Things I Cannot Say

The illusion of this newsletter is that no one reads it so I can say whatever I want here. This is just a convenient fiction. You do read it, there is a dashboard with an uncomfortable amount of detail. And while you are a small group in internet world, you are a massive number if we are talking a house party. Also all of these entries go on the actual internet where they can be read by any person anywhere with a phone. (Do you ever wonder who the people are from your past who internet stalk you? I would LOVE to know this because I give them SO MUCH MATERIAL.)

But I like the illusion anyway and still operate with that in mind. It's something you kind of have to do when you write anyway and I've built the muscle over a few decades now.

The biggest thing I have not been saying much is: I wrote a book and I am currently in the middle of querying it. (This means I am sending it out to agents to see if they will represent me and try to sell it to publishers.) It is the second time I've done this. The first time was a failure, obviously. And the first time I kept almost everything about the book, even its existence, to myself with a handful of exceptions.

This time I have decided to be more open about it. Probably because I am well past the line of middle-aged and I do indeed give a lot less fucks than I did before. But also, this book kind of took over my life for the 2.5 years it took to write it. So most of my friends have heard about it as I have talked at length about how weird and great the whole experience has been.

The problem with this book is that it is the worst kind. I wrote a memoir. I spent many many years telling people I would never do this. But I think I just wasn't ready yet. And now here I am, ready, apparently. Writing a memoir requires a real scraping out of your own soul, at least the way I did it. It is very intense therapy you do all by yourself. And then do again and again with each new draft. It is not for the faint of heart.

But writing it was a joyful act. It made me really happy even while it totally fucked me up emotionally. (Fucked me up in a good way.) Now that it is done, there is no more joy, only dread. And the best case scenario is just a few more years of dread. Books really are a weird business! You go through one bad part and then when that part is over, even if you get the outcome you wanted, the next step is... another bad part! Just bad parts all the way down!

Right now I am querying. So I spent all this time writing. And then I spent time crafting a carefully worded letter pitching the book and researching who I should pitch it to. Then I sent out a bunch of emails. And then you just sit. It's like you're applying to colleges except most of them will never send you anything at all, not even a rejection letter.

If someone says they like your query and asks to read the entire book, then you are happy for the five minutes it takes you to respond and attach the file. Then you just sit again. You sit even worse than before! Because you can basically consider a query a failure after about 3 months without a reply. But once you send a manuscript it's absolutely not unheard of to take 6 months or 9 months or even a year to get a reply.

I sent 9 queries at the end of September. In the month since I have received 1 rejection and 2 full requests and 6 nothings. These are actually pretty good numbers and yet they are also terrible. I want nothing more than to know what is going to happen but it will probably be months until I do. Soon I will send the next batch of queries out to 10 more agents. (It's a small query list compared to people who send out to dozens and dozens, but memoir is a weird little genre and not a lot of people have a good track record with it.) But I will not know for sure the book is dead or alive until... lol who knows.

And even if I get an agent tomorrow, the next part is that the agent sends the book out to editors just like I sent it out to agents. And we wait to see if anyone will like it. AGAIN.

I want to talk about this all the time because it is terrible. But I have nothing to say except that I feel terrible! Every day it is the same terrible and I have to use as much mental energy as I can to push it to the back of my brain and not think about it. This can be an effective tactic except every time something good happens, it messes me up and makes it that much harder to get back to not thinking about it. Every piece of good news is somehow even worse than all the pieces of bad news.

There is a reason you don't talk about this stuff publicly. I have browsed the AbsoluteWrite forums and everyone who is stressing about querying sounds like an obsessive jerk because that is the only way to sound about this stuff. It is better to try and hold it as much as possible in your own brain. Unless you're the kind of demented weirdo who spends a few years writing a whole book about your own stupid life and also sends a regular newsletter where you say whatever shit you feel like to the poor souls who somehow asked to have this in their inbox.

