Hello again, returning reader – and welcome if you’re new! It’s me, ALC Holfelder, one half of the two queer nerds in a trench coat writing action/adventure stories ft. queer, disabled, and diverse characters. Feel free to poke around here a bit, or find us on Bluesky, to learn about our WIPS. Then if you like, there’s a fresh blog post waiting here for you. I plan on talking about RevPit, a competition from Bluesky, and dropping some Life, Love & the Monongahela Murders meandering path to here.

If you come to us from Bluesky, you may be familiar with #RevPit. I’ll let the folks at RevPit tell their own story here in detail. In short, it’s a community event in which writers with finished manuscripts can submit to win feedback from an editor. In order to submit, we had to work on distilling our 76k manuscript down to first a synopsis (1k words), to a query letter (1 pg) to a logline (1 sentence). That was rough. Bless Watson for her opinions, thoughts, and revisions. 

During this distillation, I got to thinking about how far LL&MM has come from the first iteration: Wild One, a fanfic-turned-original-fiction based on the Endeavour Morse TV show from Masterpiece Mystery. Yes, that’s right, I used to be a fanfiction writer. My first two novel ideas (what is now LL&MM and the Cursed trilogy) were based on Endeavour, though neither bears much resemblance to that original police procedural any longer. 

Wild One began as an exploration of the original character Delle Eckles, an agender pathologist that detective Liam Turner meets and eventually falls in love with. Delle was named after two different relatives, Adelaida Augusta and my own namesake, Annie Laurie Christy Eckles. Since conception, Delle has been prickly, independent, curious, and persistent. That hasn’t changed, despite the fact that Delle is now Dr. Sanal Chand, a child of a Bengali widow who found and married another Bengali immigrant. Sanal (fiery, energetic) is their chosen name, one that they picked with the help of their brother, Rajan.

The story quickly became Liam’s story, with Sanal as a major supporting character and love interest. I’m honestly not sure how that change came to be, the story changed when Liam came out to me as transmasc. Yes, as a discovery writer, my characters often reveal things to me that I wasn’t anticipating, and the story takes a turn that I don’t expect. Liam revealed a lot of trauma to me, and that got incorporated into his story.

At this point, the story became Finding Home, and topped out at 120k words. I submitted a few places, but feedback came back that it was too long, too rambly, and needed to be narrowed down to one POV. I decided to take that feedback, and started rewriting. 

Those initial rewrites were so hard. I didn’t have a clear idea of what the story was really about, what the main mystery was to be, or what Liam’s character arc needed. Somewhere along the line, I pulled in Watson, who was tinkering with another story of mine, to beta read. Her beta feedback was invaluable, her developmental edits and character insights leading to clarity. We realized that she was inputting far more than a beta reader would, and we officially joined forces to become Holfelder & Watson.

Finding Home became Autopised Truths for several months as we focused in on the mystery aspect of the story. Unhappy with that name, we switched to Shield & Scalpel, which felt like the final name. However, other beta feedback showed us that we needed to include the romantic/slice-of-life subplot in the title. This story isn’t just a crime novel. It includes some literary fiction elements, plus an exploration of “romance” with an aroace character, and heavy focus on Liam’s character arc. Thus, Life, Love & the Monongahela Murders came to its final stages.

LL&MM has come a long way from those original meandering pages. It’s finished now, complete, concise, and clear. Well, at least, as much as it can be without official edits from An Editor. That’s what we hope to snag with RevPit. We’ve got a few beta reads out as well, waiting on those to roll back in. We’re hoping to query this year, and release this book out into your hands. We’re excited and proud of the work we’ve done here.

If you have questions, feel free to drop them here or on Bluesky. We love chatting about Liam & Sanal’s story, and are looking forward to y’all’s feedback when it comes out.

Thanks for sticking around! See you on the next page,

-ALC Holfelder