Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 2

Michelle Knudsen: Five Things I Learned Writing Into The Wild Magic

Every day at recess, eleven-year-old Bevvy heads for the shade of her favorite tree—a safe space where she can avoid the other kids and escape into her fantasy books. When she finds a new girl sitting in her spot one afternoon, Bevvy wonders if she might finally have found a friend. But Cat is not exactly friendly. She even starts a fight with Bevvy’s worst enemy and then abandons her to face the consequences.

Later, Cat’s apology is cut short when a strange car rolls up. Cat tells Bevvy to run, drags her into the woods, and then opens a kind of doorway . . . in the air. Bevvy knows magic when she sees it, but this isn’t like one of her books. The world they escape to—teeming with strange creatures, spellcasters, and dragons—is shockingly real. It’s a world at war, with those who wield wild magic battling dark sorcerers.

Bevvy soon discovers that she has her own connection to the wild magic as both girls get caught up in the struggle. But Cat is keeping many secrets. With so much at stake, can Bevvy trust that Cat is truly a friend? And can she trust herself with her newfound power?

1. Your book may have a great origin story! Or it may not!

My last picture book (Luigi, the Spider Who Wanted to Be a Kitten) was inspired by a real-life experience in which I went to stay at a friend’s place in the country while I was between apartments and discovered that a giant spider was also staying at my friend’s place in the country. I’ve always been terrified of spiders, and while I’m better about them than I used to be, I am still not thrilled about sharing indoor space with them. Especially giant country spiders that are like 1000 times bigger than city spiders. (This is not true but it feels true.) Small spiders I can trap in a cup and put outside (I’m not a murderer), but this guy was enormous and would not be contained by human drinkware. So … I named him Luigi and talked to him a lot (mostly about how he should stay far away from me, especially while I was sleeping) and this helped me feel a bit less scared and we both survived our brief cohabitation. Later, in my new home, I wrote a book about a giant spider who was also looking for a new home. It’s a fun story I can tell at book events, and since people often ask where you got the idea for a thing, it’s a relief to have a solid answer.

I do not have a solid answer for Into the Wild Magic. This book started with a single scene of two girls meeting in a schoolyard, but I don’t know where that scene came from or why. Novels, for me, usually grow out of many things that eventually come to connect in ways I didn’t originally see. This makes it harder to answer the question “Where did you get the idea for this book?” but that’s okay. The answer is messy and indirect and basically comes down to: I recognized that there was something in that original scene that spoke to me, and I kept coming back to it and writing a little more and a little more until it started to grow into a real story. Which brings me to:

2. If you love something, there’s probably a reason.

I loved the scene of these two girls, even though I didn’t yet know who they were or what was going on. I kept those 685 words in a file for over a year, thinking about them, rereading them, wondering about them, until my writing brain finally felt that little excited spark of keep going. But before that exciting sparky stage, there was the equally important and far-less-fun waiting stage. This is when some part of your subconscious is working on the story without you. Stephen King calls it “the boys in the basement”; Damon Knight in his book Creating Short Fiction (formative in my high school writing years) called it “collaborating with Fred.”

Sometimes you write a bit of a thing and you know there’s nothing there. (Ask me about my never-finished story about George, the spear of asparagus.) Sometimes you write a bit of a thing and it’s vague or whatever but there’s something you love—something you don’t want to just delete and move on from. That’s something to pay attention to. Even if it takes you a very long time to figure out what comes next.

3. You will never get over that one terrible summer at sleepaway camp.

I have a lot of wonderful summer camp memories, but one year a group of kids full-on pretended to be my friends in order to torture and humiliate me. I had an afterschool-special moment where I overheard them talking about me on the other side of an open window and finally realized the truth of what was going on. I am now a grown-ass woman, and obviously totally past the trauma of that betrayal … except I’m not, not really. That feeling of horrible understanding that you are wrong about people you thought liked you, that they actually kind of hate you, and the inevitable follow-up questions of Is it your fault? Are you a bad person? Are you unlovable in some essential way that everyone can see but you? … those are questions that burrow deep into your soul, into your still-developing sense of self, and some part of you will be wrestling with them for the rest of your life. If you’re a writer, this means that you will write a lot about friendship, and about what it means to be a good person, and you will try to create worlds in which your characters make true connections and heal those deep fears that you may still be harboring deep within yourself. This is not a bad thing, although it can be startling to realize that there are some themes you will always come back to no matter what else you think you’re writing about.

4. It’s okay to change your process.

Writing a novel is hard. When you do it once, you may briefly believe that now you Know How to Write a Novel and that the next one will be relatively easy in comparison. You’ve got the roadmap now, and all you need to do is follow it. This might be true for some people, but I don’t think I know any of them. But you do discover some things that work. I know that it helps me to keep a novel journal for each book, to listen to certain songs on repeat during long walks to work out plot problems, and to color-code sections of notes and revision stages in Scrivener in pretty colors to please my crow brain during the hours/days/weeks/years of writing. But while writing this book, I learned a few new things and explored new methods of revising that I much prefer to what I’ve done in the past. Also, I made cool maps and watched amazing slow-motion videos of flying moths. Will these things be part of my process for the next book? Maybe! Or maybe my next book will need different process tweaks. Learning not to hold too tightly to what has worked before leaves you more open for what other things might work now.

5. You can write through Big Life Things.

Over the course of writing this book, I revised and sold and promoted a different book, met and dated the man I would eventually marry, moved in with the man and his two children, squished my apartment office into a tiny corner of our bedroom, adopted two cats, got engaged, got married, became a stepmom, and adopted a corn snake. Also, this big global pandemic happened shortly after the moving-in-together and adopting-cats thing. We had six living creatures (no snake yet) in a two-bedroom apartment under lockdown, two of whom needed help to do remote school every day and one of whom (me) had a full-time work-from-home contract editing job and two books under deadline. Also in that window, we planned and executed our tiny, lovely, outdoor, Covid-era wedding.

Small life things (unplanned errands, ill-timed phone calls, children or pets or spouses who dare to need me while I am working) can sometimes, in the moment, feel as if they may completely derail my writing for the day. But then I remember the conditions under which I wrote in 2020 and early 2021, and I recall that it is possible to write even when the world is terrifying and you have no ideal quiet time anymore and there are all kinds of things to worry about that objectively are far more important than your little book. So I try to keep that in mind, and also try to remember that making art is important even (especially) when big or bad (or both) things are happening in the world. Sometimes it’s also exactly the thing will help you make it through.

