Liner Notes #8: Updates and a BOOK OF TONY excerpt
Hello and welcome to another belated Liner Notes. The above photo is one I took while in San Diego on book tour. It's been almost three months since Bitter Medicine was released, and only now am I really able to pop my head up and take a breath.
I really don't have any excuses for how irregular this newsletter is; it simply is. I've been busy, but everyone is busy, right? Really, I'm just glad the semester is over for my kids and they can have a week to do nothing but veg on the couch and play video games before it's off to camp.
What no one tells you is that debut is exhausting. For two months after debut, I was tired. I'm normally tired, but this was a kind of exhaustion that I'd associate more with depression, except I wasn't depressed. I just did not want to engage with online spaces or with book-related things in general. Unfortunately, comma, books are part of how I make a living, so I had to keep going.
And I'm still going! I've got appearances lined up for the summer. Tachyon's marketing and publicity department, which is all of two people (huge thanks to Kasey and Rick for all they do), has been outclassing other publishers left and right. They're not an 80-1 underdog like Rich Strike was in last year's Derby, but they're certainly not a 2-5 overwhelming favorite like Hachette or Macmillan or Penguin Random House. They're a comfortable 9-1, but they are all class and that's why Bitter Medicine is in its second print run and continues to get publicity almost three months after release.
In a couple of weeks, I'll be in DC for AwesomeCon, followed by the Columbus Book Festival in mid-July, and then immediately followed by San Diego Comic Con days afterward. And then I'll be back in San Diego for a thing that hasn't been announced yet but I'm very excited for. When it's announced, I will scream about it. I promise. Later in the fall, I'll probably be at DragonCon signing books, and though I'm not officially part of MultiverseCon here in Atlanta, I'll probably drop by at some point.
Oh yeah, and Chuck Tingle followed me yesterday on Twitter, which has made my entire life. Chuck, I know you're not reading this, but I am a bona fide buckaroo and you're the greatest.
In book-related news, I got a revise and resubmit for KEY & VALE. That means, essentially, that the editor at the publishing house likes it, but doesn't like-like it enough to take it to acquisitions and ask the pub to spend money on it, so the editor has made a list of asks that I will hopefully, maybe be able to make good on in a fresh revision, and then the editor will reread the manuscript and decide whether or not she wants to take a chance on it. This is the speed of adult science fiction and fantasy publishing, by the way; you're on submission for months and months, nine in my case, and then you get an R&R, and then you spend more months revising, and then you send it off and wait all over again. I do think that pubs were waiting to see how Bitter Medicine would do before saying anything. Now that the book is out, maybe I'll get faster responses from houses whenever the new K&V manuscript hits editor desks.
As for Bitter Medicine, there are currently no plans to release another book set in that world, though THE BOOK OF TONY is the next one. It's got half a vomit draft to it, so the likelihood of that book getting finished and sent out to Tachyon is pretty low, especially since KEY & VALE is on my mind right now, with RED ENVELOPE HUSBAND not far behind it (I've spoken to a person at the Taiwanese consulate here in Atlanta, and when I say that she was extremely confused about what I was doing and what questions I was asking, believe me, that it's an understatement). REH is probably not happening any time soon, but the horse girl middle grade novel might, which is why racing odds have shown up in this newsletter.
Never mind that it's racing season now and that I do follow horseracing lightly - my first stepfather worked at the Daily Racing Form and I had exposure early on to racing... anyway, it's been a terrible opening to the season, with a death toll of twelve, and it makes me think about what I want to do with the book, which is tentatively titled CATCHING THE WIND. I love horseracing. I don't love the drugs, the cheating, the dirty money, the eating disorders, or the organized crime. But the sport itself, the purity of a horse and jockey trying to get to the finish line first, is what I love and have loved. It's just that stakes racing is a cruel sport. I have to reassess whether that's something I want to highlight in a book, or if I'd rather go for something like Hidalgo or a Pony Express-type deal.
