Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 107

Elsa S. Henry: On Teaching Disabled Representation In Fiction

Elsa S. Henry returns to terribleminds (when last we saw her, she wrote the vital “So, You Wanna Write A Blind Character?” — she’s now going to teach a class on the subject of representing disability in fiction. Would you like to hear more? You should.

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Six years ago in graduate school was when I realized that my identity as a disabled person mattered, whether I wanted it to or not. There’s something really scary about sitting in a room with a bunch of your peers, and suddenly realizing that they’ve made assumptions about whether or not you can have children all because you’re deaf and blind.

Six years ago was when I transformed from a person with a disability to a disabled person. For me, that shift meant that I stopped distancing myself from the body I was born in, and gave voice to a whole list of frustrations I’d been telling myself didn’t matter.

I’d been telling myself for my whole life that my disabilities didn’t shape me, or my life. That people didn’t give a fuck whether or not I could see – but the truth was, they did, and they still do.

Which is why I started speaking out about why representation matters. It doesn’t just matter because my feelings get hurt, it matters because the world around me judges me based on what they see about disabled people out there in the media.

When George Takei posts a meme joking about how a wheelchair user stood up and could reach for alcohol because that was “a miracle,” that reinforces that wheelchairs are only for people who can never stand up. (Link: http://rampyourvoice.com/2014/08/19/the-george-takei-disabled-meme-controversy-the-offense-response-public-apology/)

When Daredevil throws his cane away in an alley, it reinforces the fact that people with disabilities are faking.

When I flinch because someone grabs my arm and asks me if I need help while they’re moving me in the opposite direction from my goal- well, they learned that because the media tells them that blind people always need their help.

Representation fucking matters.

I’m the kind of person who wants to fix things, so when i realized that I had the skills to fix some of the problems that I see out there, I started writing. I started speaking. I started pitching books and articles, and asking people to listen to me.

And not everyone was happy about it.

I’ve gotten threats through email and harassment on twitter, all because I’m just saying we should have better representation of blind people. Just because I don’t think it’s useful to only represent tropes of disability as the only disability representations out there.

So now I’m teaching.

A few months back I went on a bit of a rage spiral about how an able bodied person was teaching a class about how to write disabled characters. I basically threw down the gauntlet, and I said I wanted to teach. And boy, I should always think about what I put out into the universe because I got plenty of teaching offers. Including the one coming up next month.

I’m teaching a Master Class on deaf and blind characters for Writing the Other.

You should come. It’ll be great.

It’ll be great because I’m deeply invested in changing the way that people write about disabled characters, the way that we develop a fictional world matters. Because science fiction and speculative fiction aren’t just reflections of the world we already live in, they’re reflections of the world we want to build, the place we want to claim as our own in the future. If we keep writing stories and futures where we don’t include disabled people, then disabled people will continue to be invisible, until someone decides we don’t exist anymore.

Dystopian futures don’t include us, even though our stories would be fascinating to tell. Cyberpunk futures erase our bodies, claiming that to be augmented is better than anythng. Erasing disability from your future doesn’t just suggest that we won’t matter in the future, it suggests that we won’t exist.

I don’t want to live in a world where I have no claim to my body, or to the identities which have shaped me.

My disabled identity only came to me six years ago, but now that it is a part of me, I know I could never give it up without a fight.

Claiming crip (Link: http://www.rootedinrights.org/claiming-crip-to-reclaim-identity/)  gave me more than just an identity that meshed with my experience of the world – a place where I have been denied opportunities on the basis of my disability, a world where I have literally been blamed for the bad things that have happened to me because I am blind. Claiming crip gave me a place where others would lift me up for being who I am, and for inhabiting the body that I have.

When I teach Writing the Other, I’ll be giving able bodied writers a glimpse into the world of disability, a chance to understand what it means to make choices based on the body you own, not just the one you might rent in a cyberpunk future.

I promise I don’t bite. But I do want to give you an education. One that’ll change the way you look at disability, from heroes to people. From overcoming narratives to living. From wheelchair bound, to valuing the chair as an equalizer.

So join me on September 10th.

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Elsa Sjunneson-Henry is a half-blind, half-deaf, half-Scandinavian writer who haunts New Jersey. She’s worked on tabetop RPG books, been in fiction anthologies (check out Ghost in the Cogs from Broken Eye Books), and has written a number of nonfiction articles about disability. You can find those floating around on the internet. She can be found on twitter @snarkbat and at feministsonar.com. When she’s not frantically scribbling, she can be found singing Hamilton lyrics to her hound dog.

Elsa Henry: Website | Writing The Other

Dear Men, It’s Time We Had A Conversation

Gather around, those who identify as menly mens.

We need to have a talk.

A number of of you are doing some things very badly. You’ve gone awry, you poor fools.

(And already I know there’s some suppurating human blister out there about to hop on social media and call me Cuck Wendig, but trust me, if “cuck” is your go-to-insult of choice, we all know you’re a greasy, blubbering shit-baby who still lives with his parents.)

Let’s highlight some areas of improvement, gents. Because you’re getting to be a problem.

What Did You Do To The Restroom, You Animal

Merciful Jesus, what the fuck did you do to that public restroom?

