The Black Hand, vol.47

The monster under the bed

It seems a bit weird to be talking about crime news when political leaders (ahem 👀) have been committing crimes all over the place? So this month I’m diverting a little to share an article which is crime-adjacent, but mainly a kind of nightmare for me personally, and probably for anyone who’s ever watched a horror movie or read a creepy novel and then been afraid to let their feet hang out over the side of the bed…

A babysitter in Great Bend, Kansas, was reassuring the child they were caring for that there were no monsters under the bed…and when she kneeled down to look she found a man hiding beneath the bed.

Sorry – when I first read this headline, I actually squealed aloud, and now I’m inflicting it on all of you.

Anyway, when the babysitter discovered the man under the bed, there was an ‘altercation’ – which I’m going to take to mean that the babysitter SCREAMED REALLY LOUD, which is what I sure as hell would’ve done - and when the man jumped up, one of the kids was knocked over. The man ran away, and nobody was seriously hurt. He turned out to have been a former resident of the house who was under a protection order not to return. The man was arrested after a foot chase by police deputies.

BUT SERIOUSLY THOUGH, I would die. Like, I would actually die.

Or maybe just never sleep again.

Could this situation be worse? I mean, maybe it could be worse…

It seems like a good time to mention this case in Tibet, of a man who took a room at a nice hotel and found the smell from the air conditioner so awful, he asked to move rooms. It wasn’t until later that management realised the smell was…from a corpse under the bed.

I think what we should all take away from this is that it’s never worth looking under the bed.

Welcome back from school holidays!

My youngest son (currently in Year Eleven) and my partner (a high school teacher) have returned to the world of school/work and I’d like to send my sympathies their way. Also, my sympathies to everyone who has to resume study or employment after Chocolate Bunny Long Weekend – elbow bumps and heavy sighs to you.

Is this the sleaziest looking chocolate bunny ever, or is it my imagination?

I myself have to get into an edit so I’m resuming work as well (I’ve had two whole weeks off, in which I don’t think I wrote anything at all! Amazing!). But I must point out that working from home as I do, I also sigh – with relief – when people go back to their respective occupations and the household returns to the state of calm quiet that I’m accustomed to.

What else has been happening? Well, All Shall Mourn is still going gangbusters – it’s reached over 800 ratings on GoodReads and it’s powering along in categories, which is awesome.

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Also I neglected social media for over a month and nothing caught on fire and now I’m (mostly) back. Also I neglected to write this newsletter for a few weeks while I was still beat from completing my manuscript, but as you may have noticed, I’m back now! Also also I’m taking bookings for school/festival events, and started talking to teachers about Book Week…

Nature is healing, as the kids say.

I finished the book on deadline and then I was exhausted

People have been asking me what I’ve been doing lately and that’s pretty much it?

I think I remember I told you that I was firing on all thrusters trying to get a new book finished by March 31 – well, the good news is that I hit my deadline! The bad news is that I my thrusters burned brightly while getting there…then puttered out into black ash in the aftermath.

So yeah, I got a little fried. Actually, if I’m speaking honestly, the last five or six months have been a bit of a slog: I finished writing All Shall Mourn, sold a new book on pitch, prepped for the All Shall Mourn publication and release, went away with my partner to India (where I continued writing the New Thing), came home, released All Shall Mourn (whoooo!), then suddenly it was February and I needed to finish a 300 page book by the end of March.

And the new book was research-heavy – man, I really had to crunch that sucker to get it in on time. I worked some crazy hours, and my partner carried the household load while I was doing that. Then when I was finished, I kind of collapsed in a heap.

If you don’t mind me getting personal for a second, can I send out a giant thank you to my partner – to all the partners and families and teams who support writers. Because we would not be able to do this without our teams 🖤

As I mentioned above, “nature is healing”, so this week I cleaned my house (*gasp*) and tidied up my life in other ways, and it was really nice 😊 And now my edit letter has arrived, but I’ve had a break and feel recovered, so I’m okay with the fact that it’s time to get back to work!

Post-deadline cocktail

What do you do to celebrate finishing a book, you ask?

I drink a:

🍸Lemon Drop Cocktail🍸

~in a shaker with ice, add 2 shots vodka, 1 shot simple syrup, 1 shot fresh lemon juice (way better fresh!), 1/2 shot triple sec;

~shake, pour into a martini glass or some other fancy glass so you feel fancy;

~you do not have to coat the rim of the glass with caster sugar, it depends on how tired you are or how eager to drink your cocktail, and won’t detract from the taste;

~drink a toast!

