Craig Schaefer's Blog, page 5

The Hungry Dreaming: Now on Audio!

Sorry for keeping you waiting, but I’m pleased to announce that the audiobook adaptation of The Hungry Dreaming is available now! Narrated (with her usual excellence) by Susannah Jones, it’s live over on Audible. This is the biggest adaptation of my longest novel, and twenty hours of mystery, adventure, and deeply weird history is waiting for you.

It’s been a rough winter but I’m keeping my head in the game and my keyboard jumping. Currently, my top priority is — of course — getting Down Among the Dead Men, the new Daniel Faust novel, out into the world. I don’t have a hard release date yet, but we’re getting closer by the day.

Past that, I have three projects in the works, percolating on a back burner. First up will be Never Send Flowers, the next Harmony Black adventure, followed by a sequel to The Hungry Dreaming. Finally I’m doing research for an excursion into historical fantasy; a certain dreaded lady of ancient Greece (someone I’ve never written about before, and that’s the only hint I’m giving) wants her story told…

And that’s it for me! Stay warm, stay safe, and I’ll talk to you soon.

This Is Not An Apology

So I was at my Thursday night dinner party, chatting with a beloved friend about how she’d just utterly broken one of her submissive playthings.

And I realize, in this moment, that those may be the least surprising words I’ve ever put to paper. Anyway, my head filled with visions of medieval torment and I had to know: what terrible, unspeakably cruel and sadistic torture had she employed?

“I forced her to look at herself in the mirror,” she said, “and say nice things about herself.”

Horrifying. I mean, I knew she was a diabolical genius, but I never knew she’d go that far.

This piece started out as an apology. I’ll cut to the chase: the first three chapters of the new Patreon serial, which were supposed to come out tomorrow, aren’t ready yet. I need more time and I’m shooting for Friday, possibly next Tuesday if I really get stuck in the weeds. But this is not an apology.

~ ~ ~

I’ve written before about how my brain spiraled out of control during the early months of the pandemic, sending me into a burnout spiral, and how antidepressants pretty much saved my life. Mental health is important to me; I want it to be important to you, too, which is why I’m open about this stuff. I strongly support a “hey, taking care of your brain is good, actually” worldview.

When I moved earlier this year, to a more supportive home and community than I’ve ever had before, my friends pointed out what was obvious to everyone but me: the medication was good, but not enough. I needed to put in some serious work. In other words, therapy.

I did some shopping around, found a therapist who I really resonated with (very important), and we got down to business. First and foremost, dismantling my old and no-longer-needed survival mechanisms one by one. Confronted with my own unvarnished, naked reality, I immediately turned upon myself with predictable self-loathing, a serpent determined to devour itself because it didn’t deserve to live.

“Can we reframe that?” my therapist said. She is very gentle, sometimes. “You’re a survivor of trauma. You developed your coping mechanisms in order to stay alive. And back then, at the time, you needed them. They helped you. Now you’re entering a new phase of your life, and you don’t need those mechanisms anymore: they’ve gone from helping you to actively hurting you, so it’s time to let go.”

To let go, in a spirit of gratitude. I sat down after that session and wrote a thank-you letter to my old life and my old ways. Of course, nothing is that easy: therapy is hard work, if you’re doing it right, and after months of weekly sessions I’m really seeing just how much is yet to be done. But I’m also seeing progress, so that’s all right.

~ ~ ~

People have jokingly (?) suggested I’m a writing machine, some sort of rogue AI tuned for prolific output. The reality is far less interesting: writing is my job and I treat it that way, which means showing up for work and putting in the hours, simple as that. And I love doing it, so it’s not like I’m working in a coal mine.

Still, I’ve taken some pride in my reputation. Before my spiral, before the pandemic, I had never missed a single deadline in my entire professional career. Not one. If I said “the manuscript will be done by (insert date here),” I had it finished two weeks ahead of schedule. Often that meant committing to ridiculous, self-destructive hours. I spent a three-year span working every single day, rain or shine. And as I tumbled into that work-obsessive cycle, it became a badge of perverse pride. Of course I worked on weekends and holidays and missed social events and missed out on my own life. I’m dedicated. I’m tough. I can take it. I couldn’t see it at the time, but I was building a crutch and a prison for myself — and if I spent every waking hour working, that meant I didn’t have to spend time with myself, in my own head.

~ ~ ~

“Can you be kind to yourself?”