Michelle Knudsen is a New York Times best-selling author of more than 50 books for young readers, including the award-winning picture book Library Lion (Time magazine’s 100 Best Children’s Books of All Time) and the novels The Dragon of Trelian (Kids’ Indie Next List; VOYA Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers) and Evil Librarian (YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults; Sid Fleischman Humor Award). She also sometimes writes short stories for older readers, one of which (“The Pigeon,” Drabblecast 476) was a 2023 BSFA finalist for best audio fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with three humans, two cats, and one snake.

Michelle Knudsen: Website | Instagram | Bluesky

Into the Wild Magic: Bookshop.org | Lofty Pigeon Books (for signed/personalized copies!) | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Libro.fm | Audible

Staircase In The Woods: Sale, Schedule, And Sundry Other Snidbits

If there’s a chance you’ve been eyeballing The Staircase in the Woods but kinda maybe sorta wanted it a bit cheaper — though here I remind you that libraries exist and are good, actually! — I note now that the book is on sale for $6.99 in e-book format for your electromatic book-reader of choice.

Which is to say, you can find the e-book at Bookshop.org, Kobo, Amazon, B&N, Apple, and so on.

The sale is, I thiiiiink, until tomorrow.

Don’t quote me on that, they don’t give me all the scoops.

Hey, so why should you check it out?

Well, at Vulture, Neil McRobert (whose own Good Boy is a must-read) has it on the list of the best books of 2025 so far, and said of the book: “The Staircase in the Woods impresses in two distinct ways. First, the haunted other-place beyond the staircase’s last step is a truly hideous proposition, making this Wendig’s darkest novel to date. Second, he writes about the adult resumption of childhood bonds with a messy honesty that sets the book apart from other nostalgia-fests. Friendship may wane, but trauma lasts forever.”

And the New York Public Library (!) calls it one of the best books of 2025 so far, as well, which, huge honor.

And the librarians of Libby said the same — one of the best of 2025.

So, y’know, you should check it out. And not just because our dryer died and our air conditioner started barfing water all over its electronics and so we bought a new dryer but the old one was propane and the new one is electric and now we need a new outlet and a new electrical panel ha ha ha ha AAAAAAhHHHHh aaahhhem. So I mean haha now’s a good time to buy my books, I’m saying. I mean I’m not saying but I’m just saying. Poke poke.

Poke poke.

Seriously, though, thanks to all who have checked out this book. It means a lot! It’s doing… like, pretty well? It has, as of today, outsold Wayward. Like, the entire run of Wayward’s sales from November 2022 until now? Staircase just beat it. And it’ll outrun Black River Orchard’s total sales in a few weeks, I think. It’s already on — I dunno, maybe it’s third printing? Fourth? I don’t keep up, because number of printings is relatively meaningless (a book could have 1000 copies in a print run, or 500, or 10,000) — but it just means, hey, the book is selling, and in fact is selling out, and they need to make more books. It’s a good place to be, so thank you.

Worth noting that I’ll be out in support of this book and the upcoming The Stand anthology (ahhhhh), The End of the World As We Know It —

First up, at Doylestown Bookshop on August 16th is DARK INK 2, an all-day horror-writer-panel-signing-stravaganza. You’ll find Nat Cassidy, Paul Tremblay, Vincent Tirado, Chris Golden, Clay Chapman, Cina Pelayo, Lindy Ryan, Todd Keisling, Sam Rebelein, Dennis Mahoney, John Langan, Chris Panatier, Mary SanGiovanni, Kay Chronister, Diana Rodriguez Wallach, and probably more?? Last year was wild. Amazing event, stocked to the rafters with folks. Here’s the day’s schedule — and I note too if you’re looking for a signed book by me but won’t be there, you can order from the store and I’ll sign there and they’ll ship it to you.

Then: I’ll be at Vortex Books and Comics — the mighty Keene-SanGiovanni joint — in Columbia, PA on August 19th, for the End of the World As We Know It Release Party. Line forms at 4PM. It’s me, Brian Keene, Bryan Smith, Richard Chizmar, Ronald Malfi, Alma Katsu, and Somer Canon.

On September 9th, I’ll be at Midtown Scholar with Keene, Somer Canon and Rich Chizmar to talk The End of the World As We Know It.

And I have one more as-yet-unannounced con coming up, which may or may not be a cool convention in Canada in November that I’ve done before, but I don’t think that’s for me to say, yet.

OKAY BYE

Quick E-Book Sale Bits

Psst. Hey, did you want to check out Wanderers or The Book of Accidents? You did? WELL THEN HOT SACK OF HOLY SHIT, they are both on sale for your chosen electromagnetic book-ogler. (Erm, in e-book format, I mean.)

Wanderers? $1.99.

Book of Accidents? $4.99.

This is true at a variety of e-book marketplaces —

Wanderers: Bookshop.org | Kobo | Apple | B&N | Amazon

The Book of Accidents: Bookshop.org | Kobo | Apple | B&N | Amazon

Soooo, umm, have it? Tell your friends. Okay bye.

The Radical Act of… Reading A Magazine

This is going to expose me as a weird dork*, but when I was a kid I’d just sit and read the fucking TV Guide like it was a novel. I read books, of course — actual novels. But I also read the TV Guide. Like, cover to cover. Cheers and Jeers? C’mon. I’d use it to plan out my Saturday cartoon watching, and also, my post-school cartoon watching, and also my late night Friday watching. (Friday Night Videos, baby.) When it added cable schedules to the book I’d read those, fascinated by a world of truly alien programming (we didn’t get cable on our dinky backroad until I was in my teens). Oh, and holy fucking shit, when the TV Guide would announce the upcoming TV shows for next season, I’d basically lock myself in my room, poring over it. My parents probably thought I was up there with a MAD Magazine or a stolen lingerie catalog. I mean, I was probably doing that, too.

I dunno what it was. Something-something TV was rotting my brain? Maybe it provided me with some comfort in a turbulent time — I lived in a pretty turbulent house, and certainly growing up just in general sucks a lot of the time, so locking down my TV watching schedule for the coming week had the power of a lifejacket in rough seas. It didn’t calm the waves, but it made sure I didn’t sink beneath them.

Or, again, maybe I was just a weird dork.**

As I noted in the post here from the other day (“A Small But Vital Thing, Taken“), it can be hard to clear your mind — and additionally, it can be tough to focus. There’s just a lot going on. A lot a lot. There exists this sort of endless noise going on in the background of American life — and the noise as of the last couple months has gone from a low white noise thrum to a screaming chatter of pony-sized cicadas. Whole skies full of them.

