Vampires of El Norte is a Locus Award Finalist! 2024 publication news! (And a sad update...)
Hello!
Phew, didn’t mean to scare you there. I know it must be a shock to see me in your inbox so shortly after my last email. I couldn’t resist barging in—I have some exciting news to share and I simply couldn’t wait another minute!
Vampires of El Norte is a Locus Award Finalist!
My jaw about hit the floor on Friday night when I received an email from my agent letting me know that Vampires of El Norte was a top 10 finalist in the Locus Awards for Best Horror Novel! (The Locus Awards are a massive popular vote, so this is huge!) I’m honored to be in such incredible company as Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Stephen Graham Jones, among other luminaries. I’m so thrilled!!! If you voted, thank you so much for picking Vampires of El Norte. It’s a crowded field full of heavy hitters, so I’m pretty sure Vampires won’t waltz home with an award, but being a finalist is more than enough for me!
Surprise! A 2024 release!
The book subscription box OwlCrate recently revealed the cover for their first-ever original anthology, MONSTERS IN MASQUERADE, edited by Robin Alvarez and featuring sixteen “darkly sensual and spine-tingling stories”… including one by yours truly!
I teased the opening of “Eva and the Devil“ a few newsletters ago, and I’m thrilled to announce that it will be in print later this year. OwlCrate hasn’t announced when this anthology will be available for purchase, but I’ll let you know as soon as buy links go live!
In the meantime: can we all admire this dramatic cover for a second?? (The skull! The flowers! The sprayed edges!) I love her.
A sad update: no more premium subscriptions (iamsobusyimightspontaneouslycombust)
We’re only a few months into the year and I have failed in my experiment to have a paid tier for this newsletter. I was so ready to send out brand new short fiction every month for the rest of this year, but two very happy things have happened:
1) I girlbossed too close to the sun and, uh… accidentally sold a bunch of those stories, which means that I can no longer share them with you first. 😬 I shot them off to a few publications on a whim (the hustle never ends when you’re a writer!), and, well, oops. They’re getting published.
However! It DOES mean that these stories will be published in the coming months, and you will be the first to hear about them when they go live!
2) Are you a writer? Have you ever wanted to pick my brain about writing all things gloriously spooky? Well. WELL. Hopefully this reason will soothe the bite of ending paid subscriptions:
I was invited to teach a creative writing course on incredibly shiny new platform called The Writers Conservatory this fall! Think Masterclass, but with much more in-depth and nitty-gritty “but how do you actually do the thing on a sentence level”-type material for writers of all levels. I am SO excited!
I’ll be sharing more about The Writers Conservatory in the coming months, but for now, let it suffice to say that I have A LOT of work on my plate over the next few weeks. We’re working on a pretty tight schedule to get material locked in and content filmed before the Fall 2024 quarter begins! The time and brainpower that I would otherwise devote to writing short fiction will be poured into preparing material on how to craft delicious Gothic atmosphere, terrifying tension, and unputdownable pacing.
So: the hustle, alas, has led me to turn off subscriptions. You should no longer be charged; if you do get charged, please shoot me an email (just reply to this newsletter!) and I’ll troubleshoot Stripe to refund it.
But in just a few days, I’ll be sharing a short story that I have long promised: “The Ruby of Sindbâd” will go out to this whole newsletter. I hope you like it.
In the meantime, back to the drafting trenches! I’m SO CLOSE to finishing this novel. I absolutely cannot wait to share it with you.
Isabel xxxx