Open House serialized on Substack (free)

My suburban gothic horror novelette, Open House, is serialized on Substack this week. I’m posting one part each day, with the finale dropping on Halloween. All parts will be free to read, and I plan to leave them up (and free) for the foreseeable future.

Here’s the blurb:

When very pregnant Kim Idlewood attends an open house with her husband in an expensive Portland suburb, she hates the place. The décor is hideous (The 1980s called. They want their mauve curtains back. And their mauve walls.), the kitchen hasn’t been remodeled since the Iran-Contra scandal, and the Idlewoods can’t afford it anyway. But Kim’s husband loves the house–a little too much.

I sold this story to the Storyteller Series podcast back in 2021, and they turned it into a full-cast audio drama. Sadly, the podcast is now defunct and seems to have disappeared from all platforms except Spotify. Their website is also gone, so the print version of the story is no longer online–or wasn’t, until I posted part 1 on Substack yesterday and part 2 today.

I’ve never serialized a story before, nor have I ever posted fiction on Substack before. I’ll confess that this venture is what experts in the field call, A Wild Hair. I woke up yesterday with the idea, thought, What the hell, and did it.

This is not normal for me.

Normal for me is to spend two weeks researching and another three weeks wrestling with self-doubt before trying something new. I’m a chronic overthinker and a recovering perfectionist. As I was setting this up yesterday, I kept telling myself I was probably doing it wrong, should probably edit the story since it’s been a few years since I wrote it and presumably I’m a better (or at least more experienced) writer than I was back then, blah blah blah.

But I didn’t. I just kept going. OK, I did edit the first post about 4 times after publishing it, but still…

If you’ve been hanging around here at Camp WTF for more than a few minutes, you probably know I’ve been wrestling with what to do with my first novel, Vanishing, Inc. Do I revise and resubmit to 2 agents who invited me to? Do I query small presses? Do I self-publish? I’ve been going round and round in my head about that since… March. Seven effing months of being stuck in my own head. I’m getting closer to a decision, but you see what I mean? I’m the queen of analysis paralysis and procrastination.

So I’m proud of myself for jumping into something new without spending months agonizing over it.

If you like “light” horror–not a lot of gore and gruesomeness–give Open House a try. You can learn more about it in this post from when it was first published, read a snippet in this post–or just hop over to my Substack to read (as of a few minutes ago) the first two parts. Hit Subscribe over there and the next 5 parts will appear in your inbox.

If you’d rather listen than read, here’s a link to the audio drama, free on Spotify:

Happy Halloween!