Surviving the Woods and the Ever-Spreading Brainrot

Aug 29, 2024

CAN YOU SURVIVE THE WOODS?

Can you believe we have three months to go until WHAT THE WOODS TOOK hits shelves? Sometimes it feels like I sent my agents the first 100 pages just yesterday, asking “Is this any good?”

I don’t have many updates I can share at this moment since so much gets announced closer to release. But I’ve been assembling the materials to send to people who took the WTWT survival quiz in August and I’m super excited to stuff those in the mail first thing September! If you haven’t already taken the quiz, click the link below! I had so much fun devising this quiz, and hearing how you all handled the woods has been so gratifying!

Just a little over a hundred days to go and things are heating up! More soon!

TAKE THE “WHAT THE WOODS TOOK” SURVIVAL QUIZ

THE HOUSE WHERE DEATH LIVES

has entered the chat!

THE HOUSE WHERE DEATH LIVES is officially out in the world! This anthology features 16 creepy stories, each taking place in a different room of the same metaphysical house across cultures and times. It opens with my story (Good Morning, Georgia) about a girl trapped in her attic room who befriends an entity living in her mirror.

I got to chat about this book at Powell’s on 8/7 with Alex Brown, Liz Hull, and Rosiee Thor. And then Rosiee and I chatted about it again at The Book Bin in Corvallis on 8/24! This book is genuinely such a moving, spooky, and entertaining ride from start to finish, full of camp and balanced by heartfelt and intimate stories of grief, death, and regret. I’m so honored that I got to kick it off with my story, and every story after just gets better and better!

PURCHASE YOUR COPY OF THE HOUSE WHERE DEATH LIVES

I’ve been thinking about maybe featuring a little bit of the things I’ve been watching in this newsletter! I’ve been really dedicated to watching most new horror releases in theaters! Though I love horror, I am a notorious baby who struggles to watch scary movies without screaming, crying, or throwing up. So! Here’s what I’ve watched:

LONGLEGS

I loved this so much I watched it twice in theaters, and if I’d had time, I would’ve gone again. Inventive and original and SO atmospheric. This movie started with a bang (my friends and I literally screamed OUT LOUD in the theater) and I don’t think I relaxed my shoulders even once for the rest of the runtime. I’ve seen some folks online saying it “wasn’t scary” and to that I say OKAY! TO YOU! For me, I couldn’t sleep for three days because I kept seeing that devil face in the corners of my room!

Also, Lee Harker if you’re free on Thursday I am also free on Thursday to hang out if you’re free. My birthday is on the 13th, it’s all good.

CUCKOO

Oh my god, at no point did I know where this one was going. I was SO stressed for the main character the whole time, and so frustrated that no one would take her seriously. In the pantheon of bad dads in media, this guy shot straight to the top of the list. That said, I too would like to meet a mysterious lesbian in the misty mountains of rugged rural Germany who wants to take me on long, pensive night drives.

The monster in this one is so freaky, by the way. Absolutely bonkers, deranged, and wildly engrossing. I was so captivated from the first shot to the last.

TRAP

Okay, this is cheating because I’m not seeing it until this weekend, but from the very first advertisement for Trap, I was hooked. It looks like silly, goofy, bloody fun. M. Night Shyamalan is a director that I watch very closely despite him having an EXTREMELY spotty track record. Some of his movies I genuinely love (The Sixth Sense, Signs) some bore me to tears (Knock at the Cabin, The Village) and some are so hilariously bad they swing back around to good (The Happening, Old). I’m hoping that Trap falls in either the first or last category. I will report back!

NEW RELEASE SPOTLIGHT

THIS RAVENOUS FATE: I picked this one up at Powell’s the week it came out and I can’t wait to dig in! Lesbian vampires? 1920’s Harlem? Lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers? I could not be more stoked, and I am so delighted to see that this debut was an instant best seller!

BETTER LEFT BURIED: I read a version of this book in 2020, and then again right before Mary’s Portland launch (which I had the honor of co-hosting!). It’s a fun, angry, emotional, clenched muscle of a book with an intriguing mystery and a big beating heart. I’m so excited to own a physical copy!

