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First Assignment - Story Statement Mia Romano must learn to break free from the comfort of familiarity and trust herself enough to embrace something new—something real—with Will, all while navigating the resurfacing of her past and the uncertainty of her future. Second Assignment - Antagonist: Hudson Just as Mia finally begins something real with Will—something unlike anything she’s ever known—Hudson returns to New Jersey in July, upending everything. He’s back from medical school, returning to the life he left behind, including the girl he cheated with. But now that Mia is happy, now that she’s moved on, he decides it’s time to reappear. Hudson isn’t outright malicious, but he’s selfish. He’s spent years believing Mia would always be there, always forgiving, always his. And for a long time, she was. Their relationship had been built on routine, a cycle of comfort that she never questioned—until now. Will is different. He’s older, more mature, and refuses to play games. He wants Mia, but will he wait around while she wavers between the past and the future? As Hudson tries to pull her back into their old patterns, Will challenges her to face what she truly wants. With his sister’s wedding approaching in August and his own decision about staying in New York looming, Mia is running out of time. She must finally break free of the past and choose: the boy she once loved or the man who’s showing her what love is supposed to be. Third Assignment - Breakout Title See You Later – This title is a reflection of Mia and Will’s ongoing connection, capturing the way they always say "see you later" to one another, a phrase that becomes a symbol of their bond. It’s more than just a casual farewell; it’s a promise they share, a way to stay connected despite the uncertainties of their journey together. Their repeated use of "see you later" is both playful and meaningful, embodying their growing relationship and the quiet hope that their paths will always cross again, no matter what comes next. What’s Meant for Mia – Emphasizes Mia’s journey of self-discovery, as she figures out what truly belongs in her life, both in love and in her career. This title encapsulates the emotional evolution Mia undergoes as she navigates the complexities of her relationships and begins to trust in what the universe has in store for her. You Deserve More Than You Think – A title inspired by Will’s belief in Mia, representing his gentle persistence and her transformation throughout the story. It highlights the core of their relationship, as Mia learns to embrace love in a way she never had before, recognizing that she deserves more than the hurt she’s experienced. Fourth Assignment - Develop two smart comparables for your novel. Who compares to you? And why? Meghan Brandy’s Say You Swear – My book shares a loose take on the love triangle dynamic from Say You Swear, but it’s more playful and less intense. While Say You Swear has a deeper, more serious edge, my novel injects a fun and lighter atmosphere into the narrative. The dynamic between Mia, Hudson, and Will is more about personal growth and timing rather than an all-consuming love triangle. Will’s character is inspired by Noah Riley, but he brings a fun, easy-going vibe to the mix while still being emotionally supportive, unlike the more intense tone in Say You Swear. Emily Henry's Book Lovers and Happy Place – My book shares similarities with Emily Henry’s Book Lovers and Happy Place, blending romance with personal growth in a setting that feels both relatable and heartwarming. While Henry’s novels balance heartfelt moments with humor, my story does the same but with a lighter, more playful tone. The emotional layers are there, but they’re mixed with enough charm and wit to make it a fun, enjoyable read. Like Henry's characters, mine go through challenges in love, but with plenty of joy and humor in the journey. Fifth Assignment - Hook Line Hook Line: Mia Romano, a young financial analyst reeling from the heartbreak of her high school sweetheart Hudson’s affair, unexpectedly meets Will, a charming stranger at a hotel before her company’s holiday party. She’s drawn to him in a way she can’t ignore. However, she soon discovers that Will is a Vice President at her company’s California office and will be joining the NYC team. As Hudson desperately tries to win her back, Mia finds herself torn between her painful past and her undeniable connection with Will, forcing her to confront her fears and learn to trust love again. Despite her initial guilt over moving on, Mia realizes Will is mature, kind, and the man she’s been missing in her life. However, as Mia begins to open her heart to Will, Hudson returns, trying to re enter her life and complicating her newfound happiness. Torn between the past and the future, Mia must find the strength to move forward with Will and leave behind the man who no longer deserves her. Core Wound: Mia’s core wound is rooted in the guilt she feels over her attraction to Will after Hudson’s betrayal. Despite the deep connection she shares with Will, she struggles with the feeling that she’s doing something wrong by letting go of her past. But as Will proves himself to be a man who is emotionally mature and steady, Mia begins to push aside her guilt and fears. Her journey becomes one of self-discovery, as she navigates the pull of her past with Hudson and the promise of a healthier, more fulfilling future with Will. Sixth Assignment - Matters of Conflict Inner Conflict: Mia’s internal struggle stems from the anxieties she feels about moving forward after her relationship with Hudson. She feels guilty for even considering a relationship with someone new, unsure if it’s the right thing to do. Despite these feelings, her best friend, Amelia, constantly reminds her not to be scared of embracing new possibilities. As Mia grows closer to Will, she starts pushing past her fears and allowing herself to experience something real. Will’s steady, mature demeanor helps break down her emotional walls, making her feel safe and valued in a way Hudson never did. But just when Mia starts feeling comfortable in her new chapter, Hudson reappears, throwing her into turmoil. She’s forced to confront the fear of leaving the past behind and embracing her future, uncertain whether she’s ready to fully trust herself again. Secondary Conflict: Mia’s secondary conflict revolves around the professional challenges she faces as her relationship with Will develops. As an analyst in the New York office, she feels the weight of their differences in seniority—Will is a Vice President, and she’s much lower on the corporate ladder. She’s nervous about how their budding relationship could affect their dynamic at work, particularly how it might be perceived by their colleagues. The office environment is filled with whispers, especially since Will is considered very attractive, and the women at the company are often vocal about their admiration for him. Mia tries to keep things professional, denying the connection between them, but people begin to notice the subtle changes in their interactions. The pressure mounts as Mia tries to navigate her feelings for Will while managing the risk of office gossip and maintaining her reputation in the company. While navigating all of her emotions, the concern that people might think poorly of her because of her relationship with Will only adds to her growing anxieties. Seventh Assignment - Story Settings - sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? Please don't simply repeat what you already have which may well be too quiet. You can change it. That's why you're here! Start now. Imagination is your best friend, and be aggressive with it. Mia’s NJ Home - Mia’s family home in New Jersey holds memories of her past with Hudson—the last time she saw him, when he tried to act like everything was okay, despite the cracks in their relationship. The house, warm and filled with the bustle of family life, serves as a reminder of what once was and what has since changed. Mia’s family home in New Jersey is a place where Sunday dinners are a cherished tradition, a time when everyone gathers around the table to share laughter, stories, and, of course, an abundance of homemade food. The kitchen smells of roasted meats, simmering sauces, and freshly baked bread as her aunts and uncles bustle around, preparing their specialties. Her cousins, always full of energy, run through the house, while her grandparents sit at the head of the table, telling stories of the past with a touch of nostalgia in their voices. Mia’s Car - When she drove to Amelia to tell her how Hudson cheated on her. Her car is her sanctuary, a small personal space where she can think through the mess of her emotions. NYC Streets - The streets of New York City are where Mia feels a surge of inspiration, a sense of possibility that’s hard to find anywhere else. There’s an electric energy in the air, a pulse that drives her forward as she walks through the bustling streets. The city is alive with movement—people rushing by, the sounds of honking taxis, the hum of conversation, and the clatter of coffee cups in cafés. Mia loves the anonymity of the crowds, the way she can blend in yet feel completely connected to the vibrant pulse of the city. Hotel - Where she and Amelia stayed the night before the extravagant Christmas party, a quiet retreat away from the rush of the city. The sleek, modern lobby with its polished floors and chic décor sets the tone for a night of luxury and escape, a brief respite from the whirlwind of emotions Mia is processing. The front desk, checking in, where Mia first meets Will—a moment that would become the catalyst for something she couldn’t yet comprehend. His charm and effortless smile were enough to stir something inside her, but she didn’t know then how much this encounter would come to mean. The hotel felt almost like a world apart, a place where the outside worries faded into the background. That first night, unable to sleep, Mia finds herself drawn to the complimentary beverage bar. The soft lighting, the quiet hum of the space, offers her a moment of peace amid the chaos of her thoughts. It’s there that she spent a moment with Will, connecting with him, before knowing that he would be working with her in the future. They built a bond, before knowing they’d be professional together in the future. The hotel hallway becomes a poignant setting once again after the Christmas party. In a quiet, unexpected moment, Mia and Will share a kiss, a moment of connection that feels both exhilarating and overwhelming. Yet it’s cut short, interrupted by a call she overhears that Amelia and Hudson are in, desperate to pull her back into the past, leaving Mia torn between the comfort of the familiar and the pull of something new and uncertain. The hotel, in all its elegance, becomes the backdrop to some of Mia’s most intimate moments—memories she’ll hold onto, but also ones she’s trying to move forward