{"id":1868,"date":"2023-04-27T12:08:06","date_gmt":"2023-04-27T16:08:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=1868"},"modified":"2023-04-28T17:37:51","modified_gmt":"2023-04-28T21:37:51","slug":"coming-in-2024-the-keeper-of-the-key","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/coming-in-2024-the-keeper-of-the-key\/","title":{"rendered":"Coming in 2024: THE KEEPER OF THE KEY"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
It’s not an official deal until it appears in PM!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

OK, that thing I said in a previous entry about having better publishing luck in odd-numbered years? I was kinda joking, but now I\u2019m starting to think there might be something to that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been sitting on this news since mid-February, so I am thrilled to announce my YA horror novel THE KEEPER OF THE KEY, which I\u2019ve been workshopping and revising and shopping around for years, will finally be getting its day in the sun with Parliament House Press. It\u2019s a pretty significant departure in tone and style from Tidepool<\/i> and The Shadow Dancers of Brixton Hill<\/i>. For starters, it\u2019s actually set in the present day. I\u2019ve been pitching it as Bluebeard x The Haunting of Hill House<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Have a summary:<\/p>\n

Sixteen-year-old Rachel isn\u2019t exactly thrilled when her mother announces they\u2019re going to live with Mom\u2019s boyfriend Geoff in Morgan House, an old, run-down mansion. The best thing about Rachel\u2019s new hometown is Nick, a guy she knows is worth keeping when he takes her to a cemetery on their first date.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Geoff\u2019s got a mile-long list of annoying house rules, and Rachel\u2019s baffled by his insistence that she stay out of the basement. But something in Morgan House plays by its own rules. Night after night, an unknown force pulls Rachel down to that forbidden basement to show her terrifying visions of a man in shadows murdering women. If Rachel won\u2019t heed the warnings of the dead and see things as they really are, she\u2019ll become part of Morgan House forever.<\/i><\/p>\n

(Trust me that if you think you know what\u2019s going to happen in the book just from reading the description\u2026you don\u2019t<\/b>. What fun would that be?)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me tell you: I fought hard<\/b> for this novel. I wrote the first draft during Camp NaNoWriMo in April 2018: http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/camp-nanowrimo-a-very-happy-camper\/<\/a>\u00a0while Tidepool<\/i> was still going through its post-Pitch Wars agent search. KotK<\/i> has been to several different workshops.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, and a well-known writer leading one workshop group told me nobody would ever publish this book because the premise was unoriginal and overdone. (I\u2019m not naming him. He knows what he did.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That just made me determined to prove him wrong. A man in the same writing workshop told me \u201cI have<\/i> to know what happens next!\u201d And a New York Times<\/i> bestselling author who read an early version of the manuscript told me she\u2019d stayed up until two in the morning\u00a0to get to the end and find out what happened. So I persisted, believing there had to be an agent or an editor out there who would respond to the book the way she did.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m so excited to be working with Parliament House again, as I think they did a stellar job with Tidepool<\/i>. Malorie Nilson had wonderful ideas and a lot of enthusiasm for the book (and for horror in general) when I spoke to her, and I can\u2019t wait to get to work so you can read this story and meet these characters. I\u2019ve been living with them for a long time. At this point, Parliament House is planning on a Fall 2024 release to capitalize on spooky season.\u00a0I’ll include more information as soon as I have it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, that thing I said in a previous entry about having better publishing luck in odd-numbered years? I was kinda…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[38,40,129,41],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1868"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1868"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1879,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1868\/revisions\/1879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}