Category: newsletter

September 2025 Newsletter: September, I Remember

I don’t have a ton of news this month, although I hope August has been good for all of you and the back-to-school time hasn’t been too stressful for those who are back-to-schooling. I’ve spent most of the month dealing with a lung ailment—nothing bad enough to get me sent to the seaside to take the air, but I’ve been on some medication that made me pretty tired, so I didn’t accomplish much other than some editorial stuff and I don’t have much news. The good news is I’m doing much better!

The biggest announcement is that I’ve rolled both shorts (“Dous” and “Sparking Something”) into a single file, which will eventually be published as a short story collection. It’s called Toward a Consolidated Philosophy of Ghosts, and it’s on the website on the extras page here. The cover is somewhat temporary. I also updated the annotated bibliography to contain references to the plays mentioned in “Sparking Something.” This required me to realize I don’t have a good way to summarize the events of Waiting for Godot, although I’ve seen it performed at least two or three times and read it in both French and English. It’s, you know. Two guys waiting. I feel like saying anything more than that would be frowned upon by the ghost of Samuel Beckett.

Tant pis.

I also added an AI Policy to the website. You can find it here. I am guessing it says about what you’d expect it to say, though.

I also want to show off some new Wisconsin Gothic stickers. These were the idea of my book doula, Rowan, and they helped me edit the files, too–the art is drawn from the cover of Dionysus in Wisconsin. And they came out so pretty–shiny and gold! They were originally intended as book plates/consolation prizes in case we run out of copies on-hand at Booked Eau Claire, but I ordered a ton. If anyone wants one, I’m happy to ship wherever (signed or not). Just send me your address!

Gold rectangular stickers featuring a vine with three heart-shaped leaves and one Wisconsin-shaped leaf. They say "Wisconsin Gothic."

Upcoming Events

I’ll be at Booked Eau Claire! on 12/13 September! I’ll be appearing on two panels (one on indie publishing, which I believe runs 9-9:50am on Saturday, and one on open vs close door romance, which runs 10-10:50am, but check the website for schedule changes and the like). I’ll also be selling/signing books from 12pm-5pm on Friday and 11am-5pm on Saturday. We will have free stickers, a limited supply of tarot card decks available, and tarot readings too! This will probably be the biggest event I’ve ever been to, and I’m both nervous and excited. For more information, click here.

Later in the month, I’ll be at the Waunakee Author Showcase from 10–12pm on September 27th at the Waunakee Public Library. More info here.

Also, for Madison-area Shakespeare nerds looking for entertainment, check out Mercury Players Theater’s production of Hamlet at the Bartell from September 21–October 4th. It stars my (hella yoked) husband/alpha reader Bryan as Claudius! It’s going to be a good time and worth checking out. More info here.

Podcast

This month we released one podcast episode, number 95, on the Avignon Papacy. Not to showcase my own terrible jokes too much, but it is titled “Sur le Pontife d’Avignon.”

Books I’ve Read

This has been a month of mystery novels as I read both Fadeout, by Joseph Hansen, and Lavender House, by Lev AC Rosen, two California noirs featuring gay detectives. They make an interesting set of books to contrast, because Fadeout is set in—and was written right around—1970, while Lavender House is set in 1952 but was written in 2023. Hansen’s detective, Dave, is pretty open about being gay (for a detective, anyway, meaning he’s close-lipped but not ashamed). He runs into his share of bigots, but because of the PI/suspect relationship, he retains a lot of power in these situations, and their commentary doesn’t seem to bother him too much. Meanwhile, Rosen’s detective, Andy, has recently lost his job as a police inspector after being caught in a nightclub raid and is a raw nerve marinating in homophobia and paranoia; at one point he gets beat up by the police for reasons unrelated to the case he’s working, and it was very tough to read (skip to the end of ch 10 if you want to miss the specifics). Both detectives investigate cases related to queer people. I think Hansen knows and uses his setting a little better than Rosen—the 1970s fashions and weirdos are top notch; meanwhile we don’t even get a single baby beatnik in the Bay area. (If Rosen ever writes anything heading into 1955 or so, I’d love to see Andy react to Howl.) But I thought they were both good books, and a nice change of pace for me. Also, if you want more California noir, there’s always The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (or any of his books, really!), which is set in the early 1950s (and was written contemporaneously), and Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, which is set in 1970 (but was written in the 2000s). Both works are incredibly exemplary of their respective authors and wonderful as books go.

