By Dave Oei

Rachel Howzell Hall is entering brand new territory with her latest novel. After writing a book series featuring Detective Elouise Norton and ten other standalone crime and mystery novels, the two-time Los Angeles Times Book Award winner has published her first foray into the genre of romantasy with her new novel, The Last One. It features Kai, a sharp, strong, beautiful woman who discovers her clothes are missing, and worse, she has no memory of who she is or why she’s in the middle of a forest. The world is in the midst of drought and a pandemic—the first town she comes across is barren, and the impoverished folk want to lynch her because she’s different.

But she learns there’s a sort of magic in the air that separates haves from the have-nots, and even she has a whiff of it despite not understanding it. While navigating the rugged landscape, Kai must learn who she can trust, why she is hearing voices in her head, and what’s behind the elusive and gorgeous Jadon. Why is he so keen on helping her—surely, it’s can’t only be her good looks?

The Coachella Review talks to Hall about the challenges of jumping from mystery to romantasy, being a Black woman author and standing out as the other, and the craft of folding together stories within stories.

 

The Coachella Review: As a veteran mystery and thriller writer, what was it like going from the contemporary, focusing on one character, set in gritty Los Angeles, to The Last One?

Rachel Howzell Hall: It was hard. It was the summer of July 2022, and my agent called out of the blue and said she had an interesting opportunity for me. She mentioned Liz Pelletier, who is the publisher of Entangled, and how Liz wanted to find something for us to do together. She said, “Liz is launching a new imprint around these high concept romantasies. Do you want to do one?” And I immediately said, “Yes!” without even knowing what romantasy was, and also knowing I’ve never written neither romance nor fantasy. But I trust my agent that much, and I know that Liz is a queenmaker. I was like, “This is exciting!”

But writing The Last One was one of the hardest things I’ve done. One, because of everything going on in my life. My daughter was about to start college. Then, my father-in-law passed that October. Our dog passed that Thanksgiving, and my mother-in-law passed in January. Then my father passed [the following] September.

TCR: Was Entangled understanding? Did they give you guidance?

RHH: They did. We pitched ideas, and Liz had an idea of what she wanted. It was Lord of the Rings meets Stranger Things. I was like, I got it. I’m a gamer. I was playing Elden Ring at the time; I’m not totally in the dark. But that was kind of a false confidence, it turned out.

TCR: Oh?

RHH: My first book came out in 2002, so I’m not some young kid who has never done this before. But for this venture, I started reading Wheel of Time.

TCR: Robert Jordan.

RHH: And A Court of Thorn and Roses.

TCR: Of course.

RHH: All the representatives. I had read Game of Thrones and others like Legendborn, but not as a forensic reader. You know, you’re reading…

TCR: For fun.

RHH: Yeah, like I-don’t-care-this-is fun! So I started reading even more, but this time forensically. And, actually, are you a gamer?

TCR: Less now that I’m in school.

RHH: Well, even with films, they have the “making-of” books. And my husband, who’s also a gamer, he had the making of The Witcher, filled with the art and the creatures and all that. That’s where I started. So, I’m reading forensically and outlining and the things that I always do for my stories. And I just started writing, and it seemed fine.

TCR: Well, that sounds good?

RHH: But then I realized. What is this? I had no idea what I was doing because in the worlds I’ve written, they’re worlds with law, crime in the street, they’re a hard and fast world. It exists. There are rules that say you can’t do that, that and that. And I kept turning to my husband [and asking]: “Can I do this?”

He’s like, “You’re God.”

“But can I do that?”

“Do you not understand what I’m telling you?” he says.

I did not.

TCR: It sounds like your husband helped you with world-building context.

RHH: He did because he’s like, King Nerd. And even my daughter, who is not necessarily a geek, she still was raised by them. And yeah, you know, she’s read the romantasy. She’s used to the fantasy worlds and all that. So they both helped me, but it wasn’t until I finished the first draft that I realized I don’t know a lot of stuff. And draft after draft, I was getting better, but it took a lot of time for me to finally understand I was not done—even up until  Thanksgiving [of 2023], when I thought I was finished.

My mysteries tend to be long, so 100,000 to 110,000 words. I came in with my Last One draft thinking I was done at 120,000 words. And Liz was like, That is not a lot, honey. You need more world. You need more romance. I didn’t know what was enough. I thought I’d written enough at 120,000 words, I’m doing it, and I’m not thinking that I had to be George RR Martin or Tolkien. And when she started showing me and saying, for instance, It needs more this and that, I was like… Oh. Oh.

