Hello, everyone! Hope you’re having an awesome weekend. Also, in case I didn’t say it last time, thanks for reading. Speaking of reading, the image above is a photo I took while reading in my car while it was raining. I love doing that. Anyway, let’s get to it!
October
You wanna know what’s on my mind? October. I’ll be in a few cool places. I don’t think I’ve announced any of them yet, but I’ll tell you here the first one will be the Brooklyn Book Festival. I’ll be leaving on the 30th and having in NYC for a couple days. I love New York, and any chance to visit is great. Also, I love being on the road, and knowing October will be full of traveling makes me happy. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking hate airports and flying, but I love going places. I’m looking forward to all of it. Oh, and this will be my second trip to NYC this year (I was there for the Edgars earlier this year), and the fact that both trips were for book stuff also makes me super happy.
Everest
I think I mentioned it before, but Everest is one of my lifelong obsessions. I don’t want to try to reach the summit or anything, but the mountain’s long shadow has always called to me. I was about 12 and reading a book by Reinhold Messner about the Yeti and that got me hooked. Since then, I’ve spent countless hours reading about Everest and watching documentaries about it. From time to time—and this is something that happens with all my obsessions; tattoos, cryptids, witchcraft, etc—Everest starts calling to me, whispering about the bodies on its slopes, asking me if I don’t want to write a mountaineering horror novel. When that happens, I watch more Everest stuff. This time, I wanted these:
Dying for Everest (2007) - Decent. It adds nothing new to me in terms of knowledge, but it takes an interesting angle and focuses on the ethics of not even trying to help anyone who can’t help themselves while in the death zone.
The Fatal Game (1997) - Yeah, I know, more about death on Everest, but…whatever, it is what it is. Another solid one that centers of what happens when things go wrong.
I’m still on an Everest kick, so maybe there’ll be some more documentaries on the next newsletter.
A Guide to Writing Your Next Novel
I shared this on twitter a few times, but thought it’d be great to share it here. Every time I finish a novel—a miracle every single time!—I share this short guide to writing a novel I wrote a few years ago. I’m editing the next one now for the last time, so this came to mind. Hope it helps.
A Guide to Writing Your Next Novel in 10 Easy Steps:
Step 1: Stand in the middle of the road in a strange part of town and scream “Everything’s a construct!” at the top of your lungs.
Step 2: Read amazing novels and get angry because you’ll never be that good and maybe no one loves you. Maybe you really a hack. When you’re done, take your insecurities into a dark alley and shoot them in the back of the head with a shotgun.
Step 3: Get inside your blood. Find the ghosts that ride your veins and fight them. Let them win the first round. Then get up and destroy them.
Step 4: Pull your deepest fears out of the bottom drawer of your soul and staple them to your face with the sharp bones of tiny birds.
Step 5: Listen to your favorite music. Then listen to something darker. Listen to something awful and scary. Listen to the ominous silence. Listen to music from movies you’ve never seen. Listen to atmospheric black metal while walking around the woods at night holding a knife.
Step 6: Eat tacos and ponder life without soy sauce or garlic or salsa or sofrito.
Step 7: Remind yourself of every fight, every accident, every dance with fear, every night spent pressing your tongue against the blood clots on the inside of your lips, every broken promise, every drop of anger, every death that crushed you, every spirit you’ve ever felt.
Step 8: Punch a wall until your knuckles bleed. Lick the blood off your knuckles. Punch the wall some more. Remember no one owes you a thing. Smile. Pick up a gutter flower and put it in your hair. Tell the world you can do this. Tell yourself you can do this. Do this.
Step 9: Type as if the keyboard owed you money. When you hit a passage that means something, hold your breath and keep going. Kill every meaningless word. Let it all out on the page. Then sharpen it until it’s sharp enough to draw blood from the moon.
Step 10: Reply to the voices in your head. Scream at the moon. Understand that hell’s fire is nothing compared to what you hide under your skin. Obsess about everything. Cry without shedding any tears. Finish the damn thing. Move on to the next one with a new set of neon scars.
I love the guide--it's exactly how it feels. Blood, sweat, and shooting your insecurities in the back of the head.
Real and unfiltered. Sublime!