I also read Seducing the Sorcerer, by Lee Welsh (cis M/M). I went in knowing very little about the book, although I love Welsh’s work, and it kept me company through some late nights when I couldn’t sleep because of my ailment. It’s about a down-on-his-luck middle-aged guy who discovers a magical horse made of old sacks and because of this meets a sorcerer. And honestly it was lovely. Lee Welch is a delight.

August 2025 Newsletter: Time for the Deepening and Quieting of the Spirit

Big news month, guys, but make sure you keep reading—there’s a short story in here for you down after the first photo.

I had a great time at the Middleton Book Fair, which coincided with the National Mustard Museum’s celebration of National Mustard Day. It was exciting to see people walking around in costume; I did not realize there was such fandom for mustard. Also, welcome to all the new subscribers! 

I’m writing this early on a rainy morning in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I have come for a vacation. There’s a hint of autumn in the air that feels out of step with the bright bleached yellow-white of August. But the mornings are getting darker, and I’m excited that someday soon, it will be fall.

Itch Dot Io

If you’re chronically online, or just follow a lot of writers, you may have heard there was a kerfuffle with itch.io that led to the website de-listing a lot of books and other media that had been marked “adult,” as well as other stuff that was marked “LGBTQ,” even when that content was not marked as adult. This is related to decisions by credit card companies—primarily MasterCard, I think, although Stripe is also a big problem—about what they were and weren’t going to pay for, itself the result of a surprisingly small number of calls by a conservative Australian group that objected to a (fairly heinous) video game. As it stands, my work, which is marked as LGBTQ but not adult, was not de-listed (although a lot of writers with the same tags were!). Nevertheless as someone who believes in freedom of speech, I have been disturbed by this turn of events. 

I appreciate that in order for itch to remain as a platform, it needs people to use the site for buying and selling, and it needs to be able to collect payments. Those feel like very basic things a platform that facilitates transactions should be able to do. But I also resent the fact that so many works were rapidly deplatformed simply because they were marked LGBTQ. I don’t trust anyone that automatically assumes anything under that tag must be in some way pornographic. I also find it both fascinating and frustrating that payment processing companies like Stripe and MasterCard have so much power—they are able to say they refuse to pay for things that fall into an extremely broad category, and suddenly that market is no longer viable.

As of right now, itch has announced they are reindexing adult content and looking for a new payment processor. As far as I have heard, the deindexed LGBTQ works are also available again. For the time being, my work is still up on itch, but I have changed the cut of sales the site gets to 0%. This will not prevent them from making money on me, I don’t think—there’s a period after someone buys a story that itch holds the payment (ostensibly in case of returns), and my suspicion is that they receive interest on that which is not then paid out to the writer. But I also didn’t want to just take the stories down, since I think there are people who bought my ebooks but haven’t yet download them. For now, if you want a signed paperback, I suggest emailing me directly rather than going through there. 

To read more about this issue and find a script for calling major payment processors with your displeasure, click here. MasterCard’s updated statement disclaiming any responsibility (i.e., bullshit) is here.

A watercolor painting of a mason jar with a rum and coke in it. There is one ice cube and a lemon lurking behind the jar. The title is "Sparking Something" by E. H. Lupton.

The Short Story

This month is Pride in Madison, and thus as teased last month, I have a new short for you all: “Sparking Something.” It’s an AU scene from chapter 2 of Dionysus in Wisconsin. In the original novel, we get this bit:

A screenshot of p. 26 in Dionysus in Wisconsin. "No rush." He watched as Sam pulled on a suit coat over his stage blacks. Sam lived, somewhat to Ulysses's surprise, on Bassett Street, where the population was primarily hippies, on the top floor of an old house that had been converted into apartments. He brought the bike to a halt at the curb and felt it rock slightly as the other man slid off. Sam didn't run for the door the instant he touched the ground, which was . . . nice. Instead, he licked his lips nervously, shifting his weight slightly from foot to foot. "It's not much, but if you want to come up--" Oh. OH. "Some other time?" he asked. I've got a case to take care of tonight." Sam raised an eyebrow. "A case?" "I'm a very specific sort of private investigator." Sam sighed. "Of course you are." He started to turn away. Ulysses slid off his bike and caught his sleeve. "Hey." Sam turned around. "What?" Ulysses leaned in and kissed him, very gently, on the cheek. "Thanks. I had a good time." "I--ah---" Sam's brain appeared to shut down for a moment, and he closed his eyes. "Thank you. I mean, you're welcome? I mean, I'm glad."

