Margarite Lawson, the famous mystery writer, substitutes at every writing workshop she can. Lawson, famous not just for her mysteries, but for the fact that death stalks her everywhere she goes. Death follows her because she provokes it all—for a reason. 

Can anyone stop her? Maybe it will take a Margarite-level plot twist to do so.

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Murder, She Workshopped

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Spending six weeks at a writer’s workshop in the Midwest would drive an empath insane. Or maybe it would make the empath suicidal. Or homicidal, depending on the emotions swirling around the empath that day.

I think about such things because 1) I am trapped at just such a writer’s workshop and 2) I am in the process of divorcing said empath. He’s at home, with all our belongings and our cats, while I’m here for week four, when my target finally arrives. Fortunately for me, Said Empath (who shall remain nameless) didn’t get the bright idea to clear out our bank accounts until yesterday. I had that bright idea three hours before I started researching my lawyer months ago. All the money once labeled ours is now in several accounts now labeled mine, and no matter how hard Said Empath screams over the phone, he’ll never be able to find them.

Empathy works two ways. He can feel all of my emotions when we talk and I can feel all of his. His are extremely powerful. Mine are generally muted, which explains the initial attraction.

It also explains why I do what I do.

I kill people. Well, not people per se. Evil magical creatures that misuse a human form. Lest you think I am insane myself and use this explanation to rationalize my murderous tendencies, let me simply tell you that I have few murderous tendencies. That’s why I get the jobs I do. I’m a highly skilled, highly paid assassin who works only once every four to five years.

I also happen to have a 100% success rate.

Which might completely vanish on this particular job, distracted as I am by Said Empath and by the silly workshop itself.

Here’s the problem: I’m thinking seriously of retiring and taking up writing as a new career. Secretly, I’ve always wanted to write.

But if you had asked me—oh, say, three weeks ago—which would be harder, becoming a writer or an assassin who specialized in magical creatures that misuse human form, I would have answered writer every time.

Then I met the first three of my so-called professional instructors. The best thing I’ve learned at this workshop is this: If they can become professional writers, then anyone can do it.

Sure wish I’d known that twenty years and five assassinations ago.

But I wouldn’t have ended up here on the campus of a major state university at a program for serious unpublished writers taught by the professionals. Theoretically, I’m here to assassinate someone.

In reality, I’m taking these six weeks to learn how to write.

So I’m a busy little writer bee, handing in a story per week to each new instructor and letting my fellow students shred me in public. At first, I thought I’d get assistance from the instructors, and while the first one was helpful, the instructor for week two was more interested in fomenting discord—which was relatively easy to do, considering most of the students have nothing to do except read about two short stories per night.

The instructors come from different fiction genres and are supposed to give us insights into their various disciplines. As I’m learning, the use of the word “discipline” along with the word “writer” verges on oxymoronic.

That oxymoron seems to apply more than usual to week three’s instructor, a has-been award-winning western writer who hasn’t published a book in more than a decade. She’s subbing for a bigger name who got sick and couldn’t come. She’s always the sub at this workshop because she needs the money. She doesn’t have a lot to teach, except gloom and doom, and so after Discord from the week before, she’s only making things worse.

My handlers warned me this would happen. Apparently this workshop has a pattern. By the middle, the inmates—I mean students—have forgotten everything they knew about home and have now become convinced that the workshop is the world.

Weeks Three and Four are when the big blowups happen. Students quit, affairs end, and fistfights occur. One group stripped the least-liked student naked, painted her green, and carried her like an offering to the Dean of the English Department.

That was the year the workshop had to change university sponsors.

I was told to pay special attention starting in week three, because my target would arrive in week four, and she would make sure this workshop was one for the record books.

***

My target, Margarite Lawson, writes lurid bestselling novels based on actual crimes. Margarite picks a famous crime, changes the names, maybe even moves it to a new location, and gives it her personal spin. The weird thing about Margarite’s books is that the more she published, the more likely she was to have a hand in solving the famous crime. In fact, in the latter five books or so, the famous crime became famous because Margarite was on-site when it happened.

It’s become a joke that whenever Margarite shows up, someone is going to die. In fact, my workshop has been nervously kidding each other about this since our first night together. Everyone, that is, except me.

Because to me, Margarite’s talent for finding the crime in a given community isn’t coincidence. It’s part of her unnatural charm.

Margarite arrives on Friday night of Week Three, so that she can confer with the Western Writer before the poor sap leaves on Sunday morning. If all goes according to script, someone on this university campus will die on Saturday.

Margarite will organize the police investigation, handle the media, and solve the case by the following Friday. About two years from now, she’ll published a novel about the case.

She’ll get wealthier while she’s feeding the demon within.

My assignment is simple: I’m supposed to stop her once and for all. If possible, I take her out on Friday night, before anyone else gets hurt.

But after nearly three full weeks undercover in this rather unique circle of hell, I’m not sure I want to prevent anyone from getting hurt. I’m tired of the drama, the petty jealousies, the bickering and the backbiting.

These people need something real to whine about.

And I figure Margarite Lawson is going to give that to them.

***

Nine a.m. Friday morning, the workshop meets as per usual. We have full run of a graduate student dorm that opens into a private courtyard. At one end of that courtyard is the so-called lounge—really an oversized conference room filled with uncomfortable upholstered chairs, flimsy tables, and one extremely loud Coke machine. Laptop users have to make certain the batteries are charged before they arrive, or fight for a seat nearest one of two unused outlets on the only wall without a window. That wall is covered with whiteboards, because—apparently—in university circles, chalkboards have become passé.

My “student” laptop—a battered first-generation iBook—is always charged. Whenever I’m out in public, I carry that thing.

My business laptop stays in my silly little graduate student suite, under lock and key. The laptop is unlike anything anyone around here has seen, except maybe in some of the secret R&D labs around campus. Maybe not even there.

Because this thing is high powered—not just with tech, but with the occasional magical connection. And how to explain magic to the non-believers in my audience? It’s simple, really.

Magic slips into the real world. Or the real world slips into the magical world, depending on your point of view. Mine is the point of view of a person who uncomfortably straddles both worlds. I can see the magical, even though I have little magic myself.

I have little magic, but I have access to magic. Thanks to engineers with magic who also happen to design computers, I have at my fingertips the simplest of spells. I also have commonsense non-magical remedies to magical potions, and other such things that occasionally come in handy when dealing with the other side of reality.

In truth, I’ve only used those things with Said Empath’s friends. In my work, I’ve used the standard gun/knife/whatever’s handy to complete the job.

Which is looming.

That’s what I’m thinking as I approach my usual chair. It’s a wingback with high arms that sits directly across the room from the instructor’s chair.

I staked out this chair on day one of the workshop, and although one of my less observant compatriots tried to take it from me on day two, no one will ever try that again.

They say I’m touchy.

I’m just a little protective.

The problem is that I don’t look touchy. If you were to walk into our little critique session on this Friday morning, I’m the one you’d ignore. I’m older than most of the class for one thing. I also have cultivated the don’t-pay-attention-to-me vibe so essential in my job.

Maybe it’s one of my little magics.

If you glanced at me, you’d see a once-pretty woman who allowed time and lack of attention to make her seem faded. But if you looked, really looked, you’d notice a few anomalies. I wear baggy clothes to give the impression of flab, when in truth I have none. I also have a hard time hiding the intelligence in my eyes, so I look through my eyelashes a lot, like an unrepentant Southern belle.

My fellow students have yet to notice these things about me, but the instructor week two, Discord, noticed right off. He never picked on me, even though I was the one who had two (rather mediocre) stories in for critique that week. Instead, he avoided me as much as possible, making him rank just a bit higher in my mind than he normally would have.

Apparently, he became a bestselling thriller writer through observation, not through all that tough-talk he imparted to the other students.

But I digress.

I also arrive at my seat before everyone else, so I can watch them enter. I ignore most of them. They’re the background for my two missions. But a handful of people are impossible to miss.

Like our teaching assistant, Raj O’Driscoll. He’s a glorified gofer, and not bright enough to realize that should anything go wrong with this workshop, he will get the blame.

Then there is the faculty advisor, Lawrence B. Hallerhaven. Hallerhaven has taken on the job to schmooze with the famous writers. He’s terrible at planning and even worse at following through. He leaves all of that to poor Raj, who is spending this morning preparing for Margarite Lawson.

Apparently she made an unusual list of demands before she agreed to come. Raj is trying to meet those demands before her arrival tonight.

