Author: RebeccaFrostWrites

ARC review: You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

I was lucky to be granted a NetGally advanced copy of You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace. I didn’t know anything about the book, but the back cover certainly made it seem right up my alley:

The night after her father’s funeral, Claire meets Lucas in a bar. Lucas doesn’t know it, but it’s not a chance meeting. One thoughtless mistyped email has put him in the crosshairs of an extremely put-out serial killer. But before they make eye contact, before Claire lets him buy her a drink—even before she takes him home and carves him up into little pieces—something about that night is very wrong. Because someone is watching Claire. Someone who is about to discover her murderous little hobby.

The thing is, it’s not sensible to tangle with a part-time serial killer, even one who is distracted by attending a weekly bereavement support group and trying to get her art career off the ground. Will Claire finish off her blackmailer before her pursuer reveals all? Let the games begin . . .

You’d Look Better as a Ghost is a bit You, a bit Dexter, a bit Hannibal, and a bit Fight Club – but not the Fight Club part of Fight Club. Claire is a serial killer with a dark sense of humor and her own personal code, and when we first meet her she’s reeling from the death of her father and trying to cope in the way it seems only she can. Her bereavement support group doesn’t seem to be helping … and might actually end up hurting as it throws her together with people she’d otherwise never have met.

Claire’s an engaging narrator obsessed with observing “ordinary people” and doing her best to fit in just enough so that her hobby – no, not her art; her other hobby – isn’t recognized. For the most part she keeps to herself, which makes the bereavement group such a challenge, since she has to figure out how, exactly, “ordinary people” act in that situation. She makes some insightful comments about the other characters while at times missing the obvious about both them and herself, making you turn the page to see when – or if – she’ll realize it, or if she’s just set herself up for a fall.

If you like the voices of Joe Goldberg, Dexter Morgan, or the narrator in Fight Club, then you need to pre-order You’d Look Better as a Ghost. Part comedy, part thriller, and guaranteed to keep you up until the last page is turned, this book kept me laughing – and guessing – to the end.

Five stars. You’d Look Better as a Ghost comes out March 26 from Penguin Books.

The Ripper Inside Us – coming this spring!

Why hello there. You might be curious about what I’ve been working on lately. Let’s take a little peek.

The Ripper Inside Us: What Interpretations of Jack Reveal About Ourselves is coming this spring from McFarland, and in many ways it’s the counterpoint to my first book, The Ripper’s Victims in Print: The Rhetoric of Portrayals Since 1929. That one looks at how authors have spent the past century or so writing about the Canonical Five women murdered during the Autumn of Terror, and The Ripper Inside Us examines the ways we’ve presented, and represented, the murderer.

Let’s take a look at the cover copy:

The story of Jack the Ripper has had continual interest since he stalked the streets of Whitechapel during the Autumn of Terror in 1888. During this time, the murders of the Canonical Five made headlines all over the world while in the modern day, the Ripper story continues to permeate all forms of media on the page, screen, in podcasts, and in fiction. We continue to search for something we will likely never, and perhaps do not even wish to discover: Jack’s true name.

This book looks at the lasting intrigue of Jack the Ripper and how his story, and the stories of the Canonical Five victims, are brought back to life through modern lenses. As psychological approaches and scientific techniques advance, the Ripper’s narrative evolves, opening a more diverse means of storytelling and storytellers. How these storytellers attempt to construct a full tale around the facts, including the burning questions of motive and identity, says more about us than the Ripper.

While I limited myself to, uh, print for The Ripper’s Victims in Print, my sources for The Ripper Inside Us run the gamut from print to stage to screen to waxworks. Basically we won’t let this story die – we keep adapting it to all kinds of media and situations, including romance novels, of all things. Katrina Jan‘s doing her doctoral work on the Ripper and romance novels, and she’s one of the awesome contacts I’ve made while working on representations of the Ripper.

The thing is, there are so few hard facts about the Ripper crimes. They were committed in 1888, and much of what was collected or written about them at the time has been lost or otherwise muddied in the retelling. Can we trust newspaper reports of the crimes or their versions of witness accounts? How much can we really glean from the surviving official documents? What assumptions can we make based on Victorian forensics?

On the one hand it becomes a game of connect the dots, asking us to take the small pieces we can trust and turn them into an integrated whole that makes sense. On the other it becomes a sort of Thematic Apperception Test: there are snapshots of a sort, but they’re ambiguous, and the story the viewer tells about the image reveals more about the teller than the scene being described.

