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Hey there! You're reading the Tuesday Telegrams, a bimonthly newsletter from author Naseem Jamnia. Every other Tuesday, I send out a Telegram that's either writing related or a personal essay. You're currently reading a writing-related Telegram, which is where I give updates on projects, behind-the-scenes look at my work, craft discussions, recent publications, event news, and other publishing things.

You can change whether to receive a writing-related, personal, or all Telegrams in the footer of this email. Go to "Update your profile" and choose from the drop-down menu.

Unsurprisingly, many authors—heck, artists—are asked about their process. While I can wax poetic about my revision process, how I approach a new project has been more difficult to talk about, because I've been working on stories that have been around for a while.

In a previous Telegram, I talked about how writing my latest novella (currently back in my agent's hands, in the hopes of a post-Labor Day submission) was a completely different experience than my previous projects. When I wrote that Telegram, I was discussing a manuscript—a story after it had been written and gone through some minor revisions.

So now I'm going to discuss a project in an even earlier stage.

Lately, I've come up with a slew of story concepts. This is so different than how I used to begin projects that I didn't realize it was happening until it kept happening. I'd consume a compelling piece of media; as I mulled over it, I'd consume another compelling piece of media, and then, voila, a project idea combining the two things is born.

I have at least a half-dozen ideas in this stage, where I take the elements of each media that I'm excited about and brainstorm them together. Some of them are decently fleshed out; most of them are a couple bullets of thoughts that I will continue to mull over for the next few years.

Starting with "media meets other media" concepts has been extremely generative for me. I think this is for a few reasons—I'm enacting, not just embracing, the idea that "nothing is original, 'originality' comes when you put your own spin on things." This takes the pressure off to create something "new" (as opposed to something that's interesting). Another reason this works for me is that I don't usually care about a heavy plot, so if I have a framework for that already, I can more easily think about who fits into that framework and what their story is. Having that kind of plot scaffolding allows me to bring in my strengths as a storyteller and focus on making it a Naseem story.

It's sort of funny, then, that the project that sparked this newsletter is not a "media meets other media" idea.

When my husband and I moved to Reno, we would take our dog in a random wilderness-y area we affectionately called The Barrens. This is a reference to Stephen King's IT, a book we read aloud to one-another soon after our move. In the story, the kids traipse around a forest-y area called The Barrens, which runs up against the sewage system in which the eponymous monster resides.

(I think it would surprise a LOT of people to know that there are many Stephen King books I love, given my penchant for not reading [or actively abhorring] stories by cishet white men, but I digress.)

Deep in our IT era, we joked about a group of kids of color running around fighting the spirit of Old Man Peavine (Peavine being one of the mountains around here), and left it at that.

A few years later, this idea came back up. (I don't think it was in response to IT: Chapter 2 coming out, but it might have been, since I was already working on Sleepaway by this time.) We were hiking around a different area and began to joke about that old story, and the different kids who would be a part of it.

And then I had seven kids contending with Reno/Northern Nevada history, each with their names and backstories and loose character arcs, and a few big plot moments within a larger story.

The project thus nicknamed Old Man Peavine was, in this iteration, meant to be a middle grade horror. I was hoping to sell it on the heels of Sleepaway as a sort of option project. I pitched this idea to my agent as one of the two I'd work on in 2024, in the hopes that we'd sell one of the other three projects I currently have out.

(An option project is the project in your contract that your editor has "first look" rights to. Because Sleepaway was sold by the packager, though, the option clause technically applies to the packager's next related project, not to me.)

But with how kidlit has been doing (and how MG sales have particularly tanked), I began to wonder whether OMP would be better served as an adult horror. IT wouldn't be MG even with the adult points of view chopped off, but one reason why it is adult is because of that thirty-year time skip.

(By the way, this is not an IT retelling by any stretch; it's just the easiest comp in terms of "a group of kids fight an evil thingie.")

So for the past, oh, eight months, as I worked on the dark academia novella, I mulled over OMP. It would be easier to work as an MG—MG horror is such a fun category to write in, and despite the genre, it can have serious overtones and undertones without being so heavy you want to die a little.

(No? Just me?)

But that's also why writing it as an adult would be compelling—because I could dive into so many things I wouldn't be able to as an MG. I'd have to do my research and due diligence in a different way, and it would take longer, but the result would be all the more interesting.

So yesterday, as we took the dogs for a long walk (walking is where we do a lot of brainstorming, if that wasn't obvious), my husband and I also brainstormed what OMP could look like if it were adult instead of MG. We looked into which adults would be important enough to have a role in the story and what that might be, plus the potential conflicts/tensions and how that would relate to each of the kid's journeys.

And now I have stuff brainstormed on my whiteboard for the first time since last fall, so I guess that means aging it up was the correct move. Even without having each plot beat, having the general scaffolding of "group of kids have to defeat a spiritual evil" was enough to at least start building out their families and the role they would play.

I'm not planning on writing anything new for the rest of the year, but I'm excited to start fleshing this one out.

Links to aid Palestinians who are undergoing genocide:

• ​​​Operation Olive Branch​​​
• ​​Care for Gaza​​
• ​​​Adalah Justice Project​​
• ​​PCRF​​​
• ​​​Jewish Voice for Peace​​​
• ​​​​Autostraddle's round up of resources​​
• ​​The BDS Movement​​​
• ​​​Resistbot to contact your officials​​​

Where you can learn about violence in:

• DR Congo - M23, Cobalt​
• Darfur, Sudan - International Criminal Court, CNN, BBC (Overview); Twitter Explanation on Sudan​
• Tigray - Human Rights Watch (Ethnic Cleansing Report)

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