A Quick Update

Hey all! I hope everyone has been able to stay cool during this ridiculously hot June. Always fun to feel like you’re (a) being cooked alive when you step outside, or (b) breathing through a wet blanket, or (c) both. Curse you, Virginia humidity, and you, climate change! *Shakes fist at sky*

Elmo gets it. (Also, maybe a relevant visual metaphor for the messy first draft of my novel?) © Whoever created the image—you’re my hero.

Anyways, as you can probably tell, given the date this newsletter is going out, June kinda got away from me. As such, this month’s newsletter is going to be (mercifully) short.

But there’s a good reason for that, I promise.

I’ve been working away at the first draft of my first-ever novel, Black Coral—and I’m almost done.

Yes, I should be wrapping up the first draft sometime here in July—a year after I started. The draft is currently up to about 66,000 words at the moment, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being around 70,000 words total when all is said and done.

It’s been a journey, for sure, and a massive learning experience—one I’ll probably devote a whole newsletter to at some point in the future.

But for now, the work continues.

Here’s what I’ve been up to when I haven’t been working on Black Coral, or spending time with my family:

What I’m Reading: Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman; Immortal X-Men; X-Men Red; various Wolverine comics.

What I’m Watching: I Saw the TV Glow (Vudu); Godzilla Minus One (Netflix); Twister (DVD re-watch); The Acolyte (Disney+); Shoresy Season 3 (Hulu).

What I’m Listening To: Been a podcast kick of late, so Last Podcast on the Left; Rachel Maddow Presents Ultra; Things Fell Apart with Jon Ronson. Also listening to albums by indie god Alex G (Trick and God Save the Animals) and obsessing over Finnish psychedelic black metal masters Oranssi Pazuzu (Mestarin kynsi and Varahtelija). Oh, and the new Ghost song, “The Future is a Foreign Land,” is SO FREAKING CATCHY, it’s great!

Okay, well, that’s it for June 2024. Back to working on Black Coral!

Thanks for reading, and stay strange.

—Austin