When she told me, it was the week of Thanksgiving, and we’d driven up to Oakland to spend the week with my brother. I got there, I opened up my MacBook… and somehow it had gotten smushed, and the screen was broken. The Last One was on my MacBook, and this is Monday before Thanksgiving…

TCR: Oh, no.

RHH: We were just into the week, and of course everybody was closed because it was a holiday. And then after discovering that my computer’s broken and there was no one around to fix it, Liz called and says it’s not big enough. Yeah, she wanted me to write this whole thing over again.

TCR: Oh my god.

RHH: I sat in my brother’s room, and I wept. I wept because this is probably the twistiest story I’ve ever written. I was writing this fantasy, my dad had just passed… all this stuff that I had been holding onto and been strong for. And then for Liz to say, “It’s not enough,” wow. I cried in that room for ten minutes, and my husband just came and helped me because I had been doing just so many hard things that I’d finally kind of given up.

And when you’re a creative—

TCR: Especially when you think this is good.

RHH: And while in some areas it was. Liz was right; it just wasn’t what it was supposed to be. So yeah, I wept and I drank that night. [laughs] We went to Best Buy and bought some dongles. My sister-in-law had an old monitor. And we MacGyver’ed my computer to get the files. The next day, I got up and I started again. My editor walked me through it. We went over everything: what I needed, what her vision was. I’m like, tell me what it is exactly, because at that point my brain wasn’t working any more.

TCR: That sounds very collaborative. I mean, it sounds like that’s the way it was from the very beginning. I’m imagining that was different from your mysteries and thrillers.

RHH: Yeah! Even though I’d been doing those for so long, this was a vertical learning curve, you know? There was a lot of blood and tears. Even after twenty years of writing crime and mystery, here I was going in cold, and my husband kept reminding me, “You’ve never done this.” But yes. It was a very incredibly collaborative effort. My editor, Alice German, was at Harper before she went to [the Entangled imprint] Red Tower, so she was not only very smart, she understood as close as possible what Liz had in her mind. And then when Alice didn’t come close to the idea, Liz herself would say, I’m thinking of this, this, this.

It worked well for me because in my daytime job, I am a writer. I write for Cedars Sinai as one of their fundraising communications writers—a hack for hire. I’m used to taking direction. What do you want to see? Just tell me and I’ll write it.

TCR: That’s different from the creative side.

RHH: But at the same time, I had to turn that part of myself off in order to succeed, to learn, and to get it right. I had to shut down a part of myself that wanted total control, to be okay to say, I don’t know. Please tell me because I want to get it right.

TCR: There’s a lot of vulnerability that comes with having to let go.

RHH: Yes. Because at one point I felt, well, failure is a strong word, but I was thinking, I’m dumb. I can’t get this. I’m not understanding what they’re saying to me, but everyone else is saying I’m doing good. Which says we’re our own worst critics. So finally, January comes. I hit the first of this year. And after doing all the world building and all the romance. Remember I was at 120,000—

TCR: Yes?

RHH: 200,000 words. 200,000 and I was like, Yes! And Liz was like, That’s too much. We need it around 150. But I write better overwriting. So it was a matter of me taking out what wasn’t important. I needed to build it in order to know what was needed or not.

TCR: So going from 120,000 to 200,000—did that have a significant impact on the ending?

RHH: It did because I’m a butterfly-effect writer. Even if Chapter 30 mentions that thing over there, the crime writer in me—the red herring part of me—tells me I have to go back and build it all up so that it’s not a cheap shot. Which means then, if that was red but is now green, then everything else around it, even if it’s indirect, I have to go back and make changes. It’s how the book got big. I’m not just going to do a search and replace. I’m going through the whole damn thing. And I’m tracking everything. And it was crazy, but it was fun.

I had not only the world building but also the romance. I write crime scenes, not sex scenes, and so that was hard. So that’s how it grew from 120 to 200: because of all the stuff that I learned about my characters and about this world and also being true and honest with my reveals. And having to earn everything. Liz said, Just don’t give her a power. People have to earn that. Knowing all this and knowing the type of person I am, where I don’t want to take the easy route and I don’t want a reader to ever say, “Well, she skipped from here to there.” At least you’ll say there are lots of curves, instead of that straight line. Stories, like life, are not a here to there.

