Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 10

Dan Hanks: Five Things I Learned Writing The Way Up Is Death

When a mysterious tower appears in the skies over England, thirteen strangers are pulled from their lives to stand before it as a countdown begins. Above the doorway is one word: ASCEND.

As they try to understand why they’ve been chosen and what the tower is, it soon becomes clear the only way out of this for everyone is… up. 

And so begins a race to the top with the group fighting to hold on to its humanity, through sinking ships, haunted houses and other waking nightmares. Can they each overcome their differences and learn to work together or does the winner take it all? What does the tower want of them and what is the price to escape?

Red shirts are people too (and inevitable in a huge cast of characters)

Having a huge cast of characters and a tower intent on killing them meant that, inevitably, a few of them were going to become the ‘red shirts’ of my latest book. In other words, they were characters clearly destined to meet a sticky end. I didn’t plan it that way. Initially, I wanted to try and pay homage to LOST, creating a very character-centric adventure where everyone is the hero of their own story and you don’t know who’ll make it. But it soon became clear that it’s ridiculously hard to do that in book form. Across multiple seasons of TV you can generously give lots of characters their own episodes, building them up in the viewer’s estimation, before cruelly cutting them down when it’s least expected. In a book? Unless you’re going to be rotating between 13 POVs and your publisher is okay with a brick of a novel, it’s a little more challenging to give everyone their time in the sun. So eventually I had to admit defeat and learn to embrace the red shirts. And while I worked hard to try to tone down the bloody crimsonness of their attire, in the end I kind of like that they’re there. There is a tone to this story that is very 1970’s disaster movie – like The Poseidon Adventure – and leaning into the trope of having characters who are obviously destined to pop off screen early is part of the fun of the piece, I think?

Writing is a very good and very cheap form of therapy

The prologue of The Way Up Is Death was written at a time when the UK was shitting the bed in terms of common sense and decency and professionalism and lots of other things. Consequently, in a couple of scathing pages, it references the kind of political chaos that we were experiencing and would probably be an accurate representation of how we’d have handled an alien tower appearing in the skies above us. It was me venting. My way of shaking my fist at them, by immortalising their ineptitude in a fictional setting. And it felt soooo good.

I can’t imagine I’m alone in being overwhelmed by the sheer idiocy still messing with us? If you feel the same, I highly recommend spilling your bottled angst onto the page. Getting it out where you can see it, mock it, and manipulate it – however you see fit – is incredibly cathartic. You’re the one in control. And that’s not nothing in a world where we might feel perpetually helpless. The Way Up Is Death features a lot of grievances about life for that reason. Not only in the prologue, but in the characters themselves. I also hoped it might shine a spotlight on these things and go “SEE? THIS IS NUTS!” and thus offer a consoling nod to those who think they’re alone in witnessing all this and being baffled. You’re not alone. We’re all in this together and if the tower in this book teaches us anything, it’s that we need to work with each other to get through the despicable challenges ahead.

It’s fun to ponder the meaning of life

When you’re plucked from your Saturday afternoon and encouraged to climb an alien tower in the sky, it’s going to raise a few questions. Chief among them probably isn’t going to be ‘what’s life all about then?’. At least not at first. Yet as you’re thrown headlong into perilous situations, and constantly threatened with death, it may well soon cling to the forefront of your mind. The writing of this book marks one of the few times I’ve actually done research, because I did begin to wonder what life was all about for these characters, and I’m pleased to tell you that far smarter minds than mine have got an answer to that age-old question. Or, at least, they have a theory. Namely that the meaning of life is split into three stages: coherence, purpose, and significance, and that authenticity is key throughout. If you perceive increasing authenticity in your life, it’s supposed to be a sign you’re on the right track. Which felt right to me. It was a lot of fun working this philosophy into the structure of the story, and it gave me the chance to play with the characters and the authenticity they displayed to each other as things got progressively worse for them while climbing the tower. How would any of us react when faced with such unknowable horrors? Would you hold tightly to your carefully curated façade? Or would you accept who you are and embrace the flaws and differences of those around you? Ultimately, I think placing importance on authenticity is no bad way to live your life.

We would very quickly get bored of a mysterious tower hovering in the sky

It’s no spoiler to say that in this book, when an alien tower appears in the sky, hanging over the rolling green hills of middle England, society’s interest is not held for long. Only a few years ago the very idea that we’d get bored of such a thing would be ridiculous. But life in 2025 is a different beast. We are beset by so much information in text, images, videos and sound – increasingly interspersed with AI-generated bollocks – that our attention spans simply can’t cope. If a mysterious tower appeared in the sky right now, I truly believe we’d be bored of it within a week or two. We would have saturated the internet with images, made all the relevant memes, and TikTokked it into a state of normalcy. It’d just be that thing that appeared and we have to live with it and OH FFS HERE’S A BRAND NEW HORROR TO TALK ABOUT and yep we’re onto the next thing. I don’t know about you, but I kind of miss being awed by cool things in the same way that little green men captured Agent Mulder’s attention for so long.

Standalone books can be satisfying too

I love an ending to a book that leaves room for a possible ‘To be continued…’ (ideally in a rad Back to the Future font). There’s something about the knowledge we’re not done here – your favourite characters WILL return to finish the story – that leaves its hooks in you. It keeps you thinking long after the moment has passed and you can’t wait to slip back into that familiar world to explore it a little more. My first two books were deliberately set up to achieve that. The story was done, but also WAS IT? Yet with The Way Up Is Death I was thrilled to write the story knowing this was it, the tale would not continue, and we were going to say goodbye and be done with the tower at some point. I found a joy in the finality of that – to find the end of the long spool of thread I’d been pulling from my mind. I think there is a lot to be said for writing a one-and-done book and in this era of sequels and prequels and spin-offs, it’s kind of nice to have a neat little package that is what it is.

