novels – Page 4 – Andrew Careaga

Friday Five: ‘All Our Tomorrows’ author Amy DeBellis

‘Don’t be afraid to write stuff that’s mediocre. If you don’t write the mediocre, you can’t build up to the good and the great.’

For Amy DeBellis, “writing is a way to express negative emotions: fear, grief, rage,” she says. “I also find that makes for more interesting stories.”

To call Amy’s stories interesting is like calling Stephen King’s novel Christine a book about an old clunker. Her short stories may glimmer on the surface, but beneath that veneer, the gruesome and bizarre are exposed, but not in an overt, obvious horror-genre way. She also sets many of her writings in a dystopian near future–one not so far off from our current world and circumstances, just enough to help us imagine what those current circumstances can lead to.

Amy’s astounding debut novel, All Our Tomorrows (CLASH Books, 2025), explores the lives of three Gen Z women navigating late-stage capitalism in a near-future New York City.

Friday Five: Tommy Dean on five ways to open any story (but especially a novel)

Advice from an exceptional writer, editor, and literary agent, with real-life examples.

Today’s Friday Five is cones courtesy of Tommy Dean, a talented writer, editor, and literary agent who shares his writing wisdom regularly via his Substack, where today’s post originally appeared. It is reprinted here today with permission.

Tommy Dean

Tommy is editor of the popular flash fiction literary magazine Fractured Lit and Uncharted, a writing coach who offers editing services and writing workshops, and an associate literary agent with Rosecliff Literary. He is the author of Hollows, a collection of flash stories, and two flash fiction chapbooks, Special Like the People on TV and Covenants. Tommy has also appeared on this blog before as the subject of an April 2024 Friday Five interview.

What I love most about this post from Tommy is how he draws from actual examples–actual novels–to support his points. This approach makes me want to dive deeper into my reading to see what other novels follow similar paths.

Friday Five: Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar

‘Modify your story, make it real, make it whole, but don’t give up if you believe in the tale you are trying to tell.’

Portrait photo of writer Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar — Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar

The author of two books and numerous flash fiction and micro fiction stories, Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar is an Indian American writer based in Columbus, Ohio. Her flash fiction and microfiction, including her debut collection Morsels of Purple, explore the nuances of womanhood across cultural and geographic boundaries. Her novel Skin Over Milk tells the story of three girls “who bear the weight of being unwanted daughters in 1990s India.” Sara’s writings have appeared in several print and online literary journals, including Ghost Parachute, SmokeLong Quarterly, Reflex Press, and Flash Fiction Online, and have earned nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. She also is a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly.

In addition to her writing, Sara is a mother, wife, and IT leader who holds an electronics engineer degree and an MBA. Read on to learn how she balances the many facets of her life to consistently create wonderful stories.

LitLinks, Volume 1, Number 3

On interior monologues, the devil we don’t know, the future of fiction, and the rage of the literary man

Happy Juneteenth!

Here are some lit-related items that caught my eye in recent weeks:

Do you hear an internal monologue?
The rage of the literary man. “He’s certainly publishing less, but he’s louder and angrier than ever.”
The Devil You Don’t Know. Noir writers know evil is real. What about the rest of us?
The future of fiction. Will all tomorrow’s novels be serialized on Substack?

As always, if you’d rather listen to a podcast-style AI summary, here you go. Or use the player below.

Image via Pexels.

Friday Five: historian, writer, and Dad Lit podcaster Dan Roberts

A Father’s Day weekend conversation about this new genre and the appeal of “voicey, moral, unwieldy, independent, ambitious, and impatient” literary men.

With Father’s Day just around the corner, it seems appropriate and timely to shine the Friday Five spotlight on Daniel Roberts, a historian, writer, and host of the Dad Lit podcast, which is available on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

A professional historian, Dan has many published works of history, but no published works of fiction — not yet, at least. He is the author of the biography, The American: The Life, Times, and War of Basil Antonelli, the story of an Italian-American immigrant that Amazon describes as “a quintessentially American biography of immigration, assimilation, and sacrifice.” Currently he is on submission with two novels, The Black Hole Pact, a Sci Fi novel about a woman investigating her father’s role in saving the world from a killer asteroid, and Cursed at the Hanging Pine Inn, a horror novel best described as The Shining meets Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.

He established the Dad Lit Pod earlier this year, not long after a bit of hand-wringing in The New York Times about the disappearance of the literary man (a topic I also blogged about). So the topics Dan delves into on his podcast have never been more timely.

As you might expect from such a booster of Dad Lit, Dan is himself a dad. He’s the father to a four-year-old girl and has been blissfully married for eight years.