When we take a look at these crimes and the evidence surrounding them and make a case for a suspect, we’re telling a story that makes sense for us, based on our own personal experience and what we have been taught by our home culture. One element of the tale is very nearly standard: the vast majority of us agree that the Ripper was indeed a Jack, because we can easily believe that a man would violently kill a large number of strange women. Police in 1888 didn’t have modern psychology or the benefit of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, but they – and the newspapers – agreed that a man could do this. His reasons might not have been clearly defined as they are today (for example, the fact that we currently recognize four types of serial killers, which handily gives us four broad motives) but the collective mind agreed that these murders were the work of a man.

When various authors, directors, or creators work to assign motive and identity to the Ripper, they explain what makes sense to them, in their time, and given current thought about violence. Some of these narratives are short-lived or otherwise quickly adapted into fiction – for example, the idea that Jack the Ripper was in fact Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale – while others linger and withstand changing ideas about violent crime.

The Ripper Inside Us has also received this advanced praise:

“The Ripper Inside Us: What Interpretations of Jack Reveal About Ourselves offers a holistic and rigorous examination of a controversial subject which had imbedded itself into our cultural psyche. The spectre of the Ripper has been with us for over 130 years, assuming a multiplicity of shapes through the decades. Frost adeptly stalks these manifestations of an unsolved mystery that refuses to die, exploring everything from nonfiction and novels to walking tours, documentaries, podcasts, wax works and movies while asking the uncomfortable question, what does our need to keep telling these stories say about us? Both balanced and insightful, Frost has expertly crafted what will be an essential text for anyone researching or teaching this subject.”

Hallie Rubenhold, Baillie Gifford Prize-winning author of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

What does our need to keep telling these stories say about us? Mostly, I think, that we really need to take a step back and ask ourselves that … and then take a look at the stories we’ve told, and why we find them so believable. If we can empathize with a serial killer enough to metaphorically step into his shoes and explain his actions … well. How far do we actually stand from him, after all?

Blood Sisters – the first reviews!

Things have been busy, between getting ready for the start of the school year and Blood Sisters coming out, and the first reviews have been posted as part of Zooloo’s Book Tours. I’m very grateful to Zoé and the bloggers who read and shared and reviewed Blood Sisters. Here’s the official tour page where you can find all of the reviews linked.

I’m going to share some of my favorite snippets here.

Thank you to all these book bloggers for their kind words! And remember, if you love a book, don’t keep quiet about it! Post about it, write reviews, and tell your friends. You never know when you’re going to help an author make another sale or help a reader find their next favorite book.

two weeks until Blood Sisters!

It’s two weeks until Blood Sisters comes out! You can pre-order a kindle copy and add it to your Goodreads “want to read” shelf. And, of course … I can get even more excited!

The cool kids are still doing arrows, right?

Last week we had some tropes. This week is more “things you’ll find in this book.”

a serial-killing brother

This isn’t really a whodunit sort of book. In the opening scene, you learn that Nessa’s brother, Brent, is in prison for being a serial killer. He’s been there a while, too, so this isn’t really a Making a Murderer sort of deal where you doubt whether Brent actually murdered anyone … or is it? Because that first scene can be summed up as:

Skye: I don’t think Brent killed my sister, Sunni. Actually, I think Sunni killed all of them and framed Brent.

Nessa: … wtf.

The thing is, Nessa knows a lot more about her brother than Skye does.

She knows he belongs behind bars.

a true crime podcaster

Brent’s murders haven’t actually made it onto a podcast because he chose to stand mute and literally didn’t say anything. Ever. Which makes it hard for a podcast to use sound bytes and tell his story, so … they haven’t.

Except Skye might not be too pleased at Nessa’s refusal to engage with her theory. If she wants a wider audience, she just has to figure out who to call.

pine trees. lots of pine trees.

This book takes place in and around Houghton, Michigan, including going up the Keweenaw Peninsula. (That’s pronounced KEE-wi-naw, for the record.) And the peninsula is also known as Copper Island because, once they dredged out the Portage Canal in the mid-1800s, that’s what it became. There’s only one way across – the Portage Lake Lift Bridge – and, once you go north, you’re surrounded by Lake Superior.

And it’s full of pine trees.

So if, as a nonspecific example, someone forces you to drive up the Keweenaw, you can’t exactly go far, but you can still end up in the middle of nowhere where nobody will find you. Or your body.

