Forty-five-year-old Imogen has always struggled to fit in, never finding her passion in life. And while that may include having cold feet in her impending nuptials, that doesn’t mean she’s ready to ditch planet Earth—and her entire life—completely.
When Imogen is kidnapped by an alien prince in disguise, there’s nothing she can do to stop him. He’s sidhe—a being with powerful abilities—and he’s grown up used to getting what he wants. The prince is convinced Imogen will fall in love with him, and that her new powers, once she’s turned sidhe, will help his country win a centuries-old feud.
With the help of the prince’s much more tolerable brother, Imogen starts to get her feet back under her, but even he can’t protect her from those who would use her for her powers. If Imogen can’t find a way to fight for herself, she’ll become a pawn in a world that has already decided what she’s going to be.
As cool as it might seem, getting abducted from Earth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
I did an ARC giveaway for A Dagger of Lightning recently. To enter, you had to answer one question, “Would you like to be kidnapped from Earth?” The overwhelming response was, “Yes, get me out of here.” However, my protagonist, Imogen can tell you, it’s anything but fun. Her autonomy is completely stripped, for one. She doesn’t get to say goodbye, her entire family likely assumes the worst, and the alien prince who kidnapped her keeps blithely reassuring her that she’ll get over it. Not to mention, the country he’s at odds with keeps trying to abduct her for their own purposes. Fortunately, his more empathetic brother is around to help her get her footing.
People are actually really interested in a middle-aged “chosen one.”
When I first got the idea for Dagger, I was concerned that no one would be interested in an older protagonist, but I couldn’t stop writing it. I finally showed the first few pages to a friend, eliciting promises of honesty if this concept was a waste of time. “It’s not stupid. I think you should write it,” she said. I wrote the first draft in twenty-eight days, which is insane and has never happened again. Of course, there were a lot of beta reads and rewrites over the years before it sold. One thing remained consistent, however, people loved a fierce, fully-adult woman main character. The early reviews have also been overwhelmingly positive in this regard.
Coming of age stories don’t have an age limit.
Not one aspect of a person freezes the moment they turn twenty-one. At least it shouldn’t. Personal growth should be continuous. I have reinvented myself professionally at least four times during my life, and I’ve experienced my share of internal growth spurts as well. Creating Imogen as she learns to fight for what she wants while slowly allowing herself to become emotionally vulnerable was one of the best parts of writing this book.
Sometimes not getting what you want is the best thing for you.
In the beginning, all Imogen wants is to get back to her life on Earth. Although change is foisted upon her in the worst way possible, she finds something worth fighting for in her new life and grows in ways she never would have on Earth. Likewise, A Dagger of Lightning grew in spite of my frustration—I wanted the book to sell right away—I continued to rewrite Dagger after each failed pitch. The book that comes into the world on April 1st is the same at its core, but it is so much more vibrant and nuanced than the original inception. Just as Imogen fails to get what she initially wanted so desperately; each rejection pushed me to make this book the best version of itself.
It’s okay to have fun.
Coming off my first book, Ghost Tamer—where, yes, there is humor, but it’s inserted intentionally to offset the exploration of grief, loss, and moving on—writing A Dagger of Lightning was honestly a joy. When I started writing, my intention was merely to explore what it would be like to be yanked from mortality and a normal life at middle age, I didn’t have any intentions to go deeper. The comments on misogyny, friendship, self-growth and so on emerged on their own. Mostly, I just wanted to have a good time and I think readers want that, too. But we can have a good time while raging against misogyny and the abuse of privilege. Part of the reader’s catharsis is watching Imogen establish a sense of self while fighting against a system that wants to use her and force her submission. Just like in life, the fight isn’t over with the final pages, there’s always room to grow and more battles to win.
