Jack Segreto's Blog

Hello all!

Just throwing out there that you can become a monthly patron on Patreon by clicking this link! You all probably know that I am 100% financially responsible for everything I do for my writing career, and the coffers are empty. Your contributions will allow for a new audiobook version of Conditional Immortality and for me to finish the editing process for Sleeve & Shuffle!

As always, if you don't want to contribute monthly, you can make a one-time donation via Venmo (@bigmoneygator) or PayPal (bigmoneygator@gmail.com)!

Love & Lobsters,

Jack

Anne Rice passed away at age 80 on December 11. Despite the lamentations of fans insisting that Lestat took her away, she is really gone, and a powerfully bright star has gone out. I'm one of many that feel saddened and stricken at the loss of the empress of the vampire genre. It was hard for me to learn this fact when I'm in the middle of doing the one thing I've wanted to do since I first picked up one of her books: writing my own vampire novel. I'm one of many that were influenced and inspired by her work. Though she was problematic at times, I'm not here to discuss the nuance of her transgressions against the fan community or the unsavory story lines she so liked to explore.

No, I'm here to do what I do best: I'm here to tell you a story.

It is almost impossible for me to overstate the impact Anne Rice has had on me. After discovering Interview with the Vampire at a friend's house, I remember showing her the book and saying, "This is what I want my writing to be like." I was already writing short stories and scribbling down ideas, but nothing that I had read shaped me the way that book did. One of my dearest and most long-lived friendships began because I was spotted reading an Anne Rice novel. Previously, Liz and I didn't get along very well, but we bonded over our shared passion for Rice's The Vampire Chronicles. I would save all my lunch money and snatch quarters out of my father's change dish so that I could go to the used book store by my middle school and spend all of it on Rice's novels. My father was, predictably, very upset with me.

Of course, these are important stories about my formative years, but the real tale I'd like to tell you is far more humorous. If you follow me on Twitter, you may remember this story from when I was attempting to re-read TVC in its entirety before the new show is released (a task that I gave up on when I remembered how much I loathed The Tale of the Body Thief, but I digress).

I believe this story takes place around 2003 or 2004, far before my transition or even when I knew what being transgender was. I was a little proto-goth, into emo music and desperate for an eyebrow piercing. I thought that Sum 41 and Puddle of Mudd were the coolest bands ever, and I wore lots and lots of bracelets from Hot Topic. (Blessedly, there aren't many photos of this time, and none that I have access to at the moment.) My favorite thing in the world was complaining about my life on my LiveJournal. I was particularly fond of the groups on LJ that would sort you into say, your Harry P*tter house or tell you which anime character you were-things like that.

As I mentioned, I was obsessed with Anne Rice and all of her books, so when I found a group that would decide which one of her vampires you were (based on popular vote), I leapt at the opportunity. I wanted, rather desperately, to be voted Lestat. He was the hardest character to be voted into; the moderators didn't want there to be too many "egos" and "drama" that could be caused by having a bunch of preteen internet users getting voted the main character of a vampire franchise.

I was not deterred. I would be voted Lestat.

It took me about a week to fill out the questionnaire that would determine my fate. Obviously, as an obsessive fan, I was able to slant my answers towards my desired outcome. I agonized over each detail, changing something so small as my phrasing right up until the last minute before I posted in the group. At the end of the survey, they asked you if you were a girl or a boy, and if you minded being voted contrary to your gender. I believe my answer was something along the lines of, "I'm a girl but I don't mind being voted a boy character!!!!!! :))))))"

I can vividly recall sitting up at the family computer until late into the night, refreshing the page obsessively to see who the groups were nominating me as. And, boy, was I vindicated: The first handful of votes were cast, and they were all definitive. I was Lestat. 'Hell yeah,' I thought. 'I'm the fucking Brat Prince. Walk with me in the savage garden. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, bitch.'