(p. 26)

I want to stress that this chapter was always written this way! This short is not an outtake, it is something new that I wrote some time after I’d written the original chapter (after I’d published the entire book, in fact) because I was a bad combination of bored and stuck. A few warnings: first, it is basically an excuse to have a relatively long sex scene, so if you read my works only for the plot, it may not be for you. It isn’t queernorm—there’s a couple brief acknowledgements that homophobia exists, although no one’s day gets ruined by it. And it does spoil a lot of the plot revelations that happen in chapter 8, so if you haven’t gotten that far, you might want to wait.

It is available at my website (epub and pdf). Circumstances being what they are, I haven’t put either up on itch yet. Eventually I will put it together with “Dous” and various other shorts and make a whole print book, but for now you will have to do things the old fashioned way, by printing this out on a printer if you want a print copy.

Bookstores!

I visited the excellent Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis, MN, a romance-only independent bookstore that stocks all of the Wisconsin Gothic series. I signed everything they have in stock and drew hedgehogs on them, and left a bunch of Wisconsin Gothic stickers too. If you’re in the Cities, go over there and pick something cool up!

Yolo with Kobo

Finally, I’m again participating in the Yolo with Kobo promotion. If you have Kobo+, or if you have Kindle Unlimited but are looking for a change, you may be excited to know that all of my books are available on Kobo+! For those not in the know, Kobo+ is a service that allows you to pay a monthly fee and check out as many participating books as you can; writers get paid a certain slice of the subscription fees based on what you read. Find all the participating authors on Kobo’s website here, with a few additional ones (plus translations and audiobooks) here.

Upcoming Appearances

I’ll be at Booked Eau Claire on 12/13 September! I’ll be appearing on two panels (one on open vs close door romance and one on indie publishing), and selling/signing books from 12-5pm Friday and 10am-5pm Saturday. We will have free postcards and stickers, a limited supply of tarot card decks available, and tarot readings too! It should be a good time, with over sixty authors present and Abby Jimenez speaking. Check out the details here.

I’ll be at the Waunakee Public Library’s Local Author Showcase from 10-12pm on September 27th! Check it out here.

Books I’ve Read

I have been through a lot of books this year in a bunch of disparate subjects, which is as much a reflection of what my local public library has to offer (especially in the audiobook section) as it is my own variegated tastes. To date, I’ve read forty-four books (more than I read all of last year!), including 18 romances (8 M/M, 1 trans M/trans M, 9 M/F), 8 scifi, 1 horror, 4 YA (read aloud to one or both of my kids), 6 non-fiction/memoir, 2 mysteries, 4 plays (including two versions of The Bacchae), and 1 humorous travelogue (abridged). Some July favorites:

All Systems Red, by Martha Wells. I have reentered the world of Murderbot, partly because of the excitement around the TV series getting released (haven’t watched it yet), and partly because the audiobook was available with no wait and read by the inimitable Kevin R. Free. The books are so good. Also I accidentally played the audiobook of Artificial Condition in the car while driving my kids somewhere and now I am stuck reading All Systems Red aloud to my 7yo, so I am getting a very close look at how Murderbot’s narrative is constructed. I thought it was pretty flat the first time I read this. It is definitely not flat; I was wrong. Also it is very good and you should go read it.

A Caribbean Heiress in Paris, by Adriana Herrera (cis M/F). A strong, driven, intelligent woman from Hispaniola meets a Scottish earl (courtesy title) at the 1889 World’s Fair. He’s immediately smitten, she’s interested but too busy until he proposes a marriage of convenience for plot reasons. I love a romance that uses actual history instead of making stuff up for the purposes of feminism, and 1889 is an excellent time for the nascent women’s liberation movement! The book also features at least five explicitly LGBTQ side characters and an excellent deconstruction of the slavery and related economies that made all those British lords so wealthy in the first place. Said would be proud.

