First, allow us to reintroduce ourselves.

Caitlin: I’m the author of one single published book: The Damage, which I call “upmarket suspense” or “crime fiction” depending on my mood. (And sometimes when people ask what it’s about, I just completely black out and I’m not sure what I say, because I’m too busy bracing for the next question: when’s your next one coming out?) For all the time we’ve been writing this Substack, I’ve been working toward delivering a second novel. Guys, I finally have one1. It’s due to my editors later this summer, and if it doesn’t get published I’m going to yeet myself into the stratosphere.

I’m also a lawyer and I teach case law to forensic psychologists. And I have one husband, two kids, and one cat, all of whom try to lie on me the second I sit down on the couch.

Andromeda: I’m the formerly Alaska-based, now BC-based expat author of two suspense novels: What Boys Learn and The Deepest Lake, on sale at the moment and I hope still on sale if you decide to check out those links. (I just noticed that Caitlin’s The Damage is on sale, too!)

I’m also a stubbornly multi-lane author, which is something I’ve been thinking, writing, and talking about a lot lately, because it’s a trend I see among my fellow authors: the desire to be less boxed-in and to keep growing as writers, regardless of labels.

Before I wrote suspense, I wrote historical, literary, and speculative fiction. My next forthcoming titles include horror, historical, and hybrid literary fiction. I love story first, genre second, which means that I pick the best genre “container” for anything I’m obsessing about.

On the side, I’m a freelance book coach and developmental editor.2 I also teach on writing retreats like this one, on the Queen Mary 2 in early September.

What are we excited about on PT this summer?

Caitlin: I’ve been emailing with Bruce Coffin, the former homicide detective I mentioned in a post quite a while back, and we’ll have an interview for y’all later this summer! We’ve also got a contributor piece coming about substance use in crime fiction, from a writer from my neck of the woods.

Andromeda: Whatever I’m stuck on in my own writing is what I’m most excited about! That may be diving into the crimes of a past era (I’m currently researching an unsolved 1974 IRA terrorist bombing) or figuring out how to write a modern-day Agatha Christie-type mystery.

What questions are we still noodling?

Caitlin: How to write character-driven suspense fiction that doesn’t lag at the beginning or otherwise disappoint reader expectations. I love a slow burn, but I don’t want the match going out (i.e. the reader putting down the book because “nothing is happening”). I would love to try to figure out some guidelines from successful (and maybe unsuccessful) books. Andromeda once said to me something about Present Tense being the opportunity for a homemade MFA in suspense, and (1) heck yeah ARL, I love that, and (2) this issue would be my thesis.

Andromeda: You stole my top question, Caitlin—how to write meaningful, character-rich fiction that satisfies readers who want page-turners.

My other questions are:

• How to write a great twist that wows readers—AND how to reconcile oneself to the fact that not every book needs a big twist.

• How to come up with a novel idea that can be explained compellingly in one sentence (aka “high concept”).

• How to write a complicated, flawed main characters who aren’t deemed problematically “unlikeable.” (A little unlikeable is fine with me. I prefer edgy characters.)

Caitlin: I am stealing all those questions too, now.

Readers and writers, do you have a question you wish someone would answer?

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What are we reading this summer?

Caitlin: This question was my idea and yet I don’t have anything specific planned EXCEPT picking up my copy of Caitlin Mullen’s Heather from my local bookstore and devouring it. Maybe God of the Woods (I’m always behind on the trend) for my abovementioned thesis research. In another week or so I’ll be turning to an old novel draft from over two years ago, and I’ll likely choose some books based on that. (Deliverance and The River at Night by Erica Ferencik have been on my bookshelf. The latter is modeled after the former, and I’ve held off reading them so I wouldn’t be too influenced in my own river story, but I do want to read them eventually. Maybe this summer—we’ll see!)

Andromeda: I’ve been pre-ordering a lot of books lately as a way to support authors. Already purchased or on the way are Heather (which you just mentioned!), Leah Rowan’s Marion (a re-telling of Psycho) and due out in September, Alma Katsus’ Incarnate.

I’m also on a nonfiction binge (reading about the IRA in 1970s Ireland/England) and also, even though I know my reading appetite is bigger than my reading stomach (i.e. I read slowly and I never catch up with my TBR), I really, really want to read some books by authors who will be attending Bouchercon, the big mystery conference, to be held in Calgary this year. For example: Louise Penny, PJ Vernon, Alex Finlay, Tessa Wegert, Marc Cameron, JT Ellison, Jennifer Hillier.

What are our best writing habits?

Caitlin: I think my best habit is that I just don’t quit. As I mentioned above, I’ve been working toward delivering a second novel for many years now. Despite rejections and massive life interruptions, I just keep writing. And I do think of this as a habit. Most week days, absent being sick or having a poor night’s sleep, I get up at 5 am and my husband is on kid duty as needed until 7 am, so even on my busiest days I usually get a little time with whatever my writing project is at the moment. I know writing every day is not for everyone! But for me, it makes me feel like myself.

A habit I’ve developed in recent months is taking dance breaks while in long stretches of writing. I find it can:

• bring some levity when I’m working on an emotional scene,

• purge some nervous energy building up, and

• stretch my creaky old corpse.

And a final habit on the more technical level: I write in a word doc, and I make headings and subheadings as I go (heading = new chapter, subheading = new scene in that chapter) with brief descriptions, always opening with the name of the point-of-view character. An example would be: Georgia - discovery meeting w/ Paige. It helps me see the story from above, make decisions about moving information (or whole scenes) around, look for issues like “too much happening here and not enough there,” and see what happened the last time that character had a POV. It’s a little cumbersome to delete these headings for the clean ms going to your agent, but the juice IS worth the squeeze for me.

Andromeda: I’m so glad you shared that subheading trick, Caitlin! I tend to add the POV and number of words below each chapter heading so I can see what pattern I’m creating.

One of my best habits is keeping a digital ideas file. Every time a new idea clamors for my attention, I’ll make some notes or write a quick scene and file it away. I’ve come back to those “starter” files often. Having a lot of ideas and opening pages feels like having money in the bank or a freezer full of salmon (I used to live in Alaska, where nearly every person has a freezer full of salmon, as well as blueberries).

My other best habit is faith in my manuscript-juggling/stacking process, which took well over a decade to develop. Frequently, I’ll lose momentum around the midway point of a manuscript—sometimes, it’s a loss of motivation; more often, it’s a craft or structural issue I haven’t solved—and now I know that if I set the manuscript aside and work on another novel, I’ll come back to that set-aside draft with more energy and ideas. The same is true if I’ve reached the end of a messy, doughy draft and I know it really needs another punch-down followed by additional time to rise.

I absolutely love that feeling of sudden insight that comes from letting manuscripts cool off or rise (the metaphors are multiplying fast here). That may mean six weeks (the Stephen King standard) or three to six months (a typical standard for me, especially if I’m busy on another writing project, doing line edits, copy edits, or promotion).

What’s something readers of our Substack or fiction may not know about us?

Andromeda: First, that we’ve never met in person! East-Coaster Caitlin and Pacific-Northwester Andromeda met on Instagram; soon after that, we started this collaborative newsletter.

Second, people may not know that I’m a very slow middle-aged triathlete (next race, Ironman 70.3 in Calgary, July 26!) and an even slower language learner. At the moment, I’m studying Mandarin. My dream is to get to China and start using the baby Chinese I’ve been studying foreverrrrrrrr.3

I firmly believe that being curious about—but also bad at—many things is a good foundation for being a writer.

Caitlin: I think I’m lighter and goofier than my fiction (and perhaps even my Substacking) indicates. I definitely have a dark streak, but I’m usually quite sunny! And I make a lot of jokes, for better or worse. One of my most unfortunate hobbies is hyperfixating on a meme I think I should make in response to a text message I got, or taking a photo and then zooming in, cropping, and drawing on it to make it “hilarious,” by no one’s definition but my own.

Thank you for reading! And please stay in touch via comments! We want to know more about you, your books, your reading recs, and your questions and obsessions.

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But AI is not the focus of this post! We’re here to celebrate the new paperback release of Andi’s The Last Ferry Out, a CrimeReads Best Book of the Year. Here’s the pitch: On a trip to the tropical island where her fiancée died, a young woman begins to suspect the death was no accident—and the killer’s closer than she could’ve imagined—in this “unputdownable” thriller from “a master of suspense” (Elle).

She’s also graciously allowing us to re-run one of her candid, eye-opening posts about what it’s really like to have a major hit that doesn’t guarantee ever-increasing sales or stability.

Andi writes…

Earlier this month, I read an Instagram caption that stopped me dead in my tracks. Pop singer Betty Who had completed a Reddit AMA, and she shared screenshots of one of her lengthier replies with the following caption:

the life of a middle class artist is being successful to some and a failure to others all at the same time. lots of people replied to this on my story so i figured id share it here. idk if it will help anyone but i want you to know you’re not alone in the struggle.

Holy shit, I thought. It’s me.

Walking around with the cognitive dissonance of (a) knowing many authors would kill for some of the things I’ve gotten while (b) cringing every time I open my sales portal and wondering, not actually all that absurdly, if my publisher will keep working with me now that I’ve spent four+ years falling short of expectations since We Were Never Here hit its peak…

Here’s the question that prompted her brutally honest and wonderfully human response:

Honest question - it felt like you were on the cusp of huge stardom with “somebody loves you” and I even heard “all of you” on the radio - how do you cope with not necessarily reaching pop’s upper echelon? I hope this isn’t offensive!

Her answer is worth reading in its entirety—seriously, go check it out. But here’s a graf that resonated:

idk. on my bad days i feel like a failure. like i’ve let people down. a lot of people come to my show for the first time and say “i don’t understand how you’re not bigger!” and i know they’re being nice but it makes me feel bad. my parents tell me they think i deserve better and i feel like i’ve disappointed them by not living up to all the potential they saw for me.

Oof. I don’t know why you’re not bigger is something I hear too. And its variations: BookTok roundups of “super underrated thrillers,” captions and comments noting they’ve never heard of The Last Ferry Out. “I just can’t believe your book isn’t selling—it’s so good.” Thank you. I think so too. Certainly there’s tons of randomness and luck at play in the arts, as Betty Who could tell you.

Kate McKean wrote a very smart post about how we vaguely expect an author’s book advances to keep trending up, like a salary in most other fields. But for the vast majority of working writers, it’s simply not the case.

It’s definitely not the case for me. In my case, having one NYT bestseller led to one great new book deal—and now, with subsequent contracts, I’m back in my pre-breakout ballpark.

It’s part of what makes it so difficult to be a full-time author—even hitting a bestseller list guarantees nothing about your future earnings. Having a book that sold hundreds of thousands of copies was a dream come true, a gigantic stroke of luck (in addition to the hard-work bit), as unlikely and fortunate as pulling a winning lottery ticket. I get that, and I’m grateful.

But still, my latest book advance was a big step back.

But still, my most promising film options aren’t renewed.

But still, my latest raked in zero foreign sales, no nibbles from Hollywood, and—as you’re likely sick of hearing—my most sluggish sales yet.

I’m not Stephen King or Mary Higgins Clark. I’m not even Lucy Foley or Shari Lapena or Ruth Ware, talented women in my genre (whom I’ve been so lucky to meet! They might even call me a peer!) whose every incredible book is, rightfully, an instant NYT bestseller.

And I might never be. It’s possible that what happened with We Were Never Here will never happen again. In the parlance of pop music, I could very well be a one-hit wonder.

So why am I still out here doing this? Well, wise Betty wasn’t done:

i focus on the things that i’m proud of. i have checked things off my bucket list … i’ve done really cool things and the people who are my fans still show up and support me and have created a really special community.

i guess my “why” has changed. when i was younger, if you asked me why i was doing this - making music, performing - it would be... because i’m good at it! that’s what i’m supposed to do!

now it’s a little deeper. i believe in the power of music. i know what it feels like to listen to a song that makes me cry. makes me laugh. makes me feel like a bad bitch. i think a lot more about my audience now. how can i support them, what do they need to hear right now. how can i be of service through this gift i was given - through my love of music.

I’m not alone in tearily reading this but replacing music with fiction in my head, right? It’s a beautiful response, moving from ego and envy and comparison and me-me-me to the stuff that actually matters: community, purpose, passion.

We know how powerful books can be. We’re so lucky to have this outlet, and each new reader who picks up one of my books is someone I can serve, someone I can challenge and connect with and give a big cosmic hug.

Thanks, Andi!

Got a guestpost for us? (See below.) Conversely, is there something you just don’t understand about the life of a suspense writer or anything you’d like to know about craft, publishing, or reading recs? Let us know in a comment!

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We had a coffee date a couple weeks later, and I eventually read her debut, which held a fascinating mix of domestic suspense and high finance subterfuge. I asked her if she’d write a piece for us on her choice of niche, and happily she did. Enjoy! - Caitlin

Five minutes before my crucial presentation, an executive twice my age and three times as confident pulled me aside. If you know high finance, you know you should never admit a lack of confidence. Impostor syndrome is the kiss of reputational death. But here and now, I’ve agreed to tell you why I write Wall Street thrillers, and to really explain this, I’ve got to be honest about what life was like for the two decades I spent in the game. So, this man—let’s call him Pasty Bald Guy—put his thick fingers on my wrist and steered me away from the table. Not to quietly offer me guidance or to wish me luck. Instead, he said, “Kristine, grab a chair along the wall. I’ll toss it to you when the time’s right.”

Pasty Bald Guy was stealing my presentation. He wanted me to be a wall-dweller. If you haven’t spent the excruciating hours that I have in boardrooms, you might not realize how this shook me. Cold plunge to the chest. I had prepared for weeks to sit amongst the suits and argue for an innovative restructure. My seat was at the table. Period. Full stop. In that mahogany paneled room, with carpet so soft you could curl up on it, my voice was my power. Speaking would be extremely awkward, if not impossible, if I was not at the table and instead a member of the visible-knee clan with my back pressed up against the wainscot.

This moment was Wall Street. Every gesture is a negotiation. Every seat is a battlefield and every meeting a silent opportunity to climb, to survive, or to share the stage without losing relevance. It’s why high finance makes the perfect setting for a thriller, and why I set my novel, The Lies We Trade, squarely in the center of it.

1. Power imbalance is the air Wall Street breathes

Thrillers rely on tension, and there is no tension quite like the silent hierarchy of finance. It’s not just who is in the room but who is allowed to talk. It’s the way a junior analyst’s idea suddenly becomes visionary when echoed by someone with a loftier title.

This is exactly the kind of imbalance that drives The Lies We Trade. Protagonist Meredith isn’t just navigating corporate politics: she’s navigating the delicate ecosystem of unspoken rules, shifting alliances, and hidden agendas. When that mysterious envelope lands in her hands, the question isn’t just What does it mean?

It’s Who benefits? Who is threatened? And who wants her out? Power imbalance is thriller fuel, and Wall Street pumps it out with every trade.

2. High pressure creates organic suspense

Some thrillers require a serial killer, a car chase, or an evil plot from decades past. Wall Street needs none of these. The stakes are already sky-high. In my novel, the mysterious Betsey is brilliant but fragile. She could be a hero, a pawn, or a nightmare depending on her wounds and choices. Wall Street is full of people who fear failure, irrelevance, and at their very core, they fear not being enough. These are the motives that make characters like Hardwin, the older lawyer in The Lies We Trade, so compelling. He’s not twirling a mustache; he’s clinging to an identity, desperate to stay indispensable. Corruption rarely starts with malice. It starts with rationalization.

Thrillers thrive on secrets. Wall Street seeks to expose them. It’s a perfect match.

3. Corporate pressure bleeds into family life and amplifies the stakes

A great thriller doesn’t just put its protagonist at risk professionally. It puts her at risk personally. The demands are relentless, and the emotional cost is real. In The Lies We Trade, Meredith’s high-pressure job strains her marriage, distances her from her daughter, and forces her into impossible choices that follow her home long after the trading day ends.

In The Lies We Trade, the real climax isn’t just about uncovering the truth. It’s about Meredith discovering who she is when the world she built crumbles and her family is threatened.

As an executive who spent more than twenty years navigating a high stakes career, alongside people whose quirks, brilliance, and egos could fill a bookshelf, I can say with absolute certainty: you don’t have to invent drama on Wall Street, you just have to pay attention.

So, what did I do after Pasty Bald Guy tried to relegate me to the wall? First, I quickly read the room. Then I saddled up to Bold Seahorse Tie Guy, who was not the most powerful in the room, but a tight second. I leaned in and shared some quiet intel. He pulled out a chair and I sat. I wasn’t a wall-dweller. Not this time.

Hope you enjoy reading The Lies We Trade. Reach out and let me know. Any guesses on why Bold Seahorse Tie Guy was my mark?

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Kristine Delano is a former Wall Street executive turned author of domestic thrillers set in the high-stakes finance world. Her 2026 debut The Lies We Trade hit the ECPA new release best seller list. Her sophomore novel, Forget What You Know, also from Tyndale House, will be out early 2027. Kristine hosts the We Talk Careers podcast and mentors women on work-life balance. When she’s not writing or reading, she enjoys scuba diving with friends or chasing her family down the ski slopes of western Maine.

Kristine pens the Substack, Wall Street Suspense.

Wall Street Suspense

Intrigued by the world of Wall Street and the power imbalances of the board room? I write thrillers that explore the work / life balance of women in high finance.

By Kristine Delano

Much of what I’ve been reading lately has convinced me that 1) I’m missing the boat on what sells books, 2) I don’t know America, and 3) In some cases, I don’t know myself.

You don’t like horror. Why keep reading this?

Let’s start there, because until recently, I kept saying the same thing.

“I’m not really a horror fan.”

For too long, I’ve protested my affiliation because I don’t like gory or sadistic movies. No Saw for me, thanks.

Turns out, most Americans don’t like the gory stuff, either. (Or slasher films or even “found footage,” which I thought was really popular.) What they like is psychological horror. Which is very close to psychological suspense, my favorite genre. Turns out, my tastes are typical. I don’t have to keep explaining “I don’t like gore” because most people don’t!

