Hi there. Well, it's been a couple weeks since the final chapter of Alice isn't dead,

but our journey's not over. The novel is coming in less than two months, and to celebrate,

we will be putting up excerpts from the audiobook read by the always amazing Jacica Nicole.

There will be an excerpt every two weeks leading all the way up to October 30th,

publication day, where we will have a special surprise for everyone on this feed. So stay

subscribed, and if you like what you hear, please consider pre-ordering the novel.

This first excerpt is about half of a chapter from Fairly Late in the Book. If you haven't

heard the podcast, some minor spoilers, but I wanted to give a sense of the places I was able

to go in the novel that I just didn't have room to do in the podcast.

If she had a name, her name was Thistle, but she had no name. There was no separating her from

Thistle. She and it were born in the same instant. Even she could not explain her history.

Her first memory was of clawing out of mud after a long reign, but perhaps that was not her first

birth. There may have been earlier births in simpler forms that she does not remember.

Back then she didn't need to look human, and so she didn't. She took all sorts of forms,

a bird of prey with long white feathers, a burrowing creature with long white teeth,

a plant with thorns that broke off and putrified in the flesh.

Her name and form did not interest her. What interested her was the effect she could have on

the world. Once humans came, she mimicked them, seeing in them a unique opportunity to cause new

pain. It is difficult to track her history once she blended in with people, which were acts of

isolated human cruelty and which were influenced by her whispering. In 1873, a traveling doctor

and salesman of cure-all medicine arrived in the town of Okomogi, Oklahoma. The sign on the wagon

said, thistle modern miracles of health. He spoke in sold in town for a few days and moved on.

...