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Aaaand for my 28th birthday, the universe gave me a book deal! Super excited to announce that my debut novel was just picked up by��. Special thanks to my agent, Connor Goldsmith, for believing in me and in the book sometimes even when I didn’t. More details to follow!

If you’re looking for some summer reading, here are some awesome books to consider, with official copy:

In this powerful debut novel, three American soldiers haunted by their actions in Afghanistan search for absolution and human connection in family and civilian life.

Wintric Ellis joins the Army as soon as he graduates from high school, saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Kristen, and to the backwoods California town whose borders have always been the limits of their horizon. Deployed in Afghanistan two years into a directionless war, he struggles to find his bearings in a place where allies could, at any second, turn out to be foes. Two seasoned soldiers, Dax and Torres, take Wintric under their wing.

Together, these three men face an impossible choice: risk death or commit a harrowing act of war. The aftershocks echo long after each returns home to a transfigured world, where his own children may fear to touch him and his nightmares still hold sway.

This richly textured novel telescopes through time to track these unforgettable characters from childhood to parenthood, from redwood forests to open desert roads to the streets of Kabul. Throughout, Jesse Goolsby tackles questions we all face: What is the price of forgiveness? Where can we turn for companionship and understanding? Most of all, what responsibility do we bear toward others: friends, parents, lovers, children, strangers halfway across the world? When violence threatens to sever the links between us, we must strive for connection �� at any cost.

Both a timely meditation on the weight of war and a humane tale of family, friendship, and love,����’d��Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them��is a novel of disarming eloquence and heart-wrenching wisdom, and the debut of a bold new voice in fiction.

An excerpt:

your house becomes an angry mouth

and the front porch buckles into teeth / the basement salivates like the nile / derek clutches to an empty keg and floats desperate up the stairs / his guitar becomes an oar / jake scales the shelves trying to catch flies with his jaws / sings: nobody knows the trouble / the chimney boards itself closed / the fire groans and chokes / colin writes suicide letters on the bathroom mirror / threatens to hang himself from the lip of the gutters / tyler says farewell and mark says nothing / you and i hide the ladder and find the last bowl of chili waiting in the kitchen / it speaks after weeks of growing its own being and a taste for riddling: / what is a home but not your home? / not the cupboard filled with starving / the walls aching under pressure / the two of us toss around in the stomach of your bedroom like we are rotten / like this house is sick enough to spit us out / like the sink still dripping / i cannot help myself

“How can the world be anything but a music made out of what we are, a jagged tune, a knife song, a wild blood and bone aria? In Rob Talbert’s energetic, frightening, human, kinetic collection we can hear every note. I want to download this book into the musical score it is and listen to it whenever I’m alone but desperately need the world.�� ��Matthew Dickman

“Rob Talbert’s��Jagged Tune��is a gorgeous post-industrial lyric hymn to minimum-wage jobs: from corrections officer to pawn shop employee to cruise ship attendant to insurance certificate specialist to retail clerk to unemployed and back again, Talbert’s poems—hewn from life experience—contrast the constraints of work with the ecstasy of nightclubs, their “feral engine�� and “deep recess of liquor techno.�� “My life depends on night,�� he writes, and this is a nocturnal book that embraces the wonder of darkness, its broken song. I am awed by these poems—their unyielding eye, their deft music, their capacity for wisdom, and all the ways in which they illuminate facets of the American experience that we rarely see.�� ��Erika Meitner

Two women come to Maine in search of family, and find more love, heartbreak, and friendship, than they’d ever imagined one little fishing town could hold.

When Leah, a young New York reporter, meets Henry, she falls in love with everything about him: his freckles, green thumb, and tales of a Maine childhood. They marry quickly and Leah convinces Henry to move back to Menamon. As Leah builds a life there, reporting for��The Menamon Star��and vowing to be less of an emotional screw-up, the newlyweds are shocked to discover that they don’t know each other nearly so well as they thought they did.

When Quinn’s mother dies, she tracks down the famous folk-singer father she’s never known, in Menamon. Scrappy and smart-mouthed, Quinn gets a job at the local paper, an apartment above the town diner, and tries to shore up the courage to meet her father. But falling in love with her roommate, Rosie, was never part of the plan.

These two unruly women’s work relationship at��The Star��deepens into best-friendship when they stumble onto a story that shakes sleepy Menamon—and holds damaging repercussions for Leah’s husband and Quinn’s roommate both. As the town descends into turmoil, both women must decide what kind of lives they are willing to fight for.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the 2014 Lambda Literary Awards in New York City. And let me tell you, it was surreal. Here are some highlights.

