Wow, I’ve neglected this newsletter a little. Let’s start with the traditional housekeeping.
Library Journal gave The Salt Grows Heavy a starred review, which is always such a goddamned honor. I was a journalist for long enough to know how difficult it is to impress an industry professional. You spend all day inundated by the best of your field. It means something to stand out and I’m glad that my weird little folk tale did.
In a similar vein, The Salt Grows Heavy is a May Indie Next Pick! And I’m also very blown away by this. Thank you so much, booksellers. (Y’all have to understand. About four million books come out every year, and bookstores only have so much shelf space. There’s a reason why authors spend a lot of time going ‘hey! I have a book! Pay attention, please!’ and why we’re always so flabbergasted when the universe says yes, absolutely.)
I’ll be headed to Brookline Bookstore for an in-person event with the lovely Paul Tremblay. You can register here for free. (Although there are other options you can register for. I promise I’m not judgin’.)
Vanity Fair gave The Salt Grows Heavy a little nod in their April issue, which is very exciting because Vanity Fair feels very grown-up and I still feel like three toddlers in a trench coat sometimes.
We sold the French rights to Hammers on Bone and A Song for Quiet!
As always, if you’re interested in the book, please consider pre-ordering instead of waiting for release. I understand the pleasure of immediacy. There’s nothing like being able to get the thing you want right the heck now, and pre-orders don’t really give the same dopamine jolt. But they are absolutely vital to authors.
Also I’m doing Pilates every Monday at KinectedNYC under the supervision of one Joy-Marie Thompson, who some of you might know as the Bald Witch from Sleep No More. Come join me there (but please don’t be weird. o_o)
Onwards to the babbling:
I love spring.
There are colors I’ve come to associate with the season: the brilliant yellow-green of new shoots, the nearly florescent emerald of certain bushes and grass, the heady pink of magnolia blooms and cherry blossoms. The sight of them makes me ache with joy; they tell me that we have survived, that winter is over, and it is now time for the long decadent trek to summer.
I’ve been thinking a lot too about Frances Hardinge’s Unraveller, which I read several months ago and haven’t been able to shake. It’s an absolutely fascinating book and just gorgeously written; Hardinge has a gift for making language do impossible acrobatics. But the leitmotif is what gets to me, and what has stuck throughout this time. It asks such a simple question, ‘What do you do with pain?’
What does one do with the abuse they’ve faced? How do they process the damage? In Unraveller, that pain congeals into the ability to curse another person, to inflict punishment, whether they’re warranted or not. (The book makes it clear it is almost never warranted, that hate is a horror to treat rather than something to spread.) It’s such an elegant metaphor for cycle of abuse, and how often people continue that cycle, needing something to feed the agony inside them.
The book touches too on how hard it is to hold back, to choose control, to elect gentleness, to let go of that hurt safely. And I’m still amazed at how much ground it covers in regards to the topic, how it illuminates the complexity of abuse and pain and everything else in between.
If you need a book that’d keep you up until two in the morning, get Unraveller.
Anyway, as always, a cat photo. (I spent an hour every morning in bed with this ridiculous floof. We have a system now. She hops onto the bed, mewling with excitement and crawls into my arm, laying herself across the length of it. I then drape an arm around her, and we both watch the birds wheeling in the sky in half-awake comfort.) I hope y’all are keeping well.
Pre-orders may not give an immediate "dopamine jolt", but personally I find great joy when pre-orders do eventually come through the letter box because so many months have passed that I've actually forgotten I ordered it. It's like receiving a surprise present from my past self!
So wonderful to read (and see) that you and your ridiculous floof are doing well. (This comment briefly delayed whilst one of my own ridiculous floofs *demanded* tummy-skritches by floomphing herself between the keyboard and myself, purring away.)
Your descriptions of everything coming alive and bringing joy with it after months of brutal conditions resonates so deeply with my own experiences and feelings here on the opposite side of the world. We have been blessed this year with an early and so far quite wet Autumn/Djeran (see link below), (ridicfloof interrupted again at this point) and it's all so uplifting and life-affirming. The fact that my Summer SAD has finally lifted just *might* have something to do with that as well. Perhaps. ;)
Much love to you and the floof both, from Way Down Here. <3
http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/nyoongar.shtml