Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 114

Steven Spohn: Your Last Good Day

Steven Spohn is COO of AbleGamers, a charity dedicated to helping gamers with disabilities. He’s also a hella good dude and a nice guy and a champion for a lot of people, and last week he wrote a post on his Facebook that connected with me in a really big way. Please to check it out, and if you are willing and able, consider supporting AbleGamers.

* * *

34 days ago, I lost the ability to drive my wheelchair and with it… my independence.

You see, my disease, SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy), is deteriorating my muscles at a very slow pace. Over time, my abilities are being torn away due to the atrophy that sets in from not using groups of muscles. The same thing would happen to you if you were to stay in bed for months or years without moving. Astronauts experience some of what SMA does to the body after being in space for long periods of time where you don’t have to fight gravity to lift your body weight.

Basically, if you don’t use your muscles, you lose them. Keep that in mind the next time you decide to skip out on leg day at the gym.

John Green captured the disturbing truth of living with a progressive disease in The Fault in Our Stars. The main protagonist, Hazel, riffs about life “There’s no way of knowing that your last good day is Your Last Good Day. At the time, it is just another good day.”

Your Last Good Day is a day like any other day. The limitations in your life have stayed the same for some time. There’s nothing different about that particular day. Until all of a sudden, like a dump truck crashing through your front door, everything changes in an instant.

For someone with a progressive disease like mine, you get many, many Last Good Days.

My Last Good Day of breathing, right before I was put on a ventilator, was when I was nine years old.

My Last Good Day of driving a wheelchair with a standard joystick controller was right after high school.

My Last Good Day of using a computer keyboard was a decade ago.

My Last Good Day of driving with a tiny joystick using my thumb was a Friday in late February.

The thing about this concept is that it’s not limited to people with disabilities. In fact, like many subjects, the real difference is that they’re amplified for me. But you’ve had your own set of Last Good Days. Maybe you just haven’t thought about it that way.

Your Last Good Days look entirely different than mine and entirely different than everyone else’s. Yours might be something like your Last Good Day of seeing without glasses, walking without pain, lifting without discomfort, or eating a piece of cake without it going straight to your hips.

Each of our lives are full of Last Good Days.

Truth is, you and I have an invisible clock above our heads. It began the second you were born, counting the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds you still have on this Earth. Even with a terminal illness, you don’t think about the clock. You’re busy living your life. The best life you can. The best way you know how.

But every once in a while life has a way of reminding you that the clock is still ticking.

On that random Friday, I was doing the same things I do every day before getting a harsh muscle spasm in my thumb that would take away my freedom. Eventually, I’ll figure out another way of operating my wheelchair, but it will never be the same. That portion of my life is done.

Rather than let it get me down, I’m choosing to use this as a reminder to live life. And I am officially inviting you to join me.

Since that day, I’ve started living life as an active participant, beginning to go after goals and reach milestones–things I’ve put off for far too long.

Okay. That’s a lie. For the first couple of days, I ate a ridiculous amount of pizza and ice cream because everything is made better by pizza and ice cream. EVERYTHING.

After THAT I started living life as an active participant, beginning to go after goals and reach milestones:

I reached out to 3 of my biggest idols and asked them to be a part of AbleGamers.

I entered a contest to co-write a novel with James Patterson.

I took a phone call with the White House.

I started learning Japanese, again and have continued the lessons every day for a month.

I emailed 3 celebrities sharing my story and hopefully beginning my inspirational, Tony Robbins wannabe career.

What do all of those things have in common? They were all scary and they were all things that I have wanted to do for a long time, but I either “never had the time” or would “do it tomorrow.”

And this is where you come in. I know your first reaction is going to feel sad for me and want to offer your support. While I appreciate the gesture, I have an alternate request.

We all have things that we have wanted to do for a long time but there’s always an excuse, a reason something doesn’t get done. Instead of posting sadness for my derelict thumb, I want you to do the following:

Post TWO (2) things you always wanted to do but never got around to starting, and promise me you’re going to start now.

Did you always want to learn how to be a better cook? Great. Look up and sign up for a class.

Have you always wanted to write? Fantastic. Open a word document tonight and begin.

Maybe it’s learning another language, emailing a celebrity you wish you could interact with, reaching out to an old friend to tell them you appreciate what they did for you, or whatever is in your heart. The point is to start TODAY.

Remember, although life is long, time is short– you never know how many Last Good Days you have left.

* * *

Steven Spohn is the COO of AbleGamers charity, award-winning author, and advocate for people with disabilities. Featured on CNN, NBC and other mainstream news outlets as an assistive technology and game accessibility expert, Steven brings all his knowledge and much more to championing for people with disabilities in the video game space as a means of defeating social isolation. When not writing or doing charity work, you can find him reading the latest sci-fi novels or cracking jokes on social media — @StevenSpohn or Facebook.com/StevenSpohn. He currently resides outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his two cats.

An Open Letter To Tiny House Hunters

Dear Tiny House Hunters:

Boy howdy, those tiny houses sure do look cool. I’m with you on this. They’re like dollhouses that you get to live in. Everything is so neat, so compact, so pragmatic. Looking at your existing home or apartment, you start to think, LOOK AT ALL THIS WASTEFULNESS. Do I really need all that floor near my bed? What am I doing with it except walking on it in order to get into bed? Do I really need that much counter space? Yes, I have a bowl of fruit on the counter, but surely that’s an improper and extravagant misapplication of three-dimensional space. What if I could just store my fruit under the sink, or in a secret ceiling cubby hole, or in a quaintly hollow tree stump outside? Are hallways anything but just the middleman of architecture? Do I truly require this much oxygen? My own house suddenly feels bloated, like a gassy belly. It’s cluttered and chaotic and — I mean, is this a house, or is it the airless infinity of outer space? Right? Am I right?

The tiny house is like a diet.