Hypothetically speaking.

(nearly) identical twins

Sunni and Skye are identical twins, except for the fact that one disappeared a decade ago and is presumed dead, and the other is out here bugging Nessa with her weird theory. (Skye’s probably seen Gone Girl too many times.) Plus Skye seems to think that’s she’s a fairly normal and well-adjusted human being while her sister’s a serial killer. A serial killer who framed Brent and then, somehow, managed to disappear completely.

Skye might not be as well-adjusted as she thinks.

(Also, for the record, their full names are Sunni Cassiopeia and Skye Andromeda. Their parents are Hank and Jenny. Hank and Jenny didn’t want their girls having boring names, I guess.)

too many secrets

First, everybody lies. Or at least lies by omission.

Nessa doesn’t know for sure that Brent’s a serial killer, but she knows something else that happened when she was still a kid.

Brent knows, too, but he’s also got a good reason for not talking about that part of his life.

Skye might not think she’s lying, but there’s something a bit weird about her girlfriend, Tori. Tori used to be Sunni’s college roommate. (Yeah you might need a bulletin board and red yarn for this one.)

If Sunni’s actually still alive, then she’s definitely lying. But that might only be Skye’s last desperate attempt to bling to hope about her sister.

… and it’s entirely possible that some of them take their secrets to the grave.

men in plaid shirts

It’s the UP. We celebrate Plaidurday. You’re Yooper formal when it’s the plaid without the holes in the elbows.

Plus Nessa’s husband Josh just looks good in plaid.

Two more weeks until you can dive in, get lost in those pine trees, and get to the bottom of this mystery! I can’t wait!

three weeks until Blood Sisters!

My sophomore novel, Blood Sisters, comes out in three weeks … and you can preorder the Kindle version now! Even more exciting, I can talk a bit more about it.

Let’s go with one of those “book cover and arrows with tropes” images, shall we?

And now, arrow by arrow …

the evil twin

As you probably know by now, the book opens with Skye wanting to talk to Nessa. Skye’s identical twin sister, Sunni, was murdered ten years ago by Nessa’s brother. Brent went on trial for multiple murders and was convicted all of them and sentenced to life in prison – in fact, he’s in Marquette Branch Prison as the sisters speak. (Well, it’s mostly Skye speaking. Nessa does a lot of holding her tongue.)

The thing is, Skye very seriously informs Nessa that she doesn’t think Brent’s actually a killer. Skye not only faked her own death but killed all of Brent’s victims, which means she’s out there somewhere, living her life and laughing at everyone who fell for her tricks. Which not only makes Sunni the presumed evil twin but also a suspected …

intelligent psychopath

The smarter you are, the better antagonist you make, right? Skye’s convinced that Sunni’s pulled a real-life Gone Girl and disappeared. She’s even got a file folder with highlights and sticky notes and all the connections necessary to prove it … at least to herself and to her girlfriend, Tori. Skye ant Tori at least convince Nessa to take that folder, which she does mostly so the others won’t follow her home.

But, once she’s home, Nessa gets sucked in … which has her husband, Josh, concerned. The story of an intelligent psychopath Sunni would mean Brent’s innocent, so Nessa forces herself to slow down and try to find the gaps in the story. The parts that mean she can text Skye and say sorry, but I don’t believe it, and I’m done here.

stalker

Let’s just say “Sorry, but I don’t believe it, and I’m done here” isn’t the end of the story. (Fun fact: a major scene having to do with this arrow takes place on the parking deck in Houghton, MI, which is fine because the story’s set in 2019, but they’ve finally started taking it down. I got pictures of The Exact Spot before they started demolition, but let’s all raise a glass of KBC beer to the end of an era.)

“I know who you are”

Josh knew exactly who Nessa was – or rather, who her brother was – when they started dating. Imagine dating a serial killer’s sister when you live in a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone.

And now add in Skye on top of all that.

Plus, you know … what’s a good thriller when everyone’s truthful all the time?

found family

Nessa’s parents are dead and her only sibling’s in jail for serial murder, so at first she resisted any sort of new connections after Brent’s trial. (Damaged goods trope, anyone?) But now a lot of Josh’s family has really become hers, too, so she has support while this whole weird twin thing unfolds.