Meredith grew up in New Orleans, collecting two degrees from Louisiana State University before running away to Chicago to be an actor. In between plays, she got her black belt and made martial arts and yoga her full-time day job. She fought in the Chicago Golden Gloves, ran the Chicago Marathon, and competed for team USA in the Savate World Championships in Paris. In spite of doing each of these things twice, she couldn’t stay warm and relocated to Nashville. She owns several swords, but lives a non-violent life, saving all swashbuckling for the page, knitting scarves, gardening, visiting coffee shops, and cuddling with her husband and two panther-sized cats. Her first novel Ghost Tamer is an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best SciFi Fantasy, an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Gold Winner for Best SciFi Fantasy, an IPPY Award Winner for Best First Book, and a Silver Falchion Winner for Best Book of 2023 and Best Supernatural. A Dagger of Lighting releases April 1, 2025, both with CamCat Books.
[Delilah is not merely one of my BFFs in this life, and not only someone whose posts here from time to time are quite popular, but also, she’s someone who wrote this very excellent book that you should most definitely check out — but first, cover reveal + writing tips from The Delilah Her Own Self –]
1. Write what you know. For example, I now know that getting roofied SUUUUUUUCKS.
Back in 2019, my husband and I went to one of our favorite fine dining restaurants in Tampa. I ordered a drink, and someone (not my waitress), brought me a different drink because they were apparently out of some of the ingredients of what I’d ordered. No problem! I’m easy! It was a fancy restaurant with a great bar! I like adventures!
I did not like this adventure.
Because someone put something in that drink, and I blacked out while appearing fully functional, lost eight hours of my life, and woke up on the shower floor covered in puke with RACCOON BLOOD ZOMBIE EYES from the power of all my yarking. That experience heavily informs this book, but I’m not going to tell you why because [spoilers]. I will tell you this: You might think getting roofied is something that only happens to young party girls who leave their drinks sitting on the tables of clubs while they figure out how to pee in a jumpsuit, but if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. There are sociopaths out there, and they do not care if you’re in your forties with your spouse eating $40 scallops.
Does that make you mad?
Then you’ll like this book.
2. It’s okay to write from spit.
No. Spite. Write from SPITE.
I have an art degree and have dabbled in every artistic medium that doesn’t involve—
Well, no, I have used live fish as an artistic medium, so I guess that’s ALL OF THEM.
But while I was taking my umpteenth pottery class, I was reading a book that started with a potter in a pottery studio, and the book got every. Single. Thing. Wrong.
I threw the book across the room.
I mean, take a pottery class, or ask your artsy friend to do a quick read-through, or just watch a YouTube video. There’s no excuse for getting pottery SO WRONG. And that was part of the genesis of this book:
I wanted to write about a potter who knew about the pottery studio.
And a calligrapher and a fiber artist and a stained-glass artist and a sculptor—
So, yeah. It’s okay to be powered by spite. Or spit. That’s your personal business.
3. Go out and get some XP.
By which I mean EXPERIENCE.
See, I’ve done tons of different artistic media, but when I wrote It Will Only Hurt for a Moment, I’d never been to a retreat. Not an artists’ retreat, not a writers’ retreat; I had never retreated at all! And as mentioned before, I like to know that if I’m writing about an experience, I’m getting it right, because I don’t want you to throw my books across the room.
I mean, at least not until the end, and then only because I’ve blown your mind.
That’s totally fine.
Anyway, I needed to go to a retreat, stat. But I couldn’t find an artists’ or writers’ retreat during the right time frame, so I ended up going to a Spiritual Renewal retreat for women, which advertised yoga, meditation, reiki, sound healing, past life regression, and dance parties. I was open with the people there about my motives, but I am always up for healing, so I did my best to take part with an open heart—except for the dance parties, because there’s only so much time you can dance in a room with eleven other women while monks chant from a portable speaker. I studied how the retreat center was laid out, went on hikes, peeked in the kitchen, and even burned myself with tea while gazing off into the mountains.
It left a bitchin’ scar.
