Update on "The First Hotel On The Moon"

and your invitation upstairs

[update from spring 2025: I’m incredibly excited to share that I have now signed with my amazing literary agent Mark Falkin and the book is currently on submission to publishing houses!]

I started writing The First Hotel On The Moon, my science fiction novel, in a blind frenzy of adrenaline two years ago.

I was getting ready to graduate from college. My final season of mock trial had just ended, meaning that I was no longer spending long nights practicing lawyer cosplay. I’d submitted my honors project. Classes were nearly over. But I didn’t know how to stop running, and I didn’t know how to turn off the adrenaline. I dove into the first draft with the panic and energy of someone being hunted. For three months, I wrote with sheer desperation, and at the end of those three months, I had a terrible first draft.

When I look back, I did have my setting. I had the Hotel in my fingers. I had this glorious glitter-dark entity, and the atmosphere of intrigue and luxury that it inspired.

And it was empty, because I did not yet have my story.

I mean, I had a story. Things happened. I had characters, and they had each other, but there was nothing that was real and exciting. I didn’t even care about them. That’s how you know it was bad.

To make matters worse, in June 2022, the same month I graduated, I took on a full-time role with a startup that demanded very long hours. I don’t remember most of that summer. I remember sitting in front of the weak air conditioning unit in the old apartment on Grove Street in Evanston, working at an overheated laptop. The cool, comfortable world I’d built on the moon started to fade. I have always been a perfectionist, and I’d created something so riddled with holes and mistakes and weak bits of writing that it was almost painful to consider it mine. So I laughed about it to my friends, calling it this evil little thing I’d written. I refused to show anyone.

But in the winter of that year, when Chicago grew colder, I went up to the Hotel again, and Draft 2 began to take shape.

I began to understand the story and characters that this world needed. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, I began to edit it into genuine existence. Over the entire year of 2023, I began to pull the corners of this strange world together. I began to explore the Hotel, and what it meant for these characters to be there.

Honestly, I think that second draft was mostly terrible, too. But it had some heat, as John Bresland would say. It was starting to rear its head, here and there, with sections of meaning. It was ugly, but it was beginning to matter to me.

And finally, this past winter, in Draft 3, I found the story that the Hotel needed. Finally, as science fiction is supposed to, it began to mean more than the story and its characters.

I think we’re almost done here.

The past few months have changed the way that I think about writing. Eric has helped a lot with that, too. I can’t think of it as an art right now, but as a routine, and as a vital part of my life. I know now that this is the work I care most about. That realization is as frightening as it is freeing.

I’ll be back with more news and more haunted little short stories soon. The fact that you’re reading this means the world to me.

But for now, I want to be the first to welcome you all upstairs, and to let you know that the Hotel is almost ready for guests.