My entire world came crashing down when I checked in the morning and saw that the tables had turned against me. Someone had voted me Gabrielle, and others were quick to follow suit. "You're a girl, and Gabrielle is the male version of Lestat, so you're Gabrielle!" I was enraged. I couldn't believe the absolute gall of these peons. I was Lestat! I wasn't Gabrielle, I couldn't be! I'm the Brat Prince!

It was too late. The voting period closed, and I was given a little badge with a graphic of some woman who looked like she could be Gabrielle de Lioncourt, along with a little note about how I had been voted as her in this little group. Once you were initiated, you were expected to be active and vote on others at least once a week, and you had to sign off using the banner. I voted a handful of times, but I got so sick of looking at that banner with that girl's face on it that I abandoned the voting and was kicked out soon after for inactivity.

Somehow, some way, that tiny little early amoeba of myself knew that I wasn't in the right skin. I couldn't believe that anyone could perceive me as anything other than male. Frankly, it was insulting. And, I believe to this day, indicative of their massively poor judge of character. My apoplectic fit over not being voted Lestat really only proves that my personality is probably closer to his than anyone else's.

I'm the Brat Prince, bitch.

Thank you, Anne Rice, for your vampires. For your art. For your books reaching out and bringing me and my best friend together, and for your terrible, spoiled Lestat making me realize that I needed to be true to myself. You will be truly missed.

If anyone is planning to attend Anne's celebration of life fete in New Orleans next year, please reach out! I am planning to attend with my husband and my beloved Liz, the friend I never would have made if it weren't for one blonde haired vampire and his whiny companion.

Until next time,

JACK

All Hallow's Eve draws closer, and while I can assure you all that it means I will be dressing up as a ghoul and running amok, it also means that the release of Conditional Immortality looms!

I have decided to treat you all with a little taste of the book! Read on below for a sneak peek of Conditional Immortality (and other life lessons from a lobster)!

"The Kiddie Pool", original artwork by Cassius Moore.

Leo looked up with a soft smile on his face. “Wyatt, thank you for coming over today. If you’d like, you can leave now.”

Wyatt frowned, tugging on the little braid that Lulu had put in his hair that morning when it was slow. “Are you trying to get rid of me again?”

“No.” Leo shook his head. “But you can leave if you’d like.”

“I think,” Wyatt said, pausing for a moment. He got the feeling that this was his last chance to leave, though he didn’t think anything truly bad would happen if he didn’t. “I’ll stay,” he said apprehensively.

“Good.” Leo looked down at Brick again, and then looked up, making intense eye contact with Wyatt. “Would you like to hear about how I found Brick?”

“Uh, sure,” Wyatt said.

Leo settled back in his seat and lit another cigarette. “I grew up in this house. I was lucky because even after my parents died, it was able to stay in my name. Sometimes, in those days, they would sell off an estate because the parents died with debt, but my father was a good businessman. I was able to keep the house, and my sisters were able to stay with me until they all got married. That was nice for them, I think. Being able to stay in their childhood home.

“I inherited quite a bit of wealth when my father died. He had his fingers in all kinds of pies. Shipping and imports, textiles, real estate. He was a lawyer, and he was determined that we would live below our means — and this meant that when my sisters were married and I was alone in the house, I could live a life of leisure. So, I did. I did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I wasn’t stupid; I didn’t go drink and gamble my money away like many other young men would have. I spent time here, at Pleasure Beach, wandering the surf like I had when I was a child.

“There was a storm rolling in one day when I was out collecting crabs. I liked them for my dinner — I had a cook back then, a wonderful woman who could turn just about anything into a feast. Most of my servants thought I was a bit eccentric, but I paid them well and wasn’t cruel, so they let me have my scruples. I wanted to have a good meal that night, because I was meeting the next day with a gentleman who wanted me to marry his daughter. I wasn’t paying attention to the weather. I was thinking so hard on that man’s daughter. When we were children, she had been extremely ugly, but my sisters had told me that she had returned from English finishing school much transformed. I was nervous and excited. I dug up my crabs, and just as the storm was beginning to hit the beach, I found a little lobster.