Mr. Collins in Love, by Lee Welch (cis M/M, maybe one character is demi). I had an ARC of this one! Under Welch’s ministrations, a somewhat sanctimonious side character becomes a tightly wound, anxious guy under a lot of pressure to make right and take care of those he loves. The language is perfect, and the love story is nontraditional and functions entirely within the bounds of regency society (as opposed to some other queer regency romances I’ve read that tend to chuck the rules in the last ten yards or so). Delightful!

July Newsletter: Fyren means “made of fire”

Hello, and welcome to the July newsletter! It won’t be too long. July is kind of a terrible month, anyway. Too long, too hot, too bright.

This month I came across the phrase “in olden times” in a story. This is a fairly common phrase that I had never given much thought to, but what the heck is “olden”? Immediately I assumed it was some kind of back formation to make the word “old” seem…well, older. But it isn’t! The -en suffix turns out to be common in Old, Middle, and early Modern English, where it is used to create adjectives meaning “made of, of the nature of,” and we actually use it in other familiar terms, for example in words like “golden”’ or “wooden,” although it’s common to just use the non-suffixed form of those adjectives (we usually say “wool sweater,” rather than “woolen sweater”). Etymonline.com also notes the obsolete words “beanen” (made of beans), “hunden” (of dogs), “wreathen” (entwined), and “fyren,” meaning “on fire, made of fire.” I feel like I have been made of fire lately, so perhaps we need to bring fyren back.

Writing Updates

I have finished writing the first draft of a novella that is currently titled Blood Magic! At the Beach that chronicles Sam and Ulysses’s attempt to take a honeymoon in a place that isn’t Madison. This completes the last promised piece of Wisconsin Gothic ephemera. I will have to think about distribution methods at some point; at about 25k words, it’s too short to print on its own. Ideally, I could release it as an ebook, and hold onto it to print until I have a few of the other short things (including “Dous”). But I know some people have a strong enough preference for print that they won’t read it until it comes out like that. So I guess I’m still thinking it through. If you have any ideas or preferences, feel free to shoot me an email.

I am starting revisions on book 5.

Appearances and Book Sales

My ebooks will be 75% off at Smashwords for the month of July. Here’s a link to the series.

I will be at Middleton Book Fair on August 2nd, joined by Rowan with their tarot decks after noon. Last year we sold out, so come by early. Also, it’s Mustard Days I think? So if you like mustard a lot…Middleton’s got you covered. (The National Mustard Museum is in Middleton.) The sale will be on Hubbard Ave. on both sides of the Stone Horse Green.

In September, I’ll be at Booked Eau Claire (in Eau Claire, WI) on the 12th and 13th. I’ll be selling books both days, and also appearing on two panels—one on writing sex scenes (open vs closed door) and one on indie publishing. If you’re going and interested in preordering a copy of one or more of my books, the form is here.

There’s more stuff happening in October, but we won’t go into that right now, since it’s really far away.

An acrylic painting of a green tea latte with colorful latte art on top that looks like a floweer.
I went mad and painted about ten lattes this month.

What I’ve Been Reading

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith. An episodic detective novel set in Botswana with a sort of meandering plot connecting all the episodes. I could not tell if all the little bits were completely in chronological order or not, and I didn’t care. McCall Smith obviously loves Botswana a lot, and the way he described the Kalahari made me want to visit it.

Bombshell, by Sarah McClean. (Cis M/F) I stumbled into reading a bunch of novels set during the reign of William IV into the early Victorian years, and this was the best of the group. McClean doesn’t really care about historical specifics (case in point, a character refers to the ugly duckling story about five years before it was published), but she writes exciting, sweeping feminist fantasies in which women find ways to circumvent societal strictures in order to take revenge on those who wronged them and fall in love along the way. I find I generally don’t like the way gender is handled in these types of books—all the men are the most manly men ever, all the women fall in love because the men are big and strong and make them feel safe and protected. In this one, the heroine gets to kick butt and take names (she has a special leather-lined pocket in her skirts for her knife). And what’s not to like about that?