But, here’s a thing —

I read a fucking magazine.

Like, a physical magazine. A magazine that exists in corporeal reality. With pages! And photos! And words! I know! I know.

And here, you’re correctly like, “What? So what? What the fuck?” And you might add, “People read magazines. Like my Grampy Joe. He loves his biannual copy of The Journal of Vintage Brass Hose Nozzles, and sometimes he takes his copy of Corn-Huskin’ Hotties into the cellar for a long while.”

But I, I don’t read magazines — not in a long time, not since the internet came along and was like, HERE IS ALL THE CONTENT THAT EXISTS, FRESHLY SQUEEZED RIGHT IN YOUR EYES EVERY TIME YOU OPEN THEM. Why kill a tree to read a magazine? All that shit is right here, right now, always.

And then, some months ago, I subscribed to a new newspaper. A physically-printed, three-dimensional newspaper.

I subscribed to The Onion.

(Note: you can do this too.)

That monthly copy of The Onion serves a keen purpose: it lives around the house, and people pass by it. They pick it up, read some bits, have a good snort-laugh, maybe ask one another, “Did you see this?” and then everyone’s day is just a little more mirth-filled than it had been five minutes before.

But at some point, I also subscribed to Wired, because honestly, they’re doing great work for the most part in this current era. It was for the digital subscription — but it also came with an actual mailed, printed copy. I didn’t really want it but it was a part of the deal, so I shrugged and said, “Sure, send me your ANCIENT RAG. Why not FAX it to me, or duct-tape it to a FUCKING PIGEON, or maybe I can swing by your office on my VELOCIPEDE.”

The first copy arrived. (No pigeon. Nary a pterosaur.)

Then, the other day, that copy found its way to the dining room table.

I sat, ate breakfast, and before cleaning up?

I opened the magazine. I did this more as a curiosity — like, “Oh, I wonder what magazines these days are up to.” Would there be a Drakkar Noir cologne sample tucked in there? Were the printed pages digital now? Would the print magazine be infected with artificial intelligence somehow??

I opened it at the beginning.

And then I started to read the magazine.

I started to read the magazine cover to cover.

I didn’t just flip through it. I read it. The magazine. The whole magazine! (Now, I did not do this in one sitting, but rather, two. I had to get up because apparently I sometimes have to do things? Which is bullshit! I’ve complained to life’s manager, but so far, my complaints have gone unregarded.)

And lemme tell you — it was great.

Further, it made me remember that I didn’t just used to read TV Guide, or MAD Magazine. I read Cracked. And Cemetery Dance. And Omni. And Fortean Times. And National Geographic. And PC Gamer.

Reading a magazine felt clarifying and calm. I didn’t look at my phone once. And nothing in the magazine interrupted me, demanding attention — no email, no texts, no pop-ups. Hell, my phone doesn’t even need to interrupt me to demand my attention. I have every notification on social media turned off, off, off, and yet I’m still keenly aware of those apps in the background. Hiding behind the curtain like little chocolates I occasionally must sample. (And because it’s social media in a Currently Bad Era, it means at least half of the chocolates I sample are filled with grub guts and skin tags.) And when reading an article in a print magazine, there’s no demand I pay money to subscribe because I already did that. I don’t need to look up a password. I don’t need to constantly find where I was in the article because somehow the procedurally-generated ads keep repopulating and shouldering the text up and then down and then up again, sometimes even just covering up whole chunks of text in their entirety. It was great. It felt like being at a lake and skipping stones. A weirdly pure, unbothered series of moments.

Now, I recognize this is not revolutionary. It’s stupid. I’m reading a magazine. It’s not therapy. It feels like detoxing but it’s not detoxing. This isn’t a radical, heroic move, it’s just me being an old man at the table reading a magazine. This is advice as obvious as, “Wow, I drank water and did some stretching and now I feel better.” But it felt radical. It felt like for a moment I was reclaiming something — something from my past, sure, but also something from my present: my attention span. Plus, hey, sometimes I need to be reminded to drink water and stretch.

So, maybe, just maybe, get a magazine subscription.

A print one.

(And Wired ain’t a bad place to start, but YMMV.)

Or you know you could read books like the ones I wrote ahem ahem ahem.*

* you already knew this, I already knew this, my family knows this, it is known

** still am, really sorry

*** I have to dance for my dinner I am so sorry but seriously if I don’t sell ten copies of Staircase in the Woods before midnight tonight my writing shed will explode with me in it, this is true and not a scam probably

A Small But Vital Thing, Taken

When I’m writing, one of the most crucial components of that process is my downtime. And I’m talking down downtime, not just like, oh I’m gonna fuck off and do something else for a while — I mean the times where I have nothing really to do, nothing to think about, and that’s when the weird hermit crab that is my brain emerges from its shell and starts to wander around its skull-shaped terrarium, finally comfortable. I’m talking about when I’m in the shower. Or mowing the lawn. Or just taking a walk. I get to perform a relatively thoughtless action, which allows my actual thoughts to focus on whatever story I am writing during that period.

So, if I’m working on a novel, I go for a walk, and during that walk, my brain emerges, and uses its various claws and pseudopods and probing tendrils to turn my current story over and over and over again. It pokes, it prods, it pulls it apart and smashes it back together again. I think about characters. I imagine scenarios. I play endless what if what if what if games. I find plotholes and try to figure out how to spackle them shut. It’s very useful time.

It is, in fact, essential time.

And the current news era has stolen this from me.

The CURRENT NEWS is like toxic groundwater — it fills all the low places. The moment my brain stops moving for a second, in seeps all the septic shit going on here in the country and around the world. I’m usually good at turning this off, at building seawalls, or at the very least finding a way to absorb that stuff — and my feelings about it all — into the work.

But it ain’t working.

The seawalls have failed.

So, instead of getting to chew on my story problems, I’m instead huffing news fumes and gargling catastrophe juice.

Technically, this is a me problem — but I do think it’s designed somewhat from the top down. Meaning, it’s intentional. I think flood the zone with bullshit as a strategy isn’t purely just about juking the media or one’s political opposition — I think it’s a way to synaptically overwhelm the citizenry. I think this strategy is flawed for a number of reasons (“I want to eat the bee’s honey, therefore I will throw rocks at the hive” might work but, uhhh, there are better ways), but it does overwhelm. It’s where you get the narrative of, “Don’t fall for this distraction! Wait, this thing is distracting us from that other distraction! Everything is a distraction except for that one thing, which as it turns out, is also a distraction from a thing we haven’t even seen yet.” None of it is a distraction. It’s a full slate of horrors both malicious and stupid, all of them moving forward simultaneously. It is a multi-pronged attack on our attention spans, our informational fidelity, and our ability just to deal with it all. We can juggle up to three balls, and so they throw three balls, four chainsaws, an angry octopus, and a bitey mountain goat at us.