4. Do your research, even when it makes you want to pull out your own hair.
It Will Only Hurt for a Moment takes place now, but parts of the book hearken back to an earlier time when women could be sent to an insane asylum for, oh, say, reading novels, talking back, or being in love with someone too poor. My main reference for this phenomenon was the book The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore, which chronicles the life of Elizabeth Packard, a nineteenth century wife and mother whose husband had her committed to an insane asylum to put her in her place. But Elizabeth, of course, was sane, as were many of her fellow inmates, and she dedicated her life to fighting for her freedom—and theirs. This book was one of the most infuriating things I’ve ever read, and it certainly helped fuel the fire of female rage that leads to my own novel’s cathartic end.
5. Do something audacious.
This book cover is undoubtedly gorgeous. It’s by one of my favorite cover mavens, Regina Flath, who also did the covers for my books Hit and Servants of the Storm. But as we learned once I started printing swag, the hardcover art disappears when it’s thumbnail-sized. Seriously, it just becomes a gray smudge. Thus, we’re spicing it up for the paperback with some brighter colors that will hopefully grab the eye from the bookstore shelves.
I’ve also been told this version is giving Wicked, which works.
There is a lot of defiance in this book, after all.
Point is, sometimes you’re chugging along while writing, and you’re not quite sure what happens next, and that’s a great time to do something unexpected and shake things up. What Lucas finds at the bonfire? I didn’t know that was going to happen. He just wandered off into the woods and screamed, and then I started the next chapter and had to figure out why. What Sarah finds in her cabin? Same thing. It’s a fun challenge, to figure out what will make sense narratively while also surprising both the author and the reader.
6. Rebel.
Yeah, it’s always five things around here, but I’m giving you six because the very nature of art is rebellion.
I hope you’ll pick up a copy of the paperback on July 1, or, heck, just preorder it now as a gift for yourself then. Or, if this listicle (a horrid word, that) is quite simply too enticing, it’s available immediately as a hardcover, e-book, or audiobook, and I bet your local indie bookseller or bookshop.org would be delighted to procure a copy.
We are nearly one month out to the release of The Staircase in the Woods, and it’s very hard to get one’s head above the mad clanging din of news noise to deliver bits of cool news, and yet, I must try, so here we go —
First, hey, holy shit, Staircase is now a LibraryReads book for April! Libraries are amazing, librarians are amazing, and to have the support of them for this book is beyond amazing. (Link here.)
Second, it landed in the New York Times as one of the 24 Works of Fiction to Read This Spring, which — wow. It’s nice to see horror show up in a list like this, for one thing, and to also be paired with SGJ’s Buffalo Hunter Hunter? C’mon. This is dream-come-true stuff here.
Finally, Staircase gets a really lovely review by Anna Dupre at Capes and Tights — “Wendig manages to shatter your heart and stitch it back together with this unique group of folks each complete with their own idiosyncrasies, flaws, and merits that feel so real. We all know the past comes back to haunt us, a truth that is all too real for these characters. Yet, we get a fresh spin on this narrative with a unique setting that lends itself to the feelings, thoughts, and emotions that fall through the proverbial cracks as we grow older. … To say this is a haunting novel is a vast understatement with every choice existing as a ghost that lingers much longer than the turn of the page.”
Oh and though it’s not Staircase-related — this next weekend I’ll be at the Lehigh Valley Book Fest! Saturday, 3/29, 4:15PM, details here. I’ll be hanging with Paul Acampora, Aggie Blum Thompson and Lisa Williamson Rosenberg to talk… thrilling and scary fiction? I dunno! It’ll be great!
Ummm. Is that it? For now? That’s it! For now! I’ll maybe have a few more tidbits and such before launch, and you can expect me to get steadily more noisy about the book as the day approaches…
To remind, too, if you wanna pre-order the book and if you’re not going to come get the book at one of the events I’m doing out in the world, then Doylestown Bookshop has you covered — you’ll also get some cool Staircase stickers and a special personalization. (Note that folks who see me on tour can also get those, too, though. Stickers long as supply lasts.) Order from Doylestown Bookshop here, and they’ll ship right to you.
Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She’s built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time—to any point in the traveler’s lifetime—and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it’s not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe.
After Beth’s husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella—their only daughter—and continue the work they started. Mired in grief and threatened by her ruthless CEO, Beth pushes herself to the limit to prove the value of her technology.
Then the impossible happens. Simply viewing personal history should not alter the present, but with each new observation she makes, her own timeline begins to warp.
As her reality constantly shifts, Beth must solve the puzzles of her past, even if it means forsaking her future.
HOW TO BUILD A TIME MACHINE
One of the first challenges when deciding to write a time travel novel is creating the machine. Because there’s got to be a machine, right? Of course there does. Whether it’s a Delorean or a hot tub, there needs to be the thing that gets your characters blasting through space time. For me, I knew some basics going in.
First, I knew it would be a traditional sci-fi machine, i.e., something built in a lab by an engineer and a bunch of smart people.
Second, I knew it would be the type of machine that stayed put. Ditto for the traveler. This was not a situation where the machine itself, or the person within it, would end up in an overgrown meadow with a smoking volcano in the background and a curious T-Rex sniffing at a possible new toy. I made the assumption that if time travel was possible then other stuff was possible as well: quantum computers, the harnessing of negative energy, impossible amounts of digital storage, light-speed data transmission, etc. Ergo, I used all the technological advancements of my near-future story world to create a unique machine that only sent a person’s consciousness through time, which ended up giving me a lot to play with (along with some challenges).
Third, I knew that traveling through time, despite what the super-smart scientists in my book thought, would mess up the present, and possibly (probably) the future. From a storytelling standpoint, I liked the idea that there were some “hard rules” that my characters believed as gospel, because I knew I was going to break the hell out of them.
Fourth and last, I based the mechanics of my machine, and some of the other technology in my story, on real science, which brings me to my next point.
KEEP IT REAL (UP TO A POINT)
My job as a fiction writer is to make stuff up. Whether it be monsters or curses or, you know, time travel, I have a ton of liberty when it comes to how much “reality” I want to infuse into my stories. Cloud creatures that make it rain bad dreams? Sure! Sounds fun. A witch’s curse that makes someone die horribly every time you sneeze? Hilarious. No notes.
For time travel, however, I felt it important to fuse my story with a little more reality. Much like my historical horror novels, Boys in the Valley and the upcoming Sarafina, I wanted to make the reader actually believe the stuff that was happening in my books was not just fun and scary, but actually plausible. With Third Rule specifically, I wanted the reader to think: Dude, this could actually happen, and not be wrong.
There’s a lot of future science in the book, and I knew that to make the story really sing, I’d need to do some heavy lifting on researching the theoretical possibilities of the science. In the Afterword of the novel, I list a few of the physicists that I drew from for the time machine, the digitization of a human consciousness, and the mechanics of sending data away from and then back to the earth in a way that the information itself would be stuck in the past instead of the present (which led to some key plot moments where reality was revealed to the characters in fun and alarming ways).
But to the point of this essay, what I learned was that there’s a point where you want to ground the reader in real science (or history or facts, etc.) so that the events of the book feel possible, and therefore make the reader connect more with the story and empathize with the characters. But there’s also a point where you want to let go. Where you push past the boundaries of reality and facts and hard science and you open the world up to the speculative and, perhaps, the supernatural. For me it was interesting to find that balance between the “real” and the “not real,” and the hope is to give the reader some footing in facts just before you blow their minds with ideas and events that can’t be explained.
However…
EXPOSITION IS A BALANCING ACT
Getting all that science into the book created another tricky problem: how do I let the reader know all the hard physics behind the technology without boring them to tears and stopping the pacing of the story dead in its tracks?