I go into the rooms where men are supposed to take out the biological garbage, and fucking god how are we fucking this up? There is piss everywhere. How is that happening? Are you whizzing into the Dyson Airblade with the hopes of misting the entire room with your urine? At each urinal, there is a small pond — nay, a lake — of pee underneath. I go to the airport restroom with the express purpose of sterilizing my suitcase’s caster wheels in the collective urine of a thousand men. Urinals aren’t thimbles. It’s not a difficult carnival game. Each urinal is very generously sized for the meager stream of Mountain Dew that will exit your body. Point yourself at the welcoming porcelain and hold steady. How is that much urine getting outside the urinal? I’ve literally seen urine on top of urinals. As if you thought the goal was to hit the wall and then drizzle it downwards into the urinal’s mouth. (I’ve also seen poop in a urinal. Which, y’know, I guess I’m happy it was in it and not outside of it.)

I once, while waiting for a urinal, watched a guy piss all over his own shoes because — and this is just a guess — he was afraid to look down at his own dong or accidentally grab a glimpse of a neighboring dong. Instilled with sheer dick fear, he chose instead to just wee all over his feet instead of casting his gaze south to see how the whole “peeing in a urinal” business was going.

Don’t even think about looking in the stalls. The stalls are practically sweating with urine.

Then there’s the sink area. Oh my god, that’s wet, too. Moistness, moistness, everywhere. Granted, some bathrooms suffer from poor design (WASH HANDS HERE, WALK 100 YARDS TO A TOWEL DISPENSER THAT DOESN’T WORK), but even still, why is everything so wet? Are we in that much of a hurry? If we could collect all the wasted water in a men’s restroom, we could save California from drying up and going full dustbowl.

Men, get better. Control yourself in the bathroom. Fix your business.

Enough With The Fucking Cologne

Ye Gods, some of you smell. And not in the way where it’s like you’ve been digging ditches in a hot swamp. No, the odor is like you took a shower underneath a nozzle that dispenses only CK-1. You smell like bug spray and fraternity hazing. You stink like you just took a dunk in the same tank of noxious chemicals that birthed the Joker.

Listen, I get it, you think, UGH, MY MALODOROUS SWEAT, and guys are sort of inundated early on with this sense that we’re not supposed to have any kind of smell beyond that which we choose to apply to our bodies. Puberty hits and suddenly it’s like, HEY NOW YOU LEAK AND STINK, SO HURRY UP AND ELIMINATE YOUR NASTY HUMAN MIASMA LEST THE WORLD RECOGNIZE YOU FOR THE NERVOUS, OOZING PIG THAT YOU ARE. And we have a wide range of deodorants and anti-perspirants and colognes and shampoos and other pesticidal stench-fighting unguents to help us combat that human miasma.

But here’s the thing.

First, your sweat probably smells better than you’ve been told. Okay, it’s one thing if you’ve been pickling in your own manbrine with no interest in actually showering. But as long as it hasn’t been a protracted amount of time, you probably smell, well, normal.

Second, if you do wish to apply some kind of chemical scent to your body, more power to you. Just don’t use an amount equivalent to what it would take to drown a human toddler. A mist here, a spritz there, okay. Fsst, fsst, psshhh, done. Stop there. Put down the can, the tube, the mister, the hose, and walk the fuck away. If you’re going through more than one bottle of cologne every, say, ten years, you’re almost certainly overdoing it.

Third, soap is actually a nice smell. Just soap. Regular soap. A little bit of it. Soap.

I was at the beach this summer, and so many men there who gave off a mephitic, eye-blistering wave of horror — this corpse-sweet frat-boy rape-culture Windex smell that summarily overtook the normal beach smells of sand, salt, suntan lotion. And they were at breakfast, too — you’d try to take a bite of sausage and with it you’d inhale a mouthful of Axe Body Spray so thick it had weight and texture. A stink you can chew.

Just, god, fuck, stop punishing yourself and the rest of us us with your unholy sheen of venom. Wash your body from time to time. Use soap. That’s it. Cool it with the nerve toxins, you’re killing birds and frogs and other nearby wildlife.

Go To The Doctor Already

Men don’t like to go to the doctor.

It’s some combination of I WAS TOLD THAT TOUGH GUYS DON’T GO TO THE DOCTOR I CAN FIX IT MYSELF and ALSO SECRETLY I’M AFRAID TO GO AND I DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO SEE THAT I’M AFRAID SO INSTEAD I’LL JUST PRETEND I’M MISTER BULLETPROOF. Add in the fact that the occasional doctor’s visit requires the doctor to:

a) handle your privates, whatever they may be

b) stick a finger or probing device up your no-no-hole

And suddenly guys are all stoic and cocky about it, until of course their prostate swells up to the size of a cantaloupe — but ha ha, at least nobody ever shoved a finger up your butt, big guy.

Seriously. Get your shit checked out. Go to the doctor. Get your health dealt with, you coward. Your manliness is not in danger. Your manliness has nothing to do with it. Your manliness isn’t even a thing. Be a person who gives a shit about themselves and about the people around them and get your business handled. I got my prostate checked out by a big-fingered doc who said my sphincter had “nice snap.” It was not my most dignified moment but the silver lining was, hey, I don’t have prostate cancer and also, I will accept any compliments about my sphincter, that’s fine, that’s very nice, thank you, large-knuckled doctor. Don’t be Mister Tough Guy who dies because he’s too tough or because he’s homophobic.

