A Road to Publication Update; Plus Creepy Podcast Recs!!!

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day, all! Roberta at Offbeat YA reminded me recently that it’s been a few months since my last Road to Publication update, so here we go.

Edits for THE ART OF ESCAPING are officially done, which is kind of terrifying and liberating at the same time. At some point, you have to decide that your book is as good as it’s going to be and let it go off into the world. You worry about your book the way your mom probably worried about you when you went off to college, but it all worked out, right? That’s what I keep telling myself.

My book baby will be fine. My book baby will be fine.

Anyway, I will also have a cover soon. It’s still a work in progress, but I have seen some mock ups and they are cool.

Edits done and cover almost done means…ARCs are coming!!!

(ARC stands for Advanced Reader Copy, by-the-by.)

Yeah, ARCs. That’s when shit gets real. My book baby will be fine. My book baby will be fine.

So that’s the latest on THE ART OF ESCAPING. Meanwhile, I just finished up a round of pre-submission edits with my agent on my second novel, and it’s going to go on sub later this month. Eek! Fingers crossed at least one editor falls for my weird little brand of sociopolitical commentary.

Since it’s nearly mid-October and the Eve of All Hallows will be upon us before we know it, I want to end this post by recommending three fantastically creepy podcasts.

1. The Black Tapes. This one is in its third and final season, so if you like to binge-listen, hold off for a few months and then, as my bro and fellow podcast fan would say, “crush the whole thing in one sitting.” The Black Tapes starts out as a perfectly engaging monster-of-the-week type deal, and then morphs into something else entirely in a sneaky way that’s kind of amazing. If you like music, math, awkward/endearing public radio reporters, and weird historical truths blended with fiction, The Black Tapes is for you.

2. Limetown. It’s a little sad that we might never get a second season of Limetown, but I recommend it anyway because the first season stands on its own as a complete story—a story as beautiful and weird as it is horrifying. Let’s pretend that, ten years ago, the entire population of a little town-slash-research-facility in Tennessee straight-up disappeared. It made national news and then, as we tend to do, everyone just sort of forgot about it. Limetown is what would happen if a fictional Sarah-Koenig-like reporter dug into the whole affair and found way more than she bargained for. Like all podcasts, Limetown is audio-only, yet there are images from season one that are so vivid they’re going to be stuck in my brain for a good long while.

3. Alice Isn’t Dead. This one is just freaking brilliant and if you’re a fan of Welcome to Night Vale (which is a great podcast that sort of defies categorization), you’ve probably already listened to it. But you don’t need to be a Night Vale fan to check out Alice Isn’t Dead. It follows the serpentine criss-cross-country journey of a woman who takes a job as a truck driver after her wife disappears. I honestly can’t tell you much else without filling this post with spoilers, but I will say that I’m in awe of the way this podcast seamlessly blends spec fic with commentary on this vast and strange nation we call the U.S. of A. It is absolutely as much about America as it is about…well, you’ll see.