That was one of the first things my therapist asked me. Big ask. Scary-big. I can go twelve rounds beating myself up, no problem, but kindness was a radical and frightening concept. We started with something simple and terrible: setting an alarm. It goes off every day at five o’clock, and tells me that I’m done working. Period. You know those bits in reality competition shows when the clock runs out and everybody has to put their tools down/step away from their cooking stations/etc? It’s just like that. The next challenge was taking weekends off, and I’m pretty sure that was one of the tasks Hercules had to tackle back in the day.

But then I discovered something amazing. When I took time to breathe, time for myself, time to live, my actual productivity didn’t change all that much. I’ve been spending fewer hours at the keyboard but I’m more focused, more driven when I do. And while I’m the worst judge, I think some of my recent writing might be…better?

And that’s everything to me. Writing is my career, sure, but it’s also my passion; if it wasn’t, I could have stuck with my old corporate job (and made more money.) I always want to give you my very best work, and I always want to be improving as an artist.

Which brings us back around to the new serial. Me 1.0 would have piled coal into the furnace, canceled sleep and sanity, and done whatever it took to have the chapters ready for tomorrow morning’s launch. And they would have been fine. Perfectly readable, maybe even good. But I don’t do that anymore. The chapters need more work, and I’m going to keep hammering at them until they’re in proper shape. The end result — if I do my job right — will be worth it.

So in conclusion, therapy is pretty amazing. I know a lot of my readers are struggling right now, seeing as 2021 hasn’t been the greatest of years, and if you feel like you might need it yourself (or just benefit a little bit from giving it a try), please don’t wait as long as I did.

Oh, and one question: can you be kind to yourself today?

Thoughts on Worldbuilding

As promised, I decided to write up a few of my thoughts on worldbuilding in fantasy. This is a followup to my earlier pieces on outlining on my Patreon page (which you can find here and here and here and here, and I’ve unlocked ‘em for non-patrons.)

Worldbuilding? Just make some shit up. There you go, you’re welcome.

…what, that’s not enough? Ugh, fine. Okay, the creation of fictional worlds is both an important process and a dangerous trap. The trap lies in the temptation to go all-in, to define your world down to the smallest tree branch, which is not only overkill but tends to result in not actually writing the book. It’s easy, especially for new writers, to disappear into one’s own navel and compose more background material than you’ll ever use or need.

And that brings a second, even more insidious trap: the compulsion to put all of that stuff on the page and share it with the reader even though it has nothing to do with the story. Yes, the heroes might be riding past the former castle of Baron Pfluhrhr, who lost his life two hundred and ninety-one years ago in the Cola Wars, struck down by a silver-plumed griffon which is notable because griffons only rarely have silver plumage, but this particular griffon was bred in the far-off kingdom of—

—and congratulations, your reader has either fallen asleep or thrown the book at the wall.

Here’s the trick to get around all that: worldbuilding isn’t the first step. It’s the last step. When I’m working on a new story, I always begin with characters. Who are the leads? What are they like? What do they want, and what’s stopping them from getting it? While I’m jotting down a mess of notes, I’m also thinking about theme. What do I want to say in this book? How do I want the reader to feel, and what’s the ultimate takeaway?

With rudimentary characters, conflict, and theme, I’m ready to roll. All three will get fleshed out during the outlining process (and may radically change by the time I’m done), but now I know the basics and have a list of things to focus on. If I’m writing a story about a humble baker, I don’t need to write thirty pages chronicling the history of the kingdom he lives in: I need to know how to bake bread. A story about a politician doesn’t need a treatise on the local flora and fauna, but I do have to define how politics work in her world.

Tools of the Trade

Time to get organized. Trust me on this one. I know a certain author whose initial series notes are scattered across three notebooks and twenty-odd text files, and they really wish they’d had their act together when they started out. Sigh.

In my posts on outlining, I’ve extolled the virtues of Scrivener. All of my books are written in Scrivener, and it’s a great tool not only for structuring your scenes and chapters, but for keeping your background notes together for quick and easy reference. I’ve recently found a perfect companion tool: it’s called Plottr, and it’s absolutely amazing for outlining and note-taking. It’s essentially a database where you can keep all of your info on characters, important places and events, and also a timeline which can be exported to create a handy-dandy final outline.

(Not an endorsement, and I don’t get kickbacks from these folks, just sharing my two favorite tools. Check ‘em out! I think there are demos for both, so you can try before you buy.)

Focus on What’s Needed

You have characters, conflict, theme, and a plot all beginning to emerge. Now it’s time for worldbuilding. I like to distinguish between which setting elements need to be set in concrete, and which can be left (for now, at least) as rough sketches.