All of his running about makes me nervous, and I’m just sitting in my chair, typing random thoughts in my student laptop as the rest of the class arrive.

They’re carrying a variety of things: the laptops, hardcopy manuscripts covered with their inept scrawls, and various poisons from lattes to regular coffees to donuts to apples to leftover pizza.

We don’t have a lot to say to each other any more except Shut up or Move your ass, I need some room here or Were we supposed to read Steve’s story for today?, so there’s a lot of rustling without a lot of conversation.

That’s okay. It gives me a chance to figure out, once and for all, who is going to die.

That person has to have no redeeming characteristics. This is the person we all love to hate. When that person dies, we’re all going to be relieved he’s dead. We’ll just wonder why someone hasn’t killed him sooner.

As the class wanders in, I contemplate the possible candidates.

The three likeliest victims arrive in a clump. These three are miserable and proud of it, because they believe (erroneously, in my opinion) that misery begets book contracts.

First through the door is Hamlet Thorshov who deserves the Most Miserable Person of the Workshop Award just because his horrible parents decided to name him Hamlet. He’s an underdeveloped twentysomething of very obvious Russian lineage. His white-blond hair matches the color of his white-blond skin and fails to accent his pale blue eyes. He has somehow managed to find t-shirts that are too small for him, and he wears a watch half the size of his arm.

His watch is where the trouble begins, every single workshop. The damn thing can probably fly an airplane on its own. And he toys with it in the middle of the first critique, pressing buttons as if he were setting the stopwatch for his mid-morning run (if he ever exercised, which he most clearly does not).

No one tries to get him to stop any longer, although two days ago, Carlotta Sternke—one of the other three troublemakers—tried to cover the thing in bubble wrap, just to silence it.

That was probably the only time the workshop cheered for her. Carlotta Sternke was the workshop goat long before we decided to pick on Hamlet.

Carlotta is chubby and shows way too much skin through fishnet stockings, tops that deliberately leave her stomach bare, and leather skirts that are both too short and too tight. Her lips are always covered with black gloss and she outlines her eyes in late season raccoon.

Her hair is black with a white streak that might be deliberate, although with Carlotta, it’s impossible to tell. She’s as unpleasant as her clothing, with a high-pitched nervous giggle that makes me long for fingernails running along blackboards.

She feels like she needs to police everyone—hence the bubble wrap on Hamlet’s giant watch. And the person she loves to police more than anyone else is the third in our nasty triumvirate.

Norman Zell makes a good first impression. He’s tall, lanky, and reasonably good-looking. He’s embarrassed by the name “Norman,” so he insists that everyone he meets call him Zell, which, I have to admit, is an improvement.

The problem is that Zell has the attention span of a gnat and the energy level of a hummingbird. He’s in constant motion—either one knee jiggles or an arm or every single finger (and not in unison). In the first week, he managed to sleep with or proposition every woman here (I said no with probably more enthusiasm than I needed to express), and made it clear by the end of the week that he considered every woman who tumbled into his bed to be a conquest.

A conquest that he had the right to write about in Margarite Lawson roman à clef style. Only he wasn’t nearly as good at changing the names or the events. The instructor week two actually made Zell stand in front of the group and apologize to everyone.

Zell burst into tears in the middle of his apology and yet somehow didn’t command any sympathy. We’d all had enough by then, and even though the tears were probably genuine, they wouldn’t change his behavior. And sure enough, by week’s end, Zell was sleeping his way through the cafeteria staff, and the first story he turned in this week is titled, “Love in A Time of Meatballs.”

This morning, Hamlet, Carlotta and Zell manage to sit equidistant from each other, forming a perfect equilateral triangle. They are getting out the first story for critique when the door opens again, and Margarite Lawson sweeps into the room.

She’s taller than I imagined she would be, blonder, and prettier. Or maybe that’s just how her human covering manifests itself in person. She wears a gauze lilac tunic over black pants, and manages to appear imposing and charming at the very same time.

I can see the magic flickering off her, sending sparks around the room. And inside that marvelous human form, I see the TrueSelf, spiny, scaly, and moss green—rather like an upright alligator with tusks.

She surveys the room and sees exactly what she should see: Surprise, shock, and dismay. Surprise because she’s hours early. Shock because no one picked her up at the airport. And dismay because most of us were looking forward to our last few private hours with our sad-sack western writer.

“Well,” Margarite says, “what a motley crew.”

She actually licks her lips, but it doesn’t look out of place unless you can see those tusks like I can. Everyone else just stares at her, no one more than Raj. I don’t have to be an empath to know he’s worried about losing his job. Somehow he failed to escort the most important guest writer of the workshop to her accommodations. Never mind that no one told him she’d be early. Never mind that she probably didn’t tell anyone that she’d be early.

Margarite doesn’t seem upset by the reaction to her appearance. If anything, she’s probably pleased by it, although she doesn’t show that pleasure. She doesn’t dare. It would ruin her entire plan.

How do I know her plan? Because if you chart the appearances she’s made before a murder, you can see a pattern of twenty-two months between unfortunate events.

The twenty-two months are the tip-off to the fact that she’s a chaos dragon. The first part of the name fits—she does thrive (and I mean thrive, as in need it to live) on chaos. The second name is a misnomer given by someone like me who can see the upright alligator in these imposters and somehow mistook it for a dragon.

More accurately, you should probably call her a chaos reptile or a chaos demon—but again, you find yourself in linguistic hell. Since she doesn’t have as many powers as the average demon, and she has considerably more than the average reptile.

Still, the bottom line is that every twenty-two months, she needs to snack on the distress caused by the release of a soul. That soul must die by murder most foul, and there must be some kind of investigation in which at least five people are suspects. If the chaos dragon doesn’t get her negative emotions within a two-year window, she will waste away.

Unfortunately, for her, she can’t overindulge either. The handful of chaos dragons who become police detectives or defense lawyers tend to explode—quite literally. These deaths are usually blamed on bombs or car accidents or, in one rather dramatic case, some weird kind of poison.

The disciplined chaos dragons feast every twenty to twenty-two months, which gives them two to four months leeway should the earlier feeding go wrong. And the disciplined chaos dragon also has a cover story for why she’s near so many horrible homicides.

She needs the cover story because the real story is more sordid. The real story is that the actual homicide itself is triggered by the chaos dragon’s presence.

In fact, she’s probably triggering someone right now. I watch her work, see her make eye contact with half a dozen people in the room, including—not surprisingly—my triumvirate. She doesn’t make eye contact with me, for which I am grateful.

Then Margarite smiles. She’s seen what she wanted to see. I know this because the reptile within smiles as well. She says, in a voice I’m already beginning to hate, “I just wanted to say hello and envision all of you before I go to my hotel room for my beauty nap.”

(She’s the only instructor who insisted on a hotel room. Even Bestselling Discord Thriller Writer, from week two, had no trouble staying in graduate student housing for the duration of his instructorly duties.)

Then Margarite waggles her fingers at us, says, “Toodles,” and goes out the door into the courtyard. We watch her walk away, except Raj, who scurries after her.

He catches her arm, which makes me wince, and then gestures as he talks to her, probably telling her he needs to come with her to check her into that hotel.

Poor guy. He’s always been good and fair to me whenever I’ve had issues with the workshop (and I’ve had a few). I don’t envy him that moment of contact, which probably sent a small shock through his already-overburdened system.

They disappear through the courtyard’s main door. Our sad-sack western writer, still nominally our instructor for the week, sighs, and somehow refrains from commenting. Instead, she holds up the three manuscripts we’re to critique today and asks who wants to go first.

***

Class ends a half an hour late, what with book signings and hugs and heartfelt cries of I thought you were the best instructor so far (which the other instructors also heard on their Fridays). I go back to my room and make myself a bologna and cheese sandwich, then carry it to the kitchen table where I bring out my other laptop, so I can catch up on industry news while I eat.

I probably should be with the group, eating lunch and gossiping. They’d be surprised, though, because it’s not my thing. I have to do my job—my real job—but I can’t be obvious about it either.

I figure the murder won’t take place until tonight. That gives me most of the afternoon to finish a story and probably the early evening to make sure my weaponry is in the proper state.

I bring a kit with me wherever I go. Different evil magical creatures must be killed by different real-world tools. But you already know that. You’ve seen it in a variety of stories.

