End-of-May Vibe

Bird lifer and yearbird ushers in The Deading and Ten Sleep excitement

It’s all about the bird vibe post here at the end of May. A few mornings ago, I found an East Coast warbler on the West Coast. A Northern Parula, fresh from its wintering grounds in Central America, on its way to Texas, or even the Great Lakes. The little guy made a wrong turn and ended up at Sweet Springs Nature Preserve in Los Osos, California. Couple days ago I tracked a Yellow-throated Warbler at a campground in Oceano, California. Same thing—off course from wintering grounds while heading to breeding grounds in the Eastern U.S. That one was a lifer! If you happen to find a rare warbler, send one my way, preferably a Cape May or Cerulean.

I figure you need a birdy sort of newsletter intro since I want to tell you some things about THE DEADING (pre-orders still welcome). The vibe of its upcoming release, still two months away, is already feeling like that rare kind of warbler Pokémon card that I can add to my year or life list. Not to mention, all the related booky things I will be writing for places like Crime Reads, Nightmare Magazine, and who knows where else, is fueling me for the mystery and excitement of its release.

BOOK TOUR?

A tour will be planned: virtual appearances, in-store book talks, podcast discussions, and maybe a book release party in San Luis Obispo if I get my act together. In the meantime, here’s a cool short review (with no spoilers!) of The Deading by Alice Martin in Shelf Awareness (click the paragraph link if you wanna read the whole piece, though you’ll have to scroll down a touch):

But for as much brutality as exists in this dystopic Baywood, it goes hand in hand with wonder too, often in the form of the relationship Blas has with birding, which is framed in awe. Even at the height of the novel's horror, Blas is struck momentarily still by “the collective hum of wingbeats that follow one another in what has turned to a fiery pink-and-orange dusk and rapidly descending night,” and a “continuing dark spiral of wings.” In this eclipse of wings, perhaps the novel's most breathless moment, Belardes finds beauty.

FILM/TV AGENT PICKS UP THE DEADING

Whuuut? It’s true. A film & television agent who works with my agent recently read The Deading and loves the book. Woot!

So what does this mean?

Means I don’t have to pitch my own work to Hollywood entities. Means, I have an advocate in the industry. Means, maybe an option deal for starters, if I’m lucky. I’m just happy about learning more about the crapshoot in selling films in the post-Covid world, in the uncertainty of television and film industry as a whole, in the mystery of being “in the game.” Right now, I have the tiniest of toe-holds. Happy with that. More on this, if anything cool develops.

WHAT’S UP WITH THAT SPORTS EMMY AWARD?

I’m always bragging on my kids. Jordan has been performing music all over California’s Central Valley and Central Coast with his fiancé. Makes me happy that that little kid I once encouraged to play a violin is still so thrilled by the instrument that he still performs in restaurants, bars, stages, wineries, breweries, you name it. My other son, Landen (also a musician), was just thanked onstage at the 2024 Sports Emmys for his sound editing work for Red Bull TV | YouTube. His team won for OUTSTANDING AUDIO/SOUND –POST-PRODUCED. Yes! Landen is always posting cool video game trailers and in-game cinematics he’s worked on while at Source Sound. He was also nominated for two Golden Reel Awards this year for his work on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, and works on all kinds of games, including the latest Star Wars release, Jedi: Fallen Order. He recently did some sound mixes (I might not be using correct terminology) on the film, Gran Turismo. Yeah, baby!

TEN SLEEP

While The Deading is close to arriving on bookshelves, we’re deep into finalizing the manuscript for Ten Sleep. No release date yet, though expecting maybe around July 2025? I wrote the first draft while attending University of California Riverside’s Palm Desert’s MFA Program.

If you’re a writer and on social media, you might find yourself on one side of the fence or the other about whether MFA programs are worth the money, whether you learn anything, etc., especially low residencies like the one I attended. This could be the subject of an entire newsletter, but for short, here’s a little bit of my take . . .

My strategy going in was to immerse myself in writing/reading for craft, and that’s what I did, fine-tuning my writing skills so I could create sellable work. I revised and added to The Deading and wrote Ten Sleep from scratch while in the program. I listened to professors, and jumped through as much of their hoops as possible, always up for the challenge. I also restructured and wrote the second half of American Fade while in the program, which I just handed over to my agent for a second read.

While Jane and I plotted that I would sell a book while a student, I never said that to any fellow students. I mean, what if it didn’t come true? The director of the program thought I might sell while a student. I played that down too. Kept my plans to myself. My strategy? Just keep working, revising, writing, building skills, and when the time was right, pen that query letter, see if an editor would bite. Now, there are all kinds of land mines here because I already had an agent, but that’s mostly another story, and we hadn’t talked in a long time (he’s still my agent and we’re doing fine in our agent-author relationship).

The Deading sold to Erewhon Books while I was still a student, so level unlocked and achieved. But I technically sold two books, and I think Erewhon editor Diana Pho may have had her eye on Ten Sleep, especially since I already had a blurb from horror writer Stephen Graham Jones. So when the time came to discuss the second book, well, it was no surprise what she picked.

Ten Sleep, at its core, is a monstery cattle drive in the Wyoming high country. It promises more creep-outs, more scares, and an even tougher main character than Blas in The Deading. I think Greta from Ten Sleep would knock Blas down in a shoving match and take his binoculars. She’s a tough, dual-ethnic Chicana who’s in that wifi-less big country wilderness, hoping to make a few bucks, and then get out of Wyoming for good, maybe track down a mysterious love interest. But this isn’t any normal wilderness, there’s something going on with the landscape, especially a certain canyon, its past, its present, the animals, things in the sky, and things slithering through the prairielands. Something isn’t quite right until things really aren’t right at all.

Stay tuned for a Ten Sleep cover reveal. I recently gave my editor a few ideas, maybe a creepy decapitated bear head on the cover, maybe a big illustration of the mysterious canyon in the story . . .

THE DEADING HAS BIRDS, WHOOP!

Yes it does. I mean, of course, of course. My recent fascination with birbs & borbs has transformed into a rudimentary study of them. I mean, it’s a really poor study of birds, like, if you were going to use my novel to do that. But, what The Deading does offer about birds is a gateway to the wonder of them through Blas and other characters, even through birds themselves. Thing is, The Deading is also a story of how mysterious and free birds are, that while people trap themselves and animals around them because of how humankind treats both the ocean and local habitats, that some animals are free and lovely, though in decline. Yes, decline. This is sad, tragic, breaks my heart constantly.

Some of the birds in the story, were you to look up their Wikipedia pages or on eBird, you’d find some are threatened or endangered. Some have mysterious population sizes. Others are world travelers, dangerously jetting back and forth between South or Central America and the U.S. or Canada. They funnel across narrow flyways between continents in vast migrations where birds fly by starlight, navigate by the stars, or some kind of mysterious force in them. The Deading offers this glimpse, makes their presence even more mysterious, intentionally so. And while the novel is about so much more, I just want to bring this up, as I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe, some of you will learn to love birds, nature, the ocean, as I do.

Talk more soon. - Nicholas