Category: writing

February 2026: Six More Weeks

At least January is over. (Or, as I write these words on the 23rd of January, I hope that it will be over when I send this. I have faith that January cannot last forever.)

Living in the upper Midwest, never a picnic during the winter, has been especially stressful for the last couple of weeks owing to the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, a place where I have many friends and family members. I generally donate a book’s first day Amazon profits to a charity, and since I didn’t get that done in December for The Alignments, I wound up giving my money to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. If you’re interested in making a donation to a Minnesota organization but don’t have any particular org in mind, you might like to look at this website that lists a whole bunch of good ones.

(Just to be clear, I don’t do this donation thing to goad people into preordering from Amazon or anything; it’s just the most popular single site people buy my books from. Amazon is patently not a good company, but also I respect them for the way they have made self-publishing both accessible and very popular. Business, it seems to me, is often about figuring out how to work with awful people and keep hold of your soul. This is my way.)

I can usually tell when I’m stressed out, because I read a lot more. Right now I am at six novels and two academic articles for the year, and we won’t even talk about the amount of fanfiction I consumed. I realize this isn’t that many comparted to many, but I do have a novel to finish. Part of my stress came from trying to finish Renaissance before sending it out for developmental edits. Then with it off my plate I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I read a lot, and eventually started revising the first draft of book 6. And now I’m revising Renaissance again before copyedits.

Thank you to everyone who has preordered Renaissance already, by the way. In less than a month, it reached the number of preorders The Alignments had during its entire preorder period (which, to be fair, was only slightly more than a month). This is a stat that means almost nothing, but also I’m extremely buoyed by it. It is wonderful to hear how many people enjoyed the previous books enough to take a chance on this one, and how excited everyone is for it.

Upcoming Events

Madison’s new mobile romance bookstore, WanderLust Mobile Books, will be having its grand opening on Valentine’s Day, and I’ve been invited to participate. I’ll be selling and signing books at Giant Jones Brewing Company, at 931 East Main Street in Madison, from 3–7pm. The bookmobile will be outside and we will be inside, so come by and say hi! We may also have little felted chickens in honor of Lupercalia Valentine’s Day.

On March 3rd at 6pm CT/7pm ET, I’ll be doing a zoom book talk with the Ashland, MA Public Library’s Romance Book Club. It doesn’t look like you have to be a MA resident to sign up. There’s also an option to order signed copies of books 1-4 through Tropes and Trifles in Minneapolis, MN. (I will be supplying them with signed Wisconsin Gothic book plates and they will mail the books, presumably around 3/3 or slightly thereafter.)

On March 11th, I’m participating in a romance panel discussion hosted by Forward Theater and the Wisconsin Book Festival at the Madison Central Public Library! Forward Theater is an exciting local theater company that does great work, and they’re presenting the world premier of Lady Disdain (by Lauren Gunderson!), which led to this event. I’m so excited to be a part of this evening. It will be at the Central Public Library from 7-8pm. I think this event is free and does not require a ticket.

Podcasts

We put out two podcasts in January—episode 98, on what the heck was wrong with Roman calendars, and episode 99, on authority! Stay tuned for episode 100 in February!

Book Reviews

I feel like I am in no way an early adopter on this, but Death in the Spires by KJ Charles was very good. It’s a mystery novel with a lot to say about bodies and liberation, about law and morality. There’s a relationship in it, but it is not a romance.

A Bloomy Head (cis F/trans M) by J. Winifred Butterworth was also delightful. It’s 1820 and the newly widowed Kate is trying to save her family farm by making cheese, her brother brought home his doctor friend who is recovering from a severely broken femur in the corner of her kitchen, and someone just found a decapitated body in the creek. You can order signed copies directly from the author if you are a lover of signed copies!

Finally, if you’re looking for something academic, I’ll recommend “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Come for the postmodernist theorist drinking game (take one drink if he mentions Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Bakhtin, Butler…maybe we better stop there, you’re looking wobbly), stay for the weirdly (annoyingly?) prescient things he says about outsiders, categories, and desire. It’s in a lot of places; I read the copy available here: https://www.qc.cuny.edu/academics/prod4/wp-content/uploads/sites/147/2024/08/FYW-Sample-Reading-B.pdf (warning, pdf).