The stories get various elements right, but not all of them. For example, the wooden stake that kills vampires must be made out of the no-longer existent cedars of Lebanon. The silver that kills werewolves must be pure old-fashioned European silver, not the purer, prettier stuff from the Americas.

Chaos dragons are a modern phenomenon, so they die in more modern ways. First, you have to touch the thing with an authentic Bowie knife, preferably one from the 19^th century. That makes the human form dissipate. Then you have render the thing immobile, which is a lot more difficult than it sounds because, at this point, you’re fighting with a small alligator. It has alligator claws and alligator teeth and in addition, really big tusks.

I’ve only killed one chaos dragon, which is one more than my colleagues, and even though my handlers like to attribute that to skill, I know that the death was simply luck.

Because there’s a third step: You have to remove the tusks or the thing will regenerate. The tusks are pretty simple to remove. You grab one and tug. The tusk comes out easily, like a fake fingernail comes off a hand. But you have to be able to get close enough to tug.

I learned my lesson the last time. I have reptile tranquilizer darts—the large kind used for crocodiles. I didn’t use this the last time. Instead, I managed to knock the chaos dragon unconscious.

But, as I said, that time, I was lucky.

This time, I doubt luck will run my way. That’s probably the other reason I’m finishing the story.

Because a part of me thinks it might be my last.

I’m done with both the bologna sandwich and the story when someone knocks on my door. I sigh. I thought I’d discouraged knocking during the first week when I made it clear that I wasn’t into socializing or making nice.

Still, the knock’s pretty insistent. I peer through the window to the left of the door and see Raj standing there, fist up, looking frazzled. Poor guy. I actually feel sympathy for him. He probably spent the last hour with Margarite. I’ll wager he returned to a variety of errands for Hallerhaven, and one of those errands includes me.

I pull open the door—

—and dodge the giant arch of a knife.

Raj pushes his way inside, kicks the door closed with his foot, and tries to knife me again. His eyes are glazed, and spittle runs off the side of his mouth.

How had I missed that?

I grab his knife hand and shove it behind his back. He starts kicking. Then he grabs my hair and pulls my head forward. Somehow he spins me, and gets the knife out of my hand. He jabs at my neck and succeeds in sinking the knife into the flesh above my right breast.

It’s startlingly painful. I break out of his hair-hold and grab him by both sides of the face. Then I twist.

His neck breaks with an audible snap, and he crumples, clearly dead.

I’m breathing hard. I’m not bleeding much—the knife somehow managed to avoid important stuff like arteries and nerves. But I have a hunch that some muscle has been compromised.

Then I realize I’m thinking like a person in shock.

Maybe because I am a person in shock. I’m injured, but that’s not what’s causing the shock.

What’s causing the shock is that jolt you get when your perception of yourself gets turned upside down.

The goat at the workshop, the person everyone wants to kill, the one who would generate the most suspects if he/she/it died isn’t one of the triumvirate.

It’s me.

***

I splash cold water on my face to force myself to think clearly. Then I put my magic laptop away and call the police. I try to sound like a damsel in distress, which isn’t easy for me.

I say, “I let him in and he stabbed me.”

I say, “I think he’s dead.”

I don’t say that I used a technique I’d learned in my assassin training to snap his neck.

The campus police arrive almost immediately, look in my room, and confirm with someone on the other end of their radios that indeed I’ve been stabbed and there’s a dead man in my room. They offer me an ambulance, which I accept as part of my damsel in distress disguise (hoping the whole hospital thing won’t take long), and then the real police arrive.

They take one look and start asking questions.

Like, “How did a little thing like you break his neck?”

And, “Where did you learn how to snap necks?”

And, “You really snapped his neck?”

I blink a lot and make my eyes tear up, and say things like after watching many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I decided I needed a self-defense class, and there they taught us to grab someone by both sides of the face to distract him and then knee him in the groin.

I say he must have turned oddly when I kneed him, because I heard his neck snap.

I say I’ve never heard that before.

In other words, I lie.

Eventually, the EMTs arrive and haul me away to the university hospital where the emergency room doc X-rays me, pronounces me lucky that nothing much was hurt, and sews me up. Then he sends me out into the wild with a prescription for enough painkillers that I could sell them on the street and still have some leftover for me.

I fill it, but take none of them. That’s for later. Instead, I arrive back at my room to find crime scene splatter everywhere (fingerprint dust, Luminal, and a general mess). No one has discovered my magic laptop or my weapons kit. (Thank heavens.) The last of the photographs have been taken, the body has been removed and the room is being returned to me, blood and all.

My classmates have shown up. They actually seem concerned, but more that Raj has gone off the deep-end (and that concern manifests in a “who’s next?” kinda way). They try to be solicitous, offering to feed me and comfort me and give me advice on how to take care of a knife wound (as if any of them has ever done that).

Hallerhaven shows up to let me know the university will take care of everything, including my tuition (in other words, please don’t sue us) and promises me I’ll be just fine.

I thank everyone for their kindness and plead exhaustion. Slowly, I get them out of my room and sigh with relief.

Then I wait until the little clump in the middle of the courtyard is gone. While I was being questioned and poked and prodded this afternoon, I got to thinking.

I have screwed up Margarite’s plan. She isn’t going to get the chaos she wants. In fact, a straightforward stabbing/self defense probably doesn’t even register as an energy spike.

I have a few precious hours before she tries to rile up someone else to kill me.

I’m going to have to take care of her now.

And if I do it right, no one will ever blame me for her death.

Of course, doing it right means I can’t use the tried and true chaos-demon killing techniques. Doing it right means I do something no one has ever done before.

I don’t even know if it’ll work.

But I’m going to have to try.

***

The fanciest hotel in town isn’t all that fancy. It’s basically a mid-level hotel with a Four Seasons attitude and a Holiday Inn budget.

I slip in the front doors, and walk purposefully to the house phone near some potted plants. The nice thing about me, remember, is I’m one of those beige middle-aged women, formerly pretty, that most people see but don’t really see.

Of course, the security cameras see me, but most hotels put them in the same locations—facing the registration desk (because of the money), the offices (again, the money) and the entrances and exits. Elevators and stairwells have them too.

No one cares about the house phone, however. I use it to verify that Margarite is here (she is) and what room she’s in. I do that by asking for her direct dial phone number. Hotels always put a nine in front of the hotel room number as the direct dial, and they’re usually happy to give that out to other guests—or the person who booked the room, namely one Raj O’Driscoll acting on the part of the university.

Apparently, the hotel operator has no idea that Raj is a male name.

Which works to my advantage of course. Margarite’s room is on the top floor (as I expected) and is probably one of the few suites in the hotel.

I take the stairs, because it’s easier (and more logical) to keep your head down in a stairwell than in an elevator. I’m carrying a purse instead of my weapons kit, having already prepared my tools.

I have my standard equipment inside the purse—a pistol and a couple of knives as well as the Bowie knife in its sheath. I also have the tranquilizer ready to go. Fortunately I learned that the best way to tranquilize an alligator is to use the same tranquilizer needle that vets use on elephants. So I have a few in stock.

I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

Except for the aching knife wound and the slowly growing exhaustion. I might be at more of a disadvantage here than I thought.

I make it to the eighth floor, find the room, and get confirmation that yes, she’s in a suite. If I had more time, I’d finesse the room next door or find a maid’s cart or something, but I don’t.

So I go the old-fashioned route.

I knock.

It only takes a moment for the door to sweep open. Margarite is standing there in a lovely pink negligee, complete with matching pink mules.

I of course see both her and the tusked alligator within, and I have to admit the pink looks a lot better with scaly green than the purple ever did.

She looks surprised to see me.

“We have a problem,” I say and walk inside as if I’ve been invited.

She has no choice except to follow me.

Here’s the moment of truth. With one quick movement, I grab the tranquilizer and shove it—not in her neck, like you’d do with most humans—but in that poochy belly of hers.

If she were a real human, that just might kill her, but she’s not. And my aim has to be perfect, because I’m trying to drill through the fake human skin into the soft spot where the alligator’s jaw meets its neck.

If I miss and survive, I have to go to plan B, where I try to get rid of the human form (which’ll be tough because now she’s prepared) and then go for the alligator soft spot.

She looks at me in stunned surprise, and then growls. Or roars. Or whatever it is alligators do. I feel the damn tusks clamp down on my wrist—something I hadn’t thought of at all. What if she disables my good hand? I’ll be damaged on both sides.

