John Hartness Harted My Novel!

Posted byAda Milenkovic BrownPosted inUncategorizedTags:, , , ,

Now that I’ve cleared some recent deadlines off my desk, I have time to talk about my latest big news. I have a book contract!

I finished my novel, Fairytale Hell, in the summer of 2025.  While at ConCarolinas that year, I had the opportunity to pitch it to John Hartness, who runs Falstaff Books, and he asked to see the first three chapters. 

Then he asked to see the entire manuscript.  And then he offered to draw up a contract if I was willing for them to publish it. Which I totally was!

I was still kind of in shock about that, and then I went to ConCarolinas again.  John talked about me at a panel in front of guests of honor, Maurice Broaddus and Sheree Renée Thomas, and at the Falstaff Books Roadshow. He said that (whoever at Falstaff Books was reading my full manuscript) got frustrated because they couldn’t read my novel fast enough.  And they  stopped in the middle of reading my novel and told Iohn, “Buy this novel now!”

I’ve known for years that the key to getting published is finding the publishers/editors who are fans of what you write. But I never knew how to do that. And somehow this time I did it. Yay!

When people ask me what Fairytale Hell is about: Several coma patients are all dreaming the same dream, that they’re in a fairy tale together.  The princess in the fairy tale, a med student in real life, realizes the prince was a case history in one of her classes and is also the latest news. His father has just won a legal battle to remove him from life support.  And then it’s a race to find how to wake the prince up before he gets shut off.

I will, of course, keep you all posted on when it comes out.

At ConCarolinas with one of my The Ceaseless Way coauthors, Allegra Gulino. Cool horns, Allegra!

Published by Ada Milenkovic Brown

Hi. I'm Ada Milenkovic Brown, a writer whose short stories, humor pieces, and poems started appearing in publications in the mid 1990’s and my spec fiction about a decade after that. I write mostly fractured folk and fairy tales but occasionally break out into science fiction. I'm trained as a scientist, and taught at a medical school. But having strange ideas that turn into stranger stories was probably always how I was going to end up. I should have known that in high school, when one of my classmates made a collage for me for my birthday. It’s a snapshot of what my brain looked like then. It’s also the background to this homepage. It’s still what the inside of my brain looks like. And the only difference now, is that I've read and watched more widely. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell would be in there, along with the gods and goddesses of N. K. Jemison's Hundred Thousand Kindoms, Kidd from Samuel Delaney's Dahlgren, the Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee, and Christopher Eggleston Dr. Who's. (All of you David Tennant fans may now say, “Okay Boomer.) And everything would have a patina of some nightmarish fungus from the mind of Jeff VanderMeer. I'm in the latter stages of revision of a novel called Fairytale Hell. It's Inception meets Into the Woods. Speaking of musicals, I’m also a lyric soprano, actor, and oboist. If you’re interested in my performing arts side, find out more here.

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