For example, my patrons have voted on my next project, and it’s going to be a challenge: my first stab at science fiction (well, science fantasy). I haven’t slept much in the last week. It’s a whole new, weird universe, and I have to build it from the ground up. Once I nailed down the story itself and who it’s about, I was able to get to work on the essentials.

“Write what you know” is well-intentioned but often misunderstood advice. After all, I write crime stories but I’ve never robbed a bank or committed a murder (my lawyer told me to say that.) I’ve also never conjured a demon (my lawyer told me to say that, too.) But with a little imagination it’s often possible to adapt the knowledge you do have to storytelling and worldbuilding.

We’re writing a space opera here, and people are going to be on starships. I don’t know about starships but I do know, thanks to my wayward youth spent out on the Florida coast, about boats. I know how showers and toilets work on boats, and cooking, and how people adapt to tight quarters and limited storage space. We can work with that! (I also know how boats are money pits that demand constant expensive maintenance, and you’d better believe that’s finding a way into the narrative…)

These are all details that can make an imaginary starship feel true to life, because they are true to life. And that’s the most important part of creating a fictional world: nailing down the details that make a reader feel like they could live there. Defining things like where people live, what they eat, and how they get around will serve you and your story more than a hundred pages about your world’s ancient history.

I started by defining the setting in its broadest strokes. I had images in mind of an over-extended empire in collapse, lost technology and mysteries, and a lawless frontier that would make the perfect playground for my characters to explore (while getting in trouble, of course.) Instead of writing out thousands of years of history, I decided on the big beats of the timeline, the pivotal moments that shaped the setting into what it is. After some brainstorming, this boiled down into three key eras — the Age of Titans, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Decadence and Ruin. Each age got a three paragraph writeup, summarizing the most important moments and events that the protagonists would be affected by.

That’s it. Just three paragraphs each, maybe a couple of pages, for the history of the galaxy. When it comes to the big-strokes elements of your setting, gaps aren’t a sign of incomplete worldbuilding, they’re a powerful tool you can put to work later.

Leave Some Gaps

You know I’m an obsessive plotter. The last scene of the final Daniel Faust novel (which is still many books away) was written before the first book, because I needed a rock-solid vision of Daniel’s series arc. The cosmology of the universe, the nature of god, the heaven situation — none of that stuff was revealed to readers until the Wisdom’s Grave trilogy, but I wrote it all in my notes years beforehand, because I needed to know it. With all that said, you might think that every last corner of Daniel’s world has been documented to death.

Nope! There are lots of wide-open spaces, waiting to be filled in — but only if/when they’re needed. For example, very early on I decided on the ins and outs of infernal politics; the machinations of the courts and princes are integral to the series, so I absolutely had to nail down how hell worked, its laws and customs, who holds what territory and where. But while Daniel travels a lot, he’s never left the United States, and that means I’ve left the infernal courts overseas as a blank slate. They don’t feature in any of the stories, so there’s no need to spend time figuring them out.

That said, I’d love to bring the whole gang to Europe someday. When that happens, I’ll need to write up the local courts and influential demons, and most importantly I can create them to fit the needs of the story I want to tell (instead of bending the story to fit the pre-written lore.)

Getting Specific

When it comes to the details you really need to pin down, your characters will show you the way. Take a look at each of your main characters, one at a time, and make a list; you’re looking for any notable qualities about that character which demand background details. This is a brainstorming session, so just keep it casual and loose and jot down anything that leaps out at you. For example, here’s a partial (trimmed heavily for space and to avoid spoilers — the original is about four times this long) list I put together for one of our new protagonists: Mair Finley, co-pilot of the Second Chance.

— “co-pilot” reminds me, we still need to decide/justify how faster-than-light travel works. Also, fuel. How much is needed, and how available is it?

— augmentations from military service. How common are these things?

— anti-rejection drugs: who makes them (brand name, or generic?), and how expensive/hard to get? This will tie into the ‘how common are augs’ question above.

— Mair and Waylon both like to kick back with a drink when they’re off-duty; should come up with some notable brands and what they taste like.

— sidearm: something big and reliable, she doesn’t go for the weird stuff. So probably a heavy pistol but we can jazz up the tech some. Electromagnetic propellant, maybe? Do some reading on speculative designs.

— has a music collection; what’s the dominant recording medium in this world? Are there multiple standards? Music is universal, part of the human experience, really think about how it expresses and evolves across star systems

— why did I say I would develop an entire new universe in one week, why do I do these things, I am not smart

— pet fish?