I push the plunger and hold it down, praying this stuff works. She starts wailing and wreathing. Her human face changes from pasty white to gold to a sickly green and back again.

Bone snaps and it’s not hers. It’s mine. My right hand is useless. The syringe falls away.

She keeps digging those tusks into my skin.

I’m not sure Plan B is even possible. I’m not sure escape is possible. I’m not sure how anyone is going to explain this one to the cops.

Then her eyes roll into the back of her head (both sets of eyes in both heads) and she topples over backwards.

Her tusky grip on my wrist, however, gets stronger.

I probably only have a few minutes. I’m trapped by those damn tusks, but I still have one hand free. That it’s the hand with the damaged arm is less important than it would have been, say, half an hour ago.

I grab a regular knife, the closest thing I have to the knife Raj used on me, and proceed to use it to slit the alligator within from gullet to gizzard. Then I pull out the tusks.

They still don’t come off my wrist. It’s like they’ve adhered on.

But the alligator within has curled up and turned black, and because I’ve seen it before, I know that means only one thing.

She’s dead.

***

I was going to slip out the balcony and rappel down the side of the building, just like they taught us in assassin school, but with one arm disabled and one useless wrist, I’m not going anywhere—at least by rope.

I have to let myself out of the hotel room and slither unrecognizably down the hall.

Not for the first time do I wish assassins of the magical are given their own powerful magic. I have to keep my head down and my movements non-conspicuous like any other hired killer.

And I can’t think about the searing pain in my wrist.

I get to the stairwell and stagger down, careful to always look away from the cameras.

All the way, I’m reevaluating my thinking. Maybe I should have killed her the prescribed way. Of course, how do you explain to university and hotel personnel that a famous writer has gone missing and in her hotel room is a dead alligator? It was hard enough to explain that the first time when the chaos demon wasn’t famous.

It’d be even tougher now.

No. I used poor Raj to my own advantage. He’ll get blamed for Margarite’s death (that’s why I used the same kind of knife) and the cops’ll decide that after killing her, he came after me. Maybe, they’ll say, he was going to kill everyone connected to the workshop.

Poor guy. If I could rehabilitate him, I would. But right now, I need a crazy version of Raj, not a brainwashed version. And I have to get back to my room before anyone sees me.

It’s not as hard as it seems. As long as I keep my tusked wrist tucked inside my purse, no one looks at me. I walk as best I can back to campus and back to my room.

Once there, I use an all-purpose pair of pliers in my non-dominant hand to try to remove the tusks. It’s so hard to do, I almost have to get help. (The question of who is what stops me.) Finally I manage to get the things off, but not before I hear my stitches rip.

The bone is broken, but I can’t do anything about that now. Tomorrow I’ll go to the hospital, say they overlooked the wrist, and I didn’t notice until morning. By then the scrapes will have bruised up nicely, and they’ll look more like something you’d get in a fight with a human than, say, a tusked alligator.

I clean the new wound, bandage it as best I can one-handed, then take as many painkillers as I can without killing myself and fall into bed.

When I wake up, it’s twenty-four hours later, and Carlotta Sternke is sitting on the edge of my bed.

“I was afraid you were dead,” she says in a tone that implies she wasn’t afraid at all but was, in fact, looking forward to it. “We cleaned up your floor.”

We, it turns out, was Hamlet Thorshov and Norman Zell. Turns out I had misjudged them. What I took for alienation was actually friendship among the most antisocial of writers.

They want to take care of me. I let them discover the wrist and insist on another hospital visit.

Where I get a splint, more stitches in the other side, and another prescription for painkillers.

Which I need, since it turns out that the Triumvirate was being nice to me only because I woke up while they were stealing my pain pills. Or maybe they were being nice to me because they felt guilty about stealing my pain pills.

It doesn’t matter either way. I’m not going to report them. I want this workshop to continue.

It looked shaky for a few days, but the school psychiatrists said we’d all be better off if we finished our workshop than if we left now. We agreed. Hallerhaven found someone to take over Margarite’s week, and we tried to get back to normal.

Or at least I did.

Because I’m getting out of the assassination racket. In fact, I can’t work assassinating even if I wanted to. I’m short-term recognizable. I’ve been interviewed by all the major networks, asking me why Raj came after me and Margarite. (I don’t know! I claimed in my best damsel in distress voice.)

Then I got an idea.

The western writer called her agent because she wants to write the true crime version of what happened.

I can’t write the true crime version because it would be too true and too unbelievable.

But I can write the fictionalized version.

If I play this right, I can become the new Margarite Lawson. I know of enough mysterious and unsolved crime scenes (not all of them my own) to keep me in novels for decades. I don’t have to go around magicking graduate assistants into forced homicides.

So even with the damaged breastbone and the broken wrist, I’m pecking away at the keyboard. I’m going to learn as much as possible these remaining three weeks.

And then I’m taking the publishing world by storm.

Look for These Other Titles from Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Destiny: A Story of The Fey

Five Fantastic Tales

“Game Testing”

“The Japanese Sword”

“Renn and the Little Men”

Sign up for the WMG Publishing newsletter to receive updates about new releases, bonus content and more at wmgpublishing.com

This bundle has everything from noir to romance. Great time travel tales and marvelous alternate history. There’s monsters and trains and adventure. There are crimes. There’s happily ever after. And almost everything is exclusive, including the writing workshop if you’d like to learn how to write your own time travel story.

My contribution to the bundle is an exclusive mini-bundle of two of my novels. The exclusive is called What If…Volume 1. (Yes, there will be more.) This particular volume combines two of my novels—Snipers, which is an alternate history and a time travel story filled with romance and adventure, and the first attempt at the same kind of story. The first attempt, Consecrated Ground, isn’t time travel at all. It’s a crime novel, and it’s not available anywhere else at the moment (although it is on preorder). Consecrated Ground is dark; Snipers is not (ultimately). Both are well reviewed and were popular when they were first published.

The cover on the top of this post is the brand-new cover for Snipers. And belowis an image of most of the books in the bundle. You can get all 15 books and the workshop for $30 (and give to World Central Kitchen at the same time).

Now here’s the bad news: The bundle will cease to exist late on Thursday (PDT). So if you want great ebook reading at a discount, go forth quickly and buy your copies. You can get your copies here.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post is from February of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

Sticking The Landing

Oh, wow. Endings. They’re so very important. They make or break an entire novel. Sometimes they make or break a reader’s entire experience with the author.

I’m very aware of this, and sometimes, as a writer, I don’t care. I’m not trying to please my readers. I always write to please myself.

Last week, as I was planning the future of my own writing, I ended up marinating in memories of my traditional publishing days, which brought back all those compromises I had to make. I never compromised on the work. I would walk instead of changing my vision for a story or a novel. And that made me unusual.

However, I would compromise as I was developing the idea, because I needed to sell on proposal. Often, I just ignored the proposal later, but occasionally I didn’t.

There were often dozens of fingers in my work on the proposal stage. People would say: Make it more like this current trend. No one wants to read about that topic. And my favorite, which still reverberates in my head sometimes: Wow, you’re trying to insult everyone all at once.

It’s hard to write when you have a crowd in your office. It’s hard to do a good job. I’m aware of that, and it makes me so happy to be indie these days.

I still read traditionally published writers, though. I have several whose work I love. And I sample books from writers I’ve never read before.

In January, I read a lot of short story anthologies, and in one of them, I read a story by a New York Times bestseller of long-standing. (And no, I will not tell you who she is.) I remember when her career started in the early part of this century. I thought she was a good mystery writer.

But somewhere along the way, she pivoted to the trendy. She became a writer of domestic thrillers—you know, the kind that happen in upper class suburban neighborhoods and gosh, by golly, gee whiz, there’s crime there and domestic violence and OMG, untrustworthy people.

Yeah, as you can tell, not really my genre, although I did sample a number of writers, realized it was me not them, and returned to my mean streets of cities fiction and other things.

I think I sampled this writer’s work then and didn’t like it— remembering that it’s me, not you—so I was a lot surprised by how much I liked that short story. I figured maybe she had moved off the domestic thriller train. It’d been a decade or more, after all.

I ordered her latest, which is set in New York (yay!), and then picked up one more book that sounded interesting as well. I settled into the latest book, and sure enough, the first part was pretty darn good. It kept me reading, anyway, even if there were parts that reminded me of Ira Levin novels from sixty years ago.

That’s okay. I don’t mind homage.

