It’s week twenty-three of 2026. How’s the writing treating you these days? We’re creeping up on the halfway point of the year, so it may be time to have a serious reckoning with your goals and priorities for the year. My own goal is to get to a final draft of Novel Study Book 2 next month, so I’m keeping my gaze fixed on that. If you think you’d like some support and structure for a writing or revision goal in the coming months, be sure to check out the section below on the Monthly Mentorship program run by Katey Schultz.
I’m writing this newsletter from North Carolina, where I’m visiting family, and it feels like true summer to the part of my brain that will always be attuned to the South: slowing down in the afternoon when the heat peaks, sitting outside with a cold drink, wearing flowy summer dresses, listening to frogs croaking in the evening. We even saw one of the first lightning bugs of the season last night! I hope summer is treating you gently if you are in the northern hemisphere and that my southern hemisphere readers are staying cozy in the dwindling daylight hours of winter.
Last week I went to see the new horror movie Backrooms, and I’m still thinking about the experience. When I was younger I stayed away from horror because I had a hard time shaking off the fear after the book or movie was over. As a teen, I accidentally saw a movie trailer that haunted my nightmares for years afterward. But recently I’ve been gingerly dipping my toe in the horror genre since I have a couple clients who shifted to writing horror and my daughter is a big fan of the genre.
Watching and reading horror feels like a safe way for me to stretch my boundaries around the feelings of fear and anxiety, testing where they are now that I’m 52 rather than 15. As I said in my podcast interview with Annmarie Boyle a couple weeks ago, trying new things is one of the defining features of play for me. Recently we’ve watched Get Out (fantastic), Us (which pushed me over my comfortable fear threshold), Sinners (fantastic), and now Backrooms. There were some sections of the movie that I couldn’t watch, but I didn’t have to flee to the bar next door—though I definitely will not be going inside a creepy furniture showroom anytime soon.
One thing that helped me was to intellectualize the experience so I could tamp down my fear response a little bit. I thought a lot about the storytelling, cataloguing tropes that were familiar to me from other genres and seeing how they operate differently in horror. For example, the portal trope: In fantasy, the initial transport to another world is frequently accidental, and the protagonist’s first reaction is often wonder and fascination before there is any hint of danger. Think of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example. In horror, the danger of the portal is always clear but the protagonist needs to have a motivation to cross the threshold anyway. I thought Backrooms solved this problem beautifully and efficiently by pairing furniture salesman Clark with therapist Dr. Mary Kline and showing us just enough of their backstories so we could understand their own inner demons.
I also spent a lot of time thinking about how much emotion and tension is communicated and generated by the music and sound effects in horror. I wondered about how authors might engage that layer via an audiobook or a recommended reading playlist. In the climactic sequence that I couldn’t watch, it was interesting to realize that I could actually tell who was winning the fight based on the audio cues alone.
And I pondered the ending and how horror differs from other genres. In romance, of course, we have the famous happily ever after, and a mystery must end with justice served and order restored in the story world. In horror, the defining feature of the ending is that the monster or whatever is generating the horror might be temporarily dismissed but it is never finally defeated—it’s always lurking, waiting for a chance to re-emerge. Thrillers blur the boundary a little bit—sometimes order is restored but justice isn’t served or is ethically complex. I think that’s true of the ending of Freida McFadden’s The Intruder and I’m excited to talk about that and many other questions in our upcoming live Zoom discussions of the novel this coming week. There is still time to join us!
Revision Strategies
In my last newsletter, I asked to hear about your strategies for the always-tricky revision process. What follows is a detailed and practical approach from author Beth Ball. I’d love to feature more of these because approaches and tactics vary so widely. Please email me if you’d like to share your process in the newsletter!
Separation is key. What this actually means and looks like:
When you receive your edits back from your editor and/or are otherwise heading into revision, celebrate! You're in the home stretch! If your celebration looks like reading through their comments, great. (Mine does!) Do that. But then you're done until after you've slept and woken up again.
If you didn't read through comments and sleep on them in step one, time to do that now.
Take care of the little things so your manuscript is cleaner. The commas, typos, inconsistencies. Leave the ones that are connected to larger revisions. While working through this correction round, think of each fix as receiving a green check-mark. It's done!
Choose either medium-sized revisions—sentence and paragraph-level, moving things around within a chapter—or the big ones, like a plotline problem for fiction or structural argumentation for nonfiction. Take your time. More green checks. Leave the computer when you get cranky. Move around. I tend to print editor letters for this part so I can physically mark off and keep track of the bigger parts of the revision.
Take care of the medium or the large revision pieces from 4, whichever one you didn't choose. Try very hard not to mix them together. Again, separation is key to sustaining feelings of progress, and you're protecting your sense of momentum AND your ability to make careful decisions by not pulling in and out of multiple levels of the manuscript all of the time.
Now it's time for the little edits that you put off or put in timeout because you couldn't decide. This cleanup pass should be pretty quick and easy!
Each of the phases above should have a spot on your to-do list or a post-it on your Kanban board, however you keep track of revisions. Just like it's overwhelming to have "write your book" on your list, "revise your book" is large enough that you will procrastinate unnecessarily unless you break it down into distinct phases and nurture your sense of accomplishment (kinda like the last hour of a long road trip).
Thanks for sharing these well-earned tips, Beth! Check out Beth’s immersive, heroine-driven epic fantasy series.
Monthly Mentorship
If you have a big writing or revision project ahead of you and want support and community through the process, while also learning skills for improving your own self-editing, take a look at the Monthly Mentorship program run by Katey Schultz. The new cohort starts up in August and runs all the way through April—a generous amount of time that will allow you to make sustained progress on a big project. Katey is an experienced author and coach, and she’s assembled a team of smart instructors who guide you through the seasons with tested methods and materials.
Sisters in Crime talk
I’m doing a virtual talk for the Sisters in Crime NorCal chapter on Saturday—come join in!
Reading the EKG of Your Novel: How to Use Internal and External Intensity to Diagnose Pacing Problems
Every novel has a pulse. Some open with heart-pounding action; others build slowly toward an intense climax. I’ll show you how to trace the EKG of your novel by graphing each scene’s external intensity (what’s happening in the plot) and internal intensity (what's happening inside your point-of-view character). The shape that emerges reveals things about your pacing you can't see any other way.
We’ll diagnose three recent crime novels with very different pulses—Tana French’s The Searcher, Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me, and S.A. Cosby’s King of Ashes—and see how each author's choices about action, backstory, and interiority produce a distinct shape that's right for that book. There’s no single “right” shape—but there is one that's right for your novel, and the EKG will help you find it.
Upcoming appearances
I love speaking to writers and editors—check out my Speaking page or reply to this email if you are interested in having me speak to your group.
Sonoma County Writers Conference, October 17, Santa Rosa, CA: topic TBD
Author Nation, November 10–13, Las Vegas, NV: Stop Dumping, Start Layering: Adding Backstory and Setting Without Killing Momentum
Our Thing of Joy this week: Young filmmaker Kane Parsons discussing Backrooms (YouTube); you can see both the portal itself and get a sense of the music. For sensitive souls, the video is a little creepy but not scary or gory until the last few seconds. His story is also a great lesson for indie artists of all stripes; start working with your ideas and find ways to make them rather than waiting! (Hat tip to my daughter for finding the video for me.)
Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights.
Kristen
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