That’s all for this month! Stay warm and fuck ICE!

Decorative Gourd Season (October Newsletter)

It feels very aggressive and unkind to go around being October. I’m not ready for it. It’s time to reread that famous McSweeney’s article, It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.

It has been a really long, rough week around here. We had to say goodbye to our older dog yesterday. Although I don’t think anyone can own a dog that is approaching her fifteenth birthday and not feel the relentless march of time, her decline at the last was very precipitous and distressing. So I’m going to keep this email short. Here is a portrait I painted of Maya almost ten years ago. She liked cheese and peanut butter, loved her people and no one else, and tolerated cats. In addition to various tricks she consented to do, she was constantly in the kitchen when the cheese drawer opened or a bag of popcorn crinkled, even well past the point when she seemed fairly deaf otherwise. 

An oil painting of Dr. Maya Angelou the Dog (DFA) under a table. She is a red shiba inu.
Dr. Maya Angelou the Dog (DFA–Dog of Fine Arts)

Some bad news: I am turning off the TeeSpring shop where formerly you could buy T-shirts with the book covers on them. TeeSpring (now just “Spring” after a merger) seems to have stopped fulfilling orders—I ordered some shirts in August that had not been printed more than a month later, and an online search turned up people who had been waiting for much longer than six weeks. I don’t imagine this will affect anyone too much, but if you decide you want one, contact me directly.

Upcoming Appearances

I will be sitting on a panel at Rainbow Space Magic Con! This year, we’re talking about Writing About the Past to Talk About the Present, because once upon a time I read the in-book introduction to The Name of the Rose and thought, oh, this isn’t really about the 1100s. Or not entirely. I’ll also be doing a reading! What will I be reading? I don’t know yet. Maybe something from Lazarus, Home from the War. Maybe something new!

The panel will be Sunday at 11am CT, and the reading will be three hours later, at 2pm CT. Rainbow Space Magic Con is a queer-friendly scifi/fantasy convention that is online and free to attend. It’s a one-stream con, so you never have to make decisions about which panels to attend and which to skip. You can see the whole schedule and register here.

Finally, I will be giving a talk on finding joy and fellowship in revision at Wholehearted Writers Week in January (the 12-16)! It is tentatively entitled, “Oh no, you accidentally finished your manuscript! Now what?” Because I think we can all agree that just having a manuscript you endlessly tinker with and add to is, if not the best possible way to live, certainly the most relaxing. No publishing deadlines, no problem. If you are interested in a week-long chance to talk to other writers about your projects and problems, you should definitely check it out. Details here.

Books I’ve Read Lately

I picked up Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher (M/F, cis) knowing that Kingfisher writes a lot of fantasy/horror. I was prepared for that—ready to watch some poor sucker walk down the wrong alley and get eaten by a monster. Instead, it was a very sweet romance set in an interesting world, and it was also very funny. It lacked some of the pointed political commentary of Terry Pratchett, but I think it would appeal to people who liked Discworld and don’t mind a little romance. It was also a very comforting read, despite the fact that there are a couple of decapitations and a poisoning or two (including, actually, a poor sucker who walks down an alley and gets eaten by a monster).

That’s it for this month. See you in November. 

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!

Lazarus, Home from the War Bibliography

I don’t always cite my sources for novels–in fact, they’re novels, and I think in general I’d prefer not to make it clear where I’ve hewn close to the truth and where I’ve wandered. But I did so much reading for Lazarus, Home from the War, and it touches on so many topics I think people might be somewhat interested in, I thought I might as well give a few options for further reading.

On Buddhism

I spent what felt like half of my academic career studying Buddhism, from the very first semester of my undergraduate life (thank you, Professor Hallisey) to the final moments of my second MA. Some good non-academic introductions to the ideas of Buddhism might be:

Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (1922). An imagining of the life of the Buddha. I think this was probably the first thing I read (when I was in my teens!) about Buddhism.