Amazing people I saw/met

Last time, I was the only one at the Lammys in a saree. This time, I spotted someone in a beautiful red saree and it turned out to be a fellow Sri Lankan Tamil writer whose book�� was a finalist for the LGBT SciFi/Fantasy/Horror category.

We’d been Facebook friends for a while, but we finally met in person! And took a great picture. Sassafras is the author of��, won the Emerging Writers Award last year, and presented the LGBT Anthology category at this year’s Lammys.

I’ve read his work since college, and it was amazing to meet him in person. He also won the Gay Poetry award for��Unpeopled Eden.

Ok, so technically this was��before the awards, but it was great to meet my agent in person for the first time. Behold the agent-writer selfie.

I got to see some amazing faces again

Many of my peeps from the Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat showed up at the Lammys: , , , Matthew Philip, , and .

And the best speech goes to��

Kate Bornstein delivered an amazing speech in acceptance of the Pioneer Lifetime Achievement Award, stressing the importance of including the identities that are lost and made invisible in the fight for LGBT equality.

Watch the whole beautiful speech:

#ABookSavedMyLife

The Lammys this year started with a composite video of the #ABookSavedMyLife crowdsource campaign. Check it out.

See my contribution to the ‘s crowdsourced video campaign , featuring ‘s book .

My short story “Miracle Boy�� won the Fiction Vortex Reader’s Choice Poll for April 2014. Thanks so much to everyone who voted.

:

I sat behind him the day he grew wings. I always seemed to be behind him �� in class, in line during morning prayer �� maybe that’s why I noticed him in the first place, before the wings, before everyone else did.

He was in my third grade class. Red sand always coated his legs, garish against his blue-black skin. He took off his shoes to play in the courtyard at recess, and kicked up the sand where grass refused to grow under the tropical Sri Lankan sun. His friends played cricket. They ran and yelled and boasted under the watchful eyes of the girls who stood by the swings. But he just kicked and kicked at the sand, watching the dusty clouds his feet made.

My body wasn’t strong enough to play outside at recess, so I sat at the classroom window and watched his feet, the way the sand slowly stained their bright, pink undersides.

My speculative short story “Miracle Boy�� appeared in Fiction Vortex.

At this year’s AWP in Seattle, I attended two panels on structuring the realist literary novel. In genre and commercial fiction, the plot is often external. A murder mystery. A fantastic quest. A romantic pursuit. But in realist fiction, oftentimes the plot is internal, driven by the characters�� desires and wants.

Clearly there are no hard and fast rules to structure, but the panels and AWP argued that most successful literary novels follow a 3-part or 4-part guideline, intentionally or not. I’m going to analyze a general 4-part structure, but I’ve added my own take on the points of transition between them. To illustrate, I’m going to use the large story arc of all seven Harry Potter books. (Using a genre fic like HP helps to more clearly point out the differences between the parts.) HP spoilers, duh.

I’m also going to give examples from my , but only for the first part, since giving the rest of the story away kind of defeats the purpose of trying to get it published at all.

Here’s a quick look at the flow of a general 4-part novel:

��

Inciting Incident

The event that begins the narrative, the start of our . When I took a workshop with , he told us to imagine our stories as rocks perched at the edge of a cliff. The inciting incident, then, is a bird that flies by and hits the rock, sending it tumbling down the cliff. It is the moment of change. A stranger comes to town. A character decides to quit smoking. A car crash. The inciting incident is that cusp of change that ripples into the rest of the novel.

Harry Potter Inciting Incident �� Harry gets a letter in the mail from Hogwarts.

Inciting Incident �� Lucky gets a call from her mother, asking her to move back to her hometown to take care of her ailing Grandmother.

Part I

The beginning, where characters are introduced and their desires are revealed to the reader. We get acquainted to the world of the story—its internal logic, its heroes, its villains. We are introduced to what’s at stake in the story.

Harry Potter Part I �� The entire first 3 books, which invite us into the world. We experience and learn about the wizarding world as Harry does. We learn about Voldemort, about the war, about the inequalities and political struggles within the wizarding world.

Part I �� We are introduced to Lucky’s family, her marriage of convenience, and the tensions between her and her mother. We learn why she keeps her sexuality a secret, and realize the stakes involved.