And while writing The Last One and What Fire Brings and living how I was living, it very much was a thing of nothing ever being straight, nothing ever being easy. And I tend to beat my characters up a lot.

TCR: I could tell.

RHH: You see in that book, yeah. It’s because, especially the last two to three years, I felt beat up. And I tend to put myself in my characters. So none of this is easy. I think trauma makes us exhausted but also more interesting. I’ve experienced things that I can now tap into and give all my characters, and I was very happy that I got to give it to Kai, even though she is not human. Even though she’s extraordinary, she still faces identity crises and betrayals and all the things that make life interesting for people who write.

TCR: I want to ask about Kai. She’s very headstrong. We meet her when she’s not wearing anything. She’s very confused, slightly horny, and her voice is something else. What is your process for developing someone so nuanced, multifaceted? She’s also sweet and tender. How was developing her different from others in your mysteries and thrillers?

RHH: Well, Kai comes from a springboard of Black women in America, and of always being the “other” in the room. And you understand this.

TCR: Indeed, I do.

RHH: Like when we’re going into a space and people look at us, and they’re trying to figure us out and they think, Do they deserve to be in this space with us? And what are these people going to do to mess it up? […] We can’t afford even the appearance of impropriety. So, Kai comes out of that kind of tradition, from that space where you’re naked, not necessarily literally, but vulnerable. And folks are just plucking at you, and you’re having to be stronger and smarter and faster to survive—that’s the bottom line. She’s born a baby, but like a wildebeest, just dropped and then running with the herd. She is that character. But—and this is again, the strong Black woman—you get tired and you get vulnerable, and there are few safe spaces for you to collapse. Kind of like me in that bedroom at my brother’s house: I was just crying, and I had family around me who understood. But then you go out and have to be strong again and smart. So, it took that character that I tend to write in my mysteries and put her in this world where she literally does not know who she is, but she knows she’s smart and she knows she’s badass. But she’s also thinking, Am I really?

TCR: The amnesia part is really interesting. On the one hand, you don’t have to set up a lot of worldbuilding because we’re just as confused as she is. At the same time, you have to figure, how am I going to mete out the information? Have you ever worked with playing with memory in this way?

RHH: It was crazy because I was working on [What Fire Brings]. It’s about dissociative fugue, and the idea came out of a real-life news story. There was a piece in New York magazine about a young woman who was found floating in New York Harbor, and she didn’t know how she got there. She’d had fugues before, and she ended up in the Caribbean during a hurricane, suffered a fugue, and disappeared. Her parents didn’t know where she was until she showed up in New York. And they were like, Well, how did she get there? And she was fine for a moment, but then it happened again, and they don’t know where she is to this day.

[The magazine article] was about trauma. Maybe she faced some trauma on the island? The idea took me down an interesting road. Trauma makes you do random weird things: you drink, smoke. I was starting to go through that slow march of death with my family, and I was taking care of people that I didn’t think I’d had to, like dealing with dementia with my mother-in-law and her wandering around the neighborhood.

Thinking about how my husband was traumatized seeing the woman that brought him up not remembering who he was, not knowing who she was, not thinking this place that she lived in was her home. Trauma for him, trauma for her, her husband. For me, watching all this was tough; we were having conversations that I never thought we’d have.

And it was weird—the whole mind thing. My daughter, right before she started college, thought she wanted to major in psychology. Then she saw what was happening to her grandmother, and it was freaking her out. She said, I can’t do it, so she veered away from that. But that’s what I write about, you know, for crime. It’s like, Why do we do the things we do?

So, I was dealing with memory and identity at that time, and it’s still fascinating. Like someone will remember when I did a thing two years ago, and I’m like, I don’t remember this at all. But that was because I was going through so much trauma. I was just living, going through the motions, trying to get to the next pit stop. So, it was very much top of mind for taking a very strong person and putting her in this world where she thought she might belong, but also not being familiar with it.

TCR: I definitely see this in her initial journey—just needing to get to the next point.

RHH: And having people tell you, “No, you’re this,” and you’re like, Okay, but I don’t think so? while still maintaining some semblance of strength and knowing that you’re strong and bad[ass] and smart. It was fun balancing that whole: I know who I am, but I don’t. I’m the main character, but am I? And being betrayed and having to trust people. And wondering, Why do you love me? Why do you admire me?