For me, just from a practical, creative perspective, this fucking sucks. It’s very hard to escape the gravity well of Endless Hypervigilance and just sit down for a while and try to imagine what the pretend people in my head are going to do about the pretend problems I’ve given them. (Storytellers are such dicks.) It’s a small problem in the grand scheme but large in the personal, creative sense — to have a mind allowed to be free of troubles is far too big an ask, but to have a mind free of relentless, endless, unmitigated troubles feels like it should be a fair request now and again.

I don’t know what to do about it, precisely. I’ve tried just tuning out the news — which, for the record, means tuning out social media almost in its entirety — and that does work, with the exception that living in the total dark brings with it its own sense of wariness. Reading the news feels like tracking the path of a tornado, whereas looking away feels like admitting, “There’s a tornado out there, but no idea where it is or when it’s gonna pick me up and take me to Oz.” Plus, I like social media. I like being connected to other writers and readers and all the stupid shitposting that goes on. And then there’s the problem that when you do go back to social media and to the news, it’s just drinking from a burst sewer pipe. At least looking at it now and again gives you the vague sense that you’re taking small doses of iocaine powder in order to become immune to it.

(Spoiler: you’re never immune. You’re just disassociating.)

For the record, I’m managing — the greatest success I have in fixing this problem is a kind of vigorous diligence to combat the hypervigilance. Meaning, I have to be actively aware of my brain’s downtime and work very hard to try to keep it offline, so to speak, in order to let it defrag the creative hard drive. Easier said than done, and somewhat betrays the point of simply having downtime at all — downtime being a thing that is supposed to be passively automatic, not me stalking the fence with a rifle looking for whatever beast lurks there in the dark to tear through the chain-link and use its many antlers to fuck up the peace garden I’ve grown.

So, I dunno. Again, I’m managing.

But I figured I’d ask —

Anyone else have this problem?

And how are you handling it, provided you’re able to at all?

(I note here in conclusion that there are wayyyyy worse things going on than what I describe in this post. This is a woe is me boo-hoo kind of post, when there are people who have lost a lot more — there are people who have lost people. People stolen. People taken. People thrown into vans or simply churned under the propaganda machine. But please forgive me the need to talk about this small and vital thing that’s been taken, thank you.)

Anyway, buy my books or I am vanquished. Bye!

Chelsea Conradt: Five Things I Learned Writing The Farmhouse

Every woman who has lived on this farm has died. Emily just moved in.

When Emily Hauk’s mother dies, it’s time for her and her husband, Josh, to finally leave San Francisco. A farm in rural Nebraska is everything they want for a fresh start: clear skies, low costs, and distance from the grief back home.

They should have asked why the farm was for sale.

Three years ago a teenage girl went missing from the farm. Soon afterward the girl’s mother mysteriously died. The deeper Emily digs the more stories she uncovers of women connected to her new home who’ve met their own dark ends.

With each passing day Emily’s sanctuary slips further away. The barn seems to move throughout her property as though chasing her. Her mother’s favorite music drifts across the cornfield. She swears she saw blood in one of the farmhand’s trucks. And the screams that wake her are not fox howls, no matter how many times her husband says otherwise. If she wants to claim this place as her own she’ll have to find out the truth before whatever watches from the cornfield takes her, too.

1. The reason you can feel “seasick” in the plains is the same reason it might feel like a barn or silo is chasing you.

The story seed for The Farmhouse came during a discussion about Baba Yaga folklore with a group of writers at The Storied Imaginarium. This witch’s house was built on chicken legs to move where she needed, the people who would come to ask for help, and those who would actually be granted it. It was a great conversation, but I kept thinking back to when I lived in the Midwest.

Landmarks like silos or barns were harder to track without any reference point on the horizon. It was just a sea of green or gold and this building jutting up from it. Almost as if it were on legs.

And then all I wanted to do was write a story where the barn was chasing my main character. Because that’s how it feels driving along a two-lane road for miles.

Digging into it, the phenomenon is the same reason some people may experience “seasickness” while driving along I-80 cutting their way across the middle of the US. Much like being in the ocean, the horizon is endless without a mountain or collection of buildings to center you. And so you drift. Even in the corn.

2. I needed readers to feel seen

I set out to write The Farmhouse as an “onion book.” I want readers to have the choice to escape with Emily as she solves the mystery around the missing girls. But if they have the appetite for something more, I hope they’ll dive into the way we process grief, the fear of not trusting their own mind or feelings, and the complicated dynamics within her marriage. Readers who want the thrilling mystery, horror atmosphere, and the depth can peel as deep into the book as they want. All flavors of readership are welcome.

But while I’d always intended the plot to include gaslighting, in writing I was forced to face the systemic way many of us self-gaslight. The “I’m overreacting” or the need to justify feelings because you don’t want to be seen as overly emotional. While this book is centered on Emily getting justice for herself and for the women who have died on her farm, by the time I finished this book all I could feel was the need to tell readers “I believe you.”

There are so many women and female-presenting persons who have their voices diminished and their knowledge dismissed. I hope this book helps them feel seen and understood.

But also if they’re just there for a creepy moving barn, ghosts, and gaslighting…that’s rad, too.

3. Chickens Could Eat Your Teeth

Look, writers have to research unique things. Did I need to find out about what chickens are capable of eating? Yes. Did I need to find out if they could eat human teeth? Yes. Now you have to know, too.

While they can eat human teeth and be totally fine, it would not be a great way to hide any evidence, because they wouldn’t break it down. The hens would be fine though. It’s a bit like how some birds eat gravel to help break down their food.

Anyway, chickens could eat your teeth. You’re welcome.

4. Turns out I really miss writing about music

I’m a former music journalist. It was my first career and I wrote for popular alternative newsweeklies and music magazines, and I loved it. Because I love music. I actually started writing fiction after leaving the journalism industry because I missed writing daily.

The Farmhouse has a soundtrack. The main character Emily’s late mother was a music producer. So part of her grieving her and remembering her are moments tied to specific songs. Building out the music layer of this book with songs that would give insight into who her mother had been added this extra spark for me in writing the book. I had to pick the perfect tracks for you to hear the book, too.