On top of that, after reading an anthologized essay by Tananarive Due about how long it took her to recognize and embrace her horror-loving side, I considered my own childhood and early teen influences. Out of curiosity, I made a list of the seven most memorable movies and TV shows from my childhood. Four of the movies were horror: Alien, The Blob, Jaws, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Two were frightening sci-fi movies, blending horror with speculation and wonder: Logan’s Run and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And one was the TV mini-series Roots, which spurred my best friend and me to adore the rebellious and resourceful Kunta Kinte and invoke his name—as well as Chicken George’s—often during sessions of make-believe.

(I didn’t own Barbie dolls, which is one parenting move by my late mother that I approve of. Parking me in front of endless TV without supervision: not so much.)

Roots seems like an outlier, but only at first. Why couldn’t I get that groundbreaking show out of my head? Because of the scenes showing Black people being enslaved, whipped, and hunted, as well as the poignancy and bravery of those who resisted. It shook me to the core. I didn’t think of that show as horror, but now I do.

(Quick moment to reflect: think of 3-7 movies or TV shows that rearranged your brain as a child or pre-teen, plus at least a few books. What genre were they? Were your screen genre favorites different than your book favorites? Did you seek scares or comfort as a child—or both?)

I could fill a post with the “why” of horror, but I think any of our lists of most-remembered films or books answer the question. Some of us like the physiological rush of being scared and the subsequent relief of knowing we’re still safe after a scene has ended. (Science actually shows that “voluntary arousing negative experiences” like scary movies and haunted houses can leave us calmer and more prepared to cope with future stressors.) We like rehearsing how we’d survive terrifying situations.

And we can’t stop wondering and needing to tell stories about why humans are bad. In the case of both Alien and Roots, I’d say the answer is greed.

In the case of non-human baddies, like the blob and the pod people and an unfairly portrayed great white shark, territoriality or the innate need to spread is often invoked. But at its extreme, isn’t this just another form of greed? (I will spare you a screed here about American politics and/or AI.)

Back to genre lessons.

Something can be popular, profitable, and hated at the same time. Welcome to fandom.

You’ve probably heard about the current horror boom, a growth spurt not seen since the 1980s. It applies to both film and book publishing. Circana Bookscan reported a 54% increase in horror sales in 2023. My own publisher, Soho Press, started a horror imprint called Hell’s Hundred in 2024, building off the uptick they’d already seen in horror submissions as well as general excitement for the genre.

And yet—and here’s the thing that showed me I don’t really understand how fandom works—horror is hated as much as it is loved. It’s the most divisive genre out there. A full 45% of people dislike or hate it. (Compare to comedy at 14% hate+dislike.) Horror has a very loyal fanbase, and on top of that, horror films are relatively inexpensive to make, which is why they can have lowish revenue while still showing an atypically high return on investment (ROI).

Setting film finances aside, if you’re an author, and even if you have zero interest in horror, I think it’s worth dwelling on that small-but-loyal-fandom issue. Most of us aren’t known and beloved by millions of readers. At best, we are known and really loved by hundreds (even if we’re lucky enough to sell to thousands, thanks to timely premises or good reviews). Those numbers sound insignificant at first. But it’s better to be loved or really, really liked by a small number of people than sorta liked or merely tolerated by lots of people.

Learning from the punk rock genres

It occurs to me that horror reflects the values of my punk teen years, circa 1984, when I spent a summer in London (without parents—are you seeing a theme?) that changed me forever.

When I came back home to suburban Chicagoland, I was not following a trend. Punk (and even New Wave) wouldn’t come to my suburbs for another two years, and even then, only marginally. And I didn’t care. I had no desire to fit in. Punk had inoculated me to conformist tastes as well as any desire to be thin, rich, or pretty. (If only I were as sensible at middle age as I was as a 13-year-old; do I blame myself, society, or both?)

Punk’s ethic still exists in the world of horror—and some other genres, too, like stand-up comedy. You can’t write horror or do most forms of comedy without alienating some people.

Check out Goodreads ratings for edgy but popular horror and you’ll see some surprisingly modest ratings. (One example of many: Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World, which is both a Goodreads’ Choice Award nominee and horror fan favorite—with only a 3.32 rating, adapted into a successful M. Night Shyamalan movie, Knock at the Cabin.) In horror and comedy—and hopefully in some forms of literary fiction as well—you have to risk going too far!

In this era of cancel culture and high sensitivity (even if that sensitivity is sometimes overblown), it’s fun to think about creative realms where aiming to please everyone simply won’t work.

Authors: what would you write if you weren’t afraid of offending someone or estranging a third or more of your potential readers?

Readers: who would you be if the opinion you cared about—maybe the only opinion you cared about—was your own?

Everyone: Do you love horror? Hate it? Thought you hated it until you read this post? Tell us!

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It can happen to anyone at any time. You may think you’re safe at the backyard barbecue, the work drinks, or the coffee date, but the questions come for us all. The questions might be asked by someone who means well: a family member who read an alarmist article or a friend who thinks they’re helping you be realistic. Or they might come from someone who just invested in Palantir and is feeling smug about it. You’re minding your own business, and then without warning, it happens.

“Won’t AI will do all our writing in the future?”

“How much of your next novel with be ChatGPT?”

“Why should I buy a book when I can get AI to write me a novel for free?”

In these moments, you might find yourself smiling politely at Uncle Greg while crying internally and trying to figure out how to explain in friendly terms why you think (or is it just hope?) that they’re wrong and the novelist still has a future.

Have faith! We’re here to tell you that feeling deep inside is correct! Writing is a uniquely human activity, and thriller writing in particular will be human territory for as long as there are humans who want to be thrilled.

First, some facts AKA a crash course in Silicon Valley economics

Researchers have been working on Artificial Intelligence since the middle of the 1900s, with an early focus on trying to mimic the qualities of the human brain. In the 1990s, AI developers at IBM had their first truly public success when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov at chess. Advancements in machine learning and neural networks had impacts on video games and prediction models used in fields like meteorology, but to the average person, these things were entirely behind the scenes.

By the 2000s and 2010s, machine learning and AI companies still mostly lacked flashy ways to gain public attention and pump investor interest. DeepMind beat a top Go player in 2016, but after the successes in chess this seemed inevitable. OpenAI had a bot that could play Dota2, a video game with limited following in the United States, but otherwise, the work they were doing on neural networks didn’t have a “killer app” they could trot out in front of investors. This was fine as long as they were one of the only games in town. Musk, Thiel, a16z, Microsoft – most of the big money people in the Valley were putting their funds in the OpenAI basket, with a few dollars spread out for the other players in the space.

In 2022, OpenAI was facing funding lag (they were burning more than they were raising, and promised funding was coming in slowly) as well as competition from Google’s DeepMind and some former coworkers who had walked away to form a competing company, Anthropic. OpenAI needed some way to juice investors and stand out from the crowd. Thus, ChatGPT was released to the world.

Now, to be clear, AI has the capacity to do a number of things. It can analyze chess positions, suggest your next Netflix binge, and help detect skin cancer. But there’s a difference between these kinds of AI and generative AI, a category that includes Midjourney, the now-defunct Sora, Elon Musk’s Grok, and of course, ChatGPT.

Generative AI works by ingesting a large quantity of training data (millions of YouTube videos, for instance), breaking it down into chunks called tokens, and then responding to prompts with a bunch of tokens grouped together in probable ways – where “probable” is determined by that same training data. It’s generative in the sense that it’s generating things, and AI in the sense that…it uses machine learning to determine which tokens should be near each other in the output.

So generative AI programs like ChatGPT are basically glorified auto-complete. Given a prompt, ChatGPT will spit out the most likely series of words that look like a response. It was trained on stolen writing that it regurgitates without citation, confidently spews incorrect information that looks like fact, and tells our Uncle Greg that he’s a genius – all errors of the gravest sort – but it captured the interests of the public and got OpenAI the attention they wanted all along: that of their investors.* Since the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI has raised over $150 billion in investment, in spite of the fact that the company loses vast amounts of money every year (as does Anthropic).

Suffice it to say, generative AI is a clever marketing ploy, but it can’t actually do what its cheerleaders claim. Simply put, it can’t write.

*The training and running of generative AI systems also has massive environmental and human costs, but that’ll have to be a different essay.

Thrillers, as a genre, offer readers two things generative AI is incapable of: readers want surprise...

The text extruded by generative AI text is (by both design and necessity) average in every way, which isn’t desirable in any writing scenario, but for thriller readers in particular, average doesn’t cut it.

Fans of thriller, suspense, mystery, and horror are all here for the twists, the subversion of expectations, the startling turn that makes your skin tingle. Skilled authors can learn strategies for making these twists satisfying, but an electric twist cannot come from a machine designed to assemble predictable text.

In fact, AI-generated text is only becoming more homogenized as time goes on thanks to this fun new thing: AI Cannibalism. (Look, we could have linked to an article about AI “Mad Cow Disease” and didn’t, so you’re welcome.)

Because AI companies continue to “train” their generative AI on whatever random stuff exists on the Internet while venting AI slop into the web like toxic waste into a bay, ChatGPT and others are being trained on “inaccurate blogspam, factoids that have been chewed up and spit out a thousand times over,” according to Vice writer Luis Prada.

And with homogenization comes compounded bias. Research by Amogh Gupta and others established that when students in STEM classes used generative AI to help them study, the AI “personalized” its responses to students based on cues related to race, economic status, and social class. The AI then provided simpler responses to students from less-privileged backgrounds, thereby “treating social identity as a signal of intellectual capability.”

Are we angry about this? Yes.

Are we worried these self-same programs will take our jobs as fiction writers? No.

...And readers want fear.

Scary stories are a critical part of how humans learn to interact with and exist in the world. From Wendigo to Cyclops to Wicked Witch, we rely on scary stories to help us mediate our experience. And they work! Myrto Bakaraki and other researchers confirmed that listening to fairy tales helps children learn right from wrong in a way that makes them less fearful, not more so. Hearing and discussing fairy tales encourages “positive self-image and emotional intelligence” and the happy ending of a fairy tale “lessens tension, alleviates anxiety...and meets the need for justice among kids.” Just replace “happy ending” with “well-earned conclusion” and “kids” with “me as an adult,” and there you go.

Point is, we need genuinely scary stories, and [pause for drama] humans are better at coming up with scary stories than chatbots are. Researchers at Souk Ahras University constructed a John-Henry-vs.-the-Machine-style study where they asked a bunch of students (not professional writers) to write horror stories—some using Claude’s AI and other using “only” their brains. Researchers discovered that the human-only stories were both scarier and more original than the AI-collabs.

AND, over the course of the study, the humans writing by themselves demonstrated improvement in their ability to write believable characters, where Claude...did not. Again, these weren’t even professionals.

The business of fiction is built on trust, but generative AI can never be trusted.

We know that AI makes mistakes.** We’ve seen it on Wall Street, in scientific publications (historical medical frymblal, anyone?), in courtrooms, and, tragically, in war zones. Obviously, an error in a novel has much lower stakes in terms of actual human suffering, but the point remains that picking up a book is an act of trust on the part of the reader, a trust that will only continue so long as the book continues to demonstrate trustworthiness.

A reader trusts an author to compel them, to make them feel something, to immerse them in John Gardner’s fictive dream. That means, for example, no plot holes and no inconsistencies in characters or style. Achieving this requires the attention and intention of the author (and editor, copyeditor, and proofreader) to every scene, every segment of prose.

Attention and intention are two things that are simply outside the capability of generative AI.

**Though even using the word “mistake” to refer to output produced by something with no capacity for choice or knowledge is a misnomer.

At its core, fiction writing is an act of interaction between humans.

It’s essentially inaccurate to use the word “writing” to refer to text produced by generative AI because (among other reasons) writing is communication between people. It requires an author who has thought deeply about real people’s experiences and crafted a story that elucidates some part of what it is to be human and a reader who opens themselves up to the reading experience with the expectation that the author respects them and their essential humanity.

AI cannot understand anything, nor can it respect anything.

And if the goal isn’t to write fiction but to sell books, then AI will still disappoint.

The supreme court ruled in March that works authored by AI cannot be copyrighted, so...don’t count on ever being able to make money from an AI-generated book.

Humanoid is the wrong shape for a robot AKA why are we even having this conversation.

On a philosophical note, the question of whether AI can generate fiction points to our human impulse to see ourselves in everything. Even our fear around AI is based on our assumption that artificial intelligence must be like human intelligence in some essential way. We fear its ability to replace us, and in fearing it, we instinctively identify the skills and abilities that are most eminently human, especially our ability to create art and our ability to love one another. (Regardless of AI’s actual ability to do what we seem to both fear and, perversely, want it to do.)

Look, there are robots out there today who are using artificial intelligence to do things humans cannot do. We’re talking the adorable Aqua Joey, who trundles down water pipes to find leaks or the tong-wielding robot who has ventured into the heart of the Fukushima nuclear plant to begin cleanup efforts. These robots win Best Robot in our hearts, but they don’t get headlines the way ChatGPT does because they don’t feed our fear. Instead of Nuclear Hero Robot, we go straight to talking about AI nannies.

And we can’t seem to stop trying to make robots in our image, despite the fact that, because of myriad reasons (not enough joints, no skin, can’t pick up a shirt), a humanoid robot just never seems to work.

But the reality is that this fear (like most of our fears) is self-generated. Wonder if anyone’s ever written a book about that.

(Side note: if you want a beautiful example the classic narrative technique “the inevitable yet surprising ending,” please enjoy this video titled “Robot Built for Marathon Trips Over Tiny Bump, Dies Instantly.”)

So no, Uncle Greg, ChatGPT cannot write a novel in a day.

And if it did, no one would care.

There’s already enough text in the world to keep even the speediest reader busy for lifetimes. (The Library of Congress contains more than 175 million texts and counting, and if you want something with a little more casual flair, fanfiction.net has 127 thousand fanfiction stories based on the TV show Supernatural alone.)

The world doesn’t need more text. It needs more thoughtful books that written by authors who know us and respect us, who know what we want, and who know how to provide it.

----

Bio AKA Who are we, and where do we get off? Lauren Reding and Thomas Bechtold are a duo of writers and teachers living in Baltimore. Lauren’s debut The Killer in the House launched last month, and Thomas’ book, well...we’ll talk about that later. They both teach composition and creative writing at Towson University in Maryland, where they’ve become experienced in talking to people who are very sure AI will solve the ultimate threat to humanity: homework.

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Works Cited***

Amatriain, Xavier, and Justin Basilico. “Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars (Part 1).” Medium, 6 Apr. 2012, https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-recommendations-beyond-the-5-stars- part-1-55838468f429. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

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Bhaimiya, Sawdah. “Companies are blaming AI jor job cuts. Critics say it’s a ‘good excuse.’” CNBC, 19 Oct. 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/19/firms-are-blaming-ai-for-job-cuts-critics-say- its-a-good-excuse.html. Accessed 26 Apr. 2026.

Boumous, Moufida. “Human Creativity Vs. Artificial Intelligence: A Comparison of Horror Fiction Crafting from ‘Bookish Minds Club’ at Souk Ahras University and Claude AI.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities [Kolkata], vol. 16, no. 3, January 2024, https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v16n3.01.

Brandom, Russell. “OpenAI raises $110B in one of the largest private funding rounds in history.” TechCrunch, 27 Feb. 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/27/openai-raises-110b-in-one-of- the-largest-private-funding-rounds-in-history. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Brittain, Blake. “US Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material.” Reuters, 2 Mar. 2026, https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court- declines-hear-dispute-over-copyrights-ai-generated-material-2026-03-02. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

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Dupré, Maggie Harrison. “Doctors warn That AI Companies Are Dangerous.” Futurism, 21 Dec. 2025, https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/doctors-warn-ai-companions-dangerous. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Field, Hayden, and Kate Rooney. “Open AI closes $40 billion funding round, largest private tech deal on record.” CNBC, 31 Mar. 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/31/openai-closes-40-billion- in-funding-the-largest-private-fundraise-in-history-softbank-chatgpt.html. Accessed 29 Apr. 2029.

Gerard, David. “Disney sues AI image generator Midjourney.” Pivot to AI, 12 Jun. 2025, https://pivot- to-ai.com/2025/06/12/disney-sues-ai-image-generator-midjourney. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Gerard, David. “Medical frymblal: Nature’s latest AI-generated paper.” YouTube, uploaded by Pivot to AI, 28 Nov. 2025, Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

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Gupta, Amogh, et al. Compounding Disadvantage: Auditing Intersectional Bias in LLM-Generated Explanations Across Indian and American STEM Education. March 2026, https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2601.14506. Accessed 26 Apr. 2026.

Hagen, Lisa. “Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, started calling itself ‘MechaHitler.’” NPR, 9 Jul. 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-antisemitic-racist-content. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Hamilton, Isobel Asher. “Bill Gates hails ‘huge milestone’ for AI as bots work in a team to destroy humans at video game ‘Dota 2.’” Business Insider, 27 Jun. 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-hails-huge-milestone-for-ai-as-bots-beat-humans-at- dota-2-2018-6. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Harris, Mark. “Elon Musk used to say he put $100M in OpenAI, but now it’s $50M: Here are the receipts.” TechCrunch, 17 May, 2023, https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/elon-musk-used-to- say-he-put-100m-in-openai-but-now-its-50m-here-are-the-receipts. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Kaste, Martin. “Penalties stack up as AI spreads through the legal system.” NPR, 3 Apr. 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/04/03/nx-s1-5761454/penalties-stack-up-ai-spreads-through-legal- system. 29 Apr. 2026.

Loizos, Connie. “Why OpenAI really shut down Sora.” TechCrunch, 29 Mar. 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/29/why-openai-really-shut-down-sora. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Nield, David. “Cannibal AIs Could Risk Digital ‘Mad Cow Disease’ Without Fresh Data.” Science Alert, 6 Aug. 2024, https://www.sciencealert.com/cannibal-ais-could-risk-digital-mad-cow- disease-without-fresh-data. Accessed 29 Apr. 2029.