Of course, if you were to ask me for a sequel to The Way Up Is Death, then, yes, I have an idea. But it’s batshit ridiculous, so you probably shouldn’t.

Dan Hanks is the author of Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire, Swashbucklers, and The Way Up Is Death, and has published articles in outlets such as Publishers Weekly. He works as a freelance editor most of the time, but being an over-qualified archaeologist he can’t help but continue to do a little part-time work in the heritage industry too (usually indoors where it’s warm and not as muddy).

Having moved around a lot in his life, Dan is currently content in the rolling green hills of the Peak District, England, where he lives with his two kids and some fluffy canine sidekicks.

The Way Up Is Death: Bookshop.org | B&N | Waterstones (UK) | Amazon

Dan Hanks: Website | Instagram | Blue Sky

Bryan Young: Five Things I Learned Writing Battletech: Voidbreaker

For those of you not familiar with BattleTech, it’s the long running tabletop miniatures game, RPG, and fiction series that began in 1984. Some of you might know it as a videogame, where it flies under the brand MechWarrior, which is the exact same universe and essentially the same canon. It’s set a thousand years in the future where humanity has spread across a thousand planets and combat is done in giant BattleMechs. It’s a bit dystopian and war still pretty much sucks for everyone. In the universe, rapid modes of communication have been cut off for the last thirty years or so, making it really hard to get just about anything done.

VoidBreaker deals with that specific problem, so here’s the back cover copy of the book before I dive into my lessons learned:

A NEW ERA DAWNS!

Clan Sea Fox aims to be the leading broker of interstellar communications across the Inner Sphere, but the Blackout, the continuing malfunction of the hyperpulse generator network, has stood in their way for far too long.

To fix the broken HPG network, the Sea Foxes enlist the skills of an elite Watch operative, code name Kitefin. Her first priority is to capture the one man with the knowledge to end the Blackout and restore communication between the stars: Tucker Harwell, a genius technician who vanished amid the chaos of Terra’s conquest.

Before Kitefin can take Tucker to VoidBreaker Station to begin the work of repairing the vast HPG comms network, she’ll have to find him. Unfortunately, she’s not the only one looking for him…

Every book in a series could be someone’s first:

If all of that sounds a little overwhelming to you as someone who may well have never heard of BattleTech, I wanted to make sure I could craft a book set in a universe with this much history to it that anyone could pick up and find enjoyment in. I interviewed Max Allan Collins at one point in my journalism career and he told me that his approach when writing Batman comics in the ‘80s was to make sure that every issue could be approachable by new readers as a jumping on point. “Every comic could be someone’s first” is a quote that’s bounced around a lot, often attributed to Stan Lee, but I realized it’s just as relevant in situations like BattleTech, and this was the philosophy I decided to go into with VoidBreaker. (Indeed, I try that for all of my series work.) Since I was introducing a brand new character in a faction that hasn’t seen much screen time over the course of the franchise, it would be easy to provide enough context for new readers to ease them into the universe. The thing I realized and really learned writing this book is that it can be really hard. You don’t want to talk down to the long time readers who will instantly know all of the jargon and factions at play, and you don’t want to overload the new readers with too much exposition. Finding that balance can be difficult at times, but I found the trick was to draft in the mindset of that familiar reader and then revise from the perspective of the new reader. Every time I’d get to a point where I’d say, “Why would I know about this if I don’t know anything about the world?” I could reconfigure the scene to naturally include details or imply enough context to make it work without dumping exposition all over the place and I think it makes a better reader experience for both sets of fans; the old guard and the ones coming to the universe for the first time. Having said that, you’ll have to try it out for yourself and let me know if it worked.

Challenge yourself and try something new:

Every time I set out to write a book, I try to learn something new about my craft and try something I’ve never tried before. I try to grow and learn with every bite of the proverbial apple. I think that’s something I learned early on, but I always half-forget through the process and remember why I like doing it when I get to the final product. It’s not fun to write on auto-pilot. Giving yourself a challenge is fun, it makes the writing more interesting, and more often than not makes for a better story. My friends and writing mentor, Aaron Allston once told me at our last writing retreat before he passed away, “I’m always excited to see what new mistakes you’re going to make, Bryan.”

I was a little shocked and offended at first, but he explained it to my little newbie-self that it meant I was trying new things and growing every time and I never want to lose that spirit. For this book, I wanted to stretch into story styles and genres I’d never tried before, and work with structures that were novel to me. I think it came off pretty well and I learned a thing or two about how to craft a story, I think.

Read what inspires you, but also outside your comfort zone:

Stephen King once said (yes, that Stephen King, not some other random Stephen King), “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.” And I take that really seriously. I read a lot, especially when I’m writing a book. This book in particular took a lot of inspiration from Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, so I was reading them as I worked to keep that fire of inspiration burning. But I was also reading a lot of stuff as I wrote outside that comfort zone of inspiration, looking to books I wouldn’t normally be reading, looking for outside perspectives and different modes of thinking. The polar opposite of what I was working on. While I was binging Ian Fleming on one hand, I was also reading things like Balzac’s Colonel Chabert and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and contemporary stuff, too. Stuff by Hailey Piper or N.K. Jemison or Gabino Iglesias or Delilah Dawson. I even sneak in a romance novel here or there. They’re not usually my thing, but they handle character development in ways that we can all learn from. Seriously, has anyone here read Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown? It’s a stunning romance fantasy and I learned so much reading it. It’s just terrific and everyone should read it.