TCR: It’s easy to relate to her plight. I also like how your book is very different from a lot of fantasy in that there’s no prologue.

RHH: We had one, but in one of the drafts I said I didn’t want to step on the first line about choosing violence, so we got rid of the prologue.

TCR: The nice thing is we’re thrown into Kai’s reality and are glued to it immediately.

RHH: Yeah! You have no idea how happy I am.

TCR: The other characters also pop, and I’m wondering: To what extent do you bring in people that you know and make them a character? Is that something that you do, or do they all kind of appear in your head?

RHH: It’s a little bit of both. I knew the archetype [Kai] had to have; like, in every story, you have to have the wise one. But how they look and how they interact with Kai, I didn’t know that until maybe even my fifth draft. It takes me a while to get to know my people because I really, really, want to know them. I do the Myers Briggs thing, I do horoscopes because I don’t want my people sounding the same. I want everybody to have distinctive voices, and to have distinctive voices, they have to have these distinctive characteristics. You know Kai is a Virgo. I’m a Taurus. We’re both kind of organized. But other than that—

TCR: Different approaches.

RHH: Yeah! Coming up with the character, I had to figure out, Who is Jadon? And Kai? Who are these people, and how do they see each other? How do they see themselves? It was kind of fun, but it took me a while to figure out who these people are. Whenever my agent wants to read an early draft, I hate it because I know she’s going to say, “All your characters are a little flat.” But I don’t know who they are. They’re just talking. At first, I’m just trying to figure out the story. And then I figure out who they are and why they’re in this part of the story.

TCR: You talked about how you create character, but how about your world? Do you play Dungeons & Dragons?

RHH: Yes.

TCR: Did you ever think that your gaming and your D&D would come into your writing?

RHH: I had no idea. And that’s why I think I said yes to Liz and Entangled so quickly. Because I was playing Witcher 3—I’ve played that twice—I’ve played Fallout 4, which is my all-time favorite game, maybe five or six times, so I was very familiar with lore and choosing weapons and side quests and all the rest of it. Foolishly, I thought, yeah, I can write this. [laughs]

TCR: The monsters that you bring to The Last One are quite otherworldly. They are not what you’d find in the D&D Monster Manual.

RHH: Exactly. This is my job. If I’m going to be God, I need to make creatures that haven’t before existed in other people’s minds. My husband is a creative—he’s a graphic designer—so he has all these big art books.

TCR: That is not fair.

RHH: I know! [laughs] These are those heavy books, they cost like a billion dollars? So I’m flipping [through the books] and taking this piece here and adding it to that there. I’m taking art cover things and taking pictures and melding them together. It was a very old school process.

TCR: So, your book, it’s split up into parts. And at the beginning of every part, there’s a eulogy. And you include a fairy tale. So, these are stories within the story. Which means they have to resonate not just with us but with the characters. I want to learn about the challenges that come with these restrictions and why you decided to put yourself through this endeavor.

RHH: Well, [there are] a lot of reasons. I always tell stories within stories. In every book, I tell a story within a story because I think that’s what our lives are. And that started with a rejection. My first book was published in 2002, and for many reasons my second book was not purchased. I loved this story. It was about a woman, it was a memory story. She wakes up in her bathroom, not knowing where she is and who she was and why she was there, and it was basically a story about domestic abuse, and it was not purchased.

So, it sat. Until finally, after writing the Elouise Norton series and then starting They All Fall Down, I finally knew how to write that story that had been sitting and had been rejected by everybody in the industry. I used it to write And Now She’s Gone; it ended up being the story within that story, where a private investigator is looking for a woman who doesn’t want to be found. And that book that was rejected ended up being nestled in She’s Gone, and that that landed me my first of two LA Times Book Prizes. So yeah, I just didn’t know when the story was going to pop. Since then, I’ve liked this kind of story within a story, where you think it’s a random thing, but it’s not. And I think it’s fun. Some people are annoyed by it. Some readers are like, Why is she always putting in newspaper clippings? Well, I don’t like straight narratives.

It also came from reading all the great books that I want this to be like. They included songs and poetry and these miscellaneous things you don’t understand at first, but then it’s like, Oh, I get it. I was an English/American lit major, so I’m coming from that background of The Canterbury Tales. It’s that story, but also that story nestled within. And I’m a church kid, so I have a background with all these stories and eulogies and songs. I want all this kind of epic stuff. The Song of Solomon-like things because that’s what the “proper stories” do and I wanted to write a “proper story.”

