Coming Soon: TIDEPOOL
Hello there, everyone. At long last, I get to tell you some great news!
I have been absolutely dying to talk about this since I signed the contract at the end of August, but needed to keep quiet until the official acquisition announcement went out. Now it can be told: My dark fantasy/horror novel Tidepool is being published by Parliament House Press! It will be coming out in early 2021.
The plot: In 1913, Henry Hamilton disappears while on a business trip, and his sister, Sorrow, won’t rest until she finds out what happened to him. Defying her father’s orders to remain home, she travels to Tidepool, the last place Henry is known to have visited.
After corpses wash up on shore looking as if they’ve been torn apart by something not quite human, Sorrow’s ready to return to Baltimore and let her father send in the professional detectives.
But then she encounters Mrs. Ada Oliver, a widow whose expensive black silk dresses and elegant manners set her apart from other Tidepool residents. A terrifying encounter with the “daughter” Mrs. Oliver keeps in the basement leads to Sorrow’s discovery of Tidepool’s dark secret and her brother’s fate.
Sorrow wants to get justice for Henry, but doing so could doom all the town’s residents. And some denizens of Tidepool — human and otherwise — are hell bent on making sure Sorrow never leaves.
My inspiration for the novel was equal parts H.P. Lovecraft and American Horror Story. I know I’m perhaps a bit biased, but I really love this book. I wrote the first draft during NaNoWriMo 2016, just a couple of months after I’d been laid off from the company where I’d worked for over 20 years, and I really threw myself into this one. At the time, I talked about the process of writing it on Medium’s NaNoWriMo publication. A sample entry: NaNoWriMo: The Reread. (The novel was still called Blood Tide at the time.)
NaNoWriMo 2019 is coming up soon, and with it will come the inevitable naysaying from those who claim that NaNoWriMo is a waste of time because you’ll just be writing a bunch of unreadable crap. And sure, this novel started out that way, but the good news? If you work hard enough at revision, you just might turn the crap into something other people will want to read.
Two years ago, this novel got me into Pitch Wars, a very competitive mentoring program, and Peter McLean, my wonderful mentor, really helped me get the manuscript into shape. (He also suggested the title change.) Don’t let anyone make you feel bad or like you’re wasting your time if you’re entering NaNoWriMo with the hopes of turning your Draft Zero into a published book someday.
I tried for a couple of years to get an agent with Tidepool, but while several requested the full manuscript (a very positive thing) and I got a lot of favorable feedback, even the most enthusiastic of them said “I just don’t know where I could sell this.”
Finally, #SFFPit, a Twitter pitch contest for unpublished sci-fi and fantasy works, connected me with Parliament House this summer, and in late August they made an offer of publication. I liked what I read and heard about them and appreciated their responsiveness to my (many) questions, and I accepted.
I will be talking more about Tidepool on my blog; if you didn’t know my blog existed, it’s at http://www.nicolewillson.com. I also have an author page at Goodreads— feel free to follow me there.
I’ll have a lot more to share about the novel as 2021 draws closer (such as the actual publication date, a cover reveal, and sample chapters), so if you’re not already on my mailing list, click this link and please sign up! You’ll get a short story of mine just for joining, and I occasionally share writing with my list that doesn’t get posted anywhere else. And I won’t spam you; that’s a waste of writing time.
You guys, I am SO excited. I really can’t wait for all of you to meet Sorrow Hamilton and Ada Oliver at long last.