100-page Problem

I’m calling this such because in a 300-page literary novel, the incident usually comes around the 70-100-page mark. This is the event that kicks off the rest of the novel, the point of transition between the beginning and the middle. So far, we’ve coasted on the effects of the inciting incident, but now we need something else to carry us through the rest of the novel. At this point, causality should increase, and the rest of the scenes have to feel like they’re building toward something. This is usually when the larger story arc kicks in. The 100-page Problem introduces the major obstacle between the protagonist and his or her desires.

Harry Potter 100-page Problem �� Wormtail escapes capture at the end of Prizoner of Azkaban, setting in motion the larger story arc of Voldemort’s second rise to power.

Marriage of a Thousand Lies 100-page Problem �� While living at home, Lucky rekindles romance with her childhood friend Nisha, but Nisha announces that she’s getting an arranged marriage. This is the major problem that Lucky must now solve. Just because it’s called the 100-page Problem doesn’t mean it needs to come at the end of the first third of the story. Nisha’s marriage is revealed early on in Part I, but it takes a while for the romance to begin, and even longer for Lucky to be truly invested in her relationship with Nisha.

Part II

The “seeking�� phase, where the character seeks his or her desires and reacts to the problem posed by the 100-page Problem. A lot of fumbling around the obstacle, but without a clear idea on how to beat it.

Harry Potter Part II �� The 4th and 5th books, in which Harry seeks the things he wants, but is still reacting to the world. Things keep happening TO him, and he reacts.

Turning Point

The incident that changes the course of events, or raises the stakes. Usually comes around the middle of the story, and transitions from Part II to Part III. This is the incident that causes the protagonist to start to act.

Harry Potter Turning Point �� Sirius’s death. This is the first time in a long time that Harry loses a loved one to the war. It changes the stakes of the narrative, and signal’s Harry’s loss of innocence. After this, he goes after Voldemort and is more invested in defeating him, rather than just living a normal life.

Part III

The character stops seeking and starts acting to fulfill their desires in spite of the obstacle posed.

Harry Potter Part III �� The 6th book, where Harry is mature and proactive about fighting Voldemort, even as he struggles to accept his role as the chosen one.

Twist

Transitions from the middle to the end, and reveals the final hurdle—the last obstacle that stands in the way of the character and her desires. This can be an actual plot twist, or just a bend in the road of the narrative that changes the perspective or stake—either way, it’s the last piece of the puzzle, the last bit of new information we need to reach the end.

Harry Potter Twist �� Horcruxes. Now, Harry knows what he has to do, even though he doesn’t know how yet. This is the last piece of the puzzle. The mystery of Voldemort’s “immortality�� is revealed.

Part IV

The ending, most of which is the build up to the climax. Stakes are high, tension is high, suspense is high. Resolution is imminent.

Harry Potter Part IV �� The last book, when the death count keeps rising, fissures start to form between Harry and Ron, and they’re all racing against time to find and destroy the Horcruxes.

Climax

The moment of highest tension in the story. Fight or flight. Life or death. Or something much less dramatic, but where the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been before. The character comes up against the obstacle for the final time.

Harry Potter Climax �� The Battle of Hogwarts.

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The falling action. In contemporary literature, the dénouement section keeps getting smaller and smaller. It wraps up the rest of the story, and eases the reader out of the narrative. Or throws the reader out. Whatever works.

Harry Potter ��é�Դdzܱ𳾱�Գ� �� Everything after the Battle of Hogwarts and before the Epilogue (though, like most fans, I subscribe to the EWE philosophy—Epilogue? What Epilogue?).

So does this mean structure always wins?

Of course not. But pick up your favorite novel, and try deconstructing it using the 3- or 4-part structure. Not all novels follow it, and there are many novels that don’t. But for the most part, structure is interesting in that it allows us to talk about the progress of the novel, and to plot out the plot. Let’s look at the fancy graphic again.

Does this mean I support outlining? Only after drafting it all out the first time. I’m a fan of wandering, of letting the story tell itself for a while, then going back and figuring out the shapes of these parts and the moments of transition between them.

Does this mean falls into this structure? Not exactly. I wrote without outlining, without a structure in mind, so the story is largely unstructured. But I can point to the general moments of transition between different parts, and an awareness of structure is never bad.

Last week I read and commented on a friend’s novel-in-progress, and it has me thinking about causality. More specifically, about how establishing a pattern of cause and effect in your fictional world builds momentum in the narrative.