from. Christmas Party - The extravagant Christmas party is a turning point for Mia. There, she realizes Will isn’t just a stranger from the hotel—he works at Eastend Investments too and is about to transfer to the NYC office. The moment shifts their dynamic, making their growing attraction even harder to ignore. Amid the festive chaos, they share brief but meaningful exchanges that make Mia question what this connection might mean. NYC Taxi - The taxi rides are brief but frequent moments throughout the book, offering Mia and Will small, intimate pockets of time to connect. Office - The office is sleek, fast-paced, and filled with the pressure of career-driven ambition. Mia works hard to prove herself in this high-stakes environment, but she's also acutely aware of the complex power dynamics, especially with Will. His daily coffee deliveries and his subtle gestures make her happy entering the office and look forward to her daily routine. She finds comfort in her big office and the opportunities it represents, but she also has to navigate her feelings for Will while maintaining professionalism. Jersey Shore Beach - The Jersey Shore beach offers Mia a moment of peace and reflection during Memorial Day weekend. It’s here she tries to clear her head and focus on her future, only to be interrupted by Hudson’s friend, Mark, who mentions that Hudson plans to return in July, throwing her emotional clarity into turmoil. Mia and Amelia’s Apartment - Mia and Amelia’s cozy two-bedroom apartment is their sanctuary—a place filled with laughter, late-night conversations, and the comfort of true friendship. It’s here that Mia can process her internal struggles, confide in Amelia, and seek guidance. The apartment becomes her safe haven, a spot where she can reset and recharge after the pressures of her personal and professional life. It’s a true testament to their shared girlhood and unwavering support for one another. Will’s Apartment - Will’s apartment is a stark contrast to Mia’s cozy, modest space—luxurious, modern, and impeccably designed. The first time Mia spends the night there is after drunkenly texting him, an impulsive move that leads to an unexpected, yet intimate, connection. The apartment feels like a glimpse into Will’s world, one that’s different from the life Mia knows. It’s sophisticated and sleek, with expansive windows that offer a breathtaking view of the city. Later, Mia finds herself spending a rainy day there, the sound of the rain against the windows adding a peaceful, almost surreal quality to the moment. As she sits in the lavish surroundings, Mia grapples with the growing complexities of her feelings for Will and the life she’s now entering. Pizzeria - The pizzeria is where Mia and Will find a bit of normalcy and comfort. After their post-Christmas party pizzeria encounter, it becomes a place they visit often. Will shares his favorite pizza slices with Mia, and it quickly turns into a sweet ritual between them. Restaurant by the Brooklyn Bridge - Located with breathtaking views of the Brooklyn Bridge, this upscale restaurant is the perfect setting for Mia and Will’s first date. The romance and elegance of the place set the tone for their deepening connection, creating a moment of intimacy and excitement that Mia can’t ignore. Will’s Car - Will’s car serves as a quiet, intimate space where Mia and Will share personal moments. Whether they’re heading to Brooklyn or off to Rhode Island for Will’s sister’s wedding, the car is where they can truly connect, away from the distractions of the city and the complexities of their work lives. It becomes a place where Mia can open up more than she might otherwise. Rhode Island - The serene environment of Will’s family home in Rhode Island sets the stage for a wedding that brings Mia closer to Will’s world. The elegance and warmth of the wedding contrast with the storm of emotions Mia feels as she navigates her feelings for Will. Surrounded by family, Mia is forced to confront her emotions and question what her future could look like with Will in it. Christina and Enzo’s Apartment - Christina and Enzo’s apartment is a welcoming, family-centered space where Mia feels a sense of connection outside her own family. Their Sunday dinners, filled with food, laughter, and close relationships, remind Mia of her own family traditions. It’s during these meals that Mia begins to reflect on love and relationships, with Enzo’s stories sparking deep thoughts about what she truly wants in her own life. What makes these settings so interesting is that they aren’t just places—they’re reflections of Mia’s journey, her emotions, and the choices she’s struggling to make. Every space she moves through carries meaning, whether it’s tethering her to the past or pushing her toward something new. There’s a contrast woven throughout the book: familiarity vs. change, comfort vs. uncertainty. Mia’s New Jersey home is warm, loud, and full of tradition, but it’s also a place where Hudson’s presence lingers, making her question whether she’s really moved on. Meanwhile, New York City is electric and full of possibility, a place where she can get lost but also discover something entirely new—especially when it comes to Will. Some settings are big and cinematic, like the Christmas party, the wedding in Rhode Island, or the restaurant by the Brooklyn Bridge—places that make her relationship with Will feel larger than life, almost unreal. But then there are the quiet, intimate spaces—a hotel hallway, a late-night pizzeria, the inside of a taxi, the privacy of Will’s car or apartment—where emotions build in a way that feels even more intense. These are the moments where Mia and Will are forced into proximity, where their connection deepens even before either of them fully realizes it. And then there’s the office—where Mia is supposed to be focused on her career, but Will is there every day, making it impossible to ignore what’s growing between them. Even the Jersey Shore, which should be an escape, becomes a reminder that her past is never as far away as she thinks. All of these places matter because they shape Mia’s decisions, pull her in different directions, and make the love triangle even more emotionally charged. The settings aren’t just where things happen—they are the story.

One: To move towards her lifelong desire of being in a same-sex relationship, the protagonist must untangle her religious beliefs from a mental health disorder that, together, keep her trapped within a heterosexual marriage. Two: The protagonist and antagonist are the same character who is locked in a back and forth over the freedom to fulfill her lifelong desire. In me vs. myself, the antagonist is personified in patterns of anxiety and evangelical certainty. I fight my own entrenched religious fundamentalist beliefs and layers of distorted thinking that keep me in a state of fear and a miserable heterosexual marriage. Three: What the Third Eye Sees: A Foray into the Forbidden Certain Beliefs: Unraveling the Anxiety in Fundamentalism and the Fundamentalism in Sexuality Certain Uncertainty: The Magic of Overcoming Distorted Thinking Four: HIJAB BUTCH BLUES by Lamya H. Written from a Muslim perspective, the author dissects traditional stories of the Quran in the way I use the Christian spiritual practice of lectio divina. Both of us reinterpret what we have been taught to renegotiate the binary character of God. We come to a new understanding of ourselves and integrate our sexuality and feminist beliefs into our faith. Although the root causes differ, Lamya H and I both struggle to be vulnerable and are lonely souls in search of the authentic connection that isn’t available to us through romantic heterosexual relationships. Primary differences between our stories make them unique to each other. First, I chose my fundamentalist faith as an adult and built my marriage and parenting on its tenets, whereas Lamya was raised steeped in the teachings of the Quran. Also, because I came of age in an era that obscured the gay landscape, I lacked an understanding of my sexuality until I was middle-aged and already married to a man. Lamya, however, understands this when she is in her late teens and unmarried. Further, the layered themes in our stories are different. Lamya writes of the difficulties of being a Muslim immigrant near the time of 9-11 while I include the complex layer of an anxiety disorder. MAYBE YOU SHOULD TALK TO SOMEONE by therapist and writer Lori Gottlieb. Gottlieb’s memoir follows a chronology much like mine. The plot is anchored in the therapy sessions of the main characters. As readers sit on the couches with Gottlieb’s clients, so they sit with me in my story. Both stories present mirrors to readers and enjoin them in a process of self-examination, but my story is told from the client’s perspective rather than the therapist’s. Further, my story is broader in scope as it captures life outside of therapy. LIVING, LOVING, and LEAVING the WHITE EVANGELICAL CHURCH by Sarah McCammon. Evidenced by its rapid rise to the New York Times bestseller list, this memoir reflects the appetite for books about the evangelical world across a broad readership. The book, which is part memoir and part investigative journalism, addresses evangelical cultural issues of her childhood, including sexuality, women’s roles, and other dogmatic religious teachings. While I speak to many of the same issues, I, in stark contrast, could be the parent in her story because I raised my children much like she was raised. Another difference is my emphasis on the patterns of dualistic thought produced by a fundamentalist worldview; patterns that were kept in place by a need for certainty and reassurance. In addition, McCammon is not a lesbian. Five: After years of battling an anxiety disorder, a health event propels a 60-year-old evangelical woman into the therapy that springs her from traps of distorted thinking and frees her to choose her authentic sexuality. Six: Early spiritual and supernatural experiences of “hearing” God nurtured the belief that every choice or decision is either the right one or the wrong one, and that making wrong choices will result in displeasing God or tragedy. Overcoming binary thinking means foregoing religious teachings and the need for certainty. When therapy uncovers a childhood trauma of sexual assault, the embraces that as the cause of her same-sex attraction, but only tells her husband about the assault. As she tries to extricate herself from the marriage, he holds on to the idea that she can be healed from the assault’s wounds, forcing them both into a cycle of guilt and reprieve. Seven: The story is anchored in therapy sessions in two different offices, but flashbacks take the protagonist out of those places into other primary settings of her home, neighborhood, inside churches, and the bar at a local grocery store. Scene is enhanced by the behavioral details of the actors, such as jangling keys, slamming doors, picking up lettuce off of a plate, and looking down at the floor.