You Can’t Fix Everything

Put. That toolbox. Down.

Toolboxes are for closers only.

You can’t always fix that thing you think you can fix. And that’s okay! I can hang a shelf. I can maybe replace a ceiling fan or a light fixture. But good goddamn, you have to know your limits. Buying a house becomes an exercise of, HEY, I WONDER WHAT JOE-BRO OWNER “FIXED” WHEN HE OWNED THE HOUSE LAST. You get an actual repairman in there and they open the walls and suddenly it’s all, “The last owner tried fixing everything with duct tape and lamp-cord. This pipe over here is just a Pringles can and chewing gum. You were about ten minutes from everything exploding.” I recognize the need to be frugal, and I also recognize that it is perfectly wise to try to develop the skill-sets necessary to perform certain kinds of repairs within a certain purview. But you know, sometimes you have to call in the expert. They’re the ones who can save you from spending more money to fix the thing you just fucked up when trying to fix the thing. They’re the ones who can prevent you from injuring yourself or from burning your dumb house down because your Amateur Hour Electrician status jolly well won’t cut it.

To repeat: KNOW YOUR LIMITS. You can’t fix everything. And you don’t have to. We need to as men stop judging other men who aren’t handy with tools or who can’t fix every last machine in the house. (My wife is actually the one who fixes shit, for the record. I do the cooking, and she does the home repair. I have no problems with this arrangement.)

Hitting On Women, Catcalling, And Other Shitty Shittiness

*sighs*

*pinches bridge of nose*

I once watched a guy try to hit on a blind woman in a grocery store.

It was gross.

Yesterday, an article went boomeranging around social media from a PUA MRA knob (some fuck-man named “Dan Bacon,” if you can believe that, god help us), and this ‘article’ was about how to properly engage (read: “hit on”) a woman who is wearing headphones. Which is asinine because of course a woman has headphones on because she doesn’t want to talk to you — either actively or passively, it doesn’t matter. She’s busy. She doesn’t need or want your shit up in her shit. I said on Twitter that the best way to talk to a woman wearing headphones is:

a) punch yourself in the face

b) when she looks up and removes her headphones, apologize for thinking she owes you her time

I would then add c) run home and stare at your bloody face in the mirror and think about what you’ve done, you belligerent cankermonkey, and also be thankful she did not open her mouth and consume you in a howling vortex of spiders.

Women don’t owe you anything. They don’t owe you a smile. They don’t owe you kindness. They don’t owe you a single moment of their time, much less any kind of romantic or sexual gratification. They aren’t animals who temporarily escaped their fence and it’s your job to convince them with cooing noises or a cracking whip to come back to their stable. Don’t catcall them. Don’t hit on them. Don’t touch them if they don’t ask to be touched. Get enthusiastic consent in every possible interaction. They have power equal to yours. Yours does not eclipse theirs. Your manliness is so not a thing.

We have these outmoded ideas of manliness that replace confidence with aggressiveness, that exchanges basic human strength of character with dominance and ownership. Get shut of all that. Your idea of masculinity is brittle, over-worked steel — it is fragile because it simply cannot support itself. It’s toxic because it’s off-gassing centuries worth of bad ideas about how men must conquer and compete and control. You need to do better. You need to be better. You need to stop giving the rest of us a bad name, damnit. Stop giving into the bullshit.

P.S. nobody wants unsolicited dick pics

P.P.S. seriously the dick is the least-most interesting thing about you and probably the least-most interesting thing in the whole world, put that thing away, you’re upsetting everybody

Invasive Photo Contest — Winners!

AHOY-HOY.

It’s time to announce the Invasive Photo Contest winners!

First, you can go here and see the current entries.

Now, time to announce the random draw, who will win a Harper Voyager prize pack…

And now, my pick, which was a tough one — I kept bouncing back and forth between three of them, but in the end, this one was the inevitable winner, I think:

Congrats to both Steven Voelker and Corey Peterson! I’ll be emailing you shortly…

Five Things I’d Like To See In No Man’s Sky

*stomps feet like petulant child*

I DEMAND THINGS

I DEMAND YOU, VIDEO GAME, CHANGE FOR MY FICKLE WHIMS

*kicks sand*

*pouts*

*stabs somebody*

Okay, I apologize for my tantrum.

I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky. A lot. I love it. It is oddly relaxing and calming. It is punctuated with moments of bizarre beauty. It skips along to moments of emergent narrative, like the time I lost my ship, or the time I lodged my ship between some rocks (due to a bug, admittedly) on a high security sentinel planet with few resources — I had to move hell and highwater just to repair the ship and get it summoned to an outpost I found halfway across the planet.

This is a game that highlights the journey over the destination. It is experiential and strange.

It’s also occasionally very hollow.