Sailor’s Delight, by Rose Lerner. (Cis M/M) I’ve read only a few romances where one main character was Jewish, but in two of them, that character was named Eleazar, which is weird. I genuinely hadn’t read this one before I selected that name for Dr. Eli Sobel, and although I probably wouldn’t have changed it (the Eleazar/Lazarus thing was too tempting), I feel odd. Luckily, this Elie (note the extra “e”) is a great dude. It’s 1813, and he’s kind of an accountant for sailors in the Royal Navy. And he’s in love with one of his clients. Who happens to be engaged. No spoilers, but everyone gets a fair shake, the Judaism is approached with care and deliberation by both the main characters and the author, there’s a lot of period atmosphere, and in general I wished this was longer. 

A Gentleman’s Gentleman, by TJ Alexander. (Trans M/M) A slightly improbable but gentle and loving regency romance that spends a lot of time meditating on the different ways to be a man, and more broadly, a human. Includes a very exciting carriage chase and many other hijinks. Alexander was up for a Lammy the same year I was and lost, and I hope they get back there for this.

Wow, that’s more than I thought. (NB I deleted two book reviews from this, so it was even longer in the first draft.)

Podcasts

In June we put out two podcasts, both on the pope. Episode 93: Take Me Down to Vatican City and episode 94: Popes and Antipopes. More pope-related episodes soon.

On the blog

As threatened, I got this post about the bibliography for Lazarus, Home from the War up. Yesterday. I got it up yesterday. Still counts.

June Newsletter

Thank you all for the support for Lazarus, Home from the War. Many people posted lovely reviews on social media and shared my posts, and in general made release day very delightful for me. I donated the first day’s profits from Amazon to Doctors without Borders and Amazon Conservation, two organizations I’ve supported for a long time.

June is Pride Month! (Except in Madison, where Pride happens in August because all the serious Pride-goers go to Milwaukee and/or Chicago first, I guess.) Happy Pride to everyone! Last year I had a short story for you all. This month, well…I wrote you a novel. Actually, I’ve been working on some shorter things, but nothing is done yet. Sorry! I did write you a novel.

Speaking of which, I’m pleased to announce that last week, I finished work on the first draft of book 8. This means that all nine books in the Wisconsin Gothic series have first drafts written! All of them clock in between 63 to 80k words; the fastest any of them was written was about eight weeks, and the slowest was about 55 weeks. (Length doesn’t correlate with writing speed, surprisingly.) And, if you’re curious, the order in which they were written, as far as I can remember, was: Dionysus in Wisconsin, Old Time Religion, Lazarus, Troth, book 6 started, book 7, book 6 completed, book 9, book 5, book 8.

Thanks to artist S. S. Genesee, I have a new Wisconsin Gothic sticker! I will be sending them to various bookstores as freebies and will also have them at events. And maybe send them out with direct orders. If you find yourself jonesing for a T-shirt or a tote bag with this logo, let me know.

Which reminds me: I am now fully stocked with paperbacks of all the books! If you want one, you can email me, slide into my DMs on a social media site, or head on over to itch.io. I charge $17 if I have to ship and $15 if you’re local and want to pick it up. If you want multiple books, definitely message me and I can give you a small discount. I know a few bookstores also have Lazarus in stock, notably Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis (I saw a photo).

Upcoming Appearances

I will be at the Author Fair at the Hedberg Public Library in Janesville, WI on June 21st. It runs from 2:30-4:30pm. In addition to copies of all four novels, we’ll have tarot decks available, and Rowan will be doing tarot readings for $5 (space permitting).

I will be at the Middleton Book Fair on August 2nd from 10am–4pm (or whenever we sell out). It’s being held on Stone Horse Green this year, which is at the corner of Elmwood and Parmenter.

I’ll be at Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis, MN the first week of August to sign some stock and say hi. This is a very unofficial visit. Specific date/time TBD.

And in September, I’ll be at Booked Eau Claire! It’s a big event taking place from 12–13 September. I will be speaking on two panels (one on closed vs open door romance and one on indie publishing). If you’re planning to attend and would like a signed book, you can pre-order here. (Note that this is a very manual process, so if you try to pre-order and don’t hear from me with a bill, send me an email!)

Other Announcements

New Milwaukee-area romance bookstore The Well-Red Damsel will be carrying Dionysus in Wisconsin when they open, so make sure you drop by and pick up a copy so they know it is a good idea! I’m going to send them some stickers too, although I may not have them for their opening, which I believe is June 21st.

In May we did zero podcasts. Whomp whomp.

