Sam Flynn's Cabinet of Curiosities - Issue #1

Hello and welcome to my Cabinet of Curiosities, a new quarterly newsletter I’m starting to chronicle my burgeoning career as an author. I named it Cabinet of Curiosities not only due to my fervent admiration for Guillermo del Toro but to encompass the range I hope to capture in this space, including but not limited to updates on my upcoming novels, stories and comics, dispatches from the trenches of modern publishing, reports on what I’m reading and watching, writing tips & tricks and whatever else comes to mind.

The Mystery of the Pale King Giveaway!

Thanks for being the first to peruse Sam Flynn’s Cabinet of Curiosities. The winner of a copy of my upcoming novella will be contacted shortly. I’ll run another giveaway in the next issue so be sure to stick around until then at least!

Book News

The first half of 2024 was incredibly fruitful, with much of it spent laying the groundwork for the publication of The Mystery of the Pale King, my debut fantasy-horror novella out September 17 from Timber Ghost Press (preorder here, ARCs available soon!). June 15 is also the one-year anniversary of the publication of my sci-fi story Paradise Found in Flash Fiction Magazine.

I also attended the Futurescapes Writers’ Workshop for the second time, learned from an incredible group of authors and agents, and bonded with fellow aspirants in my cohort. I cannot recommend Futurescapes enough and workshops in general (Viable Paradise and Clarion West are other examples for genre writers) for the boost they give, both in practical terms, because where else are you going to get face time with industry professionals, and in creative ones, because the feedback will accelerate your development as a writer and the marketability of your work.

The rest of my time was dedicated to finishing my epic fantasy-mystery novel The Darkest Fate so I can plunge into the query trenches this summer . That has mostly involved getting the manuscript short enough because I’m a chronic overwriter and publishers are looking for shorter books. This story has lived in my head for decades and to finally have it down on the page feels like nothing less than an exorcism. The ghosts of the remaining books in this nascent series still haunt me however and in my dreams I get to write them all into life.

To that end, in addition to this newsletter, I’m also launching a Patreon! If you’d like to support my efforts as an independent artist, you can join at any level and receive the additional access and benefits such as behind the scenes look at the writing of a novel, flash fiction and short stories just for you, community Q&As, early access and sneak previews of my upcoming projects. My immediate need is to raise funds to pay for travel and accommodations necessary to promote The Mystery of the Pale King this fall. My long-term goal is to build a direct connection with you, my readers, that allows me to pursue writing full-time.

What I’m Reading:

Much of what I watch, read or listen to feeds into my creative endeavors and I am endlessly fascinated by the reflections between art and artist and how each feed into each other. I’m also a little* obsessive about cataloging my interests and generally being as well-read and as well-watched as I can be. As a book nerd, my sweet spot will always remain fantasy, sci-fi and horror but I also enjoy murder mysteries and crime sagas, which is probably why I’m always dressing up the latter in the former’s clothing.

*Your Honor, I’d like the record to show that the witness’s nose just grew several inches.

Currently I’m halfway through the Ambergris Cycle by Jeff VanderMeer which is, naturally, all about the relationship between art and artist. It’s an exciting and unconventional trilogy of books and very absorbing, so vivid that sometimes I feel like I too am being consumed by mushrooms (it makes sense in context).

I recently finished the Danny Ryan trilogy, which make up Don Winslow’s final books, a riveting retelling of the classic Greek and Roman epics the Illiad, Odyssey and the Aeneid set in the days of 80s/90s American organized crime. I had so much fun diving back into those historical legends while reading to see where Winslow drew inspiration, what characters and events he incorporated and how. His punchy sentences recall the best hardboiled writing and his pacing is made of jet fuel, rocketing the reader from one page to the next.

Before those, I read the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy* by Cixin Liu (recently adapted into the decent Netflix series 3 Body Problem) which instantly vaulted into one of the best science fiction stories I’ve ever read. Dense and sprawling in my favorite ways, the series blurs the line between science and fiction until only horror remains. I loved it.

*It’s been a trilogy-centric year for me thus far

Next up for me are The Lies of the Ajungo and The Truth of the Aleke, a pair of recent novellas in a series by Moses Ose Utomi (whom I had the pleasure of learning from earlier this year at Futurescapes) followed by Children of Anguish and Anarchy (out June 25), the final book in the Legacy of Orisha trilogy by Tomi Adeyemi.

What I’m Watching:

The movies I grew up on gave me much of the visual language I use to envision and write my stories. The cinema is my church, in the way I’m told a church is a church for some. Once upon a time, I even aspired to be an entertainment reporter and remain fascinated by the ups and (historic) downs of Hollywood. Expect a lot of talk here of movies and shows, new, old, foreign, commercial, indie, and everything in between.

Competing for number one movie of the year for me are a pair of sandy revenge epics: Dune: Part Two and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Both have the distinction of enhancing the previous entries in each series and utilizing blockbuster storytelling to its greatest effect. I love the Dune books so the fact that I dug Part Two is no surprise but Furiosa I went in skeptical story-wise (prequels being a dicey proposition) only to exit the theater with a big smile on my face. That’s what happens when you nail your endings, folks. I also dug the unnerving nail-biter Civil War and bawdy historical comedy Wicked Little Letters.

On the TV side, my faves of 2024 so far are True Detective: Night Country, which played as a brilliant homage and inversion of the first season, X-Men ‘97, a stellar and mature continuation of the animated series I grew up on and made explicitly for nostalgic 90s kids like me, and Outer Range, an acid trip of a sci-fi neo-Western that recently dropped its second season on Amazon Prime. Next up is the new adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun, of which I’ve heard is so good they’re making more seasons beyond the book.

The best movies I caught up on recently were The Fall, a beautiful 2006 film from Tarsem Singh about relationship between a suicidal stuntman and a young girl recovering at the same hospital in 1915 and the tale he spins her that transforms in a magical fantasy about the power and limits of stories. Imagine a deeper, darker, more vibrant Princess Bride and you’re close to imagining the genius here.

Then there’s The Insider (1999) starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino. I love when I can put on a movie with a great rep and it more than lives up. An instant contender for best movie in Michael Mann’s already-impressive oeuvre, it’s also a definitive historical document about one man’s stand against corporate corruption and the corruption of journalism by corporations. An incredibly dense film that nonetheless flies by at a thriller’s pace for the entirety of its 2 ½ hour runtime, an achievement that brought to mind last year’s Christopher Nolan opus Oppenheimer.

Writing Tips & Tricks

Here’s where I’ll drop whatever hard-won writing advice I have. Today’s word is playful. Sometimes, playing with or inverting certain details can refocus your writing. For instance, I was writing a scene where I described the scene and characters as cold. But it wasn’t a sticky detail and I had to remember to mention the characters’ were cold which didn’t read super natural. Something was amiss.

Naturally, writers deal in the invisible so I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. I decided to play around with the details. When I upped the temperature and made the scene hot suddenly my subconscious started providing me with other sensory and visual detail, precisely what I didn’t know I was missing. Inverting the temperature might be harder to pull off if your story is set in, say, Antarctica, but the broader point stands. It’s important to remain playful with your work.

That’s a wrap! See you September, my friends, where I will update you on my experience querying my novel and further hype my debut’s forthcoming release. (don’t forget to preorder!). Email [email protected] and tell me your thoughts on the newsletter and what you like to see in future issues.

With authorly affection,

Sam