I promised my agent she could have a draft of the new hot mess on May 18th, and I’m proud to say she got it at like 10:30 p.m. on 5/17/20. Sometimes you know your problems are not fixable with an all-nighter.
It was cool! I hadn’t finished a draft since 2018, and that was under a punishing deadline (though not my MOST punishing deadline of all time) with a crappy day job getting me down. This time I wasn’t like…in pain and exhausted! I was thrilled to finish and excited about it and knew it was a mess but it was fine because I would have as much time as I needed to revise. Not writing to publishing deadlines is amazing!
Anyway. I put it to bed and then watched the amazing episode of The Taskmaster where they all try to eat as much watermelon as they can in one minute. And then I slept like a log.
Then I started to think, what fun thing can I share on Substack that isn’t like…actual text from the novel? What’s a fun teaser? What’s a special feature?
It’s this, y’all. This is the special feature:
I title each scene to help myself remember which thing happens when and where. They make no sense out of context, but they’re fun in a dadaist kind of way. And maybe they give a good sense of the TONE of the book.
I’m also noticing that I have two scenes called Eureka. I guess it’s KIND of a mad scientist book…with lots of sex and murder. See if you can guess which scenes have which.