The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery, by Janwillem van de Wetering (1971). When it’s the 1950s and you’re in postwar Japan studying Zen and also Gary Snyder is there.

The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen (1978). When your wife just died and you are a Zen Buddhist and you decide to go to the Himalayas with George Schaller to look for the snow leopard for two months. (Side note: Matthiessen had kids with his wife, the youngest of whom was 8 at the time of their mother’s death. It’s not clear why he gets to go traipsing around Nepal, and they go…where? This has nothing to do with the book, which is wonderful. It’s just always bothered me. Also, Matthiessen was a spy, and later became a monk, making him I think the only monk/spy I’m going to mention in this list.)

But those are all about Buddhism generally or Zen Buddhism, which is Mahayana Buddhism. Laz is a Theravada Buddhist, because he converted in Thailand. These are different sports, although they are played on the same field. (Sorry, I’m not a sports person. Does that…make sense?)

For slightly more academic looks at Buddhism (note that none of these texts is exactly introductory)

World Conqueror and World Renouncer : A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background, by Stanley J. Tambiah (1976). He’s an anthropologist, so you know it’s gonna be a bad old time. There’s survey data. There’s tables. But there’s also info about how one becomes a monk (in Buddhism, unlike in the West, it can be a temporary commitment, rather than something you sign up to do for the rest of your life.)

The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Thailand, by Justin Thomas McDaniel (2011). It’s about how modern-day Thai Buddhists practice their religion.

“Buddhism and Conscience: An Exploratory Essay,” by Gananath Obeyesekere. Daedalus, vol. 120, no. 3 Religion and Politics (Summer, 1991), pp. 219–239. Mostly about Col. Henry Steel Olcott, who I find fascinating. I don’t know. This is my bibliography, let me alone. (Olcott: born 1832, became a spiritualist, served in the Civil War, helped investigate Lincoln’s assassination, became a lawyer, helped found the religion of Theosophy, converted to Buddhism along with Madame Blavatsky, moved to Bombay, wound up in Sri Lanka, and developed what is now known as the Buddhist catechism, which was his attempt to educate Westerners in the precepts of Buddhism. He also designed a Buddhist flag, which is still in use today.)

“Attack of the Widow Ghosts: Gender, Death, and Modernity in Northeast Thailand,” by Mary Beth Mills. In Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, edited by Aihwa Ong and Michael G Peletz, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 244–273. I don’t know if this is actually helpful, it’s just about using wooden penis votives (among other methods of gender performance) to ward off evil ghosts, and I think that’s kind of neat.

On Judaism

Okay, I actually am Jewish, so I don’t have a lot of elementary texts on this. It’s just my life. Like: Why does Eli not know when Hanukkah is? Because when I didn’t have kids, I always had to look it up, because I didn’t care. (I still don’t care. But now I have to look it up.) But I do have some stuff on dybbuks.

“Appropriating the Golem, Possessing the Dybbuk:  Female Retellings of Jewish Tales,” by Ruth Bienstock Anolik. Modern Language Studies, vol. 31, no. 2 (Autumn 2001): pp. 39–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/3195336

“The Dybbuk: The Origins and History of a Concept,” by Morris M. Faierstein. In olam he-zeh v’olam ha-ba: The World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice, ed. Leonard J. Greenspoon. Purdue University Press, 2017, pp. 135–150. This is an excellent paper.

Jewish Magic and Superstition, by Joshuah Trachtenberg (1939, updated 2023 edition published by Global Grey referenced). Beware: it’s a bummer.

A Dybbuk: and Other Tales of the Supernatural, by Tony Kushner and Joachim Neugroschel (1997). Although the idea of dybbuks is relatively old, the play The Dybbuk by S. Ansky (1914) is really what popularized the idea; it was later made into a movie (in Yiddish) in 1937. Here, Kushner works with Neugroschel’s translation to produce a new English version.

On the Air Force

People who fly airplanes are insane, as far as I can tell. No one has ever looked at an airplane and thought, yes, it would be totally cool to fly that and also been 100% all right. This goes double for fighter jets.

