PUBLISHING ANNOUNCEMENT and praise for Rowan Prose
This month’s blog post is very much a follow up to last month’s entry, where I spoke about how things have been since signing the publication deal for my novel, The Monsters Among Us. It’s funny… what I’m going to talk about here could have been in that post, as the news broke a couple days after I wrote it, and before it went live on the blog. But I didn’t want to disrupt the focus of that entry, so I abstained from including the news.
You should all know what I’m referring to, so I’ll come right out with it:
My short story, A State of Emergency, will be published next year in a horror/thriller anthology from Rowan Prose Publishing.
That’s right. That makes two of my stories that will be available in 2025. My debut novel, The Monsters Among Us, and A State of Emergency. The two are very different and yet similar as well. That’s because the short story was the first of two side projects I wrote while working on The Monsters Among Us. While the two are different in tone, they pair greatly together so I could not be more thrilled that both will be releasing in the same year. Also, it’s all the sweeter that, out of all my stories, the two getting published are my favorite novel and my favorite short story. Both through Rowan Prose, to whom I am eternally grateful.
Now, if I could find a publisher for my other side project from the era I wrote The Monsters Among Us, then I would just be giddy. But since that other side project is a memoir and I’m not yet a notable personality, that’s a bit tricky. But regardless, my year has already been made.
Sure, just simply receiving publishing deals for these two stories is exciting on its own. But I bring up this other side project for a specific reason, and that’s shown in this excerpt from this currently unpublished memoir:
“I said it in the beginning of this series of reflections. This will be a journey similar, but different from the events of The Plague Journal. I felt that to be true well before reading this entry, and what do you know, I’m dealing with many of the same struggles as I was before. I have a knack for that. I’m not psychic, and I don’t believe in that drivel. But when I have a strong gut feeling about how something is about to turn out, I’m often right. 2016 was a great year, when I finally got fed up with my small, insignificant existence, then got angry enough to do something about it, and went back to college. After a couple terrible years that snuffed my inner flame, eventually, at my darkest point, I felt a shift. In 2018 I got on the dean’s list twice, finished the draft of my novel, and got accepted into Bard College. In 2021, after another interval of misery, I finished my novel, graduated with honors because of it, and that special book of mine received praise so high, I still can’t believe it.
Do you see where I’m going here? Deep misery followed by grand achievements. The eternal recurrence. The heaviest of burdens. I don’t feel it yet, that strong gut instinct that tells me achievement is near. But what I do feel strongly is that it’s time to return to New York. Once I do, who knows? Making myself known in New York again, reoccurring there, might trigger the next step in my publishing journey.
I’ve been working at it for long enough now. Shouldering this heaviest of burdens. Think about the years when I achieved accomplishments. 2016 → 2018 → 2021. I can’t know for sure, but 2023 or 2024 seems ripe for something great to come my way. It’s about time for another great shift. A repurposing of life. Nature’s rebirth in spring.
Something big must be coming.”
This blog post isn’t about this memoir, so I’ll make this short, but you may be wondering how this was a side project to The Monsters Among Us, considering the specified dates. This book is a strange one, and when I say it was a side project, I mean that its Part One was a side project. What is written above is out of Part Two, something I originally had no intention of writing. But I did, and it was written in early 2023.
Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself prophetic, but here I am a year later with two publishing deals! The shift occurred and things have finally started to work out for me. And I have Rowan Prose and my editor Kelly Moran to thank for this. They looked at two stories that are heavily intertwined in dark themes of mental health, and they gave them a chance. Now, neither of these stories are lighthearted gags about a quirky neurodivergent person. They’re grimly honest portrayals of what living with things such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder is actually like. All the nightmarish neuroses, as well as the grand, illuminating gifts found within the mental turmoil. In other words, both The Monsters Among Us and A State of Emergency are stories that others in publishing would have wanted nothing to do with.
But not Rowan Prose. They saw the stories for all the artfulness they hold, for all the value they contain. And as I stated above, these are two of my favorites I’ve ever written. So I hope Rowan Prose understands just how much this means to me. Not only giving me my break but breathing life into these stories that have grown so desperate for someone to give them the chance they deserve. So, thank you, Rowan Prose. Your goal of being a publisher for authors by authors is shining through as deeply genuine. Which is just what these stories need. They and I are in good hands, I feel very confident about that.
And I also feel confident that Rowan Prose’s interest in these stories will be quite fruitful for them. To refer again to the excerpt above, the novel mentioned as having “received praise so high, I still can’t believe it,” is none other than The Monsters Among Us.
The specifics of that praise is something I’ll talk about as the book’s release nears, but I’ll end with this: you have great cause to get very excited about it!