I’ve written a blog post with a bibliography of sources I looked through while writing Lazarus. It’s not up yet, but look for it later this week.

That’s it. Have a good month!

Lazarus, Home from the War is out!

So first off, today is the day that Lazarus, Home from the War comes out! I’m very excited. You can find the book on all the main sites here, on itch.io here, or on my website here. It’s on Goodreads here. For those looking to order the paperback through your local stores, that should be available to order now or very shortly using the ISBN, which is 979-8988394433.

Second off, today is Hmong-Lao Veterans Day in Wisconsin. I just found this out yesterday! The Hmong were deeply involved in the Vietnam War and came here as refugees afterward, so I wanted to commemorate this, given the topic of the book.

Now, for those with longer attention spans or nothing better to do, a little essay.

LHftW is a very personal book in a lot of ways. I lived in Vietnam for a year and I have a master’s degree in Southeast Asian studies, so I have a weird and probably outsized attachment to the whole region. But my connection to VN goes farther back than an impulsive decision I made in college. 

(What, you didn’t decide on impulse to move to Ho Chi Minh City?)

When I was in college as an undergrad, I lived for several years at the corner of Bassett Street and Dayton, a block from the Mifflin Street Co-op. Mifflin Street was the originating location, in 1969, of the Mifflin Street Block Party, a political protest cum bacchanal that was where former three-time Madison mayor Paul Soglin got beaten by the cops and arrested. Or a place. These things as facts are all very well and good—and living in the area, I was relatively aware of them—but why choose Mifflin Street for the party?

Basically, this area was the heart of the hippie student neighborhood during the 60s/70s, and thus the heart of the antiwar movement in Madison. At some point, and I can’t quite work out the timing (except that it was before 1975), Bassett was nicknamed Ho Chi Minh Trail. I have no idea if this was a self-given title, or a bit of anti-anti war-movement vitriol; nevertheless, the locals embraced it, and put up a street sign.

Before I knew this was a real, actual street sign, my editor and I discussed whether the nickname was a dog whistle, and I removed a reference to it from the final version of Dionysus in Wisconsin because it was too difficult to explain all of this in passing. But I’ve since had it confirmed, not just by the photographs, but by long-time Madisonians as well.

In June 1975, following the fall of Saigon, the city council rejected an attempt to rename the street permanently “in a spirit of reconciliation,” and the sign came down.

(Click here to view a photo of the street sign and a newspaper article on Facebook.)

I still find the whole thing fascinating. But it’s also emblematic of how the US’s relationship with Vietnam has for many years been mediated by the war. I went to HCMC more than a decade after Clinton normalized relations with the country, and it was still such a part of the collective memory in the US that this fact—”Bassett used to be called Ho Chi Minh Trail”—was the main thing I heard from my peers when I announced I was going. (Maybe that says something about who I was hanging out with, too.)

Interestingly, learning about the war for the first time mostly from the Vietnamese side of things, where it’s often referred to as the Resistance War Against America, gave me a view that I now often see echoed in online discourse about it–that it was really a war fought between the United States and Vietnam. This was not, on the whole, a common view at the time–if anything, it was perceived to be not a war between South and North Vietnam that was not the US’s war to fight. It was also not the view of the South Vietnamese who came to the US as refugees. It’s interesting how the rhetoric has shifted.

That said, Vietnam is an amazing country. And so is Thailand, my other love, where Laz has also spent time. A few years later, after I’d been back in Madison for a while, I went back to school for library science and wound up also getting an MA from what was then called the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, wherein I mostly studied Thai.

So because of my own, uh, checkered past, Laz spent some time hanging around at Than Son Nhut (a base on the edge of Saigon, actually not far from where I used to live) flying Jolly Green Giants (search and rescue helicopters) before getting sent to a base in Northern Thailand, where he flew other things (the RF-4C Phantom, mostly) and also did some light espionage hung out with a monk he met.

And then he comes home, which is really where the novel begins. I can’t say anymore, because of spoilers. But I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I’ll catch you at the beginning of June with my normal newsletter!

May Newsletter: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon

When I noticed the date, I decided to send out the newsletter early. Probably I’ve been thinking about Viet Nam too much. (April 27th was also the 50th anniversary of the release of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so…take your pick what to commemorate this week.)