And just like that, you have a list of worldbuilding tasks that are actually relevant: stuff that you know you’ll put to good use, not just filler or busywork. Make a list for your entire cast and you’ll really be on your way! Also, it’s not uncommon for questions to lead to other questions, and that’s a good thing. (For instance, in my case, a question about local government led to a lot of pondering — and some heavy economic research — about the behavior of currencies in a collapsing regime. Definitely a detail that will be important in the story to come.)

One Last Thing: All About Magic Systems

Don’t.

Seriously, though, I wrote up a whole thing for this section that devolved into a bit of a rant and there’s really no point; the very concept of “magic systems” puts my teeth on edge, but a lot of readers love them, the more detailed and mechanical the better. If you really want Cormac the Bold to power up his firebolt (which he can use twice per day, each bolt traveling a maximum of twenty feet and inflicting 3d6 damage) by infusing his aura with precisely three drops of purple mana and one drop of blue mana, go for it. Authors far, far more successful than me have gone that route.

My personal taste is to keep my magic weird and, when I can, use it to reflect its wielders or the world they live in. Daniel Faust, Vegas magician and hustler, employs a deck of magical cards. The ever-rational scientist Savannah Cross turns the Mandelbrot Set into a lethal incantation while Nessa Fieri, befitting her essence as a fairy-tale villain, spins flesh into tortured glass. Assigning rules and mechanics and hows and whys to any of that would strip it of the, well…magic.

But that’s me, you do you. In any event, just make sure that magic sits in its proper place: in service to the characters and their story. Readers should not come away knowing more about your magic system than they do about your protagonists’ inner lives, and they certainly shouldn’t care more about it.

Thank You For Coming to My TED Talk

So there you go; a few thoughts on worldbuilding, jotted down while I’m in the middle of doing just that. I hope that you found this useful, or illuminating, or at least interesting! And now, I’m getting back to work. This book won’t write itself, after all.

The Hungry Dreaming: Available Now!

Good morning! I’m very pleased to introduce The Hungry Dreaming, which is available today in ebook and paperback editions. This story is personally important to me on a lot of levels — working on it largely got me through this last weird, rough year — and I hope that it resonates with you as well. I’m looking forward to introducing you to my new friends! Beyond that, I’ll keep this short and sweet and let the book speak for itself, but here’s a quick FAQ to answer some questions I’ve gotten of late:

Q. Wasn’t the next Daniel Faust novel supposed to be out first?

Yes, that was the original plan, derailed by this past year. My editor had a slot open, and this manuscript was ready to go while the Faust novel was still in progress. That book should be coming out soon, followed by the next Harmony Black installment.

Q. Which series does this belong to?

The Hungry Dreaming is a side-story set in the Sisterhood of New Amsterdam (Ghosts of Gotham / A Time for Witches) universe. It’s its own thing, with a new cast of characters, and you don’t have to have read the other books first.

Q. Will there be an audiobook?

Yes! Susannah Jones will be narrating, and I’m on her upcoming schedule.

And that’s all for now! Have a great week, and I hope you enjoy the story.

The Hungry Dreaming, and a New Year

Hey there. It’s been a while!

Like many people, this past year shattered all my best-laid plans. Things fell apart, the center could not hold, etc. I spent some time away from the keyboard (for the first time in years) to get some better brain-meds and a top-notch therapist and start putting myself back together. Meanwhile, I moved to a new home, one with big fluffy dogs and murderous cats, far enough into the woods to see the stars at night. You know, all the good stuff in life.

I’m not going to say I’m back to where I was, because I’m not and that’s not my aim. I’m more into working on Me 2.0, healthier and improved. I CAN say that I’m back to work full-time and full-speed, working on new stories to share. I had originally hoped to have Down Among the Dead Men, the next Daniel Faust novel, out by now; that’s still in the works, almost done and ready for a couple of editing passes before I can bring it to you.

That said, I’ve got something for you. The Hungry Dreaming (originally serialized, now revised and fully edited from the ground up) is on its way and will be out next Tuesday, June 1st! This is a side story set in the Ghosts of Gotham/A Time for Witches universe — a new cast of characters and a new historical New York mystery to unravel, but with a small special cameo or two. It is also, by far, the longest book I’ve ever written: the paperback clocks in at nearly 700 pages, don’t drop it on your foot. Don’t drop the e-book version either (because you might damage your Kindle.) Here’s the blurb:

The discovery of lost letters between Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, describing historical events that never happened, sends shockwaves through the academic world. Meanwhile, a citywide surveillance program is coming to New York on a groundswell of dirty money and dead bodies. To hard-nosed Brooklyn reporter Nell Bluth, the two mysteries couldn't be more different.

