::Stefan voice:: Today’s hottest upcoming novella is Cinderwich. Cinderwich has everything: a dying southern town, a hotel that’s haunted af, an elderly gay academic whose girlfriend disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and the niece of said lost girlfriend - with whom the academic has (shall we say) a complicated past. You’ll find a trio of middle-aged goth sisters who live in a grand old house and get very excited about tea, an interstate Waffle House oasis, a playful but powerful Victorian ghost who knows everybody’s secrets, taunting messages graffiti’d around town for decades by unknown persons, and a dead lady whose corpse was stuffed into the crook of a black gum tree years and years ago. While you’re there, you’ll also learn what, exactly, a “clootie well” is - and why you should always treat them with the utmost respect…or else… ::end Stefan voice::
So… yeah. Coming sometime in the middle of 2024 (give or take), Cinderwich will be published by Apex Book Company - and I will finally get to introduce you all to the second Ellen Thrush. No sign of the first Ellen Thrush has ever been found, but a body that might have been hers turned up in a tiny Tennessee town in the 1970s. The unidentified corpse has been a local legend (and subject of speculation) for fifty years but the trail is cold, and clues are either thin on the ground - or written in paint on the abandoned train station: “Who put Ellen in the black gum tree?”
Let’s find out.
Look, I’m not going to lie to you: this is kind of a strange one. Cinderwich is a “cozy horror” novella I wrote after a work-for-hire project* that had me saying, “To hell with this, I’m going back to teaching, or maybe I’ll apply for a gig working the elevator at the Space Needle - that might be fun.” In short, I badly needed to remind myself that I don’t hate writing, actually. So I wrote this - for the lols, and for the love.
And I got ridiculously self-indulgent with it. I had to. I was ready to walk away from fiction altogether, if I couldn’t find even a single a shred of joy in it anymore; it’s too much work and heartache under the best of circumstances, and you can only refuse to be demoralized for so long, you know?
So I got thinking about what kind of story would give me genuine pleasure to tell. It wasn’t an easy question.
I was in a tough place at the time (from more than one angle), and I wanted something gentle, but genuinely creepy. It definitely needed ghosts. And some folk horror seasoning. And oddball locals performing strange rituals. And what if there was something in the water? There’s always something in the water, right? ::fingerguns::
So I invented a tiny, half-dead town in south-central Tennessee, and there I placed a remixed a southern American version of the Wych Elm story (a real-life mystery that happened in England, in the 1940s); then I added some haints and some weirdness and uh, some friend fan-fic. Sort of.
I’m not sure why the idea of friend fan-fic appealed to me so strongly, except that I have the kind of friends who’d probably be thrilled silly to find themselves on a little getaway, participating in a relatively low-stakes ghost story in the middle of nowhere. And that’s I was really jonesing for: I wanted to hang out with some pals in a pleasantly creepy setting. Maybe have some tea. Look for some ghosts. Solve a mystery, or something.
But here in the real world, the pals in question are scattered to the four winds - and there is no tiny southern town of Cinderwich, all et up with ghosts and mysteriousness, mwoohahahaha. So I had to invent it for myself. And I did!
And yes, I reached out to the friends in question - just to make sure they’d be cool with a caricatured cameo, inspired by their personal awesomeness. I think the fastest “YES DO IT” response came in less than thirty seconds, if that tells you anything, heh. At any rate, I’m very happy with the results - and they are, too. (Yes, of course they’ve all read it.)
These characters are not actually those people, but I wanted them to know how much I appreciated their general awesomeness all the same. And uh, they know who they are ::wink wink nudge nudge:: If you know them, you might recognize the characters they inspired. If you don’t, that’s okay - you’ll love them anyway.
And there you have it, I suppose.
Sometime in the middle of next year, you can pick up my small, quiet ghost story about how the past never stays where it belongs. I mean, Cinderwich is about other things, too - because of course it is. It’s about chance, and loss, and how sometimes it’s okay to hang on; and likewise, sometimes it’s okay to let go after all - even if you swore you never would. But mostly, I think, it’s about found community, found family, and found places… and the choices made over generations that make these things happen.
I hope you’ll give it a chance <3
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Don’t bother looking for it. My name isn’t on it.