Looking over my shoulder, I think about 2023 as my “Wonka year” (“You see: nobody ever goes in… and nobody ever comes out.”). No sooner had On Good Authority hit shelves (my debut novel! the stuff of my wildest dreams!) than I disappeared… or, at least, receded. I DID do things—for this book, and the next book—but it was less than I imagined I would do. By a lot.

Because something else was happening, behind the scenes of my book launch: my family of over a decade was breaking up. Had been breaking up. I got the news that On Good Authority was going to be published literal days after we in our throuple had decided on divorce, back in the summer of 2021. There were no villains, we all still loved each other, it just wasn’t working anymore—and that made it hurt even more.

I had been imagining for years, how we’d all cry and hug and party if my book finally sold… And the reality, when I got that e-mail at last, was the three of us sitting in separate corners of a room, restrained. Happy, but sad. Feeling the huge, deep difference—between how it could have been and how it was.

I kept the dissolution of my family, our home, to myself for months. I was terrified that my publisher and my agent would lose faith in me, or see me as a bad bet, if I confided what was going on. I have memories of crying at my desk, staring at revisions that were due soon, trying to think my way from how things were to what they absolutely must become—in the draft, in my life—when all I seemed to have in my head was hissing, strangling static.

I didn’t know how to fix the book up while I was falling so irreparably apart. I didn’t think I could.

I held it together. I mean, I think I did. I turned in the revisions, often at the very last moment. I did launch events and readings—one of these on the literal same day I moved out of our home of a decade.

And then, at the end of 2022, when nothing else was due, or expected of me, I fell all the way apart. I was exhausted. And I had a lot of hurt to feel, which I’d been putting off, while we all let go of our home, our life. I don’t know that I meant to hibernate for all of 2023… But I certainly quieted down.

But Willy Wonka never stopped making chocolate, even with all the doors locked, and neither—metaphorically—did I.

I’ve been working on The Next Novel, slowly but surely. Word by word, in changing chairs, from familiar to new, strange rooms. The story is dark and sensual and weird, like me, and I am, I think, mere months away from turning in a revised version. I can’t promise what will happen next—that’s not up to me—but I can say I’ve come out the other side of my seclusion with something to show for myself.

I also published two short stories of which I am very proud. One, a new myth about getting Death married off, called “A Match for Death,” landed in no less than Flame Tree Press’s Hidden Realms Short Stories anthology, as part of their Gothic Fantasy series.

The other, “His Cup of Tea”—perhaps the weirdest and most heartfelt thing I’ve ever written, which has been looking for its right home for a decade, landed in Artifice & Craft from ZNB. It’s so perfectly right that this story should come out now. If you are looking to support me, and know me a little better too, either anthology is a good bet, but… I’d especially urge you to try Artifice & Craft.

And hey, if you haven’t read or reviewed On Good Authority, my coming-of-age kinky, Victorian Gothic debut, it’s out here waiting for you to find it.  

Meanwhile, the next story is coming, in all its queer, dark-academic historical glory. And I will make it worth the wait.