You look at it, and you think: I can do that. I can get healthy. I will juice cleanse and then eat asparagus and chia seeds for the rest of my life, and sweet hot fuck, I’ll be healthy as a horse. A robot horse. A robot horse who will live forever and be the handsomest robot horse ever. I’ll lose this weight. People will admire my lean frame and my culinary judiciousness. I’ll eat like a rabbit. I will defy gluten and cast sugar into the sea and JUST SAY NO to pizzas and ice creams and tacos and all I will eat are these rods of asparagus and these spoonfuls of chia seeds and once a week for dessert I will treat myself with these delicious crackers made from ancient grains (amaranth, motherfuckers!). For sweetness, I will mist them with agave syrup the way the lady at the fragrance counter mists you with perfume as you walk past.

I will diet, and I will be good.

I will tiny house, and I will be good.

* * *

I started watching your show at my wife’s behest.

We used to watch House Hunters until we learned the whole thing was a crass, reality show lie, and then we watched House Hunters International because even if it was a lie you got to see how they took showers in Iceland or what atrocity they called a “kitchen” in Hungarian apartments and of course we’d occasionally wiggle our toes in other shows, like that horrible one where people who are way too rich actually try to buy entire fucking islands because sure, why not, buy a whole fucking island, assholes, but if you’re not turning it into a villainous fortress then I just don’t understand you.

One day my wife said, “You need to watch this new show.”

And I said, what is it, and does it star Guy Fieri, and will he milk the donkey sauce from his pubic beard into a chicken stock in order to make the soup that takes us all down to the FLAVORPOCALYPSE. And she said, no, no, “It’s a new House Hunters show,” and I thought, well, where else can they go? Maybe House Hunters New York Apartments where we follow a broke single person trying to fight rat-swarms in order to find a rent-controlled outhouse-sized apartment for less than the cost of a mansion in Minnesota.

“It’s not that,” she said. But it was close. It was very close.

Enter you people. Hunters of tiny houses. Cave-humans once stalked lions on the veldt, but you intrepid hunters track itty-bitty homes — houses compressed down like coal until they become the shining diamonds of Spartan living.

You are the tiny house hunters. Er, not that you yourselves are tiny — far from it, as some of you are quite large-sized, like many of us humans! No, no, the tininess is embodied in the houses you seek. These homes are magnificently small. Many are 200, 300 square feet — 400 max. You get a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, maybe a living room or sitting area, but all those rooms are smooshed together, stacked on top of one another, or are merged into mutant aberrations (“WELCOME TO THE KITCHEN WHERE THE SINK IS YOUR SHOWER AND THE OVEN IS YOUR CLOTHES DRYER.”) It’s not an apartment. It’s like a regular house hit with a shrink ray.

The normal house made Lilliputian.

Some look like little cabins! Others like chic trailers! Others still are shipping containers, or hobbit houses, or weird Transformers that expand and contract like a breathing lung.

I find that there exist two overall categories of tiny house hunters.

One group of you is the lone individual. You’re maybe young, an artist, with lots of student loan debt, and you tell us all the lie that you’re going to buy the tiny home and buy some property with it, except the truth is, your tiny home will forever haunt the yard of one of your siblings because that’s where you plant it. Or maybe you’re older — a musician gone to pasture or an aging hipster or a yarn lady — and you’re divorced or your spouse has perished in the usual way and now you just want to pare down your life. I understand that.

Another group of you are the couples.

Oh, the couples.

Two people who think they can co-habitate in a space roughly the size of the Keebler Elf Tree. Some of you are also older: you’re retiring and you are embracing austerity in your later years. One of you is perhaps way more on board than the other with living in this adorable little tomb, and that’s fine. Maybe you’re a younger couple instead, and if that’s the case, you probably have like, four kids and two dogs and you think ha ha ha that this is going to be good for your family, don’t you? Because sure, kids and animals like nothing more than being crammed together in a piano crate, forced to share their limited oxygen while Mommy and Daddy make clumsy, grunting love in the casket-sized open-air loft above everybody’s heads, and the dogs are barking, and the kids are fighting, and Mommy and Daddy are rutting like wild boars and yay, family.

I watch this show, though, and no matter who you are, I’m always a little amazed at your reactions. As if you don’t actually know what a tiny house is? You start out by saying, “We want to simplify and downsize,” or “We want our family to be closer,” and then you get into these tiny houses and start changing your tune. You say things like, “This is cramped,” or “Where’s the shower?” or “What is a composting toilet?” You then say, “This is cute,” but you say it in the way someone says it when they’re looking at someone wearing a homemade sweater. You don’t mean it. You look terrified, like an otter trapped in a cardboard tube.

So, I’ve seen a number of these episodes now, and I’d like to walk you through some of the realities you are likely to face upon procuring and dwelling within one of these tiny houses.

First, the toilet. We just need to get this out of the way right now. It’s very possibly a composting toilet. Now, if you’re a hipster like me, you think, HEY COMPOSTING IS GOOD, but I do want you to understand, you’re basically keeping your poop. I mean, we all keep our poop somewhere. Mine is underneath my backyard. But yours will be closer. More intimate. It will be mixed with sawdust or coconut hulls or, I dunno, the ashes of your parents, but you’ll keep it close and it will turn into dirt that conceivably you can use to grow flowers. That’s very nice. But make no mistake, whereas right now you poop into a bowl and pull a lever and the poop is whisked away by forces unknown, in a composting toilet you mostly just poop and then kinda… get up and walk away. I say this only because many of you seem quite surprised. As long as you don’t mind pooping like you’re living at a Lilith Fair, you should be fine.

Second, the toilet. Nobody has brought this up on the show, but I’m going to now: if you live with other humans, eventually one of you is going to take the kind of deuce-evacuation that could conceivably destroy a marriage. Normally you’d be fine, because normally you’d be living in a normal-sized human house where you have a door to close and a fan and several rooms or even floors of separation. But now you dwell in an elf-house and now you and all the other elves are going to share in that dump you just took. You’re going to live with it for a while. Everyone is going to become intimately familiar with one another’s bathroom peccadilloes, okay?