Then she finds the missing link. Seelie Rose, a transgender runaway and the eyewitness to a murder, has a priceless secret in her pocket and a ruthless assassin on her trail. Nell and her partner Tyler are drawn into a centuries-old vendetta, a conspiracy dating back to the Revolutionary War...and witchcraft.

A secret war is raging on the streets of New York. It's a battle to control the narrative of history itself, and the winner rewrites the world. Three unlikely heroes will have to outrun and outwit every obstacle in their path; with time running out, they're the last hope to save the past, the present, and the future. And if they can't, they won't live to see tomorrow.

So, yeah! There we go! It’s moody, it’s dark, it’s got witches in it, Greek myths coming to life, and some very nasty villains. I am excited and nervous to share it with you, and it’ll be here on Tuesday. And with that, I’m getting back to work. Daniel Faust is in deep, deep trouble, and I need to make it even worse. I’m evil that way.

The Year in Review, and Looking Ahead

Normally I'd start this annual recap by saying something like "Wow, I can't believe this year is almost over! Where did the time go?"

My feelings toward 2020 are slightly different. A bit more nuanced, you could say. More along the lines of "kill it with fire."

Publishing-wise, it was a productive year, though! We saw the release of Black Tie Required, the sixth Harmony Black novel, back in April. That was followed by The Insider, Charlie McCabe's second mystery, and finally by A Time for Witches -- the sequel to Ghosts of Gotham -- in time for Halloween. I was deeply, deeply touched by the response to A Time for Witches. In a year that got pretty rough (no complaints, I've still got a roof over my head and food on my plate), having a gamble turn into one of the best-reviewed and received novels of my career was incredibly heartwarming and I'm so very grateful.

(Speaking of, the final audiobook files for A Time for Witches have been reviewed and approved, and we're just waiting for Audible to do their final checks before it comes out.)

I found time along the way to squeeze out a couple of short stories, commenting on the sheer weirdness of the year (Lockdown and Hex the Moon, both available for free on my website if you haven't seen them), and launch my Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/craigschaefer where I've been serializing a new novel set in the world of Ghosts of Gotham. The final act of that story, The Hungry Dreaming, is underway, and soon I'll be polling subscribers about what you'd like to see next.

I hesitate to comment on the more downbeat issues of 2020, because things are tough all over and I don't have any kind of monopoly on hard times. Other people have it a lot harder. That said, I'd be remiss doing an annual look-back without reflecting on how this year found me burned out and spiraling down. I reached out and got help -- therapy, meds -- and I'm doing a hell of a lot better now. On reflection, I think it's safe to say that getting mental help probably saved my life.

If you're struggling, even drowning, thinking about getting medical help -- please do. This isn't a matter of pride, any more than getting help for a heart condition or a broken leg is a matter of pride. This is a matter of survival. Benefit from my example, okay? Tell 'em I sent you.

So that's the look back. What's ahead?

I had originally hoped to release the next Daniel Faust adventure, Down Among the Dead Men, in early 2021. I'm still working on it. The aforementioned issues slowed my production to a crawl and I had to choose between half-assing it and rushing a manuscript out, and taking the time it needs to be a really good story.

And that, of course, isn't a choice at all. I'm finally making forward progress again, and polishing it into what I think -- hope -- will be a worthy follow-up to The Locust Job and pay off on a whole bunch of dangling threads (not to mention taking Daniel on a visit to...well, I'll keep quiet in case anyone hasn't read the ending of TLJ yet, but those who have know what I mean. It's going to be wild.)

So I don't have a proper release date yet, but it is coming, sooner rather than later. Likewise, later in 2021 I'm still planning on bringing you the next Harmony Black novel, Never Send Roses. Supernatural espionage and action ahoy!

Beyond that, well...we've got options. I'm open to doing another follow-up to Ghosts of Gotham and making Lionel and Maddie's story a proper trilogy, but the story has to be just right, and I've jotted down a few notes but I haven't quite found it yet. We'll see. I've also been outlining a foray into science fiction, since I've always wanted to give that genre a try.

Of course, it's me, so don't expect hard science. Think big, weird, and mystical, along the lines of Dune. It'll definitely be me-flavored. Not sure if it'll get done this year, but it will happen eventually.

