Last week I talked a little bit about Hot Wax and dashed expectations, how crushing disappointment is a rite of passage in publishing and you have to find things besides success in sales to keep the fire burning. Today in the interest of being a little bit less of a downer, I figured I’d talk about the opposite: how, occasionally, a book does better than anybody expects.

This was very much the case with Graveyard Shift. The inception of the project was bizarre; I remember it vividly because I had just left my whole life behind to embark on the grand Hot Wax research road trip. It was June 2023 and I was on the top floor of a weird old hotel in Birmingham, DoorDashing a block of Velveeta up to my room in an increasingly desperate effort to get my dog to take his meds so we didn’t both have a nervous breakdown in the car. In the middle of this I got a call my from agent, who’d had a call from my editor, who’d had a call from a certain retailer saying they were having some success with novellas, would I be interested and did I happen to have anything? (Publishing feels, much of the time, like a never-ending game of phone tag.)

It had never crossed my mind to write a novella. But I knew it would be another two years before I had anything else out in the market and when I flipped through the story drawer I realized I had just the thing. I sent a sloppy two-sentence email pitch to my agent and (to my surprise as much as anyone’s) the publisher loved it and agreed to sign a contract sight unseen. I hadn’t written a thing except that pitch. I had no idea where the story was headed. All I had was this idea about a group of insomniac misfits and an open grave, a story that could be told in the space of one night. I’d never found the right container for it — it felt too small for a novel, too big for a short story; for a while I thought maybe a podcast? But nobody wants to be that guy. So I sat on it, forgot about it completely, got caught up with other things. And then the offer came along.

I won’t bore you with all the tales from the trenches of writing the book. You’ve probably heard them all and if you haven’t, you can find them right here. But I’ve never talked about the afterlife of this odd little book.

I went into it with very low expectations, and my first hint that they might have been off was New York launch at the Strand. I’d asked about tickets the day before1 and they told me 45 — which is respectable for some places but a big disappointment for the rare books room, which seats something like 200 people. Nobody updated me on the headcount before I walked out, and I was, frankly, gobsmacked to find a full house.

The surprises piled up. I was in the car and on the road and happened to be sitting at the same intersection where I once burst into tears because I couldn’t afford groceries when my editor called to tell me we’d hit two lists: top ten on the Indie chart and a respectable USA Today ranking. Then the Times piled on from across the pond. We were selling out of stock at every festival I went to. We sold through something like 30,000 copies in the first month. Those are crazy numbers for a book nobody really expected to sell. It earned out almost immediately. Two years later, it’s still selling like gangbusters, as backlist titles go.

Never in a million years did I think a weird little book about chain-smoking losers, lab rats and lichen, would find its people, or more than a handful of them.

With the benefit of hindsight I can explain some of it: Graveyard was a paperback original in the US and priced accordingly. That and the fact that it’s also shorter made it an easier sell. (I once had the deliriously weird experience of signing the only copy in an airport bookstore only to have the guy in line behind me buy it right out of my hand because it looked like just the right length for his flight.) It hit right before Halloween, and it was a very Halloweeny sort of book. However, because it happened so fast from contract to pub day, it also tapped into a couple of cultural swells before they really crested: the resurgence of novellas, for one; the meteoric rise of horror and the neo-Gothic for another; a newfound interest in all things fungal for a third.

These weren’t things I thought about consciously. It was 2023 and we were staring down the barrel of another Trump election after three years’ halting recovery from the hellscape of COVID-19 and its horrid mishandling by the first Dumptruck administration. It felt like we’d just come through the Black Death and the Reaper was back for an encore. Horror was very much in the air, which has everything to do with why the genre is still breaking records and winning Pulitzers and completely remaking the publishing landscape. Art imitates life.

Good artists and lucky ones sometimes get out of in front of it. The same thing sort of happened with Villains, but on a much longer timeline. In retrospect maybe the “dark academia” boom was inevitable. I think it happened when it did because so many jaded, overeducated English majors were coming of age to write these books right around 2020. I just happened to be ahead of the curve; most people don’t write their debut at 22. And you best believe that at 22 I was blissfully unaware of how all these things conspired to make a Villains a bestseller three years after my own publisher had decided it was unsellable.

I didn’t sit down and think about trend forecasting and the fact that there were a lot of other people who had been sold and soured on an academic American Dream that bore no resemblance to reality. The “dark academia” reaction makes perfect sense in that context: a lot of people engaging in wish fulfillment by romanticizing the academic experience they were promised and never got, but (hopefully) also critiquing the soulless rat race privatized education has become. As tends to happen with these things, the genre has largely been diluted now to tropes and vibes. Enshittification is well underway. But back in 2014 I had no idea any of that was coming. I was just writing the book I wanted to read.

