Thank you again for reading Novella, and for your patience during my recent hiatus. “We’ve had a lot going on,” as they say. Hasn’t everyone? Do you ever find yourself in a state of complete overwhelm where your inbox feels like a snowball bearing down on you, gaining mass and momentum by the second? This tends to make me go into a shell and just try to do the things that must be done today. Which of course makes the snowball grow even more daunting.
It’s important to remind yourself that, once you’ve taken care of your family and kept the kitchen stocked and the roof on, you need to carve out a few minutes a day for your own creative work. A few minutes a day may feel impossible, but it can be the difference between a life spent fulfilling millions of small duties you can’t remember completing and a life in which you make something on a regular basis.
I’ve recently completed a draft of a new novel—speculative fiction, quite different from my previous books—and I’m deep into the process of revising and editing. It usually takes me as long to revise a book as it takes me to write it—or, often, quite a bit longer. When I revise, I end up taking the whole book apart and putting it back together sentence by sentence, which is perhaps not the most efficient way to work, but I can’t seem to find another way. I’m really excited about this novel and can’t wait to share it with you, when the time is right.
The Sequel!
I’m also nearly finished with the sequel to my last book, The Wonder Test. The sequel is my next book on contract and therefore will be the next one to see the light of day. It has been a joy to spend more time with Special Agent Lina Connerly, the protagonist of The Wonder Test. The sequel finds her in a new country (one where I might have lived). Her son Rory is a junior in high school. She’s working a new case, grappling with French bureaucracy, trying to find her way out of the fog. She has even become a dog person, because, after all, people can change.
On Writing a Revenge Plot: the novella-in-progress I’m serializing here on Substack
I started this story about five years ago. It began as a short story for the anthology Alabama Noir, edited by my friend Don Noble. As I was tying up the story, I realized the idea was longer than a story and decided to turn it into a novel. The short story form gave me the impetus to write the idea but not the space to say everything I wanted to say.
Of course, sometimes a thing doesn’t want to escape its original form. It has to be coaxed out of its shell. I shelved the novel and returned to it many times over the years. At that point I realized maybe I was trying to make a leap too far—from short story to novel. Maybe it was a novella instead. That tweak of thinking gave me a new window into the story. Sometimes you just have to trick yourself into getting started again. A few months ago, I brought it over to Substack to give myself a kick in the pants. You can read the first episode here.
I wanted to tell a story about a mother’s grief, but also, of course, about the state of the world. I have written all of my novels in first person. Most have featured a central character and an intimate partner in some state of harmony or disharmony. Writing this novella in third person limited has been a challenge. The narrative depends upon a cast of characters whose actions, taken together, are in large part responsible for the state of grief in which the mother finds herself. Trying to get my head around the motives of those characters, to make them real people instead of caricatures, is the issue of this novella but also, in these charged times, the issue of life. How do we get by in the world if we cannot see people whose views exist in such violent opposition to our own as humans with an individual story instead of as caricature villains?
Sometimes you just have to trick yourself into getting started again.
And yet, the story must have villains, for sure. It is a revenge plot. As a person who is mildly conflict-avoidant in most situations (though I do have buttons that turn on my grrrrr response, like people who are rude to servers), revenge is new territory for me. The protagonist of this novella has been pushed to her limit, so far that she finds herself on a mission to make the world listen.
Structurally speaking, this book should be quite simple to write. I began with a plan, an actual outline, which I never do. Never ever. But the plan stymied rather than inspired me. I’m getting back to the novella/novel/whatever-it-is slowly in this newsletter, abandoning the plan and just writing forward through the narrative, to see where it takes me. Thank you for reading along.
So far, I have posted chapters one through eight. If you’re new to this newsletter, you might want to start here. I’ll be posting Chapter 9 very soon.
Thank you again for reading!
About the cover image: we recently visited our son in Winston Salem, North Carolina. One of my favorite shops in Winston is Mast General Store, which has a room dedicated to barrels filled with candy…and a Moon Pie wall. It is nice to reminded that there are portals into unbridled joy hidden away in the most unexpected places.