About two-thirds of the way through, though, there was a lot happening and it was getting more and more unbelievable. There were ghosts, but she wanted it both ways—maybe they’re an hallucination, and maybe they’re not—and the ghosts may or may not have an impact on the plot.

Then there was the bombshell about the husband that our protagonist knew but never mentioned, and then a lot of people died off-stage, all of them, and then…

Well, I kept reading, and sure enough, the twist was that it wasn’t the husband, like it usually is in domestic thriller. Okay, fine. The main plot ends, the ghosts are laid to rest, more people die, and we get to “six months later.”

And again, off-stage, we learn that some of the bodies were indeed dropped by the husband. The only person who ever believed in him was the wife, who at this point is (as the romance readers say) To Stupid To Live. She’s the only person in the book who isn’t a bad person, but that’s only because she’s dumber than a box of rocks. Everyone else is venal or a criminal or both. Most of them have murdered someone or accidentally caused a death, and all of them are unlikeable.

I finished that book, took it and the one I hadn’t read, and tossed them into the trade-in pile. I’m never reading her work again. Because really, honestly, that last third of the book was a truly terrible read.

She had a five-page long afterward in which she thanks her first readers, her second readers, her editors (both New York and London), her writer’s workshop, her agent (whom I happen to know and who is all about what she can sell, not about good storytelling),and all of her friends.

In other words, she lists the crowd in her office, and I’m sure, given that six-months-later section, they had a lot of influence on that.

Plus, the math was wrong. That might have irritated me the most. The main killers are eighty years old. It’s 2025. They had an eight-year-old child in 1963. Which meant that the kid was born in 1955. Which meant that the parents were both 10 years old when the kid was born.

Seriously, there were 1,000 early readers on this book and no copy editors? No one caught this but me? I actually went back to see if I had misread, but no, I hadn’t. Everyone listed in that afterward was math-challenged. Or they figured 1963 was so long ago no one would notice.

No one except this 65 year-old-reader who has a sister who turned 80 last year and who was sixteen when I was born in 1960. And no, she didn’t give birth to a kid in 1955 either.

Awful, horrible, irritating.

Because I’ve been looking for another good thriller writer. I don’t mind suspending disbelief and putting up with a high body count. I like to race through a book when it makes sense.

I thought, midway through, that I was really going to like this book. I almost ordered more books from this woman, but I’d learned long ago to see if the writer could stick the landing.

And, as you can tell, she didn’t. For me.

Sometimes sticking the landing is personal. Sometimes I don’t like the reveal that the narrator is the killer, even though I often love unreliable narrator stories. I hate books where the cute kid or puppy dies at the end—so much so that I now look ahead to see if the cute kid or puppy introduced on page five ends up dead at the end. (In paper books, I scan for kid/puppy’s name in the last chapter. It’s a pretty reliable method. I also have a few friends who know that I hate this with a profound passion, and they will let me know if a favorite author veers into dead kid territory.)

Oh, and a disclaimer—sometimes I kill the kid and the puppy in my fiction. As I told one of my students in January, I’m a complete hypocrite. (Or maybe just a true Gemini.) I hate that in my reading, but if the story I’m telling requires it, I will go that far in my writing.

Often, though, mostly, in fact, I will jump through major hoops to prevent the death of cute kid/puppy because I don’t like writing it. It’s devastating.

Anyway, that’s a me thing. And I will break the rule for some writers (I’m looking at you, Stephen King). I trust Stephen King to make sure that the death of the cute kid/puppy is never there solely to tug on my heartstrings. Usually the death is well foreshadowed (thank you) and it’s never there just to get more readers. It’s there because the story demands it.

I’ll abandon any writer who introduces the kid character, and then kills him off for no other reason besides giving the protagonist motivation. And again, that’s a me thing.

But the book I read this past week—which is not going on the monthly Recommended Reading List on my website—reminded me why so many traditional publishing books fail to stick the landing, particularly for authors who can’t stand up for their own vision.

I don’t know this particular author personally, but I will wager that she has made it such a habit to outsource her final draft that after two decades, she can’t conceive of any other way to write. And as a result, the end of the book was a mishmash of icky dumb stuff. (Everyone suspects the husband so make someone else the bad guy! If it’s the neighbors, there will be echoes of Ira Levin! We can use the Ira Levin thing as a pitch to the movies!)

The short story, on the other hand, would not have gone through the hands of the agent or both editors or anyone else associated with them. There’s not enough money in short fiction for those folks to waste their time.

So the short story was written by the unvarnished writer, who doesn’t write out of fear, the one who trusts her own vision.

As we all should.

I know, I know. I’m making a bunch of you very worried about your endings now. You wonder: How do I make sure I stick the landing?

Well, you write clean first drafts, don’t rewrite, and don’t let anyone else in your work. Then, you trust the process. Believe me, your creative voice will set up the proper ending. It won’t do fakey twists. If there’s a twist, it will be a legitimate one.

And then you let the project go. You move to the next.

There will be silly and stubborn readers like me who have ridiculous rules about what they read. (I will not read anything with corn on the cob in it! You can’t make me.) You’ll never get those readers. They will hate your work because you violated some personal rule you (and probably everyone else) had no idea existed.

But if you let an entire committee into what you do, then the writing you do will not be your best. You will stick the landing once in a while. Enough so that some readers will like what you do. But you won’t do it most of the time.

In fact, your books/stories well be good enough. As in mediocre. As in readable and little more. As mostly forgettable.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my fiction to be forgettable. I want it to be memorable.

The only way you will get people to read your next book is to have a satisfying ending on the current book…whatever that current book is for your readers. (I just finished a novel that I’ve had on my TBR shelf since 2009. That is the next book for me from that writer.)

So write your vision, and keep your friends, family, first readers, agent (if you’re dumb enough to have one), and editors out of it. You’re the writer. They’re not. How will they know if the storyworks? The story lives in your head.

The manuscript might fail, but that’s just a communication tool.

The story is all yours…and should remain all yours.

If your work is consistent—as in the ending should flow from details that exist in the beginning—then readers will return to you, even if they didn’t particularly like the ending of a book. They will see the authenticity.

The book I just finished reading had no authenticity. It was filled with kitchen-sink items, and that 1963 problem was a tell. The date had to be left over from an earlier draft.

I feel for the author. She’s clearly got it into her head that she needs the assistance of an entire village to make her books work.

And her work is good enough. It will help readers pass the time. But her work certainly won’t make them remember her for a long period of time.

That’s a shame, because the short story shows a writer with great power. Her novels do not.

Ah, well.

I’m sure I won’t remember this book much after this week. Maybe the Ira Levin stuff, and the 1963 things because it’s so egregious. But I will remember that I have not had a good experience with this author in the long form.

And I will not buy another novel from her. Ever.

“Sticking The Landing” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Around Memorial Day, I read a novel that had been released the Tuesday before from a favorite Big Name Writer of mine. The novel was good enough to hold my interest, although I found myself scanning. I took an evening off to finish it…and wow, did I get mad. He skipped the validation entirely. Just ended it with Our Hero talking to a reporter, a scenario that would have worked in the 1990s, but in 2026, in the Dumpster Fire Era? No. Fake news abounds, and what would have been a career-ending scandal would be just a day in the office now. So I turned the page…and there was no more book. Extremely irritating, so badly irritating that it took me almost a day to recover. Yeah, sometimes I take the reading personally, especially when I don’t have as much time for it as I used to.

(Note: I wrote a post on the importance of endings on my Patreon page. That post became a chapter in my upcoming book, The Write Attitude.)

But, he’s an Old Reliable, for me anyway, and I’ll pick up the next book. It would take maybe half a dozen misses for me to let him go as a go-to author. This was unusually cursory and incomplete for him, which was weird. Probably something happening in his life that took focus away from the novel. Sigh.

I also binged the Best American Mystery and Suspense stories, but I wrote it up a month later. So I’m only letting you know which stories stuck with me. Let me say this: Titles are important, folks. If the title didn’t remind me, I had to look at the opening—and sometimes that didn’t remind me either. So, writers, make sure your titles fit your stories. I can’t say too much about the stories I liked because that will ruin them—which is actually a compliment.

As for my reading during the rest of the month, I’ve enjoyed what I’m seeing. I’ve shared what I like below.

May 2026

Aptaker, Ann, “Neon Women,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, edited by Don Winslow, Mariner, 2025. Originally written for an anthology of crime stories set in the 1970s, this story captures a lost Times Square and a lost kind of personality. Vivid, startling, and well done.