“There used to be so many lobsters back then. I thought he was dead, honestly. He had just molted and had gotten swept up onto the beach. I have a soft heart, and I didn’t want him to die. I dumped out my crabs and I put him in my bucket — and then I was struck by lightning. You might not believe me, but I assure you this is precisely what happened.” He paused and held up his hand. Wyatt had noticed the thick, ropy scar ran across that his palm in class but always thought it would be rude to ask about it. “This is from the bucket that had been in my hand. I nearly died. When I came to, I thought I was dead. Someone had found me and taken me to a doctor. The doctor had to cut the bucket out of my hand, so I still had Brick with me. His name wasn’t Brick back then, though. I just called him Lobster.” He leaned forward. “And that’s how I came to have Brick.”

Wyatt laughed. “Okay, sure.”

“You don’t believe me?” Leo asked, his face falling.

“That’s quite a story,” Wyatt said. “When you were a younger man? How old are you, twenty-nine at most?”

“I’m a hundred and sixty-seven,” Leo said seriously. “I found Brick when I was twenty-seven and I haven’t aged a day since that lightning strike.”

Wyatt grimaced and stood up, putting the plate on his chair. “Okay, buddy. Everyone was right about you, I guess. Are you going to try and murder me?”

“Why would I do that?” Leo snorted. “I’m trying to tell you about my life.”

“You’re messing with me.” Wyatt dusted off his hands. “You’ve been screwing with me this whole time, and I don’t know if it’s because you’re going to kill me and eat me or what, but I’m not sticking around to find out.”

“I’m not going to do anything of the sort,” Leo said, standing up. “You wait here, and I’ll prove it.”

“Okay, buddy,” Wyatt said sarcastically. He crossed his arms and watched as Leo marched into the house. Without thinking, he looked at Brick and said, “Is he always this bad?”

Worse.

Wyatt blinked. It was as if someone had injected a thought into his mind. It was uncomfortable, a bit like the first time he had sex: something was going somewhere it hadn’t gone before. He looked down at the lobster, splashing the water with his tail. It was a fluke, he decided. Just something strange his brain had done. That was all.

Leo came out of the house with a small book in his hands. “Sit, sit,” he said, gesturing. Despite himself, Wyatt put his plate onto the dead grass and sat back down. Leo took his own chair out of the kiddie pool and scooted it close to Wyatt’s.

“Here,” he said, flipping the book open. He pointed to a grainy black and white photograph, held in place with corner tabs and surrounded by a loopy, old-fashioned handwriting, of a man with a mustache holding a lobster in his hands. “That’s me and Brick in 1885.”

“That’s a guy with a lobster,” Wyatt snorted.

“Well, of course,” Leo said haughtily. “But it’s me.”

“That could be anybody,” Wyatt said. “That’s a worse quality photo than that video of Bigfoot.”

“I assure you, when we saw the Bigfoot, we were using the best quality film we had available to us at the time …”

“Excuse me?” Wyatt demanded.

Leo shook his head. “Never mind. I’ll explain later. Do you want to see documents?” He gestured to the house. “Come inside.”

“I’ll stay right here,” Wyatt said, crossing his arms.

“Fine,” Leo snapped. He disappeared back into the house.

Wyatt looked down at Brick, considering that maybe he should make a break for it. He certainly wasn’t going to go into the house again, not when he wasn’t so sure that Lulu was right about everything. He felt another little tickle in his brain. It wasn’t a word, really — more of a feeling. His eyebrows drew together as he stared at Brick.

Truth.

The word rang clear in his head, along with the concept of honesty the way a bug like a lobster must experience it: the water is cold, and that is the truth. The sun is shining, and that is the truth. The sky is big and bright over them, and that is the truth.