Third, okay, actually, it’s also possible that the toilet is an outhouse. Which is great and fine but please be aware that spiders love outhouses. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Fourth, your bed is going to be a claustrophobic morgue-drawer nightmare. The ceiling will be three feet above your head and that’s only if the mattress is of the same material they make diapers out of. If it is a proper mattress, your nose is probably going to be pressed against the top margins of your tiny house. Beds, actual human beds, are fucking huge. Perhaps extravagantly so, I dunno, but we have left the era where we could comfortably sleep on a pile of reeds on the hard rocky earth and now we sleep on giant mattress configurations that are basically as big as half of a tiny house. If you want to practice what it’s like sleeping in a tiny house, sleep in one of your drawers, or in the crawlspace under your existing normal-sized home.

Fifth, many bathrooms do not have sinks. So, what this means is, if you want to shave, you will shave in the kitchen sink. That’s face and legs and pits and crotch or whatever you shave, if you shave it. Also, that means if you take one of those aforementioned Herculean/Sisyphean dumps, to wash your hands will require leaving that room. Also sometimes the toilet is in the shower. And sometimes there isn’t a shower. Other times there is a bathtub outside because sure why the fuck not, go bathe with the raccoons and scrub your body with dry leaves, cave-person.

Sixth, yes, that is a tiny closet, and it will hold no more than the suit or dress in which they will bury you. Did you believe that a tiny house would give you a huge closet? The only way your tiny house has a huge closet is if you use your tiny house as a closet. Which I’m sure some people do.

Seventh, no, of course you’re not going to get full-size appliances. That’s an EZ-Bake oven you’re looking at. The sink accommodates a single coffee mug. The washing machine washes Barbie clothes. You need to stop asking about full-size appliances. Actually, if someone ever makes a bingo card for Tiny House Hunters, that’ll be one of the things that goes on it.

Eighth, okay, listen, people with kids and dogs. You want “family bonding time,” but what your kids see is “hostage-taking time.” This is like, “cult bunker time.” Your kids do not want to live that close to you. Or to each other. Your dogs want to run and jump and — I mean, they’re not hamsters, you understand that, right? They’re not hamsters, and you’re not diminutive little fairy creatures, and tiny houses are not houses, they’re GI Joe playsets, they’re hipster sepulchers, they’re absurdist shoebox dioramas. I admire your desire to lean into austerity and trim the fat from your life, but unless you have a huge property, shoving a family of 6 into one of these turtle terrariums is something some people have to do, but they wouldn’t choose to do it, y’know? I lived with my mother and father and a dog and imagining growing up in one of those things is giving me retroactive trauma — my bowels are clenching, turning my innards to ice water.

Ninth, a lot of those tiny houses are pretty dang expensive for what you get. You think they’re cheap but seriously you could probably rent a hella nice apartment or even buy a couple of cool wizard vans to live in for that price. Just an FYI!

* * *

What I’m saying is –

I worry about you, tiny house hunter people.

I worry that this is all some kind of pyramid scheme, that it’s like Amway or alpacas, that there’s some unseen Ponzi scheme at play here.

I worry that after a year living in one of those tiny houses, you’ll need to buy another tiny house, and then another, and another, until you’re just stacking tiny house atop tiny house in a teetering Jenga tower of hobbit homes and shipping containers and then one day it falls and crushes your whole hipster family.

I worry that in two years HGTV will air a follow-up WHERE ARE THEY NOW special and 75% of you will have died in murder-suicide schemes, having gone mad not in the labyrinthine expanse of The Shining hotel but rather gone cuckoo bananapants inside the claustrophobic MRI machine you decided to call home.

Like I said, buying a tiny house is like a diet.

Or, rather, it’s like going on a fad diet.

Austerity sounds virtuous. And for some people, it is the thing that motivates them, it is a part of who they are. For the rest of us, not so much. Fad diets often ask you to sacrifice things to which you’ve grown accustomed — and often things your body actually needs — under the auspices of getting healthy. I WILL CLEANSE MY BODY WITH JUICE AND SPROUTED GRAIN you think, and then someone walks by you eating a hamburger and some precious thing inside you snaps and next thing you know you’re on the city bus killing and eating people.

Tiny house living will be like this. It’s good for some. Single people in particular — I mean, hey, they do it in New York (usually because they have to, though, not because they want to). But for the rest of us, while we may find some value in paring down and cutting the wheat from the chaff, a tiny house may be a bridge too far. No, we don’t need to live in 3,000 square feet, but we also don’t need to live in an airless, soul-crushing box. Many of us will find joy in having a little leg room when we’re sitting on a toilet, or having a place to put our stuff, or having a table at which we dine instead of standing around holding plates and staring at each other. Many of us like having separate rooms instead of BATHROOM-KITCHENS. It isn’t that romantic having a refrigerator that’s also a toilet, or a bed that’s also a bathtub.

Maybe a tiny house is for you.

But watching this show and hearing your comments and looking at the terrified countenances plastered to your skulls, I’m thinking — nnnyeah, maybe not so much.

Be well, tiny house hunters.

And remember: you don’t actually have to live in a tiny house.

Love,

Me

P.S. most people are trying to move into bigger houses what the fuck is wrong with you most people only live in tiny houses because they have to, you privileged turd-necks

P.P.S. but I mean hey you do you

Macro Monday Beholds The Blood Orange

Today will feature not just one image, but several.

I am a fan of the blood orange. I like its aesthetics — it’s a bruise-dark fruit that does indeed bleed into the glass — and I love its taste, sour and sweet and mmm. And so I quite enjoy using it in recipes when I can get them, and lately I got a whole bag of blood oranges (and then later, some Aliseo blood orange juice) and I used it to make two different cocktails and a taco. The taco recipe will be forthcoming, likely this week, but I’ll give you the two cocktail recipes here:

Blood Orange Negroni, aka the Miriam Black: Make a fucking Negroni, then put blood orange juice into it. … … mm, okay, that’s simplifying it too much, maybe? Whatever. Seriously, in a shaker, make your Negroni as you would: ounce of gin, ounce of Campari, ounce of sweet Vermouth, then squeeze 2-3 blood oranges into the mix. Shake that motherfucker like a pair of dice and then guzzle it with your booze-mouth. For those of you unsophisticated monsters that cannot abide gin, I say: sub out the gin and use bourbon.