Your monthly dose of thrills, chills, and necessary distractions has arrived! Here are five riveting psychological thrillers that will keep you reading late into the night. Susan Meissner, The Map to Paradise (Berkley) A blacklisted actress with too much time on her hands teams up with her clever, secretive housekeeper to investigate the disappearance of their neighbor, a reclusive writer. His sister-in-law, who’s been his longtime caregiver, insists he hasn’t vanished, and is merely working on his latest script in private. As the women grow closer, and increasingly suspicious of each other’s motives, they reveal shocking secrets and dark pasts. Sarah Hartman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me (Putnam) In this biting, satirical take on the domestic thriller, a failed pop star turned private school parent must clear her son’s name when his bully goes missing. Luckily, she’s just made a new friend—a lawyer who just happens to harbor dreams of private investigating. And her upstairs neighbor is a cop, although not a very useful one. Between the three of them, she’s sure she can track down the little shit precious angel child before her son’s reputation is forever tarnished. If you like quirky characters, scrappy fighters, and a high dose of hijinks, this is your cup of tea! Who am I kidding? This book is everyone’s cup of tea. Connie Briscoe, Chloe (Amistad) Briscoe’s latest is a respectful yet inventive ode to Rebecca, in which a young private chef named Angel enters into a potentially dangerous liaison with the haunted scion of a wealthy Black family, who appears to be grief-stricken by the loss of his powerful wife. You know the drill….or do you?!? I can’t give anything away, but Connie Briscoe still packs the familiar tale with plenty of surprises. Ashley Winstead, This Book Will Bury Me (Sourcebooks) Ashley Winstead has quickly become one of my favorite voices in the genre—there’s a polish to her characters that belies their hardened interiors and wounded pasts, their favored delusions and worst decisions. Her latest may feature her most interesting and complex heroine so far: an internet sleuth, mourning the loss of her father, throws herself into investigating the high profile murders of several sorority girls, and in the process does something terribly wrong. Many authors have taken a stab at capturing the complex and exploitative ins and outs of the true crime industry and its many cold case warriors, but Winstead’s is my favorite take yet. Deanna Raybourn, Kills Well with Others (Berkley) Deanna Raybourn’s charming sequel to Killers of a Certain Age is finally here! Our four favorite senior lady assassins Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are back. They are laying low but growing restless… but then they learn of the perfect job and swing back into action. I cannot even tell you how much of a vacation these books are. –OR View the full article

In my debut novel, Creep, the protagonist, Alice, ruminates on the significance of three: “Third time’s a charm, I am told: there are always triples in stories of old: bears, billy goats, blind mice, benevolent fairies – three acts.” It’s appropriate, perhaps that, at thirty-five, I have had three surnames, each for roughly a third of my life. Each iteration of my name has been tightly bound up in my identity as a mixed race woman, which, in turn, is explored in my novel. I was born to a Mauritian father and English mother as Emma Bundhoo* (to preserve privacy I have changed my birth surname to another common in Mauritius), and, after their divorce when I was one, endured a childhood of mispronunciations and misspellings. Why is your name funny, playmates would ask, and sometimes, after a long look: why are you brown? to which I, bewildered, had no response. I remember emulating the tired way my mother would spell it down the phone: B, U, N for November, D, H, double O. How I wished I was called Emma Lennox, like Mary in The Secret Garden. My mother met our wonderful stepfather when I was six, and thenceforth we grew up in an overwhelmingly white, English environment, and had an entirely typical (privileged) middle class upbringing: ballet lessons and girl scouts, holidays to Spain, going to the cinema, riding bikes, playing board games and reading books. We had English accents, English turns of phrase, English mannerisms, living in our English house, by the English coast – but the fact remained, we were brown, with white parents. Nothing could change this otherness. My older sister bore the brunt of it. She looked much more like our Mauritian father, with expressive brown eyes, shiny dark brown hair, and skin which tanned readily. I was a more diluted version, watered down: my hair, eyes and skin were all lighter, meaning, I could pass, if not as white, but as western. I had the uneasy privilege of being assumed to be Spanish, Greek or Italian when in holidaying in those countries, of being asked sometimes: so where are you from? in a way that was curious, not aggressive. My sister, on the other hand, was called racial slurs at school. By the time I was thirteen, she had successfully petitioned our mother to legally change our surnames to her English maiden name: Grimwood. I would never have thought of it myself, but I eagerly, gratefully, followed. It made sense: we didn’t see much of our father, had no links with Mauritius, and, for me, in a childish way, I was keen to not have to explain my name, or feel the familiar rush of embarrassment that it set me apart. Although Grimwood, too, was occasionally misspelt, it was unequivocally and reassuringly English. A layer of otherness was removed, and I leaned into this new name. Before long my schoolfriends had forgotten Bundhoo. I forgot Bundhoo. In making new friends at university, I became merely Emma Grimwood: Grimmy, Grimmers (some still call me this) and it was a thrill to be so assimilated, to pass unnoticed, to ignore my own Asianness even as I struggled to tame some of my body’s revolts against whiteness: seemingly excessive, fast-growing body hair and tendency to store fat on my stomach and thighs, arms that darkened so dramatically in summer that it drew comments. There’s a scene in Creep where Alice remembers an internship where she was asked to make a cup of tea the colour of her skin. That happened. * I married my husband in 2017, and, despite it becoming increasingly uncommon to take one’s husband’s name, I wanted to do it, to shift once more. I had been English Emma, and was ready for a more nuanced identity, one where I could cautiously find a middle ground: almost comically European, and delightfully vague, meaning “from the street/road”. It wasn’t a momentous erasure of selfhood as it felt to some friends, but a development of identity, into that of a family unit, whose name our children would have. This, strangely, is where I stopped wilfully identifying as white, and began cautiously, willingly trying on my mixed-racedness, my dual heritage. It is no coincidence that I started writing the manuscript that would become Creep a few years later. As I created the character of Alice, my writing began to make explicit things I had only ever internalised: feelings of self-disgust that came with a 90s upbringing and emphasis on thinness and whiteness, together with the quiet assumption that no one would want me. One of the first changes my editors suggested I make was to tone down Alice’s oppressive self-hatred, to use her vitriolic words about herself more sparingly. It was shocking to realise that there wasn’t one thing I had written in her unhappy, spiteful voice that I hadn’t thought about myself, and deleting them one by one felt cathartic. Now, my daughters – a quarter Mauritian, a quarter Dutch, half English – are van Straatens and Grimwoods and Bundhoos. One has hazel eyes, one has blue; one’s veins at the crook of her arm are green like mine, the other’s blue like her father’s. I hope they feel rooted in each name, and not at pains to push any part of themselves away. In Creep, Alice never reconciles herself with her racial identity; sees it as something conspiring to alienate her from the life she wants. I, on the other hand, after many years of shame, or trying to ignore it, am at long last, proud to identify as other: as mixed race. View the full article

This year marks the twenty-sixth anniversary of Law and Order: SVU, which has aired continuously since September 20, 1999. The hour-long drama features the Special Victims Unit of the New York Police Department, who are charged with investigating sensitive, “especially heinous” crimes against vulnerable people—primarily crimes of sexual assault, abuse, exploitation, and trafficking. Very bad crimes, done by very bad people, in near-constant syndication on a show that has also managed to host countless icons of popular culture as guest stars—Robin Williams, Chloe Sevigny, John Ritter, Serena Williams (as a hoopster!), Martin Short, Elle Fanning, Whoopi Goldberg, Henry Winkler, Zara Saldana, Jerry Lewis, and even Murder She Wrote’s Angela Lansbury, among many others. Drawn from Hollywood, professional sports, and the music industry, SVU’s guests come to the show at the top of their games, not as a way to get started. They take on roles as villains, victims, or vice because they want to. Because it means something. Feels good. With more than five hundred episodes behind it, Law and Order: SVU might be considered the Platonic ideal of the TV procedural: each show stands alone, a one-shot narrative with a tidy resolution, while the workplace world built around our investigators becomes so emotionally rich over the span of seasons that we learn to claim every member of the ensemble cast as ours to gossip and speculate about—our eccentric found family who will never change or disappoint us. In the microcosm of the procedural, we seek, perhaps above all, a performance of comforting and absolute competence. These shows deliver the fantasy of just laws and a reordered community in which every victim is listened to, believed, and fought for, and every case is open-and-shut. As Emily Nussbaum put it in the New Yorker, “For all SVU’s excesses, we expect it to keep one promise: no matter how bad things get, the story will end.” SVU is the same age as its relatively recent, and highly enthusiastic, Gen Z audience, who follows the only remaining original lead, actress Mariska Hargitay’s Captain Olivia Benson, as she is challenged alternately by her convictions and the limitations of the legal system. Benson joined the unit as green as they come, partnered with Christopher Melloni’s Detective Elliot Stabler, and we soon learn that Benson is a survivor herself, and therefore motivated by a righteousness that frustrates everyone for whom the work is only a job. Guaranteed closure and earnest conviction: these are powerful appeals in the increasingly uncertain and divided world of late-stage capitalism, and SVU continues to draw millions of viewers every week—including writers Roxane Gay and Carmen Maria Machado, both of whom have spoken about their love for the show that Machado considers a modern-day “fucked up Western fairytale.” Even Taylor Swift is on record as a fan; her Scottish Fold cat, with an estimated net worth of nearly $100 million (and presumably a fan of at least purring in Swift’s lap during an SVU marathon), is named “Olivia Benson” after Hartigay’s character. For ordinary viewers, procedural mysteries like SVU and their medical procedural cousins, including the evergreen Grey’s Anatomy and House, inspire countless fanfictions and rewatch podcasts. When the procedural format embraced forensics and crime scene scientists in the early 2000s via docu-series like Forensic Files and TV’s CSI franchise, as well as the work of bestselling novelists including Patricia Cornwell (whose Scarpetta is in the process of being adapted by Prime Video) and Kathy Reichs (whose Temperance Brennan inspired Bones), we even saw ripples in the United States’ IRL justice system. Detectives and prosecutors scrambled to catch up to the