Okay, that's really depressing. Let's talk a little about music, and then I'll drop a little excerpt of THE BOOK OF TONY, as a treat.
Earlier last month my husband and I got into a discussion about music festivals and spent quite literally an entire night trying to fill a three-day festival of '90s alt-rock and grunge bands. Eventually this filtered down to making a personal one-day festival consisting of six bands or artists, past or present. It took a bit of thought, but here's Mia's Music Fest.
HEADLINER: Led Zeppelin
Hozier
Khruangbin
Anderson .Paak
L'arcenCiel
Portishead
I'll have to have a separate jazz festival for other artists. This is how I'm getting around the rules I made myself. What does your festival look like, and who's headlining?
There's lots more to talk about, but this is getting overlong. Hopefully I won't leave the mailing letter for another three months. The excerpt from THE BOOK OF TONY is below. See you on the B-side.
“Oh,” Tony says. “Well, shit.”
There’s very little he can do except cut them. Tony keeps himself still, imagining a tendril of qi coming from the laes. It appears and circles the threads of the pixie’s energy, constricting until one by one the threads are cut. Tony heaves a sigh of relief that nothing has happened, and little by little distributes the pixie’s qi, as amorphous and gossamer as cotton candy, back into its other meridians.
He’s sweating when he straightens, his back on fire. That took more effort than he realized. The other doctors are staring at him, an array of emotions on their faces, except for the African doctor, who is busy tapping away at her phone.
“The pixie should be okay long enough for transport,” Tony explains, “but this patient is easily the most critical. Be careful.” He turns back to the pixie, hands moving over the places he’s blocked, retrieving his qi.
There’s a hiss from the door, and it slides open. Tony pays it no mind, needing to concentrate on what he’s doing. The blockage has diminished thanks to his work, but it seems to be filling more rapidly than expected. It might, Tony surmises, have something to do with the threads connecting the part of the energy he sliced off. That’s not super unlike the redcap’s energy, though the presentation of the two afflictions are like night and day. Still, it’s a similarity.
Reluctantly, he starts thinking about the best way to get home.
“Ah, Dr. Mukherjee,” Dr. Clavret says. Tony is too preoccupied to give the name much thought. Mukherjee is a common Bengali name, as common as Gupta or Chakraborty. “You’ve made it! I trust traffic was not too bad?”
Someone—it must be Dr. Mukherjee—chuckles. “What a joke, yeah? Traffic here is always bad.” Dr. Mukherjee speaks with what Tony recognizes as a Londoner accent. Arun had been from London, though after some time in the States, his accent had softened. That laugh, too, is familiar.
Tony’s stomach tightens. It can’t be.
Dr. Clavret continues, oblivious to the chills sweeping over Tony’s skin, forcing every hair on his body to stand on end. “Dr. Jiang here was just giving us a demonstration on his method of stabilizing a patient. Why don’t I introduce you two?”
Tony isn’t sure whose legs are turning him around. Certainly, they aren’t his. If he had control of his own legs, he’d be running pell-mell the other way, crashing through the wall of the isolation unit, and continuing on until he broke through the exterior of the building to fall to the street below in what hopefully would be a swift death. If not, then the undiscerning drivers of Atlanta would run him over multiple times.
No, it’s not Tony’s legs turning him around. It’s the rotation of the earth, or the guidance of a spiritual hand, or any number of reasons. Tony doesn’t want to see him, and hasn’t wanted to see him for over twenty-five years.
“Dr. Tony Jiang, meet . . .” Dr. Clavret trails off, looking between Tony and Arun with a bewildered expression.
“Dr. Arun Mukherjee,” Tony croaks. Oh, God. Oh, God. It’s Arun. It’s Arun. All the protections he thought he had, all the affirmations he’s used as pep talks—they melt away at the sight of him. No, they don’t melt. They explode. They shatter, obliterated by the sight of the most beautiful, most brilliant, most infuriating man Tony has ever met, one who has been a recurring fleeting dream in the last however many interminable years without him.