In eleven days, I am running Ice Age 50k, which is held in Kettle Moraine State Park (the southern unit) outside of La Grange, Wisconsin. I registered for the race in December. In the time since then, I have run somewhere in the neighborhood of seven hundred miles, had a brief bout of COVID that left me with a chronic cough, and got hit by a car once (non-fatally; don’t worry about it). There were days when the temperature was about 10°F. There were days when it was lower. There were mysterious aches and pains in calves and hamstrings that I worried would blossom into injuries. And there were times when the days were very dark and I thought perhaps I should pack it in altogether.

Nevertheless, here we are.

Running is a lot like writing. (Haruki Murakami wrote a whole book about this—What I Talk About When I Talk About Running—so I won’t belabor the comparison.) Both because when it’s going badly, you can always crawl into a nearby bush and wait for the end…or because it doesn’t help to get ahead of yourself. Standing on the starting line with 31 miles to go is intimidating. Staring at a blank page with eighty thousand words in front of you is terrifying. But I can run one mile (some days, I can run to the next mailbox). And then I can run another one. I can write a word, or a page, or a couple hundred words.

All of which is to say, we’re fifteen days away from the release of Lazarus, Home from the War, and I’m very excited. I’ve spent so long doing research and tightening the screws and buffing out the dents, that I’ve hardly let myself look up and see that this day was coming. I’ve spent many weeks dragging myself through edits by saying I could do one chapter, or one page, or one sentence, and then repeat and repeat and repeat.

And somehow, we’ve made it.

A watercolor sketch of a mountain in Tasmania with some pink and purple clouds behind it.
Original photo by @antongorlin@mastodon.art

Publicity and Appearances

Rebecca Crunden, who runs the Indie Book Spotlight blog/account on Bluesky, interviewed me for her blog here.

I’ll be at WisCon the weekend of May 23–26. It’s being held online, and you can get tickets here. Disappointingly, they don’t seem to be doing readings this year, but I’ll be participating in a panel on writing about religion in sci-fi and fantasy at 4pm CT on Friday, May 23rd. 

For those in Janesville, Wisconsin, I’ll be at the Hedberg Public Library’s Book Fest on June 21, selling books and tarot decks from 2:30-4:30pm. Their website is here. Fun fact: the Hedberg Public Library was originally a Carnegie Library, and it cost $35,000 in 1902 dollars.

Podcast News

We put out two episodes on medieval memes: “Ask a Memevalist” and “The Field Where I Grow My [D]ucks” (thanks to autocorrect for inspiring the episode title). Both episodes examine some medieval memes we collected from across the web, all of which can be found in the episode notes (we also describe them in the episode). We also put out “An Emergency Popecast” on Pope Francis and the upcoming conclave. (Has it started yet? Hmm.)

Things I’ve Been Reading

I read We Bombed in New Haven, a play by Joseph Heller. Was it Catch-22: The Play? No. Did it send me down a rabbit hole during which I read some guy’s PhD thesis on performances of masculinity in WWII novels? Yes. (Playing a Terrible Game of Pretend: Masculine Performance and Gender Humor in the WWII Novels of Heller, Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Weaver, by Tomas Glover Pollard.)

I listened to an (abridged) audiobook of Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome. It was short, funny, and narrated by Hugh Laurie, which made it even better. If you enjoyed Jeeves and Wooster, this is just the ticket. Honestly, my only complaint is how far abridged it was. 

I listened to the audiobook of The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson. I read it years ago (it’s referenced in “Dous,” at least partly because it is where the word/concept of “planchette” entered my vocabulary, which later became a central component of a delightful set piece in Dionysus in Wisconsin), but the narrator’s performance really brings out some of the humor I’d either missed when I read it with my eyeballs or forgotten about. The work as a whole is so well-written. It’s taut with tension and spare, but the details that are there really sing. As a story, it knows exactly where it is going from the very first moments. What an impressive achievement.

Further Administratrivia

Starting with this edition, all newsletters will be publicly archived on my blog, so if you delete this and then want to refer to the information contained herein, you can find them at https://ehlupton.com/blog/.

If you signed up to be an ARC reader and did not receive a copy of the book, let me know! I sent everything out fifteen days ago, but fear some may have been caught in spam filters.

That’s all for now. I’ll send out another message when the book’s out, so talk to you all in two weeks.