Imagine more.

BattleTech is set a thousand years in the future and it blends so many societies and different modes of thinking of humanity. Yes, there has been a backslide in humanity and it’s also a militaristic view of science fiction, but I had to remind myself constantly to think bigger about how things could have changed and what bold things I could do with not just technology, but the people and societies and planets. What would they honestly look like? Some of them might be better than we have now, some of them might be worse. What things would we have transcended? What things would we still struggle with. I was constantly challenging myself to imagine more and imagine better. And that’s something I think I still need to learn and work on and remind myself of. As I’m working in science fiction, I need to imagine more. I’m going to keep working on this as I continue to work in BattleTech and other sci-fi spaces. I’m going to keep working at thinking bigger and bolder. And I’m going to try to think in ways that might show us what a better future might look like in ways that might offer artistic rebellions we can learn from now.

Ignore the noise:

No piece of art is universally beloved and there will always be naysayers. And if anyone hasn’t noticed, there are folks invested in so called culture wars in order to… I don’t even know, drum up YouTube clicks and fight battles that don’t need fighting. BattleTech isn’t immune to this. They’ve been making rounds in every franchise from Star Wars and Star Trek to BattleTech and Shadowrun and anything else you can think of. They get angry if there is the slightest hint of representation or anything outside of the way things were 40 years ago.

I’ve learned it’s not my responsibility to listen to the noise or engage with it in any way.

My responsibility is to tell the best story possible and not worry about the rest of it. Kurt Vonnegut said that you need to “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” For me, I know who that one person is—admittedly, it’s like five people—but still. The point remains. Most of them are editors and the people I work for creatively. I want them to be happy and I want to be happy, too. I’ve had to learn to not be concerned about the reviews. Yes, I want the fans to be happy, but if the people I’m pleasing are happy, enough of the fans will be happy that I’ll be just fine.

Worrying about more than that is a good way to give myself a panic attack and I don’t need that. Nothing is really worth that.

And that’s a lesson worth taking to the bank.

Bryan Young (he/they) works across many different media. His work as a writer and producer has been called “filmmaking gold” by The New York Times. He’s also published comic books with Slave Labor Graphics and Image Comics. He’s been a regular contributor for the Huffington Post, StarWars.com, Star Wars Insider magazine, SYFY, /Film, and was the founder and editor in chief of the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot! In 2014, he wrote the critically acclaimed history book, A Children’s Illustrated History of Presidential Assassination. He co-authored Robotech: The Macross Saga RPG and has written five books in the BattleTech Universe: Honor’s Gauntlet, A Question of Survival, Fox Tales, Without Question, and the forthcoming VoidBreaker. His latest non-fiction tie-in book, The Big Bang Theory Book of Lists is a #1 Bestseller on Amazon. His work has won two Diamond Quill awards and in 2023 he was named Writer of the Year by the League of Utah Writers. He teaches writing for Writer’s Digest, Script Magazine, and at the University of Utah. Follow him across social media @swankmotron or visit swankmotron.com.

Bryan Young: Website

Voidbreaker: Books2Read | Signed copy direct from author

Enfys J. Book: Five Things I Learned Writing Queer Rites

Embrace Your Personal Power with 20 Queer-Specific Rituals

Queer people go through all kinds of unique milestones and rites of passage as we grow into our true selves. Whether you are coming out, attending your first Pride parade, or changing your pronouns, this book will help you enter these rites of passage thoughtfully and spiritually.

Explore rituals for honoring chosen family, going through gender transition milestones, exploring and affirming your gender and sexuality, entering your first queer relationship, and more. Enhance your rituals with a variety of magickal allies, including deities and community ancestors (such as queer activists and leaders).

Regardless of your skill level or spiritual tradition, Queer Rites makes it simple to connect your lived experiences to your magickal practice and commemorate occasions in a way that resonates with your unique and wonderful self.

Includes a foreword by Ariana Serpentine, author of Sacred Gender, and rituals by guest writers Storm Faerywolf, Misha Magdalene, Brandon Weston, and Rev. Ron Padrón.

It’s both satisfying and bittersweet to write the book you needed when you were younger.

As I interviewed queer people of various backgrounds and identities, it became clear how many of our landmark LGBTQ+ milestones are tainted — or worse, defined — by negative experiences. I, and many of those I spoke to, wondered how our experiences of embracing our identities would’ve been different had we celebrated them more, or at least been able to approach them more intentionally. So this book is kind of an instruction manual for how to create a sacred and empowered container for major milestones of the queer experience…and one I wish I’d had decades ago. It’s both satisfying and heartwarming to provide that experience for others, but also bittersweet knowing that I didn’t have this book when I most needed it.

No book is easy to write.

I honestly went into this one like, “Hooray, a book that’s basically an instruction manual: Easy as pie!” Um, no. As it turns out, I had to do just as much research and re-working and re-visiting and re-writing as I did with my first book, Queer Qabala. Instead of reading dusty old tomes, though, I did a lot of interviews with people whose lives and experiences were different from mine, so I could make sure the book was as inclusive as possible.

(And I also read some tomes. There was a lot less dust involved, though. There are some pretty great books on queer magick that have come out in recent years!)

A consistent soundtrack helps produce a consistent product.