People who read the New Book will understand this recipe when the book comes out next year 👀

Where you can find me

I’ll be at Melbourne OzComicCon on the weekend of 7-8 June, and I’m really quite excited about it!

You can find tickets to the con once more here at the link , I’m going to have signed copies of All Shall Mourn for sale (and maybe matching AU paperbacks? If I can get organised in time? We will see) and I might even wear my FBI agent cosplay outfit…

I would absolutely love to catch you there 😊

Nailbiters is going out to everyone this month

I thought it might be nice to encourage folks to sign up for my paywalled newsletter Nailbiters, so I’m sending out this month’s edition to everyone. If you’ve ever wanted to sample Nailbiters and see if it’s good value, now’s the time! While there won’t be bonus fiction content this edition, there should be some other cool stuff and I hope you like it!

Stuff to read and watch

I mean The Bondsman looks really silly, but also fun, and also…Kevin Bacon. He’s a gnarly old dude now, but he’s still got a cute butt and he seems like he loves his wife and is a good human:

In other media news, we’ve watched up to episode 8 of Severance, and you are all FORBIDDEN from spoiling anything after this point. Yes, I’m enjoying it.

As far as reading goes, I did some completely whim-driven book selection and read KOKO by Peter Straub. If you’re not familiar with Straub’s work: He’s a contemporary of Stephen King who had a number of popular successes, including Julia and Ghost Story, and collaborated with King on the book The Talisman. He won all the awards – the Bram Stoker award, the World Fantasy award, the August Derleth award, and the International Horror Guild award – and I didn’t mind this book at all.

It's the story of a group of friends who all met in the same army unit in Vietnam: Haunted by an atrocity committed there, the men have to band together to find one of their number who has been committing a series of ritualistic murders throughout South-East Asia. KOKO is set in 1982, and there are many twists in the tale as it takes you from NYC, to Singapore, to Bangkok’s notorious Patpong Road, and ultimately to an isolated village in Vietnam called Ia Thuc, where each man in the story somehow finds his meaning.

The book’s cover seems to have stared back at me from the shelves of every second-hand bookstore I’ve ever walked into…and I finally dived in. I won’t say I’ve ever been a huge fan of Straub – I know people absolutely froth about him, but I bounced off Ghost Story when I first tried to read it about 20 years ago. This book is pretty damn good, though: The language and writing are evocative, and you’re easily sucked into the mystery of who’s committing these murders. I felt like the plot employed a couple deus ex machina devices toward the end, but I feel strongly that every writer who reaches 576 pages can have a little deus ex machina as a treat (??? Like I’m having trouble selling a book just 25 pages over 400, I’ve got no idea how everyone was so cool with 500+ page books back in the eighties…)

Anyway, it won’t be my favourite read of the year but it was good, and I’m glad I finally read it. If you’re at the beach and you find a copy of KOKO in the AirBnB where you’re staying, pick it up and give it a whirl.

An Austen-inspired murder mystery!

I drove to Melbourne last week to sign books at Dymocks CBD, and discovered piles of the new novel MISS CAROLINE BINGLEY, PRIVATE DETECTIVE – along with the authors themselves, Kelly Gardiner and Sharmini Kumar 😊 Kel and Sharmini are amazing humans and it was so great to catch up!

I’ve known Kelly for years – she hired me to teach creative writing at Latrobe Bendigo sometime around 2018, I think it was. Then when Twitter was still Twitter, we used to get silly with #DarcyWars, which involved watching all the different versions of Pride and Prejudice (along with Jodi McAlister and Jenna Guillame a bunch of other friends) and live-tweeting about it.

The genesis of Kel and Sharmini’s new book began way back in 2021; I remember it really clearly, because we were deep in covid lockdown, and I was going for long walks every day. During my walks, I’d phone a friend to say hi, and when I called Kel, she told me that she and Sharmini had dreamed up this cool new idea involving Caroline Bingley from Pride and Prejudice as a sleuth…I knew straight away I wanted to read it, and I’m so glad the book is finally out in the world at last!

If reading Austen-flavoured detective fiction is in your wheelhouse, you can grab a copy of the book online or in stores – and it’s out in the UK and other territories as well, so please to enjoy 😊

And that’s it from me for this month! (at least until I come to terrorize you in Nailbiters in a few hours, lol – if you like the long-form Ellie stuff, please subscribe!)

I’ll tell you how I go with the edit, and I’m really hoping I’ll be able to announce that deal soon (we’re narrowing down a title!) so you can join me in celebrating – with a Lemon Drop or not.

Until next time, have a great month, happy reading, and catch you real soon!

xxEllie