Hello!
It’s me, your friend, Dana! I have a Substack that I still haven’t quite figured out what to do with yet, but in the meantime, I figured I would use it to tell you all that I have a book coming out on Tuesday, February 28, called IMMORTALITY: A LOVE STORY.
It’s the sequel to my previous novel, ANATOMY: A LOVE STORY, which follows a young woman named Hazel Sinnett who dreams of becoming a surgeon in 1800’s Edinburgh and forges an unlikely friendship with a resurrection man (aka someone who digs up dead bodies to sell them for anatomical study) named Jack.
In this one, Hazel’s adventures as a female surgeon at the dawn of modern medicine continue when she’s enlisted as a personal physician to Princess Charlotte of Wales, the granddaughter of the mad King George III.
[Q: Do I have to read ANATOMY if I want to enjoy IMMORTALTY? A: Probably, but look, if you only want to buy one book, ANATOMY already sold fine and this new one could use the help.]
Writing a sequel is inherently terrifying for me, someone who cares a lot about what other people think and who fixates on a nebulous and possibly nonexistent threshold for success. There is endless potential to something, and someone new. The shine is gone with a sequel, in a sense. It’s hard to capture the magic of a *debut,* of a new story, with new characters, filled with promise.
They say it’s easier for a novelist to get a big advance on their debut than it is their followup; that it’s harder for a young TV writer to get staffed on their second show. People smarter than I have pointed out that fast-fashion brands like Shein and Wish, which gleefully destroy our environment with cheap polyesters shipped around the globe at back-breaking speed, have risen alongside a social media imperative never to be photographed in the same thing twice.
We love Young, we love Shiny, we love New. We love something underground, that no one else has seen before. We love the reflected glow that comes from discovering something great before anyone else. We love potential. There is very little of that to go around when you are trying to convince people to buy a second book in a series. It is something I am reckoning with in the aftermath of my 30th birthday. My foibles aren’t adorable anymore (if they ever were); mistakes aren’t charming. Having a job and doing it successfully is an expectation, and not an achievement. I never was an ingenue, but I tried my best to play the part of one sometimes in professional settings.
After I finished writing Anatomy sometime in 2020 or 2021, I told myself that I wasn’t going to write a sequel. Forward! I thought. Onward! Though the story changed countless times through its numerous iterations (Hazel was briefly “Olive;” before it took place in Edinburgh, it was in a fictional American colony called New London; the time period jumped from 1818 to 1839 and back again) but it always had the same bittersweet, ambiguous ending. I would do something new, reinvent myself like a popstar ushering in an “era” with a hairstyle change and mediocre techno beat.
In my writing career, I veered from YA to self-flagellating memoir to humor to politics to entertainment reporting to comic books to television writing to history back to YA. They were all genuine interests, all pieces of myself I was identifying and offering up quick as I possibly could, to the hungry Internet—to magazine editors, to twitter followers, to the cool people I wanted to be my friends or fall in love with me or hire me. Every reiteration was a fresh chance to reintroduce myself to a public that, maybe, maybe would notice me before I aged out of being worth noticing.
(Ironic then, and enjoy the moral that the most lasting career success I’ve had has been in the growing audience for my podcast, Noble Blood, which I’ve worked at continually, steadily, unchangingly, for coming on three years.)
And then, walking one evening, I had an idea for a story for Miss Hazel Sinnett.
Or rather, I had an image.
My image. was a cabal of the most brilliant thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries—scientists, writers, philosophers, poets—lounging together in a salon, letting the world spin around them. And then I thought of a pirate ship. I thought of a shipwreck, and elegant ballrooms and gilded throne rooms and the stench of madness and arrogance and a tall doctor who might be exactly the partner Hazel always wanted for herself and suddenly I had a novel taking shape in my head the way a puzzle becomes simple once you have the corner pieces and border taken care of.
And so, I tucked away the voice in my head telling me people only wanted new that I should be doing more that I should be doing bigger (just as now, I tucked away the imagined cringe from my devoted book publicists when they realized I wrote the clause “the shine is gone in a sequel” to promote my…. sequel), and I wrote the story I wanted to write.
It was easier in some ways, because I knew the characters so well. Their dialogue came to me easy as a conversation with a friend, as did their reactions and their flaws and their limitations. But I also found myself paralyzed: that this book would always be considered Less Than it’s counterpart, or, more pressingly, that I would disappoint the readers who trusted me with their time and their money and read the first book.
Is rambling insecurity a viable sales tactic? Almost certainly not. Ah, well.
I wrote IMMORTALITY: A LOVE STORY, because I fell in love with its world in my head and I wanted to share it. I am so genuinely proud and honored of those who are willing to take the journey back into Hazel’s story with me.
If you’re going to be in one of the cities I’m touring in, please please come and say hi! These things are almost always awkward, and I will appreciate a familiar face.
If you’ve already ordered a copy: thank you, thank you, thank you.
If you’re going to review the book: I tried my best.
Hope to see you around,
Dana
Here are all of the helpful links for events!
Feb 27--Los Angeles--Barnes & Noble The Grove with Victoria Aveyard
Feb 28--San Diego--Mysterious Galaxy
March 1--Beaverton, OR-- Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing with Sarah Marshall
March 6--New York--Strand Bookstore with Hannah Orenstein
March 7--Chicago--Anderson's Books Naperville with Rachel Strolle
March 8--Nashville--Parnassus Books with Sharon Cameron
Alas, I don't live in any of the tour cities. But! One of my best friends lives in Nashville so I will implore her to come see you. Good luck with the sequel and the tour.