IT’S ALMOST HERE

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IT’S ALMOST HERE

I am feeling SO normal about the fact that we’re just a few days away from the release of Spread Me!! So normal that I almost just typed “ha ha ha ha ha” about eighty times and hit ‘send’ on this week’s digest. Everyone’s doing fine over here why do you ask!!

As this is hitting your inbox, I’m packing for the book tour where I’m going to get to say hi to YOU, reader! I’ll be in a bunch of places over the next couple of weeks. Please come out and join me to celebrate the release of this book, and to say hello, so I can thank you face-to-face for supporting my work!!

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. I absolutely cannot wait to see you!

If you haven’t already preordered Spread Me, I really hope you will. Preorders mean so much to an author’s career and success. They make all the difference in the eyes of publishers and bestseller lists. 

But more important than that—most important—preorders support the hell out of independent booksellers. When you preorder from your local bookstore, you get to guarantee them a sale; that means they can afford to order more copies from the publisher, which is good for my numbers and theirs. Your preorder offers security that lets that bookstore spend more time supporting the titles they believe in. Spread Me is an Indie Next Pick, which means independent booksellers said they believe in this book! If you can help them guarantee the sale of one copy, that means they can bet on additional copies to put into the hands of readers. And even beyond that—when you give this kind of support to bookstores, they can afford to branch out and promote the work of new and upcoming authors. 

What I’m saying is, if you preorder Spread Me (or any other upcoming book) right now, you’ll be supporting not only my career, but the entire ecosystem of publishing. If that’s not worth it, I don’t know what is.

Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble | Books-A-Million | Powells 

Thank you so, so much for supporting this book and my work. It means everything to me. I’ll see you on the road!

-gailey

Loyalty Bookstore Needs Our Help

Loyalty is the bookstore of my heart. (I'm holding my ✨super secret ultra special EARLY SALE event✨ there THIS SUNDAY. If you're in DC, come hang out with us and take home all the books you can carry!) This place is a phenomenal bookstore and event space - and it's also a hub of community in a profoundly uncertain world.

Unfortunately, they've been hit hard by recent events in the Capitol,  and they need our help. That's why I'm asking you, friends, to order three books from Loyalty via Bookshop.org. Make sure you visit that Bookshop.org link so they put Loyalty’s cookie in your browser. That ensures Loyalty will get full profit from your orders.

If you aren't sure what to get, here are my recommendations:

• Spread Me by me! Out September 23! Lol psych don't worry I have three other recs, I know you already pre-ordered this one. (Right? 👀)
• The Everlasting by Alix Harrow, out October 28. I finished this yesterday and it is GORGEOUS. A knight and a propagandist historian pining for each other across time as the scales fall from their eyes. This is How You Lose the Time War meets Brave New World via Camelot. One of my best of the year, easily.
• The Court of the Dead by Rick Riodan and Mark Oshiro. A powerful examination of carceral justice for younger readers.
• A Game In Yellow by Hailey Piper. Erotic horror at its finest. This one is sharp, sexy, petrifying, and startlingly tender.

You don't have to get these particular titles, but all of them are wonderful. Either way, thank you for supporting Loyalty!!

Twisted Spine is open in New York!

Twisted Spine, a horror-focused bookstore, just opened in New York City! 

It’s absolutely thrilling to see a space that is dedicated to celebrating horror. I’ll be headed there to stock up my Travel TBR in just a few days when I arrive in New York, and I hope you’ll stop by too!

Play for Peace – an itch.io Games Bundle

As I’m writing this, there are tanks rolling into Gaza, and thousands of people are fleeing for their lives. This games bundle benefits those who need it most, on the ground in Palestine, and is good for a few more days. Go put your money to its best possible purpose: helping people.

The United Nations has Declared Israel’s Actions in Palestine to be Genocide

You can watch a video of Navi Pillay, chair of the UN’s inquiry commission, delivering their findings at the link above.

There’s Life on Mars Maybe?

Hey? NASA just shared that they found biosignatures on Mars?? It’s not a one hundred percent guarantee that there’s life there, but also, it’s a big score for team ‘they got guys up there’. 

Pre-order Liana Kangas’ DEFEND BODILY AUTONOMY shirt

This shirt, created by my Know Your Station co-creator Liana Kangas, is available for preorder now! 

Alasdair Stuart Reviews: Cairn 

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.

For a long time I was clumsy. I'd never collide with people, but I'd shoulder check doors, bang my head on low ceilings, that sort of thing. I wasn’t clumsy. I just didn’t believe I deserved to go through life unbruised and lacked the emotional tools to articulate that. So, I chose to take damage to compensate for the damage I had no choice but to take. Not capital S, capital H Self-Harm, but within sight of it, and something that began to fade when I started working on closing the gap between brain and body. 