Prada, Luis. “AI Models Are Cannibalizing Each Other—and it Might Destroy Them.” Vice, 3 Jun. 2025, https://www.vice.com/en/article/ai-models-are-cannibalizing-each-other-and-it-might- destroy-them. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Rajabi, Hamed. “The design flaw holding back today’s humanoid robots.” The Independent, 11 Aug. 2025, https://www.the-independent.com/tech/robots-ai-design-flaw-boston-dynamics-tesla- b2805362.html. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Reisner, Alex. “AI Is Coming for YouTube Creators.” TheAtlantic, 10 Sep. 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/09/youtube-ai-training-data-sets/684116. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Romano-Lax, Andromeda. “Why We Read Tense Novels in Tense Times.” Present Tense, 30 Mar. 2023, https://presenttense.substack.com/p/cayenne-powder-and-the-blues. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Suskind, Dana. “The AI Nanny in Your Baby’s Future.” The Wall Street Journal, 11 Aug. 2023, https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/the-ai-nanny-in-your-babys-future-999d0e50. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Sweney, Mark. “AI hallucinations found in high-profile Wall Street law firm filing.” The Guardian, 22 Apr. 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/22/ai-hallucinations-found-in- high-profile-wall-street-law-firm-filing. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Toh, Amos, and Emile Ayoub. “The Military’s Use of AI, Explained.” Brennan Center for Justice, 23 Mar. 2026, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/militarys-use-ai- explained. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

Wahrer, Caitlin. “How to Gone Girl in 3 Steps.” Present Tense, 30 Mar. 2023, https://presenttense.substack.com/p/how-to-gone-a-girl-in-3-steps. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

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Yamaguchi, Mari. “A robot begins removal of melted fuel from the Fukushima nuclear plant. It could take a century.” AP News, 10 Sep. 2024, https://apnews.com/article/japan-fukushima-reactor- melted-fuel-robot-9ffc309fb072580bee0161e8a24c8490. Accessed 29 Apr. 2026.

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***Sorry. We’re academics. We can’t help ourselves.

Three women try to make it home to be with their families in less than 59 minutes, before a nuclear missile strikes southern England. (59 Minutes by Holly Seddon, published last fall.)

By chance, I read both high-concept thrillers back-to-back last month and it inspired me to ask: what is a high-concept thriller, anyway? And how do the seemingly commercial premises and structures of these two books give Bannister and Seddon opportunities to flex their literary muscles? I won’t get into the literary side until halfway through this post, but trust me, it’s coming. These books read like paperback page-turners, but they are not in any way simple, fluffy, or forgettable.

Let’s talk first about what makes a book high-concept, according to the interwebs and agents I’ve spoken with, personally:

• It can be explained easily, usually in just one sentence.

• It is immediately intriguing and graspable.

• Agents, editors, and readers recognize it as “fresh.”

I would also add:

It’s often high-stakes—life or death, or something else undeniably important. Those stakes are part of the clarity.

In the case of the two novels we are considering here, the story in each has an extremely clear “clock.” More urgency, more clarity.

If one were to extract just one lesson from Ilona Bannister and Holly Seddon, it would be: make chronology work for you.

As it happens, my newest work-in-progress takes place over one day. This is not why I read Five or 59 Minutes; I’ve wanted to write a one-day book ever since reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway over twenty years ago.

Short-duration novels are often highly compelling and—free tip!—they can also be easier to write. I’m not saying Five and 59 Minutes appear easy to write, given the complexity of their structures beyond the issue of duration, but if you are struggling with a novel or memoir, including sagging middle parts that don’t advance the plot, tightening a timeline sometimes helps. (Start later; end earlier; condense or skip over the parts that don’t matter. What is the minimum duration you need to tell your story effectively?)

Of course, a short-duration novel doesn’t mean you don’t include flashbacks and substantial content from outside the main storyline. Instead, the main storyline acts as a taut clothesline from which you can “hang” flashbacks, backstory, or digressions, whether they are plotty and character-revealing or less plotty and more philosophical. (For extreme versions of the latter, see The Mezzanine and many other novels by Nicholson Baker, who can turn a lunch break into epic fiction.) The stronger and tauter the clothesline, the more weight you can hang from it.

But back to definitions. As a writer, I have my own addenda.

A high-concept premise lets us play in the author’s sandbox—a sandbox that has very clear borders. There’s something inviting about that. Here are the limits. Here is the sand. What are you going to do with it?

Put another way, the high-concept premise is a game with clearly defined rules. It’s a well-scaffolded building, with the supports and dimensions already in place, so that someone can imagine how to continue the construction process.

What it isn’t: a blueprint or formula.

59 Minutes came out in November, and when I read the premise, I pre-ordered the book, because I didn’t want to forget to read it. That’s how much her premise grabbed me.

In the case of 59 Minutes, I did hit a bit of a wall about 15 percent of the way in, wondering if the novel would end in unremitting sorrow—an end that seemed inescapable unless the author cheated in some way. I was on vacation at the time and turned to my husband. “Why am I reading this? It’s so depressing!”

By this point, I believed in the set-up, the world, and the characters. One woman was searching for her missing daughter, inexplicably absent on the school bus she usually took home. Another couple (a lovable woman named Frankie, a goofy and sweet man named Otis) had just found out they were pregnant—an hour before the world was about to end! Why are you doing this to us, Holly Seddon???

I grew up in the eighties and thought so often about nuclear Armageddon that whenever I’d see a vaguely mushroom-shaped cloud on the horizon, I leapt to the assumption that we’d just been bombed. (Always followed, a moment later, by the realization that cars would have stopped running or we would have heard about an attack on the news.)

That nuclear fear is probably why Seddon’s premise spoke to me. But it was also why I felt tempted to put the book down. And then something happened.

One of Seddon’s characters, who had been making her way through a dark subway tunnel, was joined by a second, new character, also determined to get home. Now, instead of one terrified, melancholic person in this claustrophobic storyline, we had two. Seddon had anticipated this reader’s paralytic dread and provided a moment of warmth and connection to get me through.

A little later in the plot, a different woman walking the road suddenly gets picked up by a strange trio of men. The reader can’t understand this trio’s agenda, which seems to predate the nuclear missile announcement.

At this point, I started trusting the author: She will not make this story completely bleak. And she will not simply write three parallel storylines all featuring straightforward homeward journeys. The novel is willing to reward the challenged reader with both positive emotions and surprises. Structurally and chronologically, the book’s last third is unexpected in a way I can’t explain here. Kudos for defying expectations.

Now let’s turn to Five, which comes out in May (I was so intrigued that I requested an early reader’s copy, or ARC) and has been getting lots of early buzz. While this book also promises life-or-death stakes and a tight timeline, it offers a completely different reading experience than 59 Minutes. In the case of the latter book, I never stopped wanting to know if the missile would strike and what would happen thereafter; in other words, plot was the main satisfaction, with character development in strong second place.

In Five, I was delighted by the hook and I enjoyed how the narrator breaks the fourth wall at times. At one point, she includes us with other bystanders of the tragedy unfolding, suggesting that we aren’t observing the various train passengers closely because we have our noses stuck in this book… “reading it for book club during your commute, asking yourself why you always put off reading the book until the day before book club.”

(I feel seen, Ilona Bannister.)

Five was my favorite read of 2026 so far, and yet I must confess: I didn’t care all that much about which character would die. I liked the question itself and the way in which it contributes to the novel’s structure, but I had little invested in an answer.

That’s praise for the book, not criticism. I was drawn away from the surface plot into the characters and their vivid backstories. For me, this book was about character first (nearly always, character as it was revealed in the past), voice second, and main plotline—“who will die on the train platform?”—a distant third.

We meet Emma, a desperate, isolated woman struggling with an uncontainable, difficult, and possibly neurodivergent child named Gideon.

We meet Sonny, a man with a gambling addiction rendered with painful accuracy.

We meet my favorite character, Mrs. Worth, a seemingly gruff, bitter, “unlikeable” woman who, we discover, is not some flatly drawn old person but rather a smart, retired forensic pathologist. And then the author takes us further into Mrs. Worth’s past and the very strange way in which she was raised by her eccentric father—a childhood that helps explain both her brilliance and her prickliness.

In other words, using that taut clothesline structure I referenced earlier, Bannister launches us along the line and then pauses, inviting us into character backstories with as much time and detail as she needs. (Vertical dip, into the story hanging from the line.) Her horizontal main-story timeline is short, strong, and undeniably anchored; because of that, her vertical digressions (which are not digressions at all, but the novel’s whole point) can be substantial.

Most novels do some form of this, pausing the main story trajectory for earned flashbacks, but few do it as authoritatively as Five, in which each long flashback or backstory is as well-crafted as a standalone short story or the opening of an entirely different novel.

As for the characters themselves, I’d argue that 59 Minutes and Five take opposite approaches. Seddon invites you to care about the characters as quickly and as much as possible—to “like them” in the present storyline—so that you care about whether they survive.

Bannister, by contrast, invites you to dislike the characters, whether that person is a 78-year-old woman who is unkind to her daughter-in-law, a possibly criminal man who seems to be roughing up a woman, or a lazy bystander who pretends to have back pain so he doesn’t have to help rescue a stranger. Now that you’ve seen those unattractive surfaces, Bannister complicates them. The old woman is a survivor with a strange past. The parent is doing the best she can for her child. The lazy bystander wants to be a better person.

The progressive development of hard-earned empathy is one of the novel’s pleasures. Bannister has said in interviews that she hopes people will look around at strangers (for example, on the subway or in traffic) and try to imagine their personal stories, which are often more fascinating, poignant, and compassion-worthy than any fictional character’s.

The real question of the book isn’t which person will die, but whether we can learn to love each other.

In a nutshell, Five is great for readers who:

• are intrigued by potentially “unlikeable,” grief- or problem-burdened characters

• are delighted by an “audible” narrator and metafictional approach

• are looking for a short novel; this one is only 240 pages

• want a book club pick with a discussable question at its heart

• admire strong voice over plot twists

59 Minutes is great for readers who:

• want more conventional, likeable characters to root for

• are haunted by fears of nuclear disaster

• enjoy the sequential “what-if” details of movement, communications, preparation or survival

• wonder about the effects of trauma

• need a twist to make the reading experience complete

Both books are great for writers studying chronology and how to play with it, as well as how to subvert reader expectations.

Do you have thoughts about what “high-concept” means, or other novels that grab the reader with high stakes and a taut timeline? Let us know!

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Andromeda Romano-Lax is the author of seven novels, including The Deepest Lake, a Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick, and What Boys Learn, a NYT “new and notable” thriller about a mother’s fear that her son has been involved in the suspicious deaths of two classmates.

FYI for any retreat-seekers: Andromeda will be teaching at a London-to-New-York multi-genre Writing & Publishing retreat on the Queen Mary 2 this September 5-12. Find out more!

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Then I sent everything to my agent, hoping she’d tell me how brilliant this new book sounded.

But I was impatient and started drafting, worried about possibly selling a second book before I knew if I could write it. Selling a book on spec is something I’ve never done before…and a vastly different experience from selling a debut.

(Side note: most, if not all, debut novels go through countless rounds of revision before they make it to bookshelves. Generally speaking, a traditionally published debut novel first has to be polished enough to impress an agent, which means the author has done several revisions on their own. Then, it has to be polished even further to impress an editor in order to get acquired for publication! For most, this involves years of work.)

So, there I was, drafting away, thinking I knew the story.

As I neared the final quarter, though, I saw that I still didn’t really know the ending. I realized a major scene came way too late in the book and would need to be moved. I was losing steam with a subplot I didn’t know how to resolve. It began to feel like a mess.

Then the holidays rolled around, and winter in New England arrived harsh and unforgiving, killing my motivation for finishing that quick and dirty first draft.

It felt like my idea of the story was a geode rock, and I had barely chipped away at the exterior.

Even after conferring with my agent, I was still struggling to find the heartbeat of the story. I’d open Scrivener and skim through my pages of notes, hoping to find a way in, to no avail. Eventually, I stopped trying to force the story to click and took a break instead.

In the meantime, I read. I knit. I thought about my characters and the book’s premise. I was looking for inspiration anywhere I could find it.

And then I read a book with a similar theme to my project, which allowed me to imagine my book from a different angle. What if I changed XYZ stakes so the story had more urgency and my main character’s motivations were clearer? And what if I toyed with how and when certain reveals happened? What if there’s a better twist buried in this story, one that leads to a more satisfying character arc?

I let these new ideas simmer for a few weeks, emailing myself notes if they came to me when I was away from my computer. (The best ideas always come to me when I’m away from my computer!)

The new character motivations and plot points I was turning over in my mind started to have that sparkly quality that tells me a story is going to stick. I was eager to try drafting again, this time with the same premise as before but with the ideas I had let percolate in my fallow writing period.

I wrote two new chapters that felt full of energy and suspense, and best of all, I was excited to write!

Ideas sometimes (or maybe always) need time to grow legs and see if they can stand up on their own.

We can be in such a hurry to write the book that we cheat ourselves out of the magic that happens when an idea is just something we gently turn over in our minds instead of something we force to work right now.

I haven’t sold this book yet, but I feel much better about its chances than the first iteration. This one has a charge to it that came from patience and pondering. And I know that as the story continues to evolve, I’ll need more periods of time where the ideas simmer for a while.

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The next time you’re feeling stuck and can’t seem to find the answer you’re looking for in a project, I invite you to let off the gas instead of pressing down on it harder.

Allow your story to take shape in the slow cooker of your mind, and see what happens.

Some tips for letting your ideas unfold:

• Take an intentional writing break for a set amount of time, such as a few weeks, and use that time to feed your creativity in other ways. Do activities that activate different parts of your brain. Go out into the world and pay close attention to anything that reminds you of your story in any way. Read with the intention of being influenced. Be an open channel and see what arrives.

• When you have a new idea, resist the urge to write it immediately. Sit with it for a while, taking notes about things you don’t want to forget, without putting the idea into story form yet. Give your subconscious time to tend to the idea before you put it to work. And don’t judge the idea too soon. It might need time to unfurl before you see how great it is.

• Be willing to change course at any stage of your project if you’re met with a breakthrough. Mere months before I started querying my debut novel, I had an idea that I knew would strengthen the story, so I made the necessary changes to include it in the book. That idea came because I’d put the latest draft aside for a while and was paying attention to inspiration around me in the world.

• Remind yourself that there’s no rush. We all feel like we’re falling behind sometimes. We all want to reach certain milestones as soon as possible. But there’s no rushing your art, and I promise that in the long run, you’ll be grateful you took the time to let your project fully bloom.

Do you sit with your ideas before drafting them, or do you have a different approach? I’d love to know what works for you and your stories!

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Kristin Offiler holds an MFA from Lesley University. Her short fiction has appeared in the Raleigh Review, Waccamaw Journal, The Bookends Review, and The Bookends Review Best of 2020 print anthology. When she’s not writing, she can be found reading on the porch of her 130-year-old house or exploring charming corners of New England. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband, son, and dog. THE HOUSEWARMING is her debut novel. For more information, visit www.kristinoffiler.com.

It’s a question a novelist (new or seasoned) might be asked by any number of professionals: an agent, an editor, a savvy writing partner giving advice on a query letter. It’s also a question some of us (just me?) struggle to answer about our own novels. I will say something, be met with the stakes question, and think, did I not already answer that? But no, the question I’d actually answered was “what’s a cagy, thin description of the novel you’re writing?”

This week, while killing three hours on a plane, I went through the most recent novels I’ve read and tried to define their stakes (picture me looking like Patrick Bateman while doing so, please). I thought I was killing it–it’s so much easier to do it for other people–until I realized that half of the time I was identifying something more like a hook, not the stakes.

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The difference matters when an industry pro is the one asking you the question. (Not to mention that an author might use each to her advantage differently.) So, let’s be lawyerly and get some definitions straight. Courtesy of Oxford Languages we have these:

At stake: to be won or lost; at risk.

Hook: a thing designed to catch people’s attention.

These definitions comport with my understanding, when I take the time to actually think about the terms. A hook makes the listener say that’s a cool idea, I’d read that or, in the case of the professional, I can sell that. The stakes are personal to the main character: what might she gain or lose under the circumstances of the story? (The thing she gains or loses may be physical, relational, psychic/spiritual, financial…probably more than one of these, in the end.)

Jurassic Park’s hook is something like “what if dinosaurs were reintroduced to the modern world?” and the stakes are “these sexy people gotta keep these kids from getting eaten by dinosaurs!!” The hook gets you to the movie theater, but the stakes are why you’re on the edge of your seat.

To sell your book, you need a hook and stakes

I tend to start thinking about hooks and stakes when I need to convince someone more professional than myself of the merit in the story I’m writing. If you want a pro to invest their time and energy, you’re gonna need both. The hook tells the professional if they can sell the book. The stakes tell the professional if anything is going to happen in the story. Ideally, you have a pitch–be it a query letter to an agent or a single sentence you say to your editor–that captures both.

Let’s take Gillian McAllister’s The Choice as an example. (I started listening to the audiobook on that three-hour plane ride I mentioned earlier, and it got me thinking about all of this.)

Let me boil down the opening scene for you: The main character is pursued by an aggressive man at a bar. Walking home alone, she realizes she’s being followed. She calls her husband but the call drops. The man comes up behind her at the top of the stairs, she pushes him, and he falls down the stairs to the concrete below. She stands there, unbelieving, and he doesn’t get up. Should she call for an ambulance, or should she leave?

From the very first scene, I know the main character’s freedom is at stake. If she calls for help, will she be arrested for injuring–maybe killing–the man? If she doesn’t call for help, her psychic freedom will be constrained as she seeks to conceal her involvement (and, of course, she still might end up imprisoned).

And the novel’s hook is that the reader gets to see both. The story unfolds on two tracks: one where she calls for help, and one where she doesn’t.1

The query letter / pitch to the editor / book jacket writes itself. Okay, not quite, but with trial and error we can get the hook and the gist of the stakes into a single sentence. And when we have space to do so, we can expand on the stakes, perhaps by sharing the most salient aspects of the MC’s free life that she stands to lose, or by telling how the stakes increase for her as the story continues. (More on this later.)

The thing that makes your book special might be the thing that gets the attention of the agent, editor, bookseller, or reader, but don’t overlook the clarity of your stakes. You might lose out on opportunities if you send out eighty query letters that leave agents unclear on what drives the story…not to mention that you might still have a book without an engine. You stand to gain a lot if you think about stakes long before you’re trying to sell the book.