While writing and editing this book, I listened to the Baldur’s Gate 3 soundtrack on a loop, and I credit that, in part, for helping me keep a consistent voice and tone throughout, and also for motivating me through the grind of writing and editing. (I even included the composer, Borislav Slavov, in the acknowledgements.) Video game music is super good at pushing you to keep going. It’s what it’s designed to do. (Though sometimes it also motivates you to play video games instead of writing. Your mileage may vary.)

Take time off the day job for every edit round (if you can).

I was lucky enough to be able to take a few days off work right before my manuscript was due to my publisher, and then again when I had to turn in the first big edit round, so that I could sit and truly focus for 8-10 hours each day and didn’t have to lose time context-switching/getting into the groove for several separate editing sessions. This made the process more efficient and it helped me keep the whole book in my head at once, so I could more easily catch things like, “Oh wait, I already said this three chapters ago” or “this contradicts something I said earlier” or “this doesn’t match the format.”

Try not to write two books simultaneously on top of a day job.

Right as I started working on this book, I got a golden opportunity to co-write another book, Sagittarius Witch, that had an aggressive deadline. I was able to put Queer Rites aside for a bit and focus on the other book, but then as soon as I turned that one in I had to shift focus back Queer Rites, and there were times when the edit rounds of both overlapped and I ended 2023 feeling super burned out. And I still wasn’t done with Queer Rites at that point! I decided to take 2024 off writing (though I still had to do a lot of editing), and now I am going into 2025 feeling like I still need more time to recover.

Bonus thing: Book launch parties don’t have to follow a standard script!

For this book’s launch, I co-produced a big queer cabaret with a friend of mine. We gathered some of the top talent in the DC/Baltimore region, hired a venue, lined up some vendors, partnered with local radical bookshop Red Emma’s to sell the books on site, found some generous sponsors, and sold 160 tickets to fill the venue. It was wildly successful — we sold over 85 copies of the book! But it was also a ludicrous amount of work for months leading up to it, and there’s no way I could’ve pulled this off without my co-producer, who had all the connections and savvy for how to pull these kinds of events together from a decade of experience. It was certainly more fun than rolling into a bookstore to talk a bit and do a signing, but it took much, much more preparation and had a lot more moving parts in the planning.

Enfys J. Book (they/them) is an author, priestx, blogger, teacher, performer, singer, songwriter, and comedian. They wrote the Gold COVR award-winning Queer Qabala: Nonbinary, Genderfluid, Omnisexual Mysticism & Magick (Llewellyn, June 2022); co-authored (with Ivo Dominguez, Jr.) Sagittarius Witch (Llewellyn, 2024); and wrote Queer Rites: A Magickal Grimoire to Honor Your Milestones with Pride (Llewellyn, 2025).

They are also a founding member of the “funny, filthy, feminist, fandom folk” band The Misbehavin’ Maidens, the creator of a website on queer magick called majorarqueerna.com, and the host of a podcast called “4 Quick Q’s: Book Talk with Enfys,” where they interview pagan authors using questions determined by a roll of the dice. They have taught many classes on tarot, Hermetic Qabala, magickal rites of passage, and queering one’s magical practice at conferences and events around the world.

Queer Rites (U.S.): Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon | Buy an autographed copy

Author website: https://majorarqueerna.com/

Jennifer Doktorski: Five Things I Learned Writing Finding Normal

There are five towns in the U.S. named “Normal” and seventeen-year-old Gemma Leonardo plans on visiting every one of them. Right after she escapes Children’ s Hospital in Harrisburg, where she’ s being treated for anorexia. Enter Lucas Polizzi, a high school wrestler with bulimia and, more importantly to Gemma, a getaway car. Sick of being told they’re sick, Gemma and Lucas team up for a themed road trip to “the Normals” on one condition— they can’ t mention food, ever. But as each passing mile puts their lives at greater risk, they soon realize it is their growing love and friendship, not a place on a map, that will put them on the path to recovery.

Story inspiration comes from the strangest places

The U.S. is replete with weirdly-named towns. As someone who grew up in Nutley, New Jersey and drove past Intercourse, Pennsylvania on my way to and from college every semester, I kind of knew this. But when I began pouring over the pages of a Rand McNally Road Atlas and typing “U.S. towns with unusual names” into search engines, I discovered—in addition to the five towns named Normal—there’s Ding Dong, Texas; Booger Hole, West Virginia; Boring, Oregon; Toad Suck, Arkansas (don’t worry they also have Hope); and Santa Claus, Indiana. The latter inspired my characters to take a detour enroute to Normal, Illinois. Having them drive along Candy Cane and Jingle Bell lanes and visit the post office on Kris Kringle Circle provided excellent fodder for plot and dialogue.

Writing for a living is a lot like a road trip`

Some of my favorite stories to read, watch, and write, are road trips—Lonesome Dove, Thelma and Louise, Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour, and of course, Wanderers. My first young adult novel was about a teen girl who goes on a cross-country road trip to avoid violating a restraining order after accidentally blowing up her ex-boyfriend’s car. It was a breezy, summer romance published by Simon Pulse. The three novels that followed were also set in the summer and considered beach reads. One was published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, the other two by Sourcebooks. Eleven years after my debut, I tried to switch lanes, and while my latest novel is also a road trip it’s not easy, breezy, or summery. In my journey as a published author, as my writing got better, my publishers got smaller. I went from having an agent for 14 years, to selling my latest book without one. I’m not sure what point I’m at on my writing journey. Am I at a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike? Somewhere in the middle of America? Approaching my exit? I do know that this latest book has taught me that I need to take a deep breath and enjoy the ride.