Armstrong, Kelley, The Deepest of Secrets, Minotaur, 2022. This is the final book in the Rockton series, but not the final book in Kelley Armstrong Casey Duncan Series. Yes, it can be confusing. I wrote a post on my Patreon Page about excellent series, and discussed the courageous stuff that Kelley Armstrong is pulling off even though these books are traditionally published. I’m not going to tell you much about this book because it will spoil the series if I do. Just suffice to say I’m impressed as hell.

Armstrong, Kelley, A Stranger in Town, Minotaur, 2021.  I’ve spent May plowing through Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton series. She’s pulling off an amazing reader trick, at least for me. She makes me read books in a setting I would never travel to and I can suspend my disbelief at some of the circumstances so quickly that I’m deep in the story before I even know what’s happening next. This particular tale focuses on the title–a stranger in a place that strangers can’t even find. And of course, there’s a murder and the overall plot is quite dicey and oh, my…if I say more I ruin it. Read this series, and start with City of the Lost.

Balogh, Mary, Remember That Day, Berkeley, 2026. Normally, I would put Mary Balogh’s cover here, but no. Nope. No. Not doing it. We actually made fun of the cover at Writer’s Lunch in February. The cover is so awful that it looks like it was designed by a beginning cover artist. And the “hero”‘s eyes are looking down her low-cut (for Regency) dress. Not kidding. So no cover picture. You can look it up yourself.

The book itself is wonderful and a masterful feat of storytelling. She brings two of her series together here, and her series always have dozens of characters. The romance is good and the story feels original. I wrote a longer piece about this on my Patreon Page. I started a series about writing series, and cited this book as a master work (with some analysis). So check it out!

Carter, Ally, Out of Sight, Out of Time, Little, Brown, 2016 edition of a 2012 book. This is book five of the Gallagher Girls series. It was unputdownable for me, but if you’re new to the series, start with book one. All of the tension here, at least at the beginning, comes from previous books. Then the book itself adds even more tension. Cammie, our heroine, has lost her memory over the summer, and since she is in the middle of a terrible crisis, the memory loss is a bigger deal than usual. Plus, someone important is in a coma, and the school has other problems and maybe we’re going to learn something about Dad and…Yeah. Just start the series and catch up. You’ll be happy you did.

Coates, Craig Francis, “Grendel,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, edited by Don Winslow, Mariner, 2025. “Grendel” is probably the best story in the volume. You don’t even have to have read Beowulf to understand it, but it helps if you did. The ending made me gasp. The skill level here is high. The story is one I wish I’d thought of myself. Enough said.

Leder, Stephanie, “Not A Dinner Party Person,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, edited by Don Winslow, Mariner, 2025. Great characterization here, great voice, and a wonderful ending that makes the story.

McElwain, Julie, Echoes in Time, Seshat Books, 2025. I know that Julie McElwain is self-publishing this series now, and I’m really glad she is. The books are hard to put down, the situation totally unbelievable and, as a reader, I don’t care. I’m loving the reading experience.

However, I worry about her (vaguely, since I don’t know her). She’s paying for covers and for someone to design the interior. That someone did not proof their work, and they’re just pouring the book into an online program without knowing how book interiors (for print) should look. I worry that McElwain is being horribly overcharged and that will make recouping her money difficult and at some point, she will stop writing the books for economic reasons. So…read this series. (It starts as a traditionally published series, then moved indie.) Encourage your friends. Let’s keep her sales up so that she can continue writing Kendra Donovan books, because they’re fun.

Pochoda, Ivy,  “Jackrabbit Skin,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, edited by Don Winslow, Mariner, 2025. This novella is set in a part of Nevada/California that scares the ever-loving’-crap out of me. So remote that it makes the Yukon seem populated, this part of the desert is empty and terrifying and filled with people who don’t want to be found. So, what does our LA protagonist do? She moves into one of those places where people go to get away from people. I know this, and I was tense from the first sentence. Pochoda’s writing is strong, the sense of place real, and the crimes believable. Even the ending, which I honestly did not see coming, is believable. One of the best novellas I’ve read in years.

Winslow, Don, The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025,Mariner, 2025. When I started reading this volume, I worried about recommending it. Heck, I worried about finishing it. Don Winslow likes gritty noir, and much of what’s here is just that. But the great things about gritty noir are the characters, the voice, and the setting. So most of the stories held me, even when I didn’t want them to. It was the most even reading experience I’ve had with a good anthology in years. (Bad ones are even in their mediocrity.) I found myself riveted by almost every story. I’m not sure this is bedtime reading, but it’s good reading nonetheless, and you should pick it up.

Sunkissed Summer features stories by wonderful writers from Annie and Dave themselves to Christy FiField, Dayle A. Dermatis, Thea Hutchinson, and so many others. I’m honored to be in such company.

My story happens in summer school, which, in the desert, isn’t as lovely an idea as you would think. And the characters aren’t your average college students…

Get your copy here—and enjoy!

And, if you want even more time travel, pick up my novel Snipers, which is part of the What If… book in the current Escape from 2026 Storybundle. Lots of alternate history fiction as well as time travel fiction here. The bundle will run for just a few weeks, so get your books now.

Of course, whenever I feel like I need to escape from something, I make plans. Or I try to do something that’s helpful. In this case, I did both.

First, I want to help readers (and writers) figure out how to find some personal time in 2026…by imagining themselves elsewhere. Or elsewhen. I kinda like the elsewhen part. Let’s imagine our world, but different.

So I asked some of my favorite writers if they had time travel or alternate history tales to contribute to a Storybundle. You can now get 14 ebooks, twelve of which are exclusive and impossible to find anywhere else in this bundle. There’s also a writing workshop in case you want to write your own escape.

I’ve included two of my books. One, Snipers, is alternate history and time travel. The other, Consecrated Ground, is neither, but should be. I combined them for reasons that you’ll see when you read the bundle. Consecrated Ground is an author-preferred edition of one of my best reviewed books, but it won’t be available wide until this fall. So if you want to read it early, here’s your chance.

You can get all of these books at a discount, so not only are there a lot of escapes here, but they’re also available at a bargain price.

Which leads to…

Second, I give to charities a lot during times of crisis. We–the world–have been in a prolonged crisis for years now. So I made sure the charity that we chose for this Storybundle responds to crisis. World Central Kitchen provides food in crisis zones worldwide. Their mission has remained the same over the years, but the need has grown, so any money you can give to them would be greatly appreciated.

We made it easy by adding them to the Storybundle.

So…pick up your escape, and spend the summer reading about other places and other times. All the while your money will magically work to help those in need.

Here’s the link to Storybundle. Thanks!

Everything in this bundle is exclusive to the Storybundle, including my book. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. The Storybundle ends in two days, so you might want to get yours now. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites. The new edition will release on in July.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post is from February of 2025, and is in the second section of  the book. 

DOING THE WORK AMID THE NOISE

From 2025

There are times in life when being a writer is hard. I don’t mean real-world hard. Real-world hard is when your job is so important that one small error means someone else dies. There are a lot of real-world hard jobs in the world, and they keep the rest of us safe and alive.

As I said in Chapter 11, entertainment is important as well. We have an obligation to help those who are doing real-world hard jobs by giving them some kind of respite at the end of their long days.

But that means we have to do the work, and the work comes out of our brains. When we’re panicked and distracted—checking the news every fifteen minutes, looking at our social media, worrying aloud with our friends about what is going to happen next—it’s difficult, if not near impossible to concentrate on our made-up worlds.

They feel so small and unimportant.

We don’t see readers enjoying our work. We have no idea that a reader will close a book and hug it, like I did a week ago when I finished Robert Crais’s latest, The Big Empty. I know that Bob is a slow writer, and I wish he wasn’t, because I would love another of his books right now.

He lives in L.A. Not only are people there dealing with the chaos that is America right now, they’re dealing with the devastating losses of many parts of their community. I suspect he’s distracted.

I know that Connie Willis is distracted because I’m following her Facebook page in which she aggregates all the news of the day. I have no idea how she finds the time to write fiction or if she even is. I hope she is.

I’m a former journalist. I love information, the more the better. But, after the election, I shut off all media. I canceled all of my major newspaper subscriptions, stopped watching everything but the weather on any news channel, and got a lot done. I needed to because of an ongoing business crisis.

But I also needed the rest.