Use stakes to drive your revision

Stakes give the story its urgency and tension. As a reminder, stakes are what a character stands to gain or lose under the circumstances of the story. In suspense novels, stakes frequently involve life-or-death consequences and the risk of lost freedom (physical or psychic). But stakes can, and should, be so much more than that: Will my marriage survive? Will my children forgive me? Will I ever be content? Stakes are an opportunity for depth!

This next bit is going to sound proscriptive, but know that I am simply throwing grains of salt out into the internet and you may feel free to brush them off and write your novel the way you know it must be written.

Surely you’ve been hooked by some glimmer of an idea–a mental Laura Dern, to beat a joke to death–and you should enjoy frolicking in the jungle and seeing what comes in your early work. But if you are writing suspense and you want tension in your story, I would advise that you consider the stakes as you revise. And I would advise that you consider the stakes from many angles: from the birdseye view of the novel and at the level of the scene, for both the protagonist and other important characters.

Ideally, the stakes grow graver as the story goes. “If I don’t solve this case, I’ll lose my job,” becomes “I’ve got to find the killer before he kills me, too!” If you put every scene as a dot on a line, with the Y axis measuring the gravity of the stakes, it would certainly be promising if those data points ticked upward. (See also “How to Gone a Girl in 3 Steps,” linked at bottom, in which I drew story graphs you didn’t need to see.)

And speaking of scenes, every scene should have something at stake–something the character will gain or lose depending on the outcome of the scene. (This is so even if it’s not your protagonist out in the action.) You might assess with a single question: what’s at stake for this character right now in this scene? If you’re dissatisfied with the answer, ask how you might up the stakes. (If you’re satisfied with the answer, you might still up the stakes.)

Just last week, a brilliant editor2 pointed out an early scene in my working novel where the tension slackened. I looked for stakes and found none. I cut the scene.

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And of course, I’m also writing the dark stuff.

My latest novel, What Boys Learn, is about a mother’s fear that her teenage son has become a misogynist and perhaps even a murderer. (Shameless plug: the NYT just called it an “admirably nuanced portrait” and listed it as New and Notable alongside other “terrific, twisty” new thrillers.)

What am I watching? A suspenseful German TV show called “Unfamiliar” about spies hiding out as a normal family, and a zanier Irish series called “How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.” Both shows are tense. I sought them out anyway.

The opposite is true as well—I have spent time scrolling sweet, positive stories as an antidote to gloom. (Olympic favorite Alysa Liu, I love you and your contagious joy!)

But it’s surprising that the sunny stuff hasn’t taken over our reading and watching lists entirely, given how dark the world is now.

I have some theories.

Why We Love Tense Books Even During Tense Times

Mysteries portray a world of order

The first book I was able to read during the early pandemic without my distracted brain digressing into panic mode was Miracle Creek by Angie Kim. Any book that is going to lead us, logically, along the mystery-solving path—rescuing reason from chaos—is a balm when the real world gives us neither clear patterns nor timely justice. For the person who really needs order and predictability, gentle series abound.

On my TBR: the Three Pines village series by Louise Penny. I recently got the tip that her first book is the coziest, and the later books are darker. I’ve got Bury Your Dead, book number six, on my e-reader. Titrate that tension!

The monster made manifest

Isn’t it satisfying to see something intangibly monstrous turned into a real monster? At least that monster can be fought! Racism in the abstract becomes a cabal of racists with supernatural powers. Cruelty becomes actual demons. Never mind coziness and order. Let the walls bleed!

On my TBR: The Captive by Kit Burgoyne, set in the UK, about a revolutionary group who kidnap an heiress, only to discover she's pregnant with the antichrist, and she's about to give birth. It’s described as a Rosemary’s Baby for our times.

Shared anxieties and psychological distress

Our more personal anxieties—Will my kids be safe? Will my husband remain faithful? Can I trust my memories? If something bad happens to me, will I be able to recover?—somehow recede when we are in a story featuring a character who is really going through the shit. The more we secretly worry about something, the more cathartic it can be reading or watching someone struggle with that problem. This is different from the mystery that reassures. Psychological suspense ramps up the possibility that no one is knowable and threats abound in our families and neighborhoods. Even after the threat retreats, our minds may continue to betray us.

On my TBR: Still Missing by Chevy Stevens, about a woman held captive by a psychopath in a remote cabin and her later struggles to piece her life back together.

Singing the blues

Maybe we don’t share a narrator’s precise problem, but humans have always derived a strange pleasure from the artful evocation of despair. Rainy days, rhythm and blues, dystopian sci-fi movies, memoirs about abuse or grief, and all true crime and crime fiction—pick your poison.

On my TBR: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. (Not suspense or horror, but grief! Plenty of grief!)

The elephant and the chili powder

My deep research (three minutes of googling) suggests that elephant trainers don’t really put cayenne powder on elephants’ noses to distract them from pain elsewhere, like their toenails. (Darn it! I’ve believed in that cayenne-elephant-pedicure connection for years!) But real scientists do study and debate the practice of using one kind of pain to distract from another. When multiple painful stimuli are perceived at the same time, we perceive one of them as less painful.

Don’t want to think about ICE for a few hours? Maybe you’ll choose to read a sci-fi novel about Armageddon. Hate what’s happening to the U.S. government? Time to read about the Spanish Civil War. It’s funny that we don’t always turn to a happy story but instead get a perverse relief from an unhappy story set in a different time or place, featuring an extremely terrible situation.

On my TBR: 59 Minutes by Holly Seddon, about a nuclear missile threat about to hit England. Holy crap!

Every book has an end. Isn’t that a relief?

You know what doesn’t seem to be ending? Misogyny. Greed. Hatred of the other. The desire to rape. War-mongering narcissists’ need to be surrounded by fawning idiots in clown shoes. Help! (Am I getting too specific?)

But you know what does end? A book.

In my latest novel, whether or not you are sympathetic to my narrator and her difficult son, you will understand them (and know “whodunnit”)—and then get to part ways!—after fewer than 400 pages.

Done.

What’s your reason for seeking out tension when you already feel tense? What’s your metaphor for that reason? Is crime fiction or scary movies like homeopathic medicine, or more like biting your lip hard after you stub your toe?

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Andromeda Romano-Lax is the author of seven novels, including The Deepest Lake, a Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick and Amazon Editor’s Choice, and What Boys Learn. FYI for any retreat-seekers: Andromeda will be teaching at a London-to-New-York multi-genre Writing & Publishing retreat on the Queen Mary 2 this September 5-12. Find out more!

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City of Smoke and Sea begins the way many mysteries do: with a body and no clear explanation. In this case, the death is personal. Our narrator–hero, anti-hero, unreliable witness–Queenie is the granddaughter of the deceased, Gran. In the midst of immense grief, she steps uneasily into the role of amateur sleuth, determined to understand what happened and why. What she does not get is a neat answer tied up with a bow, and neither does the reader.

For me as the author, that was intentional. Life, in my experience, rarely offers clean resolutions, especially around grief, family, mental illness, and institutional violence. From the beginning, this book set out to live in that discomfort. This novel was drafted during the pandemic (2020–2023) and published in 2025. It lives at an intersection of genres: noir-inflected mystery, speculative elements, coming-of-age story, and psychological portrait. It centers a female protagonist whose emotional register is closer to a hard-boiled detective than a conventionally sympathetic narrator.

While querying literary agents during the gap between final draft and publication acceptance, I heard the same feedback repeatedly:

• Not emotionally connecting with the protagonist.

• More interiority, more pathos (from those wanting the book to lean more in to late-coming of age narrative –– often women!)

• Less interiority, less pathos, clearer throughline (from those wanting to up the suspense/ mystery –– often men)

• I’m looking for a clearer resolution. (Looking for a high concept hook and predictable ending).

Anyone who writes genre-bending work will recognize this moment: when your book is intriguing and well-written enough to be encouragingly, even warmly rejected, but not familiar enough to be easily placed or positioned from a marketing perspective. I couldn’t help wondering, honestly, whether a male character with the same emotional restraint would have been read differently. Detachment is canonized in men. In women, it is often treated as an inadequacy of the writing. I hope we see a day soon where tastes are less typically gendered, less binary.

I did revise, many times. I deepened Queenie’s interiority, rewrote the ending repeatedly, streamlined the narrative, and cut what felt like padding (the cringy bits!). I leaned harder into pace and propulsion, without abandoning ambiguity. That version won the 2023 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, an honor made more meaningful by the guest judge, Ellen Meeropol, and the context of the award: an LA Story finding a home with LA based, woman-founded Red Hen Press. The alignment of landing with a publisher so deeply embedded in the city’s literary ecosystem was the right home for this book.

Of course I had hoped a Big 5 editor would say yes. Publishing with small presses often means more autonomy for the author, less visibility for the book in a commercial capacity. But that’s not always an option especially for more literary work, and it’s not even always the best option. Many authors have done very well with indie publishers, but you’ve got to hustle for it and put your own ducks in a row.

Publishing lesson: The “right” publisher is often the one willing to champion your book, but if you decide to go with a small press – or even with large publishers, depending on the level of support they offer – strong suggestion to:

• Have the book contract reviewed by a professional (lawyer and/ or literary agent).

• Consider hiring a developmental editor.

• Consider hiring a publicist.

On crafting ambiguity in fiction…

City of Smoke and Sea lacks a single, authoritative resolution because it is rooted in lived experience: the death of a family member that involved mental illness, a law-enforcement incident, and a series of hazy, ambiguous events that could not be fully parsed or understood. We will never know exactly what happened with this beloved’s death, or whether it could have been prevented, and I wanted to represent that in this story. This lack of clarity is a big part of what I was grappling with both emotionally and from a craft perspective in this book.

This novel can be read in two ways:

• A psychological thriller as told by an unreliable narrator.

• Speculative suspense set in a world of magic and mystery.

Dear reader, you choose the frame. If you don’t believe in magic, it is a dark story. If you do, it is a story of healing and redemption. For me, both readings coexist. Two things can be true.

I often tell my students: the reader doesn’t need to know what happened yet, but the writer does. For this project, I broke that rule deliberately. I wrote from a place of not-knowing and allowed that uncertainty to shape the form.

City of Smoke and Sea was written by the version of me living inside unanswered questions. Queenie’s universe continues to live inside me. I realized a few things after publication – this city of smoke & mirrors & sea reveals things in its own time. Perhaps a sequel is in order…

Or maybe it’s okay for readers to sit with ambiguity and let it work on them, to imagine their own version of an answer, or just let the questions be.

Craft lesson: Withholding certainty works if the reader is meaningfully oriented to the world of the story via sensory elements and narrative presence. In this case, the character guiding the reader is often somewhat untethered, and the reader is challenged to trust that process. If ambiguity is alive and operational on every page, the reader has an opportunity to live in that untethered place with the character.

Suggestions for writers working on hybrid projects…

• Expect resistance. Genre confusion is often institutional, not personal.

• Write and revise with intention, not compliance with what you think people want to read.

• Learn the advantages & disadvantages of your publishing path and plan – well in advance of publication – accordingly.

Malia Márquez is a writer with roots in the Southwest and New England. She holds a BFA in 3D Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her work in translation has appeared in Poetry magazine, and her short fiction and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of City of Smoke and Sea (Red Hen Press, 2025) and This Fierce Blood (Acre Books, 2021). Márquez currently teaches at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and for the UCLAx Writers’ Program.

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Why is this 30-year-old novel suddenly having a moment?

I went into I Who Have Never Known Men knowing little more than the broad strokes from the reviews I’d seen: originally published in 1995 in French, it’s a story about a group of women held prisoner in some kind of windowless underground bunker. Besides that, I didn’t know what to expect.

Once I dove in, though, I couldn’t stop reading. I didn’t come up for air until I finished tearing through this slim 208-page masterpiece. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days, pondering not only the writing itself and my reading experience, but also the way Harpman handled suspense so expertly.

The story is told from the perspective of one of the 40 captives. The narrator is a nameless teenage girl referred to by the others as The Child since she was very young and motherless when the group was first imprisoned. The other 39 women barely remember life before the bunker, and none of them actually know or remember how they arrived there.

The narrator mentions several times that the women are drugged while in the bunker, though they don’t know what the drug is or how it affects them. Presumably, it’s a way to subdue them and loosen their grip on memories.

Since the women have only hazy memories of their lives before imprisonment, no idea why they’re imprisoned, and no prospect of ever getting out, one can’t help but feel unsteady and off-kilter while reading. A lack of concrete information makes for a dizzying experience for the reader.

The more we desire answers about the characters’ captivity, the less we understand.

Tension grows as their absurd reality continues for years on end. The Child becomes a young adult. She ponders their existence and, though it’s all she’s ever known, she understands it’s wrong.

How bizarre to imprison a group of women without a clear reason, with no plan for them, and with no end in sight. And even stranger, when the women speak about their situation, none of them can recall specific details about life before, even though they know they once existed outside the bunker and had families.

The Child asks questions of her peers, seeking a better understanding of her reality, but never quite gets what she needs. Neither does the reader.

Reading the story from the first-person POV of The Child forces us feel like we’re living this bizarre existence alongside her. In this world, the reader knows just as little as the narrator. But! The narrator is recounting this entire experience from a vantage point in the future, so there must be answers on the horizon.

The retrospective POV choice propels the narrative forward—I couldn’t wait to arrive at her present moment and see where she ended up, and how she got there.

There’s plenty of potential to build suspense with a retrospective POV. The narrator can hint at things they know now but didn’t know back then, without revealing how they came to that information just yet. It can also fuel tension between the younger version and the current version of that character, allowing them to express regret or desire to have acted differently.

Hindsight is 20/20, and maybe it’s also a handy suspense tool.

The women don’t stay in their bunker the entire novel. Something unexpected—and, in their world, extremely unprecedented—happens one day, and they leave their prison. No spoilers, though. You’ll have to read it to find out how they get free.

Their freedom, however, quickly becomes another kind of prison.

For the rest of the book, we follow the women as years pass and they wander, seeking answers, relying on each other for survival, and facing endless uncertainty. They’re out of their bunker but not free in any real sense. They often question if they’re even on earth or if the world they once knew still exists.

The book is propulsive and deeply suspenseful because the reader can’t help but care about the women’s fate, the rules of their reality, and the larger why behind their situation.

We read to understand what’s going on, just as much as the women are seeking the same. As the characters experience unpredictability, so does the reader. As they search for answers, so do we.

But be warned: I Who Have Never Known Men is not your traditional thriller. The suspense doesn’t culminate in a big twist or reveal that suddenly ties everything together. Loose ends are not neatly resolved in this novel.

Instead, the book serves as a stage for the story to explore themes of female friendship, isolation, and existence. You will walk away from this book with more questions than answers, but there is a kind of resolution to the story that, in my mind, feels complete. Again, no spoilers.

I closed this book feeling like I’d just experienced something profound. I could easily spiral about the meaning of this book until the end of time. There are plenty of articles and forums online where other readers share theories, still seeking answers. I didn’t feel frustrated with this reading experience, though; I felt moved.

In a way, the suspense extends beyond the final pages of this book and into the lives of readers.

As a suspense writer always looking for new ways to approach the craft, I found this book to be a revelation. I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about the characters and their experience. And I’m sure I’ll buy a copy to pore over again and again as I think about the many ways we writers can infuse our readers with dread and curiosity and the relentless need to keep turning the page.

Thanks for reading!

I would love to hear in the comments if you’ve read this book, and what you thought of it. If you haven’t read it yet, have you heard about it before? Does it sound like something you’d pick up?

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Kristin Offiler holds an MFA from Lesley University. Her short fiction has appeared in the Raleigh Review, Waccamaw Journal, The Bookends Review, and The Bookends Review Best of 2020 print anthology. When she’s not writing, she can be found reading on the porch of her 130-year-old house or exploring charming corners of New England. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband, son, and dog. THE HOUSEWARMING is her debut novel. For more information, visit www.kristinoffiler.com.

Kate Lillie to the rescue! When I read her “Five Books For” Substack in December, I asked if we could repost in 2026. All these books are going on my TBR!

I have previously covered detective stories in a special double edition linked here, here and here).

So this month’s edition is something a little different, in the sense that all of this month’s books are in translation. If you’ve finished off all the Agatha Christies, read all of Sherlock Holmes, Peter Robinson and Ian Rankin, are tired of Morse or Gamache and feel like trying something new, then I hope you’ll find just the thing amongst the books below. From Russia to Iceland, via Japan and Denmark, here are five fantastic detective stories, all with irresistible mysteries and clever solutions.

The Dinosaur Feather by Sissel-Jo Gazan

“Scientific controversies were par for the course. People had argued whether the earth was flat or round, whether man was related to the apes, the status of the Milky Way compared to the rest of the universe, with a fervour which ceased the moment sufficient evidence became available. The earth is round, man is a primate, and the Milky Way does mainly consist of red stars. However, the controversy surrounding the origins of birds appeared to be different. It rumbled on, even though, scientifically speaking, there was nothing left to discuss.”

So what’s it about? A PhD student working on the saurian theory of bird evolution in the cut-throat world of Danish academia finds herself drawn into a murder investigation when her supervisor is found dead in his office, her blood-stained PhD thesis in his lap. What initially appears to be an isolated crime is soon revealed to be entangled with old rivalries, contested research, and a controversial scientific discovery that once promised fame and now threatens reputations. The investigation gradually uncovers a tangled history of ambition, deception, and moral compromise, showing how far people will go to protect their work - and themselves.

What’s great about it? This is one of the best-written crime novels I’ve ever read - it’s literary but doesn’t sacrifice suspense or intrigue. Gazan takes the familiar territory of university politics - grants, credit, jealousy, prestige - and shows how easily ambition slips into compromise, and compromise into lifelong guilt. The science is fascinating and thoroughly explored, which makes the novel richer, and while it explores the scientific question of dinosaur to bird evolution, it’s also interested n love, in the cost of truth, and in how the decisions we make when we are young and bright slowly harden around us.

Give it a try if: you love intellectual books which have something fascinating to share; you love a complex but satisfying mystery; you usually love literature but feel like dipping a toe into genre fiction; you like Scandi noir.

Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto

“Sometimes, a preconceived opinion will make us overlook the obvious. This is a frightening thing. We call it common sense but it often leaves us with a blind spot. Even if something appears to be obvious one should investigate, objectively, to make absolutely sure.”

