I’m really proud of this mystery I wrote, and I’d love for more people to read it. So, below, please find the first chapter for your consideration! If you like it, you can get the rest of the book (pay what you want!) here.
So the liberal arts are under attack from people who think the sole purpose of higher education is vocational training and from fascists. I’d like to talk about the second group because they’re more sinister, but also because if you’re a person of good will in the first group, you should be really clear on who you’re in bed with.
Fascists, and American Christofascists in particular, hate the liberal arts not because they’re not practical or because of tenure or antisemitism or even left-wing indoctrination. They hate the liberal arts because they don’t want people to think for themselves; they want them to do what they’re told.
Maps! Secret rooms! Forbidden knowledge! Libraries! This book checked a lot of boxes for me, and it’s definitely a fun, engaging read. Most of the big reveals were telegraphed pretty early on, so I can’t say anything that happened was terribly surprising, but still, I enjoyed the ride.
But of course I have some quibbles. Read on only if you’ve read the book—there are major spoilers ahead.
I never heard back on my Arkham High pitch. Did they not like the fact that the chapters were inexplicably named after Carpenters songs? Was the drug dealer as protagonist a little much for them? Did they find it too derivative of Boaz Yakin’s 1994 movie Fresh? (This one would have been pretty fair, and if you haven’t seen Fresh, I highly recommend it.) I’ll never know!
I thought I’d take one more crack at this. I decided to pitch a pretty obscure character, figuring I’d have way less competition for a Zatanna book than with something involving one of DC’s Big 3.
Back in 2016, I got a call from the person who was my literary agent at the time. They told me that their agency had been contacted by DC comics because they were in search of YA authors for a line of YA graphic novels. They wanted a big-name kidlit author that the agency represented (I won’t name names, but Don’t Let the Penguin Drive the Bus would have been a good DC Comics property for this person to write.).
But that author wasn’t interested, so my agent asked if I’d like to pitch a project. I went to New York during Comic Con and met with a DC editor and had a great conversation. I pitched a Superman story. She liked my idea, so I wrote up the pitch and had my agent send it off.
Apparently some editors loved my pitch and other hated it. The haters won out, so I got to work on another one. I used a bunch of the ideas I’d pitched to DC in my high school noir I SEE RED, which is forthcoming from…me. But said editor had also informed me that someone in the company came up with a Gotham-based idea called Arkham High. So I pressed Kaitlynne from Shelter in Place into service and wrote a pitch for it. It follows below!
The owners of the new NWSL team in Boston have made a pitch to have their home field at White Stadium in Franklin Park, quite close to where I live. So I went to a community meeting to check out their proposal.
So, first of all, I’m aware of the irony. The very act of writing this implies a certain amount of ambition. Like the great majority of writers, I write because it’s fun, but also because I want to be read. I’m large! I contain multitudes!
But we use ambition in two senses. One is the ambition to achieve something or get better at something. I, for example, am finding a strange ambition to get good enough at guitar to play some fingerpickin’ blues. (I haven’t picked up a guitar in probably ten years) I also have an ambition to write a long piece in iambic pentameter. These are ambitions I have to stretch myself, to do something difficult, and I think that kind of ambition is fine.
But then there’s the ambition to make a name for yourself. To do something that matters. To become a person who matters. And it’s this ambition I think is ultimately destructive.
I’m trying to manage my mom’s life while she’s incapacitated, and it’s a gigantic pain in the ass. Nobody likes to think about being incapacitated, but here’s something I would like to beg you to do on behalf of whoever might have to deal with the logistics of your life should you become incapacitated. (if it helps, let’s not think of this as a permanent incapacitation. Let’s say you lget mono or something and you’re just too damn tired to pay the bills, but you’re going to get better. Okay?)
I have two recommendations:
In the past, language pedants used to get very exercised about the difference between “will” and “shall,” insisting that one was correct in certain circumstances, while the other was correct in others.
Calvin woke up at 7, vomited, crawled back into bed, got up at 9:52, vomited again, and spent the next hour in bed cursing himself for being a cliche. Well, first cursing himself for drinking too much, again, and then cursing himself for being a cliche.