Remember our last post where we detailed the long and treacherous journey that a book takes before it lands in your grubby little paws? Well, today we have something fun to share with you. The development editor just sent our brilliant author M.I. her dev letter.

What is a dev letter? Good question. A dev letter is basically a memo from an editor to an author assessing a book’s plot, structure, pacing, characters, and scenes. The incredible Matthew Patin (who also edited Bindery Books’ Of Monsters and Mainframes and She’s A Doll; has edited for HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Amazon) has been hard at work on the manuscript. It was extremely cool to see his reaction to the book.

For our Last Readers, here is Matthew’s dev letter, spoilers redacted. For everyone else, a little taste to whet your appetite for Saint's Hotel!

Dear Maria—

Thank you for sharing Saint’s Hotel (HOTEL) with me. What I found in HOTEL was all I’d hoped for in our initial Zoom call: the arcane, the esoteric, the haunting, the puzzle-solving-like, “found”-document-like thrill of discovery and revelation. The themes of longing, regret, memory, legacy, nostalgia, inadequacy or failure, and—ultimately—love, whatever its form, beam brightly through the story as well.

The atmosphere is appropriately rich, too, the cosmic fear so reminiscent of Lovecraft, Shiel, Poe, the gothic horror evocative of du Maurier or the nineteenth-century gothic greats.