Hi there fellow wallowers,

Does anyone else think summer is the most gothic season? Maybe it's because I read Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy the summer I moved to the East Coast (US), or maybe it's the slow suffocation of humidity, the screaming discordant chorus of cicadas and frogs, the suffocating creep of kudzu vines... you get the picture.

Adding to my personal Scorpio and autumn-aligned sense of unease about the summer months is the fact that schedules and routines get mushier in the heat. In my day job, cascading vacations means work takes on a different tenor. And yet, I still have tasks. Work and writing and other various things I pile on because summer is this endless liminal space in which I should be able to accomplish everything.

All of that is to say that June has been a month of juggling. I finished a round of revisions on my novel and immediately pivoted to audio drama production. I was able to share the script of the final season with my cast after over a year of drafting and revising. Which, wow. Ending a series is an emotional experience. Anyway, sharing the script was just the start of my production to-do list. I also updated cast onboarding docs and tallied up lines and created a casting call which goes out on Saturday. (Want to audition?? more below.)

And I did all of that before the month was halfway over!

July is going to be a month I take more or less off from writing, in part because I need the break and in part because I'm teaching for the first time in five years. Plus keeping up with my day job.😱

I might have #regerts. Ask me in August.

Publications

My flash fiction, "CoverLetter_Version5," about academic job searches and what happens when you have to keep reshaping yourself for tentative futures, goes live at Small Wonders on July 3rd!

Oh, and look! I've got top billing on the cover?!!

Finishing The Way We Haunt Now

Production is officially underway for the final season of my lighthearted horror audio drama, The Way We Haunt Now.

My season three casting call goes out July 1st, (but you can have a sneak peek at that link as a treat).

We'll record remotely between July and August, then I'll do dialogue editing and hand things over to the brilliant sound designer, Brad Colbroock. If you need to hire someone to do sound, they are amazing!

The season will be released in Spring 2024 (Episode 21 drops March 2nd), and I'm currently planning a fundraiser to help pay the cast & crew.

It's a pretty massive production:

• 19 returning cast

• ~37 new roles

• 13 episodes (about half an hour each)

• 350 page script

4th Street Fantasy

Somewhere in all the chaos, I managed the trek to Minneapolis for 4th Street Fantasy convention, which was a whirlwind of a weekend full of amazing panels and conversations and a reunion with some of my Viable Paradise cohort. It's a single-track convention with deep, rich panels and opportunities to connect with other writers. I highly recommend it.

June Reading

This month, I read so many amazing things:

• I've been raving about A.Y. Chao's Shanghai Immortal on Twitter. It's SO good, y'all.

• Rowenna Miller's The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill is a bittersweet slowburn about sisterhood and it made me rethink assumptions of what stories can and should do.

• Freydis Moon's Heart, Haunt, Havoc was unsettling AF while also still being a great romance, which is a hard balance to strike. So impressed.

• I finally read Becky Chambers's A Psalm for the Wild Built and really related to Sibling Dex's struggle. I, also, just want to live, y'know?

Up Next:

• I'm currently reading Claudia Gray's The Late Mrs. Willoughby, which is the sequel to The Murder of Mr. Wickham. It's lovely.

• I've got two R.F. Kuang books in my TBR: Babel and Yellowface. I'm going to read one of them in July, but which is a mystery even to me!

• I also started S.A. Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi and then the library cruelly ripped it away and it was going to be a months' long wait, so I bought the hardcover and the audiobook because I was enjoying it that much. (And also, I think they made some interesting changes to the audiobook to compensate for the medium shift, so I want to compare!) That's at the very top of my TBR for sure.

I feel like the only way to end this month's newsletter is with Sarah Jarosz's cover of "The Book of Right On."

Thanks for wallowing with me! Courtney