Alone, Unarmed, and Unafraid: Tales of Unarmed Reconnaissance During Vietnam, by Taylor Eubank (2014). There was something weird with my copy, which came from Barnes and Noble’s website. So maybe try Amazon? He has a website, too, with many photos and supplementary information.

Voodoo Warriors, by Group Captain Nigel Walpole (2007). How do you get from someone designing an airplane in their sketchbook through to flying it in a war? 

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, by Malcolm Gladwell (2022). Is it accurate? I don’t know. People had some specific complaints in their Goodreads reviews that I didn’t really understand. But it does really enforce the point about how crazy the guys who founded the Air Force were. Also, it’s not every day I learn a new fact about WWII that makes me blanch, and this had several.

On the Vietnam War

There’s so much out there. These are things I happened upon, mostly because my library happened to have them.

Boots on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam, by Elizabeth Partridge (2018). TW: Look, most books on the Vietnam War contain graphic descriptions of what it feels like to watch your friends get killed in a violent and arbitrary way, and this is no different. Good context for the war though. Weird that Kennedy comes out looking like a bad guy and Nixon comes out…well, I don’t have anything good to say about him one way or the other, and this book didn’t help.

The Boys of ‘67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam, by Andrew Wiest. My biggest reaction to this was I was surpriseed that Wiest hadn’t heard of PTSD by the late 1990s (I think that’s when this book begins). The descriptions of marching through the Vietnamese jungle took me back…not in a great way. Also it’s a collection of oral histories and it made me cry, so.

Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans, by Xiaobing Li (2012). I only read a few of the stories in here. It’s of particular interest because Li managed to interview veterans from South and North Vietnam and China, among others (as it says in the subtitle, I guess). Not a lot of other books do that.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong (2019). I feel like it’s hard to talk about the impact of the Vietnam War without at least touching on some of the effects on the people most impacted by it—arguably the South Vietnamese. I don’t think that I can write with the necessary honesty about the most complicated parts of these experiences, but I do like to be conscious of them when I’m working. TW: this contains one of the most stomach-turning scenes I’ve encountered in a book, and it involves animal harm.

And of course, if you’re interested in the protest movement in Madison, the seminal book is They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, by David Maraniss (2003). (Or at least the seminal book I’ve heard about. I know there are local historians working on this period right now, and probably other stuff I haven’t stumbled across.)

On Neurology

The best-known neurologist in the world is probably Oliver Sacks. Which is good, because he was both one of the world’s great weirdos and a total delight. He also happens to have been a British Jewish queer man who was born in 1933, meaning he was in his prime during the craziness of the middle of the twentieth century. (He moved to San Francisco in the ’60s. He knew a ton of queer writers and artists, like Auden and Gunn. He had a fairly cavalier attitude toward drug use. He rode a motorcycle and was like 6’4″. He could squat 500 lbs. He was also surprisingly shy.) His memoir, On the Move: A Life (2015) is a great resource for finding out about any of the above, plus how neurologists think about cases. His other books are great too; I’ll recommend The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985) and An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) not just for the clinical insight but for the empathy on display. He was also on Radiolab quite a bit: here’s a good episode.

The less well-known but still pretty cool Harold Klawans also had a few books of clinical cases, of which Toscanini’s Fumble: And Other Tales of Clinical Neurology (1988) is the one I remember the best.

Finally, Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases, by Cory Franklin (2015) isn’t about neurology, but has interesting things to say about how physicians think. Also it contains the interesting fact that chemists who commit suicide often do so by ingesting cyanide. (Is this true? There was a 1969 paper on the topic, “Suicide Among Chemists,” by Frederick P. Li MD. Archives of Environmental Health: An International Journal, 19(4), 518–520. https://doi.org/10.1080/00039896.1969.10666878 But it only looked at female chemists. As I try to find later data, the computer is mostly offering me suicide prevention hotlines, which is unfortunate.)

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!

Em oi! #454: Sad Not SAD

Here are all the books I read in 2024. I’m not going to rank them, but I’ll give brief reviews. I usually try to read the abbreviation of the year in books, so my goal for 2024 was 24 books. I read slightly more than that across many genres, although romance was the plurality.

