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.
Something wicked is going on in the village of Ascension. A mother wasting away from cancer is suddenly up and about. A boy trampled by a milk cart walks away from the accident. A hanged man can still speak, broken neck and all.
The dead are not dying.
When Rabbit and Sadie Grace accompany their friend Rose to Ascension to help take care of her ailing cousin, they immediately notice that their new house, Bethany Hall, is occupied by dozens of ghosts. And something is waiting for them in the attic.
The villagers of Ascension are unwelcoming and wary of their weird visitors. As the three women attempt to find out what’s happening in the town, they must be careful not to be found out. But a much larger—and more dangerous—force is galloping straight for them…
It’s not that I’m forgetting how to write. The books are actually getting harder.
I’ve written eight novels (eleven, if you count my drawer/trunk books), and each one has been harder to write than the one before it. Every time I start writing a book or story, it’s like I’m starting a jigsaw puzzle, and each puzzle has more pieces.
It’s my fault. I make it harder for myself. I lay down some new gauntlet every time to make it interesting. This time I challenged myself to try two types of story structure in one book, and I dared myself to switch back and forth between third- and first-person perspectives. I think it turned out pretty well. I’m happy with the end result. But for a while as I was working on this particular thousand-piece puzzle, I wished I had chosen one of those board puzzles for toddlers.
Of course, the book I’m working on now is even more of a challenge.
I am not just one thing.
Since you read authors’ newsletters (at least one author’s newsletter), you probably already know the difference between a “plotter” and a “pantser,” but just in case… Plotters are writers who outline their books first, then go back and flesh their stories out once the broad strokes are in place, while pantsers fly by the seat of our pants (get it?), diving into a story, often with no idea where it’s going or how it will end.
I’ve always been a pantser. I don’t usually know how I’m gonna wrap up a story until I’m about two-thirds of the way through. I genuinely think my subconscious figures things out while I’m merrily typing away, and springs the ending on me when it decides I’m ready. It’s a fun way to work, and I hope that if I can be surprised by my own story, maybe you’ll be surprised by it, too.
But I got two-thirds of the way through Rose of Jericho and realized I still didn’t know how to end it. I kept writing and writing, knowing full well that I was stalling for time, filling up pages that wouldn’t survive the next draft, trying to figure out what my subconscious had in mind (so to speak).
So I did a thing I’ve never done before: I went back through and summarized each scene with a sentence or two, and printed them out, and cut the pages into strips, one strip per scene. I laid them out on our bedroom table (the only table that wasn’t piled with books, or magazines, or mail, or our son’s crap) and moved them around, removing some and writing new scenes on blank strips of paper. I figured out my structure was all wrong just by looking at the thing physically.
Plotting backwards! Pantsing forward!
My books aren’t one thing either.
Sales & Marketing would like it if my books were one thing at a time. Westerns or Horror or Fantasy. They want to be able to sell my books. And I want them to do that. I want people to read my books! That’s the whole point! I could shout my stories into the void at the edge of town if I wasn’t looking for a conversation with my readers. (The void screams at me to join it.)
It’s easier to sell a book if you can sum it up neatly, but Rose of Jericho is a Weird West adventure, a Haunted House Horror story, and a Romantic Fantasy, all in one.
This book made me actually think about what I write and who I write it for. I wrote Historical Thrillers for a long while, then wrote a contemporary thriller, then I jumped to Horror/Western/Fantasy, but my thrillers all contained elements of horror and/or fantasy, and I never gave it any thought at all. I didn’t mean to mash things up so thoroughly, but I’ve always done that, and I’ve decided to make my peace with it. This is what I like to write. I hope this is what you like to read.
Sales & Marketing will always be frustrated with me. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that. One genre isn’t enough. The story wants to be what the story wants to be.
Go easy on the spices.
I actually learned this with my second book then forgot it and had to learn it again. The first draft of my sophomore novel, The Black Country was twice as long as the final published version. I whittled away at it, and I whittled, and I whittled. Whole characters and chase scenes and subplots disappeared. I was miserable about it, and I vowed to be more focused in the future.
That lasted five whole books before I did it again. The final version of Rose of Jericho is about half as long as the first draft. I cut out a major character, and assigned his scenes to other characters, cut out unnecessary chapters and superfluous themes (see above for my genre problem). I didn’t need any of that stuff, and the book’s better without it, but it sure seemed right at the time.
Lesson learned. Again. I’m sure I’ll unlearn it in another book or two.
Rose of Jericho is amazing.
I mean the plant this book is named after (though I do hope you like the book).
There are witches in this novel, and each of them has a slightly different skillset, but they all derive their power from the earth. From herbs and wind and sun and seasons. As with my previous book, Red Rabbit, I spent a lot of time researching plants and a lot of them are absolutely incredible organisms. Case in point, Selaginella lepidophylla (also known as rose of Jericho, or the resurrection plant) can go years without water. Years! It can completely dry out, be damaged and burnt, then spring back to life minutes after being exposed to water again.
Sure sounds like magic to me.
Alex Grecian is the New York Times bestselling author of The Yard and its sequels, as well as Red Rabbit, Rose of Jericho, and the contemporary thriller The Saint of Wolves and Butchers. He has also written several award-winning graphic novels, including Proof, which is currently being developed for Fox. He lives in the American Midwest with his wife and son, their stinky dog, and a tarantula named Rosie.
Hey! A brief announcement here — I’ll have a couple more official details later in the week, but I wanted to let y’all know I’m going on tour woooo and sure everything is chaos out there and sure I’m going to have to get on planes and catch the new sexy superbug FLUSLES (aka Bird Flu and Measles), but whatever. I gotta sing for my supper, dance for my dinner, and I will do it in front of you, embarrassingly, if I have to. So where will I be?
More details to come! And some of these may require tickets and what-not, so if you’re planning to come, please check out the details page and see what’s up with that. Don’t forget too if you’re preordering and if you’re not coming to any of these, Doylestown Bookshop is an excellent place to preorder because you get VERY SPECIAL PERSONALIZATION and also VERY SPECIAL STAIRCASE STICKERS by Natalie Metzger