“Tony?” Arun says, his voice gone suddenly hoarse. It’s impossible to make out the full expression on Arun’s damnably gorgeous face thanks to the surgical mask and face shield, but Tony knows how to read every involuntary twitch of Arun’s muscles. “Is it really you?”
“Uh,” Dr. Clavret says into the awkward silence, “I take it you two know each other.”
Carnally, Tony almost says, then bursts into laughter. This isn’t like him at all, going into hysterics in front of his ex-boyfriend, but there’s nothing else to do. Oh, what the fuck. It’s Arun.
He has to keep a cool head. He’s the guy who has a smart remark at the ready, with another one in the barrel just in case, but he’s on empty now. Tony braces himself against the pixie’s bedrail and laughs, laughs and laughs, because this has to be the cruelest joke played on him by the gods. “Shennong!” Tony wheezes, wiping at his eyes. “You motherfucker.”
“Could we have a moment?” Arun says. The disposable gown on Arun rustles as he approaches, but Tony can only see blue-booted feet as he continues to laugh. Arun takes Tony’s elbow, dragging him out to the negative pressure room, where Tony has to lean against the wall to keep laughing. He has to keep laughing. If he stops laughing, he’ll start crying, and that’s an embarrassment he’d rather not live through. The quota for the last few years has already been met, and he’s spent that currency on Elle.
The room finishes depressurizing, and Arun pulls Tony into the next room. He yanks off his face shield and flings it away, where it clanks pitifully into a corner. Next he removes his facemask. Finally, his whole face is revealed, and Tony quiets long enough to get a good look at him.
He’s painfully, achingly beautiful, with silver threaded into a thick, lush beard, wings of gray beginning to unfurl at his temples. Arun reaches out, his hand shaking visibly, and pushes Tony’s face shield up. Then, with deft touches that spark heat and longing in Tony’s chest, he takes off Tony’s mask.
“It is you,” Arun breathes. He staggers, fresh pain in his eyes, and falls against the sink, still wet from scrubbing in. “Tony. I thought you were dead.”
Tony inhales, exhales, inhales again. He locks his knees, which is likely a bad idea since that will make fainting all the easier, and gives Arun the truth. “Reports of my untimely demise are wildly inaccurate. Though right now, I wish they weren’t.”
“Don’t say that.” Arun puts a hand to his chest. “Don’t—I thought you were dead. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you make contact, leave me a message, something? Anything? It’s been twenty-five years, man!”
“And?” Tony lifts his chin. “You remember what happened between us the last time we talked. Why would I want to contact you? I’m just as impossible now as I was then. Nothing has changed. Really, you should be thanking me. I’ve done you a huge favor.”
“I mourned you,” Arun says, heated. “When you didn’t come back to get your stuff I went over to your house and—” He takes a breath.
“Don’t tell me that shit,” Tony spits. “Keep mourning me. I’m as dead to you as I’ve been. I’m leaving.”
“Not before we have a talk.” Arun pushes himself off the sink counter. “I’d like to know what happened. How you survived what happened to you. If it even happened to you.”
“It happened.” Tony folds his arms over his chest. “There, talk over. Tell Dr. Clavret I’ll forward him all my info. I’m out.”
“That’s not a talk and you know it.”
“What, do you need closure?” He can’t help it; he’s petty. “You want things all nice and neat? Want to be able to step back and make an assessment and draw a conclusion? Not this time. Maybe you need closure, but I don’t.”
He begins stripping himself of the protective gear, tugging on elastics and paperlike material and whatnot until they’re wadded into a ball in his hands. He stomps on the pedal to the biohazard waste receptacle and shoves the ball in with more force than necessary.
The door to the room opens and two nurses walk in, covered in personal protective equipment, wheeling a gurney. Behind them is a fae in a white lab coat, who Tony assumes is the doctor. “Hi,” the doctor says as Tony steps back to avoid being struck by the gurney. “Is Dr. Clavret in there?”
