Dispatch from the Reading Cave

I’m taking a short breather from Kiss in the Coil this week. K.D Paige is on a much deserved vacation traveling (go follow her and wish her well!) and I am currently very ill, very inflamed, and very deep in other people’s books. That’s one way the body forces reflection/craft correction. (Don’t for a second think I mean for KITC, it’s its own standalone fun and not meant for serious types.) I’m talking about longer things. MS-type things.

In the meantime, I recorded audio for an older flash fic for your enjoyment, ‘The Mysterious Disappearance of a Local Book Collector’. An occult piece from an earlier era. Listen below:

It still reeked of something odd — the article had been right. It was an old, mold-and-sulfur stench. The figure pulled the strings of their hood tighter and adjusted their disposable covid mask up higher on their nose. There was one more thing the article mentioned that they wanted to check.

—Mysterious Disappearance of Local Book Collector Raises Questions, 2024

Alchemised fans whipping the shortform devotion into a tizzy with book trailers and this is one of my favorites, to Kipling’s ‘Boots’.

This is a decidedly not-Substack topic I thought I’d bring over into longform from Tiktok. Read outside your lanes, folks.

I’ve been reading Alchemised. (I’m not going to discuss the ethics of writing within the IP of a horrific transphobe, but I’m always behind other queer and authors of color getting paid the big sums.) And now—several hundred pages (one bedraggled third) into Manacled—I can’t stop thinking about what makes the traditionally published version of this story work at the scale at which it’s currently soaring.

There’s been a lot of chatter about Alchemised’s book deal, its success, and the sheer audacity of burning the first hundred-plus pages on worldbuilding (to sufficiently differentiate it from Rowling’s IP; it originated as a #Dramione fanfic on AO3). What, on paper, should have been a risk, in practice morphed into something readers devoured anyway. (Though I’ll admit I felt the weariness in those first ~150 pages.)

Why do this though?

The built-in audience (sure), the controversial synthesis into something new (weaseling—Weasleying—in Handmaid’s Tale??), AND IMPORTANTLY because the ensuing emotional architecture is left to feel airtight.

The developmental editing choices from Manacled to Alchemised—especially around the two MCs intimacy, pacing of trust, and moral pressure—dramatically raise the stakes over the original. This is a crucial move for transmutation into longform, to assure they’re more sharply felt, reducing immediate-shock-value (because the readers are generally already hooked by something within the premise and it’s no longer on an episodic drip-feed). By dev editing choices like pushing off the Handmaid’s Tale elements further into the horror of the FMCs imprisonment, you-as-reader feel every notch ratcheting up in horror. This is so very Bauhaus, form following function.

It’s immediately more gothic—which we already know has seen increased appreciation with the current socio-economic climate—and the developmental editing has shifted Alchemised swiftly from the fanfic/romantasy genre and into the gothic tragedy aisle, focusing on the impacts of war, with no safe actors, and postulating (loosely) on nihilism and existentialism through the perspectives of the two MCs.

It’s a reminder I needed: Readers stay for the way a character’s inner processing, changes under stress. To watch the ol’ emotional barometer. For the things that make them remember why things hurt outside of interpersonal conflict. Y’know. The Biggies.

I’m sitting with that. (Probably recovering longer than planned T_T </3)

Kiss in the Coil will resume likely next week. What have you been hooked by, what have you been learning, even if that learning is happening sideways, from bed, on steroids, with your heart absolutely wrecked by other people’s sentences?

Thank you for being here in the quiet seasons too.

🖤 Nico