THE DARK WE KNOW: Another one I was so honored to read early, and then the publisher kindly sent me a finished copy of the book to beautify my queer horror shelf! This book is all about the messiness of small town history, queerness, and friendship that always teeters on something more. Congrats to Wen-yi on this fabulous release!

I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU: Haunting and emotional and raw, this book left me speechless when I first read it. It digs in and explores all the nastiness of emotionally abusive relationships with a speculative twist. I think we don’t talk enough about abuse in the queer community and we especially don’t talk about it enough in YA. Definitely add this one to your shelf.

A DARK AND DROWNING TIDE: This one is only a few weeks from hitting shelves and I could not be happier. It’s romantic, lush, atmospheric, and heartfelt. Enter an intricate fantasy world full of folklore, murder, mystery, and more! And if you want to pick up a copy in person (and hear the brilliant, talented author speak) join us on Friday, September 20th at Powell’s Cedar Hills to celebrate ADADT’s launch!

FABLE FOR THE END OF THE WORLD: This is kind of cheating because this book isn’t out until next year, but I just finished reading the final version and it made me completely lose my mind. This is the feral, violent, magnetic kind of F/F I have been looking for and I’m so honored I got to read it early not once, but twice! Definitely preorder!

I THINK I’M LOSING MY MIND

When Mitski said “I think my brain is rotting in places,” I felt that.

I had a few ideas about what I would write in this essay space this month, but after a few scrapped intros about the latest chapters of JJK, on Mitski lyrics, on writing processes, I realized the only thing I could really think about is the state of my own mind. I promise, this is about writing.

Those of you who have been following my newsletter for a while know that I have a few projects in progress. And you have probably noticed that I’ve had a few projects in progress for a while. At the beginning of the year, I was motivated to get things moving quickly. “I’m going to sell two more books by the end of the year,” I said then, certain that a whole year would be enough to get the ball rolling. When February came and I hadn’t made progress, I thought This is fine. It’s only been a month. I have time. When April came and it was time to write another newsletter, I looked at what I’d produced and found that it was a few pages and a half-formed outline. No worries, it was a busy beginning of the year! Surely by June I would have more to show for myself.

By June, I did not have more to show for myself.

Over the course of a few months, I have just barely scraped together a hundred pages of one project (with no synopsis) and a vague outline of another (with nothing actually written). When August began, it dawned on me that we are eight months into 2024. My “two book deals this year” have not yet manifested. Though I am overflowing with ideas - I know what twist would absolutely kill at the midpoint, know what emotional reveal will make a villain sympathetic, know exactly the line of dialogue I’ll use to initiate the romance - I can’t seem to grasp the simple task of putting words in a document. Though I’ve written several books, I just can’t seem to remember how I did it. I can’t remember what it feels like to write one sentence, then another.

Though writing is the thing I love most in this world, lately, I’ve found no joy in it. I think, as a publishing professional, it can be easy to fall into a pit of always thinking about the commercial appeal of what you write. Will the readers like this? Will they buy it? Will it market well? Am I using the right tropes? For nearly a year, I’ve found myself thinking of my writing in the context of sales. I think marketing first and work backward from there. It’s so deeply antithetical to the way my actual creative process works, it feels as though I ran face first into a creative wall. I just want something under contract, I caught myself thinking as I barely eked out a hundred words in a week. Just write enough of this for someone to buy.

And so, for the next few weeks, I am stepping away from my process and forcing myself into a hard reset. I sat at my writing desk the other night and exhaled out all the fears I have about publishing. No more worries about sales figures and cover reveals and preorder campaigns, no more staring down a looming road ahead wondering when this whole thing will work out. I started writing because I loved it, and I needed to find that love again.

I think I’m beginning to!

It’s going to be a long process. I’ve always said that every time I go to write a book, I have to learn how to do it all over again. And that’s true! But for this book, I find myself digging deeper and trying to relearn not just how to write a book, but why. I want to savor the little moments of unexpected character development, the joy of combing back over a passage and understanding how to make it perfect. This book I’m working on (hopefully more soon on that) has forced me to get better in a way I wasn’t sure I could. It’s immensely different from everything I’ve ever written before, and I’m letting it surprise me.

All this to say you might find my socials quiet for a while. My book and I are going to couples therapy, and it’s kicking my ass.

Courtney Gould

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