The way appears

The poet Rumi said, “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” To put it in Dory-speak, “Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.” Not sure if Rumi would agree, but that’s my take. Writing this book taught me perseverance. To wake up every day and do the work of a writer. Sometimes that means sitting in front of my laptop, sometimes it means taking a long walk, or people watching and eavesdropping and jotting down ideas on my phone. I’ve also started writing freelance non-fiction articles again. Until this week, I last published a book in 2018, though I’ve written three full manuscripts since then, including the one that became FINDING NORMAL.

The journey is better with a ride or die and a baby raccoon

My critique partners were with me every step of the way while drafting this novel. They are my ride or dies who hold me accountable. At the beginning of their road trip the two main characters in FINDING NORMAL, Gemma and Lucas, find an orphaned baby raccoon. To some people, raccoons are disease-carrying, kitten-killing, dumpster-diving trash pandas, but to me, with their five-fingered “hands” and black masks to prevent nighttime glare, they’re more like the ambidextrous (times two) quarterbacks of the animal world. Mama raccoons are fiercely protective of their kits (babies), who stay with them until they’re a year old, and researchers have found these adorable bandits are highly intelligent problem solvers. Whether or not they’re smarter than your average bear is up for debate, but their intelligence is on par with rhesus macaques monkeys, which leads me to the last thing I’ve learned.

Don’t make eye contact with the monkeys

This is something I didn’t necessarily learn from writing this book, but something I’ve learned from writing books in general, and from my critique partner who recently visited Bali. Upon checking into her motel, she and her partner were warned to not make eye contact with the long-tailed macaques on the property. “They see it as a sign of aggression,” she was told. Similarly, author-types who value their stomach linings and sanity should not engage with reviewers, booktokers, bookstagrammers, random Goodreads folks, and any other readers who take to social media to insult a novel that may have taken you six years to complete and feels more like your third child than a story. Take it from someone who learned early on, no good can come from engaging. Even when it’s obvious they’ve never read your book and/or published a review that got key facts (like the main character’s name) wrong. Do what I tell my dog Molly when she’s running around the house with a spent toilet paper roll in her mouth. Leave it!

Jennifer Salvato Doktorski received a 2024 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She is the author of five young adult novels including, FAMOUS LAST WORDS (Holt), a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year; THE SUMMER AFTER YOU & ME (Sourcebooks), a YALSA Teens’ Top Ten nominee; and FINDING NORMAL (Fitzroy Books 2025). She has published articles and essays in national magazines including Cosmopolitan and began her writing career on the obit desk of a local newspaper, where she learned the importance of deadlines and developed a lifelong love of news and coffee. She lives with her family in New Jersey and spends summers “down the shore,” where everything is always all right.

Finding Normal: Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon | Asbury Book Coop

Jen Doktorski: Website | Instagram

Here’s What I Think You Do Today, January 20th, 2025

It’s gonna be a stupid, horrible day. We all know that. It’s going to be full of what passes for pomp and circumstance amongst the set of rich tacky dickheads that are about to take full control of the country (they had most of the control anyway, to be fair), and then there will be a bunch of shock and awe, except I dunno how shocked we’ll be, and we definitely won’t be in awe, and many of us will want to break our Dry January streak to drink vodka from our toilets, only coming up for air long enough to shovel more ice cream into our mouths. It’s the first day of our new kakistocracy slash oligarchy, the kakistoligarchracy. It’s going to be like if William Gibson wrote Idiocracy. It’s going to be a stupid, horrible day.

But I think there are things you can do.

None of these things are revolutionary.

I don’t think today is the day for revolutionary.

I think today is the day you do the best you can do.

I think first thing you do is you donate to a charity, maybe a few charities, especially one who are going to have to do some heavy lifting in the years to come. And it’s MLK Jr. Day, too, so maybe factor that into your giving efforts. Some options could include: Southern Poverty Law Center, National Black Woman’s Justice Initiative, RAICES, ACLU, Center for Reproductive Rights, Trevor Project, Trans Lifeline, Arbor Day Foundation, Woodwell Climate Research Center, World Central Kitchen, and so forth.

Charity Navigator is a good place to find and vet charities, btw.

Giving directly to folks in need too is good, via GoFundMes — no links here because those are populous and fast-moving, but I’m sure you’ll see ’em on social media today and in the days that follow.

Reading books is wonderful. Read a book. Reading any book — from a bookstore, from the library (which to be fair are not open today), from your own shelves? Yeah. Books are good food. Doubly so if you take the time to read a book by, you know, anybody who will be hurt by today’s chaos. Author Jessica Conwell has a list over at Bluesky, for instance, of trans authors — it’s a fount of books to be bought and read, including Jessica’s own Ghost Flower. Go read some Hailey Piper, Eric LaRocca, Colson Whitehead, Charlie Jane Anders, Kosoko Jackson, V Castro, Cassandra Khaw, Cynthia Pelayo, the river of reads that awaits you is wide and it is deep. Here’s a good list of Black Authors, too. Shit, you want a great book to read today that’ll be fast and ferocious? Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark. Go find that, read it. If you’ve read it, re-read it. Memorize it.

Look away from the news if you gotta, or stare dead at it if you feel so inclined. (You gotta look eventually. Apathy will serve no one in the years ahead.) You don’t have to do it all today. You don’t have to do anything today. You can just try to be happy today, or calm, or whatever you need to be. Nobody’s asking you to spend it all and burn it up and out.

