XV. The Devil
The Devil. When I chose this card for this month’s newsletter, I was thinking about the cult leader who is the mastermind behind the cooking competition in my cosmic horror cooking competition book, which I’m currently calling Ultimate Sacrifice. What kinds of people become cult leaders, and who is drawn to them and why? Especially in this case, where the cult leader is someone who has a direct line to the Elder Gods (if a direct line to powerfully destructive and cruelly indifferent gods exists). The Devil is a card about obsession and addiction, a compulsion to power. I haven’t fully identified the nature of their addiction and what deep well of emptiness inside them is driving it, but it’s giving me a direction for an important character.
This is pretty representative of the stage of outlining I’m at. I have the general shape of the story but not a lot of the specifics, and before I can get to those, I like to start defining the major characters and their relationships. I’ve tried a lot of different approaches to character development, and the one that seems to work best for me is thinking about people in the context of those around them. Who do they love, what is their community like, who is their best friend and how do they relate to each other? And from there, finding the complications in the characters and their relationships is what gives me the character arcs that help to propel the characters through the story. I think horror is so much scarier when you’re connected with its characters and are invested in everything they have to lose and fight for.
Other than that, I just finished the last round of revisions on Ghosts of Bakersfield. So now it’s time to start working on my query letter and start preparing for querying. I’m really proud of this book and how it’s shaped up, and hopefully I’m successful in finding an agent who agrees.
I’m also in the pre-outlining stage of an alien invasion horror parody of a management book I read for work, so I’ve been watching a bunch of alien invasion media. This is probably the most fun phase of working on a book (although I do really love revisions as well, so it’s hard to say for sure), where I’m just letting the story stew in my head while I gather ideas like a magpie collecting shinies. I probably won’t start outlining it until I have the first draft of Ultimate Sacrifice complete although I might try outlining while drafting. Working on revisions and outlining concurrently has been working really well for me, so I’m interested in trying to multitask some of the other phases. We shall see!
Recommendations
V: the Miniseries (1984)
V had a pretty big impact on me as a child, and I was delighted to find when revisiting it that it really holds up in a lot of ways (the original miniseries, anyway. The Final Battle sequel miniseries and the tv show, to increasingly lesser extents). The Visitors, although initially overtly friendly, are in reality mostly fascists here to exploit the earth and humanity to their own terrible ends. It’s transparently a metaphor for Nazi Germany, down to the Visitor Youth and the use of propaganda and imprisonment of dissenters. One of the things I really like about V is that there are dissenters among the Visitors, and they take a lot of risks to aid their human allies in their resistance efforts, so it’s not that the aliens are inherently evil. Some of them have chosen to be evil, just like the humans. Some of the special effects are very 1980s TV (Diana eating the rodent, so impactful at the time, now looks pretty goofy), and I don’t understand the schlick schlick noise every door on the spaceships makes, but otherwise it’s definitely worth a watch.
Mickey 17
I love Bong Joon Ho, so I was pretty determined not to miss this one, and I’m very glad I didn’t. If you’re familiar with his work, I’d say this one is tonally somewhere in between Snowpiercer and Okja, with some creepy-cute aliens endangered by the colonists on the spaceship, a lot of fairly obvious critique of capitalism and cult-like behavior, and a surprisingly upbeat note about loving the many versions of a person. Mark Ruffalo’s performance was slightly off-putting for me, but ultimately I found his character arc cathartic.
Black Bag
I absolutely love this kind of dark romance. Two terrible people love each other and everyone around them is in danger because of it? Yes please. I saw a tumblr post referring to sodium chloride ships and I thought it described the dynamic between Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in this movie very well. I can already tell that this is going on the comfort watch list, and I want to pair it with Phantom Thread, one of my other favorite dark romances.
But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo
This is a delightful sapphic gothic romance with spiders, both as food and pets, and spider monsters, both as threat and love interest. Pretty perfectly aligned with my interests, obviously, but it’s also just beautifully well written. I particularly love how the house is described; I can picture it clearly and I would love to either visit or at least get a youtube video tour.
A Gentleman’s Gentleman by TJ Alexander
TJ Alexander absolutely never misses for me. Their books are delightfully, deliciously written romps, with characters and relationships who sparkle on every page. This is their first Regency romance, and it features a trans man struggling with the pressures of his role and needing to get married to maintain his position. One of the things I always look for in romance novels is strong supporting characters, and A Gentleman’s Gentleman has them in a genuinely lovely community of people who are there rooting for our protagonist and his love interest (and other interests as well!). I need more! Thankfully I already know another one is coming next year.
Double Feature + Food Pairing
This month’s suggested double feature is Snowpiercer (2013) and Train to Busan (2016), paired with sushi and sour gummy worms.