Children’s/YA books

  1. The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper. Read aloud; I don’t think I have to convince anyone that this is an amazing book.
  2. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett. Read aloud; at times we were laughing too hard to go on, and really, what other endorsement is needed?
  3. Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle. Some excellent moments but ultimately too much Jesus for my tastes. Already lived all that shit by proxy growing up.
  4. Belle of the Ball, by Mari Costa. A pretty graphic novel with a big heart. Full disclosure: I met Mari Costa at the Lammys!
  5. The Golden Thread: A Song for Pete Seeger, by Colin Meloy. I may be biased because I’m a fan of both Colin Meloy and Pete Seeger, but this was delightful. (I never read it to the kids, though. Just saw it at back to school night.)
  6. The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos, by Deborah Heiligman. Too many words for a bedtime story, but my 3yo inexplicably loved it. The story is very cute, and Erdos was a loveable weirdo.

Romance (pairings and settings as noted)

  1. I’m So (Not) Over You, by Kosoko Jackson (M/M, contemporary). I hope Berkeley feels embarrassed by how dirty they did this poor book. Could have been good, but it was an entirely unedited mess.
  2. Take a Hint, Dani Brown, by Talia Hibbert (M/bi F, contemporary). For what it was, it was fine.
  3. Bisclavret, by KL Noone (M/M but one of them is a werewolf, middle ages?). A novella retelling the werewolf story “Bisclavret” by Marie de France. I usually think novella is not the best format for a romance, but this was charming. Full disclosure: I’ve been on panels with KL Noone a few times now at Rainbow Space Magic Con. (I don’t think she remembers me though.)
  4. A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske (M/M, late Edwardian). Book 1 in the Last Binding series. The plot was fine and the writing was good.
  5. A Restless Truth, by Freya Marske (F/bi F, late Edwardian). Book 2 in the Last Binding series. The supporting characters were good.
  6. You Should Be So Lucky, by Cat Sebastian (M/M, 1960s America just pre-Kennedy). I am not interested in baseball, but this was a delight start to finish and a standout. The second in the Mid-Century New York series (I lost the Lammy to the first one).
  7. A Minor Inconvenience, by Sarah Granger (M/M, Regency). Don’t think too hard about the plot. Or the sex scenes. The setting was nice.
  8. Letters to Half Moon Street, by Sarah Wallace (M/M, Regency). A gentle epistolary novel with almost no plot and an interesting queernorm regency setting that nevertheless left me with a lot of questions.
  9. An Appreciation of Cats, by Des DeVivo (M/M, contemporary?). Another novella that I read. I got this one as an ARC.
  10. Oak King Holly King, by Sebastian Nothwell (M/M but one of them is an elf, early Victorian). A standout–set in 1844, with strong medieval undertones and a delightful episodic plot that draws on the story of The Green Knight. Full disclosure: I was on Sebastian Nothwell’s podcast (Right Here, Write Queer) and he was recently on mine.
  11. A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske (M/M, late Edwardian). Book 3 in the Last Binding series. I didn’t hate it. Also I liked the characters from A Marvellous Light a lot better here.
  12. The Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel, by KJ Charles (M/M, Regency). This was a delight. I have to go read book one now.
  13. Scandal in Spring, by Lisa Kleypas (M/F, early Victorian). This was the third book in a row that I read where one character had a BIG TERRIBLE SECRET that got revealed at or after the 50% mark in the book and turned out to be eminently overcomeable, and I am so over it.
  14. Cutting It Close by Reese Knightley (M/M, contemporary). I kind of lost track of the number of (war) crimes committed by the ostensible heroes. This book is a reminder that I need to stop picking audiobooks by just grabbing whatever is listed under “available now.”
  15. Dead Egyptians by Del Blackwater (M/M but one of them is a ghost, Edwardian). More of a character study, but a really lush and intriguing one. TW for an assault that happens around the 75% mark. Full disclosure: I have met Del Blackwater a few times (she lives in the area).
  16. My Last Duchess, by Eloisa James (M/F, Georgian). I want to say that it doesn’t make sense to try to body-shame someone when the fashion is to wear panniers, but that really diminishes the amount of fun that this book was.