Well. Unless this is going to shake that foundation, too.

he fell first

I am all about supportive golden retriever boyfriends/husbands, and yeah, Josh has some issues and his own backstory, but he’s always there for Nessa. He figures that it’s his job to be the solid, steady one in their relationship – he may or may not be right about that – and, no matter what happens, he’s there for her. Even if he thinks she’s making the wrong decisions.

(He’s pretty sure she’s making the wrong decisions.)

Blood Sisters has a lot to do with messy, complicated, and necessary relationships as we try to accept the truth about people we love, and this is only a teaser. It’s only three more weeks until you can dive in and I, for one, am totally counting the days.

Nessa’s Shrug – a free knitting pattern

You knew it was coming – another shawl means another knitting pattern! And it’s got the same preface as my Marcy shawl: I’m posting it on my blog for free. It’s here. Download at will. But once again I’ve got a favor to ask.

If you download the shawl, please preorder Blood Sisters. The link is currently up for the Kindle edition, and it’s only a matter of weeks before the print link will be available, too.

That’s a Kindle book and a knitting pattern for $9.99 friends – what a deal! Once more you get years of my life and the work of my heart for less than ten bucks. Don’t make me mention avocado toast.

If you’re just here for the shrug, scroll down to the bottom to find the download link. If you’re here for the inspiration behind the shrug, keep reading.

First off, Nessa lives in the UP.

Write what you know, hey? And a good Yooper has a closet full of plaid. I didn’t use just any plaid here – I went for Buffalo plaid in classic black and red. It’s a very bold plaid, with big solid chunks of color, which makes it easier to knit.

However, if you take a closer look and really scrutinize those cuffs with a critical eye …

… they don’t match.

I used the same two colors of yarn (Ravelry Red and Black in Malabrigo Rios, for the record) and both cuffs are Buffalo plaid, but they aren’t the same Buffalo plaid. One uses squares that are three stiches wide, and the other uses squares that are five stitches wide. The cuffs are very nearly the same, but … not quite.

Because the book – and the shrug – isn’t just about Nessa.

Sorry, Nessa.

She’s the main character and one of the two POV characters, but there’s a pretty big important cast going on. For example, Nessa’s got an older brother, Brent, and he happens to be in prison for serial murder. Oops. One of Brent’s murder victims was Sunni Bowen, and in the opening scene of the book her twin sister, Skye Bowen, comes to the UP to talk to Nessa.

You might say the cuffs of a shrug are like identical twins, right? The same thing, done again?

These cuffs aren’t identical, but they’re close. And maybe Sunni and Skye aren’t as identical as people thought … or are they? Cue dramatic music.

There’s also a lot of play on threes.

Let’s take a look at the solid part of the shrug. It’s also in Malabrigo yarn, but this one’s in Washted. (No, that’s not a typo.)

We’ve got three sections to the back, two in moss stitch and one in cables, and that cable section isn’t centered. Plus the middle section has three cable sections, and each cable has three parts. That middle one even feels a bit wonkier than the others, because it could be a standard braid, except … it isn’t. It’s uneven.

There are a lot of uneven threes when it comes to the characters in the book. You’ve got Nessa, Sunni, and Skye … Nessa, Brent, and Skye … Nessa, her husband Josh, and Brent … and a few more I can’t quite say yet. (26 days until publication!) Who’s got the power in each group? Who cares about whom … and doesn’t care for someone else? Once again, cue the dramatic music.

Why a shrug for Nessa?

Marcy got a shawl with some frilly bits because she needed something she could wear over various patterned sundresses to keep warm. Nessa demanded something a little more practical that would stay on while she’s working on her next book (she’s a thriller author, too – write what you know again). A shrug will stay on her shoulders while she madly types her way toward the climax and maybe forgets to eat (or turn on the space heater).

So here we are:

nessas-shrug-20230727Download Nessa’s shrug

And, of course, since I’ve got you here … preorder a copy of Blood Sisters so I can keep on writing books and knitting patterns. Cheers.

Chekhov has more than a gun

This is something that’s come up a few times now when I’ve been alpha– or beta-reading for other people, so I thought I’d muse on it for a bit.

First, let’s cover that Chekhov reference. He was a Russian playwright – hence the cover photo for this post – and Chekov’s gun is a famous piece of advice. There are a few versions, but the most famous goes:

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.