ideal that no crime is committed without leaving clues while simultaneously struggling to overcome the unrealistic expectations that the scientifically documented “CSI Effect” inspired in juries. Procedural book, television, and film series are a catechism, a soothing and cherished mantra against feelings of dysregulation and fear. The Equalizer, whose CBS reboot stars Queen Latifah and is now in its sixth season, makes this promise explicit by offering justice directly to the disenfranchised: in every incarnation of the premise, the protagonist, a retired intelligence agent, advertises their services, “Need help? Got a problem? Call the Equalizer.” The current CBS series takes this vow a step further, promising in its tagline, “Injustice will be equalized.” In most episodes, Latifah’s Robyn McCall goes head-to-head against enemies who embody current societal problems, from transgender discrimination to refugee trafficking to domestic violence. The diverse cast illustrates the triumph of progressivism in all of its muscular and unyielding power. While The Equalizer, along with SVU, CSI, Bones, and their cozier counterparts like Murder She Wrote and the reissue of Matlock with Kathy Bates, have invited criticism for their lockstep and formulaic structure, it’s the formula that makes the viewing experience soothing. On a procedural, justice is inevitable, and the journey is the point. The viewer is along for the ride, relaxed and free to ponder the larger issues at stake or to fixate with delight on a favorite slow-burn ship. Perhaps this is why Roxane Gay has said she does most of her writing “lying on my couch and watching Law and Order”: the procedural doesn’t compete for her attention so much as it creates a comfortable backdrop for Gay’s creativity. The appeal of the procedural is, in this sense, a shade different from the appeal of a sleuth mystery or even of true crime. Consider the jokes about there being “nothing more soothing than true crime before bed,” the popularity of “relaxing with my murder podcast” and stepping into a space of being “basically a detective.” True crime and sleuth mysteries explicitly invite the audience to participate in the work of solving a crime. They tell their stories in a variety of different ways, with only the sleuth themself (or the podcaster’s soothing narrative voice) remaining constant from one episode to the next. The procedural, by contrast, is an established step-by-step procedure of storytelling. It presents its case not so much for the viewer to solve (although we’re welcome to speculate) but rather to make a frame for what the viewer is truly interested in—whether that be complex character issues, anger, advocacy, romance, found family, friendship, or all of the above. Of course, there’s no hard-and-fast dividing line, but it’s interesting as novelists to think about the procedural as its own separate space in mystery storytelling. Much of the advice given to budding mystery novelists is grounded in the assumption that readers will strive to solve the mystery alongside the protagonist, and many do. On the other hand, surely one of the pleasures of a long-running mystery series is that there is no requirement to stay one step ahead of our sleuth. Kay Scarpetta, Temperance Brennan, and even Stephanie Plum can be trusted to get their guy. Deep in the Kinsey Millhone alphabet, we know that the procedure by which Kinsey solves the titular mystery will involve a jog on the beach, a conversation with her landlord, and one or more episodes of mortal peril, along with half a dozen changes of clothes. Sara Paretsky, author of the V.I. Warshawski series (launched in 1982, with its most recent release in 2024, a longer-running series than even SVU) and founder of the professional author group Sisters in Crime, likewise blurs the lines between procedural and amateur sleuth, adopting a handful of beloved plot beats that she utilizes in every book to tell the reader where they are and where they’ve been in the mystery, and to remind us that the bad guy can’t stay ahead of Vic. Our upcoming mystery debut, Big Name Fan, embeds a fictional TV PI procedural called Craven’s Daughter alongside its actors’ attempt, five years after their show has wrapped, to solve the murder of one of the show’s crew members. There’s nostalgic fandom here, placed in conversation with fan critique of a network’s shortsighted decision-making when it comes to queer ships, but there’s also an acknowledgment of Mariska Hartigay’s observation that the longer a show goes on, the harder it can be to tell the actor apart from the character she plays—even for the actress herself. Maybe that’s why, as readers of these books and audiences of these shows and podcasts, we find ourselves loyal to particular series and to characters and can even be reluctant to explore a new fandom or book. Novelty is in the details, but not in the voice. Not in the familiar home that a procedural makes for its mystery, whether it be dark or light, romantic or gritty. Olivia Benson, as ever, has got this, and she understands, especially, why you’re here. *** View the full article

Mannikko Tazmanakos silently bolted to his feet at the faint sounds of Karl’s widow’s lithe frame ever so slowly brushing her way among closely spaced foliage. Realizing her movement was not wandering at all, but directly toward him, he crouched frozen behind tall dense arbor vitae for her to finally step close enough to allow him to quickly seize her, with a hand pressed firmly but gently upon her mouth. The feel of the exquisite contours of her thinly clothed womanly form pulled close against him brought an aching reminder that he had not held any woman for what now suddenly felt far too long for him. He realized a second too late how it made his breath a little deeper and dryer than he wanted her to hear. She was more than sensual enough to feel the aroused tenor of Tazmanakos’ hot breath, from where his lips slowly whispered the words two centimeters from her ear. “Be still now. If I wanted you hurt it would already be over, yes? And I declare you are confident that would be impossible since I am only here because your Karl trusted me more closely than anyone else. I trusted him with my life. He trusted me with his. Will you trust me? Can I trust you? I’m going to release you now, OK?” Tazmanakos saw her forehead barely reach his shoulders as she pushed away and glared fearlessly up at him with her slightly more platinum than aquamarine eyes flashing a fierce energy made surreal by the reflecting brilliant ivory moonlight, which for that moment rivaled the moon’s glow above them. The highlights plentiful throughout her slightly past shoulder length compactly curled red hair wildly shimmered in the moonlight around her milky grey satin camisole draped as liquid closely against her pale skin, making her appear to him as a gothic faerie. She spoke at him in a supple and resonant voice that he could feel in his chest as much as he heard her. “Now who are you? Why have you invaded my home?” Tazmanakos realized she could see his obvious effort to gather himself to find his next words. “You heard me say ‘Karl’”? “Who is Karl? I don’t know any Karl!” “You appear too serious to make me believe you are toying with me. So why is it then that you want to deny him?” As if to act contrary to Tazmanakos ‘serious’ she broke into a laugh that snapped out of her chest. “Haa! Deny someone who never existed?” “He spoke of you frequently, and only to me. Most often about when you were both younger. Together. Before he had to distance himself from you. For your safety. Never told me your real name. Only that you were his ‘Jenya’. I worked with him continuously, right up until the moment when he passed.” Tazmanakos saw her freeze at the name she had heard no one say for many years, and then quickly reflected on why it had been so long since then. “’Passed away’; that is what you call it? Worked with him? Then you and he regularly shared the same blood on your hands? He was dead long before he knew it. He just needed someone to finally remind him of it! Speak not another word of him and go now. Never return, understand?” “I am trying to be respectful, that’s all.” “Will you please go? Right now! You do not want me to ask you again!” “I was with him when he died. I heard his last words. Don’t you want to know what he said?” “Absolutely not! Long before he died I refused to hear anything out of him!” “I can understand. However I heard plenty out of him. It was on more than one occasion that he asked me to never tell you he was sorry, especially if you had any lightweight glass objects with immediate reach.” Tazmanakos saw the recognition flash out of her stunned eyes, revealing the memory’s brief grip on her, before she snapped back at him. “You dare to be so insulting!? You know nothing at all of that! You know nothing of me!” “He described the L-shaped scar on the front of your left thumb, from the time you accidentally sent your hand through the glass door into you home. Is it that door back there, behind from where we stand?” “He said accidentally, did he?” “It always took two stiff drinks to bring it out of him. In nearly the same very few sad words each time, he made it clear what a terrible day it was for him.” “You had no business talking about that with him!” “Of course I defer to you on that. But I’ll tell you this. I can tell when a man is straining himself to assume blame that was not his.” “He blamed himself?” “I think he finally convinced himself; not me though. I wasn’t about to argue with a man who was arguing with himself. Nonetheless he was totally crystal about one thing. Made me promise to occasionally check on you.” “So your prowling here is what you call ‘checking up’ on me?” Jenya wondered why Tazmanakos took such a long scan up and across the completely cloudless sky, before he slowly drew a deep breath, before almost whispering to her. “He warned me that it would be a mistake to contact you directly. He insisted that I wait until the stars aligned properly. Only then would you approach me, because as strange as it is to me, he really seemed to believe, it would invoke what he said would be a celestial blessing to allow him, or was it his spirit? I never really understood his description of that that part, though, ok, for him to see you through my eyes. That was his belief, strange as it sounds, to me, at least. Does it sound as strange to you?” Tazmanakos watched Jenya instantly become wide eyed while she reflexively looked up to the stars brilliantly adorning the clear sky. She appeared to be searching for a couple of seconds, when she appeared surprised at whatever she saw. She quickly gathered herself to incredulously probe deep into Tazmanakos’ eyes for nearly a half minute to seek any deception, when she felt a sudden flash of a too uncomfortable familiarity out of his gaze that provoked an anger that, at least before tonight, she had always directed exclusively at Karl. “What? Oh, so he sees me now through your barbaric eyes? Could he not have done better than such a blunt instrument as you?” The cooling night air stung slightly over his humiliation flushing warmly through his skin. But then he remembered the humility that Karl warned he would need with her. “Perhaps he could have, given enough time. However, he did state it plainly to me that his confidence in me to watch over you was perfect.” “Perfect? So he still loved to overindulge himself with that foolish word? He was always the self-aggrandizing warlock!” He blinked hard in surprise at that recognition. “I would never have asked you about that; however, since you raise it, yes, he did mention to me that if you ever trusted me enough, then you might acknowledge him as such a man.” “I don’t trust you to acknowledge anything!” “Of course; not so much about trust as it is your comprehension, yes? I for one do understand how I see you now. So haven’t you and I passed beyond the need to debate your acknowledgement? Look, it’s just me asking now, is this all because you are also involved in the craft?”

