Winding down, winding up

It’s gone by very quickly (for me, haha) but the Fiend tour is finally winding down. I remember wondering, in the days before it kicked off, how am I ever going to get through all this? I love seeing readers and booksellers, but I’m not big on traveling anymore. Airlines are too unreliable, traffic has gotten worse everywhere, Ubers are expensive. As it turns out, I tried not to worry about it in advance and just put one foot in front of the other, and somehow it all got done.

I’ve just returned from the Boston Book Festival, a whirlwind overnighter. I love Boston: I grew up in the suburbs, wrote for a couple Boston newspapers, and my first real job was not far from Copley Square, where the festival is held. It was a beautiful weekend, the city was packed full. I took a spin up and down Newbury Street and Boylston Avenue and marveled at how much it’s changed in 40+ years.

I was on a fun panel that was not horror-themed with Nicky Gonzalez and Tova Mirvis, moderated by Tatiana Johnson-Boria. We had a packed house (thanks to everyone who trudged up four flights to join us!). Then I rushed to Logan Airport and caught a flight home, drove for two hours to get home. Whew! That was the last flight for a while (we’re driving up for the event at the Boston Public Library on November 12.)

The room filling up; stacks and stacks; it's a wrap!

At the same time, editorial notes came in on two books: the next horror novel for Putnam, titled INCARNATE, and my next spy novel which will be for Thomas & Mercer (Amazon Publishing), tentatively titled HAVANA SYNDROME.

It’s funny switching gears like this. For me, writing is like physical activity, like a sport, and after time off it takes a few days to get back in the groove. Luckily, both books are written and so it’s easier to slip into the world of the book. Editing and reworking are like surgery. Sometimes it’s fine and precise, and other times it’s like amputations in the Civil War Era. I think the work on both these books is going to be somewhere between the two. I expect it to get messy but I think it’ll be okay.

After so much time without serious writing, I’m looking forward to getting back into it. The process is usually the same (for those who like to watch sausage being made): I break down the last version of a book into chapters. I think about which scenes or chapters need to go because sub-plots have changed, and I think about what new scenes need to be written, and where they will go. As I write and build and weave, I keep an outline in a spreadsheet, making sure to capture every plot point so I can look stuff up easily when the inevitable changes need to be made. A lot of the work of putting a book together (at least for me) seems to be keeping track of plot points—and character details. What name did I give the main character’s eighth grade teacher? Where did the villain go to school? There’s a page in the spreadsheet for these bits and bobs and I try to be good and make a note when it comes up in the writing, but sometimes I keep writing, promising to fill it in later. Inevitably, I don’t.

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Giving Away More Stuff

We have a winner for the last giveaway: Teresa P. of Michigan, who won a signed copy of Clay McLeod Chapman’s Acquired Taste.

This week I’m giving away a copy of Daniel Kraus’ Angel Down. To enter, drop a comment below. Books can only be sent to U.S. mailing addresses in the lower 48 states.

It’s never too soon…

…to remind you that signed books make great gifts! There are two ways to accomplish this:

• I signed a lot of copies of FIEND while on tour. Now is the best time to scoop one up, before they’re gone. You should be able to find them at Harvard Bookstore (Cambridge MA), Bookshop Santa Cruz, Diesel Bookstore (Brentwood CA), Bards Alley Bookstore (Vienna VA), Curious Iguana (Frederick MD), Wordplay (Wardensville WV), WORD Bookstore (Brooklyn), Mysterious Bookshop (NYC), Rainy Day Books (Kansas City), The Novel Neighbor (St. Louis), Parnassus Books (Nashville), Symposium Books (Providence RI), Gibsons (Concord NH), One More Page Books (Arlington VA) and Bobzbay Books (Bloomington IL). Some of these stores will have a few signed copies of my backlist titles, too.

• Email me at almakatsubooks2@gmail.com and I’ll send signed bookplates. I have them for FIEND, THE FERVOR, and RED LONDON and I’ll personalize them, too. Lmk who’d you like it made out to and provide a U.S. mailing address and I’ll get them out to you soonest.

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Recommendations, not the usual kind

First: if you’re a writer or artist and you’re looking for a residency, and you love the outdoors, check out Elevated Spaces. Now, I don’t know these folks. They bought a bunch of land in the mountains around Santa Cruz with an eye to building their own outpost, learning to be more self-reliant, then bringing in friends and like-minded people. They seem cool, their hearts in the right places, and creative and hardworking. They’re looking to share their bounty and are starting a residency program.

Funnily enough, someone I met at the Monster Symposium told me about Creekside Arts, another residency program, this one near Eureka, California that sounds delightful.

YouTube: We started watching a second narrowboat YouTuber, Cruising the Cut. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that my husband and I started watching Country House Gent during the pandemic when his channel was briefly featured on Apple TV. These narrowboat vids are the perfect thing to watch when you need something completely chill. The canals are generally shallow so there’s no danger that anyone’s going to run into serious trouble. Cruising the Cut is a bit funnier (in that dry British way) than Country House Gent, whose host is a bit of a curmudgeon.

These narrowboat videos have made me a bit nostalgic for the camper, I’m afraid. I’m having those yearnings to jump into a motorhome and run off for a few days or weeks. I think we all know by now that I’m not that spontaneous. Nevertheless, the husband and I watched this video for this year’s new special edition Airstream, the Frank Lloyd Wright model. (No, we will not be buying one.) If we were to dip our toes back in that wading pool, and I doubt we are, it would be with a motorhome, like a small camper van, not some honking big 28-foot behemoth.

Anyway, on to TV. The Low-Down (FX) is pretty good; it’s a noir about a “truthstorian” who’s trying to find out who killed a man he’d written an expose on. It stars Ethan Hawke and is produced by Sterlin Harjo, the creative force behind Reservation Dogs, still one of my favorite shows ever. There’s a bunch of noir novelists on the writing team, including Walter Mosley and Lou Berney. Check it out.

Anyone else find Only Murders in the Building a bit of a snooze this year?

Reading: Clown Town, the latest in the Slow Horses series by Mick Herron, was a fun, fast read. You can read Ed Aymar’s review in the Washington Post here. For historical fiction fans, I’m listening to The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrel (author of Hamnet), the story of a 16-year old noblewoman married off to her dead sister’s fiance—who may or may not be responsible for the main character’s impending death. And I’m streaking through Joe Hill’s just-released King Sorrow, a fantasy-horror hybrid as fat as a brick.