Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 22

Out This Week: Wayward, Sequel to Wanderers, In Paperback

Hey! It’s here! Wayward, the sequel to the 2019 bestseller, Wanderers, has arrived in its glorious paperback form. It continues the tales of the characters from Wanderers, all of whom are dwelling in a world gravely and madly transformed by a (ahem, oops) global pandemic and by the artificial intelligence responsible for sending a flock of sleepwalkers to the town of Ouray, Colorado, in order to survive the end of the world. But the artificial intelligence, known as Black Swan, has grown strange in its proximity to humanity, and its desires and designs for the future of humanity grow darker and more dire day by day.

There’s also a golden retriever in it named Gumball. So that’s nice.

Anyway!

People said nice things about it:

“Chuck Wendig’s Wayward proves that there’s always more story to tell. If King had written a sequel to The Stand, it might look something like this monumental epic of a story. I don’t think I’ll get this book out of my head for a long time—maybe never.”—James Rollins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Kingdom of Bones

“As great as Wanderers was, Wayward is better: The best post-apocalyptic fiction combines grim extrapolation, great characters, and hope. Wendig nails it!”—Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Road of Bones

“Chuck Wendig has done it again. Salient, masterful, this is an author at the top of his game.”—Adam Christopher, New York Times bestselling author of Empire State

“IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

And if you read no other review of the book and still need convincing: Alex Brown’s review at Tor.com is truly something to behold, and I quite like their take on the book. Excerpt: “Wayward was written, in fits and starts, during the pandemic, and it’s impossible not to see how the real world bled into the fictional one. Could Wendig have written it without the pandemic? Sure, of course. It would’ve been a great science fiction thriller with lots to say about the human condition. But this version of the story feels tangible and truthful. It doesn’t feel so much predictive like Wanderers did but more like a reckoning or a reconciliation. Like catharsis. Like understanding. It’s not just a story of what could be but of what was and is and is still to come.”

I hope you check it out and enjoy it, and that you spread the word. To my surprise, I like this story even more than Wanderers, and that’s not nothing, given that I’m pretty pleased with the way that one turned out.

Also, if you want signed, personalized copies — I’m doing an event this week at Doylestown Bookshop with Philip Fracassi (Boys in the Valley) on Weds, and you can either show up and I’ll sign your book there, or you can order from the store and I’ll sign/personalize and they’ll ship right to you.

Finally, the UK version is also out now —

Similar covers, obviously, though feel free to let me know in the comments if you like one over the other, and why.

Thanks for checking out the book. Spread the word, leave a review, make a TikTok, scream about the book to doves and gulls, load a crate of the book into a trebuchet and launch it at the surrounding towns and villages, you know, normal stuff.

Your options for procurement:

Doylestown Bookshop | Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon

Or, in the UK:

Waterstones | Amazon UK

You can also check it out from your own local favorite indie, or you can request that your local library carry it.

(Audible and e-book are also options, of course.)

Finally, if you’ve already got this, do not forget about —

Black River Orchard.

Harvest time comes 9/26/23.

Pre-order now.

* some folks ask if there’s going to be a third book set after Wayward, and my answer is, truthfully, I’ve no idea, but at present I don’t expect to write one — if I have a full story to tell and the sales of Wayward make it sensible to do so, I’d consider it, but the nice thing is, these two books form a kind of inadvertent duology, and each tells a connecting tale, both different, both both part of a larger narrative. That said, I am perhaps writing a novella set after Wayward. More on that soon, to be sure…

Series VS Standalone: Cage Match

No, this is not about Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg MMA-fighting one another in some kind of Douchebag Octagon, though I am certainly sending my prayers to an unforgiving universe that both of them kick each other at the exact same time and in that moment they each explode in a rain of money that catches on the wind and is spread to the four corners of the earth, finding the hands of the needy and not the mitts of the rich.

This is about a conversation that kicked off on Bluesky (god I really want to capitalize the S in BlueSky) by author pals like CL Polk, Max Gladstone, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Elizabeth Bear, Ryan Van Loan, and ultimately perhaps by Delilah S. Dawson, who lamented about those books of ours that have fallen to obscurity despite being loved by us, their wayward creators. (I’ll offer briefly my own lamentation: I wish more people read Atlanta Burns. I really liked that one. Anyway.)

