I’m currently co-writing an adult novel, which is very hard to describe, but my co-author swears they’ll be able to nail the elevator pitch and I should stop worrying about it.
On my own, I’m writing an A to Z of Fashion F**fery, a non-fiction debunking of dress rules and fashion don’ts. Mostly so I can mock Gabrielle Chanel and Christian Dior.
I’m also working on a brand new psychological thriller, currently untitled, set in New York City, involving the world of vintage clothing. And another set in an alternative USA where the Klu Klux Klan and other white supremacist terrorists were cracked down on after the Red Summer, anti-lynching legislation became law and was enforced, and FDR’s new deal applied to everyone, not just white people.1
I was working on Psychopath in Love but have stalled out. I also have twelve other stories in various states of progress. They range from barely 1,000 words to well over 100,000 words.
Since 2007 I’ve been writing a way-too-big novel set in New York City during the Depression, which involves having to wear 1930s-style clothes, listen to lots of Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and Robert Johnson, and watch movies like The Thin Man and Easy Living and Jewel Robbery over and over. Not to mention learning how to lindy hop. This novel is already very long and yet I feel I am at least another two hundred thousand words or so from its end. I begin to suspect it is more than one book. Also that I will never finish it.
In case you think I’m being super slow with the NYC 1930s novel can I point out that while working on it I have finished How To Ditch Your Fairy, wrote Liar, Team Human (with Sarah Rees Brennan), Razorhurst, and My Sister Rosa. I also put together the anthology, Zombies versus Unicorns, with Holly Black, not to mention starting several other novels. See? I’m not lazy at all.
Of the several other novels there’s a middle grade about a group of girls on a summer scholarship in Italy and their weird guardian angel. Another one is about a girl and her family’s lodger who may or may not be a fallen angel. (Hmmm . . . I seem to have angel brain.) Then there’s the eighteenth-century cricket romance. What? The world is crying out for one of those. And, lastly, the werewolves who snowboard novel, which to be honest, is a bit more of a haiku right now.
Who knows when I’ll finish any of those? Typically the novel I finish next tends to be the one that came out of nowhere which is what happened with How To Ditch Your Fairy, Team Human and Razorhurst. I’m also seeing a pattern whereby the more I talk about a book the less likely I am to finish it. So I’m (mostly) refraining from talking about what I’m working on until I have a finished first draft. Because superstitious.
- Yes, I started work on this novel way before Watchmen. Trust me, my novel bears zero resemblance to it. [↩]