Wyatt blinked. He knew that these were not his thoughts. It was not his concept or definition of truth or honesty. He knew, objectively, that they could not be the thoughts of a lobster because a lobster could not share its thoughts. Nothing could share its thoughts unless it was speaking them out loud, and lobsters could not speak.

Truth, the word came again, more urgent this time. Wyatt felt the great relief of being picked up off the sand and put in a bucket. He saw the distorted image of a young man with an unfortunate mustache, could make out his tab-collared shirt and suspenders through the haze of water. He felt the impression of that bucket, scratching a soft claw against the wooden sides, feeling a seize of existential fear when the water became charged with electricity. He could see the blood on the handle of the bucket. He could hear voices that he could not understand, not yet — but they were starting to make sense to him.

Wyatt jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you alright?” Leo asked, a look of concern etched on his features.

Wyatt blinked up at him.

Leo looked down at Brick and then back at Wyatt. “What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Wyatt admitted. “I was looking at Brick and then it was like … I could see … something.”

Leo’s grey eyes went wide. “Was he … speaking to you?”

“I guess you could call it that? It was just pictures, and a few words. Like thoughts, but ones that shouldn’t be in my head.” He shook his head. “Did you drug my beer?”

“Why would I do that?” Leo asked. He set the leatherbound folio in his hands on the ground and reached into the water, hefting Brick out and holding him gently, the way a normal person might pick up a rabbit or a cat. “Brick, did you speak to Wyatt? Can you speak to Wyatt?”

Wyatt, the little voice said. It sounded as though it was in the same tone of voice that Wyatt thought in. Wyatt. It repeated. Wyatt, Wyatt, Wyatt.

“He’s learning your name,” Leo explained. “It takes him a long time to learn names. They’re the most foreign to him. Lobsters don’t have the concept of names.”

“Lobsters don’t …” Wyatt shook his head. “I’m sorry, but, what?”

“I think he thinks you’re the right one,” Leo said excitedly. “He’s never spoken to another person before. Never. He’s never even tried.” He held Brick up and laughed. Brick waggled his antennae.

Wyatt, he repeated.

“I’m hearing the thoughts of a fucking lobster?” Wyatt asked, incredulous.

I hope you've enjoyed this little taste of Conditional Immortality!

As a reminder, you can preorder your digital copy using this link, and physical copies will be available October 31!

Oh joyous day! You can pr-eorder your digital copy of Conditional Immortality RIGHT NOW!

Please follow this link to reserve your copy on Amazon!

Additionally, the RedBubble shop is now open! Get your merch using this link.

Until next time,

JACK

*At this time, Amazon does not offer pre-orders on paperbacks.

If you’ve read slumber. and you’ve gotten some kind of idea about what Conditional Immortality is about, then you might have noticed that I have a tendency to write about certain things. I like movies, I like photography, and I like the concept of immortality. I’ve had my quirks since I was very young, but this whole thing about immortality has really sat with me since I first got my hands on an Anne Rice novel (don’t judge me, please). I was fascinated by the concept of living forever, and the incredibly thinly-veiled homoerotic subtext. I’ve always liked photography, digging through my family’s photo albums and demanding that my mother tell me who was included in the photos. Most of the time, she could tell me, but sometimes she couldn’t. I guess when I was sitting there, a child of no more than ten or eleven, staring at these people that I did not know, I wished that they could talk and tell me their stories.

Just a small taste of my antique camera collection - along with some of my books. Do not judge my Nicholas Sparks novel. The Longest Ride is a classic.

If you follow my TikTok, then you’ve already seen Hank, the haunted photograph of an early 1900’s heartthrob with kind eyes. I picked up Hank when I lived in Michigan, along with a huge batch of other pieces of photography. Since Conditional Immortality isn’t out yet, what you don’t know is that photography plays a huge part in the story. One of the main characters, Leo, has a robust personal collection of photos he’s taken over the 167 years of his life. Unlike my mother, however, he can tell the story of everyone in them.