What I mean is, it often feels not like I’m traversing a real universe (which, obviously, I’m not, though it is the game’s job to convince me that I am) — but rather, that I’m traversing a backlot set at a movie studio. I feel like at any moment I could walk up to one of the creatures, or the cliffs, or the alien outposts, and I could kick them over. A cardboard proxy would fall with the illusion neatly spoiled. It all feels like vapor. Like none of it really matters. Sometimes I feel like a space tourist, which is exciting in its own special way, like I’m collecting postcards on my lonely voyage through the interior of the universe. Other times I feel as if I’m haunting the universe like a ghost just passing through, ineffective and unseen.

I thought it would be interesting (for me, maybe not for you) to put together THE THINGS WOT I’D LIKE TO SEE in this game. Just as an experiment of me shouting into the void to see if the void answers back. So, here we go. Things I wanna see in No Man’s Sky, starting now –

1) I WANT THINGS TO MATTER. Jesus, god, half this game feels like the knob that makes the toast darker on the toaster — it says it does something, and you spin spin spin the knob, but the toaster is gonna make the toast as dark as it jolly well fucking pleases. The knob is an illusion. The cake is a lie. And No Man’s Sky is full of inconsequentiality. The creatures you find fake an ecology, but they have none. They don’t eat. They don’t fuck. Some try to kill you and most don’t. They amble about, purely decorative. Sometimes you feed them and they shit like, nickel or other elements? I dunno. It’s not just them. So much of the game seems disconnected from the larger system. I don’t know that my standing with the alien races matters. I don’t know that me learning their vocabulary matters. If I name a creature or a place or a fucking cactus, what does it matter? Who will see it? (I’ve gone back to worlds and found my names erased or changed — some discoveries suddenly undiscovered.) The game fakes complexity. It fakes connections between systems. But most of it is a painting of complexity — the suggestion of connection without anything hooked up to anything else.

2) I WANT TO OWN STUFF. Right now, the game allows you three things: a suit, a tool, a ship. I like this, it’s simple. And I like how you upgrade these things and they stay with you. You carry them on your journey, and you have nothing else to call your own. That’s interesting philosophically and narratively, but over time, it’s less interesting as a game mechanic. What I mean is, we are given a bounty of riches in a nearly endless, infinite universe. Planets of such volatility and beauty make for interesting travel — but once in a while, I want to do more than simply be a tourist. I don’t want to be an explorer — I want to be a fucking settler. I want to find a place and stay for a while. I believe this is changing soon with the addition of building bases and capitol ships, but boy howdy, would I like a little Minecraft injected into this game. Minecraft gives me a procedural world and I can wander aimlessly — or I can hunker down and build a fort. Or a castle. Or a palace. Or a statue to my own brilliance. I want to own planets. I want to settle. I want to make mining operations and have droids do shit for me and I want to make spaceships that I can sell to other people. Or, at least, I want the ability to build a fucking house where I can live and have a Space Dog and I can park my multitool and take a shit or have a nap or — really, something, anything that gives me a sense of intimacy and permanence. Let me construct. Let me sculpt. Let me settle the world on which I’m standing should I so choose.

3) I’M SO GODDAMN ALONE. The creators have rightly and fairly said, “Hey, if you want multiplayer, then go play Destiny.” Which is reasonable. I don’t want to play a No Man’s Sky that has me running around a random planet with a thousand other yahoos — probably a gaggle of twelve-year-olds screaming racial epithets at each other as they camp a valuable mining spot. I don’t want this to be Eve Online, which is one of the most punishing, venomous galactic experiences you’ll have. But sometimes, too, this game feels so woefully, miserably alone. I like that at times. But when I name an alien critter, I want it to be like a name I carved onto a wall — I do it in the hopes someone will pass by and see it. Once in a while I’d love to experience the genuine thrill of seeing another actual living being in the universe. How sublime would that be? A moment of connection in a sea of isolation. I need a smaller universe. I need contact — once in a while, real, bonafide contact. Which seems impossible, here. The game does not merely have minimal multiplayer — it has absolutely none. The promises of some connection — a shared universe — is yet another of the game’s many illusions.

4) PIRATES ARE MY SCHEDULED “WELL I GUESS I’M GONNA FUCKING DIE” TIME. It happens every galaxy, now. I’m flying. Some turd-dick pirate scans my ship. Said dick-turd attacks. And I die. I die because the game offers me nothing in terms of beating them. Mostly I just spin wildly about as the computer lasers me to death, and then I have to go and repair my ship and find my grave and it’s like — fine, this is my DEATH TIME. But once again, the illusion is present. The game manifests this as a challenge, but it is the illusion of a challenge. You can beat the pirates, but there’s little reason to do so outside of avoiding the consequences of dying. You get nothing for it, and it’s hard and random, and again, who cares?

5) MORE COMPLICATED PLANETS WOULD BE NICE. Right now, NMS takes on the Star Wars theory of planet-building, mostly — a planet is one thing, one biome, that’s it. You don’t get snow here, you don’t get tropics, there’s nothing polar, nothing equatorial, there’s no difference between a lake and an ocean. Minecraft actually gets some of this right. At least a procedurally-generated world there has variance. This is just… the same thing with tweaks on the theme. Variety is real, but the value of that variety is (once more, say it with me) an illusion.

To sum up:

I want fewer illusions.

I want more systems to matter.

