Lazarus Home from the War

December 2025 Newsletter: Hazy Shade of Winter

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, if you celebrate it. We did. And then we got 9.3″ of snow (that’s 23.6 cm for the rest of the world). It’s not exactly common for this to happen in Wisconsin in November (and unlike the snowstorm I wrote about in Lazarus, Home from the War, it wasn’t melted the next day, which is something that happens a lot more). So we shoveled a lot. Come, winter, and welcome.

Anyway, happy December! The year is almost over. Time to break out your copy of the Mountain Goats singing “I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me.”

The big news this month is that I have put the top secret project (a novella about Sam and Ulysses’s honeymoon) up for preorder! It’s called The Alignments. You can get it here (Amazon), or here (itch.io). It will also be available on Kobo, Smashwords, Apple Books, etc., on launch day. (Not all these sites do pre-orders.)

I have answers to your frequently unasked questions, but first, let’s look at the cover!

Three standing stones on the shore of the ocean. A moody oil painting. The Alignments, by E. H. Lupton.

All right, questions!

-Why was this top secret for so long?
I had originally planned to just release it without a preorder period, as though I were Beyoncé dropping an album. Just email you all on 12/21 and say “Bon appetit!” But the podcast Fated Mates named Lazarus, Home from the War one of their best books of 2025, so I decided I would try to capitalize on that and do a preorder.

Oh, that happened. Did I mention that? Laz is on the Fated Mates best books of 2025 list. I don’t really know what to say! I’m thrilled. And a little confused about why their affiliated bookstore decided not to carry my book. But whatever, you can order a paperback of Lazhere, or here, or from your local bookstore (give them the ISBN: 979-8988394433), or email me if you want a signed copy ($17, including shipping).

-What is The Alignments about?
Sam and Ulysses arrive in Carnac, France for their honeymoon. They’re thousands of miles from Madison and hoping for a little rest and relaxation. But when an academic rival of Ulysses’s reveals herself during Sam’s birthday dinner, they find themselves pulled into the investigation of an unexplained death that seems to be tied to the ancient, mysterious stones that litter the town.

-Is this another AU or missing scene?
No, this is canon. It’s on the series roadmap. It’s generally pretty silly, though. Except for the parts where…uh, spoilers. Suffice to say there is a plot, they do various investigatory things and have fun. And it’s set in France!

-Is there a sample?
You can hear me reading an (unedited) version of ch 6 here! I think it really gives the vibes of the whole thing—funny and a little creepy.

-Will it be published in paperback?
Eventually. I wanted to collect all the short fiction and publish them all together. But there’s at least one short thing in progress I haven’t released yet.

I know this is a little disappointing for everyone who would prefer a paperback! The problem is that the cover doesn’t match the other covers, and the book itself wouldn’t be long enough to print anything on the spine. People who like paperbacks tend to want the whole series to match. I have been working hard on the cover for Renaissance, and I will start on a black and ochre cover for all the shorts when I’m done with that book. But it’s taking a while. The cover of The Alignments (which I love) is an actual oil painting (done with water-miscible oils, which I just started using). None of this happens quickly.

In the meantime, if you absolutely don’t like ebooks, you can either get the book from itch, where there will be a pdf version available, and then print it out yourself, or send me an email and I’ll send you an ARC copy of the pdf.

-Any trigger warnings to be aware of? (Skip this if you don’t want any spoilers.)
There’s some light bondage in The Alignments (bondage in pursuit of a good time, I mean). Separately, there’s a demon and a death.

-Anything else?
It’s always extremely helpful to tell your friends about indie authors, because advertising is hard and attention spans are short, but I did zero advanced marketing for this, so please spread the word! I actually estimate that most of my sales come via word of mouth (either in person or on social media), so you can make a big difference with relatively little effort.

Book Sale
My books are currently on sale on itch for 70% off. You can find those here. Starting next week, they will also be in the Smashwords semi-annual sale. I don’t have a link for that yet, but you can find them all on Smashwords here.

Upcoming Appearances
In December, we’ll be at the Big Gay Market on December 20th (note that this is only the second day of the market) from 10am-5pm. It’s being held at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison! We will have the usual assortment of cool stuff: books; poetry tarot cards; felted earrings, crows, and nazars; stickers and postcards. Come by and pick up last-minute holiday presents! Get a tarot reading for $5! Enjoy lots of other vendors! Details here.

For those who are also writers and are looking for a chance to meet other writers, maybe hear some informative presentations about different aspects of the writing process, maybe have a little retreat from the comfort of your homes, I will be presenting at Wholehearted Writers Week in January. This is sure to be a really great conference, and no matter where you are in your writing process I encourage you to come. Find all the details here.

Podcast
We released one episode in November: Non-Roman Calendars (ep. 97). We also announced that we are joining the Nerd and Tie podcast network. Nerd and Tie is a Wisconsin-based collective of independent creators making podcasts on a variety of topics, from true crime to witchcraft to (now) medieval history! This is a great move that we hope will bring us a bigger audience while allowing us to maintain our ownership and creative control of the show.

We made this move because I got to be a fan of the BS Free Witchcraft podcast and then met its host, Trae Dorn, at Booked Eau Claire back in September. And they knew who I was because their sister read my books! So hello, Trae’s sister, if you’re out there! BS Free Witchcraft is a podcast of the genre “guy [gender nondenominational] who knows a lot about a topic ranting into a microphone,” and I honestly really enjoy it. Trae is funny and they know a lot about their subject and have interesting things to say.

Book Reviews
This is the time of year when many people start to search around for gifts for children. Especially books, because it’s fun to give children something that’s going to stick in their head for the rest of their lives. In general I am skeptical of “best of” lists (excluding the Fated Mates one above–that’s 100% gold), so I asked my 8yo what his favorite books he read this year were, and what he would recommend for kids 8-12 years old. He said:

Lightfall, by Tim Probert. It’s a graphic novel series (3 books at present, with the fourth due out in 2026) about a young girl, whose grandfather is a pig(?), who along with a friend tries to save the sun.
Wings of Fire, by Tui T. Sutherland. Described to me as “Game of Thrones but with dragons.” Also Sutherland is a lot more prolific than George R.R. Martin–there are sixteen of these now. (Sorry not sorry, George; finish your book.) The 8yo prefers the novels over the graphic novels, which is an achievement.
The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper. It’s a classic for a reason. 5 volumes.

That’s it for today. Talk to you all on the 21st!

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.