Now, was it hard? Yes, it was. But here I am doing something hard already, so let’s make it extra crispy. [laughs] I thought I might as well just go for it.

TCR: I want to circle back a bit. You talked about being a Black woman in publishing. Romantasy is very white-woman-centric. When I look at a list of the authors, it’s very monolithic, and publishing is already a hard environment for people of color. What are your feelings of walking into an environment like that?

RHH: As someone who’s been around, unfortunately it’s not too unfamiliar. Crime and mystery have become more colored recently, say in the last five years or so. So it’s not necessarily a new thing in these spaces.

But it’s going to be scary for me in some ways. Because the romantasy fandom is different. Romantasy fans, they know what they like. And if you’re not that, they will go on Goodreads and totally kill you. So, it was this kind of a balancing act of making sure that I also had nice white characters in my story. I have to think, Am I being hard on these characters because they’re white or because they’re just awful? I had to kind of temper some things that I didn’t even think of, but that’s growing up in America as a Black person. When I go into a space, it’s an automatic thing.

So, I’m interested in seeing how the reception is. So far, the test readers absolutely love [Kai], so that makes me happy. But I think she’s going to be celebrated because she is a very interesting person. And I think women of color will like her, too, because she’s going to be straddling that line. Everybody will able will be able to see who they want to see. At least, I’m hoping.

TCR: For you personally, when you’re walking onto a stage with other authors or you know you’re—

RHH: Tempering what I’m going to say because I know I’m going to be the only one up there, and I don’t want everything to sound like I’m anti-white or anything, so being honest while being thoughtful? It’s exhausting.

TCR: You have to choose your words carefully.

RHH: Very carefully. So, this won’t be different from when I write crime. It’s just now there are more people because romantasy’s readership is huge. More people will be interested in what I say, which means I probably won’t speak as freely compared to mystery because things are exacerbated in romantasy. More people are tuning in, and there are those who are ready to tear you down. I saw it happen to Rebecca Yarros, who is whitey-white, like Colorado Air Force white. And she made what we thought was an innocuous statement, and then legions of people just came for her—and she’s one of them.

So, you want to know what I think? Read my book. Otherwise, I’m going to be extra cautious and extra deliberate and let my work speak for me.

TCR: That’s really unfortunate, isn’t it?

RHH: It is. But you know, we grow up like that. It’s sad. My daughter is twenty, and before she went to college, she grew up in primarily white spaces. But [now that she’s in] college, she’s learning, some people want to be the main character, and they feel threatened when you’re actually smart, when you actually get the guy. She’ll call me crying. I’m frustrated and I’m like, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can tell you, but we’ve told you this your entire life. This is what it is. And if you’re going to be exceptional, this is what it is.

I remember my first Bouchercon, which is the big mystery conference for crime writers. It was in Long Beach, so I was on home turf. And this was 2014. There were only a few people of color. There’s me. There’s Gary Phillips, a Black guy who writes crime. Naomi Hirohara, one of the few Japanese Americans back then, and it was like three of us in this sea of everybody else. And I remember going to my hotel room, exhausted and crying, and I called my husband. I was like, I don’t know if I can do this. Because I’m smiling and everything’s fine and everything’s great. But I’m faced with, [people who] don’t want my book because they don’t know who I am. They’re not Black, so they think they’re not going to get my characters. I’m thinking, But you read stories about vampires and werewolves. You get that, but you can’t get me? How am I supposed to feel about that?

TCR: The nice thing is, Kai is very relatable. Putting a character like her, someone so headstrong and vulnerable into her situations. How can you not root for her?

RHH: I’ve been in spaces where I’m the guest of honor. I was at an event at a country club in Orange County. This is one of those luncheons where an author sponsors a table. I was told that I couldn’t sit at my own table. There’s my name on the stand, and these women were like, We’ve saved these seats. And I was like, That’s my name. This is my table. And then, I was standing at the coffee area, and this old lady comes by, tells me, “We’re out of coffee. Can you go and get some more?” And I’m in my cashmere, being treated like the help.

So, I’m taking all these kinds of experiences and putting Kai in a space where, here she is, the Lady of the Verdant Realm being told, “Go get some coffee, girl.” How ridiculous is this? Yes, I got to use all of that ridiculousness in the story where you can’t believe this is actually happening. Well, the world being as it is, I have enough material to write forever and ever and ever.