I want to feel like I’m doing something, like I’m making a difference.

I want to feel alone, but not so alone my only friend is a fucking volleyball with a painted-on face.

This is a beautiful game. It is meditative and fascinating. I love it and consider it a wild — if flawed — success, despite what you feel might be criticisms — these don’t diminish my love, I just want to love it more. Or, rather, I want it to have more longevity. Minecraft is a game deceptively simple that I’m still playing, and I can play it to survive, or to create, or to destroy, or to wander. I need NMS to have more axes of entry — more routes to affecting the universe and leaving my own footprints behind. That’s what we want to do — we want to go onto the moon and leave our bootprints in the dust. What that means to you, well, I don’t know. But the above post is what it means to me.

You playing the game?

What do you think about it?

Macro Monday Dreams Of Autumn, And Bears Bad News

All right, summer, you’re too damn hot to handle. It’s time to go, chop chop, let’s bring fall in. Let’s get some pretty leaves falling, some cooler air, some nice breezes, some kids back to school — hell, I’ll even take the traditional AUTUMNAL PRACTICE of the PUMPKIN SPICE ENEMA. That’s a thing, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure it’s a thing.

That macro there is, by the way, a fallen leaf with some waterdrops on it.

Now, onward, to news-shellacked tiddle-bits.

GeekDad reviewed Invasive! “Wendig’s short and sweet chapters will keep you reading ‘just one more’ because he’s an obvious master at cliffhanger chapter endings.”

Speculate SF not only reviewed it, but then had a follow-up interview with me on the podcast! Go check those out, and then support ‘em.

At Bookish, I swing by and offer up a selection of my favorite CREATURE FEATURE novels! Need new books to read, then clicky-clicky.

Paul Tremblay, who writes horror that is (like True Detective in its way) what I consider “supernatural-adjacent,” said of the book — “INVASIVE by @ChuckWendig: smart, relentless, Crichton-esque (but with so much better chararcter work) fun. Get some!” Which is really kind, because Paul is an amazing author. Even though he’s a math teacher. I guess I shouldn’t let ants kill him. Fine. *calls off ant army* *sulks*

I’ve also added an appearance: I’ll be with Fran Wilde on 9/27 at B&N Rittenhouse! COME SAY HI.

Probably something else I’m forgetting, but so it goes.

Now, onward to the BAD NEWS BEAR, who bites you and infects you with bad news.

Hyperion, at Marvel, has been canceled. This week will see the final issue (starring Iron Man, which means I got to write Iron Man, which is a badge I will now wear forever with great bluster), and the six issues will be collected together for purchase. It’s sad. I’m super-bummed about it. But it was a strange book with a Marvel character who never really had the spotlight. I was really pleased that Katie and Christina let me do the weird small-town-horror I wanted to do with it (killer clowns and worm guy!). The art by Nik Virella and Marc Laming was swoonworthy, and the Romulo aced the colors in a way that made me not only swoon, but faint and hit my head on the coffee table. The book was honestly canceled the day the first issue came out, so it wasn’t really down to anything that we’d done on the book but rather down to the way that store orders fell off, as I understand it — again, because Hyperion is more of a fringe character. But he’s a fringe character that I hoped I got to give some more life to, pulling him away from the margins a little and making him more interesting. Marvel was really supportive and continues to be, and I hope to do some more work with them in the future. Thanks everyone for reading the book! Hope you enjoy the last issue, coming out this week. I’m sorry there won’t be more!

*belligerent sobbing ensues*

And since we’re at it, let’s deliver a second bite from the BAD NEWS BEAR.

Folks ask me now and again when the sequel to The Hellsblood Bride will hit. I had originally conceived of the Mookie Pearl stories as a trilogy. And the answer to that is… a tiny shrug emoji?

I want to do that third book, I do. I’m not sure yet the finances or the time line up.

Here’s the deal –

The Blue Blazes is the introduction to the Hell underneath Manhattan and of Mookie and Nora, and then Hellsblood Bride shows us a lot more of Hell and the mythology while complicating the hell (ahem) out of Mookie and Nora’s stories. Some may remember that there was some, um, publishing shenanigans around those books, so last year I managed to get the rights back and publish them myself in October, which means we’re coming up on one year after release. I do very little to support them in terms of pushing their sales because really, I don’t have that in me. (It’s why self-publishing is tricky — you gotta stay hungry and be as much a salesman as an author, and honestly, it’s tiring as fuck. This ceaseless parade of reminding people about the book and building buzz and juggling your strategies. I really just want to write books. An unrealistic demand, maybe, but it’s why I like partnering with smart publishers who will, ideally, do that part for me.) Even without pushing the books, they’ve done okay. First month I had already paid for the cover and the e-book design and after that, the money has been nice enough. But maybe not nice enough to justify that third book.

Which means, at present: no plans to do so. (Unless a publisher wants it? Dangle, dangle.)

Which is a bummer! I know. The second book is an ending, but boy howdy is it a rough one. The third book would pull the series out of that dark place, but again, I don’t think I’m getting there any time soon, so for now, that means Mookie’s tale ends where it ends there in Hellsblood Bride. If the book sales surge or by next year start to pick up for RANDOM COSMIC REASON, I’ll re-evaluate. This isn’t a never, but definitely qualifies as a not right now.

