Summer Updates and Excerpts
It's been a while since I've posted any kind of substantial update on my writing and teaching, so here we go!
First bit of news: I'll be teaching my 4-week introductory horror writing class with Atlas Obscura again this summer, with one section in July and another in mid-August. We cover idea generation, plot, character, scene and narrative structure, and generally have a lot of fun talking about horror. The last week is an outline/pitch workshop, and it's generally a good time. If you're interested, or know someone who might be, there's more information here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/experiences/horror-writing-course
Second piece of news: Burned and Buried, previously known on this patreon as Super Dead Girls, has been renamed Dead Girls Don't Dream. I handed in my last developmental edits in April, and am now into line editing. The novel has shifted DRAMATICALLY from when I first wrote it in 2019. It's gotten better (thankfully, because it definitely got worse there for a while) but it's also a completely different book. At some point, I'll write a more substantial post-mortem on the process of writing (and rewriting, and re-rewriting) the book, but for now...a short excerpt:
Riley caught sight of something moving in the corner of her eye. A long length of ribbon that had been tied to a tree, sun-faded to a light yellow. As she looked, she saw other scraps of fabric.
They were attached to a wolf tree.
She’d found the phrase in one of Toby’s many history books. White settlers in this part of the country had leveled the forests for farmland, and when they realized that the thin topsoil didn't produce much, they brought the forests back to log them. But smaller, controlled. Tamed. They took down the old, sprawling trees, not for wood, but because they wanted the room and the sunlight for more profitable trees. The logging companies called those ugly unprofitable oaks and hickories and maples "wolf trees" because they were like wolves preying on a flock of sheep, stealing resources away from a nice, tidy, forest that could be clearcut every twenty or forty years.
This wolf tree towered up, bigger than any others in Voynich Woods. Riley wasn't even sure what species it was. Its roots rose out of the ground and spread out in a roiling mass, and all along them were glints of metal where silver coins had been hammered in. Iron nails bled rust down onto the bark, and bits of cloth, bleached and tattered from the weather fluttered amid the branches. Generations of people had carved letters and sometimes full words into the gray bark. Shoes were up there as well; boots and half-rotted sneakers, lonely pairs of baby shoes.
Not just any wolf tree. The Wishing Tree.
Surely this tree is perfectly normal, and nothing bad will happen there. Right? Right.
Last bit of news: I wrote my first short story since 2020. This was a solicited story, and I was terrified of turning it in, since it took me three tries to find a story I wanted to tell, and then another three drafts as I re-taught myself how to contain a story to 3500 words (instead of the novel and novella length that I've become accustomed to). I assumed it'd be rejected (this 100% still happens with solicited stories) or at least get a revise & resubmit, but...nope! Apparently, I can still write short fiction, even if I've lost all confidence for it.
It's sort of an ode to being a high school theater kid; and to Thornton Wilder, one of my favorite sad, repressed, gay writers; and to the girls I had crushes on in high school without understanding they were crushes; and to choosing both the joys and miseries of life. Here's a quick excerpt:
“Cue forty-eight, go. Stagehands, go," Angela says softly in her ear. Soft blue lights come up downstage left, enough for her, Rina, and Melinda to see the spike tape on the floor. They come out unobtrusively, carrying the tables and chairs to recreate the Webbs’ kitchen. After the furniture is set, Lynn crosses the stage to the makeshift graveyard. If Angela is the Stage Manager, all-seeing and somehow holy, then Lynn and the other stagehands are psychopomps, mostly invisible laborers except for when it's funnier or more poignant to remind the audience or the actors that they're there. She holds out her hand to escort Emily back to her family kitchen on her twelfth birthday, the day she has decided to relive.
Lynn's hand shakes as she holds it out, and Carla June’s is sweaty when they touch. Every night for the three performances, her soft, damp palm crosses Lynn’s. There's another of those dips in time and space, and Lynn suddenly sees---
She sees the first time Carla June will look at her, exactly the way she dreamed. Lynn isn’t sure it’s real, until Carla June convulsively squeezes her hand. "It's a magic," she'll say later, "isn't it? Theater, I mean. You're onstage with empty hands but everyone sees your heart spilling out of you."
I hope you all are doing well, and that you are finding joy and community during Pride month. <3 (Also, apologies if any of you are on my Patreon as well and are seeing this update twice. My bandwidth for self-promotion is dangerously low these days, so I'm reusing rather than writing something new.)