The Mimosa, Reloaded: Yesterday I decided that the bottle of Champagne that my wife and I have had in the fridge since the Cretaceous needed to stop taking up space, and I thought, HEY FUCK YEAH LET’S DRINK MIMOSAS. What were we celebrating? Our ability to make mimosas and drink them whenever we want because damnit, we are adults. Then someone on Twitter — @mattaccount — said, “You should put amaretto in that,” and I thought, ew, no, why would you do that. The taste profile seemed odd to me — but that’s because I’m dumb. Almond cookie plus sour plus Champagne actually sounds great when you think about it. (I have admittedly only recently come around to amaretto, which as it turns out is fucking amazing, especially Lazzaroni.) So I changed my tune and decided, you know, okay, maybe. Maybe. And I did what this person said and it was amazing. Then I thought: let’s go bigger. LET’S GUY FIERI UP THIS SONOFABASTARD AND DRIVE THIS DRUNK BUS THROUGH THE WAL-MART IN FLAVORTOWN, and then I bleached my pube-beard and put on sunglasses and surfed on a tide of — wait, no, none of that happened. But I did add something to the third iteration of the drink, and here’s what I did — ounce of Amaretto, ounce of blood orange juice, ounce of pineapple juice, top off with Champagne. I did not put this in a fancy flute glass because I am not a fancy flute glass kind of guy. You can drink this out of a proper wine glass, or a bike helmet, or a shoe, I don’t care. It’s good. Have it. And it’s breakfast. Totally nutritious because fruit juice.

THERE YOU GO.

Before the images, I will remind you of some things:

AN EVENING WITH CHUCK WENDIG is next week, so if you’re in the PA/OH/WV environs, come say hi, listen to me jabber, get a book signed, take a picture, get in the van, fight a wizard.

Also, now there’s a whole different EVENING WITH CHUCK WENDIG (seriously, I’m pretty sure I’m going on a date with the whole audience), and this one is more Star Warsy in nature — on May the 4th I’ll be at the Cherry Hill public library at 7PM, but you can also buy tickets to a catered reception at 6pm (see? a date!), and so if you’re closer to PA/NJ/NY/DE, come say hi.

I’ll remind you folks that the second Atlanta Burns book, THE HUNT, is now out. If you want a kind of… noir-ish grim-dark Veronica Mars, well, I got your book, so go check it out. In it, Atlanta’s ex-BFF Bee needs her help untangling a nasty knot to find out who got her pregnant. That means Atlanta’s got to go around once again kicking over logs, and as always, what she finds underneath is a squirming, teeming mass of corruption.

NOW, ON WITH THE BLOOD ORANGES.

These images all belong together — though, given that they are macro photos, some may hide their true nature. But I promise, this is all part of a series, all taken together. Enjoy.

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Dragon

Today’s challenge is deceptively simple.

Your story must include a dragon.

OKAY THERE YOU GO BYE

wait hold on don’t leave.

There’s more.

You might be saying, “But I don’t want to write fantasy.”

Okay, so what does a dragon in science-fiction look like?

And I’d encourage you to think outside the scaled, fire-charred box. Who said the dragon has to be a literal dragon? What about a serial killer called the Dragon? An MMA fighter or wrestler? The name of a boat or spacecraft? The name of a disease? In fact, I’d encourage you to think beyond the literal here as much as you can. Get creative.

How do you include a dragon that isn’t really a dragon?

You have, mmm, let’s say 2000 words.

Due by Friday, April 8th, noon EST.

Post at your online space.

Link back here.

Behold the dragon.

Sam Sykes: A Blorgery Post About Escalation In Writing

Sam Sykes wrote a book. Well, he wrote several books, but one of those books escaped his head and attacked a publisher and now is on bookstore shelves and whenever you go into one of those bookstores, the booksellers stare at you with dead eyes and then those dead eyes roll out of their heads like discarded marbles and there in the darkness of the sockets is a pair of tiny Sam Sykeses, and those two little Sams sing the refrain of a familiar song: BUYYYYY MY BOOOOOK. 

Anyway, hey, look, here’s Sam now!

* * *

Hey, fellas.

Did you know I wrote a book? It’s called The Mortal Tally. It’s a good ‘un. You can find it in your local bookstores. Please buy it. Okay, thanks.

…

…what? What’d you say?

…MORE? Jeez, I thought I did pretty good already, but…uh…

It’s the second book in my new trilogy, Bring Down Heaven.

And to be honest, that fact gave me some pause.

I feel like the second book in a trilogy is usually met with some tension from both authors and readers, thanks to a long and storied past filled with disappointments. Authors are never quite sure how to keep the tension going between the exciting rush of the new first book and the dramatic conclusions of the third book. This occasionally translates to readers who are less than enthused to see a book that becomes the literary equivalent of treading water.

Both of these weighed heavily on me as I started in on The Mortal Tally. Fortunately, I had the advantage of this being my second second book in a trilogy, so I had learned a few lessons, which I would like to share with you today.

And I think the very first and biggest problem facing a second volume comes from the fact that both writers and readers go into one without a clear expectation of what they want.

They want the story to continue, of course, but they don’t know how. They want to get between books, but they want to feel like something has happened so their time wasn’t wasted. They want to feel like this story works on its own, but also bridges the two.

Daunting, right?

Now, far be it from me to suggest anyone need to change anything with their writing or reading (you’re perfect just the way you are, you precious little gosling), but I think we, as a reading culture, would benefit highly from setting down what we expect from a second volume.

Your answers as to what that is might differ, but I found mine early on.

Escalation.

The second volume should be when the characters realize just how in over their heads they are. It’s when the antagonist takes notice of them and stops underestimating them. It’s when the relationships that formed in volume one are put to the test. It’s when the price for victory is laid out and the question of who’s going to pay it is weighing heavily on our characters and our readers.

All storytelling is conflict. And as the first volume is presenting the conflict and the second volume is finishing it, the second volume is where the conflict is sharpened into a thousand tiny blades, turned into a meat grinder and our heroes are fed through it, one by one.

In The City Stained Red, my first book, things ended poorly: a war between two occupying forces had broken out in the civilized heart of the world, our heroes divided as their differences grew too great to keep them together, and they learned that a terrible demon was watching over their every move.

