logan's first book

There’s cool news at the end of this. Just bear with my establishing stories first.

My dad helped me self-publish a few books when I was 12. Impressively, all of them are still available as free e-books; I even occasionally get emails telling me that someone has downloaded one.

Throughout middle school, I wrote like an absolute maniac. I recently went through my storage boxes and pulled all of my old notebooks out, flipping through the half-baked stories I was clearly just ripping from popular media (Divergent, Supernatural). The crowning jewel of my tween years, though, was the sweeping, five-book post-apocalyptic YA saga I was convinced I could pull off. It really had everything: a love triangle that could’ve easily been solved by throwing them into a polycule, some bury-your-gays, ridiculous science-fiction elements and acronyms (“H.A.N.D.” and “P.A.N.”), and superpowers!

These notebooks are bizarre time capsules. My friends had sketched in the margins of many of these pages. One page has a unicorn, another a cat, peaking out from between the lines. Occasionally, they would get my notebook long enough to write entire non-sequiturs in the middle of a chapter. There’s one where a fictionalized version of my friend whips out a chainsaw, kills the rest of our friend group, and bathes in everybody’s blood. Rediscovering how decorated these books are has dredged up really conflicting emotions. It’s a little hard to process when you get to the end of a notebook, and the handwriting of a girl who used to be your best friend, a girl you haven’t spoken to in five years, tells you: “This book was created by the amazing, talented [Logan-Ashley] Kisner! One of my best friends and an amazing writer! love you [Logan] <3”.

The point of this piece isn’t dead friendships and grief, but whenever I talk about my writing, it’s a theme that’s kind of hard to avoid. You write what you know, and when I was a kid writing books, I didn’t know anything. I was writing Supernatural, But Worse. I read my current stories back to myself and I’m like, oh, this is about X and Y. This is me processing Z. I’m an adult now, with things to try and process.

Also, my penname came with a small author’s biography.

“Being only 12 years old, a lot of people wouldn't expect this kind of writing out of me. But I worked hard for recognition, and I plan to get it.”

Cocky little asshole, wasn’t I?

I stopped writing in notebooks in high school and I pretty much stopped writing original fiction altogether until college (although a few bits of deeply embarrassing fan fiction prove I was never totally out of the game). Call it a byproduct of COVID or whatever, but I finally felt like I knew things. I finally had demons I needed to excise, trauma to process.

I won’t ramble on about the Importance of Representation here. You all get it. I’ve always written the stories that I want to read. As I entrenched myself deeper in the world of film and film criticism, I found myself being exposed to more and more voids. Opportunities that are glaringly obvious, yet not being taken. Stories that I saw other people yearning to read, to see explored to the full extent that these stories deserved. Stories I remain passionately intense about wanting to tell and wanting to see told at a time where mainstream trans/queer media seems only concerned with respectability politics and attempts to assimilate. I want to tell trans stories that are complicated, weird, messy, and scary. I want trans characters at the forefront of horror; I want us being ripped apart and I want us standing triumphant in the bloody ruins.

I know I said that I see other people yearning for the same stories I yearn for, in both a cinematic and literary context, but there are not words to describe how blown away I am by peoples’ reactions to my writing. I mean that for my film crit, too. There are so many emails in my inbox from literal kids, thanking me for exploring film and gender in the way that I do. I wrote this small little thing for an essay collection last year, and someone’s long thread of reviews included this: “Writing like [Logan’s] is the reason [they] love horror and film analysis, and it is worth the price tag of the collection alone”.

This is all a long and rambling way to say: I have just had the most intense, hysterical year of my life. I flew to Pennsylvania to talk about trans horror. I flew to SXSW in Texas on a fucking whim to see Evil Dead Rise. Graduated college. Got published in that essay collection. Been on more podcasts than I can even keep straight.

And I got a literary agent. Less than a year after my initial query, we’ve just sold my first book. Technically, we sold two.

I won’t say much about Old Wounds here. Only that I could’ve never imagined how many people’s eyes would light up when I start talking about this book. This strange, weird little book that I wrote simply because I wanted to read it. Taking from my experience trying to sell a screenplay (0/10, do not recommend), I didn’t expect for anybody to read this story and give it a shot. For that, my first public thanks of many to Chloe and Krista. They have been such champions of this book from the moment we hit the ground and I’m going to be thanking them from now until the end of time.

There’s a lot stuck inside of this story— cryptids, a literal cult of gender, too many Meat Loaf songs, multiple rants about how much Boys Don’t Cry sucks, and two trans kids who refuse to go quietly into the night. This book is about many horrible things, both real and otherworldly, but it is also about survival. It’s about love and community and how the violence enacted against us is not an inevitability. I am so thankful that so many people already care about Erin and Max, and I am so excited for the rest of you to finally meet them.

Old Wounds. Coming Spring 2025.