New book and recent writing

It's been a quiet time for essays on Isaac's Law, your premier destination for 1000-word quickies on fanfic and the symphony. I've been busy promoting my new vampire archivist novel, Dead Collections, which the New York Times (in a rave review by Casey McQuiston) called a "thoughtful, acerbic, bracingly hopeful book." Dead Collections was my second book, and my first release from a big 5 publisher, which meant I just learned what it's like to have everybody pay attention to you for exactly 24 hours. The answer is "wild."

Anyway, I'm just updating the Law with all the essays and things that I have written lately, mostly to publicize the book. Here:

I wrote for Lithub about the way archives are chalk outlines for dead bodies, and about some jars of pubic hair that we have at work; also crying in the archives, and Robert Chesley's kinks.

I recommended some haunted books for tor.com. This piece required editorial intervention to make me explain why, exactly, I wanted to read five books that made me feel like shit.

Danny Lavery interviewed me for the Chatner, and then Calvin Kasulke interviewed me for Electric Lit. Both interviews are, if I'm honest, bangers, and really speak to Danny and Calvin's editorial skills in simply cutting out every moment that I was boring. For a bonus, you can see that I talk like a Victorian man (Calvin's interview was conducted over the phone), but do a pretty good job of disguising this in text (Danny's interview was conducted via email).

My agent and fellow writer, Kate McKean, had a conversation with me over at Catapult about what genre is (my own conclusion: for a publisher, it's a marketing tool, and for a reader, it's something we depend on to validate our understanding of the human condition, and those are just two of the reasons publishers and readers tend to talk past each other a little bit).

I wrote a polemic about fan fiction for Crimereads. I didn't pick the title ("Dismissing Fan Fiction As Base Just Makes You Look Basic"), but I admire its chutzpah.

Lastly, I did a Reddit AMA over on r/fantasy, in which I answered some very charming questions about things like "drinks that best represent my work" and "did I invent any more of the fictitious religion in my first book than you see on the page" (absolutely not).