At the junction of immortality and photography, I find there’s a niche I like to sit in quite comfortably. I was recently speaking with my editor (hi, Bryn!), and we started on the topic of this junction. What I said, and what has sat with me, is that the concept of “I was here once, and it’s different now” is a real driving factor in my writing. When I went to Los Angeles a couple of years ago, I would delight in standing on movie sets and in famous places because Humphrey Bogart was there once, and now I was too! James Dean had been here, standing in this spot, and now I was standing right there. It’s like the past was so close I could touch it, but it would never be that time again. When I write about characters that are immortal or close to it, there’s a different kind of melancholy that comes with being in a place you were once. Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe you go to visit your parents who still live in the house you grew up in and you look at the dust in the corners or at the counters that once seemed so high, and you feel a little pang in your chest. Maybe you’ve gone to see your old school or a park you used to frequent, or even just your hometown, and everything looks just a little different. They tore down that old movie theater or put a walk-in clinic where the Blockbuster used to be. There’s a certain kind of sadness knowing that things won’t ever go back to the way they were, a tangible pain that makes you feel the passing of time in ways you didn’t understand when you were younger.

Now, if we take that same feeling and multiply it by two or four or even ten – think about how much pain it would cause you to come and see a place again after a hundred years. After a thousand. The things you used to love, the things that made the place familiar and comfortable, are all gone now. There’s no one there that would remember you, or the way it used to be. You become an island of memory, all alone in the knowledge that you used to be here once, and it’s different now.

I listened to the podcast Dolly Parton’s America when it came out (I am a die-hard Dolly Parton fan), and in one episode, they delved into how a singer in Kenya is famous for her cover of “Tennessee Mountain Home”, even though she hasn’t ever been to Kenya. They talk about how Nelson Mandela played “Jolene” when he was in prison. Most significantly to me, they talk about the origins of the word “nostalgia”. Anyone who has perhaps taken a medical terminology class and an Ancient Greek class (just me?) would be able to break down this word into its parts. “Nostos” – home. “Algia” – pain. One of the guests discusses this, how Dolly’s music transcends distance to be able to invoke the same painful longing for a feeling of home. I liked this so much, it ended up in Conditional Immortality. Leo talks about how he thought returning to his childhood home to live out the remainder of his numbered days would perhaps make him feel better, but all it does is remind him of how much time has passed and how there is no one in his family left now.

I’ve been making a lot of noise on Twitter about writing a vampire love story (the gay vampire love story we all deserve), and for a minute I had to pause. Another story about a bunch of immortals? But then, how could I resist? How could I not write a story about a pair of lovers who keep finding one another, being with one another and breaking it off only to find each other a century later and forget all about how they never work out? Because in the end, if you live for that long, all you want is someone else who remembers how it used to be. Not just yourself, alone on the island, but a companion who was there, too. Someone who can hold your hand and say, “We used to be here, and it’s different now, but at least we have our memories of this place together.”

Before I go, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for sticking with me through a brief dry spell there! Work got a little wild and maintaining this website and blog is its own full-time job.

Hopefully next time, I can give you all a final release date for Conditional Immortality, as well as information about pre-orders.

Until next time,

JACK

"What is it with you and lobsters?"

Well, the long and short answer is...

Listen, I was raised in New England. I didn't eat lobster when I was growing up because I thought it was gross, but once I started I really couldn't stop. Lobster rolls, lobster tails, lobster mac and cheese ... you name it. My day job is at a seafood counter, and I love telling people about lobsters. They're cool little bugs! Who wouldn't want to know fun facts about their food? (As it turns out, most people, but that's another story.)

Now, I didn't come from thinking lobsters were disgusting sea roaches to considering them my favorite animals out of nowhere. I read a book. But the circumstances that led me to reading that book, now there's a story.