One option that I’ve used in the past is the “sprinkle” method. Apply a little truth here and there as the story goes along to let the reader know some real-life details. But while that might work with some stories, for this particular story I felt I needed to get all the heavy lifting out of the way early. That way, when my characters began to run into problems, or experience unforeseen plot twists, the reader would understand why BAD THING wasn’t supposed to happen, and why it wasn’t supposed to happen. In other words, I had to explain how my version of time travel worked before I could get into the meat and potatoes of my story.
And while any writing teacher worth their salt will beat it into a writer’s head to “show don’t tell,” I knew for this book I’d have to do some telling before I could do some showing.
The solution I came up with was to create an entire character to act as a sort of “reader proxy” for the book. In this case, the character I introduced happened to be a reporter writing a story about the time machine, ergo, they’d needed to know how it worked.
Voila!
Of course, that new character needed to have more agency than just being an exposition conduit, and I gave that to them, but I still had to balance how much info to give, how detailed to get, and when to deliver these parcels of theoretical physics and quantum mechanics to the reader in a way that wouldn’t create story speedbumps and keep things clicking along.
Ultimately, I feel I was able to find that balance, although I’m sure mileage will vary with readers. But figuring that all out was a big lesson for me as a writer.
MINOR CHARACTERS CAN BE COOL! (OR EVEN CRUCIAL)
It seems obvious, but the reality is that I’d never given a ton of thought to minor characters. I’m not talking about secondary, or B characters… I’m talking about folks who appear in one or two scenes throughout the entirety of the story.
But after I wrote Third Rule, I was caught off guard by people bringing up this one character again and again. The guy had like 2.5 pages of “screen time” in my novel, but he was mentioned by my editor, my agent, and even a movie director who I met with about a possible adaptation of the story. They all loved Jerry (that’s the guy’s name), and I was completely caught off guard.
It got to the point that when I did initial edits I was asked to add more Jerry! As in, I gave him a whole chapter where he spills all sorts of tea to my protagonist.
After some discussion, I realized that people didn’t like Jerry because he was funny or smart, they liked the character because he was disruptive. What I mean by that is that the story goes, and goes, and goes… and then, WHAM. Who’s this person? Why are they acting like this? And isn’t it cool how they kickstart the story a little bit?
I’m not suggesting a random character has to show up midway through a western novel wearing a giant bunny head and gunning down the cranky old sheriff with a laser bazooka from the future (or am I?), but what I am suggesting is that sometimes even a brief scene can add some needed texture and depth to a cast of characters and, quite possibly, provide some key piece of knowledge (make sure it’s earned – easy on the dues ex machina!) that propels the story forward in a fun, unexpected way.
From now on I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to my tertiary characters, because those guys recently became a whole new tool in my storytelling toolbox.
DATES MATTER (aka SPREADSHEETS CAN BE FUN!)
We’re gonna wrap it up on a very practical tip, because I’m boring that way.
In screenwriting it’s important to keep track of your days and nights, your dusks and dawns. But there’s a second layer to that, which is keeping track of your dates. Knowing if it’s a Tuesday or a Saturday, if it’s January 4th or June 11th, and whether it’s been a week since the BIG INCIDENT, or a day, or a month. Is it snowing or raining or sunny? What time does the sun set? Is someone’s birthday coming up—and if so, will the party be an outdoor affair?
It sounds obvious (and trivial), I know, but it’s not something a lot of new writers think about when writing a story, and believe it or not, it can mess you up if you’re not careful.
One might be surprised at how many times you’re at the keyboard, about to give your character a day at the beach, and go: Wait, is it even a weekend? Because my character mentioned how much he hated Mondays in the last chapter. And then you have to go back and read-through your work to make sure all the timing works out and that can suuuuck.
