A brief history of the female werewolf
Hello loves!
I feel like I have spent the last month surfing a tsunami, but land is in sight. This weekend I'm heading to MCM London Comic Con (catch me on Saturday talking about Horror & the Art of Suspense, and wearing Dungeon Crawler Carl cosplay) and that's the last of the big Femme Feral launch publicity things for a while. I am exhausted but damn, it's been a goddamn pleasure getting to have so many conversations with people about my weird book baby.
I've been writing a bunch of stuff for various other places that are not this newsletter. So allow me to direct you to where you can hear my thoughts about...
A brief history of the female werewolf
"For most of the past century, the werewolf has been one of the most stubbornly male-coded monsters. If vampire films were often exploring cultural anxieties around deviant sexuality and aristocratic decadence, werewolf stories were typically exploring the masculine fear of one’s own violence... To modern eyes, a female werewolf feels like a twist of the norm. But really, the older subversive strain has always been there, living in parallel, probing questions about women’s bodies and women’s violence, about the traits in women that we find monstrous, about the forms of power that can be claimed by women who refuse to be cowed when the fingers point at us and call us a she-wolf or a witch."
Despite the name, this is a rather thorough (sorry lol) essay about the literary history of the female werewolf, how it connects to early modern witch trials, and the Omegaverse.
Sam Beckbessinger
13 songs that inspired Femme Feral
"I’ve always used music as a crowbar to access emotions that I usually hide from myself. As a teenager, I remember lying in the bathtub and listening to Radiohead while dribbling water down my cheeks pretending I was crying. When I was writing Femme Feral, I listened to a lot of furious music, mostly ’90s Riot Grrrl, while walking for hours around London."
One of my favourite briefs so far, where I got to write about 13 songs that inspired the novel. I had so much fun ranting about Fiona Apple, Björk and Dolly Parton.
Read the rest on Largehearted Boy
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How I slowly crabwalked into writing novels
"I always wanted to write novels but I didn’t think I had the skills, so I tried basically everything else first ... And I guess, finally, there was nothing else to do except to do the thing I’d always wanted to do ... I think I’d built up the idea of being an “Author” into this big thing, a thing only the greatest and most special people in the world could be, an unachievable goal. But I love writing. So now I just think of myself as a writer, because it’s more of a verb than a noun. I’m a writer every day that I write. I now have this weird career full of cobbled-together ways of making a living from writing words, and every day I get to do that feels like the luckiest day of my life. I’m going to keep trying to get away with it until someone makes me stop."
A delightful Q&A featuring nerdy questions like the first book I can remember falling in love with, the difficult moments in writing Femme Feral, and the best books I've read this year so far.
Read the rest on The Nerd Daily
Elise Dumpleton
Why midlife women are reading more horror
"Growing up, women’s rage was invisible to me. Fury was an unacceptable emotion for women. The version of (white) feminism I was handed was Girlboss feminism. We were Hermione-pilled: groomed to be obedient, compliant, praise-hungry, convinced that if we could just be good enough we could have everything. In the controlled environments of school it worked, until we were booted into the real world in a midst of a recession, discovered that the glass ceiling is cracked but still very much intact, crashed into the realities of the unequal mental load and childrearing and caring for our parents and the missing social safety nets and most of us just found ourselves exhausted. Our compliance and our striving has bought us so little. There’s a reason so many Millennial women tattoo Mary Olivier’s “you do not have to be good” on our ribs: we need the bloody reminder."
Thoughts on the "femmegore" subgenre and why it's especially resonant for women in midlife.
Read the rest on The Shift with Sam Baker
sam baker and Sam Beckbessinger
My bananas writing process
"I think I might be the only novelist to use spreadsheets as much as any writing software ... I have a naturally chaotic mind, so a lot of my process is about trying to bring order and structure to this absolute tangle of thoughts in my brain. For this book, I had a really ridiculous colour-coded spreadsheet that had about 50 different tabs in it by the end, tracking every single beat in the story."
Sadly this one's not online, but South Africans, there's a marvellous multi-page feature in the May-June issue of Fairlady.
What else have I been up to?
Amongst all this launch chaos, I've been running my final creative writing workshops for the trimester at Bath Spa University, getting involved in launching a new fintech startup (y am I like this), planning a trip to South Africa in October-November to launch of the Manage Your Money update, I ran my second-ever half-marathon, and wrote another draft of the Marmalade is Missing film script (it's feeling fun!). When I tell you I am tired, friends, I am TIRED.
I'm buggering off to a beach next week where I intend to do as little as possible, hopefully eat snacks and read books, maybe treat myself to a tiny breakdown, who knows! Then ONWARDS into the summer, where the next novel's waiting for me.
Wishing you Mary Oliver tattoos and femmegore,
Sam
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