There's an island off the coast of Maine that used to be a Victorian summer vacation spot. Accessible only by boat, it's filled with cabins and cottages, and it has a shack where the caretaker spends his days, along with a tennis court and a beautiful meeting hall with a stage. Much like in Dirty Dancing, the stage used to host an annual end-of-summer talent show of sorts. Now, it's not used much and the hall has a few couches and a lending library. There's no electricity on the island and the cell service is abysmal, so all of your distractions need to be analog.

This place is called Heron Island, and I was lucky enough to go visit it maybe eight or nine years ago. The person I was dating at the time had a family cabin there, the Sunrise Cottage - it faced the eastern edge of the island and was the first to be touched by the rising sun. The cabin was very charming. There was a rumor that Robert Frost had stayed there once, though I never learned if it was true or just a family legend. It had a cast-iron stove and an old-fashioned refrigerator - the kind they stopped making after World War II because they didn't want little kids getting stuck in them at the dump. It also had a beautiful wrap-around porch, where we would sit in the mornings and have coffee and wave to the lobster fisherman.

I spent the week exploring the lush forests and lounging in the meeting hall-turned-library, going out to hike to see the cliffside and trying to find sea glass on the pebble beach. I cannot begin to describe to you how beautiful that island is; it feels as though it was from another time. I can still conjure up the smell of that place, the feeling of wet leaves on my face and the brine of the ocean spray at high tide. I felt transported there, as if I was existing outside of time and space. It was its own secret garden, separate and beautiful, where the forest met the ocean. I would stand in the meeting hall and look at the photos of all the summers past, the women in their high-necked blouses holding squash rackets all the way up to the brightly-colored short-shorts of the seventies and I would feel so insignificant in the face of the passing of time. And yet, I felt like I was in on a secret, too. I could see the pictures and see all these people, feel a connection to them even though we would never meet. I was standing somewhere they had stood once. I still get this feeling when I go places; my friend Nicole took me to see the Warner Brothers lot and I stood in front of the last remaining artifice from Casablanca and I think that the realization that Humphrey Bogart stood where I was standing was as close to a religious experience as I'll ever get.

Now, to the point: everyone in that cottage looked forward to the trip we were going to take to the mainland to visit one of the docks where the lobster fisherman unloaded their catch. You could get lobsters way cheaper than at the grocery store, and you couldn't get any fresher. I wasn't excited, because I still hadn't really eaten lobster and I was still laboring under the delusion that they were disgusting. What ended up changing my mind was finding a copy of The Secret Life of Lobsters. I found a copy in the cabin, and since I had already torn my way through my copy of American Gods and all of the Doctor Who serials I had brought with me, I figured, why not?

That book made me realize that lobsters are complex creatures. They're fascinating. These solitary bottom-feeders like to roam and live in rocky caves. They have brains in their stomach and their blood is made of copper. They can be right or left-handed, depending on which side their "crusher" and "pincher" claw is on, and sometimes they are observed walking together holding claws as they make their way across the sandy bottom of the ocean (hence the name of this post, which is also a nod to The Mountain Goats - if you know, you know). There are so many types of them! European lobster, American lobster, Caribbean lobster. They're not like crabs, but they are like crabs. They're unique and they're weird and they're delicious! Even the history of how we came to eat lobster is weird - but I'll save that for another post.

I learned so much from this book, but the most important thing about it was that I finally decided to try lobster. You know, for science.

Joke's on me, really. Lobster is fucking delicious, and I had been missing out my entire life.

I never did go back to Heron Island, though I really would like to some day. I think about it all the time, though. I would love to go get lost on that place again. If it weren't for Heron Island and that book, I don't think I would have ever gotten the lobster bug (get it?) and I don't think I would have ever written Conditional Immortality.

Until next time!

JACK

PS: Check out the website proper - my new headshots just came in last night and I've updated my photo. I think I look pretty good. :)

Hello everyone!