5. Home is always home

This book is also a bit of a love letter to Nebraska. I grew up in rural Nebraska—although I lived in a town much larger than the one nearest Emily and Josh in the book—and there was something nostalgic about getting to write about the beauty there. (I really regret having to cut a scene about Runzas, because iykyk.)

I wanted this book to capture the beauty of rural living. Nebraska is gorgeous. The sunrises are stunning. There’s a peacefulness and a slower pace that can provide respite and a place to be with your thoughts. But it’s also isolating and lonely. There is a lag to get to places, to get to your friends, to get help. Farm life is a hard life. It’s a different way of living, and while the characters in this book don’t work the land, they still have to adjust to being twenty minutes from an emergency vehicle arrival.

Many years ago, I brought my husband to visit my family in Nebraska (who absolutely still live there!) for the 4th of July. He was most excited about doing his own fireworks. We were driving along country roads, as is the way of things, and had to pull over so he could go into a cornfield in real life. The experience (and, yeah, there’s a pic) blew his mind. Being inside real cornfields is far more disorienting—and beautiful—than the corn mazes you find at fall festivals and pumpkin patches. That fish-out-of-water surprise and curiosity definitely fed into The Farmhouse.

ABOUT CHELSEA CONRADT

Chelsea Conradt (she/her) writes twisty speculative thrillers and horror including The Farmhouse. Her books are packed with both murder and kindness because we can be more than one thing.

When not writing stories that make you question what’s real, she is likely watching a baking show or a true-crime documentary. She is nothing if not on brand. Chelsea lives in Texas with her husband, son, and two big dogs. Find her online at chelseaconradt.com.

The Farmhouse: Bookshop.org | Libro.fm | B&N | Amazon | Kobo

JOHN WISWELL: FIVE THINGS I LEARNED WRITING WEARING THE LION

Heracles was raised to revere his Auntie Hera, Goddess of Family. As he grows up to become the strongest man in the world, he spreads word of her glory and raises a family of his own. Then an Olympian God strikes, driving him mad and destroying his family. Shattered, Heracles embarks on a series of labors, confronting the greatest minds and monsters in the world to find which Olympian is responsible. The only god he still trusts is Auntie Hera.

There’s one problem: Hera is the one responsible, and she’ll do anything to hide the truth. She’s always detested Heracles, the illegitimate child of her husband Zeus. As Goddess of Family, Heracles is a living insult to her entire being. She only realized what she’s set in motion once it was too late, and now Heracles discovering the truth would destroy them both. She must keep him from solving the mystery. Desperate, she stalls by sending him off to face impossible monsters, but each time he winds up adding another creature to a newfound family. A family that could wage war against the entire heavens.

Yes, this is a story where Heracles tries to befriend every bloodthirsty monster in the world.

The legend of Heracles was one of the first things my parents read to me, and I definitely pretended to be him as I ran shirtless around my backyard. As I grew up, I wondered about all the gaps in those stories, like why Heracles wasn’t more haunted by his actions, and where the heck Hera went after starting everything. Writing this book was about finding a beating heart in the mythology. I learned a lot, including…

MY FAVORITE GREEK HISTORIAN WAS A FRAUD

Ever since college, I’ve loved this little green book called The Library by Apollodorus, translated by the famous James George Frazer. The Library is a concise collection of Greek myths, often telling an entire myth in a couple of pages. It’s so plain, never pausing to dwell on the magnitude of what’s happening. The old generation of gods has been wiped out? Next. A huge war comes to a bloody conclusion? Next.

But “Apollodorus” was a popular name in ancient Greece, and sometimes Romans would write under that name when they wanted to sound authentic. The “Apollodorus” who wrote The Library was an impersonator, living centuries after the time of the actual Greek Apollodorus, and long after the time of Homer and Sophocles. Historians often call him “Pseudo-Apollodorus.” He was trying to garner fame by collecting the great Greek stories in a single space—a library, of sorts—while also mixing some Roman values into them. Such cultural prickles wound up influencing my book in ways I won’t spoil.

HERACLES HAD A TWIN BROTHER (WHO WASN’T A DEMIGOD)

Heracles’s story is weird from his very conception. One day Zeus spied an attractive queen named Alcmene. Being the absolute worst, Zeus decided to woo her by shapeshifting to look like her husband, Amphitryon. That night, Alcmene conceived the demigod Heracles, Zeus’s new favorite son. You’d think the story would end there, with everyone mad at Zeus. But no.

It turns out that Alcmene and Amphitryon were super into it. They hopped into bed and, in defiance of medical science, conceived a second child immediately. This child was Iphicles, totally mortal, no superpowers whatsoever. Iphicles and Heracles coexisted as wombmates, and then Iphicles immediately cut in line to be born first.

If you think this is weird, imagine being Hera: both Zeus’s wife *and* Goddess of Fertility, meaning her phone was blowing up all night.

EVERYBODY YADDA-YADDAS THE GIANT BULL

One of the issues with Heracles retellings is that after a few labors, the audience gets tired of him punching yet another giant animal. It starts with an invincible lion and then moves to a many-headed hydra. After that, do you really care that he’s fighting a really big boar?

So many versions turn the middle labors into a montage. He chases a deer, he fights a bull, who cares, what else is on? For a story that is essentially about twelve amazing feats, storytellers clearly find some more amazing than others. It actually gets funny, looking out for which labors an author skips over.

If you know my writing, you know I love monsters. My answer in all these cases was to explore the personality of the creatures. What is life like for a boar on an otherwise desolate and abandoned mountain? Which other hunters have come after it before? By treating the creatures as characters, many of the middle labors became my favorites. Having a Heracles who collected the animals in a found family rather than fighting them allowed so much more meaning to pour out.

HERACLES’S WIFE DOESN’T HAVE TO DIE

Among the many retellings, Megara often lives! My novel pivoted the moment I realized this. The classic story is that Heracles is driven mad by the Furies, and in his madness he slays his wife and children. He destroys the very family life that Hera is supposed to enshrine and protect. Everything he loved is gone.

But as I read more historians and versions of the Heracles myth, his wife Megara kept popping up. One time, she saw him off on his labors and wished him luck. Then at the end of Heracles’s labors, she appeared and married Heracles’s nephew. There was even an anonymous poem about Megara commiserating with Heracles’s mother over how their family was destroyed.

She was very busy for a dead person.

Megara’s fate changed wildly depending on who was telling it. Realizing that I wasn’t mythologically obligated to fridge Megara changed how I breathed. The entire book pivoted. While grief over loss is important to Wearing The Lion, this change allowed both parents to process the grief in different ways. I got to dig into the clash of their attempts to help each other,  how they succeeded, and how they failed. The entire arc of the book changed with Megara’s influence.