So what’s it about? When the bodies of a man and a woman are found on a remote beach, the authorities quickly conclude that the couple died by suicide. The case seems straightforward, neat, and emotionally legible. Yet when small irregularities begin to surface, noticed not by dramatic flair but by patient attention to timing, movement, and record-keeping, two detectives determined to solve the case find themselves up against a seemingly impossible crime.

What’s great about it? Tokyo Express is a masterclass in understatement : beautiful, quiet prose with a cleverly constructed crime at the centre. Perhaps most remarkably, Matsumoto builds suspense not through escalation, but through subtraction - fewer suspects, fewer theories, tighter margins for error. This isn’t something I’ve seen often, and I read a lot of mysteries - I imagine it must be difficult to do well, and still keep the book interesting, so I really admired it. The real drama of the book lies in logistics: timetables, alibis, and the grinding persistence of a detective who refuses to accept a neat answer simply because it would be convenient.

It also doubles as a portrait of post-war Japan grappling with corruption and power that operates politely, publicly, and just out of reach. The tone is cool, restrained, and quietly devastating. You finish it with the unsettling feeling that to get away with murder depends not on passion, but on planning – and that many crimes must go completely undiscovered.

Give it a try if: you love clever mysteries; you’re not a fan of thriller-style detective stories but like books that are more calm and measured; you love books with memorable detectives or main characters; you love books which capture and particular time and place.

The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji

“In my opinion, mystery fiction is, at its core, a kind of intellectual puzzle. An exciting game of reasoning in the form of a novel. A game between the reader and the great detective, or the reader and the author. Nothing more or less than that.”

So what’s it about? In cult classic The Decagon House Murders, a group of mystery-loving university students travel to a small, isolated island to stay in an unusual, decagon-shaped house. The site is infamous: some years earlier, a series of brutal murders took place there, and the house itself has become a kind of architectural memorial to violence. Soon after the students’ arrival, history begins to repeat itself. Will any of the students make it out alive?

What’s great about it? This book is pure intellectual pleasure. Ayatsuji writes with one eye permanently winking at the reader, constructing a puzzle that is both homage and critique of classic whodunits, especially Agatha Christie. It’s playful without being silly, rigorous without being dry - and profoundly satisfying if you enjoy spotting the clues and trying to solve the mystery yourself: all the clues are there. The author never cheats. If you miss the solution, it’s because you looked where he wanted you to look. It’s the literary equivalent of a beautifully designed maze - and a reminder of how exhilarating clever plotting can be when it’s done with confidence.

Give it a try if: you love Agatha Christie or any of the other Golden Age writers; you love seemingly-impossible mysteries; you like books with atmosphere.

Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

“Clothes maketh the man, say those who can afford the best. And by their shoes ye shall know them.”

So what’s it about? A young German student researching Icelandic witchcraft texts is found murdered in his Reykjavík apartment, his death marked by disturbing ritualistic elements. Thóra Guðmundsdóttir, a lawyer with a knack for investigation, is asked to assist, drawn into a case that sits uneasily between ancient belief and modern brutality, drawing in medieval manuscripts, academic obsession, and personal histories as the investigation progresses.

What’s great about it? This is classic Nordic noir, but with a twist of warmth. Thóra is pragmatic, funny, and refreshingly unimpressed by melodrama, which only makes the darkness around her feel more real. The Icelandic setting is used brilliantly, not as atmosphere for atmosphere’s sake, but as a culture shaped by isolation, history, and long memory.

This is much darker than this month’s other recommendations, but it balances its brutality with intelligence and restraint. The past is never romanticised, and belief is treated as a force that can both sustain and destroy. The story is chilling without being gratuitous and anchored by a protagonist you quickly come to trust, which is no small thing in a book this bleak.

Give it a try if: you love Scandi noir; you like your mysteries dark; you love books set in Iceland; you love female protagonists who are both capable and funny.

The Turkish Gambit by Boris Akunin

“The titular counselor buttoned up his collar and replied seriously: ‘If you live in a state, you should either ch-cherish it or leave it—anything else is either parasitism or mere lackeys’ gossip’.”

So what’s it about? I’ve written before about this series and the wonderful Erast Fandorin, so this is the second book in the series. Set during the Russo-Turkish War of the 1870s, the novel follows Fandorin, a clever and observant diplomat, as he becomes entangled in a web of espionage and political intrigue. Rumours of a high-level spy threaten military strategy, and Fandorin is tasked with uncovering the truth amid shifting alliances and active battlefields.

As the investigation unfolds, the novel ranges widely - across camps, cities, and social classes - revealing a world where information is as valuable as weaponry. Misdirection, coded signals, and carefully managed appearances drive the plot forward. The result is a crime story shaped by war, where certainty is rare and loyalty always provisional.

What’s great about it? Akunin is enormously fun, but never lightweight. The plotting is intricate, the pacing immaculate, and the historical detail worn lightly. You learn a great deal without ever feeling lectured. Fandorin himself is one of crime fiction’s great creations - intelligent, observant, and quietly moral in a world that rewards neither quality.

What really makes this book stand out is the blend of genres: spy novel, detective story, historical adventure - it has a bit of everything but all of it works. It’s clever, elegant, and sharply aware of how narratives are manipulated in wartime. You close the book aware that “truth” is often just the most convincing version of events - and that good storytelling has always been a strategic weapon.

Give it a try if: you love books with brilliant, charismatic, likeable heroes; you love mysteries that have a bit of extra depth; you love historical fiction; you love books set in Russia.

Thanks for reading!

I hope you found something good to read here. As ever, I’d love to hear if you’ve read and loved (or even hated) any of the books here, and which ones you’d add to the list. You can reply directly to this email or leave a comment by clicking the button below.

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In the meantime, I wish you happy reading,

Kate

Check out Kate’s excellent “Five Books For” newsletter.

Share PRESENT TENSE: Suspense, Mystery, Thriller Craft and More

A final reminder from Andromeda: we love guest-posts like these! Present Tense was created to be a community for readers and writers. If you’d like to write for us or have a suspense-related post you’ve already published and want to share with a different audience, contact us!

In a mere three days, I have a new suspense novel coming out. It’s called WHAT BOYS LEARN (Kirkus review here), about a Chicagoland mother who fears her son may have been involved in the deaths of two classmates—think Defending Jacob meets The Whispers meets We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Either I’ve done my work and you’ve pre-ordered the book (thank you!) or you will consider ordering after several more reminders or recs from trusted sources (fair enough), or perhaps you’ve never heard about it at all, which means that while I feel like a loud-mouth, I haven’t been loud or repetitive enough.

You’d think an author wouldn’t have to be the one to bring attention to her work. Kidding! Of course you wouldn’t think that. Because you read author or book substacks and you know how publishing works!

Truth is, most of the word-spreading happens

• organically, by readers, in wonderful ways beyond industry control

• by publishers and publicists

• by bookstores (booksellers are great at hand-selling books)

• and by book clubs, including the powerful celebrity book clubs, Book of the Month, and other entities capable of moving tens of thousands of copies.

But that still leaves a few small levers to push, especially helpful for those of us who crave the illusion of control or genuinely enjoy the learning and connections that can emerge from playful DIY experimentation.

I’ve done my own share—for example, a pre-order “fill the map” campaign focused on indie booksellers. Stage one, here. Ongoing results, stage two, with more of the map filled here. (For full results, hit reply to this Substack and I’ll email a confidential report later this month.)

Which brings us to today’s post about the weird, wonderful, or even unintentional things some of my favorite writers—or their friends and families—have done to go that extra mile.

Unintentional Branding

I first connected Megan Collins’s name, titles, and face thanks to her social media posts, including one in which she explained that her teal frames matched her 2023 novel, Thicker Than Water, one of several Collins books that I’ve enjoyed and recommended to others. From that point on, her covers have remained highly memorable to me. I was surprised to find out that Megan didn’t think of this eyeglasses maneuver as an intentional branding scheme.

By email, she explained, “I first did it for my debut, The Winter Sister, with red glasses that matched the red dress of the girl on the cover. Then my next book, Behind the Red Door, had a completely red cover, so I got to use the same glasses. Then I got teal glasses for The Family Plot, which also worked for Thicker Than Water because that had a similar color scheme. The only one I didn’t do it for was Cross My Heart, but I TRIED. I wanted purple glasses so badly and tried on a bunch but none of them were quite right. So I still had teal for that launch, but I made peace with it (haha) by reminding myself that teal goes really well with pink and purple.”

Choose Your Friends Wisely (and Kids Are Even Better)!

Every author needs the right ally to do what one is not willing to do oneself.

Liz Alterman says, “I have this very outgoing friend who is a real cheerleader for my books. We belonged to the same pool the summer The Perfect Neighborhood came out. Any time she spotted anyone with a book, she’d go up to them and say, ‘I see you love reading. Let me tell you about my friend’s new novel!” She’d do it without warning and I’d be mortified until she finished her pitch.”

Liz, who is not truly shy (in her Substack, she has written about a recent bout of Zoom flashing, which she survived) and she now admits that maybe she should have embraced her friend’s promotional tactics.

I’m also the type to blush, but I will accept any friend’s help—and I personally wish I had the kind of helpers Kristin Offiler describes, below.

Kristin, debut author of The Housewarming, writes, “The weirdest thing I’ve done to sell one of my books isn’t even something I personally set out to do. My 8-year-old son and his cousin, my 9-year-old nephew, are best buds who find it really cool that I published a book, so they’re constantly shouting about it in public places (that’s little boys for ya).

The day my book came out on Amazon First Reads, my nephew loudly proclaimed his aunt had written a book while we were in line for popcorn at the movie theater. The two women in front of us turned around to ask about it, and then downloaded it on the spot. At a Barnes & Noble signing over the summer, the two of them wandered the store and told strangers about my book. This resulted in several sales. Someone even said, “I was told by two kids that I have to read this book.” And at a bookstore event held during a holiday stroll, my son walked around with my husband and handed out branded bookmarks to people he thought “looked like they’d like your book.” One woman actually came in to buy a copy because of him! She was so lovely and said the way he described the book convinced her she would like it. It may only be a handful of sales overall, but it’s definitely the weirdest and funniest way my book has been marketed so far—and my favorite.

When Being Author Isn’t Enough, Be An Auteur

Our final item in the “Can I borrow your friends/family?” category comes from Ilona Bannister, author of When I Ran Away and the forthcoming thriller, Five, which is already racing up the “must-read” charts ahead of its May pub date.

Ilona writes, “My debut came out in the first week of lockdown, so there was literally no promotion we could do. So the best thing we did was dress up my family as different people who would be at a book launch party and we did a film. My kids were little, so we had them in hats and fake mustaches and wigs and they did different party scenes with a choreographed dance at the end and we put it on Instagram. That’s a nice memory. I have also done three live events where people have fallen asleep while I was talking, and one in a back room of a pub where you had to walk through the bathroom to get to it. My favourite thing my son ever said to promote my book was, ‘This is a very good book for middle-aged women.’ He was 8 at the time.”

Map My Book

I adore maps, so I was immensely pleased when Naomi Hirahara, author of multiple award-winning mystery series, told me this:

“Since my recent historical mysteries have been so place-based, I’ve been emphasizing setting in the marketing of my books. Fortunately my publisher has been very supportive and included a map of several real locations in Chicago, Los Angeles and Pasadena, California. As a result, both readers and I have used those maps to engage with the story. I was amused when Run & Read Chicago selected my first Japantown Mystery, Clark and Division, as one of their book selections. About a dozen runners ran about the six-mile course, ending up at a cafe where I was Zoomed in to answer questions.

[Edited addition from Andromeda: Have a location-based book? You can hire Read & Run Tours to plan and host a running tour inspired by your book, or host your own through the Read & Run on the Road program. Learn more here.]

I used that concept (not the running part) to encourage readers to take a self-directed walking experience for my second book in the series and now with the third, Crown City, I’ll be actually leading an hour walking tour of locations in Pasadena for booksellers and newsletter subscribers. We did a test run in October in conjunction with Pasadena’s annual walking campaign and four times the maximum number of participants signed up! So I think there is something powerful about people physically experiencing the story’s path.”

At Naomi’s author website, you can access a PDF version of the self-guided walking tour (image below) for Evergreen.

The Auction

When I asked Gin Phillips, author of Fierce Kingdom and the forthcoming mystery, Ruby Falls (March 2026) for her best or weirdest DIY marketing story, she wrote, “ I’m going to go with ‘weirdest,’ and I’m going to pass right over that time where a guy pulled off his shirt in a Barnes & Noble and asked me to sign his chest. (I did.)

I think the number one spot goes to a night over a decade ago at a U.S book show which I will not name: the organizers were trying out something called an “Author Auction.” Basically, one by one, a couple of dozen authors got up on stage, and an auctioneer introduced us and asked us to say a few words. The audience, made up of readers and booksellers, then bid on us. The highest bidder won you for an evening’s worth of dinner and conversation. (My agent was so worried about the whole thing that she asked me to text her from the restaurant as proof of life.) I should mention that there were some big names in this auction—not just debut authors like me. Anyway, I can’t remember my sale price, but a man and his wife—booksellers—won me and took me to a nice dinner. Nothing disturbing occurred, unless you count the fact that the man handed me a business card, which had his name, contact info, and a final italicized line that read only Wine and Women.

At Least We Had a Great Party!

In her latest Substack post, Andrea Bartz, author of The Last Ferry Out and We Were Never Here , wrote about the fact that “I’ll continue doing DIY promo for my books AND I accept that I can’t really move the needle. … But I do it, because taking action gives me a feeling of control.”

In an email to me, she added a DIY example to our list:

“I have no idea if it actually sold any copies, but certainly one of the most FUN marketing endeavors I’ve undertaken was organizing a book-influencer party for THE LAST FERRY OUT. I got lots of social media exposure from it...and I love a good party, so if nothing else, it was a damn good time. I wrote all about how I organized it here:

Attention Economy

how to throw an influencer event for your book 🤳🍸

My first review for If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You—from Kirkus, the most notoriously difficult trade pub—is in and it’s a rave: “Gothic horror meets the glitz of 21st-century Los Angeles in this surreal and bingeable story…

Read more

a year ago · 82 likes · 62 comments · Leigh Stein

No One Can Hold a Candle to Jo Piazza

Perhaps you already know about Jo Piazza’s book promotion car sticker, which is brilliant. But did you know the author of The Sicilian Inheritance and Everyone is Lying to You also collaborated on a book-themed candle?

Jo explained via email, “I have a dual view of my books. On one hand they’re like my kids, these gorgeous creative things that I spent years making that I want to protect and cherish. On the other hand they are commodities that need to be sold and to that end I am constantly marketing them, not just on week one or month one, but forever.

It’s been about six months since the release of Everyone is Lying to You and our latest marketing is the creation of a candle called Tradwife Tears. Each new product or story about the book gives it a new shelf life and I love Mise en Scent, the woman run candle company in Brooklyn. They totally got my sensibility and made us a candle that I believe actually smells like burning down the patriarchy. We’ll be selling it on their website, in bookstores and in my own pop-up bookshop, The Bookcase.”

I hope you found these examples inspiring—or exhausting enough to convince you that you’ll leave the marketing to others. Either way has its valid arguments!

Tell us which DIY example you’d consider imitating or tell us your own “worst/best/weirdest” stories below!

I’m almost out of room, but I’d like to know your opinion about whether I should do an ice-swimming/cold ocean plunge challenge the week my book publishes. I’m on the fence, honestly, having already done my map project. Don’t worry for my health—I do cold swimming already—but staying in longer would indeed be a stunt. Is it worth a week of shivering to bring in some more 1st week sales? Fun fact: What Boys Learn has a swimming subplot.

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Andromeda Romano-Lax is the author of What Boys Learn (Jan 6) and The Deepest Lake, a Barnes and Noble Monthly Pick, as well as five other novels. In addition to this collab substack, she writes her own author substack, called From My Island to Yours.

Forgive the title of this post. I sent it to Andromeda expecting her to talk me down, but it turns out she’s a bad influence.

In the couple years I've been working toward finishing a satisfactory second novel, I've had verbal conversations about my half-baked book ideas at many stages, for a handful of reasons. (Research, impatience, bonding/commiseration, contractual obligations, commercial viability predictions.) Every time I go to open my mouth, I think: should I really be doing this?

I emailed a panel of suspense writers and asked for insider insight into when to talk about ideas, with whom, and to what end. Here’s the roundup. (Yes, we plan to do this again with other questions, so comment if you’ve got one!)

Melissa Adelman

WHAT THE NEIGHBORS SAW

Put me squarely in the under-sharer camp. Lots of reasons why—introverted tendencies, starting to write in earnest during pandemic lockdowns, deep-seated fears of rejection…I don’t think there’d be much use for me in casually running half-baked elevator pitches by my friends. But I have started to think about whether becoming part of some kind of writing group would be productive. It’s only now, in the few weeks that my first book has been out and opportunities to connect with other writers are coming up, that I realize how isolated I’ve been. I don’t have any professional training as a fiction writer, so no old classmates to call on, and also no “writer friends,” so it will take some work, but probably worth doing.

[Note from Caitlin W: thank you, Melissa, for taking my invitation to include a meme with the response. Memes are my favorite form of communication. I would read a whole novel in memes.]

Erin Flanagan

DEER SEASON, BLACKOUT, and COME WITH ME (out August 22, 2023)

I love that you two are asking this question, because it really is a personal thing! I have a friend who is super secretive about what she’s working on and always has been, and I have another friend who doesn’t really talk about a project until she figures out the title, which could be the first thing or after it’s nearly done. I like to start talking about an idea before it’s even a half formed thing in my head. For me it’s not about when I talk about it, but to whom. My first person is always my husband, who is a woodworker, English prof, and nearly had a career in engineering, so he is the ultimate problem solver. He’s so good at helping me work through complications and add more and he’s my first reader at every stage. He also calls me on my bullshit, which is incredibly rude but ultimately helpful. He knows my love language is READ MY PAGES NOW.

Donna Freitas

THE NINE LIVES OF ROSE NAPOLITANO and 20+ more; fellow Substacker!