I did that via a lot of physical activity over a very long time. I’ve done indoor climbing, Tai Chi, Muay Thai, Judo, Rugby, and a lot of Couch to 5k. All this means I’ve got a level of cardiovascular fitness that carried me through a couple of health scares alongside the world’s only slightly broken nose, a yellow belt in Judo, a pretty decent Muay Thai clinch and a left knee that gets sore and clicks when it’s cold.  More importantly, I’ve got knowledge of my body's size, capabilities and what I can push when I need to. It’s been, and continues to be, a hard road but the journey is always worth it.  That journey is just one of three you go on in Cairn, out now in demo form for PC and PS5. In it, Sophia Eleni plays Aava, a legendary climber setting out to become the first human to climb Mount Kami. Aava has an antique (And ADORABLE) robotic belaying partner, not enough food and a mountain. That's it. That's the game. Or at least the demo.

It opens in a climbing gym, cleverly folding the tutorial into a literal classroom. You have to climb three training walls before you’re allowed to climb the back wall onto the foothills of Mount Kami. That's a nice beat of visual dissonance and it also seats you inside the worst elements of the athlete mindset. You can, and will, do your three walls and then climb up and out.

But if you don't, you'll find four other walls to practice on. There's extra equipment, working vending machines with food, even spare change to pick up around the gym. If you're mindful of your environment, of your present not your goal, you have an easier time of it. That's an elegant gamification of “think pink,” the climber mentality I was taught that helps keep you serene and focused. It's also a nice adaptation of what's called the Couch Cushion Protocol in these parts. You never, ever leave a room in a video game without checking what you can take with you.

And then there's the mountain. It's a colossal monolithic rock that's goal, level and adversary all in one. I felt the weird vertical restriction of my old training wall when I saw it and felt it even more when I fell off again. And again. And again.

And again.

You will get frustrated. Aava does. She hates it. She growls, screams, swears with frustration and you’re right there with her. The game’s controls encourage you to move like a climber, one limb at a time. A subtly obfuscated stamina system means you can push but only so far before the controller shakes in the exact way your limbs do. Get a belay in the rock in time, and you can rest. Don’t, and you’ll fall to your last one, or just fall.

This is game as learning curve and learning curve as game. It gives you the same taste of metaphorical blood in your mouth as Dark Souls-style games but here the difficulty curve is vertical and you’re holding onto it for dear life. You will get through. You will make it to the top. But you’ll fall over and over again before you do.

These are the first two journeys the game takes you and Aava on: The physical challenge of the mountain and the psychological challenge of coping with the physical challenge. There’s a third too, only hinted at in the demo which seems to be professional. Aava is a legend in her circles, and that weighs heavily on her. There are persistent phone calls you duck and some elements of the game play like sports movies about champions on their last run. It may be different in the full game, but there’s weight to the climb here that suggests it’s either Aava’s last or a climb she’s failed before. The full game, which also features other climbers on the mountain, will answer that.

For now though, Cairn is more than enough to be keeping anyone busy. It’s unforgiving but rewarding and the sense you get of reading the cracks and overhangs and finding the best route is fiercely satisfying for you and Aava alike. Alone on the mountain but united in purpose. Climbing out of the pit one limb at a time.

Cairn is available for free in demo form now. The full game will release for PS5 and Windows November 5th.

Currently Reading: Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Featured New Release: Play Nice by Rachel Harrison

Clio Louise Barnes leads a picture-perfect life as a stylist and influencer, but beneath the glossy veneer she harbors a not-so glamorous secret: she grew up in a haunted house. Well, not haunted. Possessed. After Clio’s parents' messy divorce, her mother, Alex, moved Clio and her sisters into a house occupied by a demon. Or so Alex claimed. That’s not what Clio’s sisters remember or what the courts determined when they stripped her of custody after she went off the deep end. But Alex was insistent; she even wrote a book about her experience in the house.

After Alex’s sudden death, the supposedly possessed house passes to Clio and her sisters. Where her sisters see childhood trauma, Clio sees an opportunity for house flipping content. Only, as the home makeover process begins, Clio discovers there might be some truth to her mother’s claims. As memories resurface and Clio finally reads her mother’s book, a sinister presence in the house manifests, revealing ugly truths that threaten to shake Clio’s beautiful life to its very foundation.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

If you’re a paying subscriber, I have a question just for you! The comments are a little dry these days, and I think it’s because this form factor of comments-section just ain’t formatted so great for our purposes. I’ve been wondering if y’all would have fun in a Supper Club Discord if we set one up. Drop your thoughts (or just an emoji react) in the comments!

—Gailey