In March, I traded Seattle gray for Arizona sun and attended the Tucson Festival of Books. It was a glorious weekend full of connecting with readers and other writers alike. I had conversations with readers that made me cry, made multiple panelists cry, and in general, cried a lot and left with my heart full to bursting. It was my first book festival and definitely not my last.
Also in March: my short story “All The Things I Know About Ghosts, By Ofelia, Age 10” was selected to appear in Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Vol. 5! This is a prestigious anthology for the horror short fiction world and I’m honored to be included in such illustrious company as Tananarive Due, Darcie Little Badger, and Angela Slatter.
In early April, I headed to San Francisco to speak to students at Ohlone College. I made it out to Fremont despite horrific traffic and torrential rain and arrived 5 minutes before the event was set to begin. Phew! (Bay Area readers: how do you live out there, that was madness.) It was so wonderful to both connect with students and to catch up with old friends.
At the end of April, I opened my biannual royalties statement for The Hacienda and discovered, to my shock, that it had earned out.
(If you don’t know what that means, here’s a quick explanation. TL;DR: it means The Hacienda is selling insanely well. Well enough that I’m going to be receiving royalties checks from it moving forward.)
I cried. I felt like throwing up. I celebrated, and continue to celebrate. I’m so grateful to you all not only for reading The Hacienda, but for talking about it, for telling your friends and relatives and book clubs and coworkers about it, for requesting it at your public library and ordering it through your indie bookstores.
Nothing–and I mean nothing–the Penguin Random House marketing wizards in New York City can plan and execute matches the alchemy of word-of-mouth. I am overwhelmed with gratitude. The Hacienda earning out and Vampires of El Norte continuing to sell at a healthy clip means that you will continue to see books from me on shelves for as long as I am able to keep writing them.
Speaking of, I’m in the midst of revising my next book. I can’t say much about it yet, except that it’s another historical Gothic horror with a hearty dash of romance (we’ve begun to call the subgenre horromance, and I love the moniker). I am having the best time researching 18th-century silver mines and mercury poisoning.
In fact, I just lifted my head from the glorious haze of sketching out my (quite short!) path to THE END and realized, holy shit, somehow it’s already May. Damn. I am so excited to share new books with you, so I had better stop yapping and get back to polishing those up.
Listening
COWBOY CARTER. Gallons of ink have been spilled over how brilliant it is. I have nothing to add except my SHEER DELIGHT. “Daughter” is my favorite, but “Tyrant” will lift me out of any bad mood.
Beyoncé put me on a country kick, which is, uhhhh, extremely unusual for me. I spent most of April listening to Sammy Arriaga, some random Cuban kid who followed his heart to Nashville and began to make country music, and it’s… great???! It’s the frothy, summery, full-o’-yearning Spanglish country I never knew I was missing from my dog walking playlists.
“lonely cowboy,” by KALEO: a song so Néstor-coded that it almost makes me wanna write a sequel to Vampires of El Norte. (I am too busy, alas.)(Also, if I were going to write a sequel, it would be to The Hacienda. That letter keeps Andrés up at night.)
The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift: I mean, obviously. Who isn’t listening to TTPD right now? Songs that are extremely current-horror-work-in-progress coded include “Guilty as Sin?” (she wrote that for the Catholic girlies, and man oh man, is my next book also for the Catholic girlies) and “The Prophecy.” A number of readers have tagged me in posts on Instagram linking “But Daddy I Love Him” to Vampires of El Norte, and I wanted to take a moment to give this my Official Seal Of Approval. (Dear reader, if this is you, I love you.)