If you want to check out any of these books (and book sales, for the record, help support this blog and obviously the books overall):

Blue Blazes: Amazon / Buy Direct From Terribleminds

Hellsblood Bride: Amazon | Buy Direct From Terribleminds

Invasive: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Flash Fiction Challenge: Behold The Idiomatic!

The Idiomatic.

I love it. It basically mashes up a couple-few idioms into something new and very possibly inane, and very possibly wise. (Example: “God shouldn’t cross the bridge till you come to it.” What does that mean? I don’t know! But damnit, I like it.) It forms the backbone of today’s fiction challenge.

Click it. Get a fake mash-up idiom you like. (Re-clicks are fine, obviously.)

Then use it in a story.

That’s it.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: Friday, September 2nd, noon EST (holy shit, it’ll be September soon, you guys)

Write it at your online space, link to it in the comments, and voila.

Five Things I Learned Writing Invasive

[So, I get to do one of these right? I think I’m allowed. Don’t look at me like that. IT’S MY BLOG AND I’LL DO WHAT I WANT. *kicks sand in your face* *and by sand, I mean ants* *fire ants*]

“Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride. Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Hannah Stander is a consultant for the FBI—a futurist who helps the Agency with cases that feature demonstrations of bleeding-edge technology. It’s her job to help them identify unforeseen threats: hackers, AIs, genetic modification, anything that in the wrong hands could harm the homeland.

Hannah is in an airport, waiting to board a flight home to see her family, when she receives a call from Agent Hollis Copper. “I’ve got a cabin full of over a thousand dead bodies,” he tells her. Whether those bodies are all human, he doesn’t say.

What Hannah finds is a horrifying murder that points to the impossible—someone weaponizing the natural world in a most unnatural way. Discovering who—and why—will take her on a terrifying chase from the Arizona deserts to the secret island laboratory of a billionaire inventor/philanthropist. Hannah knows there are a million ways the world can end, but she just might be facing one she could never have predicted—a new threat both ancient and cutting-edge that could wipe humanity off the earth.

* * *

The Three-Step Research Tango

Both Zer0es and Invasive are very research-intensive books. Not to say every book doesn’t require a little bit of research — but the further you drift into fantastical territory, the greater license you are given to say hey, fuck it, and then, barf up a glowing river of unicorn slurry and get on with your life. But these two books, not so much. Sure, I could just make everything up — fiction gives you a pretty long leash. But I wanted to get things right. Or at least so they felt right — authenticity being the illusion of truth.

So, that meant research.

With Zer0es, I researched by disappearing from my family for a year and joining a Russian hacker cabal. They called me Yuri, and I ended up in prison for a while, and got a bunch of really rad Russian prison tats. Then, for Invasive, I rolled around in brown sugar and slept on my lawn overnight until in the morning I was colonized by ants. I’m still colonized by them, even now. I feel the ants inside my face. I am not their queen but rather, their king. Ha ha ha, Ant #91,812, you’re tickling the inside of my nose! Ha ha ha. *sneezes* *ants everywhere*

Okay, maybe not.

For me, research takes three stages.

First stage is, read a lot about it. Scour the Internet. (Might I recommend beholding Alex Wild’s macro ant photography?) Read expert texts on the subject. (For Invasive, anything by Holldobler and Wilson. Journey to the Ants is wonderful. As is The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization By Instinct.)

Second stage is, talk to people who know things. Speak to experts. In this case, talk to entomologists. Make phone calls. Ask questions. Kidnap them. Force them to yield all their secrets to you. DISCOVER WHICH INSECTS CONTROL THEM. Wait, no. Just ask questions.

Third stage is, try to get hands on. Obviously, we have ants all around us — the ants outnumber us by an epic factor. (The Earth is home to roughly ten thousand trillion ants.) It was easy enough to watch ants at work, and present them with challenges — disrupt a pheromone trail or establish for them an American Ninja Warrior course. But also, that meant for me heading out to the wonderful Bug Barn at Purdue University under the care of Gwen Pearson. I got to see ants! And hold a tarantula! And behold the OBT, the Orange Bitey Thing, the Orange Baboon Tarantula. (You don’t touch the OBT without a hazmat suit.)

That third stage is one of the most important because you pick up things that are more impressionistic than they are fact-driven. Like, anybody can read about a subject. But to experience it — even in the tiniest way — gives you little bits of information that are all yours. And you can use them. (Example: in writing The Cormorant, I went to Florida to travel where Miriam was traveling. Way better than doing the same journey on, say, Google Maps.)

Research, Like Anything, Can Overwhelm The Story

The story is everything, and all serves the story. If something does not serve the story, then you must lay it upon the altar and chop off its fool head. The reality with research and the facts it yields is that you can first only use so much. When something doesn’t match the narrative — getting it to fit means cramming it, and nobody likes anything crammed anywhere.