Madhavi and SriMyna's Children's book - Looking forward to the feedback. Thank you 1. Story statement Maya, a naughty little girl from heaven learns magic spells from God and plays pranks on the creator. When she was sent to earth, she tries to change the way of the world using her own unique sense of self-taught morality creating both meaning and chaos to the modern world while navigating through the normal school life 2. sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Antagonistic forces are girls and boys in her class who were judgmental, snotty and did not become friends with her as she was different, chubby and brown 3. Title of the book a. True friendships do not need magic cupcakes b. Smile, share, listen and laugh to make good friends c. Maya makes friends 4. Develop two smart comparable for your novel. a. Genre is children’s books The book is the first book in the series about a little naughty girl Maya who learns magic spells in heaven and uses them while living on this earth. The first book is similar to “My way of making friends” by Elizabeth cole, The series is similar to a little girl using magic to change the way of the world like the books “Its raining bats and frogs” by Rebecca Colby or “Marigold Star” by Elise Primavera or “Love sugar Magic ” by Anna Meriano 5. write your own hook line (logline) A naughty child from heaven must find her way to the hearts of her classmates who are judgmental, snotty and are not interested in friendship with Maya who is different, chubby and brown. 6. sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. 1. Inner conflict for protagonist - core wound · When her classmates were not interested in friendship with Maya, she feels lonely and lost and must find a way to make friends 2. secondary conflict is the social environment · Naughty Maya always used magic at her whim and fancy to change the way things existed in the world and she had to learn to control the use of magic 7. sketch out your setting in detail. In the beginning of the book the setting is heaven, then it is earth and as it progresses the setting of the book is Maya’s school

Hi Madhavi here. Here is my submission. Looking forward to the feedback. Thank you 1. Story statement -what's the mission of your protagonist? The goal? Some stories must be told. They represent the truth and are the testament of the times we live in. They are the stories of inner battles of human beings who try to fight against all odds to live every day. The book is a collection of short stories on existential agonies of people in both America and India. These are stories of wounded souls of the western world looking through a kaleidoscope and stories of the lost hiding souls of the eastern world watching them through a magnifying glass. 2. sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story Antagonistic forces in each story are different. In America, they are the unplanned wars, immigrants' fears, misunderstood religion, confused sexual orientation, untimely love, sudden divorce, cultural shock, Autism with social anxiety, hunger and Anorexia, MENSA intellectual loneliness etc., While in India, the antagonist forces are the rigid traditions, interreligious marriages, under the table corruption, color discrimination, fake religious gurus, overambitious parents, dowry harrassment, male dominance, body shaming, power politics etc., 3. Title of the book : a. Broken strings make beautiful music b. Melodious Blues from broken strings c. Life sans color, Laughter sans joy, music sans melody 4. Develop two smart comparable for your novel. a. Genre is literary fiction b. There are stories of immigrants as in Jhumpa lahiri “Name sake”, there are realistic characters in the novel with all their flaws as in Aravind Adiga’s “White Tiger” and the story narration is in the lines of “Broom of the System” by David Foster Wallace. 5. write your own hook line (logline). A young student from India must navigate through the melting pot of America meeting many wounded souls on the way while on his return to India, he has to blend with shrinking souls hiding life in a tight fist. 6. sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Inner conflict for protagonist - core wound – Each story has its own inner conflict – the core wound · For a soldier it is the death of his dear friend to road side bombs · For a Mexican cook the stress of being caught and sent home · For a bright spell bee champion untimely love and teenage pregnancy · For a middle eastern man in witness protection the fear of being recognized · For a professor in theology the clash between his professional beliefs and personal love for his overly religious wife · For an orphan child in India being rejected by prospective parents · For a Hindu Muslim couple, love caught between religious fights · For a rape victim, holding on to the child of the enemy in her tummy · For a bright poor engineering student, the deadly cancer disease 2. secondary conflict is the social environment · The soldier dealing with war has to also deal with loss of a limb and not be able to hold his new born daughter · A Mexican cook not only deals with immigration issues but also feels the pain of being away from his sister and parents when he gets arrested · For the spell bee champion it is not only teenage pregnancy that bothers her, it is also the emotional struggle with her over ambitious Indian parents who were terribly disappointed by her pregnancy · Hindu muslim couple not only have to deal with their inner battles because of different customs and traditions but also must deal with societal pressure from family, friends and even strangers · Rape victim has to deal with her inner struggle of learning to love the child within her after being impregnated by a man who abused and raped her but also deal with the society treating her like a outcast All the characters have both primary and secondary conflicts. · 7. sketch out your setting in detail. For each story , settings is different a. For the soldier it is Afghanistan, Iran b. For a spell bee champion, it is a first generation Indian household living in Usa c. For a Mexican cook it is Mexico and all the countries he crossed to enter America d. For Hindu Muslim couple it is a small town in India with lot of temples and mosques.

The protagonist of Search Party, a ruminative yet rudderless young woman named Dory who jilts her staid hipster existence to try to solve the mystery of an acquaintance’s sudden disappearance, has frequently been referred to by critics as a sort of “millennial Nancy Drew” (which, to some, means she’s an “Anti-Nancy Drew”). This comparison generally stands to establish her as a particular type of protagonist: a young female amateur detective. It also serves to remind audiences of the narrative pitfalls commonly associated with such a character, namely, the cliché of how “seemingly inconsequential objects like a necklace or a torn check all take on greater meaning”— the ability to find direct and obvious clues that act as clear signposts on the way to a solution. But Search Party is not a mystery peppered with the obvious evidential breadcrumb trail of a Nancy Drew story so much as a warning to those (audiences and characters alike) who expect all mysteries to play out this way. Those who might expect this, the show suggests, are those who have grown up on police procedural dramas, or consumed the mystery stories put out by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (which produced The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, et al.), tales with highly predictable, and even dependable formulas. Indeed, the show is sprinkled with reminders of the expectations of these works: cutting often to the CSI-style TV-show-within-a-TV-show which employs Dory’s blonde, Upper-West-Side-bred best friend Portia, an actress terribly miscast as a young Latina cop. Additionally, the episode titles themselves mimic the cadence of Stratemeyer titles: “The Secret of the Sinister Ceremony,” and “Password to the Shadows.” This warning, against relying on the events in Season One of Search Party to follow the conventions it flags, is pulled off effectively by swapping in hallmarks from many other groups of detective stories: mostly from film noir and neonoir, but also hardboiled crime, and thriller. But these thematic and aesthetic twists that play out against a backdrop of another entirely different, heretofore unrelated genre: the millennial city comedy. Indeed, the multi-layered Search Party, which aired its first season in pairs of two out of ten half-hour episodes each week (and made all of them simultaneously available online, ready for bingewatching), has been hailed for its particular conformity to the noir genre and its relatives, while retaining the feel and structure of a twenty-two-minute sitcom. It is, many critics have discussed, a comedy about millennials (the white, privileged, Brooklyn-based cut of it), and it retains this sensibility even as its protagonist turns it into a mystery (just not the kind she thinks it is). Search Party, which initially premiered on TBS and then moved to HBO, becomes an entirely different type of show in each of its five seasons. Genre is a kind of alchemy in Search Party; the different stylistic and thematic associations of each leg of the show seem to activate certain qualities in the characters and then allows those qualities space to grow. This essay is about Season One of Search Party, which is firmly a pastiche that both explores and overthrows the “plucky amateur girl detective” story that has been a sub-genre staple of the detective story for generations. Dory’s own boring life seems to transform into a nostalgic mystery when Dory believes she sees the missing girl, a former college classmate named Chantal Witherbottom, at night, through the windows of a Chinese restaurant. Dory’s observation is illuminated by glowing red neon signs so commonly associated with neo-noir, a genre which, like its predecessor of film noir, is overwhelmed by antagonistic forces such as conspiracy and corruption, and faces its protagonist with gritty futility. Dory’s first clue – her own view of Chantal—in her Nancy Drew-ish quest, is literally illuminated and colored by a hallmark from another genre. The juxtaposition suggests a darker take on Dory’s discovery than her own excited expectation. Generic trades such as this force a character who has perhaps stylized herself on such an effortless, hyper-successful and ubiquitous archetype, to confront the ambiguity, disillusionment, misapprehension, and failure more familiar to the investigators populating other, less-triumphant detective subgenres. [Spoilers aheads] Indeed, what makes Search Party truly noir is that it turns out there is no mystery at all, like The Third Man (1974) or Chinatown (1974), the film’s dangling carrot is revealed to be an illusion—more specifically, an exaggeration fabricated by over-reading on the part of the detective, perhaps fostered by the expectation that real-life clue-following is just like the kind that appears in the genre’s more clichéd texts. Dory’s entire journey, starting from this first clue, is based on misunderstanding, miscalculation, and the hope that she can save the day, and will lead to a sensation quite unlike the ending of a Nancy Drew story—the detective’s being entirely wrong. The show builds a perfect conspiracy featuring the missing girl’s secret pregnancy, a simple paper trail leading to a dangerous real estate company making secret deals, a baby-obsessed cult housed inside a pretentious artist collective, and several ambiguous characters, including a gruff, duplicitous private investigator, and a possibly-paranoid woman who insists that there are darker forces at work shortly before she is found dead. Ultimately, though, it turns out that Chantal has chosen to abscond only to take an extreme kind of emotional-health cleanse—leaving her family, friends, responsibilities, and social media profiles to go concentrate on herself for a while and be free from the various pressures in her life. It’s common, in noir, for the detective to fail in fixing the problem at hand, or to realize that he (in this genre, the detective is rarely not a “he”) has been duped. Often, the mysteries picked up by detectives are dummy-cases generated by enormous and powerful powers, to distract from more substantial, crooked dealings. In such works, the detective must discover that he has been led in the wrong direction, and work to find the truth, even if he is not powerful enough to indict the guilty group. In Search Party, though, the fault lies with the detective. (Well, the show’s missing girl, Chantal, is revealed as being unbearably, cluelessly selfish for disappearing in the first place. But Chantal is a subject for a later episode.) While such noirish elements pervade the story, the tale also becomes a Hitchcockian thriller for a while (the second episode, after Dory sees Chantal in the restaurant and grasps her first clue, is even called “The Girl Who Knew Too Much” instead of the usual titles). For a while, it hovers in Hitchcockian territory. In Rear Window, an amateur saves the day. In Shadow of a Doubt, the amateur detective on the case is a very young woman who is doubly jeopardized when she