By causality I mean the direct and indirect results of actions and incidents. Cause and effect allows for a logical flow of events. Not a predictable narrative, but a logical one. Like this: A character files for divorce. To take the edge off her pain, she meets up with an old flame at a bar. After a few beers, she drives home. On the way, she gets pulled over by a cop, and is arrested for driving drunk. Logical flow of events. One scene leads into the next. Cause and effect.

Without establishing a flow of causality, the narrative can feel unanchored and random. Causality makes the reader care. Breaking the logical flow can break trust with the reader.��Expectation of the effect creates suspense and keeps the reader turning the page to find out more. Without cause and effect, you have a random string of scenes. With cause and effect, you have a story.

Let’s take our character from before. Say that she files for divorce. Then she makes a sandwich. Then she goes to work. Then she meets an old flame at a bar. Then she goes home. Then she goes to work. Then she meets a new coworker. Then she goes out and has a great time. Then she gets sad. In this version of the narrative, there is no causality. Scenes do not build on top of one another.

Let’s try that again. She files for divorce. She tries to go about her life like normal, but the pain of the divorce keeps her from focusing at work and she botches up a huge project. She gets fired. She decides to live on her savings for a while and take a trip backpacking around Asia. She drives her dog to her mother’s, and takes off for Taiwan. In this version, each scene is a result of the previous one. Plot builds like a snowball rolling down a hillside. Momentum.

In a narrative that isn’t linear, links of causality still exist, but may be revealed out of order. Take Louis Erdrich’s novel��The Plague of Doves, an epic multi-generational family saga that is anything but chronological. The novel starts with a murder and takes the whole 300-and-something pages to reveal the who and why. The glue holding the novel together is the slow revelation of cause and effect.

Causality doesn’t have to be obvious. At the beginning of stories, causality can be and often is tenuous. Establishment of new subplots can seem random at first. But as the story starts to gain momentum—like our accelerating snowball—causality has to increase, speeding toward the end, which, as we know, should be both surprising and inevitable.

Massive writerly meta self-thought chain blog post. Sure, why not?

Actually I’ve been meaning to start blogging about my writing process, and this seemed like a great opportunity to start.��I was tagged by , so go check out his post.

Oh, and I write literary/realist fiction, and dabble a bit in creative nonfiction and poetry.

What am I working on?

I just finished a major stylistic revision of a novel,��, a story about a Sri Lankan American lesbian in a marriage of convenience. Well, mostly finished. I wrote a new ending, and am waiting to hear back from beta readers before revising it.

I’m also starting to think about the next novel project. I’ve been drafting, but so far I only have a vague idea of what it might be. What I know so far:

There are two chronological story lines, plus interconnected short pieces that tie into the overall arc.It involves heavy, gritty subjects like train accidents, 9/11, hate crimes, police reports, etc.Oh, and the main character dies. Twice.

I’m also starting to brainstorm about a series of blog posts about other parts of the writing process, and my personal journey writing my first novel. Follow if you’re interested.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I’m super interested in intersectionality in my characters. In other words, how do our various and complex identities combine and contradict with each other to affect our individual human experience? How do our group allegiances and memberships affect our lives? What do our individual and group struggles reveal about the human condition?

I don’t give a shit about suburban ennui, but I do want to write into knowledge about race, class, and gender.

Why do I write what I do?

I believe in the power of stories to change the world, and I use fiction to try and tell some truths about our lives and struggles. In particular, I focus on voices not often heard in literary and realist fiction, voices often challenged and silenced in commercial publishing: the non-white, the non-male, the non-Christian, the queer, the immigrant. There’s power in these voices, there’s power in my characters, and there’s power in daring to write about them.

How does my writing process work?

I’m not what you’d call settled. In the past 5 years, I’ve been both single and not single, I’ve been in grad school, had a full time job, been unemployed, and had a job where I traveled 60-70 hrs a week. Routine isn’t exactly something I’ve enjoyed, so I’ve had to be very flexible with my writing schedule.

I write in spurts. I have periods (usually two to three months long) where I’m writing consistently, on a schedule with self-imposed deadlines, producing anywhere from 500-2000 words/day, 5 days/wk. Then I usually relax for a month, give myself time off the writing schedule and just write when the mood strikes me. No word quota, no deadline. Sometimes I write about my writing, thinking about future revisions, or structure/plot/characters/place/etc. Sometimes I do freewriting. Sometimes I don’t write at all, and use that time to travel for fun, hang out with friends, talk with beta readers, and binge-watch shows on Netflix. To me the downtime is as important as the crunchtime.