“Yes,” Tony responds. “You’re here for the patient, right? The pixie.”
“Yes. We have a room prepped and ready to go.”
Tony nods. “Good. You’ll need it real soon. Restraints too, just in case.”
He watches the doctor, gurney, and nurses enter the negative pressure room. On the other side, Dr. Clavret is staring at him, his normally brown eyes an eerie golden color. Whatever. Tony doesn’t care.
“Tony.” Arun’s voice is quiet.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“We really should talk.”
“If you’re going to show me pictures of your partner and kids, save it. I’m not interested.”
“I don’t have any kids,” Arun says.
“But you do have a partner? I’m happy for you, really. I always knew you wouldn’t stay single forever. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to escape before Dr. Clavret can get to me.”
“I’ll go with you.”
Those were words Tony wished he’d heard three decades ago. It’s ironic that he’s hearing them now. “No thanks. And, to reiterate, in case you didn’t hear me the last few times I’ve said it, I don’t want to talk either. Unless it involves an apology from you.”
Arun blinks, surprised. “An apology?”
Tony laughs without humor. “You’re right. I don’t want anything from you. Not nice to see you, Arun. Have a great life. Dr. Clavret knows how to reach me.” He grabs the door handle, wrenches it down, and exits.
Only to be greeted with unfamiliar hallways. He hadn’t paid much attention on the way in, and it has bitten him in his shapely ass. It doesn’t matter. Tony picks a direction. Left. Left is fine.
He isn’t more than a few steps away when the door opens. “Tony,” he hears Arun say.
Tony takes his cue from Beyonce and lifts both middle fingers in the air. At the end of the hall is a stairwell, to which he makes a beeline. It’s eight floors down, but Tony accepts the exercise, needing to get his jitters out.
He checks his phone as he descends. There’s a text message from Elle, as well as a missed call. It must be safe to return it.
She picks up on the third ring. “Tony, I’m so sorry.”
In the background, Luc says, “I’m not.”
Sassy asshole. “Let’s not have a repeat of that again.”
“We’ll do our best.” Elle muffles a laugh. “You left in a rush. What’s the medical thing about?”
“I’d rather not talk too much about it, but it’s about that thing I took care of last year.”
“The illness?”
“Yes.”
“It didn’t stay taken care of, did it?”
Tony frowns. “You sound a little smug.”
“I do not,” Elle replies. “Why would I sound smug about people being sick?”
It’s a good question, but a rhetorical one. Elle is too sweet ever to have those feelings. Tony, on the other hand, is a jerk and is proud of it.
“So what’s going on with the illness?”
Tony corners sharply into another flight of stairs. “It seems to have spread.”
“What? To Atlanta?”
“No, no. The patients are here in Atlanta at a hospital connected to the, uh, CDC or something. I’m not sure whether this is agency or not. It’s all been very muddy. Anyway, I’m going to be sending my notes and such to the head of the task force, who happens to be Dr. Clavret.”
“Oh! Please give him my regards.”
“Can’t,” Tony says. “I quit.”
“You—you what? You can’t quit! You haven’t even started!” Elle’s tone turns accusatory. “Tony! This is part of your responsibility! You can’t refuse to do it!”
“I can if I have to work with Arun!” Tony shoots back.
This time, Elle squawks into the phone. “You have to what?!”
“Work with Arun. Yes, the same one.” Tony pauses to take a breather. His heart is pounding erratically. If he sits down, or stops long enough, he’s toast. The sheer number of emotions trailing him will drown him if they catch him. He continues. “He’s on the task force. He’s the epidemiologist Clavret called in. Seeing as that’s a total dealbreaker, I said seeya and hightailed it out of there.”
Elle doesn’t reply for a moment, but that’s okay. She’s probably thinking. Unlike Tony, she isn’t mouthy, nor a fast-draw insult shooter. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Don’t you sister me.” Tony shakes a finger at her, though she can’t see it. “I’m fine.”