And that's the year: one down, and hopefully a much better one to come. I'm looking forward to bringing you new stories, new experiments, and new adventures in 2021. Thank you so much for joining me on this ride.

A Time for Witches: Available Now!

It's a day I've been eagerly (and more than a little nervously) awaiting: A Time for Witches, the sequel to Ghosts of Gotham, is out now. The Kindle version is live on Amazon, and the paperback should be available later today or tomorrow at the latest. Meanwhile, Susannah Jones has booked studio time later this month to record the audio edition.

Returning to Lionel and Maddie's story was a delight and also a challenge: to expand the world of the first book in new and fitting ways, and bring you a story worthy of the original while treading fresh ground. I hope I succeeded.

A Time for Witches: Chapter One

It’s official: A Time for Witches will be arriving in one week, on Wednesday the 14th, in ebook and paperback. Susannah Jones will be in the recording studio later this month to record the audio version. It was a joy to return to Lionel and Maddie’s story, and to celebrate I thought I’d share the opening chapter. Note that the story begins shortly after Ghosts of Gotham ends, so if you haven’t read that yet, beware of major spoilers…

1.

“I knew there was going to be a sequel.”

Lionel recognized the face of the dark-eyed woman at the hors d’oeuvres table. The name, he had to reach for. She tossed him a lifeline.

“Jerrica Winter,” she said. “We met at the press expo in DC last year.”

“Right.”

He took her hand. She had a soft grip, and her fingertips slid along his palm as they parted. She lifted her hand to her face, flicking at her raven bangs while she looked him up and down. He’d thrown a sports coat over his ivory button-down and faded pale jeans, but he still felt underdressed for this party. Black tie was the rule of the evening, and the faux-sandstone floor of the Griffith Museum’s gallery hall hosted a whirl of Savile Row suits and shimmering couture gowns. At least he wasn’t alone, lingering at the unfashionable edge of the room; Jerrica had shown up in an off-the-rack pantsuit and sensible flats.

“I finished reading your book on the flight,” she said. “Good stuff. When you went on ‘indefinite leave’ from Channel Seven, I figured you had to be working on a follow-up. Publisher must have handed you one hell of an advance to make you give up a steady TV gig.”

“Something like that,” he said, craning his neck and scoping out the room. Still hoping he’d see one particular face in the crowd.

He had left New York a month ago. Now he was living on his dwindling savings, driving a rust-spotted Corolla hatchback he’d bought with cash on the Jersey border. His mission was fueled by intuition and gas-station coffee.

Jerrica studied him with a fresh eye, like something had just occurred to her. “You’re not going after Spears, are you? I know you like hunting big game, but you’re wasting your time. He’s so clean he squeaks when he walks.”

Cordell Spears. Invisible fingertips riffled through the who’s who in the back of Lionel’s mind. Billionaire, philanthropist, made his cash in medical technology and slapped his name on a dozen children’s hospitals from coast to coast. No. Lionel had made his journalistic bones taking down quacks, charlatans, and peddlers of mystic woo. As far as he knew, Spears was on the level.

Then again.

“Everybody’s got skeletons,” he said, keeping his tone neutral and his eyes on the snack spread. Small plates, deviled eggs, blocks of white cake like imported Athenian marble. The gnawing in his belly reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since that morning, when he drove into Indiana with a cardboard cup of black coffee and a stale glazed doughnut in the center console.

“Not him. None worth writing about.” Jerrica pursed her lips, like she disapproved of the lack of scandal. “Two ex-wives, but hell, me too. He pays his alimony on time. No disgruntled employees with receipts, no whistleblowers. Spears Biomedical employees get a full year of paid maternity leave and an honest-to-God pension fund. Guy dedicated his life to eradicating childhood diseases, and when he’s not working medical miracles he’s funding charity shindigs like this one out of his own pocket. He’s one of the good guys. A real-life superhero.”

Lionel’s eyebrows went up. “A superhero, even?”

“The Post called him ‘Tony Stark with a stethoscope.’”

“I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a ‘good guy’ billionaire. Not when you scratch deep enough.”

“Cynic,” she said.

“It’s a bad habit. I’m trying to quit.”

He reached for a Mediterranean pinwheel, a tortilla spiral stuffed with sundried tomatoes, spinach, and cream cheese. It was cold on his tongue, fresh, with a hint of Parmesan.

“If you figure out the trick,” she said, “teach me how. So if you’re not doing background on Spears, why are you here?”

Good question.