The other thing about books you do not talk about publicly is when you don't like something. Apparently we do not do that anymore unless you get to write a takedown for a fancy publication and write something so brutal no one will ever recover. But since I've already violated the accepted rules of protocol, let's keep going.

I am really mad at this book. I am mad at this book because I went back and REREAD THE FIRST BOOK so that I could then read the second one. The first book, The Plot, I was super skeptical about and then ended up really enjoying. It's an impeccably crafted thriller. But The Sequel? Sucks.

I cannot tell you literally anything about it because just giving the premise of the 2nd book totally ruins the end of the 1st book. Let me just say that the second book has no stakes at all, it does not matter how anything turns out. And, even worse, it just repeats the same plot from the first book over again. All the satirical elements that felt biting and fun in the first book don't really work here. And honestly the whole set up makes no sense. PLUS it could have had about 50 pages trimmed out and it would have read a lot better, which means I'm not only mad at the author but the editor as well.

So go ahead and read The Plot if you haven't, it's a lot of fun, a unique thriller for sure. But this one is awful and I'm mad at it and if you have nice things to say about it, I do not want to hear them. (Somehow it has a 3.81 rating on Goodreads right now, because thriller readers on Goodreads give everything 5 stars, it's absolutely useless.)

If my book never gets published, I will be fine. I already know I will because I already did that! And I think I will feel even better than last time because the experience of doing it was so good, so personally meaningful, that I feel like the best of it is already over no matter what the outcome. And if it does get published, then I will have the joy of someone leaving a snotty 2-star review of it on Goodreads just like I did for The Sequel. The circle of life.

And now for some October releases.

Feast While You Can took me by surprise and has ended up being one of my favorite horrors of the year. (It's a short list, with the big increase of published horror books there are A LOT more that I don't like.) It's weird and I love weird. There was a point in the book where a thing happened and I was like "Yes, absolutely, I am committed to this book now." This has shades of folk horror and a vaguely Italian setting, but it's pretty gay and has dysfunctional families and a monster that is one of my recent favorites. Give it a little bit of time to get going, it's very rewarding.

I know we all like to pick on Paula Hawkins because Girl on the Train was such a weirdly huge book, but the thing about her is she's actually pretty good! And her last two books have been much slower burns that I've really enjoyed. I think she threads the needle very nicely here. It's not nearly as whiplash fast as GOTT but it's not as slow as A Slow Fire Burning (so slow it even had slow in the title). It's a bit slow for big thriller readers but quite quick for more literary folks and should have pretty broad appeal. Great ending, too.

I was into this but I absolutely hated the ending, so it's a tricky one to figure out how to recommend. Solomon writes really heavily about really traumatic stuff and I think horror is a great genre for them, but this wasn't it for me. I have a lot of thoughts about how so much trauma-based horror is just not working the last few years that I will save for another day.

So along with rereading The Plot I also reread the first two Semiosis books to prep for the release of the third, Usurpation. I did not reread book 1 before reading book 2 and had regrets so this time I did it right. And it turns out I liked the second book, Interference, so much more when I had the first book fresh in my head! Unfortunately I just did not get into Usurpation. I have lots of quibbles but the major thing that I think folks who are fans of the series should know is that the whole damn book is set on earth. I do not care about earth! Pax, the planet where the first two books are set, is where my heart lies and I have given up on earth forever. I do not care about what happens to the rainbow bamboo on earth, I would so much rather just imagine it and get to continue to see what is going on with all my Pax friends and are they still at war with the corals and how are all these species getting along now. It's so complex and Usurpation, while also quite complex, just felt boring to me. I do not care about warring humans. They are all the same and I really really struggled to stay with this one.

We have reached the end of Big Book Season. I have read only 4 more books for the entire rest of 2024. (fwiw I'm into March of 2025 and it is... not going great, I haven't liked anything very much at all.) This means I can probably start looking at a best list UGH but I am not sure if I want to do that this year. I just dislike them so much.

But now that I'm done with the memoir I keep having lots of things I want to say in the newsletter again. So maybe you will get a little more of me, who knows.