I think about these things a lot—for myself. I had an experience early in my writing career where I learned I need to be careful about sharing a novel before I’ve finished a first draft, or I may never finish the first draft.

I’d joined a writing group because it’s what every writer seems to do. It was my turn to share chapters of the new novel I was working on. I sent them to the group, we all met, everyone gave me their feedback. The feedback was largely positive! There were concerns, too, of course. But there was so much feedback, and a lot of it was conflicting.

Afterwards, I was paralyzed. I imploded. I came away thinking, This book is obviously totally dumb and awful and there’s no way for me to move forward and I should just delete it from my laptop.

Before that group, I’d been zipping along writing happily, la dee da, with tons of excitement and momentum for working on the novel. But after getting all that feedback when I was barely a third of the way through the first draft? Boy did I lose momentum. The next morning, I didn’t want to write, I became completely stalled. It took me ages to convince myself to go back to the novel. I did eventually finish it, the novel got published, and incidentally, it’s one of the ones I’m most proud of. But I came so precariously close to throwing in the towel on it.

The lesson? 

Beware sharing something too early. You may never finish it.

Also: Beware sharing with a large group. Writing groups aren’t for everybody.

After that experience, I made a rule for myself: If I share something early, I ask my reader to answer one question—should I keep going? Basically, I’m looking for a cheerleader. And someone to brainstorm with. (Brainstorming ideas I always enjoy and this can help me stay motivated.)

But after I’m done with the first draft? Then I’m completely ready for all the feedback. Gimme all the feedback, bring it on, keep it coming.

Danya Kukafka

NOTES ON AN EXECUTION and GIRL IN SNOW; also, literary agent extraordinaire

I start talking about my ideas very early on. Throughout the writing process, there are two people I rely on heavily: my husband and my agent. My husband's job is mostly to listen to my stream of consciousness over our Thursday night beer, and to keep listening as the idea changes. He reads most of my drafts as well, so I can talk through my process. He's there less for editorial consultation and more for emotional consultation, as I try to parse through which ideas work and which don't! I include my agent very early on too, as she provides a lot of developmental guidance for me along the way. She'll usually refrain from advising me thoroughly until she's read parts of the manuscript in progress, so she comes in a bit later, once I actually have words on the page. Aside from those two, I mostly keep my ideas to myself, though I think it's so important to have an outlet! I've never regretted sharing my ideas, mostly because they change so regularly and constantly—I don't think I've ever squashed a concept, just twisted it until it worked. The process is forever evolving. 

Caitlin Mullen

PLEASE SEE US

I tend to keep my ideas very close, talk about them with as few people as possible, and wait as long as possible to have conversations about a work in progress. Part of this is superstition, perhaps—a worry that talking about something that feels like it has some spark and is going well will immediately conjure up a fatal roadblock to that project. But I do think there is some value in keeping things quiet for a long time, too, or at least as it relates to my process. I change things SO much as I work from draft to draft that it can be dangerous to let someone in too early. While validation from someone else can bolster my confidence in a project, it can also skew my sense of what is vital and exciting about it, creating loyalties to old versions of characters or plot points that the novel should shed as a part of its evolution toward what it needs to become. There's a sweet spot in a book, when I've gone through enough drafts that I have my bearings a little bit, but there's still room for interesting, even radical revisions to happen—usually around the third draft for me—and that's when I like to share with an early reader. I'm approaching that point with my current novel-in-progress and it's both exciting and terrifying! 

Andromeda Romano-Lax

WHAT BOYS LEARN (Jan 6), THE DEEPEST LAKE (2024), ANNIE AND THE WOLVES, and four more

Sharing work too soon can drain a new idea of its propulsive energy, but not sharing at all increases isolation and uncertainty, which for me, are the hardest aspects of the writer's life. There is no right answer, but I do spot a trend in my own life, which is to share more and sooner (both ideas and actual pages) as I age, either because I am more confident in my ability to execute or simply because I am greedy for any kind of encouragement. I already spend my life waiting--for contracts, for emails, for edits, for checks. I need some instant gratification once in a while, damn it!

In some cases, discussing a premise without sharing pages can create misunderstanding. Four years ago, I had an idea for a novel, wrote a few chapters, and mentioned the concept to my husband, who was utterly indifferent. I set that idea aside, returning to it only recently, when I decided (why not?) to send pages to a writing group. They were enthusiastic. Because I wasn't wedded to the idea yet, I risked sharing the same pages with my husband. He was enthusiastic, preferring these pages to a project I'd spent months toiling on. I shouted, "But this was the idea you didn't like, years ago!" He shrugged.

Oddly enough, it's when I am most committed to a book--when I feel like I am going to see it through and my gut is working just fine--that I tend to wait until I have a completed draft. If all is going well, I hardly need to talk about a book; I just keep laying those bricks, focusing on what the characters are telling me. But as the anecdote above shows, I sometimes recklessly show raw pages--more so, when I feel I have nothing to lose. 

If I had to frame this as advice, I'd say never take someone's response to an idea too seriously, because an early pitch can't possibly communicate a project's full potential. When it comes to the pages, err on the side of not sharing if a mixed response will derail you. And also, cultivate beta-readers who are good at different stages. You may have friends or a group with whom you can share experimental first pages, especially when you're not feeling committed to them, and entirely different readers to be entrusted with a full draft that they approach without any previous knowledge of the work.

Caitlin Wahrer

THE DAMAGE

I believe very strongly that I should not talk about my ideas, and so I talk about them profusely.

You have opinions. Please share them!

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Pre-Order What Boys Learn and Get Gifts

Next. Are you curious about treating yourself to an intimate writing and publishing conference aboard an elegant London-to-New York oceanliner, the QM2? I’m answering questions at an online open house tomorrow, Saturday. (Recording available.) Sign up here.

Queen Mary 2 Open House

Let’s Talk About How A Failed Draft Became a Sold Book

Part of this post ran in 2024 under the title “Keep Your Monsters Close,” but I’ve also edited and updated it now that my seventh novel, WHAT BOYS LEARN, not only sold but is coming out soon, to excellent reviews. (Phewwwww.)

Here’s a story.

A teenage boy who may have committed murder runs away.

Versus this.

A teenage boy who may have committed murder stays home. Denies. Obstructs. Hides things. Seems suspiciously unbothered. Talks too much (to the police). Talks too little (to his mother, who is one step away from a complete meltdown).

Which is the better story?

I tried writing the first version about three years ago. The set-up was fun, especially creating the world of adults—parents and neighbors, all of them misbehaving in ways that would ultimately be connected to the intentionally confusing crime.

As far as the reader could discern from early chapters, the boy may have been guilty or innocent.

In either case, at the first sign of trouble, I sent the boy running away, with his girlfriend. (Cue the opening of Googlemaps, as I charted his escape route and followed the young couple mile by mile, away from their families.)

And that’s where I started getting bored, at around 100 pages, or approximately 25,000 words, for reasons I wouldn’t understand for many months. At 65,000 words—so near to the end, argh!—I set aside the manuscript.

But a year later, after putting the manuscript in a virtual drawer and turning my attention to a different novel, I understood my mistake. I had created a monster, or a possible monster, if the boy had done something wrong. And I had created a house. The house in which he lived. And the bigger “house”—the town in which he lived.

But then I had sent the monster far away from the house. And town. And everything else that grounded him in the story, criminally, physically, and socially.

By sending my antagonist away too soon, I let the pressure out of the system. I didn’t think I was doing it at the time, of course. After all, the boy could be caught! And his mom and everyone else had plenty to deal with and puzzle over, even in his absence. But let me tell you, I sure got bored writing scenes in his POV, as he traveled and evaded communications.

Later, with sufficient distance from the project, I had an opportunity to dig down and think about the scenario from the perspective of my main character, the boy’s mother, Abby. I also had more time to consult my own motherly intuitions. I realized that the worst possible thing isn’t knowing that your child may have committed a crime. The worst possible thing is having a child possibly commit a crime and then still be in your house, in your care, leaving his socks everywhere and taking too many showers and asking for more pizza as you struggle to determine his guilt or innocence and decide on an hourly basis what to do next. How do you protect him? How do you help him? How do you keep loving him?

This is one thing I absolutely love about gaining competence and confidence over time, the more manuscripts one has written. When something doesn’t work, you can choose not to think catastrophic thoughts—this whole thing is a failure, what a waste of time—and instead think, This manuscript needs to be put away. If it’s meant to be, I’ll come back to it with fresh ideas.

It’s happened several times for me lately. Six or twelve months pass. And then, boom, I know exactly what I did wrong and exactly how I can make it right. It’s such a thrilling feeling!

So far, with each temporarily “failed” manuscript, I’ve learned a different lesson.

For the purpose of this post, let’s stick with the problem of a wandering or distant antagonist.

“Monster in the house” is a horror trope, and it usually involves an evil, supernatural entity, a contained environment (whether house or town). According to the trope experts, there’s usually a sin involved as well—something that kicked off the haunting or violence.

I’m only a newbie when it comes to writing horror, but I think this trope has crossover relevance to the suspense genre, especially in relation to the second element, which is containment.

Especially in domestic suspense as versus horror, the containment may be physical—an actual house or closed location— but it can also be emotional— relationships that aren’t easy to untangle from.

Completely by chance, the last two novels I read used a combination of physical and emotional containment to good advantage.

In Ruth Rendell’s Dark Corners, a creepy man named Dermot rents a room from our main character, Carl, and not only encroaches on our protag’s privacy but begins to blackmail him.

In Erin Flanagan’s, Come with Me, a frenemy named Nicola helps out our protag Gwen by getting her a job, and a duplex close to her own, so that they can be together nearly every minute of the day. The frenemy also befriends our protag’s young daughter, infiltrating Gwen’s family life.

A clearly defined antagonist or limited circle of possible antagonists forces our protagonist to make choices and act, constantly. If the author has done a good job, each one of those imperfect choices creates further trouble. (Don’t give your characters too many breaks! Their job is to suffer!)

Interactions between protags and antags—awkward or puzzling exchanges, threatening or weird dialogues—are fun to read and fun to write, all the more so when our main character isn’t completely sure if the villain is truly the villain, or knows but is limited from acting by some circumstance, whether bribery, loyalty, self-doubt, complicity, or something else.

In the case of a definite antagonist, we should squirm as our main character’s dilemma gets even more thorny and inescapable. In the case of an uncertain antagonist, or multiple possible antagonists, we should feel even more dread as uncertainty balloons.

Think of your favorite novels or recent suspense reads. Often, the villain—or potential villain—is a wife, husband, child, friend, frenemy, roommate, or co-worker. The closer the relationship, in some ways, the greater the pressure.

(Let me repeat the title of this post, in case you’re thinking about your own story now: Narrow and Intensify Conflicts!)

The challenge for many of us, when we want to keep the monster (villain/antagonist) close but unidentified and possibly hidden among a limited number of potential antagonists, is how to surprise the reader. After all, in the most contained stories, there aren’t too many possibilities! It’s a challenge, but it’s really worth the work.

In my original post, I talked about Gone Girl and how it still functioned despite the fact that the main character fled the scene.

But since I’m updating, let me mention a recent TV show that hews more closely to the advice I’m giving you here.

TASK, featuring Mark Ruffalo and written by the same writer who gave us MARE OF EASTTOWN is one of the smartest and most poignant crime series I have seen in a long time. It’s a brilliant show in terms of character arcs. And boy, is it gripping and sometimes claustrophobic. A Task Force team investigates a series of robberies committed by a man whose brother was murdered by a local gang—but that’s only the start. Murder and mayhem ensue, as do very realistic and humane subplots involving family members doing their very best to care for each other. (I cried and cried at the end of one episode.) The criminals are every bit as sympathetic as the “good guys.” On top of that, the good guys aren’t always so good.

In this show, we keep seeing the same people interact with (and threaten) each other because, damn it, they are neighbors and friends. In the world of this story, it is not easy to flee, whether it’s from an abusive boyfriend or a brother with bad judgment or a local gang member sadist. I’m not giving away the plot by telling you to keep an eye on where the biggest threats—both physical and emotional—come from. Not outside, but inside.

In other words, the monsters are being kept close. The conflicts are intense. The geographical scope (and duration, too) are limited.

Decrease volume, increase pressure.

It works.

A final note on variations. Even though I let the last third of What Boys Learn sprawl a little—my characters go on a road trip for a few chapters, from Chicago’s North Shore suburbs, up to Wisconsin—I compensate in other ways, keeping the antagonist and the people who are being threatened most directly even closer, physically. In the novel’s final scenes, there is only one way to escape, and it’s nearly as dangerous as staying put.

Does the ending work?

In a starred review, Booklist had this to say: “Nothing can prepare readers for the running-against-the-clock action of the last few chapters, which, in retrospect, Romano-Lax has set up beautifully. A stunner.”

I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering my book at your favorite local bookstore, Bookshop.org, or Barnes & Noble, or requesting it at your library.

And I hope you’ll have the fun of coming up with new solutions for stories you’ve put away in a drawer.

Do you have any thoughts about how intensifying conflict—whether by shrinking duration or geography, or finding some other way to maximize pressure— saved one of your stories or novels? Share in the comments!

P.S. This is a collaborative Substack. Do you know I have my own free author newsletter as well, with very different content, including deep dives into the author’s life and posts on my various books, including ones outside of the suspense genre? Please subscribe.

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I’m adding “Me Me Me Monday!” The whole world is selling stuff this week. In the comments, sell us your book, event, Substack subscription, or anything else writing-related! Add your shameless proud self-promotion in the comments, with links. I’ll be disappointed if you don’t.

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Me, me, me first!

On Monday, December 2 at 1pm ET—that’s one week from today—DONNA FREITAS, author of HER ONE REGRET (see my PT interview with her here), and I, Andromeda, author of WHAT BOYS LEARN (coming Jan 6), will be in conversation at an online event hosted by Mystery to Me Books. Please register! We’d love to see some support for this specialty bookstore that supports crime authors. Full ad at the bottom of this post.

AND ALSO: I’m experimenting with a DIY “Buy Local” pre-order promotion and I’m going to make it worth your while! Pre-order WHAT BOYS LEARN, which Library Journal called a “thriller not to be missed” from your favorite local bookshop by Dec 14 and I will send you a gift book from my backlist, plus a bookplate, plus some special surprises. In other words, you buy one book that will arrive in January. You get an extra signed book before then, to enjoy or gift to someone else! On top of that, you support local bookstores. Fill out this form (full instructions once you click) and I’ll put the bookstore you choose on a map that I’ll post publicly—and I’ll send you a special package in just a few weeks. I’ll even tell you in a private email why I’m doing this pre-order promo—of interest if you’re an author experimenting with your own marketing.

TODAY’S MAIN POST:

I spent the first fifteen years of my novel-writing life reading literary fiction, including classics. As someone who didn’t read enough fiction in high school or college and didn’t actually study creative writing until I was teaching it at the undergrad and grad levels, I had a lot of catching up to do. I assembled lists of award winners and best of the century lists. In addition to contemporary fiction (Chabon, Franzen, Ishiguro, McEwan), I read lots of old white men (James, Maugham, Forster, Roth, Updike, Yates, Nabokov). My first novel was modeled on Don Quixote, for god sakes. That’s some dusty old stuff.

I hope this taught me something—about voice, theme, and the slow pace of novelistic innovation over the decades and centuries.

What it didn’t always teach me very effectively was plot. Or even about how to develop characters, in that I tolerated and even fetishized characters who were opaque, passive, and generally inaccessible. While my friends were reading Fifty Shades of Grey, I was reading and thoroughly enjoying Of Human Bondage. (Don’t be fooled by the title; it’s not a spicy book.)

Forget the notion that literary fiction teaches the writer everything she needs to know. Today, I want to argue that genre fiction teaches us as well. In some cases—going out on a limb here—genre actually teaches craft more clearly.

Let me start with horror, because it’s what I’ve been reading for the last several months while writing my first Gothic novel. Horror relies on dread, fear, and sometimes disgust, I’d always assumed. (Okay, that’s obvious.) But as a very new convert to the genre, I’m also starting to realize how much horror depends on the body—and I don’t just mean the most obvious body gore but really, most of the stories we’d catalog as spooky or terror-filled.

In my first attempt at writing this genre, I moved too fast, using the kind of plotting I see in suspense. Then I realized my error. I needed less to happen, but I needed each piece of the story to trigger more sensations. Bodily sensations. If suspense asks, “What happens next?,” horror asks, “How does this feel?”

Feel not just as in sad, but feel as in wet, sticky, viscous. You get the idea.

Horror…

…which often seems to involve a loss of control, reminds us that we can’t escape our own bodies (or “meat sacks,” as some would call them). I sometimes wonder if horror’s current popularity is in part a response to the decarnalization of our lives, via screens and phones and now, AI. Pretty soon, we won’t have bodies at all. The tech bros are excited about that fact.

For a little while longer, our bodies still matter immensely—and not only for sex. Sex, plus maybe back pain, is the one thing male writers of the ‘60s to ‘90s, Philip Roth, for example, did write about plenty. But other than that, bodies were often forgotten. Women’s bodies, most of all.

Takeaway: If you’re like me, too easily separated from your body, unsure how to communicate the many ways the body speaks—and not just in terms of erections or fluttering hearts—then read, analyze, and maybe even try to write some horror.

Suspense

That question I posited for suspense—What’s going to happen next?—is a pretty damn good thing for us to hope the reader will ask.

How do we make the reader curious? By providing her with information. Wait—not by withholding information? Well yes, that, too. But the balance is essential. Suspense advances as a series of questions, including big ones, like “Who killed the neighbor?” to small ones—everything from what is that dark shadow on the far side of the laundry room to why did her husband close himself into the bathroom to answer a text to why can’t she remember what happened last night? (This lady is not having a good week.)

But to ask those questions, we also need to know certain things. That the shadow isn’t always there and the woman’s not a nervous Nellie, usually. That the husband has been acting oddly lately, and doesn’t always hide in the bathroom with his phone. That our female protag doesn’t black out most nights and isn’t on any medication that would explain memory loss.