NAMES MEAN THINGS? WHAT A CONCEPT!

Heracles wasn’t born with that name. He was “Alcides,” named after an ancestor of the mortal family. There are several explanations for why he took up his new name, but it always means the same thing: “Glory of Hera.” It carried a bitter irony, given how much Hera hated him.

This scheme of new names with serious meanings runs through Ancient Greece. Take Diomedes as an example. Meaning “Cunning of the Gods,” it was a powerful name, suggesting a brilliant tactician. That’s why everybody wanted to be Diomedes. Heracles tangled with a Diomedes who owned man-eating horses. A while later, another Diomedes popped up alongside Odysseus and Achilles in the Trojan War. Yet another Diomedes tried to conquer Hindu-Kush around 95 BCE.

They all wanted the cool name. Every kid on the playground wants to be Spider-Man.

This practice was so common that Heracles wasn’t even the only “Heracles.” Other people sought to suck up to Hera for luck.

About John Wiswell:  John Wiswell is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He won the 2021 Nebula Award for Short Fiction for his story, “Open House on Haunted Hill,” and the 2022 Locus Award for Best Novelette for “That Story Isn’t The Story.” He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, British Fantasy Award, and World Fantasy Award. He is the author of Someone You Can Build a Nest In, a Nebula award winner and Year’s Best pick by NPR and The Washington Post, and Wearing the Lion. He can be found making too many puns and discussing craft on his Substack, johnwiswell.substack.com.

Wearing the Lion: Bookshop.org | Libro.fm | B&N | Amazon

Tim Weed: Five Things I Learned Writing The Afterlife Project

The year is 10151. For the last ten thousand years, Nick Hindman—a microbiologist and member of the prestigious research team the Centauri Project—slept in a state of cryogenic suspension as a quantum-powered system originally designed for interstellar travel propelled him forward through the millennia, a test subject for an emergency project to secure the survival of the human species by colonizing not the stars, but a deep future Earth. His protocol? 1) Survive. 2) Find if there are any other humans left alive. 3) Hope against hope for the arrival of a second test subject, a female.

Featuring a plausible mechanism for one-way time travel, a voyage across the post-apocalyptic seas, and lovers separated by ten thousand years, The Afterlife Project is a meditation on the future of humanity and the natural world we have unbalanced, the true meaning of deep time, and the possibility of hope in the darkness.

Dark fiction is good for you.

One of the things fiction does better than any other art form is to allow us to vividly experience the world through a consciousness not our own, imagining alternative lives and alternative futures—sometimes very dark ones—from the relative safety of our favorite reading nook.

Dark fiction isn’t for everyone, but if you like it—if you’re drawn to the writing of Stephen King, for example, or Shirley Jackson or Margaret Atwood or our own Chuck Wendig—then it’s possible that you’re the kind of reader for whom the horrific offers a particular kind of reading pleasure.

Because let’s face it: there’s power in darkness. It’s an essential source of narrative drive for one thing—what keeps the pages turning—and it’s also a healthy response to personal stress and the ongoing shit-show of current events.

Putting ourselves in the position of fictional characters as they confront tense and difficult challenges, then processing those experiences and the emotions they evoke into wisdom or at least working theories about life, is a cathartic, healthy, uniquely human practice. “We need to play out our fears within the safe confines of the imaginary,” wrote Ian McEwan, “as a form of hopeful exorcism.”

Life on this planet is going to be okay in the long run. But humanity? Well . . .

if there’s one piece of wisdom I’ve taken away from researching and writing The Afterlife Project, it’s that we’re not facing the end of the amazing, ever-evolving panoply of life on Earth. Far from it. Rather, we are—or should be—facing the end of the illusion that the human species is not part of nature. That we haven’t from our very emergence as a species been embedded in the ebb and flow, the stew and ferment, of this complex and beautiful 4.5 billion year-old planet. The widespread adoption of this way of thinking would be a timely and necessary paradigm shift. Because it’s still not too late to save ourselves.

One-way time travel into the deep future isn’t all that far-fetched.

Part of the inspiration for The Afterlife Project was a conversation I had with an eminent astrophysicist in Tierra del Fuego (it’s a long story) who was kind enough to give me his opinion on the plausibility of one-way time travel into the deep future. Using quantum physics and a series of complex mathematical equations scribbled on napkins, he was able to theorize a mechanism based on existing or easily foreseeable technology to send a test subject 10,000 years into the future.

There are good reasons we should want to explore this option—for example to facilitate the kind of interstellar travel that would us to colonize the nearest viable exoplanet, or, as in the case of the team of scientists in The Afterlife Project, to colonize a deep future Earth after the current iteration of humanity has done its worst.

Time’s a river, not an arrow

Time doesn’t actually exist in the way we perceive it. It’s not an arrow, it’s a river. This is mathematically proven.

The water in the river of time does flow downstream, but if you were to trace the river back upstream a few miles you would find the same water flowing between the same banks—so in a certain sense all the moments that have ever passed are still unfolding.

Because of the way it feels for us to live in our aging bodies, it’s almost impossible for us to to accept this truth intuitively, but rest assured: it’s one of the fundamental precepts of physics.

Forget about the market. You really do have to write what’s in your heart.

I know you’ve heard this before, but you really need to listen. I know novelists who haven’t listened, and it never ends well.

I mean it’s okay to think about the market before you start, and you’ll need to think about it eventually if you want to pitch and sell it, but don’t focus on the market when you’re writing!

I wrote a weird, dark novel. I didn’t set out to make it that way, it just happened. It turned out to be one of those books that felt like it was being dictated from on high, though, and when a story feels like that—when it starts to tell itself like this one did, you just ride the wave and hope for the best. As a well-known Mexican novelist and filmmaker recently reminded me, you’re writing for your own particular “species.” You just have to trust that there are other members of that species out there, and that they will find your book.

Learn about the market, of course; study it and understand your genres. But if you try to write purely for the market, the muse will turn her back.

Tim Weed is the author of three books of fiction. His work has won or been shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Writer’s Digest Annual Fiction Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Fish International Short Story Award, the New Rivers Many Voices Project, and many others. Co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program, Tim is on the core faculty of the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University. His new novel, The Afterlife Project, was a finalist for the Prism Prize in Climate Literature and Uncharted magazine’s Novel Excerpt Award.