In The Mortal Tally, things get worse: the war is joined by civil unrest amongst the beleaguered population and aggravated by religious strife in its leadership, our protagonists discover that there’s a whole world of things waiting to kill them, and we start to wonder if life under a demon might really be so bad in comparison.

And this escalation all feeds nicely into the other task a second volume should accomplish.

Development.

Specifically, character development. The second volume is where things really start to come together in terms of shaping a character. When we meet a character in the first volume, we’re only really meeting an idea of them, something that gets us interested in them. The second book is where interest turns to investment, where we start looking beyond the ideas, the quips, the cool little traits and start learning the fears, the relationships, the hopes. And as we learn them, we start to see what kind of characters these guys will be by the end of it.

The first and third volumes will feature external forces as the antagonists. But the main force of opposition in a second book should be the protagonists themselves. This is where the meaningful struggle will come in and where the big questions will get answered.

Don’t believe me? Well, why not look to another story that solidified this for me?

There’s always going to be debate over it, but a lot of people consider The Empire Strikes Back to be one of, if not the best, entry in the Star Wars series. And why shouldn’t they? It was all character development.

Han was still a rogue, but started realizing there were things he cared about more than his immediate prosperity. Leia began to realize that any future she had would require her to rise up and become a leader. And Luke went from an idealistic boy to a guy who realized the terrible price he’d have to pay if he wanted to save the ones he loved.

Now this blog has already gone on long and I can hear Return of the Jedi fans and all six of The Phantom Menace fans gearing up for a rumble, so I’ll end this ramble with just a few words of wisdom.

1. Escalation, Escalation, Escalation!

2. Remember that all escalation leads to development.

3. Ewoks are kind of cool, I don’t care what anyone says.

4. Buy my book.

* * *

Acclaimed author Sam Sykes returns with the second thrilling novel in his Bring Down Heaven series. 

The heart of civilization bleeds.

Cier’Djaal, once the crowning glory of the civilized world, has gone from a city to a battlefield and a battlefield to a graveyard. Foreign armies clash relentlessly on streets laden with the bodies of innocents caught in the crossfire. Cultists and thieves wage shadow wars, tribal armies foment outside the city’s walls, and haughty aristocrats watch the world burn from on high.

As his companions struggle to keep the city from destroying itself, Lenk travels to the Forbidden East in search of the demon who caused it all. But even as he pursues Khoth-Kapira, dark whispers plague his thoughts. Khoth-Kapira promises him a world free of war where Lenk can put down his sword at last. And Lenk finds it hard not to listen.

When gods are deaf, demons will speak.

The Mortal Tally: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

AMA: Ask Me Anything (Here At The Blog)

Reddit AMAs are a lot of fun — you guys pile on the questions, and I answer those questions. And I thought, well, hey, fuck it, let’s do one here.

Here’s how this’ll work:

You go to the comment section, and you pop in your question.

Then, tomorrow morning, I’ll start answering them.

If some questions are too damn weighty to answer in a comment, I might note that I’m setting it aside to answer in a longer form blog post later.

But you can ask me anything you want.

I will endeavor to answer where polite and where possible.

Oh, and a couple quick updates –

First, I apparently have a Wikipedia entry, finally. I AM A REAL BOY.

Then, hey, Star Wars: Aftermath dropped in paperback yesterday. And the Kindle price dropped. So feel free to ignite your lightsaber and carve off a slice.

Finally! If you’re in the PA/OH/WV area, I’ll be at Seton Hill on 4/12 for AN EVENING WITH CHUCK WENDIG, which sounds like we’re going on a date together. Maybe we are. Bring flowers. I like flowers. And by flowers, I mean whiskey. I’ll be talking about stuff and signing books and possible dancing around in a negligee or something, I dunno. The event organizers were a little hazy on that point.

NOW, WITH ALL THAT OUT OF THE WAY.

Go forth and AMA, folks.

Fuck Your Shit Up With This Ham Tetrazzini, AKA, “Hamtrazzini”

I live in a house with three people and one of those three people is a tiny person of meager age, and despite all that, I made a 9-lb ham on Easter Sunday. Which means that I presently have enough ham to fill a tote bag. I have all the ham. It is an endless tornado of ham. A HAMNADO. And this isn’t a Hamilton reference. I’m not being sly. I mean that I have a fucking shitload of proper once-pig in my refrigerator.

Leftovers from holidays present a challenge because most folks fall into the lazy pattern of making a set number of expected leftovers. With ham it’s, what? You might make ham salad. Or ham sandwiches. Maybe you stick some in an omelette. Or you make a ham hat. Or a ham shirt. Maybe you put a couple googly eyes on there and have a HAM-BASED PUPPET SHOW. Eventually, though, you get burned out on it. Monday rolled around — one day after I made the ham — and I was already like, fuck this ham. Fuck this ham sideways. Stick this ham back up the pig’s ass, because I am done with it. Ham is stupid. Why did I buy 47,000 lbs of ham? Why didn’t we just eat cereal for Easter? Cereal is delicious. You peel a couple Cadbury eggs, drop them into a bowl of Cheerios, and feast like fucking royalty. Ham? Why did I do that? Ugh.

So, I was trying to concoct something to do with the ham that was unexpected, while at the same time still utilizing a goodly portion of the ham. And I thought, okay, once in a blue moon I make chicken tetrazzini, which is a pasta dish from my youth that used cream of mushroom soup, which is to say, it’s super disgusting when you make it like that, but it’s super awesome when you make it with fresh ingredients. And I thought, I’ll make that. I’ll throw out this stupid ham and make chicken tetrazzini, instead. But I didn’t have chicken. All chickens had abandoned me.

I had ham. Of course. Shit.

So, HAM TETRAZZINI it was.

Here, now, is how I made this ham tetrazzini, aka, HAMTRAZZINI.

It was amazing.

So now, you will make it, too. You will take the tote bag full of ham leftovers that you possess, and you will combine them with awesome ingredients and you will then Paypal me a bunch of money for the huge favor I just did for you. You will tattoo my face on your body. You will tattoo my beard onto your face. You will thank me by forming a religion around me.