Anton Chekov (at least, ish)

And to a certain extent, I think all writers get that. It’s foreshadowing, right? Your main character can’t just whip out a gun in the climax if we’ve never seen a gun in the story before. That’s a bit too Deus ex machina. In Misery, Stephen King talks about the old parachute-under-the-seat trick employed by so many serials of his youth: our hero seems to be stuck in a crashing plane as one segment ends dramatically, but at the start of the next he pulls out this never-before-seen parachute and jumps to … well, not safety, but he survives long enough to make it to the next cliffhanger.

So that’s the first point of Chekov’s gun: setting up your climax.

No, you don’t want to give your whole plot away, but you want to do what all the best thrillers do: allow readers to go back through the book a second time and find all the clues they missed before. They don’t have to be obvious. You don’t need a character gesturing grandly and saying “I say, Chekov, what a big pistol you have hanging on this wall!” It can be a derringer spotted in a lady’s purse as in [redacted because hey, that gives the whole plot away].

And of course Chekov’s gun doesn’t have to be a gun. It doesn’t even have to be a weapon at all. If it’s something that’s going to be important for your character surviving the story’s climax, then we need hints at it before your character suddenly displays a new trait or skill. For example – I have to spoil American Gods for this, so skip to the next paragraph if you’d rather read it yourself – Neil Gaiman pits the old gods versus the new gods and leads them up to a final battle that our main character Shadow ends by … talking. He’s this big dude, fresh out of prison at the start of the book, and we’ve seen him fight … but only when he was goaded into it. Gaiman sets Shadow up as this pacifist who looks for other ways around the fight and only wades in when he doesn’t find other options, but that’s the most important part: he sets Shadow up that way so the final battle doesn’t come out of nowhere. We know what kind of guy Shadow is and, even if he’s a bit thrown off by all the other plot Gaiman chucks at him, there’s that core element of character that carries the day.

Spoiler over.

But the other part of Chekov’s gun comes in handling reader expectations.

I was reading the first few chapters of a friend’s book while they were still drafting it – totally alpha-reading – and I commented on a part where they’d spent a long time describing the main character’s dogs. It was something like “Oooh, I can’t wait to see how they’ll play into the book in the future!”

Their response? “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

First, it’s a first draft, so that’s totally okay. You don’t need to make Chekov’s gun work perfectly in the first draft. In fact, if you’re a discovery writer, then Chekov’s gun is totally a second draft issue. It’s absolutely, totally fine if your first draft doesn’t do everything you want your final draft to do. It just needs to do what you need a first draft to do.

Second, apparently this isn’t the usual way of thinking about it, which is why I’ve surprised a few people with those kinds of comments. So:

when you spend a lot of time describing something, you’re signaling to your readers that it’s important.

I think we all know this on a basic level but it’s not always at the front of our minds when we’re writing. Sometimes we’re just having fun describing the setting. Sometimes we’re trying to concentrate on (finally) describing the setting because we know that’s our weak point.

Sometimes it’s a slow words day and we’re just trying to get any words at all to come out.

And again: first drafts are all about getting the words on the page. We don’t judge first drafts. They’re hard-working friends who know they aren’t perfect and do their jobs well.

But, when you get to the second draft and beyond …

Chekov’s gun is a balancing act.

And, as a balancing act, it exists in more than one part of your story. Chekov indicates acts, but it works for all narratives. We need to be introduced to The Thing before we see a character use The Thing, and if we see a character taking their sweet time describing A Thing early on (Ready Player Two, I’m looking at you) then we’re primed for That Thing to show up when the character most needs it.

Once you’ve figured out how your climax and falling action are going to play out, you can look back and make the necessary changes. Did you introduce your Thing early enough? Did you spend too much time describing something that isn’t that Thing (and wasn’t meant to be a red herring)? It’s hard to strike that balance where your beta readers say something like “Wow, I should’ve seen that coming but I didn’t!” but there is middle ground between complete surprise and giving it all away.

Do you think about Chekov’s gun when you write or revise? What’s your favorite example of it being used properly? Or maybe a time when you think it could’ve been finessed just a wee bit more …

Happy birthday, Not Your Mary Sue!

My debut novel is one year old today. Sniff. They grow up so quickly.

Except, as I’ve mentioned before … they don’t actually grow up that quickly.

Step back in time with me.

Here’s Not Your Mary Sue as a baby on the NaNoWriMo website. That’s the first draft: November 2017, 135,898 words long. It was in third person but, other than that, the first half of the book is surprisingly similar to the one you’ve read: Marcy and Jay on the island, check. There was only one scene (well, half a scene, because my first drafts tend to be guilty of head-hopping) from Jay’s point of view, and there’s so much about what’s going on in Marcy’s head that switching to first-person just made a lot of sense.