Suspense requires information, but at its heart, it’s still an emotional genre, not an intellectual one. Emotions are heightened when we sense an impending threat. The ability to focus our attention on perceived threat is hardwired within us. As early humans, we may not have needed to solve intellectual mysteries or crack codes, but we sure as hell needed to listen for a rustling in that distant bush. That rustle is a piece of information. As is the knowledge that lions have been seen prowling nearby.

If you, like me, are the kind of writer who often underexplains (wait—there are lions?) or overexplains (okay okay we see the damn lion) or simply doesn’t understand how to make readers want to turn the page, analyzing suspense can help, especially if you share early drafts with a writing group. They will be able to tell you whether they are curious (good!), or baffled, or bored.

Mystery

What does my character want? To solve a crime. Readers get on board with that one very easily. If suspense asks, What’s going to happen? then mystery asks What did happen? and engages us in two important ways.

First, we have to care about the person doing the asking. If you tend to write unlikeable characters by default, mystery will push you to make them more engaging or find ways to make specific kinds of unlikability—prickliness, fussiness, woundedness—appealing. A mystery will not work if we don’t care about the main character. (Same for most genre books, but I’m going to stick with mystery here.)

Second, a crime creates easily recognizable stakes. Do you remember an old Portlandia sketch where the characters kept saying “put a bird on it?” and every time they did—bird on a pillow, bird on a mug—it was, indeed, pretty attractive? Mysteries—all crime fiction—ask us to “put a body in it.” And it works. We humans have the good sense to know that people shouldn’t just go around murdering people all the time. You may have a plot that is really about subtler things—the nature of love, the price of greed, the stain of corruption, the meaning of life—and that’s all good, but stick a dead body in there and readers will often embrace the philosophizing in exchange for finding out whodunit.

If you, like me, sometimes invent characters who are just lost or burdened souls, making their way though life in leaky boats, trying to navigate the everyday chop of existence, then give them a rudder: a crime, and the unquestionable desire to solve it.

Character Want In General

The biggest problem I see in unpublishable manuscripts—by students, by clients, by friends—is a main character who doesn’t have a clear want. (Or better yet, a want and a need.) The more literary or experimental the book, the more hesitant the writer is to nail down this problem. It’s not that he’s trying to be subtle. It’s more often that he doesn’t know what his character wants. To be less miserable? To avoid difficult situations? To maintain the status quo?

Okayyyy…

I get it, because some of my favorite literary characters, like the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, is also one of those “let me just keep going through my day, changing nothing, facing nothing, admitting nothing, sabotaging my own prospects for joy” kind of characters.

But you know what’s been happening to the legacy of Ishiguro? Readers aren’t flocking as they once did to his first really famous book. By a factor of two-to-one, from what one can see on Goodreads, they’ve taken more of a shining to Never Let Me Go, his literary, haunting, strange novel about young people who—spoiler coming here—are really being kept for their organs.

Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go characters exist in the same vague, slightly confusing kind of world that backgrounds most of Ishiguro’s novels. But the characters in Never Let Me Go, as ethereal as they are, do want things. They want love. They want to understand their purpose. They want to defer early deaths. They want to live, damn it, live! And it turns out that having characters who want to survive—as versus merely avoid life—is a stronger recipe for attracting new generations of readers.

Every genre aside from highbrow literary teaches us to write characters who want.

• Horror characters want to escape the scary house or slay the monster.

• Psychological suspense characters want to understand what is really happening—they strive for sanity in a world where little can be trusted—while also evading imminent danger.

• Mystery characters want to solve a crime.

• Action thriller characters want to use their competence in pursuit of very clear external goals: save the president, foil the plot, kill the assassin.

• I don’t write or read romance, but we all know what romance characters want: a happy ending!

If you are weak on character wants, try genre. Even if you veer back into literary, I bet you’ll press harder to understand your protagonist rather than let him slide into apathy.

Have you learned something from genre that you weren’t able to learn from literary fiction?

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Happy Thanksgiving week, those of you who celebrate!

In the mood for an author chat next Monday? Don’t forget to register:

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Click here for the form, which will explain in more detail. I will be forever grateful!

ICYMI:

From My Island to Yours: Andromeda's Adventures in Authoring

ALMOST A BESTSELLER

Remember my last newsletter about the Queen Mary 2 Writing and Publishing Voyage? That trip is happening again in September, and on Saturday December 6 at 1PM Eastern, we will have an open house on Zoom. Register here; if you can’t attend at that time, a replay will be sent the next day. This is an opportunity for interested writers to talk to organizer…

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7 months ago · 17 likes · 15 comments · Andromeda Romano-Lax

In my author newsletter (which is not the same newsletter as this one), I share all the details about how I sold 35,000 paperback copies—a damn good number; I’m very happy!—and yet still didn’t make a bestseller list with THE DEEPEST LAKE, my Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick. Of interest to those who love a peek at how the bestseller lists work or anyone who wants to squirm, pine, and cringe.

Don’t forget to share your ME ME ME self-promotion in the comments!

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Donna Freitas's new novel, HER ONE REGRET, just out this week, has been chosen as a Library Journal Mystery of the Month, Book of the Month Club, and Amazon Monthly Pick. Donna will be celebrating HER ONE REGRET with events Nov 7th (tomorrow!) at Books on the Square in Providence, RI, and Nov 10th at the Brooklyn, NY B&N on Atlantic Ave (please come see her if you’re nearby!).

And now, the interview.

Andromeda:

In the author’s note to HER ONE REGRET, you talk about the fact that you had written about maternal ambivalence and choice in THE NINE LIVES OF ROSE NAPOLITANO (which I loved), but that you left out the “what-if?” version of Rose’s life in which she regrets having a baby. Now you’ve written even more candidly about that topic, and you did it in the form of a suspense novel. Please tell us how you decided that this kind of genre would offer you a fresh opportunity for going even deeper.

Donna:

Well, I knew in my gut that I was going to tackle this topic after THE NINE LIVES came out and I immediately got multiple emails from readers who asked me, directly: Why isn’t there a version of Rose where she regrets her baby? I realized then that there were readers seeking that story. Longing for it. And maybe they were disappointed (even angry?) that I didn’t have the nerve to go there. So I pretty quickly decided I was going to go there even though I wasn’t sure how.

But—as someone who was roundly and cruelly and ridiculously judged for many years for not wanting a baby herself—I also knew I had to find a way into that story of motherhood regret that a broad readership might tolerate. That was actually my question when I started THE NINE LIVES: I’d been taught through my own experience and by certain publishing folk that “nobody wants to read about that woman” (i.e. the woman who doesn’t want a baby, i.e. me), how nobody likes her, and I’d imbibed pretty deeply how to (many) people I was intolerable, because my choice was so unlikable, so one of my first questions was: How can I write this character in such a way that people won’t automatically hate her? That question informed the very first pages of the (earlier) novel, where Rose waxes poetically about how much she loves the baby she ends up having in one version of her life.

As I contemplated writing about a woman who regretted having a baby, I also wondered: How can I write this story and not have (most) readers automatically turn away because of the taboo of the topic? And how can I garner at least some sympathy for this woman?

Eventually the answer came to me, forcefully and in a flash: Because she’s going to disappear. Which means we’re going to worry for her life. I was standing in my Brooklyn kitchen staring into the living room in the evening when I had this thought. I remember it clearly. I also knew the title immediately: HER ONE REGRET, and it never changed.

When I started HER ONE REGRET, I didn’t really think, explicitly: I am writing a thriller, or I am writing a suspense novel. I certainly didn’t think I was writing a crime novel. But eventually as I kept going, I thought: Hmmm, I seem to be writing a thriller. And thrillers are, incidentally, some of my favorite novels to read so maybe not that surprising after all.

Andromeda:

You are extremely prolific, having written memoirs, rom-com, YA, speculative/literary, and scholarly nonfiction. Your Wikipedia page lists nineteen titles, not counting this newest one! Once you decided to add crime fiction to the mix, how did you learn the ropes—by reading certain books, studying craft in an analytical way, or just plunging in?

Donna:

Definitely by just plunging in. But like I said above, I love crime novels, thrillers, anything suspense. It’s one of my favorite genres to read. From Karin Slaughter (who I discovered one day at an airport), to way back in my early 20s when I read THE NAME OF THE ROSE (which I think of as a mystery novel, even though it’s historical and intellectual, but I mean, it starts with a dead monk!), to more recently, novels like THE QUIET TENANT (a new favorite), or SEA WIFE (one of my favorite novels ever). Gosh, I could keep on listing.

But really, I just love to read a novel that keeps me guessing and turning pages—and this result can happen in so many forms. It’s not always “Who did it?” but more of a general: What’s gonna happen next, omg, what’s going to happen!!!! Holy shit is she really gonna do that!! that draws me to a book. And that doesn’t have to come in the more traditional format: book opens with a dead body and we wonder who committed the crime.

I mean, technically, a romance novel is a kind of suspense novel! (Are they gonna get together or what?! And how and when will it happen?!)

The best kind of novel (in general) sparks desire inside of the reader: to know what’s going to happen next. That is a big reason we read: to feel that desire to find out. To be in the story. A good story makes us want. I mean, in my perfect world, THE NINE LIVES feels like a suspense novel to readers. I kind of want all of my novels to feel that way, and we writers achieve this through plot. I love plot. Plot has always been my favorite thing as a writer. And plot—and the urgency we bring to a story as writers, our own urgent, desire-laden needs and questions—is what gives a novel the feel of being suspenseful, even if the suspense comes in the form of: Will they ever get together?!

As a one-time YA novelist, where plot and page-turning and urgency is always paramount, I think you learn early to find ways to keep a reader invested—because your reader is a kid or a teenager—and you know you need to grab ’em fast.

So even though I’ve always been an avid reader in the (technical) category of thrillers and I am constantly reading it, I think writing so much YA and Middle Grade beforehand gave me the solid foundation to write a suspense novel.

Andromeda:

Planner or pantser or something in-between?

Definitely a pantser! I am a writer like I am a reader: I love not knowing what comes next. When I sit down to write my first draft, I am fizzing with the wonder of what will happen today when I keep going with this story.

I’ll also say that—I am and always have been a mathematician. Since I was a kid. And I could do all the math in my head, much like my dad, which drove my teachers nuts. (I always had to go back and show my work). And plot is just like math—it’s a system, and I love systems (that’s how I became a philosophy major in college—so much of it is about systems). So writing a novel, a story of any kind, involves creating a system, which is the plot. And I can definitely see that system in 3-D in my head when I write. So, I can hold a whole story and its twists and turns in my head.

But of course, I’m still a pantser and as a pantser and regardless of my affinities for math, the hard part of being a pantser comes when you have to revise and make sure all the threads hang together and get dealt with. And revising HER ONE REGRET was hard—for many different reasons, including because of the taboo nature of the topic—but also because by the end it had definitely become a thriller and soon it was verging on a crime novel, and this type of novel is such a labyrinth. In the end, you need to make it all work, you need to figure out who did what and how and why and what their motives were and maybe that is one of the hardest parts of all in this category of fiction.

Andromeda:

Was there something that was specifically trickier to do in this novel than in your other works? Did you get stuck anywhere or make any craft discoveries you want to share?

Donna:

The topic itself was the hardest part: motherhood regret, regretting having a baby. It’s such a flashpoint. I had someone say to me, after reading one of the chapters of HER ONE REGRET: I don’t think a mother could ever feel this way. As in, motherhood regret is not a real thing, so what you are writing about isn’t real. I had to translate this feedback in my head into: You mean, YOU could never feel this way. I definitely felt scolded and embarrassed though, at the time, and on a few other occasions with this novel in its draft form. (It’s also true that certain readers of early drafts told me: I had fantasies like this all the time when my kids were babies!)

But then: feeling scolded and shamed and rejected was such a primary experience for me during my 20s, 30s, and early 40s because I was this woman who didn’t want a baby and for whom this lack of desire had cost her, her marriage—and people were not shy about openly shaming me back then. I know times are changing with respect to many younger women being open about not wanting to have children (though I’d argue that still, everyone expects them to have a good reason for it—climate change, money, etc—and that simple “lack of desire” has not yet entered the conversation as an acceptable reason). Yet even just 10 years ago you could barely say out loud that you didn’t want children without halting a conversation or having people shout, “Nooo, you don’t mean that!” or, in certain company, have people insult you openly. As though you deserved it, because you were obviously a terrible person, not to want to become a mother.

However: I am very, very lucky I landed with Juliet Grames (of Soho Press) as my editor for this novel—she not only had no fear of the topic, she helped me get beyond my own fears of writing about the topic which had given me (and the novel) some hang-ups in the early drafts. She was basically like: Donna if you are going to do this (write this novel about the taboo of motherhood regret), you’ve got to really do it. As in: you have to be fearless here, you need to go all the way. Because there are women out there who crave seeing this on the page. Write to them, for them.

So I did—or I did my best. I wanted to honor the topic, and the readers out there craving really seeing it play out on the page. I wanted to honor myself too, since this topic originally arose out of my own greatest fear that if I’d done what everyone wanted way back when, which was have a child despite not wanting one, that I would become a woman who regretted her baby. I had to get over a lot of fear to write this novel, and I also had to acknowledge all the baggage I brought to the table from my prior experiences and how I’d felt so intolerable as a woman myself for so long. It was scary to really go there, to really do it, as Juliet urged me to. But I am so glad that I did. And so grateful that Juliet made me! There were moments I wanted to throw in the towel.

Very last thing (I promise) on this subject: I do think that one of the miraculous things about writing thrillers and suspense, is that—the disappearance, the dead body, whatever act it is that sets the plot spinning—can give a reader a lot of oomph, a lot of momentum to say, play out all the questions she has about a certain topic that burns within her, say motherhood regret, or marital infidelity, or violence against women (I could go on). That initial act, which in my case is a disappearance, gave me a lot of rope with which to explore a topic that we do not discuss enough—or dare I say, really ever?

Andromeda:

I’m always curious about books that manage to align with societal conversations and events making headlines. Maternal regret is timeless, but given how we are experiencing a cultural shift in which a certain kind of traditional motherhood is elevated by conservative men—and promoted by tradwife influencers—do you see your book hitting bookstores at a particularly zeitgeisty moment? Do you have other favorite books that do this, and/or are you highlighting this aspect in your marketing/outreach in some way?

Donna:

It’s funny you ask this: my husband brought this up yesterday, in a bit of a worried way—he was like, You realize right, that you are going straight into this taboo topic exactly when practically the entire conservative, political universe is urging women to have more babies than ever, and where politicians are hanging the future and the economy and morality on bigger and bigger families? As in: Are you prepared for the backlash that might come?

My answer: Um, yes this has occurred to me. But I have always been in this particular conversation and going against the grain on this one—for my whole life I’ve been in it as someone who never wanted kids, so it’s nothing new for me. It’s also true that I’ve always ventured into the thorniest of conversations way before they became thorny in public—in my academic work, I was trying to get people to take sexual violence and harassment seriously fifteen years before #MeToo. So for years, my work was decidedly not zeitgeisty, then one day it suddenly became very zeitgeisty.

People, society, culture—not just conservative men but I’d also venture to say liberals in general, including liberal women—have always wanted to control women’s bodies one way or another, and push them into things we think are good for them. We’ve done that with respect to sex forever, one way or the other (You should be having more sex! No, you should be having less sex! No sex!), without necessarily asking a woman, or a girl: Do you know what you want from sex?

Telling women what to do with their bodies, how they should feel about something, what to believe and not about themselves and their futures, defies political affinities. We do it on both the left and the right. Often, we don’t even realize when we are doing it.

So the trad wife conversation just seems like yet another iteration of this sort of thing we’ve always done. I’d say that the desire to control women around motherhood, to push them into it, is for sure timeless. We love to push women toward motherhood, even if they are kicking and screaming and telling us no, no, no I don’t want to—exactly like I was, once. And I was pushed by many, many liberals to ignore my desires on this front, and many of those liberals were women.

Maternal regret though, I’m not so sure. It’s timeless in terms of women experiencing it. But definitely not timeless in terms of society’s willingness to hear about it, believe it exists, never mind discuss it—be a person liberal or conservative. Though I do think that’s changing too and now and then you see someone speaking about it publicly.

In terms of marketing, I think Soho (my publisher) has done a great job highlighting maternal regret as an important subject we need to more open about, and how it’s more common than people think. I also owe this to Juliet Grames, who put together statistics about motherhood ambivalence and regret for the marketing materials along with Soho’s amazing marketing team who did this very cool pamphlet about the topic and questions for discussing it that they sent around with galleys.

But I’m not exactly a marketing mastermind, so it hasn’t occurred to me to venture straight into those waters, though maybe I should consider it, Andromeda! (Despite my husband’s nervousness.)

Most of all, and beyond the general readership that I hope finds HER ONE REGRET compelling and worthy of talking about, what I hope is that HER ONE REGRET lands with the readers out there who have been looking for a novel that takes on maternal regret, who long to see it on the page. Just like I was so longing, desperate, needing to see a woman who didn’t want children on the page way back during my years of agony—and yet I could not find one. Aside from the sad old spinsters like Mrs. Bates from Pride and Prejudice, or the women we lock in the attic and decide are crazy. I wrote THE NINE LIVES for this reason. I was determined to see her on the page—even if I was the one to put her there.

Likewise, I wrote HER ONE REGRET for myself because I once was so afraid maternal regret would become my fate if I listened to the voices around me, pushing me into something I didn’t want to do—that I knew I was not meant to do. But I also wrote it for the women who did get pushed, and the women who went willingly, yet afterwards found themselves in a situation they wished they could get out of, yet couldn’t.

Before I close, I should also say the following: both THE NINE LIVES and HER ONE REGRET spotlight motherhood in so many different ways, including all the wonderful ones. I had a great mom, and so many of my closest women friends are amazing moms, and I admire them and how they handle the ups and downs and joys and difficulties of motherhood.

Ideally, one day it will be zeitgeisty just to let women choose the futures they actually truly want for themselves, and for us to give them all the tools and foundational conversations they need to make good choices about their own bodies and lives—good because they spring from a woman’s own desires, that she has learned to listen to—that she has learned to hear despite all the other voices trying to drown her desires out.

Andromeda:

I hope book clubs will continue this conversation and carry it across political lines. Thank you, Donna!