Literature and Scifi/Fantasy

  1. Matrix, by Lauren Groff. If you’re the oldest daughter, and you sometimes get given distasteful tasks, and you maybe feel the need to do a really, really superior job at everything, you will see your experience reflected here. This had so many good lines–the writing was really an amazing achievement.
  2. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong. It was very good and also sad. Contained the single most stomach-turning scene I read (heard, I guess–I had this as an audiobook) this year, maybe ever.
  3. Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu. This was amazing and everyone should read it. And give Charles Yu more money to write more books. A real standout (and I got B to read it too).
  4. No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood. Part I was like having tw*tter slow-dripped into my ear. Part II made me cry.
  5. Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente. So amazing I immediately made B read it. Also a standout.
  6. Translation State, by Ann Leckie. A tricky book; not enough connection to the earlier Imperial Raadch novels and too much. Good but unsatisfying; I think it tried a lot of interesting things and I love it for that.
  7. Legends and Lattes, by Travis Baldree. The real magic rock was the friends we made along the way, I guess. This book managed to be very boring and also keep my interest, which feels like an achievement.

Nonfiction, Biography, and Memoir

  1. The Bomber Mafia, by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s all fun and games until Curtis LeMay firebombs Tokyo. (Of note, LeMay also introduced judo into the US and later was the VP candidate under George Wallace in 1968. Gladwell doesn’t mention either of these facts. I had to find them out by myself.)
  2. Cook County ICU: 30 Years of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases, by Cory Franklin. Franklin is honest to a fault and I find I like him a lot for it.
  3. A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of a Hijacked Brain, by Sara Manning Peskin. Unfortunately this was reported stories focusing on the neurochemical underpinnings of various neurological issues rather than Oliver Sacks-esque first-hand case studies.
  4. On the Move: A Life, by Oliver Sacks. This was so delightful, and I’m glad he published it while he was still alive so no family members could stop him. (Would they? I don’t know. It was kinda scandalous. But also very good.) Key quote (not of the scandalous parts):
    As soon as I could get away from work on Friday, I saddled my horse–I sometimes thought of my bike as a horse–and would set out for the Grand Canyon, five hundred miles away but a straight ride on Route 66. I would ride through the night, lying flat on the tank; the bike had only 30 horsepower, but if I lay flat, I could get it to a little over a hundred miles per hour, and crouched like this, I would hold the bike flat out for hour after hour. Illuminated by the headlight–or, if there was one, by a full moon–the silvery road was sucked under my front wheel, and sometimes I had strange perceptual reversals and illusions. Sometimes I felt that I was inscribing a line on the surface of the earth, at other times that I was poised motionless above the ground, the whole planet rotating silently beneath me.
  5. Cultish, by Amanda Montell. I don’t know that her thesis (that cults use in-group language to promote belonging and a sense of community) is all that surprising, but I learned some interesting stuff.
  6. The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, by Dan Savage. I don’t know if I should say, “Wow, the early 2000s were genuinely as bad as I remember thinking they were at the time,” or “Dan Savage is the most Gen X writer.” Now I’ve said both.
  7. The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam*, by Andrew Wiest. A group memoir (biography? collection of oral histories?). This made me fucking cry. While driving.
  8. Boots on the Ground: America’s War in Vietnam, by Elizabeth Partridge. (Technically maybe YA nonfiction? oral histories woven together with bits of the larger historical record of the era, from the early ’60s through to the early ’90s.) I didn’t cry but only because I was running on the dreadmill at the time.

* Note–the company that committed war crimes in the village of Son My known as the My Lai massacre was also called Charlie Company, but that’s a different company. Because Army companies are named A, B, C, etc., and then referred to using the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, there’s lots of Charlie Companies.

Other Things I Read

  1. “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” by AK Ramanujan. In The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 131-160. I love this essay so much I wrote my MA thesis about it. I love this essay so much we did a podcast on it.
  2. “The Dybbuk: The Origins and History of a Concept,” by Leonard J. Greenspoon. In olam he-zeh v’olam ha-ba: The World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice, Perdue University Press, 2017, pp. 135-150. This was really informational, and well-written to boot. I learned so much.
  3. “The Etymology of Condom,” by Zacharias P. Thundy. In American Speech, vol. 60, no 2 (summer 1985): pp. 177-179. This started as a joke about the etymology of “condiment” that got way out of hand.