Reading
I’ve been reading SO MUCH this year! After the academic burnout and pregnancy of 2022 and baby chaos of 2023, I finally feel as if I’m back in action. Of the 30-odd books I’ve read thus far this year, standouts include:
Asunder by Kerstin Hall: Guys. Guys. GUYS. No one sent this to me. (I got it on NetGalley like a pleb; am fairly certain that Tor doesn’t give a shit about me.) No one asked me to blurb it. But when I say that I simply had to blurb the book because it is sheer brilliance, please believe me. Here’s what I said about it:
“There is no doubt in my mind that Kerstin Hall is one of the great imaginative minds writing fantasy today. Asunder is a masterful novel, one that is both intimately character-focused and layered with intrigue, eldritch horrors, and high-octane action. It is immersive, inventive, and intensely unputdownable. I was spellbound from the first pages.”
And I mean every word. I was sucked in from page 1 and lost three full business days–on deadline, no less!–to Karys and Ferain and their increasingly intense catch-22 decisionmaking. It’s a whirlwind. It’s heartbreak. It’s the kind of book that makes you immediately flip back to the beginning as soon as you finish because you simply can’t bear to leave.
The publisher is pitching Asunder as “Sabriel meets For The Wolf” which honestly makes me want to fire the whole marketing department–that’s an awfully nonsensical way to describe anything, much less this book. Here’s the novel summed up as best I can on minimal sleep (twelve month sleep regression just hit our house like Biblical plague):
When Karys, a woman with a god-given (an exceptionally evil god, to be clear) ability to see and speak to the recently dead, finds herself in the midst of a job gone suddenly, terrifyingly life-threatening, she agrees to magically bind a dying foreign diplomat (Ferain) to herself in exchange for a significant fee. With Ferain as her shadow (he’s literally bound to her shadow; I imagined this as Peter Pan and his shadow in the Disney animated movie), she must undertake an increasingly dangerous journey across borders and into unknown territory in order to unbind him, facing ghosts from her past and the ticking time bomb of a Faustian bargain hanging like a guillotine over her head. There is enough intricate, lawful magic to delight even the most ardent Brandon Sanderson-stan, but also eldritch horror in the form of terrifying gods and the fascinating, inventive, and unhinged technology of a steampunky Studio Ghibli movie. And on a prose level, the writing is just divine.
In this tweet, Kerstin helpfully illustrates (and I mean literally illustrates, with stick figures) how everything in Asunder just goes from bad to worse and worse and worse. Behold:
Asunder is a bit impossible to pitch, yes, but also impossible to put down and impossible forget. It has lived rent-free in my head for weeks now. Also, there is a tender, powerful love story that I ship SO DAMN HARD that I simply MUST insist that you preorder this novel. If you don’t, Tor might never order the sequel. (It is billed as a standalone. It is not. Another reason I want to take the whole publisher and throw it in the trash.)
Anyway, Asunder is out on August 20th of this year. Add it on Goodreads to be reminded when it releases, but never fear, I will nag you again closer to that date. (Probably multiple times.)
I am also in the midst of India Holton’s The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love, which is light fantasy romance in the vein of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, if the academics were magical birdwatchers, and also incredibly, hysterically violent in the Indiana Jones-caper school of comic action. 10/10. Witty as fuck and heel-kickingly romantic. (Unfortunately also not out until this summer. Add to Goodreads or preorder and thank me later.)
Bride by Ali Hazelwood is the romance author’s first foray into the paranormal and I ADORED it. I read and blurbed it last year (again, a totally unsolicited blurb that I foisted onto poor unsuspecting mutual Berkley marketing people) and decided to reread it again this spring. Just as delightful the second time around.
A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle Jensen saw my expectations, met them, and raised me an incredibly hunky and competent Viking love interest. No complaints, a great time, highly recommend. A bit on the gory side at times, but did you see me say “Viking” about a dozen words ago? Yeah, fair warning, it kinda swings for the fences. But the magic! The fierce, layered, flawed protagonist! When House of the Dragon is over, HBO should make this.
I think that’s enough for now. I could keep procrastinating, buttttttttt the baby just woke up and I have no childcare today. Yikes! Gotta bounce!
If you’re a paying subscriber to this newsletter, keep a weather eye on your inbox–there’s stuff coming your way ASAP, including an overdue short story and a sneak peak at my upcoming releases!
all my love (and exhaustion),
Isabel xxxx