Let us begin.

Get an onion. One onion. Sweet. Medium-sized, which is to say, roughly the size of a baseball and not a softball. You are going to slice it thin, and then you’re gonna put it in a hot pan with a generous dollop (1-2 TBsp) of unsalted butter. Sprinkle a little salt on that bad boy. Cook the onions till they are soft and weak and pliable. Cook the onions till they unfailingly do what you ask them to do even if what you ask them to do is against their moral code.

Now, mushrooms.

Mushrooms are kinda fucking gross because they’re like nodules of fungus that grow up out of heady, poo-rich earth, and they’re doubly gross when they’re out of a can or in bad Chinese food. As a kid I hated mushrooms because I was pretty sure they were actually little human ears. Thing is, you gotta know how to handle mushrooms — that means buying good mushrooms, ones that aren’t slimy, ones that aren’t out of a can, ones that you didn’t buy from some guy who had the mushrooms in his foul-smelling trenchcoat. In this case, some white mushrooms. The basic 101 mushroom. I got like, a half-pound or something? Came out to about two cups, sliced. Slice them up, as noted. Then put them in with the onions. You might need another pad of butter in there, I dunno. You do what you like. This is your food. I’m not eating it.

Oh, shit, somewhere put a little garlic in there, too. I did like, three cloves, minced. You can do more if you really like garlic. My father used to eat whole cloves of garlic because my father was disgusting. He was convinced that it cured all kinds of diseases, including cancer, but of course he died from cancer so either he didn’t eat enough garlic or that shit just didn’t work. Either way, his breath could melt a garage door. He’d eat garlic cloves and also hot peppers right out of the garden. Pop a jalapeño into his mouth and just, chaw chaw chaw. If I did that, I’d create a volcanic channel of pure heartburn in my chest and then I’d crawl behind the couch, weeping. My father also chopped off his own finger and wrestled a whitetail buck to the ground so he could hog-tie it, whereas the toughest thing I can muster is opening a pickle jar without one of those jar-lid-opener-helper-flappy-things, so I’m clearly almost as tough as he is. Was. Whatever.

Enough about that. I’m way the fuck off track here.

While the ‘shrooms and onions are soaking up the butter (5-10 mins in the pan), get yourself a receptacle (bowl, jar, jockstrap) and mix into it: 1 cup of dry vermouth, 2 TBsp sherry vinegar, pinch of salt, 1 tsp thyme, whisk that shit around in the jockstrap, then pour it into the pan.

Simmer it until it reduces down to a magnificent slurry.

Now, get yourself a pot of water boiling. For pasta. Actually you probably already should’ve started this because, c’mon, boiling water for pasta is the slowest activity in the history of man. Well, actually, publishing a book might be just a hair slower, but whatever.

Time to talk ham.

#HAM4HAM

Sorry, Hamilton reference. I guess. I’ve never seen Hamilton. I’ve listened to some of it and I like it but I’m afraid to listen to more because if I don’t like it, then people will kill me. They will find me, and they will burn me as a heretic. And I’ll admit that I was profoundly disappointed to learn that Hamilton contains no actual ham. When people first started going gonzo for the show, I had no idea what it was. I Googled it and found the show, and thought, “A musical about American history, oh, ha ha ha it can’t be that,” and I continued to believe that surely, surely actual ham was involved. But it wasn’t. It goddamn wasn’t. Expectations? Dashed.

Anyway, you have two metric butt-tons of ham, so cube enough it of to fill three cups. Ham cups. That was my nickname back on the football team, by the way. “Ol’ Ham Cups” Wendig, they called me. “Go long, Ham Cups! Go long! Secure a goal tally for the home team, Ham Cups!”

Whatever. Cube your ham, you rube.

I will wait. And I will watch as you sensually chop ham.

Mmm. Yeah. Ham it up, you. Ham it hard. Cube it hot. Mmm.

OKAY HAM VOYEURISM OVER.

By now your shroomy onion goop should be good. Put it in bowl and set it aside to think about what it’s done. Let it simmer in its own juicy shame.

Take the same pan, and you’re going to make a roux, which is French for buttery flour clump. Put into the pan 4 TBsp of butter, let that melt, and whisk (great word, say it with me: whisk whisk whisk) into it 1/4c flour. Then let it get golden brown but not like, dark diarrhea brown.

Now it’s time for the wet stuff. Which sounds pornographic but isn’t.

Mix in:

1 cup of heavy cream.

3 cups of milk.

1 cup of chicken broth/stock.

(If you’re one of those cocky hipsters who laboriously makes his own stock, good for you, go groom your precious mustache. Me, I use this shit, because it’s really good, and also I am fundamentally lazy.)

Then, 1/4 tsp nutmeg.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Whisk periodically while periodically drinking whisky.

This yummy DAIRY CAULDRON should bubble for about ten minutes on low-med heat.

Cook your pasta. Really, I don’t give a shit what kind of pasta you use. I think tetrazzini uses linguine, but I had spaghetti, and I’m sure there’s some argument about what pasta goes best with what sauce but really, for me, who cares? Use what you like. Use pasta shaped like little Darth Vader faces, I don’t give a flamingo shit. Hell, maybe you don’t even use pasta. Maybe you just rice. Or Cheerios. Or driveway gravel. I don’t control what you do at your stovetop, reader.

Pasta done, drain and strain and lovingly caress it. Like it is the hair of a dead lover.

Dairy cauldron done bubbling, too. Good. Great. Yes.

Mix into the now-empty pasta pot: the dairy goop, the shroomy onion goop, the pasta, and mix ‘em all together. Now mix in: one bag of frozen peas. Now mix in the cubed ham. Mix, mix, mix. Then pour in in: 3 TBsp more sherry vinegar. Sherry vinegar is an epic secret to a lot of great dishes. For years my chicken noodle soup was fairly mediocre until I learned to put in a splash of sherry vinegar right at the end and suddenly it became sublime. SHERRY VINEGAR ALSO GET YOU CRUNK. Okay, it doesn’t really. Just drink red wine or gin like a fancy grandma. I am a fancy grandma. Why aren’t you?