Books and Other Works I Published

  1. Old Time Religion. This was a scary book to write. Dionysus in Wisconsin was received well by a small but enthusiastic coterie, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. Luckily the Lammy shortlist hadn’t come out yet when I released it in January, or I would have freaked out even more than I already did. I got fewer preorders for this book than I did for DIW, which was unpleasant, and although I offered ARC copies no one wanted one. On the production side, the book was beset by some last-minute problems with the cover, which were a real learning experience and did nothing for my stress level. Fortunately, it has been well-received and sold steadily! I don’t track earnings by book, but it has earned out at this point, and slightly faster than DIW did (eleven months instead of twelve).
  2. “Dous.” This was so fun to write. I did catch myself trying to decide if I’d unfairly leveraged an argument Spivak makes about the way women are oppressed in India in a context she would object to, and then decided that I was getting a little too serious about the philosophy side of things for a lighthearted short story. As far as I can tell only a few people bothered to read it, probably because I gave it a weird title (it makes sense if you’ve read OTR, I think). But that’s fine. I know a few people really loved it, and that means a lot to me.
  3. Troth. This was a fun book to write, a hard book to revise, and now that it’s done I am extremely happy it’s out in the world. The last few chapters made me very happy to write. I got a lot more preorders for this one than I did for DIW and OTR–as many as both of them combined, actually. I didn’t bother to send out ARC copies. How do you offer ARC copies for the third book in a series without cannibalizing your audience? But despite the lack of hype, it has sold very well, including the best first month sales of any of my books.
  4. “Vivienne.” I sold this to Asimov’s Science Fiction and I have the check stubs to prove it, but although I received galleys, it was not published in 2024. I don’t know exactly what the story is; selling it was quite a coup, perhaps the most high-profile sale I’ve ever made. Maybe it will appear in 2025. Keep an eye out.
  5. Em oi! 452, 453, and 454 (above). I have another comic that I sketched and inked and then set aside because I needed to focus on something else.
  6. Lazarus, Home from the War. I have written two and a half full drafts of this novel this year, I think. I am so excited to show it to people in 2025. It’s got so much cool stuff that I love–a guy trying to put himself back together! A Jewish neurologist! A really scary snake! It will be out in May 2025, so keep an eye out!

Em oi! #452: An Honor to be Nominated

Em oi! #452: An Honor to be Nominated Em: I got the email about a month ago-- Nietzsche: Okay, ja... Em: And I've been very anxious since then... Nietzsche: Mmm...
Em: (out of frame) And it's not like it's a bad thing, so I don't know why I feel this way. Is it that I care too much about--- Mary Oliver: You can head out, Nietzsche. I've got this. Nietzsche: Danke.
Em: Mary Oliver! Mary: Dearheart, you can worry all you want. It's fine. It just inevitably comes to nothing.
Bryan: In the last panel, you should make out. Em: That feels appropriate.

(In case you haven’t read it, Mary Oliver references this poem. Nietzsche dressed as the Overman first debuted here.)

In case you missed it, Dionysus in Wisconsin got shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award in gay romance. The ceremony isn’t until June, so I get to spend the next few months either being anxious or being fêted, depending on who you ask. The other nominated works (you can check them out here) are also tremendous, which is awesome and intimidating all at once. In a very good article on being nominated for things, John Scalzi refers to all the works nominated together as a peer group. It’s hard to conceptualize myself up next to those other writers as peers, because their books are so good.

Awards are weird. On the one hand, they can draw attention to works that otherwise have been overlooked, create critical conversation, and recognize people who do work very, very hard and often receive very little. On the other hand, as an outsider, they can often seem to reinforce mainstream, middle-class values and recognize works that have already received recognition. Not for nothing, the Pulitzer board declined to award a prize for Gravity’s Rainbow the year it was released, because some of the board believed it was obscene and unreadable. (Which it is, but not in a bad way.)