Look out for your heart and help others with theirs.

Reach out to folks. Accept others reaching out to you if you can.

Check in with your communities, with whoever comprises them.

Take a walk, if it’s not too cold where you are (and it probabably is, shit). Do a little exercise. Breathe in and breathe out. Think about something you wanna do, something good, something nice. Plan a little vacation. Write a little poem. I don’t know. Distract yourself with small pulses of love and light.

Listen. It’s gonna be a weird bad day.

It’s just the first of the weird bad days.

And if we’re being honest, it’s not even the first of them, it’s just another in a long line of weird bad days where the weird part and the bad part are spiking simultaneously, like an outbreak of a particular kind of illness. It’s not just turbulence on a flight, it’s a turbulent flight, from start to finish, snout to tail.

But we can get through it, we can land the plane.

This country is a mess, it’s always been a mess, always will be a mess, but it’s our mess. We’re with it, in it, and have often helped to make it, and that’s not defeatist, that’s not apathetic, it’s just realist to see that we’re a fucking goofy nation that has stumbled and staggered up and down some big hills and into some mucky fucking ditches. Just try to remember we need to climb the hills to see the beautiful views, you know? And first we gotta get up and out of the damn ditch. Beyond that? I think at the end of the day the people we’re with, that we surround ourselves with — that matters. It’s the people we love and care about and who care about us in return. I think it helps me to remember that it’s not like we’re some shining castle in the clouds. We’re a messy place full of messy people and I think it’s good to recognize that, and to see that we can still make motions to make it better than it is, even when it fights us like a bucking, sweat-foamed horse.

Then again, I don’t know shit about shit and might feel different tomorrow. Don’t let anyone chastise you for feeling sad or upset. Toxic optimism isn’t going get us through shit. We feel how we feel and those worries, those concerns, they’re valid. It’s okay to see that shit’s gonna be hard.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of others. Be taken care of when needed.

We’ll need your fight soon. The fight continues. The fight always continues.

Good luck. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Thanks for being here.

(As a postscript, I took that photo of the frozen flag back in 2009 — and I looked at the date, and the date was Jan 20th. Who knew.)

(Anyway, here’s a final photo I took of a squirrel doing a bump of Nature’s Cocaine. May it bring you some measure of joy.)

Five Things You Learned As A Writer Writing That Cool Thing You Wrote?

Dear Writer Types: a reminder that this blog is a place where, if you have a book coming out, you can submit to me for a Five Things I Learned Writing [insert your book name here] guest post! If you’d like a good example of one, look no further than Alex White’s Five Things I Learned Writing August Kitko and the Mechas from Space.

How this works is:

You email me, at least a month before the release date of that book — email me at terribleminds at gmail dot com. (Don’t use the contact form here, I’m finding it’s kinda broken and I need to figure out why.)

You tell me what the book is, when it’s coming out, all the details, and then I email back and I say YAY, and then you make sure I have the guest post a week before it’s going to post. (It will usually post on the Thursday of your launch week though that might shift a little given what other posts are going live that week.)

The guest post should be in *.doc or *.rtf format, ideally, and with minimal formatting. I’ll copy/paste right into WordPress here and do the light formatting myself.

I’ll also need a high-rez, good quality copy of your cover! If it’s too small or low quality, I won’t post the post. I tend to lead with that cover and it’s the first thing people see here or, more likely, in their inboxes.

The format of the post is pretty easily discernible from the one I linked above, but the gist is:

[cover image]

[book flap copy/description, sans endorsements]

[no intro, just hop right into the first thing you learned]

[then list, y’know, in order, five things you learned, and these five things don’t specifically have to be about writing — they can be something you learned about yourself, or other people, or weird facts, or literally anything that falls under the umbrella of “I learned this while writing this book”]

[alex wrote a bonus thing; you do not have to write a bonus thing]

[then: author bio]

[finally, any author or book links we need to reach you and buy the book — buy links, author website, any social media we need to see, etc. — and please note that I prioritize Bookshop.org links and use affiliate links there]

And that’s it.

You do not have to be an author to send me this — agents and publicists/editors are welcome to be the ones to submit!

Please also note, this is open to traditionally published authors first and foremost, and that includes from smaller publishers, too. This is not an open call for self-pub folks, not because I don’t like you or your books, but rather, because in the past when I’ve opened to self-pub folks, it has bombed my already-under-duress inbox with a lot of submissions that I have no real ability to vet — and now, in an era of AI garbage and glurge, I don’t want people to buy some awful ChatGPT slurry from a link here. While I’m not responsible for the content of the books, obviously, I can still do my best to curate a trustworthy experience and, as much as it is wise to be wary of gatekeepers, sometimes a kept gate is a good thing when it comes to stuff like, again, Gen-AI slop. Apologies in advance!

Why submit for this at all?

Well, it won’t make your book a bestseller. But it does go out to over 11,000 subscribers (and you can also subscribe below, at the bottom of this page, to receive this blog and therefore receive the excellent FIVE THINGS I LEARNED entries that roll up in here), and is probably better than most social media posts thrown into the void.

How best to write such a post?

You know, I kinda feel like your best approach is not to try to sell the book. Obviously, you want people to read it, and you want to talk about it — but I just mean, don’t view this as a Capital-M Marketing opportunity so much as a chance for you to speak earnestly and excitedly about the thing you wrote. Naked promotion is pretty easy to reject — BUY MY BOOK is just noise. But telling us a story about the book — because all stories have stories — is interesting, and personal, and I think connects us to you and the work.