Now, get yourself a big-ass baking dish and set the oven to 425F.

Actually, you probably should’ve set the oven to 425F earlier.

But you didn’t, because you’re a jerk.

WHATEVER DO IT NOW.

Into the baking dish, pour your MILKY PASTA MAGMA.

Now it’s time to talk topping.

For my mileage, I don’t use breadcrumbs because I never ever have them. And I never feel like taking the time to make them so I’m always saying fuck these breadcrumbs and just going without. But I will note here you can do a couple nice substitutions for breadcrumbs:

a) potato chips, no seriously, this can be amazing

b) saltine crackers, also delicious

c) dandruff, but only if it’s really crunchy scalp-flake, and don’t forget beard dander, too

d) crickets, live or otherwise

e) grated LEGOs

Anyway.

Take 1.5c of fresh grated Parmesan cheese, and sprinkly-dinkle it over top the milky pasta magma in the baking dish. Then if you’re using the breadcrumb-or-substitute, use about 1/2 cup of it and sprinkle it over the top of the whole affair.

NOW BAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT

BOOM

Which is to say, 20-25 minutes in the scorching doom-cube that is your oven.

Now it’s done, it’ll be about 1000 degrees, and won’t cool down for approximately 7 hours, so just sit and stare at it until it finally chills out. And then when that’s done, it’s dinner time. It’s ham leftover dinner time. Take the pasta and shove it in your pasta hole. That is the round, largest hole in the center of your dumb face. Just grab it with your hands and cram it into the pasta hole until your cheeks are bulging like those of a greedy hamster.

Enjoy. Now send me money.

#HAM4CHUCK

Macro Monday Yells At Flowers

I love Spring, and yet, Spring hasn’t quite sprung here — it did, and then it didn’t, and now it’s cold and gray and rainy. Which is normal, one supposes.

Just the same: gimme dat sweet sweet sunshine.

And since I don’t have flowers blooming all over, yet, I figured today’s macro would be best if it were a flower. SO HERE, INTERNET. I GOT YOU A FLOWER.

TAKE A GOOD LONG SNIFF.

IT’S FULL OF ANTHRAX AND BEES HA HA HA HA

okay no.

Let’s see. Do I have any updates?

You saw that Hyperion came out, and surely you went out and checked it out, right? I mean, it’s got carnival freaks and a clown who barfs bees and a tractor-trailer and — well, c’mon.

Also, The Force Awakens’ first issue now has a cover by Esad Ribic:

So, check that out. Comic should be fun.

Um, what else?

I’m no longer feeling quite like death. This pulled muscle from coughing SUCKS MIGHTILY, but the cough is diminished so hopefully the muscle will untangle itself and calm down. This time my go-’round with pneumonia only lasted two weeks before I felt fairly normal. Last time was a whole month, so this is better (though having the flu along for the ride and a flu-sick wife and pre-schooler was, um, not ideal).

You know Invasive — out in August — is totally preorderable, yeah? Since folks ask, I’ll say that Invasive is not a sequel to Zer0es — and yet, it takes place in the same universe, and it takes place after the events of Zer0es have occurred. One does not need to read one book to understand the other, but they have some light connections. (Connections that will only deepen as other books are revealed, but on that, I can say no more.)

I think that’s it.

Go forth and punch Monday in the teeth.

You Have Permission Not To See Batman Vs. Superman

Let’s talk about my grandmother for a minute.

My grandmother — Gram — was the kind of person to go to a restaurant, enjoy all or part of her meal, and upon completion, try to pilfer everything that wasn’t nailed down. I don’t mean that she was a thief; she took things that were from the meal or were in some way meal-adjacent. She’d take the fuck out of some rolls, for one. If there was a basket of rolls, she would upend them into her purse like a sack of bread boulders. She’d take paper napkins. Plastic forks. She’d take salt — if she had any kind of receptacle, she would put salt into it.

She was also the type at home and at the grocery store to ask for bread ends, or the unwanted ends of meat and cheese from the deli counter, or day-old bakery products.

And as a kid, I had no idea what this was about. And adults didn’t really care to explain it because frequently adults just don’t explain shit to kids. (We take an opposite approach here at Ye Olde Wendighaus. We tell B-Dub pretty much everything, and he can choose to absorb that information or let it bounce off him like hail on roof shingles.) Of course, by now a lot of you have already figured out why my grandmother was like this:

She lived through the Great Depression.

Hoarding bread was not some mental glitch; she came from a time when bread and other essentials were scarce. Further, she gazed upon the bounty in the center of the table — a whole goddamn basket of the stuff she was once denied — and then must’ve wondered why exactly we didn’t all gorge on it. WE WERE LETTING PRECIOUS BREAD PRODUCTS GO TO WASTE. So, she saved them. As if they were shelter puppies. Shelter puppies you slather in butter and then eat.

Let’s fast-forward to, well, right now.

Right now, today, a movie has come out — and if you read the reviews from critics and audience members, you will learn that this is less a movie and more a war crime against cinema. Reviews greasy with precious, snarky schadenfreude (snarkenfreude?) confirm for us what we long suspected: Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice breaks the Geneva convention and tortures its audiences for well over two hours with an incoherent, grim, babbling mess. It is reportedly not just a dumpster fire, but a dumpster full of diapers that are themselves full of the runny diarrhea from toddlers force-fed too much leafy green slurry and only then is the dumpster set on fire just before said dumpster is dropped from a helicopter onto an orphanage containing children who should have one day have become the best of us. Batman v. Superman is by many reports the worst thing ever. It is worse than an Adam Sandler comedy. It is worse than biting rats in a jockstrap. It is worse than nipple rot. It is worse than your Mom pegging your Dad on your childhood bed. It is worse than than the worst thing you can imagine right now.

And you don’t have to go see it.

The warnings are clear. People are standing at the edge of a precipice, waving torches, trying to get you to realize that the bridge is out. The river is rising. You can stop your car, turn around, and go home — you don’t have to drive your care full-speed ahead into the watery gorge.