And I knew if I didn’t figure out how to control the information that came to me, I would not write another sentence—at least in fiction.

Writing fiction, as unglamorous as it sounds, is my job. It’s what I do for a living. But it’s also what I would do if the world ended tomorrow (which has gotten closer, according to the Doomsday Clock run by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists).

I make up stories. I always have. I write them down and have done that since I was in grade school.

Storytelling keeps me sane.

After the despair of the election (not shock, because I kept saying all summer [hell, all year] that this was possible, even if I wasn’t really listening to myself), I needed that quiet. I needed to accept that the world as I had known it for years would change dramatically.

How dramatically? I had—and have—no idea. This post is not about what’s going on out there in the real world. It’s changing too fast. I sat down at 1 p.m. on a Sunday, knowing that by the time I finish, more news will pour in.

It might be good; it might be bad; it might be hopeful; it might be devastating. It might be all those things at once.

It’s too much for the brain to cope with—and right now, it’s designed that way. Which is why I urge you to take care of yourself and your family first. Then take care of your community, whatever that might be, and then pick one or two or three issues to work on and be part of the solution for. If all of us do that, our differences will make sure that we will cover the entire spectrum of problems that are popping up like weeds.

Yes, I know. People are dying. I know. The situation is growing more dire by the day.

One step at a time. That’s all we can do. See above.

The problem is, then, how to corral the brain and give it enough space so that you can write.

That solution is different for each and every one of us. And it’s different each one of us as an individual at different points in our lives.

I can only give you examples from my own life.

Example #1: I got very sick when I was living on the Oregon Coast. I’m already allergic to half the world; there, we later discovered, I was living in mold and was allergic to that too. We moved to the dry desert here in Nevada just in time. I doubt I would have made it through the year otherwise.

But, I was and am a writer. I wrote through all of that, and even wrote a book about my methods for writing when I barely had enough strength to get out of bed. The book is called Writing With Chronic Illness, which will appear in a revised edition in mid-2026.

Some of the solutions in that book might work for some of you now. Doing the writing first, being happy with what you can accomplish, accepting your limits—all of those are important.

I did them as best I could there. Here, in Las Vegas, I’m healthier, although the chronic conditions do fell me more than I would like. I can get through them easier in this dry climate, so sometimes I forget what I had learned.

Example #2: Our close friend Bill Trojan died, and Dean had to handle Bill’s horribly messy estate. At the same time, my editor at one of the traditional publishing houses had a mental meltdown and spent a half an hour on the phone, screaming at me and telling me I was the worst writer on the planet.

No one treats me like that. No one. So I immediately divorced that publisher, offering to pay back the money they had invested in me and my work so that I could get the rights to my books back.

That was at least $250,000 that I would have had to pay—even though we were embroiled in the estate mess and Dean was not working on publishing and writing, due to that big problem.

My confidence was shaken, and we were in financial difficulties. I had to figure out how to write a funny novel that was still under contract.

I did, a page here and a page there. I remember sitting in my office and writing long paragraphs about how awful that editor was to get her out of my head so that I could actually finish a book that was under contract for someone else.

I did it, but shutting out the noise was almost impossible. It took concentration. It took will power. It took a daily reminder to myself that writing is supposed to be fun.

And you know what? Many days, it ended up being that way, just because of the determination.

Example #3: As many of you know, the last two or so years of my life have been filled with turmoil. Dean lost much of his eyesight, which meant we had to make some massive changes in our lives. Then, just as he was getting used to the changes, he fell on a 5K race and destroyed his right shoulder.

He couldn’t do much work. He was healing. I cared for him and, as I dug deeper into the business at our publishing company, I realized it was sick too.

We had to make drastic changes there, and I had to take over the company completely.

Which meant it got run the Kris way—lots of questions, lots of systems, lots of data, lots of procedures. The old staff buckled under the Kris method (which had not been in place since I got very ill in 2015), and within two months, they were gone…leaving problems so massive behind that those problems either had to be solved or the company had to be dissolved.

Dean and I chose solving those problems, and we had (and have) great help in doing so. These sorts of events teach you who your friends really are.

I knew, as we dug in, that I was not going to be focused on the writing. I needed to figure out how to harness that focus in a different way.

I had a novel to finish as well as short story deadlines from traditional short fiction editors. I was not going to miss those deadlines, and I needed to finish that novel.

The problem was that in this small condo, I did not have a second business office. I had to do the work on my laptop and my writing computer in my writing office.

I knew I needed help.

So I set up a challenge with other writers. I made it costly for me to lose (not just pride—which, pardon my French, fuck if I care about personal pride). I started the first challenge in December of 2023, and continued the challenges through most of 2024.

I lost a couple of times. But the challenge was the only thing that got me to the computer. Daily word count…that I had to report (and God, I hate reporting). I couldn’t fudge it for my own sake, and I didn’t.

I finished that novel, and a lot of short fiction, before September hit, and the business stuff combined with some legal matters that were all do-not-miss and I had to miss some writing days.

It irked me—and kept the writing as a focus.

Usually I don’t bring others into my writing process, but I knew I would need it in 2024. So I did it.

I continued the writing challenges into early 2025, because I knew that I needed to get back to massive novel production, and I didn’t want to lose my short story focus. I have to do both (which I have done throughout my career).

It’s not as draconian as the 2024 challenge, but my life is different now. The business has settled into a pattern. We’ve moved the main offices to Nevada, which means I have a business desk. (Yay!) And we’ve gotten through some of the mess left by the old staff, and what’s left we’re slowly wrapping our arms around.

One thing I noticed, though, in all of those crises, is that the world swirled around me, with its problems and its demands. In each of them, it felt like a massive storm pounding on the outside of my house—you know the kind: the rain is horizontal, the winds are devastating, and the view outside the windows is black and gray, with almost no visibility at all.

You just have to wait out those storms and know that when they’re over, everything will be different, but some things will still stand. There will be rebuilding. There will be heartbreak. But the sun will have come out to reveal what’s left.

In the middle of it, though, you just have to survive it and keep the important things safe.

Your writing is one of those important things. It will take effort to keep it safe. Effort on your part.

And you’ll have to figure out what it will take for you to do it. My methods might not work for you. Find what works. Realize that those things might not work in a different kind of crisis.

But you can find a way to be with yourself during these tough times.

Here are a few practical things you can do in most (not all) crises:

• Protect your safe space. For me, that’s my writing space. I couldn’t do it during this last crisis, but I managed somehow. It felt uncomfortable and reminded me yet again about the importance of having a dedicated writing computer.
• Shut off the internet. Dean uses a different computer for his internet research—one that’s just a foot or two away from his writing computer. I shut off my wi-fi, so that clicking over to the internet for research takes a conscious action, and often makes me realize that I was just heading over to distract myself. (Different strokes, y’know.)
• Set a daily writing time. Make sure your family knows what it is, and that you shouldn’t be disturbed. Try to pick a time when it’s not easy to disturb you (early mornings; late evenings)

There are so many other practical things you can do, but again, they become specific to you.

One other thing—a tough thing—is that sometimes the project you were working on when the crisis hit is not the project your creative voice needs right now. You might have to switch—something shorter, something longer, something that requires less research, something that requires a different kind of concentration.

It’s up to you.

But the key here is to remember that when you write, you’re inside and safe from the storm. It will rage around you unabated while you’re working. It’ll probably (sadly) still be there when you’re done with today’s writing session.

But you got that session done. It’s a victory.

Celebrate the tiny victories. Keep writing.

And remember, in almost every difficult time, the only way out is through.

“Doing The Work Amid The Noise” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Anyway, with school ending and a bunch of other things closing down, it feels like summer has started. The end of the school year has always felt like a beginning to me anyway, as the daughter of a professor. I love school (which is why I take the occasional class at UNLV) and I love having school end.

Oh! And basketball season has started just this weekend, even though my Aces allowed themselves to suffer a tragic defeat yesterday.

My summer includes a lot of book design, some learning on a video program, and several writing-adjacent projects. I looked at that, then looked at myself, and realized, Uh,oh. Distract-o Girl will not get much writing done unless she plans really well.

I have learned over the last few years that without firm deadlines from the outside, I need something to get me in the chair first thing. Challenges work, especially when I have a lot of other distractions. (In the past three years, they were mostly bad distractions; now they’re mostly good ones.)