That is to say, in a certain sense, it doesn’t matter if the Barbie movie gets an academy award (or even a nomination); it’s already proved its point by grossing a billion dollars worldwide. It’s already won.

For every book I’ve read that had justifiably won the award it was nominated for, I can name one that wasn’t very good and made me wonder what the judges had been thinking. And of course, there’s the terrible conundrum of the writer who wins a major award early in their career and then never quite achieves that high again. 

Anyway, as of this writing, my biggest feeling right now is just…happiness. As someone who was always kind of a weird kid, who wandered for a long time without much acknowledgement that my writing was what anyone wanted to read (remember this comic? yeah, bleak times), it’s nice to feel like, hey, actually, someone did like it after all. More than one someone.

I just want to take this moment to thank everyone who’s read the book already, or who heard the news and is reading it now. You guys are the best. If you ever get to Madison, let me know. I’ll make cookies.

Gonna file this under BF608 L86 2024 for Philosophy, Psychology, Religion–Psychology–Will. Volition. Choice. Control. (Feel a little bad for psychology, which still shares BF with parapsychology and occult sciences. That feels like a statement at this point.)

Updates

It has been a long time since the last comic I posted. This was not intentional–I had some health things come up in September, and then when I was recovered (mentally, really) and ready to draw again a bunch of other stuff happened, as is its wont–I went to operas, I parented, I stayed out too late, I took the dogs for a jog, I started seriously editing my new novella, I watched a bunch of episodes of The Good Place and read a couple of 900-page fantasy novels, and then just when it seemed I still had time to make my goal of one comic per month, it was suddenly nearly the end of November.

Whoops.

So this is an update to say, hey, I’m still alive, but I’m not going to be posting another comic right this instant. I have a few in the queue. Hopefully soon.

In the meantime, a bunch of my prose poems have been published. I’ve slowly been adding these to my bibliography section up top, but in the meantime you can check these out (note that most are only available in hard copy):

“Deluge,” Ink and Nebula (Summer 2019): http://inkandnebula.com/eh-lupton.html.

“Huaraches” and “Deflation,” Not One of Us, no. 62 (2019): pp. 24, 50.

“Before the Fall,” “Prediction Space,” and “After the Fall,” Poet Lore vol. 114, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2019): pp. I don’t know, I haven’t gotten my copy yet.

Can’t see it now, but soon:

“Now We Are Free” at The House of Zolo’s Journal of Speculative Literature, vol. 1 (1/1/20): p. who knows, it’s probably not paginated yet.

At least one other forthcoming.

Before I go, here’s my new and improved head shot. Sometime I’m going to get an actual photographer to take one.

Portrait of the author as someone who has finally managed to take a selfie without doing that weird thing with her chin.

Em oi! #439: O Magic Talking Skull

I have been working on this one for a loooong time (I found the reference photos of the skull in my phone history from early May, and I think I started drawing it before then (the relevant episode of David Tennant Does a Podcast with came out on April 8th). In the time since I started the comic, I have gotten about ten rejections, so that’s kind of what’s been going on around here. I don’t know if this feeling is at all universal among creative types or not. I guess I kind of hope so.

(Also, footnote, highly recommend the podcast, if that’s not obvious.)

Anyway, this comic demonstrates something I do quite frequently, which is spin out philosophically when I find myself confronted with a problem. Can’t figure out a path to success? = What is success, actually? Yorick (the skull) shuts that down pretty quick, but this happens a lot.

The trope of “I was about to quit and then I found success” seems to happen a lot in literary circles, including for Madeleine L’Engle (I know I’ve read of other major authors having the same thing happen too).

Actual photo of Yorick. She unfortunately doesn’t have very good teeth.

I’m going to file this one under BF175.5.W75 L86 2019, for Psychology–Psychoanalysis–Special topics, A-Z–Writing, because it is about the psychology of the writer, I think.

And that, I think, is all for today. Next time we’ll go back to a style with less pencil where I actually draw panels instead of doing randomly sized drawings on one piece of paper and trying to crop them with my camera. Yes.