Donna Freitas has written over twenty books, both fiction and nonfiction, for adults, children, and young adults. Among them are CONSENT: A MEMOIR OF UNWANTED ATTENTION, and the book club favorite, THE NINE LIVES OF ROSE NAPOLITANO, which has been translated into 22 languages. Donna’s debut thriller, HER ONE REGRET, was published on November 4th from Soho Crime, and is a Book of the Month November pick. Over the years, Donna has taught at many MFA programs in Creative Writing, and she loves working with writers one-on-one on their novels and memoirs. Donna divides her time between the US and Barcelona and when she’s not reading, she’s probably eating or cooking.

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(In my defense, readers of Lisa Jewell’s Don’t Let Him In, one of my favorite beach-perfect suspense novels this year, also quibbled with her ending, but that’s a future post.)

One author friend emailed me to say she loved the characters in my most recent book—“more complex than your average thriller”— and the chance to spend time in the head of a young writer. But, she admitted, in a final statement tenderly enclosed within gentle parentheses, there was something she’d hoped for that didn’t happen in the final chapters.

When I asked her to tell me more, Christine (who gave me permission to share her words) wrote, “I don’t consider myself a person who reads much commercial fiction, but I do think that the thriller genre—or its hybrids—tends to provoke more of a thirst for justice baked into the whole conceit, and how we are conditioned to read it.”

Another writer friend, Sky, wondered if our current times were to blame. In an age when so many bad guys go unpunished, some readers crave the catharsis of immediate justice. I hear you, Sky!

Writing The Deepest Lake, I had a dramatic question in mind, and my novel answered that question. A mystery was solved, twists were twisted, lingering queries were answered, and the denouement (etymology: French to “untie”) unknotted the knots as all denouements should.

(That sentence was for Caitlin, who cracked up when I audio-messaged her recently about this topic using a bad French accent. Denouement denouement denouement.)

Did readers of my book achieve full catharsis? Evidently, some did not! They have written to me with their own clever and fiendish ideas for alternate endings, ranging from subtle to brutal. Our country is in a very weird place right now. And also: where were these helpful folks when I was drafting? I love some of these ideas!

I have more to say, but first, I want to keep hearing from other writers about endings.

A month ago, Deborah Williams provided her take, including mention of at least one novel whose spiral-shaped ending (characters returning to the place where they started, but with some change) satisfied her.

Today in Part II, we hear from Lincoln Michel, author of Metallic Realms, a hilarious, heartfelt, perceptive, and formally inventive novel about a group of sci-fi obsessives. The prose is so funny and original that my husband and I couldn’t stop reading parts aloud to each other. Lincoln Michel’s debut novel, The Body Scout, also earned raves.

Lincoln is well known for his Substack, Counter Craft, in which he talks about craft, interviews authors about their processes, and demystifies publishing better than any other Substacker on my must-read list. Thanks for this interview, Lincoln!

Andromeda:

As someone who writes compellingly about genre, do you think each genre brings with it a specific expectation for how the story wraps up? Any examples come to mind?

Lincoln:

I like to think of genres as a shared conversation between authors, readers, and critics—I wrote about that a bit here fwiw—and with that come expectations, in-references, areas of focus, and so on. This can be either constricting or generative for a writer. I find it generative myself, since expectations can always be subverted and tropes reimagined. I’d probably say the work that interests me the most is the work that has at least some level of subversion or surprise.

In terms of endings specifically, I think expectations vary a lot by genre. Modern Romance readers tend to expect a happily-ever-after ending. Mystery/crime readers expect the case to be solved. Other genres might not have much ending expectations per se—though they might have more expectations about other elements like worldbuilding or character—unless you get to the fine-grain subgenre level. I don’t think there is any kind of specific “science fiction ending,” but I suppose I’d expect a more upbeat ending to a solarpunk SF book and a more downer ending to a cyberpunk SF book.

There are few things harder than endings. The conventional advice is that the best ending “feels surprising but inevitable.” That the reader can’t easily see it coming, yet also that the reader will think “Oh yeah, that makes sense. I should have seen that coming.” It’s very hard to be both surprising and obvious! I’m not sure I have any great advice on achieving that balance. It’s writing, revision, feedback, revision again. Rinse and repeat until it feels right.

Andromeda:

Do you have anything you want to share about reviewer or reader responses to your own novel endings?

Lincoln:

I’ve been very happy with how many readers have told me they loved the ending of Metallic Realms, my most recent book. A lot of readers said the ending surprised them but also had emotional heft. So, the ending seems to have worked the way I was hoping.

I can say that I was actually afraid the ending was too obvious, too telegraphed. But apparently it was only too obvious to me. I ended up adding more foreshadowing to the book even. Which is just to say it is very useful to have readers you trust give you feedback on drafts.

Andromeda:

To what extent do you feel like you should be writing toward expectations or trying to stretch the reader’s “horizon” or “envelope” of expectations? Is the notion of expected endings helpful to you, limiting, or both?

Lincoln:

It all depends on what you want to do and the kind of novel you are writing. There is great pleasure in more traditionally plotted and written books and great pleasure (at least for me) in more experimental, postmodern, surreal, what-have-you books. I like weird novels and experimental structures, but I also want all my books to be really fun to read. I want my readers to be enjoying themselves while things get weird. A strange romp is perhaps the goal?

One way I try to make that work is by meeting the reader expectations on some levels and surprising them on others. My first novel, The Body Scout, is a science fiction thriller. It has a fairly straight-forward mystery/thriller plot with a detective-like narrator finding clues and trying to solve a crime. There’s twists to the ending, but twists are expected in a mystery book too.

OTOH, I think it gets pretty weird in the worldbuilding and the dystopian future it envisions. Being more straight-forward in the plot allowed me to be stranger in other aspects. This could work in the reverse too. If your book is more conventional in character and structure, you might be freer to get weird with the plot. For me, this is one method to keep writing feeling free without leaving the reader behind.

Thank you, Lincoln.

We’ve started the conversation, but it’s far from over.

PT Readers: How do you feel about endings? What do you expect from different genres? Have you been pleased or disappointed by the endings of any recent novels? Do you think today’s political, social, or environmental situation make people yearn for more justice, closure, or simplicity?

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Take it away, Liz!

Several years ago, I watched with awe and envy as an author friend’s Instagram stories featured a gorgeous chateau in the scenic French countryside.

“What is this magical place?” I messaged her.

“I’m at an artists and writers residency,” she said and sent me the application.

I’d swooned over every photo, so before I could talk myself out of it, I applied. The following year, I was accepted. My two-week residency was scheduled for mid-September 2025, almost a year-and-a-half later.

As I giddily sent my deposit, I told myself that by the time it came around, I’d be deep in the middle of a project and would make unprecedented progress inside that stunning chateau.

But as my departure date grew closer, I was stalled. I’d started a new manuscript in April, but instead of plowing through a messy first draft, I’d wasted far too long (this is a euphemism for “the entire summer”) moving paragraphs (and sometimes whole pages) around in chapters one and two.

By August, with the residency fast approaching, I feared I’d spend this highly anticipated getaway doing little more than talking to the goats and swans on the stunning grounds.

For some, that might be fine, and I’m all for taking time to “refill your creative cup,” but, for me, this wasn’t that trip. I wanted to return home feeling like I’d accomplished a lot while there. Maybe it’s because I knew there would be friends and family members who’d ask, “So, did you do anything other than sample wine and cheese?” (These are the same people who cock their heads and inquire, “Are you still writing?” in the same worried tone you’d use to ask, “Are you still shoplifting?”)

Or maybe it was because I’d already squandered so much time going back and forth on the first twenty pages of this manuscript, that I craved the momentum I’d been lacking.

With that in mind, here are a few things I did to prepare as well as what I learned from the experience.

Set goals but give yourself grace

While I’ve gone on three-day writing retreats and have attended weeklong workshops, I’ve never had the luxury of so much time and space to create.

Initially, it felt a bit daunting, almost like when you finally have your house to yourself and wonder what you should do first: clean, sleep, read, binge-watch a new series, invite friends for dinner? Often all that freedom can be paralyzing and you end up doing nothing other than fretting about how to spend that precious time.

I couldn’t let that happen. Before I left, I wrote down three specific goals but told myself it was okay if I didn’t hit them all. I wanted to go in with more than one in case I got stuck. This way I could pivot rather than brood (and, ultimately, panic).

Here’s what I wanted to accomplish and how it turned out:

• Get to 30,000 words in my new manuscript. I went in with 6,000 words and came home 1,000 words shy of my goal. Will all of these remain? Do they make sense? No, probably not. But they’re a start!

• Write 3-5 minutes of stand-up comedy for my friend Lisa Kusel‘s, upcoming book launch. This felt fitting as Lisa is the author who told me about the residency. I had a chance to share a bit of this routine at the open studio on one of the final evenings at the residency. This gave me a chance to hear what’s working and what needs more tinkering.

• Start (and hopefully finish) an essay for a live storytelling event in November. Cue the sad trombone. Wah-wah. I didn’t even come up with an idea for this but I’m okay with that.

I tried to train for the moment

Before leaving, I listened to the Writer’s Routine podcast, specifically the episodes with authors Lucy Foley and Claire Douglas, who both talked about drafting without looking back—one of my biggest challenges.

Claire shared that she once ended up deleting 40,000 words from a manuscript and that cured her of spending too much time polishing very early drafts. I took their stories to heart and vowed to break my pattern of going over and over the same pages.

I stayed true to this by creating a separate document where I jotted down things I’ll need to address later that aren’t fully fleshed out yet. I also left myself tons of comments like “Fix this!” or “Find a better word” and then I kept moving forward.

When I arrived, I downloaded Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic on audio and listened as I fell asleep each night. I read this guide years ago and gave my copy to a friend. I needed a reminder to create for the love of it, to respect and honor ideas. I also wanted to get comfortable with the fear that often accompanies starting a new project. Gilbert speaks about talking to that fear, almost like, “I see you and you’re welcome to hang out, but I’m going to keep working.” I’m paraphrasing, but the point is, the fear may always be there, so you have to make peace with it and get down to business anyway.

As a pantser, I typically eschew an outline but I had some ideas for scenes I knew I needed to include, so I went in with a rough outline and it felt like a roadmap that also allowed for detours.

Embrace the spirit of community

I’ll confess that I went into this residency seeking solitude. Lisa kept telling me, “You will meet amazing people! You’ll want to take them all home with you!” and I was kind of like, “No thanks. My house is pretty full!”

All three of my children were home this summer, and though two are in their early twenties, that doesn’t mean they can locate the ketchup on their own. Someone is always asking, “When’s dinner?” or “Can I use the car?” and, with each interruption, I typically lose my train of thought.

So the idea of being alone without distractions sounded like heaven. But as soon as I arrived, I realized Lisa was right. My fellow artists — writers, poets, painters, photographers — were not only brilliant and interesting, they were kind and curious about each other’s work. Listening to them, seeing their projects take shape, and hearing their words, inspired me.

We talked about our struggles and our successes and took comfort in the universality of the creative life.

There were several workshops over the two-week period. Some were optional and yet I attended most of them and I’m glad I did. They reminded that creativity thrives in community.

Pay attention to your rhythms and play to your strengths

For much of the summer, I’d been feeling scattered and unfocused in my writing life. I wanted to know if that was a “me” problem or just more a function of my environment. (See family complaints above)

As the week unfolded, other writers and I agreed that we were most creative in the morning. We realized that because of the time difference — France is six hours ahead of the East Coast and nine ahead of the West Coast — we weren’t distracted responding to emails or texts.

I wrote from 7 a.m. to noon with a few short breaks. I’m going to try to take this habit home. Of course, I won’t have five uninterrupted hours but maybe if I don’t look at email or texts, I can get in a solid one or two.

I tried to write later in the day as well but if it wasn’t going well, I accepted that and explored the countryside or chatted with these new friends.

Of course, it also helped that we had the luxury of not needing to cook or clean. I’m also thinking about how I can reduce or consolidate some of these tasks so that I minimize how they intrude on daily life.

It may take a while to shed your regular life. Have patience.

In the past, I’ve gone to the Highlights Foundation for three-night stays. I’ve meet several people who say they stay for a minimum of five nights because shifting gears is rough.

For the first few days of this residency, I deleted more words than I wrote. It took bit to find my rhythm. Other artists said they felt the same way. Putting our day-to-day cares aside to get back in tune with our creative sides didn’t happen immediately. You can change your zip code far faster than you can change your mindset. But once we got in a groove, we felt pretty unstoppable.

Overall, I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity and eager to try to keep the momentum alive. I hope that when I hit the next rough patch, I can look back at this experience and remember that if I can make time and space, clarity and creativity will eventually return.

Liz Alterman is the author of several suspense novels. Subscribe to her Substack where she shares the ups and downs of the writing life (and cat photos).

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I just finished reading An Inside Job, the twenty-fifth book in the spy/thriller series by Daniel Silva, which features Gabriel Allon, the Israeli-trained super-spy who is also a master art restorer specializing in Renaissance art. Believable? Not really. Enjoyable? Absolutely. Over the course of the series, we learn about Allon’s painful backstory, his involvement with Mossad, and, later, his love affair and eventual marriage to the daughter of Venice’s rabbi. The intrigue varies from book to book, but almost always involves high-flying criminals, international secrets, exotic locales, and a gallery of recurring characters. And—spoiler—Allon almost always wins. I say “almost” because sometimes that victory comes at a cost, maybe not to Allon himself but to someone in his circle.

What keeps me reading, through twenty-five books, given that I know the ending? It’s the same reason I watched all fourteen seasons (!) of the British detective show “Vera,” adapted from Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope novels. The show stars the inimitable Brenda Blethyn as curmudgeonly detective Vera Stanhope, a sort of Northumberland version of Columbo, right down to the battered raincoat. “Vera” is a police procedural, not a thriller, with one crime and its complications taking an entire season to solve. Because each season starts with the discovery of a dead body, we always know what the crime is; the puzzle is whodunnit—and, spoiler again, Vera and her team always find the culprit.

The satisfaction of these tidily solved series might be the same satisfaction that arises from watching a “Mission: Impossible” movie: we know that even if Tom Cruise is hanging from the rotor of a helicopter by his teeth, he’s not going to die. And we know that because of our familiarity with the genre of Tom Cruise movies. Whether consciously or not, that familiarity –which German literary theorist Hans Jauss called “the horizon of expectations”—shapes how we respond to what we read and watch.

What does all of this mean for those of us trying to write an ending to a novel? How do we wrangle with our own horizons of expectation, as well as navigate what we think readers might want (or expect, or accept)? How do we create endings that ring true to the story we’re trying to tell, and does that always mean ending our thriller or mystery in a neat and tidy package, with the baddies being punished and the goodies getting to have a nice cuppa by the fire?

A writing-group friend of mine suggested that one reason a tidy ending brings such pleasure is because that tidiness so seldom happens in real life. In real life, as we are all too well aware, the baddies often get away with all their bad things. Real life, it seems, has a more literary sensibility, in which crimes and misdemeanors often go unpunished and ambiguity rules the day.

It may be, in fact, that we choose what to read next in part because we’re in need of one kind of ending over another. Novels that hew closely to genre conventions, a category in which I’d also add Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books and Donna Leon’s mysteries featuring Commissario Brunetti, as well as some of the novels by Ruth Ware, give us endings in which the threads are pulled together if not into a bow, then at least into a nice pile. When the novels end, we are more or less back where we began.

But in novels that play more with genre convention and skew “literary,” like Tana French’s novels, or those S.A. Crosby, the endings do something different. They may resolve, but not neatly. These novels execute what I think of as a spiral: they return, in some fashion, to where they began, but with a change. Crosby’s latest novel King of Ashes does this beautifully: at the beginning we see the main character, Ray Carruthers, in his affluent life in Atlanta and then he is called home to deal with a family crisis, gangsters, and long-buried secrets. At the novel’s end . . . I won’t spoil it other than to say that the novel concludes with a version of the beginning. The ending both satisfied and surprised me, and was in fact all the more satisfying because the surprise was completely supported by what had ensued in the course of the novel.

As I was thinking about the difficulty of endings, I re-read the ending of Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10—and the fact that I had to re-read it, even though I only read the novel last month—should tell you something. I’m sure some readers will disagree with me, but that ending seemed tacked on, almost as if Ware had suddenly remembered that she’d left a plot line dangling.

To be a writer is to willingly entertain—even to invite—friction into one’s life. Isn’t writing simply the process of rendering that friction, whatever its causes, intelligible for others?

So. An ending. What kind of ending do you appreciate as a reader? What endings do you remember, and why? Was it the beauty? The surprise? The sense of a perfect click as the ending slid into the story like a key turning into a lock?

I end with the belief that endings are as idiosyncratic as readers. The ending that makes the writer cackle out loud with satisfaction, might make the reader want to hurl the book across the room in frustration, maybe because you’ve dashed their expectations. That might have been what Ruth Ware wanted to do in Cabin 10, but because the rest of the novel so tightly fit the locked-room mystery (albeit on a boat), the ending didn’t feel earned. Whereas in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones, the ambiguity and surprise of the ending was absolutely in keeping with a novel that smashes together the genres of horror, historical fiction, and suspense into a terrifying story about the treatment of Native Americans in the late 1800s. The ending was deft, chilling example of returning to the beginning but with a change.

In the acknowledgements to that novel, Jones thanks the friends who helped him understand why various elements of the book weren’t working—including the frame narrative, with which the novel concludes. In other words: he didn’t come to his fabulous ending alone. You probably won’t either. Try on a few different endings for size; see what fits, what clicks in the lock of the novel, what makes you cackle. Just like we know that Gabriel Allon and Vera Stanhope will always get the baddies, you will find your ending. It’s just a question of how.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is the author of The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction and a professor at NYU. Her essays and interviews have appeared in The Rumpus, The New York Times, Jane Friedman’s blog, The Markaz Review, and Lit Hub, among others. She writes a monthly book review Substack, “As One Does. . . “ Other writing can be found at https://mannahattamamma.net/. She is currently at work on a novel about a middle-aged librarian who finds herself in the middle of a centuries-old struggle between witches and the men who want to kill them. And yes, she’s figured out how the novel ends.

Hey, suspense fiction enthusiast! This is just the kind of crafty guest post we love to receive. Would you like to contribute? Let us know.

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