The second half, though …

I’ve written about the original ending I had planned for the book, but … once I’d gotten Marcy to the end of Part I, I didn’t want to just … let her go. I wanted better for her than originally planned but, in that first draft, I didn’t stick inside her head for the rest of it. I invented Edison Thomas Crane on the spot and pantsed my way through the rest of the book, using third person and switching POV characters as often as I wanted. (Hey, no one ever has to read your first draft but you.)

But there’s something else I want to point out. Maybe you’ve noticed it.

The title of the book comes from Marcy’s own screennames, and it’s the rare time when I actually had a title before I started writing the book.

Long before. Check when I claimed the Twitter handle to make sure some random person wouldn’t be getting pinged because I accidentally used someone’s real screenname. (That’s why the Tumblr version is notyermarysue – someone already had the original, as Jay surmised.)

This, friends, is what we call optimism.

May 2017, months before I’d even planned to start writing the book (I plan my NaNo novels early), I made sure I had the socials my characters mention. Like it still blows my mind that 2017 Rebecca thought she’d need them, considering how long it was before I even started querying the book.

This was months before my first draft, and years before my second draft. 2017 Rebecca dreamed big.

The funny (to me, at least) thing is how my third draft – the one guided by editorial suggestions from Aesthetic Press – actually brought me back to the first draft in so many ways. A lot of the changes I’d made for my second draft (the successful draft that got me a big yes) were then undone by the time the book made it to print.

There’s probably a lesson there. I’m sure I’ll figure it out someday.

I’m still kind of surprised that I’ve got a novel out there. People have read it. People I know, in real life and online, but also … people I don’t know. It’s totally the dream but, like 2017 Rebecca making Marcy’s social media accounts, so very weird. Somehow … it’s all worked out?

Which isn’t to say it’s been perfectly smooth. I put of querying for so long because hey, rejections hurt, and then racked up my share before getting the offer. And then I chose to take a chance on a new indie press. I know a number of authors who act like vampires seeing a cross when it comes to indie presses, but … well, we’re never going to get new indie presses if no one signs with them. And hey, it’s not like anything in this world is a sure thing. I did my research and knew what I was signing up for – and what I was retaining for myself.

So now Marcy and Jay and Eds and all the rest have been out there – not just in my head, but out there! – for an entire year, and it’s surreal.

I wrote a book. This one’s not just in my computer – you can hold it in your hands.

So, as a birthday present to my book: go post on your own socials about a book you read recently that you loved, or an author you think more people should read. Leave a review of a book you adore. Spread the word about good books and help them find new readers.

It’s a lot of work and a long and winding path to get a book out there, so show your favorite authors and their book babies some love.

sometimes I even follow my own advice

Most times it feels like there’s a disconnect between Rebecca the Writer (outside of the high school classroom) and Rebecca the English Teacher (inside the classroom). There’s a shift between teaching writing and engaging in writing, but every so often I’ll mention to my students that, over the weekend, I did something I’ve made them do during their drafting … and they’re still shocked. Wait, these graded steps are things I actually do … when there’s not a grade?

The one I took most recently isn’t really something that could be graded, but I’ve been doing it since grad school, and it still works.

Sometimes I have to bribe myself.

Not every day is a “Golly gee wilikers, I can’t wait to write!” kind of day. I mean, do you wake up every morning absolutely thrilled to go do your job? Even if it’s true more often than it isn’t, there are still … those days. And sometimes terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, but deadlines are real. You still need to get a draft or the edits into someone else’s hands.

I had chapter revisions due by April 30, and the thing is, they weren’t even all that bad. Comments came from a pair of editors, but neither of them was Reviewer 2. I had to clarify a couple things, but mostly … I had to change my citation style. (Oops.)

And I didn’t want to do it, of course. Citation is awful. I always leave it to the end. I’ll put the proper info after each quote, but I’ll put off formatting it as long as possible. Part of me argues that, this way, I’m totally focused on order and capitalization and punctuation, so it’ll all match, but really … I just don’t like doing it.

So, a week ago Saturday, I bribed myself into doing those edits.

I went up to Keweenaw Coffee Works to get brunch and a fancy coffee and told myself that, since I got all that and came all this way, I wasn’t allowed to leave until my edits were done.