figures out that her beloved uncle is a serial killer, while, for example, her even more amateur armchair detective father and his friend sit on the porch solving fake mysteries night after night. The show even threatens to veer into a tragedy with some playful but very heavy foreshadowing; in an early episode, an older man next to Dory on the subway notices the book Dory is reading—a copy of Anna Karenina that had once belonged to Chantal—and ominously informs her, “I’ll save you the five hundred pages. She dies at the end.” Search Party does become dangerous, turning the show from a Nancy Drew story, in which an amateur detective learns of and solves a problem perpetrated by someone else after following a string of noticeable clues and putting them all together, into a story that harps on the impossibility of being a Nancy Drew figure in actual life, collecting various genre hallmarks from Hitchcock to noir to tragedy. It even becomes a little Gothic, with Dory’s quest starting to look more and more like Northanger Abbey (which is a novel about a young woman who reads so many Gothic romances that she starts to think she might be in one; she starts applying the ludicrous narrative logic of those books to her own relationships, suddenly suspecting her friend’s father of being a murderer and the like). As much as the references in Search Party stress that the “mystery” of it all is entirely in Dory’s mind, a product of her imagination, oments like the Anna Karenina comparison punch up the potential for danger in Search Party… not in the sense that “someone will come after” our protagonists, but that there are dark realities of “playing detective” for a real crime or strange event. The problem with Dory’s presentation as, or perhaps even identification with, Nancy Drew is not that such mysteries present a lack of danger—at least once in every book, Nancy gets too close to solving the case, so an attempt is made on her life (she is driven off the road by a suspicious car, she is attacked from behind with chloroform, etc etc). It’s that all of the crimes in the Nancy Drew stories are easily surmountable by Nancy and her friends—while danger is a risk, death is not. Nancy Drew is much too resourceful, clever, and damn lucky for this ever to be her fate. (It is important to note that Nancy Drew is an incredible detective. No human alive could solve every single one one of those things.) But also Nancy Drew is never wrong! Where she sees a mystery, there is a mystery. There is never a consequence for rampantly speculating about a crime taking place. This is what Search Party tries hard to emphasize: there are consequences, in real life, for playing Nancy Drew. Indeed, the show takes great pains to unearth a kind of cynical realism in light of Dory’s self-fashioning, and reveal that trying to become someone like the fictional Nancy Drew is in fact highly dangerous, because Nancy operates in a world governed by a very different set of rules. Nancy might play with fire in terms of her own personal safety, but she never comes close to ruining someone else’s life. She never lets her own desire to solve a crime become a desire for attention, validation, or the need to feel important. She never gets to “feel” like she’s the protagonist in a mystery because she is in one. On the other hand, Dory’s suspecting that she might be the heroine in a detective story, is revealed as a kind of narcissism, a kind of selfishness, a adrenaline-junkie’s cure for the boredom and malaise of her everyday life. Search Party isn’t the only show that interrogates the theme of “a normal person wanting to be in a mystery.” That’s a new, reflexive subgenre I have termed “the millennial whodunnit.” In that genre, as I’ve written, “characters lead unfulfilling, unhappy lives, until a murder in close proximity serves to make life interesting again, propelling their daily existence into another genre entirely.” That our Nancy Drew turns out to be a self-serving, self-absorbed schmo is one of the smart bait-and-switches of the series. Another is that the sexual politics of the Nancy Drew stories are very quickly overthrown in favor of a more disillusioned, realistic take. Ron Livingston plays Keith, the male investigator Dory works with, and it turns out that he does not want to be her professional partner so much as her romantic one. He compliments her beauty while they are sorting through evidence, seduces her at his grimy bachelor flat when they are going over the clues. (This is a show in which older men constantly assail younger women with romantic and sexual overtures.) In the G-rated sexual realm of Nancy Drew, this level of boundary-crossing is never an issue (they’re kids’ books after all); sure, Nancy is belittled by male criminals or underestimated by male clients, but no one does her the indignity of making a pass at her, or trying to turn her from a detective into a sexy sidekick or trophy partner. Everyone in Search Party is revealed to be less than their crime-story counterparts. We see how they want to be seen, and yet we see theme entirely for who they actually are. That’s the real point of the show. The only mysteries are how low we ourselves are willing to go to prove to ourselves that we are the main character of an exciting story. View the full article

I Chapter 1 Spring Last Year, 1277 -- Licoricia, an Old Woman, in her Home Early afternoon. Wisps of a late snow were melting between the cobbles on Jewry Street, one of the few cobbled streets in Winchester. It made for less mud than the other streets, but there was still mud enough for all. Winchester was a wealthy market town, and Jewry Street was a wealthy street, or it had been not so many years ago. Not so now. The last week of riots had burned themselves out. The street was quiet now, almost empty. Few people lived there any more. There were few Jews on Jewry Street, few left in all of Winchester, hardly worth the trouble of mobs rising to riot against them, but then, that’s the nature of mobs. Some of the Jews had fled the country, but not many—most couldn’t afford it, the king put too high a price on his Jews for them to leave the realm. Many had been killed—in the civil war more than a decade ago, many more in the coin clipping trials, in the riots, in King Edward’s orgies of execution. The king would have preferred to have seen them convert, or so he said, but of course, how can one ever trust them after that, how to trust a Jew who converted to a new faith, so it was only fitting that they be tried and executed, converted or not. A few Christians had moved into empty houses on the street. They didn’t have to be purchased—they were empty. No one talked about the whereabouts of the former owners, or the technicalities of buying and selling. The new owners simply took possession. From somewhere, from nowhere, the clopping of three horses came down the street. They stopped in front of the big stone house set back from the street, the home of the widow Licoricia—an old woman, a money lender, a woman of some influence a long time ago. Licoricia had lived in this house for many years. She raised four sons and a daughter here. She never knew her own parents, but she never lost her children. She was raised right here in town by Chera—financier, moneylender, who became the mother of the orphan Licoricia as a small girl. This house was the largest on the street, two stories, glass windows, three brick chimneys, gracefully set back from the street and towered over by tall trees—still bare of leaves this early in spring. A grand home at one time, with lights in the windows, people coming and going—now the whitewash faded and chipped, a few shingles clacking their demand to be repaired, the house shaded by years as well as trees. She lived here with Alice, her companion of many years, a servant girl elevated to sister by their years together. Three men dismounted and tied their horses—men in hauberks covered by tunics, gray or brown or just covered by dirt, no one took notice, and in barrel helmets so no one could see a face, and they knocked on the door. Knights, mercenary soldiers—who could know, no one saw them. Not pounded, not to draw attention, just knocked lightly, in no hurry. Inside there were only the two old women. Licoricia was in her seventies. She never really knew her actual age but the years were inscribed in the lines of her face. She paused her needlework and called, “Alice, can you see who is there?” Alice was not quite so old as Licoricia, but old enough to have earned her stoop. She stopped sweeping, she worked so hard to keep the floors clean, just long enough to open the door a crack to peek out, just a crack. They had not had callers for a long while, and she had grown cautious since the riots. She was no longer strong. The men did not have to push hard to let themselves in through the crack. They closed the door softly behind them, and drew their swords. Alice’s eyes widened as she took in the sight of them—their barrel helmets, their hauberks and sooty tunics, drawing their longswords like the teeth of dragons—they had the look of monsters. She gathered her breath but she did not have time to scream. Licoricia could only watch as Alice thudded to the wooden floor, as her eyes bulged wide with terror and her blood sprayed on the walls and spread pools on the wooden floor. Licoricia’s eyes widened and she felt her own heart fall to the floor with Alice. She stood bolt upright, faced them, not tall but still straight. She brushed a crease from her skirt and then brushed her palms, and stepped forward. She thought, so this is how it ends… She said, “Finally you are here...” II Chapter 2 Today, Spring 1278 – Florent D’Egremont 1 Florent d'Egremont stands in file on the rocky hillside with the black robed monks of the Dominican priory, the obligatory audience at this grisly performance. The hillside just beyond Winchester’s northern wall, a short way from the Durn Gate, forms a natural amphitheater between the wall and the woods higher on the hill. The Gray Friars file to the left of the Black Friars, and some homeless mendicants straggle up to watch the spectacle as well, probably hoping to get a hot meal and maybe a bath at one of the monasteries later. A few patches of snow still dot the hillside where the spring grass struggles to surface. Florent snarls inside, angry, revolted at the spectacle of the hangings, hangings and more hangings. He wants to turn away. The Black Friars priory is not far away on the other side of the wall, where Florent serves as a lay cleric. He wears the cassock and cord to please the abbot, it’s little enough and doesn’t really keep Father John pleased anyway, but Florent keeps his sword and dagger with him as well. He is of the priory but not of the priory. Bad enough, that first round of executions. That was last fall when the hillside was turning brown and cold winds were blowing eastward. It was just after King Edward issued an edict that usurers and coin clippers should be arrested, tried and executed. All over England, people heard the signal; they took Edward’s proclamation as an invitation to pillage the communities of Jews. When word reached Winchester, the strike of that flint ignited days of riots in the streets, mobs setting bonfires in the market and in front of the Jewish synagogue. Some of the houses on Jewry Street caught fire, but the fires failed to make any distinction between Jewish or Christian homes. The Jews who lived there on the street tried desperately to pass buckets of water through the mobs to the burning houses—most of whom on some other day might have helped pass buckets themselves. And since Christian homes were catching fire as well, cries arose that the Jews started the fires, as though it made any sense that the Jews would set fire to their own homes first. That first day of riots, the bailiff stood on the auction block at the market, and the crier read charges against the accused, while the conservator of the peace danced around on his horse, trying to disperse the mobs. Deputies rounded up the accused, carpenters set up the gallows. Everyone stayed busy. The accused were money lenders and coin clippers, Jews and Christians both, accused of lending money at usurious interest, or stealing the king’s own silver—and all silver coin belonged to the king—by snipping a bit off the edges of his coins. Some were guilty and some innocent—and so were some of the accusers—but few of the accused had a chance to prove their innocence. And so many more were Jews than Christians, even though there weren’t many more Jews than Christians in Winchester—in fact, far, far fewer. The mobs and riots were the worst that first week, and the bailiff Roger Dunstaple had wasted no time in hanging the accused right there in the marketplace, right in the center of town, the trials could wait until after, as though exhibitions of hangings would quiet the rioters and quell the fires. Roger was a hulking beast of a man, and if there were ever a shard of love in his heart, he spared none of it for Jews. He directed the conservator of the peace and his deputies from the garrison to hang a dozen of them that first night. It worked. As the hangings began, rioters cheered. They jeered at the convicted, flailing from their ropes. They