Trusting your instincts is harder than ever in an age where everything is artificial, our everyday existence warped and distorted by technology with no guardrails that most of us never wanted and absolutely nobody needs. It’s also tough to do in an industry as fickle as publishing where most of your best guesses turn out to be wrong. But looking back on the arc of my career thus far, my gut instincts about the writing itself are usually right — even if they weren’t vindicated until a long time later. (This is one of the reasons I haven’t yet given up on Hot Wax.)

Strategy is indispensable in a business with odds and timelines quite this long. But the art itself? When you have that itch you need to scratch, that story you need to tell for some reason you can’t yet articulate? Go with your gut. Do what you feel. Because even if the book flops — and it might! Statistically speaking, it probably will! — at least you didn’t write it for nothing. You said something that mattered to you. At the end of the day, authenticity is the thing that brings readers to the page. Chasing trends won’t get you there. Pouring your heart and soul into the thing you’re making just might. Is it enough to bring readers to the register? No, but it is the thing that keeps the book in circulation. Because the people who do take it to the register and find something genuine inside, they’re going to tell their friends. This is the thing we didn’t know we were looking for.

I’m still amazed so many people found what they were looking for in Graveyard Shift. And because everything in publishing feels so awful, feels so dire, all the time, I think it’s as much my responsibility to talk about the good as it is to be transparent with the bad. Bestsellers nobody expected happen all the time, too, which is maybe worth remembering when all the dizzy statistics get you down. Tens of thousands of crazy people bought a book about rats and lichen and biomedical ethics from an author was mostly known for Shakespeare.

Publishing is a lot of things but rarely predictable. Absolutely fucking anything can happen. Nothing is too weird for 2026. So go with your gut and go for broke, because who knows? The next ratty little Cinderella story might be yours.

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It’s sort of hard to believe I’m about to do this again. 2026 marks the third year in a row I’ll spend the fall in the car, on the road, meeting readers and booksellers, living in hotels, never spending more than two days in one time zone. Someone asked me this morning, “…

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There’s certainly some confusion about how tags work on Substack, if my notes feed is any…

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My new novel d…

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By the time I got back to the halfway point where I’d originally stopped, I had about 18 days left to to work with if I wanted a couple of weeks to tidy up before the MS is due to my editor on June 1. Not a lot of time for half a novel, even when you’re trying to keep it short.1 I’ve had at least one breakneck stretch like this with every book. So far so predictable, but that’s about where the prediction stuff stops.

When you’re in a regular publication cycle — about a book a year, or maybe two — you get a lot of questions about how you write and what your process looks like (more on that here). One reason is to satisfy our innate curiosity about how the sausage gets made, but the other reason writers get this question all the time is that they’re giving interviews for an audience of readers and a lot of readers want to be writers. They want to get published. They want to know what it takes from the people who have — against all odds! — pulled it off. We have practiced answers to these questions. But recently I got sick of my own and blurted out in an interview the secret to my success, such as it is, so I thought I’d share it with you:

I have no idea what I’m doing.

Yes, I’ve been writing for twenty years and publishing for ten and part of the point of being on Substack is to persuade people we have valuable insights about writing to share. Maybe I have a few of those, but I would be a liar if I said I haven’t been making this shit up as I go.

I don’t have an MFA. I didn’t cut my teeth in literary magazines. I’ve never done a reading series. I didn’t start going to conferences and retreats and residencies until after I had two books under my belt. I’ve spent a lot less time in workshops than most of the writers I know. I’ve never actually read Bird by Bird (though I do, of course, own a copy). This isn’t disdain for that kind of literary upbringing — au contraire, I’m envious of the writer friends who had it and still feel my share of imposter syndrome, like I’ll never be a “real” writer no matter how many books I write just because I’ve never been to Yaddo. Still, nothing makes me feel more like a neophyte than starting over with a first draft. New novel, page one.

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We didn’t want the book shelved wrong for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is that by putting it in the wrong place and calling it the wrong thing you’re selling it to the wrong readers. Folks who want true-blue horror? Hot Wax is not for them, and boy, have they let me know it! After this list came out, it had an appreciable impact on reviews and ratings. People complaining, “This is supposed to be horror?” and me on the other end of the screen, silently screaming, NO! IT’S NOT! to absolutely no avail. I knew this would happen. So did my publisher. We made our case that this gambit would hurt us and the book’s chances in the long run — not just because of one list, but because the rest of the internet and the book-buying public tends to regurgitate shelfmarks and hashtags and whatnot posted by the biggest booksellers in the country, even when the official BISAC codes for the book say nothing about horror at all.