Like I said, I’ve been doing this since grad school. I can go to 5th and Elm for lunch and a coffee, but only if I get through this reading. I can grab a cinnamon roll (sadly no longer available) from Cyberia, but only if I finish writing this paper for grad school. (Where’s that “food motivated” meme when I need it?)

Now, clearly, I know I’m bribing myself. And I know that there aren’t really any immediate consequences to going out, sitting there with my coffee and snack, and not doing the work. I’ll be in trouble if I don’t submit the thing I’ve promised, but it’s not like I’m going to send myself to bed without supper. So it doesn’t work for everyone, but it works for me. And I’ve told so many people it works for me.

And they’re still surprised to see me out at a coffee shop, working on something.

I get that some people can’t work in coffee shops, but it’s like with my students: when I break down the writing process into steps, it’s because that’s how I, personally, do those steps. My seniors had to write scripts for their presentations, and I started them off with dictating their scripts while running through their draft slides … and then did the same thing for my own PCA presentation.

The thing is, it’s not like a presentation (or a chapter, or a book, or a blog post) just springs fully formed from my head. There are so many steps that go into them, and I don’t always want to do all of those steps. Knowing those steps is a good thing, because at least I can plan out what I need to do in order to produce the thing, but doing those steps is the next hurdle.

And that’s why I bribe myself with a Brekkie Gallette and a fancy latte from KCW so I can edit my citations.

Have you ever bribed yourself to finish your writing? What’s your favorite bribe?

Blood Sisters: the book trailer

Blood Sisters has a book trailer! Take a look:

So we know that sharing your writing with someone else is pretty darn scary, but sharing it with someone else means they pull out a line you wrote

… type it with a gun to her head.

and you think “Oh, wow, that’s a great one!” before remembering … you wrote it. (In my defense, I actually wrote Blood Sisters about two years ago. There’ve been a lot of other words coming out of my head since then.)

It’s also cool because it helps me think about the story in a different way. It’s not just these words and I’ve thought about and written and revised and read and edited and read again (and again …) but as a story. When you’re doing all that editing and revising, you’re examining not just every tree, but every leaf. The book trailer backed me up and made me look at the forest again.

So, while I’m taking in the view, let’s talk some themes.

Identity is a huge theme in Blood Sisters. You probably already noticed how prominent it was in Not Your Mary Sue: who am I? Who gets to say who I am? If I lose an important part of my life, what does that mean for what’s left?

Let’s take another look at the teaser summary:

A college girl notices that a serial killer’s victims look an awful lot like her, so she figures out a way to frame him and fake her death. At least that is the story her twin sister desperately clings to even as her intrusive thoughts about her sister’s supposed murder haunts her 10 years later.

Here we’ve got identical twins, Sunni Andromeda and Skye Cassiopeia Bowen. (Their parents might’ve picked a theme.) Ten years ago, Sunni was murdered, but Skye’s still floundering: who is she without her other half? Can Skye really just let Sunni go and accept that her long disappearance means she’s dead? (Hint: no.)

Skye decides to turn to Nessa with her theory of Sunni’s faked death. She’s picked Nessa because it’s Nessa’s brother who’s in prison for murdering Sunni (along with a handful of other women). So Nessa’s having some issues with identity herself. It’s been a while since someone approached her as “the serial killer’s sister,” but that wound’s close to the surface.

I also pull a bit of a Stephen King and combine those questions of identity with the theme of writing – authors creating characters, authors creating themselves. One of my characters is an author, and an author writing under a pseudonym, no less. Not Your Mary Sue started as a love letter to Misery; Blood Sisters is more like The Dark Half (the theme of twins, anyone?) or maybe “Rest Stop.” (There’s also the fact that my favorite King book was actually one initially published under his pen name – The Long Walk by Richard Bachman – and as an extra added twist, the character uses a pen name I’d debated using myself.)

We also, in good Gothic fashion, deal with isolation, power, and the way time folds in on itself and the past is never truly gone. If you isolate yourself to try to separate yourself from the past, does it always come back to bite you in the end? (I’m just saying that, in fiction, running away from everything rarely seems to work out.)

I’m also chomping at the bit for the time when I can get into more specifics.

Tell you more names. Give you more info about the twins than just their names. Go into the entire convoluted, complicated story.

127 days, but who’s counting?

Blood Sisters is out August 22, 2023, from Aesthetic Press.