threw rotting cabbages, eggs and stones at the dangling bodies. But as the limbs of the dying went limp, the rioters fell still. And the dead were left to hang for seven days. Not all who watched were rioters. Many that first day, like Florent, were incidental observers, trapped by the mob. As the dying finished their task, the conservator rode through the crowd, separating them, sending them home. The fires ebbed, the smoke blew away with the wind, the ashes settled. The city sulked. Then it happened again, in the winter. A new round of accusations and arrests, and a new tempest of riots, lootings of homes and shops of the accused, fires. And another round of executions. But this time Roger was better prepared. Despite the frozen ground, carpenters had somehow set up gallows on the hillside outside of town. Only those most determined to watch the hangings made the trek to where Florent stood now. But Roger and Father John de Dureville, the abbot of Black Friars, and the abbots and priors of all the other monasteries, had set the time and place and given the order, so that all the rank and file of monks must line the hillside to watch the hangings. Florent guesses this act of witness might be supposed to give the weight of churchly righteousness to the spectacle—but he doesn’t feel righteous. And now, with spring about to flower, a third round of accusations, arrests, riots, lootings. And a show trial—this time held right at the gallows on the hillside, as though to save time and trouble, and the executions immediately to follow. At least this time, the trials preceded the executions. Roger claims the riots are less and he has saved the city some damage. Maybe so, but Florent doubts if anyone is really doing any accounting for it. Only a few townspeople gather to watch today, and of course the boys circle around to throw stones—by now, most townspeople would probably rather be plying their trades or at their hearths than standing too close to the rot they could sense being played out. And those few who do make it to the hillside are people Florent might want to avoid in other circumstances, like unwelcome encounters in the town’s darkest, narrowest alleys at night. The friars are here only at the abbot’s command, and he says the command comes from the bishop. So he says, but Florent is not convinced. He notices that neither Father John nor Bishop Nicholas are present. Florent and the monks stand, fidgeting witnesses to the mass execution. Three at a time, three after three, all left hanging while the next three are hoisted up. As before, not all of them are Jews—but most are. Anger seethes low in Florent’s guts, it churns. It is not witnessing death—that is all too commonplace. A plague—that comes from God. No, this is the pointless repetition of death upon death, a plague sprung from the black places of men’s souls. It recalls the executions he had witnessed after battle during his time as a squire during the war now more than a decade past, when Lord Edward—now King Edward—had slaughtered so many of the barons and their warriors. Florent has no sympathy for criminals if they break the laws of God or king, and of course he has no sympathy for Jews. Either way, they deserve justice and punishment, in this world or the next. He stands up for the laws of God and Church, without question, of course. But why are he and the monks his brothers forced to watch this punishment, time after time? Are they also being punished? Does their presence bring with it the weight of God’s acceptance of this sacrifice? He scans the faces of those about to be hanged, the third batch today. He is jolted into a shock of recognition—a pair of eyes looks straight into him. It is Jankin the doctor. Not the tanner who nearly killed Florent’s tiny daughter with his phony potions and his incompetence, it’s the real physician who spent five days in his home at Kathleen’s bedside and saved her life. The scar on Florent’s cheek burns in that way that is all too familiar to him. He forgets the revulsion evoked by the orgy of executions. He breaks ranks and rushes to the gallows, and cries out, “Free that man! Release him! He’s a physician. He saved my daughter’s life! I vouch for him, he never loaned a mark on interest in his life. I will put up my own life that he’s never clipped a silver coin.” He calls up to him, “Jankin, Jankin!” As he scrambles to climb the ladder, he draws a dagger from his waist to cut the man’s noose, if he can just climb high enough. But Roger comes from behind, pulls him down the ladder by the rope cord around his cassock, and beats him as he falls to the ground. The black robed Dominicans are now getting even more of a show. The boys in the crowd stop chucking stones at the hanging bodies to watch and point, and even the crows stop circling, and settle on their perches to see what will happen. Florent jumps up to try again to climb the ladder and slice the rope when the conservator of the peace, a knight called Philip, pulls his horse up behind him and pulls him back by the scruff of the cassock. Roger takes advantage of the instant to pummel Florent, until the conservator grabs the back of Roger’s head and yanks him, leaving Roger howling on the ground and Philip with a fistful of hair. Florent scrambles to his feet in time to see the executioner kick the ladder out from under the physician’s feet, but not fast enough to stop him. Jankin’s body jerks and dances like a macabre marionette. Florent struggles to grab his dangling legs and right the ladder. But the executioner blocks his way, the bailiff tackles him from behind, and they slam into the rabble. By the time he is able to get up from under Roger’s stinking, hulking mass, it is too late. The physician’s dance is done. The crows hop from the branches to the gallows and squawk impatiently for their turn at the eyes of the hanging. But it is not over. Roger is back on his feet and grabs Florent by the shoulders from behind, yanks him to the ground, and slams him over the head with a board broken from the gallows. Now it is over.

The Retreat (gothic horror/women’s fiction) Logline: After losing her job as a tenured professor, a fifty-year-old mother of twins attends a writer’s retreat in rural Georgia, where she must confront her own demons, defy the monster who is stealing her ideas, and manage the ghost of his sister, who wants their family’s shameful secrets exposed. Opening chapters – inciting incident, establish setting, introduce protagonist and antagonist Chapter One “Here we are – Lammermoor.” Bobby’s voice dragged Ginny up from the depths of her car nap. An elaborate wooden sign dangled between two tall posts above a dirt road that wound its way into a thick stand of longleaf pine. A newly mended fence fronted the country road for miles in either direction with pristine boards shining here and there amongst their weathered cousins. Bobby turned into the drive as Ginny looked around taking it all in. Birds darted through high branches searching for respite from the intense sunlight. When they came out of the woods, there it was, looming large, at the end of a long straightaway directly in front of them: Lammermoor. The sun dappled the gravel with dark contours as it filtered through live oaks flanking the road. Their branches curved overhead, forming a thick tunnel that was simultaneously grand and claustrophobic. Ginny marveled at the thick strands of Spanish moss dripping from the trees. She found it beautiful but knew it was a deadly parasite on its host. A cloud passed in front of the sun, just beginning to weaken in the early May evening and the scene was suddenly cast in shadow. But up ahead, the white house gleamed, its imposing presence presiding over the landscape like a queen who refused to be ignored. Built in the antebellum Greek Revival style, it had matching upper and lower front porches, held up by eight square columns and a large staircase leading to the front door. Its large, evenly spaced windows were hung with black shutters and from a distance they resembled dark eyes that contained unfathomable secrets. “Wow. It’s an old plantation. Looks like something out of Gone with the Wind.” Bobby’s comment betrayed an undercurrent of distaste and Ginny wasn’t sure how to respond. She felt bad that the retreat’s caretaker had hired this particular Lyft driver to transport her. It wasn’t her fault, but somehow, she felt responsible. She tried to steer the conversation in a different direction. “These old trees are beautiful. I wonder how long they’ve been here.” “Since before the Civil War, I’d say. Tended to by who knows how many slave gardeners.” Bobby wasn’t wrong, and it made Ginny even more uncomfortable. “From what I read, the Slakes bought the place in the 1980s when the last of the original family members had passed. Got it for a steal I think . . . must have taken a lot of money and time to fix it all up.” “Well, I guess if you have that much you can decide what to do with it. Can think of other things they might have done . . .” Bobby trailed off. “Speaking of time and money, I’d better get back to civilization if I want to pick up anyone else today. Is there someone here to meet you?” Bobby helped Ginny unload her things and bring them up onto the porch. The space glowed blue from the ceiling paint, which Ginny remembered was meant to keep away spirits. Small tables and rocking chairs were scattered along its length. Propped against a sweating pitcher of lemonade on the table closest to the front door was an envelope with Ginny’s name on it. She ripped it open to reveal a short, handwritten note and a set of keys. Dr. Walker: Welcome to Lammermoor! I apologize for not being here to greet you, but please make yourself at home. This is your set of keys for the duration of your stay. Feel free to settle into your bedroom – it’s the blue room – last one on your left down the hall on the second floor. There’s food in the refrigerator and I’ve chilled a bottle of rosé. Help yourself. I hope to be back later this evening. Owen Slake Ginny felt a tingle of excitement at the prospect of staying in a gigantic historic house all by herself. It was like being in a movie – she thought of the Sofia Coppola film with Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell. What was it called? Bobby hovered at the bottom of the steps. Ginny could tell he wanted to get back on the road but also felt a sense of responsibility for her. Clearly, he was unsure about leaving her on her own. “Please, go ahead. I’m fine – the house is all ready for me, and I am so tired. I just want to crash.” “Well, if you’re sure. Here, put my number in your phone, just in case. I’ll call you –what’s yours?” It took a few tries to find a spot where the service was reliable. They ended up trudging up the drive toward the main road to get a signal. After they exchanged numbers, Bobby got back in his car. Ginny stood on the porch and watched the Toyota recede into the distance, kicking up a plume of dust all the way down the drive. The sound of tires crunching over gravel echoed across the silent lawn. She stopped watching when Bobby’s car was obscured by the shadow of the woods and the crunching was replaced by the insistent screams of a crow. Clouds floated languidly overhead, but she noticed that they were slashed with red like they had been stabbed. Chapter Two The sound of a car door slamming startled Ginny awake. Her room was dark. Night had begun to fall while she was resting, and she woke disoriented, wearing the clothes she had travelled in. It took her a few minutes to remember where she was. She caught a faint whiff of jasmine in the air and wondered if she’d left a window open. She heard footsteps crunching in the gravel and went to look outside, noting that both windows were shut tightly. Her room faced the property behind the house. In the fading light she could just make out a close-cropped lawn flanked by several outbuildings. A barn and what she assumed was the old schoolhouse sat in the near distance and beyond that lay vast woods. A tall man in a cowboy hat, jeans, and work boots was making his way toward the barn, his flashlight beam dancing along the path. Ginny kept her room dark so she could follow his movements without being seen. She noticed that he walked with a slight hitch in his step. As she watched, a light came on in the barn. After a short while it went out again and the flashlight beam veered into the woods. Owen Slake, Ginny thought with a twinge of disappointment. She had hoped he’d introduce himself to her when he got back and offer a more formal welcome to the retreat. But then again, I was asleep, she thought. He saw no lights on in the house and probably didn’t want to disturb me. Still, she was curious. She wanted to know who he was. Ginny crept downstairs to the kitchen by the tiny light of her cell phone and found a flashlight in a drawer. She exited into the back yard and carefully followed the path she had seen Owen Slake take into the woods. It was deeply dark outside the circle of her flashlight’s beam and Ginny shivered at the thought of getting lost in the woods. After a few steps, she heard music playing – she recognized Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” – and up ahead she saw a light in the window of