Smells like success!

I promise I only make one other fragrance joke in this installment.

Folks! I’m not a one-trick pony! I have sold a new book! Unrelated to the Amberlough Dossier! And in fact, darker, nastier, and even more messed up than the Amberlough Dossier!

larazontally

A post shared by Lara Elena Donnelly (@larazontally)

Author of the Nebula- and Locus-nominated AMBERLOUGH series Lara Elena Donnelly's new novel BASE NOTES, in which twenty-something perfumier Vic Fowler has built a deadly side-hustle to cope with the crushing demands of late capitalism; but when a wealthy client threatens to bring it all down, Vic hatches a plan to manipulate a trio of similarly overworked, disillusioned millennials to commit murder in their stead, to Gracie Doyle at Thomas & Mercer, for publication in early 2022, by Caitlin McDonald at Donald Maass Literary Agency (world).

(I’ve actually never seen this movie all the way through. But the book was bangin’)

This one has been simmering away on the back burner since 2015, when I wrote The Dirty American for my Clarion class’s second fundraising anthology. (Side note: our final installment in the series, The Violet Volume, is out now). That story ended up reprinted in Nightmare. Then the whole concept sort of went into dormant mode until I was done with Amnesty and my agent and editor were like “what next?” I had…the barest shred of a pitch, but it won the battle royal against some much meatier, better developed concepts.

The first hundred pages made it through some change overs in the editor, publisher, and agent departments, and eventually evolved into a full-fledged (sexy, gruesome, arch, and angry) novel (with the help of The Dry Down, NYC’s Perfumarie, Nose University, countless piles of books and academic papers, and and and…).

I learned some new tricks writing this one and (I hope) pulled them off credibly. I guess we’ll find out in 2022.

In the meantime, smell you later.