So, I’m in need of a challenge. When I’m in need of an exterior challenge, I set one up. I talked to Dean about it, and it seems that he needs one too. Plus we need to focus on the writing first again, which means we need to do some motivational things. When we get like this, we want to share.

Rather than have me explain it all, I’m going to copy Dean’s blog from Thursday night. (Note that the “I” in the italicized section below is actually Dean.)

Everything in this Storybundle is exclusive, including The Write Attitude. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. The bundle will end in 9 days, so hurry on over. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites starting next month. The new edition will release in July.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post appeared on my Patreon page in November of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

SOUNDING LIKE YOURSELF

From 2025

In a Billboard article about Addison Rae, I came across a useful Miles Davis quote. (Billboard, August 13, 2025.) She cited the quote this way:

Sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.

Wow. That hit home. But before I used it to base a blog post on, I looked it up. I was worried that it really wasn’t a Miles Davis quote or that it was a misquote (although it didn’t sound like one). What I found was that there are two versions of this quote, which leads me to believe that the jazz great remarked on this a lot.

The other version of the quote says:

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

And I think I like that one better, although both quotes are useful. For those of you who don’t know who Miles Davis was, he was one of the most influential musicians of the mid-twentieth century. He is definitely one of the most influential jazz musicians of all time.

If you are not familiar with him or his work, start at his website, milesdavis.com, and scan outward. You are probably familiar with a lot of his music, particularly if you’re a jazz fan.

The reason I like both quotes is that they have at least two different meanings, three if you think of them from the point of view of a prose writer.

The first quote: It takes a long time to sound like yourself.

That’s all about voice. Yes, Miles Davis, Addison Rae, and vocal coach Eric Vetro (who first showed Rae the quote) were talking about a musical voice—about sounding like no one else by channeling your own inner vision.

Which is what the best writers do. (That’s why the worst copy editors aren’t the ones who introduce mistakes; they’re the ones who put some writer’s manuscript into “perfect” grammar, ruining their voice.) If you listen to Stephen King reading his own work, his inflections and pauses are not surprising because he knows how to write them into the prose. (His accent or the tone of his voice might surprise you, but nothing more than that.)

Stephen King, former English teacher, found his own voice as a young boy and then learned how to transmit that voice, via the tool of a manuscript, into the brain of a reader. What he does is an extremely difficult skill, and one I aspire to. That’s why I typed Mick Herron’s work into my computer a while back (see the previous chapter), so that I could learn how someone else did things.

The more tools you have in the toolbox, the better writer you will be.

If you don’t read much fiction or you don’t read much fiction anymore, as so many writers say, then you’ve stopped accumulating tools. As long as I breathe, I will be reading. And the fascinating part to me is that I see writers do things that I thought were impossible or things I’ve never thought of. Or, Mick Herron’s case, he does things that someone, somewhere, decades ago, had warned me away from. (The opening to each Slough House book is an astonishing exercise in setting the stage as well as the characters and the themes of each book.)

Here’s the tough part. Once you sound like yourself, your writing will seem bland to you. Because you live with that voice in your head each and every day.

So that’s the voice part.

That’s the first part of sounding like yourself.

The second part is this: You must defend your voice, your “sound.” Sure, it might be “wrong” to use a dozen semi-colons in a single paragraph, but Herron does it to such great effect (sometimes in a single sentence) that the reader doesn’t notice them.

I didn’t realize the man uses a million semi-colons until I typed in his work. I’m semi-colon lite, dash heavy, which, I thought, made me a much more breathless writer than he is, but his work continually proves me wrong.

I’m sure some silly copy editor somewhere tried, once upon a time, to edit out all of his semi-colons and to make his honkin’ long single-sentence paragraphs into many sentences, and from what I can tell, the man slapped them down.

There’s another component to voice, though, and it has nothing to do with words and grammar and punctuation. It’s subject matter. It’s characterization. It’s something I discussed after the Herron piece. It’s the ability to “go there,” wherever there is. (See chapter 10.) To write the stuff that frightens us, that makes us original, that might get us in trouble with the readers or in some cases, the government.

It’s the stuff that doesn’t fall into genre lines.

I was having a discussion a few weeks back with someone I was considering working with on a future project. That person insisted we use trope charts, like so many writers have started to do in Kickstarters.

Tropes are well and good, if used sparingly. As a romance reader, I want to see—either from the sales copy or from a trope listing—that the book in my hand uses the enemies-to-lovers trope or is a small-town romance. I want to avoid a guardian-ward historical trope because…yucky!

So a one-line description or acknowledgement of the trope is a good thing, especially in books where the ending is prescribed, like a romance (happily ever after) or a cozy mystery (amateur solves a stakes-free murder).

But other than that—a tropes chart? You might as well put two gigantic signs on your work. The first sign says, Read something else because this book is on rails. The second sign says, This book is mediocre. There are no surprises here. There’s a third sign, but only if someone dares to crack open a book based on a tropes chart. And that sign says This writer has no idea what tropes are. The ones listed here are not in the book.

Whoops.

Writers who sound like themselves can’t write books that can be boiled down into a tropes chart. Sure, the overall trope might work because that might form the heart of the book. (I’m thinking of enemies to lovers here in a romance trope.) But going beyond that would harm the reading experience if the writer is writing from their heart.

That’s why writers who are really good at sounding like themselves often have trouble selling their fiction to set markets, particularly traditional markets. Those markets want something they can sell, and a book that’s on rails is easier to market to a consumer than a book that is, at its core, like nothing a reader has ever seen before.

That’s why this quote comes from Miles Davis. His website has this sentence on the home page:

Miles Davis made music that grew from an uncanny talent to hear the future and a headstrong desire to play it.

Note the phrases here. “Uncanny talent.” In other words, he did things no one else dared. “Hear the future.” I might disagree with that one on some level, because on that level, Davis invented the future that his website claimed he heard. And, the most important phrase, “a headstrong desire to play it.”

Later this little biographical snippet points out that Davis never stopped fighting for his art. That’s my memory of him. He wasn’t as respected in his lifetime as he became later, even though no one dared argue with the impact he was having. I worked in listener-sponsored radio in Wisconsin and was immersed in jazz. We could play all kinds of jazz for our listeners and they supported the programming with their dollars.

The other local jazz station was much more conservative. They played traditional melodic jazz, things we call standards now, and would go to modern jazz after 10 p.m. when most Midwesterners went to bed. Even then, you wouldn’t find a lot of Miles Davis on that station. The powers that be loathed his work.

I think that’s the other side of this. You have to become good enough to force people to have opinions about your work. “Having opinions” means they’ll love it or they’ll hate it. What is most important, though, is that they won’t forget it.

These mediocre, “properly written” works? The ones with the voice edited out of them, with the vision troped to death? Those will be forgotten the moment that the reader closes the book.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to be accused of being mediocre. Love or hate my work, that’s up to the reader. But finding it dull or predictable…well, then, I’ve done something wrong.

The second quote from Miles Davis is my favorite. I think it might more accurately reflect what he’s getting at, especially if you’re familiar with his music.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Yeah, I know. He’s talking about playing music, often onstage. He was the master of improvisation, but even in the improvisation, the listener knew they were listening to Miles Davis. His perspective was that original.

But what I love here is the word “play.” I love watching jazz musicians in particular improvise. Somewhere in the middle of what they’re doing, they’ll grin at each other. They’re having fun. They’re creating something new, something unexpected, and it gives them joy.

This type of musicianship is why I don’t miss a Keith Urban residency when he’s in Las Vegas. He performs intensely and playfully, goofing around much more than other residency performers I’ve seen. I wasn’t a big fan (or much of a fan at all) when I first saw him perform, and now I go to watch the playful musicianship.

Writers need to play as well. We need to experiment. We need to risk failure. We need to jangle some chords, try a different instrument, and go far, far, far off the beaten path.

That means we’ll miss sometimes, but it also means that when we hit, the work will be powerful.

When I talk about play, I’m not saying that writers should only write something light and “fun.” Instead, I’m talking about experimentation, about risking everything, about free-floating ideas from our own subconscious even if those ideas make us feel uncomfortable.

We should also go for different formats and different genres, different lengths and different ideas than we’ve explored before. We might not be onstage riffing with our friends, but we should write in that same spirit of improvisational play.

We need to be uniquely ourselves as writers. And as Miles Davis said (and yes, he wrote his own stuff), it takes a long time to achieve that.

But finding yourself as a writer? That’s worth the time spent.

“Sounding Like Yourself” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.