Can I just send you the guest post directly?

Hey, please don’t! I’d rather give you a green light first.

Do you edit the post?

If I see light tweaking is needed, I may do that instead of passing it back to you. If more than that, I’ll just not post and ask you. (Though please also recognize my time is limited, sadly.) If the post is just a hot mess, then I’ll let you know sorry, it’s not going up. So, y’know, please don’t send me hot messes! Please and thank you.

What if you don’t respond?

I try to respond quickly when these come in, but also, life is both busy and my inbox is a garbage scow moving down a river on fire, and further, the spam folder is occasionally randomly hungry. Pinging me again usually does the trick, and apologies in advance!

And I think that’s it!

Wanderers Is a Buck And Change

If you have one dollar and ninety-nine pennies laying around, you could take that filthy lucre and shove it into your computer or other digital device and that device will then give you 800+ pages of pre-peri-post-apocalyptic goodness, a sci-fi-horror AI-slash-pandemic novel.

That’s right, Wanderers is on sale today in its electromagnetic book format for $1.99 for some reason? It’s a book I wrote before 2020, I book I started before 2016 — and it definitely has a lot to say, somewhat inadvertently, about our present moment and our emerging future.

So, should this tickle your bits, go grab it from any of the electric bookmongers out there — Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple, etc.

And hey, maybe you’re like, but that’s too cheap, I feel bad, and I say to you, don’t! Get what you can while the gettin’s good! But if you were so inclined to give a little more, you could add on its sequel, Wayward, and wouldn’t that be fun?

Anyway. Wanderers. Cheaper today, so maybe go grab it if you haven’t, and check out the sequel, too, if you’re so inclined.

The Standard Reminder About Preorders

Hello! Preorders of books are good! I’m just over here saying that for no reason at all, and definitely not because I have a book called The Staircase in the Woods coming out on April 29th ahem ahem cough cough. Why are preorders good, you ask? Well! For one, they’re good for the bookstore — a bookstore can ensure that they have the stock in place and also, hey, it’s an early sale, which is a win for them. It’s also good for the publisher but who cares, they’re publishers, they’re fine. But it’s good for, y’know, the author because it’s good for the book. A bookstore receiving some preorders knows to ensure that book is on their shelves in good number — maybe even putting it on a display. It also sends a good message to the publisher about the author, saying, hey, this person has readers who are willing to preorder their books.

And hey, one could argue it’s a good thing for you, the reader. In part because, hey, you guarantee you get the copy you want on the day you want it. And sometimes, preorder comes with other little bonuses or swaggy bits. (More on that as to how it relates to Staircase in a moment.)

Of course, you don’t have to preorder. It’s not essential and you should never feel bad for not being able to do it. Listen, the book will be out there whether you preorder or not. It’s just a nice thing you can do, if you wanna do.

(You can also instead ask your library to order a copy for you to read.)

And Staircase is getting some nice early press.

It’s on Paste’s Most Anticipate Horror of 2025.

Screenrant shouts out 15 of 2025’s horror releases to watch out for.

Goodreads calls it one of readers’ most anticipated horror novels of 2025.

And hey, I also remind you that if you pre-order from my local, Doylestown Bookshop, you’ll also get some bennies —

a) it’ll be signed and personalized to you, and mailed to you directly

b) you’ll get some very excellent Natalie Metzger STAIRCASEy stickers

c) you’ll receive a personalization that includes your very own

havdhr ebbz va gur ubhfr orlbaq gur fgnvef

(no, that was not a cat walking across my keyboard, I don’t have a cat, unless maybe there’s a ghost cat nobody told me about — it’s a code, which means you’ll need to use a ROT13 generator to solve that, as it contains a spoiler for the book, so decipher only if you want that spoiler)

You can get that pre-order here from Doylestown Bookshop.

If you don’t care about the signed/personalize/sticker/secret thing angle, you can also preorder from your own local, or from Bookshop.org.

OH, and a final reminder —

Book clubs!

If you’re choosing this book for a bookclub, and that club is five or more people and we can finagle a time, I will gladly do a 30ish minute virtual visit with your book club to discuss the book after you’ve read it. (These are a blast to do because at a book launch, I have to talk around a book rather than address a lot of the fiddly fun bits. At a book club we can get right into it.)

(You can ping me at terribleminds at gmail to set that up — don’t use the contact form on here, it seems to be busted and I’m working on it.)

OKAY, that’s it, thanks for checking out the book and spreading the word.

The Wildfires In LA

The wildfires in Los Angeles are as devastating as they are horrifying, upending lives and livelihoods left and right — and some people are going to need some help through this nightmare, so I’m dropping a couple links here, and you’re also free to pop into the comments to leave some donation outlets (though please note, some might get flagged as spam automagically, and I will endeavor to pluck them from that oubliette).

First up, two folks, two writers in fact, who have lost their homes —

AC Bradley, who is a most excellent writer and delightful person (and who is connected to a REDACTED project of mine) — the GoFundMe for her, her daughter and her sister is here.

And Ben Mekler, wonderful TV writer (and also very funny human online) just got a new house and had his second child, only for him and his wife to lose that house in the fire. The GoFundMe is here.

And beyond that —

California Fire Relief

California Fire Foundation

California Community Foundation

Global Giving’s CA Wildfire Relief Fund

World Central Kitchen

Pasadena Humane Society

And as always, going forward, be sure to get out and vote for people who actually believe in climate change and who endeavor to help in crises like these. Be additionally wary of misinformation and disinformation about the wildfires — seek not just information from reputable sources but confirmation from multiple reputable sources before sharing. We are in a fractured, unstable information environment and remaining vigilant against bad actors and those invested in our harm rather than our future is key.