With Third Rule, this went to insane extremes. Without divulging spoilers, suffice to say that there are a few different realities in play in the story, so keeping track of days and dates became something that could only properly be tracked in a spreadsheet—a reference for me to know that when Character A went to the park, it was definitely a Saturday, and when Character B had a one-year anniversary of an INCIDENT, that it tracked to the proper calendar day. Meaning, if a scene takes place on February 3rd, 2025, it better damn well be a Monday, because that’s what the real-world calendar says.
In my case, I was dealing with key incidents taking place in 2044, and on my initial drafts, I wasn’t paying attention to whether February 3rd, 2044 was on a Monday or Friday.
But here’s the crazy thing: that came back to bite me. BIG time. During the editing process, sharpshooter copy editors were breaking my brain with incorrect date usage (yes, even 20 years in the future), and it kinda messed my story up a smidge and led to some frustrating nights at the keyboard.
So moving forward I plan to be way more cognizant about those pesky days and dates, especially when dealing with the past, or the future (or both).
Or you know… multiple realities.
PHILIP FRACASSI is the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Award-nominated author of the story collections Behold the Void, Beneath a Pale Sky, and No One is Safe! His novels include A Child Alone with Strangers, Gothic, Boys in the Valley, and The Third Rule of Time Travel. His stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year, Nightmare Magazine, Interzone, and Southwest Review. Philip lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Copps Literary Services, Circle M + P, and WME.
So, there we have it — the official book tour where I show up and do my little BOOK SONG and my LITERARY ULULATIONS. I hope you’ll come by!
Some quick As to your potential Qs —
Why Not My Town??
Well, the world is home to a lot of places and I cannot go to them all. I would like to! I’d love to do a huuuuuge book tour where I hit every state in the country and even some international pockets but that’s just not feasible. Plus, I try when possible to cover territory I either haven’t been before or at least haven’t been recently — next book tour would likely look very different!
Listen, if I could come right to your house, I would. I’d come over for dinner! It’d be great! But I can only go where I am summoned by the ancient rituals.
Why Should I Come?
Bookstores are cool! Booksellers are cool! Buying books from bookstores makes you cool by proxy. More to the point — hey, there are billionaires out there, and huge corporations, and isn’t it nice to be able to buy from smaller bookstores as a bit of counterprogramming? It won’t save the world but every little bit helps, and buying from bookstores is good for the store, for me, for you, for the overall bookish ecosystem. Support bookstores!
What If I Can’t Come?
The bookstores I’m visiting are likely able to hold a book for you and I can still sign it — many will even ship directly to you if you aren’t near to any of these. In fact, my own local, Doylestown Bookshop, will ship to you and I will give you a unique book-specific personalization alongside some very cool stickers by Natalie Metzger which maaaaaaay be these —
And all you gotta do to get a copy from D-town Bookshop is order here.
(Note: the cool stickers will also be coming with me on tour, obvs.)
So, if you can come to the events, please do. I figure I’m going to be wading out into the chaos factory that is America, so it’d be great if you swam out through the madness to say hi.
Failing that, buy from one of these stores! They’re where the books live. My books. So check ’em out. OKAY LOVE YOU BYE
Nassau Court is an attractive subdivision in Bethesda, Maryland that’s perfect for families — nice homes, plenty of space, good schools, and friendly neighbors. Couples Scott and Aimee, Lisa and Marcus, and Gwen and Anton socialize every weekend, help out with each other’s kids, and are good friends.
But when one of the husbands is found dead, the layers of artifice are quickly peeled back, and what once looked like perfect lives begin to fall apart, piece by piece.
The genial, sociable atmosphere quickly turns dark, with steadily escalating tension, unexpected twists around every corner, revelations about how dark human nature can be, and an ending that is as shocking as it is shattering.
Trust the process (i.e. yes, it’s okay to feel seasick and gloomy when you start).