He was here because his lover kept a promise she had made to him. She’d made it with bloody tears on her cheeks, clutching the horn-handled knife she used on her arm sometimes when she needed to let the pressure out. You know what happens next? You wake up one morning, and I’m gone. I’m just…I’m just gone. Because I always leave.

He was here because he woke up alone in their bed, on the houseboat they’d rented up in Montauk, with nothing to see but an empty toffee wrapper on the counter and an empty patch of closet where she kept her rolling suitcase. Her patroness—their patroness now—had given Lionel a simple choice. His odyssey to New York had plunged the professional skeptic into a world of ghosts and horrors. He could leave it all behind. Go back to Chicago, back to the cameras and the spotlight, and his illusions of a rational world. In time, the memories might even fade.

Or he could choose Maddie. Choose her, chase her, following her trail across a haunted America. His teacher, masquerading as an elderly heiress named Regina Dunkle, couldn’t promise him victory. All she promised him was struggle and pain. And magic.

He chose Maddie. He never looked back.

But now his teacher was gone. “Regina” disconnected her phone number and had been methodically erasing any trace of her existence. She was done wearing that particular mask. Lionel didn’t feel abandoned. Sometimes, lying half asleep in the tail of a forgotten dream, he thought he could feel her. Watching, curious, eager to see what he’d do with the tools he’d been given.

The goddess Hekate—titan, witch-queen, keeper of divine mysteries—was a strong believer in the sink-or-swim method of education. And Hekate had chosen him for her own, just as she had done with Maddie centuries before.

So he trusted his intuition and drove. He followed billowing clouds of starlings and charted a course based on train-car graffiti. Lionel was new to this whole “being a witch” business—he still didn’t like speaking the word out loud and never claimed it for himself—and he wasn’t sure if he was hearing the whispers of the universe or just flipping a metaphorical coin and imagining a signal in all that noise, but until he found a concrete lead, that was all he had to go on. His intuition landed him in a cheap hotel on the edge of Bloomington, where the cleaning staff had missed a tourist brochure for the Griffith Museum left behind by the previous occupant. He’d looked it up. Tonight marked the North American debut of a new traveling exhibit, Treasures of the Mycenaean World.

Dangling banners lined the great hall, encircling the edges of a glass ceiling that rose up like a circus tent, open to the murky night sky. A bone-white sliver of moon peered down, veiled behind wispy, ragged clouds. This was exactly the sort of show that might draw Maddie’s attention: she was a treasure of the Mycenaean world herself. So far, though, no sign of her.

Lionel was still trying to answer Jerrica’s question when a deep, confident voice jarred his thoughts.

“Jerrica Winter and Lionel Page? How much trouble am I in here?”

Jerrica greeted the new arrival with a quick, tight hug. “You know you’re safe from me.”

He was statuesque, chiseled, built like a Greco-Roman wrestler in a thousand-dollar suit, and he had an easy, generous laugh. He turned to Lionel and offered his manicured hand.

“Said the scorpion to the frog. Lionel! You don’t know me, but I know you. Big, big fan. Cordell Spears, pleasure to finally meet face-to-face.”

The man of the hour. Lionel couldn’t miss the private security, hovering at a respectful distance but close enough to jump in at a moment’s notice. They wore Secret Service earpieces, and judging from the cut of their jackets, they were packing more than muscle underneath.

“Same,” Lionel said. “I understand you’re the person to thank for this exhibition?”

“Well, our archaeologists in the field did the real work. I just foot the bills. It’s a good cause. History is important to me. Should be important to all of us. We can’t chart a clear course to the future if we don’t know where we’ve been.”

“Agreed,” Lionel said.

Cordell flashed a gleaming smile. “That’s why what you do is so important. Chasing down frauds, exposing snake-oil salesmen. Take it from me, my game is medical science, and it feels like every week there’s some new con man slinging a miracle cure—”

He paused. An elderly woman, bifocals dangling from a chain around her neck, was waving a brochure at him from across the room.

“Looks like I’ve got to get up there and battle my stage fright. A thousand public appearances and it always feels like my very first time. Jerrica, Lionel, catch you two after the show.”

Lionel watched him go, the silent security guards drifting like phantoms in his wake. He felt Jerrica’s eyes on him while he loaded up a tiny plate of vegetarian appetizers.

“You’re looking for a reason not to trust him,” she said.

“I don’t dislike him—”

“But you don’t trust anybody,” she said. “Like I said. Cynic.”

“It’s a bad habit.”