The Afterlife Project: Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon | Audible | Podium

Angélique Jamail: Five Things I Learned Writing A NARROWING PATH

Elsa has felt awkward and out of her depth for as long as she can remember. In a world where one’s Animal Affinity is a sign of maturity and worth, Elsa’s inability to demonstrate hers has become more than a disappointing nuisance; it’s a narrowing path.

Obscured behind the curtain of society’s disdain, she has no confidence that she’ll ever conquer her Plainness. Frustrated by her failure to fit into their picture-perfect life, Elsa’s family grows more intolerant of her by the week. Her boss, a seven-foot-tall rage demon, is one clawed step away from setting loose his temper and firing her––or worse.

And on top of all that, her cat wants to eat her. Things could be better. But that’s not the direction they’re heading.

A violent gang of wolves prowls the streets of Elsa’s neighborhood, harassing Plain Ones. With the pack’s presence becoming stronger and its threat more real, Elsa’s life is rapidly plummeting from lackluster to perilous.

Her only bright spots are her cousin and a co-worker who seem to know her better than she knows herself. But even though they can see through to what society won’t, will that be enough to protect Elsa from making a drastic choice? In her desperation to shed her Plainness, how far will she go to evolve?

When I first sat down to write Elsa’s story, I wrote one sentence: “Elsa’s family has become meaner than usual, her job is awful, and she has a nagging suspicion her cat wants to eat her.” Then I wrote a page. The next day, I wrote another. At that time, I had no idea where the story would go, but I knew it would be fantastical. As that first draft emerged, I recognized Elsa’s challenging situation in life wasn’t of her own making, and her struggle to find agency would be at the heart of everything. That was a relatable story. It wasn’t necessarily an easy one.

Sometimes you have to write hard things.

Maybe I’m a romantic, but I like stories whose characters end up okay, especially when they deserve to. In my much younger years, I was sometimes accused of “pulling my punches” as a writer. But literature is about conflict and characters making awful choices and sometimes terrible things happening. As writers, it’s important not to shy away from that when the story calls for it.

While finishing an earlier draft of A Narrowing Path, I received news that a friend from college had died, accidentally and quite tragically, on vacation with her family. Thinking through the news and manner of her death subconsciously overlapped into my revisions. The main character, Elsa, makes tough choices when it looks like she doesn’t have enough options to make good ones. I don’t usually write fiction based on the real events in my life, but the way I wrote that part of Elsa’s story was absolutely influenced––and improved––by the way I was processing my grief.

Never underestimate the importance of close cousin relationships.

I have almost two dozen first cousins. I grew up with my extended family all around me, all the time. It was great! Growing up, I was not a naturally popular child and could count the number of classmates I was friends with on the fingers of one hand. While other kids at school had sleepovers and played softball together on the weekends, I could depend on Sunday afternoons at my grandparents’ house with all the aunts and uncles and cousins. We kids were mostly left to our own devices, and I made a practice of observing interpersonal dynamics from a young age, a skill that later would help me tremendously as a writer.

If I was unpopular at school for not being sporty and living too far inside my imagination, when I began writing short stories, things got worse. The first time I read one of those manuscripts, about an epic battle between angels and demons, to my class in fourth grade, the response I got was muted at best and othering at worst. It was clear I needed to keep that nonsense to myself and just read Louisa May Alcott like the other girls. Shout-out to my cousin Paige who handed me her brick-shaped mass market copy of Little Women on the first day of summer that year, a book I devoured so ardently that reading it at the start of every summer became a tradition.

Elsa’s family is complicated. Some of them treat her badly because of how she’s disappointed their expectations of what her life should be. But she has one cousin, completely disconnected from the morass of her parents and sister, who represents a safe, if somewhat dispassionate, haven for her. Cousin relationships are important to me, and they find their way into my writing a lot.

I write slowly; it takes time to layer all the “literary” stuff in.

When my husband and I bought our first home, we moved from an 800-square-foot apartment to a 2,600-square-foot house in the suburbs. We were able to furnish most of that house with the stuff we’d previously crammed into four rooms in the artsy part of town. One friend who helped us move in commented, “It’s like all your furniture has room to exhale.”

A Narrowing Path is a more expanded story than its original form, Finis. When I signed with my new publisher to turn the Animal Affinities books into an integrated trilogy, Elsa’s story gained room to exhale, too.

My first drafts come slowly. Some would call me a pantser or discovery writer; while writing this way feels more artistic, it takes longer. But I’ve made peace with it, because as I go through each draft, revising individual sections as my critique group tackles them before pressing forward with the next, meaningful features––character development, metaphor, themes––weave themselves into the plot. The prose improves. Storylines find their intersections, the foreshadowing becomes more subtle, the subtext blooms. Everything deepens. This is all to the good.

I love working with a small, capable press.

I’ve worked with multiple editors and publishers over the course of my career. Working with a really competent small/indie press has been amazing. In a publishing landscape that could be fairly called bleak and/or disappointing on any given day, it’s been a relief to know the people I’m working with not only prioritize and champion my books but also share my values about the industry. GenAI won’t be part of our process: the artists and designers are human and fairly paid, the editing has been done by humans, and this publisher isn’t going to feed my manuscript into an LLM without my knowledge, consent, or compensation. I always know what’s going on with my project. The transparency is profound; I feel lucky.

It’s necessary to make art during hard times.

By now we’re all intimately familiar with dystopian nightmare. Making art during times of existential dread/threat is tough, but necessary. Maybe literature helps us escape. Maybe it helps us process, maybe it inspires us. Maybe we just need more good stuff in the world to counteract the wretched.

When I was thirteen, one of those close cousins of mine, who was twelve, died suddenly from an illness. It took me decades to process that shock. He turned up in my writing over and over again: the primary way I was handling grief, even if I didn’t recognize it yet.

Things can be hard. My cousin is dead. My friend from college drowned in front of her ten-year-old. My friends are under attack from the government because they aren’t cishet white guys. The planet has a fever and someone is firing the scientists. That doesn’t mean writing is dead. That doesn’t mean I can’t respond to all of it with my art, and thereby help other people respond to all of it, too. And that inspires me to make more of it, to figure all this human condition stuff out.

Because I’m pretty sure that to survive this mess, I’ll need to.

Angélique Jamail is an award-winning Lebanese-American author whose poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies and been featured on the radio. The first time she read one of her short stories to an audience was fourth grade; the reaction to it was a character-building experience. Her other books include the poetry collection The Sharp Edges of Water, and she’s the creator of the zine Sonic Chihuahua. She serves on the Board of Directors for Mutabilis Press and is the Director of Creative Writing at The Kinkaid School. She resides in the Houston area with her family and their cats; she has otherwise lived inside her imagination pretty much her whole life.

