About

The Project

At the heart of this project is Or Else, a mystery novel, which you can read as it updates or wait till it’s completed, at which point I’ll make it available as an ebook. Beyond that, I post occasional author’s notes from my perspective, plus fanfiction and academic writing by one of the characters. You can find all that on this website. Please follow the project on your social media apps of choice, too!

I’m posting this novel online for free largely because it’s a project that’s deeply uneasy about professionalization and commercialization—all the ways capitalism and competition can sour one’s creative work and life. I also want it to be accessible to anyone who’s interested. And I’m serializing it because a big part of my writing life has thus far happened on the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own, which has shown me the pleasure of reading and posting a bit at a time, developing a conversation and a community along the way. (I promise I won’t leave you hanging, though—the novel is fully finished and will be updated on a regular schedule!)

I began writing Or Else in 2013, before I started grad school. It was a detective novel inspired by my love of Sherlock Holmes/John Watson fanfiction and my love of Pittsburgh. When I began my doctoral dissertation in literature, I realized I wanted to incorporate my fiction writing into my academic work. I decided to revive Or Else, making one of its central characters—the missing grad student, Lu—the narrator of the my academic dissertation. As I wrote the novel about Lu’s disappearance, I also wrote her dissertation, Reading for a Queer Sexual Ethics: Victorian and Contemporary Modes of Intimacy. This is itself an unusual project for literary criticism, pairing Victorian texts about bodies with close readings of queer fanfiction in order to consider what that material might provide as we search for ways to reduce harm and accommodate desire within both sexual intimacy and community-oriented political thought. Simultaneously, I made an Archive of Our Own account for Lu and posted fanfiction under her name. All together, this project interrogates the links between different modes of writing, reading, and thinking, and seeks to reach multiple types of readers.

When I finished my PhD, I considered how best to proceed with this project. I realized that the novel was, for me, at the center of it. The academic writing and fanfiction are still part of the project, but they are extras—things I’ll post occasionally for anyone who wants to read them. I also realized my biggest priority for the novel was really just putting it out there: being in conversation with other readers, writers, thinkers, fans, academics, queer folks both locally and in the online spaces I’ve found creatively fulfilling. To that end, I’d love to hear from folks interested in discussing fandom, academia, ghosts, mysteries, writing, queer stuff—whatever comes to mind as you’re reading. Please get in touch: tell me about your thoughts and ideas, your reactions, your own writing, reading recommendations; all are very welcome.