The story was unorthodox and lots of it at times personal. It was this thing I wanted to put down on paper, to get it out of my head. This again, was a side novella–something to tide over readers until my wholly unrelated novel dropped. Ring Shout‘s reception before it even dropped has been unexpected. Ran outta whuuuuuts? Anyway, some snipping and cutting and shifting things into place later… yadda yadda yadda… here we are. Whuuuut? Even said the 4k words I’d chopped off in my self-editing jitters, needed to go BACK in. When Diana got back to me she was elated. Sent it to Diana, wondering if her response would be, “errrr…what’s this homie?” I was fully prepared for a gentle, “I see what you’re going for here but let’s see if we can smooth this out and make it make sense.” Took about three or four weeks, and when I was done I was relieved. Whole time I’m writing I’m like, “can I do this?” Still, kept at it–mostly between 10pm and midnight because it was the start of an academic semester. By that time though, I had an outline sketched out. I finally sat down to work on it in August. She’ll work how she wanna, even if it’s right up to the deadline. Whatever I said must have worked because Diana was on board! Before you can say Bob’s your uncle, I had a contract for a story… that I was still dreaming up. You get a chance to pitch, you better sound like you got a firm grasp of an idea and where you’re going, even if you’re putting it together on the fly.

things get weird.” Well actually, I said more than that. I think I said something to the effect of: “southern gothic meets fantasy. But my editor Diana Pho wondered, given my luck with previous novellas, if I had ideas for anything new? Funny you should ask, I answered…and pitched what had been rattling in my head for so long. My first big writing contract! It was at first just going to be for a full length novel about this stuff. Then in April of 2019 I brokered a book contract with Tor Publishing.

Ring shout novel