TCR: Writers are writing more color in fantasy, which is great. But what makes a romantasy a romantasy is the romance. Before this, had you ever written anything romance related?

RHH: No!

TCR: You have to go by the tropes. I think it’s like mystery in that readers have expectations of what’s going to happen and when, like when the twist is going to happen. Romance readers are the same. So, while learning fantasy is one thing, how did you prepare for the romance side?

RHH: You know, it was kind of like building a mystery. Like, there has to be a meet-cute. But it was hard. I started by retreating to stories that I knew had romance in them—for instance, [the TV show] Moonlighting. I wanted a Dave and Maddie [from Moonlighting] thing where it was this constant [sense of], I’m attracted to you. And I do have Kai and Jadon get closer and closer, but then apart, so it’s wanting to have a Moonlighting thing, but at the same time wanting to have… [pauses]

So, I’ve been married for 28 years. And I think part of our longevity is, we went into this not with these wild, perfect ideas of marriage, like both of our parents who’ve been married forever. But especially as art kids, we paid attention to everything in their relationship, like body language, what they’re not saying, the pretending. Like, they just got through arguing, but now we’re going to church, and now we’re going to pretend that we’re the perfect family. So, relying on these very real examples of relationships that have these wonderful spots of joy and bliss. But then somebody says one wrong thing and then it just gets cold. Or loud.

I wanted all that kind of realness in this relationship with Kai. How can she have a real relationship when she doesn’t even know who she is? How does she know that she actually likes Jadon if she doesn’t know who she is? It’s a kind of the RuPaul-ism: How can you love someone else if you can’t love yourself? How can you love someone when you don’t even know who you are, or if you’re lovable or anything? So, I wanted that conflict in this romance.

And, one thing: Goodreads readers hate instant love. But I think you can be instantly attracted to someone, and then you see he’s crazy. We’ve all done that. You go to any club or Vegas, and you have beer goggles.

TCR: Speaking of insta-love, the way your characters express themselves is through flirting, and it’s delicious.

RHH: Thank you. And I like word play. I like clever people.

TCR: Kai and Jadon are both very clever. So did you start by writing it and asking your husband, “Is this flirty enough?”

RHH: No, it’s a very internal process, because I hear it in my head. I would go 85%, and either Alice or Liz would say, More, more! And that’s when I say okay because I don’t want to go off. I’m still thinking Maddie and David. I’m still thinking Sam and Diane from Cheers. I’m thinking about all these great couples where I want to skirt that line because you can’t show the big bad at the very beginning, right? And I think the same thing with romance. Otherwise, there’s nowhere to go!

Again, I like clever. I like smart people, and I wanted Jadon to be smart. I didn’t want [Kai] to be with just the hot guy, like the Disney character who has nothing interesting to say. I wanted her to have an equal. But yes, I prepared myself by reading erotica, but didn’t focus on the explicit—just the flirting and the build-up, which is the most exciting part. Learned all that from [the] ground up.

TCR: You’ve written more than a dozen books, so you’re probably way past the point of worrying what anyone thinks about what you’ve written.

RHH: [gasps] I still get worried.

TCR: Well, this book in particular, is riskier than a mystery—there’s sexuality. Do you worry about how you might be perceived after writing this?

RHH: I’m worried because I’ve always got to think about what my mother’s going to think. But I wrote it tastefully enough that she won’t be too embarrassed. At the same time, if I’m going to go for it, if I’m going to be honest and I want it to be true, I have to just do it! But I need other people to coax me. Even when I first started writing mysteries, I’d write some of the deepest, darkest, scariest stuff, and I’m scared of this. And it’s my husband who’s pushing me. He’s like, Gotta go more! I was like, Okay?!

And I’m terrified. And I am anxious to see what people think. I want the story to make sense. I hate cheap punches. I want it to be as authentic as possible. I’m more worried about that. Did I skip over something that I shouldn’t have? Did I land it? I want to land it more than anything.

---

 

Dave Oei is a writer, husband, father, student at UC Riverside’s Low-Residency MFA for Creative Writing, and advisor at his family’s veterinary hospital, not necessarily in that order. He is also co-editor of The Coachella Review’s Voice to Books column. When he’s not crafting romances, fantasies, or science-fiction thrillers, he can be found on the soccer pitch or on sunset beach walks with his wife of many years.