so make it beautiful
Firstly, in case you didn’t know, I am publishing another book! Tenderly, I am Devoured is my folk horror where Saltburn meets The Secret History meets For the Wolf, coming Spring 2025. I am so excited for you to meet Lark, Alastair and Camille (and Therion, the swan god) next year…
Add it on goodreads here, if you please~
2023 was the year where I wanted to give up on being an author. I poured absolutely everything of myself into my Unholy Terrors, both in writing it and promoting it. Yet, in spite of all that I (and my publisher) did, my third book released to a quiet reception amidst the crowded Fall season. I was burned out in a way I had never been, not even in my worst burn-the-candle-at-both-ends postgraduate student days.
I was just… so tired. And I thought: what if I just quit? If I stopped trying to have the career I’d dreamed of ever since I drafted my first novel, then I could avoid being hurt, or feeling this way again.
One of my favourite books is The Secret History, and though I’ve always loved the idea of myself as a “wisp of silk in a forest of black wool” ala Camilla Macaulay, at heart I am much more of a Richard. His outsider position, his blue-collar roots, the way he orbits the Greek class with such endless longing.
My own experiences with academia were messy and complex. I was halfway through my English lit PhD when I asked for a year of leave when someone very close to me died. The faculty refused and told me to withdraw, instead.
After the release of Unholy Terrors, I felt like that same, starry-eyed girl who was a PhD student, who had poured out everything of herself and been left with an empty cup. It took me right back to a time in my life where I was overcome by a feeling that I would never “make it”; I would never be “enough”
And I began to wonder… what if, instead of quitting, I wrote a new book where I explored those feelings? How it felt to devote yourself to a dream, to have a clear view of a single future, and not have it come true. What if I wrote a girl who was soft, a crybaby, the bullied one, the dropout, the “failure” — A girl who, like me, had been a bright, perfectionistic student, who gave everything to an institution that didn’t love her back?
Drafting this book was like a renewal for me as an author— rising from my burnout to discover what I need as a creator, and what sort of stories I want to tell. As soon as I realised this story would be folk horror, it was like everything fell into place. I could be more literary, more experimental, and move toward a quiet, intimate, personal-stakes narrative.
While I can’t say I’m glad for the quiet reception of Unholy Terrors, or the burnout I suffered, it did lead me here— to realising I want to write upper YA/crossover speculative horror: weird fever-dream books with lush prose. That I want to be true to myself as an author. That I want to feel like what I do is art.
Things I am loving lately:
Mood reading books which have utterly no connection to the young adult fantasy genre. A few recent favs include Foxash by Kare Worsley, Kids Run the Show by Delphine de Vigan, and Normal People by Sally Rooney
Watching movies again after a long time of not being able to focus: Poor Things, Priscilla, and of course Saltburn have my heart, forever
Doing the Style 75 challenge and slowly making myself a capsule wardrobe
This playlist:
The seedling idea which may possibly maybe one day become my fifth novel (ssh~)