Jolly, Out.

My beloved mother has always made the Christmas go. She is 83 now, and lupus is doing her bad-wrong, so this year I drove from upstate New York to Alabama with a car full of farting Boston terriers and I made the Christmas go. For her.

MY BELOVEDS. Oh, my best, best, best beloveds. My house here in New York was built in 1876, and I think about the life of the woman who first lived here. Gilded. Victorian. I wouldn’t have survived it. I would’ve been getting masturbated by random doctors and doing cocaine and licking the yellow wallpaper.

I do not want to make the Christmas go. As for me and my house, we place upon the back of the toilet two small framed pics of my children as toddlers being silently horrified by Mall Santa. Deco finis.

When I got home all I could do was lie in the bed for two days, draped in animals, eating cheese and reading books so familiar and beloved that the sentences were all like tiny weighted blankets. Stuff like, “There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.” SPEAK YOUR TRUTH, ANNE ELLIOT. I am with you.

So, yeah, this is FASTER THAN KUDZU, my personal blog that ran for a dozen years when blogs were a thing, now resurrected via Substack’s mercy, and the place where I will tell you awful truths. Like this:

Tilly the puppy is perfectly potty trained, unless it is RAINING, in which case, who can be expected to poop outside? NO ONE. Every rain day is a war, her stealth and guile and craft and mighty will versus my attention span. And I have no attention span. SO.

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Tilly-pop recently informed me that actively falling snow is ALSO TECHNICALLY RAIN. She placed her memo to this effect in the center of my bathroom, which, okay, points for correct-room-choosing, and also points for festiveness because she apparently ate some sparkly green Christmas ribbon to be-wreath her announcement-turd, but no points for Good Doggery.

Tilly-Pop was with me at my mother’s pristine house with all its miles of virgin-white carpet, and each day when I awoke I fell to my knees on the plush, snowy pile and prayed for drought. I couldn’t make the Christmas go AND protect the rugs. I couldn’t make the Christmas go AND —anything.

But I made it go, Best Beloveds, and go it did, so that now it has went, and here we are, two months out from the pub date of MISSING SISTER. This is my final thriller. For a while at least. I am writing a novel of Southern Fiction even as your read this, like, RIGHT NOW, and TBF, I can see my style of Southern Family Drama creeping into the edges of Missing Sister – it is present in the Albright family.

Penny’s mom used to sing, Penny and Nicki, Nix and Pen, where does one start and the other begin? when they were little. Now, five years after Nix ODed, Penny’s older brother is in the wind, and his teenaged daughter is acting out. It is Penny, Nix’s living twin, who has found a way forward – and what a way. Penny has decided to fix the world.

I love her for this. She doesn’t know she is about to meet Thalia, a Blonde batman whose personal vendetta rubs shoulders with the very vendetta Penny wanted to throw when Nix overdosed and died. Thalia and Penny are going to play some chess with each other and with fate. This is female friendship + murder, where revenge is the vibe at the slumber party. I love it. I hope you will, too.

The preorder for signed copies of MISSING SISTER is happening, as it always does, at ALABAMA BOOKSMITH.

You can also pre-order unsigned copies at your local or online. My website has a buncha pre-order links on the splash page.

Please pre-order, beloveds, because pre-order numbers are a big factor in my next book contract, and I want to keep writing. Turns out, I have new shiz to say.