Now, I think I know why it is that people feel the need to see this movie. It’s a many-tiered problem. First, it’s like my grandmother with the Great Depression (and yes, I realize I am straining this metaphor and totally dismissing what my grandmother went through ha ha ha oops sorry Gram just trying to make a NERD POINT here). For a long time we went without a bevy of great comic book movies. I mean, not entirely, of course, but growing up I think there was… what? Tim Burton’s Batman? Christopher Reeves as Superman? And that was it? Both great films in their own way, but the pickings were meager. Now, though, the pickings are far from slim. Superhero movies are like Starbucks — there’s one on every corner. Some of them are dogshit, but some of them are sublime, and they’re not just in the movie theaters. They’re on TV and Netflix and in video games and they’re even manifesting in this new technology called “comic books.” Comic book properties are like bread on the table — we have such a bounty I’m surprised they’re not bringing them to us free with other movies.

The other thing is, for a long time geeks have felt marginalized. Geek culture was geek culture precisely because it was not mainstream, but because it wasn’t mainstream we endured that warring feeling of a) knowing about the fun awesome geeky stuff while b) wanting also to be cool and mainstream and something-something Tiger Beat. Now, though, the script is flipped. GEEK IS COOL (which one could argue means it’s not even geeky anymore). The biggest properties and franchises out there have often been geeky things, but they have achieved a powerful saturation level. Batman Vs. Superman isn’t some niche pic. It’s a tentpole release. And not the “geek counterprogramming” release, either — it’s not the one genre film in a sea of manly action films and rom-coms. It’s thrust firmly in a year of new Star Wars and Civil War and X-Men and Warcraft and Suicide Squad.

The geek may not have inherited the Earth, but we damn sure inherited Hollywood.

So, this is a permission slip — you don’t have to go see Batman v. Superman. You aren’t obligated. There is no surfeit of good entertainment out there. This isn’t the meager crumb-scrabble of bread to feed your geek leanings for the next year. This is just a shitty hamburger on a table full of better hamburgers. You don’t even need to see it to be part of geek culture. This doesn’t look to be adding anything interesting to the conversation except the joyless snarkenfreude-flavored obligation of reviewers and fans who just want to take a clever winky snarling shit on something. (And hey, you do you. We all need those precious Internet Clicks to live.) If you want to see the movie, more power to you. Go forth. Enjoy. Hopefully Zack Snyder doesn’t just pop out of the screen every five minutes to spit in your eyes. I hear Wonder Woman is cool and Batfleck is pretty proper. But don’t go because you feel obligated.

Ain’t nobody got time for that. Or the money, actually, since going to the movies costs the approximate value of Detective Comics #1. Feel free to go do something else.

Maybe, I dunno, read a comic book…

E.J. Wenstrom: Five Things I Learned Writing Mud

Trapped by his Maker’s command to protect a mysterious box, Adem is forced to kill anyone who tries to steal it. When a young boy chances upon Adem’s temple, he resists temptation, intriguing the golem. As the boy and his sister convince Adem to leave the refuge of his temple, the group lands in a web of trouble.

Now Adem will do whatever necessary to keep his new young charges safe, even if it means risking all to get rid of the box. Their saving grace comes in the form of an angel who offers to set Adem free of the box’s magic by granting his greatest desire—making him human. But first, Adem must bring back the angel’s long-dead human love from the Underworld.  

* * *

Say yes. (And no.)

As a newbie author trying to get your start, say yes to as many opportunities as you (reasonably) can. Over the past several years while writing Mud, I’ve taken writing classes that turned into an amazing writer critique/support group, contributed guest posts for writing blogs, and helped out other writers online.

And ta-da—it sounds like common sense in retrospect, but it’s blown my mind to discover that now, these contacts have turned into people I have relationships with, and they’re all happy to help me spread the word about my book.

For advanced yes-sayers, the next step is to learn when to say no, too—protect the time you need to write and do your best at the opportunities you’re lucky enough to have already.

Touch your book every day.

Not literally. That’s weird. Stop it.

But really—do something to further your manuscript every single day. Writing a book is hot mess. There’s a lot of moving pieces of character development, plot arcs, worldbuilding, and more, all swooshing around and mixing together in half-developed blobs.

While writing Mud, I learned that it only took a couple days of missed writing time to totally lose my momentum. But when I touched it every day, even if it was just five minutes of jotting down notes on a loose scrap of paper, it kept my head in the game.

Edits: NOT the worst.

Every time I got into a round of edits, whether it be self-editing, feedback from my critique group, or notes from my editor, my first instinct was to put it off. It gave me that dark looming icky feeling, like a Dementor had just entered the room.

But then I’d bite the bullet and dive in, because it was inevitable and because I was just too busy for that procrastination shit. And you know what? It was never actually that bad. Smart feedback can even be a creative catalyst for new, better ideas.

It was never, not once, the miserable experience I expected it to be.

Not all edits are equal.

I have been incredibly lucky as a writer, in that many people were willing to take the time to give me thoughtful feedback on my novel.

But when many different people give you feedback, their opinions sometimes directly contradict each other. And even when they don’t contradict, not all of those outside opinions are right for you. It’s one thing to give each critic’s feedback respect and consideration. It’s a completely different thing to blindly follow every line of that feedback to a T.

As the writer, it’s your responsibility to determine what edits are right for your book … and which ones are not.

Support everyone around you the way you want to be supported.

I knew I’d need to rely on my family, friends, and extended network to help promote my book. But I’m finding that some of the close friends I thought were given advocates are really not, while others I’d never have expected to care at all are more excited than I’d expect my own mother to be, and are going out of their way to help me any way they can. It’s a truly amazing, humbling thing to see how excited people can get for some little thing I created.

The lesson I’m taking from this is that everyone else deserves that kind of support from me, too, when thier time comes. In fact, I wish I’d been going the extra mile for some of these people for years. I’ve lived, I’ve learned, and now I’ll do better.

* * *

E. J. Wenstrom is a fantasy and science fiction author living in Cape Canaveral, FL. When she’s not writing fiction, E. J. drinks coffee, runs, and has long conversations with her dog. Ray Bradbury is her hero.

E. J. Wenstrom: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Pinterest 

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