After having written four books, you’d think I’d know that I always start each new book reluctantly, the words coming begrudgingly, accompanied by a vague sense of nausea and the feeling that I have no idea what I am doing. Yet it hits me anew each time. One day, in the midst of writing YOU DESERVE TO KNOW I entered the kitchen and my husband took one look at my face and said, “Let me guess, you have no idea if this novel is going to work.” Turns out, I say that every time I write a book. I am currently in the queasy stage of my fifth novel, but I am better able to see it for what it is — a necessary phase, not a determination on the worth of my project.
If you build it (your fictional world), they (the ideas) will come
I am not a writer who writes every day between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. with a pee break at 11, no matter what. There’s nothing I hate more than sitting in a chair, staring at a blank screen, except maybe having to toss out thousands of words I wrote because I didn’t know where I was going with my story. I only sit down to start a novel when I have a general idea of the whole thing — plot, setting, main character, tone. Until then there are dogs to be walked. Yet, I am not a detailed plotter. I have had to learn to trust that once I have built up enough story pressure in my imagination to start writing, like a tea kettle that starts whistling, the rest will flow. My characters get more interesting the deeper I get into the book. Take my murder victim in YOU DESERVE TO KNOW. He got his start as “husband no. 3” but after a few pages he emerged a writer, and not just any writer but a failed one, with great literary aspirations (yet little to back it up), and a dead mother who wrote beautiful prose that he may or may not have cribbed. The more I wrote about him, the more interesting and complicated he became, but it was only through writing about him that he was revealed to me.
Writing is great therapy (aka living well may be the best revenge but writing comes close).
Someone did me dirty once. Maybe someone did you dirty once as well, and you, like me, wondered if there was going to be any cosmic comeuppance for this evil-doer, any karmic retribution or at least acknowledgement that they did a bad, bad thing. Maybe you too experienced a profound sense of unfairness when you realized that was not going to happen. But did you sit down and write a novel and, inspired by your tormentor, create a character so vile and twisted that you cackled with glee as you wrote? I did, and it felt great, and my therapist called it sublimation, which is a fancy word for using your pain productively for your art. And it’s cheaper than therapy, too.
Genres are like lines in a coloring book, some people like to scribble outside of them
What kind of books do you write? I always hesitate a nanosecond when people ask me that. If I say mystery, they might imagine Hercule Poirot, with his ever-present pocketwatch. And no that isn’t right, but neither is the term thriller, conjuring visions of Jason Bourne racing through the streets of Berlin. Psychological thriller often means unreliable narrators (mine tend not to be) yet I resist th term domestic suspense as too small, cramped, claustrophobic. A reviewer once described my books as “suburban noir” and I loved it. The dark side of suburbia. Of course, there is no officially sub-genre called suburban noir. The Library of Congress categorizes my book as suspense fiction. I’ll take it. I’ve learned to write what I want and let other people worry about labels. I cannot imagine trying to reverse engineer a book to meet a subgenre’s conventions, although I feel like I have read a book or two that fall into this category.
Start the next bookis almost always the answer
When you are in the dark about sales — as in how many, and where, and what moves buyers? Or when you want to tear your hair out and scream WHY when your book club raves about a terrible, awful, no-good book. Or when you’ve found an incandescent little novel that makes it worth getting up each morning and you realize no one else has ever heard of it and you wonder how can such genius go unheralded. When you worry if your agent will ever call you back. When you try to figure out what strategy you should take on Facebook/Instagram/X/TikTok that won’t make you want to drink arsenic. When you think the font on your last book is why it might not be selling so well. When a celebrity chef/athlete/influencer writes something in your genre and gets a seven-figure advance. Start the next book. The answer is always start the next book. Edited to Add: sometimes the answer is chocolate.
Aggie Blum Thompson is the author of four novels of domestic suspense that are set in the D.C. area. Before turning to fiction, she worked as a reporter, covering cops, courts, and trials, with a healthy dose of the mundane mixed in. Her writing has appeared in newspapers such as The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. She lives just over the Washington D.C. line in Bethesda, Maryland with her husband, two children, small cat, and large dog. She is currently at work on her fifth novel.
