Horror’s just so neat.

Picture this: it’s dark when you finally stir, groaning. Your head aches—it’s killing you—and your whole body is stiff, tired. You don’t remember the night, what happened, how you got here. You don’t remember anything after coming home. What time is it?

As you slowly come to, you look and grope around, taking in the cold, dirty tile with nondescript brownish residue in some of the grout lines. Right above you is a mounted TV, its screen black. On another wall, mirrors are caked in dust and god-knows-what. A row of filthy sinks, some broken, piping missing or ceramic chipped, sit opposite a row of filthy, grimy urinals. And beyond those are stalls and the exit. This place hasn’t been cleaned in… years. Your skin crawls at the sight.

You think you see a bloody handprint on the door, but you could be wrong—you lost your glasses. You must have fallen. And it doesn’t help that all of the fluorescent lights overhead in this giant, commercial restroom are broken except for one.

Where are you?

It is only when you sway on your knees, trying to stagger to your feet, do you notice the chain. Around your ankle is a thick iron cuff attached to thick iron chains attached to a radiator.

“What the…”

Loud static makes you lurch.

Behind you, the TV comes to life, closing in on a very ominous-looking puppet in a black suit and red bow-tie. Its face is white with red spirals painted on its cheeks, shiny black eyes with red irises, and red lips smeared in a sinister grin.

For a moment, you expect the puppet to threaten you, make you fight for your life, teach you some lesson that could’ve been an email. Instead, the puppet’s jaw drops and it raps in a voice that sounds oddly like award-winning American actor and rapper Will Smith:

"Now this is a story all about how / my life got flipped, turned upside down / And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there / I’ll tell you how Jamison Shea nailed the coolest blog/newsletter intro of all time.”

The Hell Dispatch is here, you think, slumping down on the tile and closing your eyes in relief.

Book Updates 📰

I FEED HER TO THE BEAST AND THE BEAST IS ME is still floating in the mystical ether that is publishing. Nothing to share here.

Publishing tends to move very slowly, editorial teams are full of busy people, and everything requires 10,000 discussions and rituals aligned under the blood moon wearing nothing but your birthday suit and the Master Sword on the third Wednesday of every month. IDK.

HELL HEIST is absolutely kicking my butt right now. I have everything outlined and plotted; I know what needs to happen and when. However, I’ve hit a little issue where what is supposed to happen next feels repetitive or formulaic, so I want another solution. For example, there is a character investigating a big mystery, and I don’t want to write her going to another library to read another book. Additionally, I hate writing in-world texts for relaying information (i.e. a character just happens to stumble upon the diary of their mortal enemy, and that whole diary entry is read on page). It isn’t fun for me to write, and I don’t know a way to craft it where it isn’t interrupting the voice and flow of the rest of the scene.

So now, I’m staring at this blank document trying to figure out how this character will uncover an earth-shattering secret that no one else in the entire kingdom knows, when all recorded accounts of it have been burned or rewritten. Brilliant.

The Craft Corner 🎨

In general, I haven’t been able to focus much these past few weeks because of appointments and errands and travel, the doctor, the vet, the labs, etc. (For example, right after cancelling my flight to a friend’s wedding because I’m sick with COVID, my doctor called to tell me that I have an iron deficiency.) October, so far, has no chill.

Hopefully I will be back on track on Monday. I miss writing, and I really, really, really, really want HELL HEIST to be over so I can work on literally anything else. It’s been on-and-off for a year.

But!! To give myself a break while also keeping my brain from turning to complete jello, I started concepting two new book ideas (both horror, one for YA, one for adult). I use the term “concepting” loosely to mean: fleshing out or enriching a book idea, so that I have more material to work with when it comes time to actually write it.

At any given moment, I have around 5-8 book pitches ready to go. That way, when I’m done with the main project, when someone asks me “What other books are you working on?” or “What’s next?”, I don’t turn into a deer in headlights.

I’d written these particular two pitches a while ago, just ballpark sentences of vibes, setting, and a character with a problem. And now, I’ve begun to flesh them out a little. To be clear, I’m not writing these books right now; I’m a firm believer in finishing what I start before moving on to something else, and that’s what I’m gonna do. However, while I’m drafting or revising a project, I like to have other ideas slowly percolating in the background.

I don’t like idleness. I don’t like indecision. I don’t like not having other options. And I absolutely hate losing my train of thought or forgetting my ideas. As a result, even if I can’t act on them now, I’ve incorporated “save them for later” into my process.

So, for example, as I’m getting ready for bed, I’ll have the spark of an idea for a character that would go really well with codename VAMPIRES WILL NEVER HURT YOU. So I go to my doc titled “Book Pitches,” scroll down to VAMPIRES WILL NEVER HURT YOU (honestly, if My Chemical Romance would grant me the rights to use that as my actual book title, I’d faint on the spot), and I leave comments and notes for my future self—about characters, plots and subplots, themes, dialogue, settings, real-world places and events and people to research, comparative titles. I don’t act on those comments right away; no, I just make them coherent and then tuck them away for safe-keeping.

Then, later when it’s time to actually work on VAMPIRES WILL NEVER HURT YOU, I have a starting point. I have a pitch, some characters, internal and external plot, setting, tropes to experiment with. I know where to start researching, what books to pick up and study. I don’t have to stare at a blank doc and think, “Where to begin?” because I’ve already gifted myself materials accumulated over the months. At that point, there’s nothing left to do but start fiddling with and exploring and brainstorming.

And for me, I like to always know what comes next. What I’m doing next, where I’m going next, even if the plan changes.

And a little Digestif 🧉

Since this is pretty long, I won’t torture you with a long poem too. Instead, I will delight you with some fantastic music and books and movies that have delighted me.

• LISTENING: Unworn’s album liminal—this is an instrumental album where each song is inspired by and speaks to a liminal space. It’s off-putting, disorienting, and evocative. It’s also kind of hard to explain, you just have to feel it.

• READING: I read two wonderfully fucked up books recently that are perfect for October, the spooky season. Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke is a horror novella about a man who accepts a piece of sour candy from a strange kid throwing a temper tantrum in Walmart and then suddenly that kid is living in his house, calling him daddy, and making his teeth fall out. It’s got creepy children, psychological horror, eldritch monsters, body horror, everything you could ever want.
  
  The other book is Boy Parts by Eliza Clark, about a woman who takes fetish photography of men in humiliating positions, and the more successful she gets, the more exploitative and violent and unhinged she becomes. It’s very dark; please check the content warnings; I’ll be thinking about this story for at least several more months. It’s reminiscent of American Psycho, but not in a satirical kind of way.

• WATCHING: Let the Right One In (2008), a masterpiece in romantic horror. The blueprint. I recently found a Blu-Ray copy for five euros.

Ta-daaaaa! Another post down and none of you have even sent me hate mail yet. And believe it or not, I wrote this all in one sitting while swatting my cat away over 20 times in an hour!

À la votre! Happy weekend! Hyvää viikonloppua! ❤️