“I think it’s sexy.” She tilted her head. “You doing anything after this? Want to grab a drink, do some catching up?”

It sounded like she had more than catching up in mind. “I’d have to ask my girlfriend.”

“Oh? She here?”

No. She wasn’t. Lionel took one last look across the sea of faces, hunting for the curve of her chin, her bright-eyed glow. Maddie wasn’t here. He’d followed his intuition and come up empty. Maybe he was fooling himself.

“We’re kind of doing a long-distance-relationship thing at the moment,” he said.

Jerrica shook her head. “Get out now, save yourself a world of heartache. Those things never work out in the end.”

The wall sconces dimmed. Through the glass circus-tent canopy, skeleton moonlight shimmered down. A microphone let out a heartbeat of feedback squeal as Cordell Spears took the podium. He stood there for a moment, a wall of stony silence, all eyes on him.

“Are we…great?” he asked the gathering.

He was answered with faint murmurs, uncertain noises.

“America was built,” he said, “on the foundations of the past. Our forefathers looked to the Mediterranean, to the traditions of Greece and Rome, when they laid the first stones of this nation. Why? Because they drew upon history, and they had studied a grand civilization that endured for centuries. What did they see there? Greatness. A model to be emulated, a promise of enduring glory.”

Cordell’s patter was well rehearsed and he had the room in the palm of his hand, but Lionel was more interested in a new arrival. Lionel didn’t fit in with this crowd, but she was a piece from an entirely different puzzle. Frizzy orange hair, bags under her shell-shocked eyes, long and sallow cheeks. She wore a housecoat and combat boots.

And as she made her way through the heart of the open gallery, no one—no one but Lionel—seemed to notice her at all. The pale moonlight wreathed around her, stealing the color from her skin, turning her to glass.

New York had given Lionel scars to last a lifetime, inside and out. It had also given him a witch’s eyes. The newcomer felt him looking. She turned as she passed, and her mouth moved in silence. Maybe he felt the words echoing inside his skull, or maybe he just read her lips: Don’t try to stop me.

Maddie would have known what to do. But Maddie wasn’t here. Just him. Lionel set his plate down on the edge of the snack table. He braced himself, shoulders tight, knees limber. Whatever was about to go down, he was going to have to pick a side and move. Fast.

A Time for Witches will be out on October 14th . The Hungry Dreaming, another story from the Ghosts of Gotham universe, is currently being serialized on Patreon .

Cover Reveal: A Time for Witches

Happy Tuesday, everybody. I know I’ve been silent for a bit, buried in work on the new Daniel Faust novel. I’m still hammering at the final manuscript, working to get the ending to fire on all cylinders, as well as trying to get the balance of my new medications just right (it’s an ongoing process.) Also, I’ve been learning how to work with Adobe Premiere and filming my first Patreon supporter Q&A video, which I’m hoping to finish by the end of this week. Apologies in advance for my horrible self-inflicted quarantine haircut.

Most importantly, my awesome editor Kira has finished her work on the manuscript for A Time for Witches, the sequel to Ghosts of Gotham. I’m doing the revisions right now, and we’re definitely on track for an October release. In fact, while 10/31 was the original projected launch day, I think we can do better than that. Once I finish my first revision pass, I should be able to lock down a date and get it up for pre-orders. And here’s the back-cover blurb:

“Once upon a time, Lionel Page didn’t believe in magic.

That was before his odyssey to New York City, and the quest for a lost manuscript that ended in mysteries, murder, and the buried secrets of his own past. He used to be a professional skeptic. Now he’s a witch in the service of Hekate, chasing myths across the heartland of a haunted America.

The reappearance of a hero from Greek legend is just one sign of the coming storm. There are Amazons on the highway, and death-spirits lurking in cheap roadside motels. And Madison, Lionel’s lover, is on a mission of her own. A mission, fueled by vengeance, to slay a man who can’t be killed: her ex-husband. If Lionel doesn’t catch up with her in time, neither of them will survive.

In Ghosts of Gotham, Lionel Page opened his eyes to the real world. Now he has to fight to protect it.”

And here’s the cover, designed by James Egan. Working on this book has been a delight, and I can’t wait to share it with you. More news soon!

Hex the Moon

Reading about how some young witches on TikTok had announced their intent to “hex the moon” for some reason (and also the fae, and the sun, I guess?), I couldn’t stop imagining how Daniel Faust would react to that news. Which, as it sometimes does, became a piece of random fiction. It had to be done. In my defense, I was left unsupervised. Happy Monday, y’all.