As far as the process of a specific piece of writing, it varies. For shorter pieces, I spend a lot of time drafting, and do a handful of revision drafts. For novel-length stuff, I draft fast and messy, and spend a lot of time revising. (For , I spent a year writing the first draft, then three years revising it.)��On each revision draft, I chose something to focus on: point of view, characters, structure, scenes, place, description, voice (roughly in that order). I will be writing more about my novel writing process on this blog and on .

The Writers I’m Tagging

is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Superstition Review, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, The Adirondack Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, and other journals. He was a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry and is the 2014 Guest Poetry Editor for CODEX Journal.

is the editor of the two time American Library Association honored & Lambda Literary Finalist Kicked Out anthology , and Leather Ever After. Hir debut novel Roving Pack was honored by the American Library Association. Sassafras is the 2013 winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Berzon Emerging Writer Award. Ze lives and writes in Brooklyn with hir partner, two dogs of dramatically different sizes, two bossy cats, and a kitten.

Massive writerly meta self-thought chain blog post. Sure, why not?

Actually I’ve been meaning to start blogging about my writing process, and this seemed like a great opportunity to start.��I was tagged by��, so go check out his post.

Oh, and I write literary/realist fiction, and dabble a bit in creative nonfiction and poetry.

What am I working on?

I just finished a major stylistic revision of a novel,��, a story about a Sri Lankan American lesbian in a marriage of convenience. Well, mostly finished. I wrote a new ending, and am waiting to hear back from beta readers before revising it.

I’m also starting to think about the next novel project. I’ve been drafting, but so far I only have a vague idea of what it might be. What I know so far:

There are two chronological story lines, plus interconnected short pieces that tie into the overall arc.It involves heavy, gritty subjects like train accidents, 9/11, hate crimes, police reports, etc.Oh, and the main character dies. Twice.

I’m also starting to brainstorm about a series of blog posts about other parts of the writing process, and my personal journey writing my first novel. Follow����if you’re interested.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I’m super interested in intersectionality in my characters. In other words, how do our various and complex identities combine and contradict with each other to affect our individual human experience? How do our group allegiances and memberships affect our lives? What do our individual and group struggles reveal about the human condition?

I don’t give a shit about suburban ennui, but I do want to write into knowledge about race, class, and gender.

Why do I write what I do?

I believe in the power of stories to change the world, and I use fiction to try and tell some truths about our lives and struggles. In particular, I focus on voices not often heard in literary and realist fiction, voices often challenged and silenced in commercial publishing: the non-white, the non-male, the non-Christian, the queer, the immigrant. There’s power in these voices, there’s power in my characters, and there’s power in daring to write about them.

How does my writing process work?

I’m not what you’d call settled. In the past 5 years, I’ve been both single and not single, I’ve been in grad school, had a full time job, been unemployed, and had a job where I traveled 60-70 hrs a week. Routine isn’t exactly something I’ve enjoyed, so I’ve had to be very flexible with my writing schedule.

I write in spurts. I have periods (usually two to three months long) where I’m writing consistently, on a schedule with self-imposed deadlines, producing anywhere from 500-2000 words/day, 5 days/wk. Then I usually relax for a month, give myself time off the writing schedule and just write when the mood strikes me. No word quota, no deadline. Sometimes I write about my writing, thinking about future revisions, or structure/plot/characters/place/etc. Sometimes I do freewriting. Sometimes I don’t write at all, and use that time to travel for fun, hang out with friends, talk with beta readers, and binge-watch shows on Netflix. To me the downtime is as important as the crunchtime.

As far as the process of a specific piece of writing, it varies. For shorter pieces, I spend a lot of time drafting, and do a handful of revision drafts. For novel-length stuff, I draft fast and messy, and spend a lot of time revising. (For��, I spent a year writing the first draft, then three years revising it.)��On each revision draft, I chose something to focus on: point of view, characters, structure, scenes, place, description, voice (roughly in that order). I will be writing more about my novel writing process on this blog and on��.

The Writers I’m Tagging

��is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in��Superstition Review, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, The Adirondack Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, and other journals. He was a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry and is the 2014 Guest Poetry Editor for CODEX Journal.

��is the editor of the two time American Library Association honored & Lambda Literary Finalist Kicked Out anthology , and Leather Ever After. Hir debut novel��Roving Pack��was honored by the American Library Association. Sassafras is the 2013 winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Berzon Emerging Writer Award. Ze lives and writes in Brooklyn with hir partner, two dogs of dramatically different sizes, two bossy cats, and a kitten.