“I’ll sister you whether you like it or not. You just told me the illness you said you cured last year is not actually cured, and that it’s spreading, and that you’re in Atlanta, where the CDC is, so that means they’re worried about an epidemic. You’ve also just told me your ex-boyfriend is on the task force and you’ll have to work with him.”
“Yes.” Tony speaks slowly. “All of those things are true. Believe it or not, I am okay.”
“Are you coming back to San Fran?”
“I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” After selling the house in Raleigh, Tony had relocated to San Francisco along with Elle, taking over the apartment above Dr. Ma’s Chinese medicine shop. His car he keeps at Elle’s, with a strict warning not to touch it. If she wants to learn to drive, she can buy her own car and have Luc teach her.
“Come back to my house. We should have a talk.”
“Why does everyone want to have a goddamn talk?” Tony complains, his voice echoing in the stairwell. “I don’t need to talk with either you or Arun. If I’m coming to your house, let’s do something fun. You go to a movie or something. I'll swipe right on Grindr.”
Elle sighs so hard that Tony feels the gust of it through the phone. He exits the stairwell into an area with a shiny tiled floor, which he recognizes as part of the lobby of the hospital. “Stop trying to displace what you want to do on me. You’ve had some big things happening to you today, and you should talk about them. Especially about Arun. What happened?”
“Nothing,” Tony says. “Absolutely nothing. He came in, we saw each other, and I left. He said he wanted to talk and I said there’s nothing to talk about, have a nice life. I even flipped him off. He doesn’t have my number and I was kind of a dick to him, so he won’t be contacting me. Also, he has a partner.”
“All the more reason to come back and have some tea and talk about it.” Elle sounds sympathetic.
“No thanks.” Tony’s phone beeps. He pulls it from his ear quickly enough to see that it’s a text message. “I gotta go. Don’t wait up for me.”
Elle sighs again. Everyone is constantly sighing around him, and it’s irritating.
Or, that same little voice says, maybe he’s the one who is irritating, which is why everyone sighs at him.
Pfft. That can’t be true. Tony hangs up on Elle, then checks the message. It’s from Ken.
You walked out on Clavret?
Long story, Tony texts back. Thanks for the hookup. They don’t really need me, though.
A rolling eyes emoji appears, along with the text This is Fern.
Hi Fern, can you give Ken’s phone back? Thx.
Three dots pop up above the text box. Clavret asked for you personally.
You can tell him thank you, and not to take it personal.
Tony leans his weight against the set of revolving glass doors, exiting into an Atlanta spring afternoon. On everything, as far as the eye can see, is a patina of yellow, a gift from the hundreds of thousands of Bradford pear trees planted over the city. They have an assist from the many pine trees in the area.
Tony tries not to sneeze as walks out, his shoes leaving a trail of footprints behind in the pollen. From the main door he has a vantage of Emory University, and that’s where the charts his course. He’ll wander around until he finds an eatery.
“God dammit,” Tony mutters, pulling the cigarettes out of his pocket. He withdraws one, as well as the lighter he carries with him, and flicks on the flame. He draws the smoke in, holding it in his lungs. The campus is full of students bustling here and there, which doesn’t bother Tony. He isn’t the one in a hurry. Rather, he might be lost. He has no idea how to return to the temp agency branch and go home.
Home. The very last place on earth Tony wants to go, and yet the only place he can go to help fix the problem. “Look at me,” he grumbles to himself. “Actually wanting to go home.” Because Elle has a point. He promised her he would take more responsibility, and that meant handling the issues Yiwu had failed repeatedly to handle. It’s his duty, both as the next head of the house and as Elle’s brother, to pull a modicum of weight.
Not just a modicum. His weight, Arun be damned.
“Argh,” Tony growls, then hits his message history with Ken. I’ll need a little time to get the info I promised Clavret. Can he wait a couple of days?
I’ll just give him your number, Ken texts back.