Welcome back to Haunted Books & Haunted Girls, a newsletter all about writing and ghosts. I’m so happy that you’re joining me. If you haven’t subscribed already, please consider signing up below (for free!), so you never miss an issue of this newsletter. It’s always spooky szn here.
Drumroll please! It’s the dawn of a new era for this newsletter, as I’m going to start using it for actual news, of which there might be a lot in the coming months (read into that statement as much as you’d like, eye emoji, eye emoji). This space will still, of course, consist of musings on writing, horror, and all things in between, but with a bit more sprinkling of updates. And, like most author newsletters, if you subscribe, you’ll hear it right here first…wink.
With that, we’re going to start with some ICYMI announcements!
Last month, I had a short story published with Crow and Cross Keys. It’s a queer and horror-bent Hansel and Gretel reimagining, that follows a now-grown Gretel as she returns to the Witch’s cottage years later. It basically answers the question: What if Gretel just became worse?
You can read And Gretel on Crow and Cross Keys here.
In similar news, I have a dark academia short story in Voyage YA’s upcoming anthology, ALL THE WAYS A HEART BURNS. My short is called “Records Room” and it’s centered around art student with a secret (and nightmarish) talent. The cover reveal dropped recently on Instagram below, and order details are coming soon!
For reasons that are not at all suspicious or vague, I’ve been thinking about revisions.
I’ve talked about this before, but despite the fact that I love to be dramatic about it (I am a Leo sun/rising after all), revising is my favorite part of the writing process. Drafting is much harder for me, because I get caught up in wanting things to be perfect, and it can be challenging to remember that I’m just telling myself the story at that stage. But in revisions, it’s where everything comes together…
…except first, it’s a hot hot hot mess.
My personal mode of revising is true organized chaos. I always start with a color-coded list, broken up by chapter, that lists all the changes, cuts, and adjustments I plan to attack. From there is when things usually descend into mayhem; my Scrivener or Word doc is in pieces, I have random pages of prose “to use later,” and my desk becomes littered with haphazard sticky notes to myself that just contain one or two words like map coordinates or green ribbon, which is a super-fun game for future De.
But as I revise (read: as I take my book apart), I keep a master list in a notebook of all the things I need to come back to in a second pass. This list always gets unruly because revising is often a domino effect for me; one thing changes, and so another does, and so another. This list will also contain those random bursts of plot hole fixes (that always seem to materialize during teeth-brushing, why IS that?) or unhinged ideas that can only arise after you’ve spent some more time in that world. (Sidebar, a writer I know once referred to revisions as “fanfiction about your own characters,” and I always think about that when I’m drafting out new scenes.) But eventually, that master list—that can sometimes be several pages long, and full of incoherent scribbles—is all crossed off, and it feels like the biggest accomplishment in the world.
I’m not sharing my process to be like “this is how you should do it” (everyone has their own method to the madness of course), but rather to just say that most of my revising is not pretty. There are times when I seriously worry that I’ve broken my book, that there’s no way to stitch it back up, but this always proves untrue.
It’s in that re-stitching, I think, where the magic usually happens. I’ve said it before, but it’s my absolute favorite moment: That moment when you write a scene or a line or a plot escalation and sit back and wonder: How was this never in it before?! Those moments are so valuable, because they serve as a reminder of why all the work is worth it.
Revising is mess, and chaos, but it’s also excavation. It’s digging into one layer and then another and then another. It’s poking and slicing at the bones of your story. It’s journeying toward your characters’ truth. It’s taking it apart, and putting it back together differently.
It’s carving and dissecting and stitching and mending, until you get to the way your story was supposed to be written. The way you meant to write it this whole time.
As you can probably guess from the above, I’ve been in revision mode lately. I can’t tell you why (YET), but I can tell you some things that have been my lifeline while on this particular secret deadline:
Gingerbread coffee
The Fall of the House of Usher soundtrack (or really, anything by The Newton Brothers)
Sending snippets to my CPs and beta readers who have seen this particular book go through a lot of different iterations and somehow aren’t sick of it (or me)
Commissioning character art (believe me when I tell you I am feral over what has appeared in my inbox recently, and I cannot wait to show everyone)
There’s so much I’m looking forward to sharing in the coming months. Thanks, as always, for hanging out with me.
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