All About My Book, Mountain Sounds

If you've been around for a while or following my book publishing journey, you've probably heard of my Southern Gothic novel, MOUNTAIN SOUNDS. I started my book blog at age 13, but always knew I was going to be an author someday—and I'd be honored if this book specifically became my debut novel. (It's been a long road.)

As a teenager who grew up within the publishing industry (and often jokes I was "grandfathered in"), I was an OG book blogger before BookTube, bookstagram, and of course, BookTok even existed in their current, functional forms. I have original review copies of just about every breakout title to hit the young adult shelves over the past 15 years. I'm no stranger to the long game, but book publishing is definitely an industry requiring a ton of patience and niche expertise.

I just hope soon that it'll be my turn to be on shelves!

About My Book

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I pitched MOUNTAIN SOUNDS to agents as a bittersweet Southern Gothic speculative novel about corrupted nostalgia and the places we return to.

I think (and others agree) that my writing and style best appeals to fans of Maggie Stiefvater, Melissa Albert, Jandy Nelson, Brittany Cavallaro, Jodi Lynn Anderson, Melina Marchetta, and the like—very atmospheric and focused on a sense of place, with a literary bent. (You might notice that the list includes many of my favorite authors—no coincidence! Write what you want to read and all that jazz.)

Although I initially pictured it as a young adult novel, it could also go the adult route; a lot of genre beyond initial markers is about focus, pacing, and positioning. And this is the plot:

“A scrappy foster kid counselor with a secret must fight to stay at her beloved summer camp after aging out or risk losing the only home she's ever been able to return to, but when the weather changes just for her, she discovers an ancient evil waking in the mountains instead.”

A Grocery List of Traits & Tropes

A love letter to the Carolinas
SUMMER CAMP
Lush, woodsy, eerie atmosphere
Folksy stomp-and-holler like The Lumineers, Hozier, Noah Kahan, Caamp…
Setting-as-character/strong sense of place
Closed community
Literary-leaning prose
Unreliable narration
Teens who don’t go to college
Thematic horror based on repressed emotion like
The Haunting of Hill House
Southern Gothic elements
Bittersweet themes
Questions of home, memory, identity, nostalgia
Vivid, witty banter and history from an ensemble cast (like
The Raven Boys or Gallagher Girls)
Precise human details and complex soulmates reminiscent of
A Study in Charlotte
The devastating romantic angst of
The Vampire Diaries
Ride-or-die female friendships + found family
Giddy summer camp adventures
Slow burn friends-to-lovers/second chance romance
Complex untraditional family dynamics — foster care system

About the Process

I'll write about this in further detail, but I've been around the block in publishing—although this would be my debut novel. I've worked painstakingly on MOUNTAIN SOUNDS in stolen scraps of time since 2017. So, a brief timeline:

2017 — started the book
2018 — finished my first draft
2020 — finished the first actually good draft
2021 — queried for approximately three days; immediately got a "revise and resubmit" request; gutted the book and entirely rewrote it over the course of a year.
2022 — submitted revision & queried
2023 — signed with agency and started another top-to-bottom revision; left agency
2024 — re-signed with new agency and revised in preparation to go on submission

Again, publishing's very much a long game and requires a great deal of faith. I'll write about my querying process (and make a specific FAQ about book publishing from the author side, for sure) but that's the gist of it. I'm thrilled to have landed where I have and am incredibly excited to get to share MOUNTAIN SOUNDS soon with editors (and hopefully eventual readers.)

Contact Me

My novels are represented by Rikki Bergman and Eve Attermann at William Morris Endeavor. To inquire about literary or film rights, please contact rbergman@wmeagency.com and eattermann@wmeagency.com.

Follow Along

For more of the journey, you can follow me on my various forms of social media. I write a relatively transparent newsletter describing the ups and downs of the process, share mostly on my Instagram, and plan to start building on TikTok, etc,. If you'd like to see MOUNTAIN SOUNDS on shelves, contributing to my platform numbers — as obnoxious as that sounds — is one of the few ways you can tangibly help.