a small cottage. Pausing behind a tree, she watched as Owen opened a beer and sat down at a table. He toasted an imaginary companion, took a long swig from the bottle and then dropped his head into his hands. Reflecting on what little she knew about this man and his family history, Ginny was moved. But it didn’t look like a good time to knock on the door and introduce herself, so she picked her way back to the house and turned in for the night. As she struggled to fall asleep, she imagined what George would say if he knew about the unusual circumstances of her arrival at the retreat. He’d been dubious from the moment she introduced the idea. “So, what’s in it for them? Do they own whatever work you do there?” After twenty years together, George remained mystified by the workings of academia. “No, of course not.” “Then what do they get out of it? You’re not paying them, so . . .” “This guy has a big estate and a house that he can’t possibly use all of, so he’s opened it up to writers and artists to give them space to do their work.” Over the years Ginny had grown weary of trying to explain the protocols for intellectual exchange in her profession. While it had become a joke for George to ask how much she was getting paid for the articles and book chapters she published, it was clear he was still puzzled by the whole thing. Jack and Cooper had begun to parrot their father when they heard about her writing projects, asking: “Does it pay?” “I just don’t see why they would pay you to go there and not get anything in return.” “George, they get the prestige that comes from being associated with the creative process.” Ginny smiled, satisfied with her answer. George looked skeptical. “Who’s going to be there when you go? Is this some kind of wacky artist colony situation?” “I’m not sure. I think there’s just one writer at a time . . . and a caretaker, of course. I’ll pull up the description.” Ginny found the classified ad on the Poets & Writers website. Lammermoor Writer’s Retreat Looking for the time and space you need for sustained creative activity? Commune with nature and the Muses at Lammermoor, a historic property 140 miles southeast of Atlanta. On 150 acres of land, with a lake, a garden, goats and an ornery donkey named Igor, Lammermoor is a perfect retreat. You will have the run of the property, plus the use of the antebellum Greek Revival house, including a bedroom, bathroom, and several well-appointed workspaces. The kitchen has been recently updated, with modern conveniences. Artists have access to a studio space in the re-modelled one-room schoolhouse. There is an old Steinway on the property that can be tuned for guests. Lammermoor is an isolated rural property, 18 miles from the nearest town. There is a convenience store/gas station 3 miles away. An old pick-up truck is available for guests’ occasional use. While we have Internet access, it is spotty at best; cell service is available with most providers at specific locations on the property. We welcome applications from artists and writers who are comfortable in a rural setting, highly self-motivated, and eager for quiet. We offer a $1000 stipend. One writer or artist at a time will attend for one of our three-week sessions. Please note your preferred dates in the application form. Transportation from the Atlanta airport can be arranged in advance. Contact Owen Slake with any questions: oslake88@gmail.com. “Who is this Owen Slake guy? Is he the caretaker?” “Actually, I Googled him and I think he is related to someone famous. His parents were in music – they died in a car accident. The Slakes owned the property, Lammermoor, named after the opera, and I guess he inherited it after they died. There’s all sorts of news stories about the crash, but not much about him. I guess he had a sister who died in the accident too. She was some sort of promising dancer. “That’s tragic – but it sounds like he came out okay.” “I guess he fixed up the house and the property and opened this retreat.” “So . . . does he live there too? Who takes care of it?” “I’m not sure.” “So, you’d be at this house out in the middle of nowhere, alone for three weeks, with no contact with the outside world?” “Yeah, I guess.” Ginny tried not to sound eager, but the thought of twenty-one days of peace and quiet with nothing to do but enjoy nature and write made her halfway delirious. “What else have I got going right now? Remember the ‘pink slip’ that came in my last paycheck?” “I’m not sure about this. It doesn’t sound safe.” “George, it’s perfectly safe. This is a real thing, it’s professional.” “Well, it sounds too good to be true, and if it sounds too good to be true . . .” “Look, chances are slim that I’ll even get this thing. Who knows how many hundreds of applications they’ll get, from actual writers. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” George encircled Ginny with his arms and patted her bottom. “You’re an actual writer – after all, you have published poetry and a novel in progress.” His smile seemed sincere, but Ginny found his tone slightly mocking. She still could not believe she’d actually been chosen for the retreat. Even after all the official emails and contracts, George’s doubts persisted and he had been reluctant to let her go. It was only when she’d conjured the image of herself as a depressed former professor, mooning about the house that he’d agreed it might be good for her. “It will give me time to figure out what’s next. Academia is going down the tubes and I am trained as an Art History professor. I have to consider my options.” “There’s so much you could do – don’t sell yourself short. I have no doubt you’ll find something else.” “Well, that makes one of us. But thank you for your confidence.” Ginny pushed her memories of the past six months to the back of her mind. The whole “academic prioritization” process that had resulted in the closure of her department had been ugly and contentious. “Academic prioritization” turned out to be a euphemism for faculty cuts. The Board of Trustees was determined to reduce costs and the future of small liberal arts colleges was bleak. “Enough.” She stopped her brain from going down that dark path. Here she was, in a beautiful home steeped in two hundred years of history, surrounded by a pastoral landscape out of a Joshua Shaw painting. What stories this place could tell. There was even a donkey and goats! Ginny was sure that the Muses would visit her at Lammermoor – how could they not be drawn to such an idyll?

I wrote my first novel that was published during grad school. Here I was thinking I was writing the ultimate love story, but it turns out it was a horror novel. The protagonist Michael’s wife and kid are dead, but still living with him. I was exploring a space of grief, not letting things go and the harm that can come from that. Okay, there may have been a demon involved (the harm that comes). Still, when it sold to a horror imprint, 47North I was a bit taken aback. I was very lucky it sold to a horror imprint because I was welcomed into a really wonderful community of supportive writers, wonderful conversations around genre, writing, history, and plain outright geekery and commonality as it seems everyone I met had grown up on the same stuff I loved from Poe to horror movies to Oz. I’m not kidding, Baum’s books are absolutely disturbing, creepy wonderful books. But I don’t sit down to write in a specific genre. When I am writing, I’m usually sitting down with a question, a wisp of an idea. In the case of Harrowgate, I was dealing with fear. I love my husband and kids so much, what would I do to keep them with me if they were taken from me? I wanted to explore love set at the edge of life and death. What followed was a very claustrophobic ghost story, with its own worldbuilding and rules. When I sat down to write my next book, I was having lunch in a kitchen nook with Toni Ann Johnson a friend who knows me very well and, with Harrowgate out to editors with my agent, I was noodling what to write next. She said, matter of factly, “You’ve always loved old movies, why don’t you write about that?” I started talking about my love for the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, and I checked out biographies of my favorites from the library. Edith Head. Barbara Stanwyck. Cary Grant. It was Cary Grant’s sad story, his long relationship with Randolph Scott and the looming Hollywood closet that generated Alterations. The skills from different genres only help each other. My worldbuilding skills from Harrowgate came in handy as I drove my main characters, Rose and Adriana through late 1930s Hollywood. It was important to ask questions like: what was that part of Santa Monica Boulevard like in 1939? (a dirt road apparently) and what did the Formosa Café serve? What was it like as a woman working at a studio filled with men? How was Paramount laid out? I also explored the operational reality of being in a Boston marriage, living with the love of your life and when exactly the hammer would come down that made that more difficult. Sadly, Grant’s story yielded a lot of that—it was when the studio threatened that he drop Randy or lose his job that he chose his job. My mom’s great Aunt lived with Mary the love of her life in 1920s Jacksonville Florida as part of a conservative Catholic family, and the couple lived happily together for the rest of Mary’s life. I wanted to explore that space of love when met with societal norms, and how some choices might be outright, but others are a slow erosion. The book also takes place in 1990s Baltimore which was its own research tunnel. Alterations came together nicely and I’m quite proud of it, but I realized that the nongenre world doesn’t really understand how a horror writer can write…not horror. I’m always hesitant to use the word “literary” for realism, because it implies horror isn’t literature. I’d argue that some of the finest prose I’ve ever read is in horror: Shirley Jackson, Peter Straub, Stephen Graham Jones, Jesmyn Ward (yes, Sing, Unburied Sing was released as realism but that was honestly the best horror book I read that year). There is this inherent ghettoization when it comes to horror writing. You tell an ordinary person you write horror and you get the nose wrinkle and the change in tone. Maybe that’s why horror folks are so kind. We’re all on the margins, so there’s no room for a notion of hierarchy. We write the books we love and come to each other with enthusiasm rather than ranking. But here I am with a new book I love very deeply out in a different world of promotion. Being known for horror leads folks to jump to conclusions over this book. Its cover, which is meant to evoke sadness of a time gone by, a bit of regret has evoked the words, “creepy!” from people who don’t understand this is something else entirely. I can’t rely on my comfortable horror community for the space in which to promote this book, and I’ve hired a publicist. I do have so many friends who are writers of realism who have been most helpful, but the worlds are completely different and have different operational realities. There is an idea of sticking to one genre and creating a “brand” but honestly, I can’t command myself to write a story about a specific thing in a specific genre. My stories come from a different space, from questions I have or feelings I’m trying to evoke. And it’s usually the story that decides its genre. Harrowgate chose horror. Alterations couldn’t be anything but realism. After writing my second horror novel The Collective (out now from Writ Large Press) about a cult, a demon and the film industry, I sat down to write a supernatural story that explored a marriage through the lens of Alzheimer’s. I had an idea that a couple could reach each other on a different plane when a diminishing memory pulled them apart…I was super excited about that angle. But the story came out over many drafts and characters and points of view and reorganized and told itself as realism. If I tried to wedge the supernatural on it, it would have rebelled. That liminal space for memory simply became…memory. And I love that book and it’s fully realized and I’m proud of it, realist though it is. I told my Cal State LA fiction students that our drafts are like children. Whatever our influence, they are fully their own people. It’s up to us to help them become the best version of themselves they can be. Even though I feel like I’m writing about the same stuff over and over: questions of love, relationships, friendships, “branding” eludes me as my stories dash between genres. This will definitely not lead me to fame and fortune but I have to say, with everything going on in the world and life, my writing life is quite content as I poke at new questions, ask questions of my characters, and write forward. One of my mentors, Rob Roberge said, “If you show up, and work hard enough, and listen, your novel will make itself apparent to you.” I quote that to my students all the time, and I live by it. But now, as science fiction short stories are working their way into my life (I’m writing a collection and have published one in Asimov’s and one in Analog.) I’d likely add: if you tell the story what it’s going to be, it will laugh and go in another direction. Just write. *** View the full article