I knew this would happen because I experienced something similar with my first novel, If We Were Villains. My publisher insisted on calling it a “literary thriller” and stores insisted on calling it “mystery” even though it isn’t supposed to be either of those things. It’s not a whodunit and it’s fairly slow-paced; folks looking for those kinds of books didn’t like it and it wasn’t until three years later that the people whom it was actually for found it on their own. All my objections to this positioning were overruled on the grounds that I was young and didn’t know the market well. But I did know my own book. I knew it better than anyone. I knew who was going to enjoy it, and people looking for more traditional mysteries and thrillers weren’t it. This is the argument I made against calling Hot Wax horror. It fell on deaf ears, and now this has gone on so long that there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. People are going to continue mis-shelving and misreading it as a terrible attempt at something it was never supposed to be.

So what exactly was the rationale behind this decision and the refusal to change position over the publisher’s and the author’s vociferous objections? Two things: one spoken, the other not. The first defense was that they “wanted to keep all my books together in the store so they’re easy to find” and Graveyard Shift got shelved as horror in 2024. This, however, is nonsense! They already shelve Villains separately (in mystery2). The second, unspoken reason is that horror is a hot genre and they simply thought they could sell more copies by calling it that. What doesn’t rate any consideration is whether deliberately misleading readers hurts them, me, my sales, and my readership in the long run. This is my problem to solve now, but my reach is a whole hell of a lot shorter.

Apart from the fact that it’s exhausting to try to course-correct this every day and wonder all the while how many sales and readers I’m losing because of it, what really makes me crazy about this is that it is a fake problem. There is an easy, blindingly obvious solution:

JUST PUT IT IN THE FUCKING FICTION SECTION.

Listen, you want my books to be side-by-side so readers can find them easily? I get that! I would like that, too! But if it means shelving all of them but one in the wrong place? Pardon my French, but that doesn’t make any damn sense.

The funny part of this story is that back when I was a little rat writer juggling four jobs, I worked for this particular retailer as a bookseller. I know exactly how their shelving system works. And I also know how much of the storefront — both digital and IRL — is just “fiction.” Not horror, not mystery, not anything else, just general fiction. But it feels increasingly like booksellers, publishers, and even readers are allergic to it. It’s no great mystery why.

This past week, I had a chance to hawk books to exactly the sort of people who might enjoy Hot Wax: a bunch of punks on a boat for Little Steven’s Underground Garage cruise. I did a panel with Low Cut Connie frontman Adam Weiner and the great (who wrote a terrific post about it) where we talked a lot about the arts and what it takes to succeed as a writer or a rocker in 2026. And one thing we talked about a lot was genre.

If you saw me on tour, you probably also heard me talk about this, but we’re in an era of what I like to call “extreme niche-ification” in the media landscape. Since social media completely remade the arts marketplace — I’ve worked in publishing since 2014 and the arts much longer than that, so I’ve watched this happen in real time — there has been a seemingly infinite proliferation of sub-genres. We no longer have just “horror,” for instance, but something as specific as “sporror,” or horror about fungus. We no longer have just “dark academia” (which wasn’t a thing back in 2014; we just called them campus novels) but “light academia” and “gray academia” and increasingly hairsplitting distinctions that get so particular they read like parody. This is an obvious outgrowth of both the globalizing effect of social media and the extreme commodification of the arts under late-stage capitalism. People are overwhelmed by the tyranny of choice and so naturally gravitate towards what they already know they like. Corporations with something to sell encourage and enable this by selling art like cleaning products: Does what it says on the tin. It’s great for readers to be able to find the books they want to read. What’s no so great is the siloing effect that flows south from this desire to never, ever leave our comfort zones and the market reshaping itself to cash in and entrench that mentality. If you’re selling books in the wrong genre on purpose because that genre is hot, you have lost the entire fucking plot.

Besides my own personal beef, here’s why this isn’t so great: If we deforest the general fiction section and force everything that used to go there into other categories, two things happen, and they’re both bad. The first is that critical thinking and critical reading continue to go the way of the dinosaurs as readers only encounter the same tropes over and over and over again and lose their ability to engage with anything that doesn’t fit within those parameters (witness the disturbing rise of readers who don’t understand that depiction isn’t endorsement, that a first-person narrator is not the same person as the writer, or what “autofiction” actually is). The second is that writers get siloed along with their books, all in the name of marketability.

