I Am Coming To Your City
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I’m Spreading Across The Country
That’s right! I’m going on tour! Spread Me comes out in, god help us all, just a couple of weeks, and I get to travel all over the dang place to celebrate. Here’s where I’ll be!
You can find more information and keep up-to-date on changes to the schedule by following me on Instagram or at the MacMillan website.
Some Details (subject to change)
- In Washington, DC, I’ll be at Loyalty Books for a pre-launch event with copies of the book available for purchase even though it technically won’t be out yet. This is an amazing opportunity to flex on any and all haters by having exclusive early access to the book.
- In New York City, I’ll be at a launch night revue at Club Cumming, Alan Cumming’s nightclub. The show will feature drag, burlesque, and cabaret performances, and will be hosted by the luminous Daphne Always. If you aren’t familiar with Daphne, just know that I have seen her perform and can testify: she is the chanteuse of all time. If you’re in the New York area, you do not want to miss this show.
- In Richmond, I’ll be at Fountain Bookstore, in conversation with the brilliant Sunny Moraine.
- In Columbus, I’ll be at Book Loft of German Village, a bookstore I’ve wanted to do an event at for years now.
- In Austin, I’ll be at Bookpeople, in conversation with the petrifying Gabino Iglesias.
- In San Diego, I’ll be at my beloved Mysterious Galaxy, a bookstore I’ve long considered one of my homebases even though I’ve never lived in San Diego.
- In Berkeley, I’ll be at Pegasus for a panel conversation with some of the coolest authors in the Bay Area, including Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders, Lio Min, and Susanna Kwan.
I am so amped and so overwhelmed by gratitude. I can’t believe I get to do this. My absolute favorite part is that I’ll get to see so many of you! Please come out, say hello, bring stuff for me to deface. I absolutely can’t wait to get to say hi to you in person.
Accountability
Okay, so, according to an incredibly arbitrary source I found and didn’t check all that thoroughly, there are about 10,000 cities in the world. Which means the title of this missive–“I am coming to your city”–is perhaps misleading. However, statistically, depending on what city you live in, and assuming that all cities are equally weighted, and assuming an even chance you might live in any given city at any given time, there’s a 0.07% chance that it’s not misleading.
So I’m 99.03% sorry for the possible-fib.
(Also, I am not a statistician.)
-gailey
Spread Me is an Indie Next pick!!
What an incredible honor! I love independent booksellers so much, and it’s deeply touching to see them celebrating Spread Me like this.
Spread Me is one of New Scientist’s Best Books of September!!
Well, this is hilarious.
I am so grateful to New Scientist, a publication that ran what is very genuinely one of my favorite reviews of The Echo Wife (they called it a comedy, which, to them, I’m sure it is). Having Spread Me featured in New Scientist was, I am not making this up, one of my moonshot dreams for this book, and they made that dream come true.
Praise for Spread Me from Publisher’s Weekly!!
Publisher's Weekly calls Spread Me a, "...sleek, sexy thriller."
B&N Preorder Sale!
If you haven’t already preordered Spread Me, you can get it for 25% off through the B&N member preorder sale happening now!
Or, you can use that money to support independent booksellers by purchasing at your local indie or via Bookshop.org!
Or, you can keep the money and go request Spread Me from your local library! You have free will, and the possibilities are infinite! Bask in your power!!
Alasdair Stuart Reviews: The Cabin Factory
The incredibly insightful Alasdair Stuart is a regular contributor to the Digest. Be sure to subscribe to The Full Lid for more brilliant pop culture analysis.
There's a problem at the Cabin Factory, and if that isn't a sentence that chills your blood don't worry, the game is just getting started. You work for a company that makes bespoke, spooky cabins. They come out of a bulkhead door in a reassuringly vast, antiseptically lit warehouse and arrive in front of you, probably smelling faintly of gingerbread. You go in, and you check them and if they're fine you send them off to be shipped to the woods for terrified children to wander into, or, I like to think, Princesses and their frequent assassins to process their feelings inside.
But there's a fault with some of the cabins. Glitches. Twitching nightmares that hide in plain sight while you do your checks and then smile as they-
No.
It's fine.
It's FINE.
Because you're always back in the warehouse, and there's always another cabin. All you have to do is correctly certify eight of them. Then you can go home.
The Cabin Factory is a walking simulator, meaning the gameplay loop is your motion through the game. You can complete it in a couple of hours; it's about 5 bucks and it's the single most enjoyable scare I've had this year.
There are three reasons for that. The environment is perfectly tuned, and the bright, clean empty spaces of the Factory have the reassuring energy of a museum or a school before anyone comes in. Transitioning from there to the cabin feels like jaws closing. It's always night, there's always a fire, and sometimes the eyes of the smiling portrait over the mantle doesn't follow you around the room. All you do is take ten steps. All you do is check the same things. All you do is become aware of how small the room is, how subtle the changes are, the motion out of the corner of your eye. During our playthrough we got zeroed out most often for calling a cabin as haunted when it was just spooky. It's a masterpiece of an environment, so much so I'm getting second hand goosebumps writing about months after we played it.
The scares are key too because none of them are one note. You can't… quite… die here, but that doesn't mean there aren't jump scares or threats. You'll see dummies moving when they shouldn't. Worse, you'll notice things have moved without you seeing it happen. The game knows you're on edge and while it will terrify you it will never be cheap about it. The scares and the tone are in lockstep and the steps are always echoing just behind you.
But the characters are, in every sense, what haunts you and the cabin. Every turn through the cabin, every scare, gives you more of a sense of what happened here and what your role might have been in it. The scares shade from rage to fear, to someone lashing out trying to express emotions that defy language. The tragedy is still there but compassion becomes the focus. All of which leads to an ending choice, played in the credits, which is one of the most powerful and hopeful and honest I've seen a video game do. We can't heal the damage we've done or has been done to us. But sometimes the cabin door is unlocked and sometimes, when you go outside, the sun is shining.
The Cabin Factory is short, intense and may be my favourite game so far this year. It's available now.
The Cabin Factory is on Steam now.
If you’re a paying subscriber, come by the Stone Soup Supper Club for our weekly chat! I can’t wait to find out how you’re doing.
—Gailey
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