Angélique Jamail: Website

A Narrowing Path: Blue Willow | Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon

Chris Farnell: Five Things I learned Writing Fermi’s Wake

“The Fermi is the fastest ship, and the deadliest weapon in the universe. We only need it to be one of those things.”

In this sequel to Fermi’s Progress, the Fermi continues its voyage across the galaxy, its faster-than-light engine vaporising every planet it encounters, forces unknown steering it towards inhabited worlds.

But now there is hope of a way out. An ancient, lost alien device that might negate the deadly side effects of the Alcubierre drive. As they voyage through dangers including a war-torn forest moon, a vampiric dinner party, and the terrors of their own imagination, will the Fermi’s crew find that escape?

Or will they be forced to confront the destruction that lies in Fermi’s Wake?

1. Everything is made up

The spaceship Fermi is a worldbuilding engine (despite looking a lot like the precise opposite of that). It was designed so I could introduce new planets quickly and show you their weirdest and most alien bits. If you have questions about those planets like “But how would that economy function long-term?” or “Is there even enough biomass in that ecosystem to support a predator of that size?”, I definitely have the answers to those questions. Except oh, the planet just exploded, I guess now we’ll never know.

But I still put a lot of thought into how each planet works, trying to avoid the baked-in assumptions of a (Western, 21st century) human society. Some things, like gender, are easy to blow apart and rebuild differently. But other times, you will start picking apart systems of measurement to try and find an alien alternative for a single line of dialogue, and discover once again that every unit we have can ultimately be traced back to an estimate of the length of a Mesopotamian farmer’s forearm.

A drum I love to bang is that good sci-fi shows us how much of what we assume to be universal (scientific, economic, moral) law is actually a convenient local assumption, but it’s still dizzying when you probe even a little bit into just how much that is true (So often it’s easier to just have your universal translator do the systems of measurement as well).

2. Sequels aren’t as much of a timesaver as you think

Fermi’s Progress was four novellas, but also very much one novel. So Fermi’s Wake really felt like my first go at writing a sequel. And writing sequels is great! You get to skip so much of the hard bit of starting a new book – establishing the characters, and the setting, and the rules of the story. Except I quickly found out you don’t really.

The beginning of a story is the beginning of a story, even if everyone in it had lives before it started (and you hope they did). You still have to do all the same jobs – you might know everyone’s name already, but you have to establish where they are now, whether that was two minutes or ten years from the last page of the previous book.

While we like to pretend characters are independent people running around inside our heads (and I do), they also exist to carry out a function, and that function is not going to be the same from story to story. So in a lot of ways, a sequel still feels like starting from scratch.

3. A bad draft can be more useful than a good one

When writing a Fermi novel, I write each novella, then go over each one in turn, then do another edit on the whole sequence before the final check and polish. Sometimes that first or second edit is easy. With the first story in Fermi’s Wake, I was rewriting the occasional sentence or paragraph as I went, occasionally tweaking the order of things for pacing, but that first draft was very similar in shape to the one you’ll buy.

The second novella, For the Trees, was completely different. Put bluntly, it sucked. It wasn’t just that it was bad – it was exactly wrong in every respect. The wrong characters were experiencing the wrong events, in the wrong places, with the wrong information, in the wrong order. People were in the midst of action that meant nothing to them, while the people who would have felt it most were sitting around waiting for plot to happen.

That first draft was so precisely wrong, it served almost as a perfect negative image of the good draft. That redraft amounted to almost a complete rewrite, and it was kind of exhilarating. The final result might be my favourite story in Fermi’s Wake – but it wouldn’t have been possible without that truly terrible first version.

4. Grim events don’t make for grim people

When I started on Fermi’s Progress, tone was a challenge. I had, intentionally, picked about the grimmest scenario you can imagine. A band of people who have lost everyone they ever cared about, and who know that everyone they ever meet is also doomed to die because of them. It’s a comedy.

It’s a comedy because I am physically incapable of Not Writing the Jokes, but I still wanted those deaths to matter, not just to be a glib punchline for each story.

But also, I’m here to write cool space adventures on alien planets. I didn’t want my characters spending their time sitting in dark rooms lost in their thousand-yard stares.

Fortunately, then the Covid-19 pandemic happened (Okay, I’m not entirely above a glib punchline). It was not the first globally bad thing to happen while writing these stories – I started writing Fermi in the twelve months before Brexit and Trump 1.0 kicked off – but it helped crystalise something for Fermi’s Wake that I think until then had only been subconsciously feeding into Fermi’s Progress.

Which is that when everything else is miserable, people don’t just stop. We make jokes. We get incredibly angry out of all proportion about things apparently unrelated to the source of the misery. We find little silly sources of happiness. And sometimes, on a really, really good day, we find ways to make things a tiny bit better.

The Fermi stories are about people trapped in and forced to maintain a machine that makes death, and Fermi’s Wake is when it really clicked for me why I relate to that so much.

5. Don’t hold back the good bits

The list of influences that went into the Fermi melting pot is a long one, and most of them are writ large in the book itself, but a big one is The Twilight Zone. I am an absolute sucker for a Rod Serling twist, that moment where you realise the two kissing faces you’ve been staring at have been a candle stick this whole time. There are definitely a few such twists scattered around Fermi’s Wake, but if you chase that high too far, you can easily trip into the “mystery box storytelling” trope, endlessly promising a good Rod Serling twist but never delivering the payoff. What makes The Twilight Zone such a presence today isn’t the twists, it’s that those twists capped off intriguing situations and characters we enjoyed spending time with.

I ended Fermi’s Progress with a few questions dangling over the Fermi and her crew, and in Fermi’s Wake you’ll get some of those answers much quicker than I think you’re expecting. If the promise of a future answer is how you keep your audience around, you’re not focusing enough on what’s happening on the page right now. And for me, the really interesting stuff is what changes once you have the answer, and what the characters do with it.

Chris Farnell had his first novel published in 2006. Since then, he has written jokes for the TARDIS, the employee handbook for Star Trek Lower Decks’ U.S.S Cerritos, as well as chronicling the misadventures of the deadly starship, Fermi.

Adventures and supplemental material he has written can be found in the worlds of Spire: The City Must Fall, Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, and Star Trek Adventures. And between all that he writes for the likes of Den of Geek, Rock Paper Shotgun, Film Stories, and The Radio Times. He lives in Norwich.

Chris Farnell: Website | Bluesky

Fermi’s Wake: Landing Page | Season Pass | Amazon