I wanted to be a writer from the time I was six years old and won the Young Writers & Illustrators contest and Read-a-Roo came to my school and gave me a balloon and a T-shirt (which I still wear). Most of my earliest stories were about animals, because that’s what I was interested in in first grade. At twelve I started my first “novel,” which was a hilarious attempt by a very young person to write something like crime or mystery. I finished it when I was fourteen and thankfully knew it was not very good, but I did write about a book a year every year after that. I wrote a fantasy novel in high school. I wrote a novel about the Napoleonic Wars in college (really). I wrote something about body-snatching in Victorian Edinburgh in graduate school. I wrote a sci-fi novel I can never publish now about a deranged billionaire and the Mars landing during the pandemic (lol). What I never did was imagine myself writing only one genre for the rest of my life. And that has made my life as a writer so. Much. Harder.

Some of this is the dark side of success. Publishing loves a sure thing, so when my first novel did find its people and start selling like gangbusters, all anyone wanted was more of the same, and the fact that I was ten years older and a very different person who never wanted to write campus novels forever and had never heard of “dark academia” did not matter at all. Almost every conversation I had in trying (for almost ten years!) to sell Hot Wax went along the lines of “But can’t it just be more like Villains? Somehow? Please?” In some ways, Graveyard Shift was me throwing the industry a bone: it wasn’t a traditional campus novel, but it had enough familiar elements that I knew people would be willing to follow me there. It worked like a charm. But guess what? Because it did now everybody in the business just wants me to do more of that.

Is this flattering on some level? Sure. Is it also infuriating? You bet.

If some part of you is over there thinking “Shut up and be grateful!” — I get it. This business is so hard and so many people would kill for a chance to have anything hit that it can be tough to hear an author who’s had some success turn around and bitch about it. However, trust that this comes less from a place of Ugh, just let me do what I want, and instead from a real concern that this trend is eventually going to leave no seat at the table for writers and artists and thinkers who can’t fit their work into neat little boxes with neat little labels that corporate overlords can leverage and TikTok can turn into hashtags (Do we even use hashtags on TikTok? I’m too old to know). I’m halfway through a new novel that I’m so excited about and my God, the research is heroic, and the story feels so worth telling, but every day I work on it some part of me wonders if there’s any point because how am I possibly going to get retailers (and by extension, readers) on board with a book about industry and labor politics set in 1947 when all anybody wants me to do now is horror and maybe they’ll just call it that anyway? I know I’m not the only author who feels this way. More and more of us are seeing the range of what we can realistically expect to sell shrink to a margin of inches.

It doesn’t need to be this way. At the same time we’re experiencing this extreme niche-ification, social media has also engendered an era of book marketing that depends on the cult of personality as much as anything else. Authors are, in many instances, expected to do the lion’s share of promotion from their personal accounts, to make as many in-person appearances as possible whether the publisher funds them or not, to put their faces on everything in an effort to please the algorithm. We’re doing away with blurbs on book jackets and going back to full-bleed author photos. With so much emphasis on The Author as product, you’d think we could find a better way to sell their writing, not their genre.

In the midst of second-guessing myself and whether this new project will amount to a waste of effort when nobody reads it because we can’t sell it because the market won’t know where to put it, I had breakfast with my publicist — who is, of course, the market expert in my corner. After chewing on the problem myself for six weeks of residencies I blurted at her, “Do you think we can just call me a crime writer?” If that’s what I am, I’m an unconventional one, to be sure, but it was the only through-line in my work I could find that’s easily reduced to a soundbite. As terminology goes, it’s a little old-fashioned, but it seems truest to what I’m interested in: the murk of human morality. My publicist agreed, that might be a useful pivot in the coming years. If you have to pigeon-hole yourself to make a living, you find a hole you can live in.

That said, “crime” isn’t really what defines me as a writer. Those things are harder to put fingers on, but the handful of readers who’ve read all my stuff (and not hated it for not being one thing or the other) will know what they are: I write large casts of messy queers with deplorable morals and mouths full of fast, snappy dialogue; I write about performance of all shapes and sizes; I write deeply researched, immersive worlds you should be able to lose yourself in for a while; I write with an abiding interest in the human body; I let the subtext do a lot of heavy lifting and tend to leave my endings open to interpretation. Those are things you can’t learn from a shelfmark. When my editor first signed me — the only editor of the bunch who loved Hot Wax for what it was and didn’t want to turn into something else — he said, “I just want it to feel like an M. L. Rio book.” That’s what I want, too. And the kicker is, I think that’s what readers actually want — at least, the ones who want to read deeply and read widely and not read the same thing over and over again. But the market is getting to be so narrow-minded that I’m starting to feel like I can’t really write like myself if I want to keep making a living.