Everything cannot be slave to fact. That’s not to say to try to get it right! But you can only get it so right before your story ceases to be possible and the whole thing just becomes non-fiction. Invasive involves genetic modification of a creature in a way that is not yet possible and may not ever be possible. The goal then is to support the outlandish sci-fi components with a backdrop of reality — it creates (as noted above) what I think of as authenticity. Authenticity isn’t fact or reality. It is a feeling of fact or reality. It feels true. It feels real. The other thing is that research is going to give you an overfull bounty, a veritable cornucopia of material. You can’t use it all. Bank it, and save it for later.

At the end of the day, you can’t let anything — research, worldbuilding, preachy thematic resonance — take over the narrative. All things buoy the story.

Otherwise, the story sinks beneath.

(Related: this also means you can’t be afraid to cut material from a book. Invasive‘s first draft was around, I believe, 120,000 words. The final was around 90,000 words. So, 30k hit the floor thanks to suggested edits from my agent, my editor, and my own cuts. Gotta be merciless when it comes to cutting the flab from the story. But not all the fat — fat provides flavor in small amounts. AND GREAT, NOW I’M HUNGRY.)

If A Story Is Told In The Forest And No One Can Hear It, Was Ever A Story Told?

It’s easy to line up all this big, crazy stuff — OMG ANTS AND GENETIC MODIFICATION AND HACKERS AND OH GOD WHAT IF THE WORLD ENDS, but all that is meaningless without a great protagonist. Character is everything. Character is the lens that focuses all these wild, erratic rays flashing around the room like you’re in a lightswitch rave. For me, pieces of this story were bobbling around the sensory deprivation tank of my own skull for a long time. The one thing that brings those elements together for me is the protagonist.

That is true here, too — Hannah Stander is the knot binding all these threads into one. She’s a character at the nexus of a lot of anxieties both personal and impersonal. As the daughter of doomsday preppers, she’s subject to a great deal of anxiety about how the world works and what her place is in it. Further, her line of work is literally to look to all the wonderful technologies and advances mankind is creating — then figure out how someone might use those things to kill us. I feel her pain, man. You look on Facebook or watch the news and it’s a very good way to feel like everything is collapsing, like we’re under constant threat from everything and everyone. It engenders this intense fight or flight response, and it’ll stir your anxiety like the wasps from a yellowjacket nest hit with a rock. Hannah is throttled by anxiety but desperate for hope.

Finding the right character is a way into the story. Every character is a door.

Let Yourself Into The Story

When I said above, “I can feel her pain,” I mean it. Every character is a way into a story, yes. And you’re a way into every character. I wrote about my anxiety a few months back without ever thinking I really would — but I did, and I’m glad I did. Another way to acknowledge my anxiety was to put it into this book. What exists there is a (fictional) embodiment of what I sometimes feel. And it’s what I sometimes see when I see other people who share anxiety.

We authors are bundles of emotional, intellectual baggage. We’ve got bullshit piled up to the rafters. We have fears and experiences and ideas. We have peccadillos and desires and secrets. All of those things glom together in a mounding, steaming heap. And in the act of writing a novel, we are given a shovel. And we are allowed to take as much or as little from that heap as we want, and use it to fertilize the story. Let yourself speak. That’s not to say the book should be overwhelmed by your presence, or that you should bury the book under that same steaming heap — but just as every character is a doorway into a story, every story is a doorway into you.

The lesson too is that it makes writing the story easier. WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW is, to me, an oft-misunderstood nibblet of advice. I never see it as a castigation — I see it as a challenge. We treat it like it’s a limitation instead of an opportunity to dig deep. It’s a challenge to take not just what I know up here *taps head* but also what I know here *taps butt* — WAIT, sorry, that was rude, I mean, *taps heart* — ah, yeah, there we go. Heart, not butt.

Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. If your story is a house, you get to live in the walls and haunt those who pass through the dwelling.

P.S. Ants Are Fucking Weirdsauce, Man

Ants are a bottomless well of weird. And given that we’re currently in the middle of a nationwide ant epidemic, seems like a good time to discuss just a teensy tiddle bit of that.

- Some ants taste lemony because of their formic acid (and yes, you can eat many ants — though I wouldn’t recommend just grabbing some from your lawn.)

- Honeypot ants store a food slurry (think bug bits, nectar, whatever) in their bodies, their butts (sorry, “gasters”) swelling up to the size of grapes. Other ants then tap them like living beer kegs to get the deliciousness out.

- Leafcutter ants do not cut leaves because they eat the leaves, but rather because the leaves will act as a kind of mulch on which they grow a fungus — meaning, they’re farmers. And it creates a kind of mutualism, because the ants need the fungus and the fungus need the ants.

- Many ants are mutualistic — some with trees or other plants, protecting them from other animals big and small who want to eat the plant. Ants milk aphids, and even carry them to new locations on given plants. Some ants suck sweet nectar from caterpillars in exchange for saving the caterpillars from other, more vicious ants.

- Ants have gained a reputation for being hard, diligent workers — and that’s true, as a colony — but up to 25% of a colony consists of ants who really don’t do much at all. That’s right — ant colonies have lazy-ass ant slackers. (And the story goes that if you eradicate the lazy ones from the population, the ratio remains as previous workers stop working to become lazy. Suggesting there’s more going on here than we grok.)

- Heck, I just learned that Argentine ants will purge their queens — over 90% of them.