Writer’s Resolution 2025: Change Your Story

The author makes a story. But a story also makes the author.

What I mean is this: I think as writers, as authors, as storytellers and artists, we build ourselves along the way out of the narrative spare parts we find on the journey of growing up. We collect them unconsciously, a crow snatching up buttons and coins, and we edit them into our own personal narratives. Some of this is obviously good and necessary; as we figure out who we are as a person, we also figure out who we are as writers. We figure out what we like, what we don’t, what challenges us, what drives us, and those becomes part of our tale. But sometimes, it presents a problem. We pick up unnecessary expectations, we gather jealousies to our chests, we clutch close many falsehoods disguised as truths, and we fuse them brutally to our idea of who we are as storytellers in this world — branches from someone else’s tree that we graft to our own.

Sometimes instead of finding our own motivations, we are handed motivations and accept them.

Sometimes, we accept the negative thoughts and problematic outcomes told to us, and they become so much a part of our story we think we told them first instead of having inadvertently copied them into our narrative.

Sometimes, the ever-shifting industry leaves us feeling rattled and false-footed and makes us doubt who we are, why we’re here, and if we can even tell the stories we once set out to tell.

We hear that we have to write this kind of story, not the one we want to write; we see that oh this writer is doing better than us so we have to change ourselves to be more like them; we make permanent decisions based on temporary conditions.

(And here I am reminded that recently I read an article about how the Broccolis, the family in charge of the creative side of the James Bond franchise, are keeping Amazon — who now own Bond! — at arm’s length because they don’t like how Amazon calls Bond “content.” And in that article there was a great quote from Barbara Broccoli when she recounts advice from her father: “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.”)

Put differently, I know a lot of writers across the spectrum of experience — from neonates to published authors to bestselling ones — who are really going through it right now. They’re questioning their place in the grand spectrum of things — trying to see themselves and where they belong in the world of both authors and their stories. And to some degree, this is good! We’re supposed to gaze inward. We need to evaluate and reevaluate that about ourselves and the tales we tell. It is perhaps essential to keeping dynamic, to being active in our own upkeep and not just settling into a rut.

At the same time, it can be hard because that reevaluation can leave us wanting — it can make us feel lesser than we are, or not up to speed, or simply undeserving of a path forward. This forms a rut all its own.

I’ve noted in my book (sorry to plug, but Gentle Writing Advice is out there for you if you choose to find it) that self-doubt isn’t always a bad thing. Doubt can open a door to a better place — it can tell us, okay, the doubt is instinctive, something is off, it’s urging me to through the door to somewhere I need to go. But it can also hamstring us. It can poison us. It can be a lie, doubt born of falsehood, doubt with teeth, doubt serving only to halt our momentum through that door instead of pushing and prodding us forward.

New writers can feel like they’re never going to get there. Midlist writers can feel like they’re never going to break out. Veteran writers can feel like they’ll never do anything new. You worry you’re writing the wrong genre, the wrong way, the wrong this, the wrong that. The story we tell about ourselves darkens, suddenly turbid with this pollution of uncertainty and self-doubt, and so I think for me, maybe for you, 2025 can be a year where you change that story. Because we are authors of it. It doesn’t author us. We have the power of narrative and the power of editing that story.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can magically change conditions on the ground — you can still only control what you control, but what you control is the story in front of you and why you bring yourself to tell it. It’s that last part that maybe matters most, here. The story you tell can be less about the weight of expectation and certainly less about all the external valuations — but rather, the story you edit and rewrite and tell anew can be one about how, no matter what anybody else thinks, no matter what the conditions of the industry are, no matter what poison has been dripped into your ear —

You’re still a writer, and the writer writes.

Is this oversimplistic? Sure. Does it pave over doubt? It shouldn’t — like I said, some doubt is good. Some doubt is clarifying. A knife at your back pushing you forward, forward, ever forward. But you can relearn why you do the thing you do. You can tell the story that you’re a person who finishes what you begin, who tells the story they want to tell, who cares about the craft rather than the industry, who is good to themselves rather than cruel. You can change those parameters of your story. You are author and editor.

So, for me, and maybe for you, that’s my way forward in 2025 — just making sure that the story I tell about myself as a writer is the one I want to be telling, not the one I’ve just unconsciously and unwittingly accepted. It’s about a surefootedness and confidence in myself, and less about the outcome others control and more about the outcome I can command.

Don’t like the story you have about yourself as a writer?

Tell a simpler story. A kinder story. And most of all, a better story.

I should note here I was going to do a RAH RAH RAH FUCK ‘EM 2025 IS GONNA BE A KICK TO THE DICK SO KICK IT IN THE DICK INSTEAD kind of a post, but that just feels like — well, you’ve heard it before. You know it already. We’ve been there on and off for the last eight years. It’s gonna get bad and weird and we will have to meet it on the battlefield, and we can use our work as opposition, as therapy, as vengeance, as admonishment and as optimism and as escape. But for today, I felt like it was better to get at the deeper heart of who we are as writers, and how our own perverted (no not that kind of perverted, relax) narratives about ourselves can fuck it all up.

Maybe that helps you.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Either way, I hope 2025 is a year of many words for you. And I hope just as you give those words your power, those words give you power, too.

See you in the new year, little chickadees.

(You can find 2024’s resolution here, if you care to click.)