For my first ever blog post, I've been mulling over the possibilities. I've been thinking a lot about lobsters lately (for obvious reasons) but I was also thinking about the process that led me to write slumber. For those of you that haven't read it, it focuses on a young man who goes back in time to visit with some of the Golden Age of Hollywood's stars and finds himself falling in love with one of them.

Now, I know there's no way we can revisit the past in physical terms, but I thought I might share with you some of the things that brought me to writing that story. Much like Agatha Christie writing books about mysteries and poisons because she had so much knowledge of them already, I also chose to write a book about classic films because of the knowledge that I already had.

For as long as I can remember, I've had a fascination with movies. I can remember my older sister and I watching movies together and listening to her explain the connections to other movies. "See that guy?" she would say, pointing to the screen. "He was also in... and in that movie, he was with this actress, who was in..." It seemed to go on and on forever, like a round of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with no ultimate end goal. I suppose it got me thinking about these things early on, and now I can rattle off the same facts with absolute certainty (much to the chagrin of my husband).

In high school, we had to watch movies like To Kill A Mockingbird and A Streetcar Named Desire, classics in black and white. When I was younger, I was fascinated by these films. I was so taken with the actors, with the stories. They seemed so alien to me, a child who had grown up watching the technicolor spectacle of Disney movies and fell head over heels in love with the Lord of the Rings movies when my father took me in middle school. I caught a showing of Arsenic and Old Lace on TCM and fell madly in love with Cary Grant. I considered the performance of Marlon Brando in Streetcar to be a defining moment for me. I don't think I had the words for it, but I was learning that they just don't make actors like that anymore.

My fascination faltered as I grew older and got more and more sucked into other things, other interests. I didn't think about "old movies" again until I heard Karina Longworth's podcast, You Must Remember This. I'm sure I'm not alone in the multitudes of people who found themselves caught up in the dramas of long-dead actors and actresses. What fascinated me most in those early episodes of hers were the stories about closeted actors and actresses. These people who were so famous and loved and could only be partly themselves sparked my interest, and then she talked about Monty Clift.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I love Monty Clift. I had read an article about him so many years ago that I had forgotten he even existed. Yet when Karina Longworth talked about him and lovingly detailed his painful, tragic life, everything in my mind shifted. I voraciously tore through his body of work. I read books. I even started my own short-lived podcast, trying to shine the light on Monty and some of his other closeted cohorts. My best friends and I sojourned to Brooklyn, determined to find the Quaker Cemetery that he is buried in, and for Christmas one year, my husband bought me a certified autograph of his. It's now framed and hanging up along with his Life magazine cover on my living room wall (see photo below).

What all of this meant, what all of it still means, is that I've been nearly obsessed with films - and their actors, tragic and queer or not - for quite a while.

slumber. came out of the mist, for lack of a better word. I had just moved home from Michigan and I was watching a lot of The Voice (sue me), and I latched onto one of the singers. He looked so timeless, and his voice sent shivers down my spine. I loved him and his little fifties look, and I started thinking about how easily he could have walked out of that time period. I write a lot about legacy and immortality; it's just something that fascinates me. I think it's a theme in every one of my works, especially Conditional Immortality (more on that later, though!). I wanted an homage to our queer forebears, but something new and different. I think the plot came through to me in a dream, and I asked all of my other creative friends what the least lame vehicle of time travel was - with no context of course!

So the novella was born, and I didn't publish it until nearly three years later. I don't know why it took me so long, but I think I was holding onto it like it was my baby, scared to let it out into the world. But here we are now! I think it was a great way to get my feet wet with independent publishing, and it's still one of my favorite works to date.

I hope you all enjoyed this little glimpse into my consciousness, and stay tuned for some more content! I'm definitely thinking next time, we'll cover some cool lobster facts and I'll drop some sneak peeks at Conditional Immortality!

Until next time!

JACK