I’ll be the first to admit: I don’t know what the solution is here. Apart from a dramatic sea change in the industry, I don’t see this problem going away unless we talk about it more. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be surprised if ten years from now there was no “general fiction” section at all. It would be a great loss. Most of the best books I’ve ever read I stumbled on in those aisles, intrigued by a title or the back of a jacket that promised a good story by an interesting writer. I rarely thought about genre, and I definitely didn’t stand there wondering whether the book in my hands would satisfy my checklist of tropes or tailor itself to my favorite “aesthetic.” This is probably why I’m such an omnivorous writer. Reading widely — across time, culture, and, yes, genre — exposes you to all the amazing things you can do with fiction. There’s a reason we emphasize general education. A varied diet is a healthy one. And I can’t help thinking that we’re starving our readers and writers with what amounts to a literary juice cleanse.

So that’s it! That’s the Friday rant. Let the readers eat.

I had a day to pack up and drive home and I gave myself those …

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Being a household of one is certainly a contributing factor; apart from it costing about 30% more just to exist as a single person on paper, when there’s nobody to share the burden of administrative and domestic responsibilities, that amounts to an enormous tax on your time, too. Run a small business on top your household and Bard help you find time for anything that isn’t necessary to keep the house from falling down or the IRS kicking your door in to demand to see receipts. It’s a lot to manage, which is why it rankles so many writers that normies love to talk about how they’d write a book if they “could only find the time.” Hate to break it to you, folks, but we can’t find it either.

I got so fed up with this that I finally decided to take a more scientific approach to the problem. At the start of this year, I installed a basic time tracker app and I have been using it to record exactly how much time I spend on a host of work-related tasks. I’m a firm believer that knowledge is power and some intentional me-search can tell you as much about yourself and your habits as fifty sessions with a qualified therapist. Just figuring out which “categories” I could divide my work into was a worthwhile exercise, and one that helpfully illustrates how much goes into making a book besides the actual writing:

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I love to see this, because I’ve been complaining for months years about the knee-jerk aversion to the word in many literary spaces. As succinctly summarized the problem in a recent post, “Plot is sometimes envisioned as an artificial constraint on what should be an ‘organic story’ (whatever that would mean…

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Join chat

The short version is this: the Discursions chat is for paid subscribers to check in, share goals and milestones, and keep each other accountable with our various writing goals over the next six weeks. You can say as much or as little as you want about what you’re working on and what you hope to get out of this time: it’s a casual space with no hard and fast rules except to be cool and be kind and be patient with me as I test-drive this new feature. (If it goes well, we’ll do it again when I’m at Studios Key West in July.)

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Staring down the barrel of 2026 has been especially daunting. I don’t think any of us believed the end of 2025 would magically bring easier times but boy, has the world outdone itself with sheer shittiness this week. It’s tough to create when the world around you is going to pieces, but I’m on a tight deadline with this draft, so over the holidays I spent some money on some new stuff, just to soften the landing of January and give myself an incentive to get off to a good start. Office supplies are a legitimate business expense (I’ll take whatever perks I can get), but there’s more to the draw of a fresh pen set or a new planner, for me anyway. Investing in my practice constitutes a significant (and somewhat symbolic) commitment to the work.

If those little investments actually make the work easier or more rewarding, so much the better. I don’t buy stuff just for the sake of buying stuff. Every book project has different demands, evolves in a singular idiosyncratic way. I have to let the novel tell me what it needs. For instance, with Book 4 — much of which is about middle management and byzantine bureaucracies — I felt a strong, weird instinct to go back to working on legal pads instead of in my regular notebook.

As soon as I got my hands on some (surprisingly hard to find narrow-ruled, and I have deep, irrational loathing of wide-ruled anything), the ideas poured out. I filled a 50-page pad with structural notes, character sketches, loose outlines, and snatches of dialogue within a few weeks. That notebook, unaesthetic as it is, feels like an artifact from the world of the novel, and at the same time recalls the feverish research phase of my dissertation, when I worked only on legal pads and had reams of yellow paper taped to my office walls. I’m in the same sort of space now in preparation to start a first draft in earnest when I leave for my first residency on January 20. The legal pad was the right instinct and a good reminder to listen to the work and hear what it wants.

Of course, that applies to the more practical realm as well: self-directed project management at this scale is a lot to take on (maybe another reason my old academic instincts are kicking in), and the right tools can really streamline the administrative part of what I do. In any case, I wanted to kick off this fresh subscriber newsletter with some of the gear that’s going to help me write this book this year.

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Because it’s been such a tough year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make everything easier — for me and for you. The first thing I wanted to do was make this space more accessible by making it more affordable. Substack won’t let me set the monthly price lower than $5, so here’s what…

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