Audely Bensen Writes

One of my close friends has raved repeatedly about Yume Kitasei, so when I spotted Saltcrop on the new releases shelf at the library, I snapped it up. I was immediately excited on reading the flap copy, as I think in terms of themes, this could be an excellent comp title for the project I'm working on right now.  Unfortunately, attempting to read this book hit just as some personal challenges arrived that made it incredibly difficult to focus on the book. So, I brought back my trusty old friend the audiobook! None of my library's apps had this available, but spotify did. Over the course of a couple days I bounced back and forth between listening to the audio book while knocking through chores and other tasks that kept my hands busy, and then flipping back through the physical book to find my place and read from there. This method really works for my brain when I'm struggling to focus, because I get some real dopamine hits from successfully multitasking and seeing the pages...

When I read Nick Fuller Googin's first novel , I was obsessed. Not only was the story exactly what I needed to read at that point in time (hopeful about a topic that I felt particularly hopeless over), it was the perfect comp title for the project I was pitching at the time. It fell into my lap at the perfect point in time. So I was excited to see his new novel on my library shelves, and then apprehensive when I realized that the opening chapter featured similar world-building themes to my current project, and one of his central characters even shared a name with my main character! Uh oh.  Turns out, I didn't have anything to worry about. While I was expecting another post-apocalyptic, speculative setting, The Frequency of Living Things is a straight contemporary. There's a few odd-coincidences throughout that may speak to a bit of hand-wavey universal magic, but nothing that makes this book in direct conversation with the piece I'm working on.  And maybe because of tha...