Ants are weird. And fun. And in many cases, terrifying.

What I’m saying is –

You should check out Invasive.

OR I’LL COVER YOU IN BROWN SUGAR AND LEAVE YOU ON THE LAWN OVERNIGHT.

Invasive: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Goodreads | Invasive Photo Contest

Writing Is Work, And It’s Art, Except When It’s Not

Recently, there had been that Twitter meme going around about your first seven jobs — I played, did my list, and I put “writer” on there because it was, is, and hopefully shall remain, a job. But it’s also not a job — for some, it’s a hobby, for others, an art form, for others still, merely an aspiration. And for many of us, it’s all of those things bound up with duct tape and shoved in the trunk of a fast-speeding car about to careen off a cliff.

I had thoughts on writing as work — and as not-work — which I’m putting in here.

PLEASE TO ENJOY.

[View the story “On Writing As A Job, And As More Than A Job” on Storify]

Writing: Longevity, Patience, And Shittin’ Pants (A Storify)

So, the other day on Twitter I summoned up a tweetstorm about writing and publishing and the advice I gave to a power company worker who came here the other day to change out a meter.

BEHOLD THE LURID TALE.

(Original link to Storify here, if you need it.)

[View the story “Longevity, Patience, And Shittin’ Pants” on Storify]

Macro Monday Looks A Little Like Snaggletooth

That is a ladybug, up close.

It is not my best photo but I wanted to post it. Why, you ask?

We think of ladybugs like they’re these cute little buggie-wuggies — and at a distance, they are. Toodling along, munching on aphids (this guy is in fact slurping up the last remains of an aphid — basically, licking his plate clean).

But look at that face.

LOOK AT THAT FACE.

JESUS GOD IN HEAVEN WHAT THE HELL, LADYBUG

And then I thought, you know what that ladybug looks like?

Snaggletooth, from Star Wars.

No, really, look.

Maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, ladybugs are super-helpful, and cute at a distance, until you look close, and then they’re a Snaggletoothed shit-show. Thus endeth the lesson, I guess?

Let’s see. Let’s bring some Invasive news, speaking of buggies.

I am told the book is selling well, and even sold out in a few stores, but of course I won’t know the reality of the book’s sales until June of 2024, or thereabouts.

One review on Amazon is titled: “Put on your shittin’ pants.” So, there’s that.

Washington Post said:

Wendig does an impeccable job blending fact and fiction as he describes invasive species and insects being used as biological weapons. This is a propulsive tale that also examines our interaction with — and ma­nipu­la­tion of — the natural world.

Men’s Journal said of the book:

…compelling, well-written, and the science (mostly about the curious habits of ants) is wholly plausible, even for folks who follow the works of E.O. Wilson. If you don’t have time to read it, expect to see it on the big screen — although reading about creepy-crawly killer ants is probably easier than watching them swarm.

(Though I’d much prefer you read it instead of waiting for the totally-not-inevitable film.)

Tor.com reviewed the book and said:

It’s no secret that I love Chuck Wendig’s books. He’s the kind of author that no matter what he writes I’ll consume it sight unseen because I know it’ll be entertaining. He writes in a style all his own, one full of intensity and fervor, like repeated shots of adrenaline. Invasive plays extensively in Michael Crichton’s sandbox, and fans of the Jurassic Park series and The Andromeda Strain will have a lot of fun here. Prepare yourself for an awful lot of Stephen King-esque body horror, not to mention the strong scent of The X-Files.

Heroes & Heartbreakers gets to the heart of the protagonist:

The consultant is the lead of the story, the one who the others depend on for survival. In other words, this character is the Chris Pratt-style lead.

But in Invasive, a woman is the lead.

She’s Hannah Stander and, unlike most leads in big action movies (or even action-adventure books), she’s given a great deal of complexity. Hannah has created a specialty and a unique career for herself but she also suffers from sometimes crippling anxiety attacks. In a nice change from the usual, Hanna’s anxiety isn’t due so much to trauma as the long-term influence of her parents, paranoid survivalists. In a way, she’s chosen to believe in the future as a rebellion against her upbringing.

In short, Hannah is confident, complex and the hero of her own story.

It’s a combination I’ve rarely seen outside of romance novels. Usually, if there’s a woman in an action-adventure thriller, she’s the girlfriend or the stereotypical badass among the guys. Wendig’s tense, action-packed book treats Hannah like a full person, not a cliché.

I answer five questions about the book at Suvudu.

In news unrelated to bugs, hey, I got my first Rolling Stone byline! Holy crap, who let that happen? I wrote a short thing about the sublimely boring space tourism of No Man’s Sky, a game I’m loving despite it’s many flaws. Check it out here.

And then back to the bugs for one more moment –

Reminder I’ll be at Main Point Books on 9/10, and Let’s Play Books in 9/22, and maaaaaybe I’ll be hanging with Fran Wilde on 9/27 in Rittenhouse Square, Philly, at the B&N there — details on that event incoming soon.

Don’t forget, the Invasive photo contest is ongoing — you’ve got a week left. Take a picture of the book. Send it to me. Maybe win some stuff. Do it now or I will send the ants to your house.

*shakes ant jar*

You can nab Invasive here:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N