I thought I’d offer some brief thoughts on why I’m largely only going to write standalones from here on out, despite really loving the big meaty toothy goodness of writing a series. This is not meant to be a commandment to you, or marching orders of any kind. It’s just my thinking. Why Em Em Vee.

a) Writing a series is depressing. It just is. By the time you’re writing books two and three (or beyond), you’ve seen the diminishing returns, the reduced support, the general “farty slow leak of the balloon as it orbits the room” vibe. And that’s a bummer. This is not the most important reason, but also, in many ways, it absolutely is.

b) Publishers, in my experience, have a rule that sequels/series releases do not get the same level of support as the initial book that leads that series. It was, I think, initially for publishers a way to “buy in” for a number of books that they can then — in theory, not in practice — coast on. Like, oh yay, we supported the first book, that energy will cascade through the next releases. This isn’t true, of course, and I’d argue they should support the later releases more than the earliest one, because you cannot Magical Thinking your way into discoverability or momentum. But generally that’s the rule: they don’t support the followup releases the same, if at all.

c) Every standalone has a new shot at ancillary rights like film/TV, foreign, or other weirder ones (comics, game, etc.). Sequels/series releases, not so much. If you’ve already sold film/TV to the first, you can’t resell on subsequent releases. Foreign sales will not come for later releases if they haven’t bought into the first. That’s not to say there couldn’t be a build-up from series releases. There could be, for international rights! But in practice, not often.

d) Every standalone is a new shot at discoverability. Discoverability remains, in my mind, one of the greatest challenges for writers. It’s just hard to get seen. It’s hard even as a seasoned writer to tell people, hey I have a book out. The Internet is noise, and increasingly messy and loud (and worthless in its integrity of information). With a series, generally that first book is the one that gets the attention — media reviews, trade reviews, that sort of thing. Followups are just less likely to ping that radar. But every standalone has a shot at finding reach. Not to say it’ll get it, but it does have a relatively equal shot at the goal. But it feels troubling when you release, say, Book Three of a Thing, and people say, “oh I didn’t know there was a Book Two.” That is definitely scream-into-a-pillow time.

e) If that first book really doesn’t work, you’re committed to the series anyway. And if you’re not in love with the series, you’re still committed to three books. And that can be… three or more years of your life. A series can be a ditch you drop your tire into and can’t quite drive out of until a good ways down the road. Which can be frustrating and difficult.

f) Paper prices are becoming a problem. (God, don’t say that sentence out loud five times. You’ll squirt blood out of your nose.) And series tend to be big(ger) books and the commitment to them early might be a peril later on if paper prices persist as a problem. Okay now I’m just leaning into it. Sorry. (Also here let me ring the bell I’ve been ringing again and again: bring back the mmpb, publishers and bookstores. Please. Pulp paper, easy to cram in a pocket, nice to throw at scalliwag children.)

g) A small point — and all of this, again, is very much anecdotal, aka “artisanal data” — but if you start big with a series, people tend to be readers of a series and not as much readers of an author. Every new series after seems like you need to do a cold start on the machine. And they never love the new series like they liked the old series.

None of this is hard and fast, and if what you’re writing is a series in its heart, it’s a fucking series. And series can also be great fun and, if they land well, economic momentum builders for you, the author. They have advantage — a solid readership can grow out of that.

But I find them tricky and sort of sad to write, and at this point I’m not intending to write any — sequels, maybe, if a book does really well and there’s a story reason to write a followup. So, you have both narrative purpose and sales numbers there to support more. But even then: I’d hesitate. Because new things are shiny and for better or worse, everyone likes the shiny.

(As a sidenote: Some of this is also why I do not want to write licensed intellectual property for others. While it’s nice to ride the marketing train put out by a Big Brand, you don’t own that shit and all that stuff is just going to compete with your original work on shelves. Bookstores will make a choice to carry those releases ahead of your own original work, and you can’t sell that shit for foreign, for film or TV, nada. Though again: YMMV!)

Anyway, preorder Black River Orchard! I made apples evil! I’m a monster!

Keith Rosson: Writing the Chaos, Through the Chaos

This is a guest post by author Keith Rosson about his new novel, Fever House, out today. If I may offer a brief editorial, here: this book arrived for me to blurb once upon a time and I failed to read it in time to do so, but having since read it, I will say this will almost assuredly be one of my favorite novels of the year. It is electric and mad. It defies genre. It is a horror novel, but it is also not only a horror novel — it is part rock-and-roll bio, part spy thriller, part crime noir nightmare, and it’s written in a way with sharp, incisive, thoughtful prose that, somehow, mysteriously, kicks you in the teeth but also makes you feel good while it’s happening. I fucking loved it and I think you will too.

Buy links at the bottom of the post. — c.

***

My author’s copies of my new novel, Fever House, arrived today. Three big-ass boxes from UPS, my oldest kid, the seven-year-old, struggling to help me carry them in.

We put them on the coffee table and then I went through that moment where I was almost afraid to open them up. That last stretch of time before the book became a tangible, real thing – be it beautiful or be it be-warted, you know?

But then I cracked open a box and marveled at the thing. I felt such gratitude – realizing how lucky I was to have an entire team of people whose jobs are to make my book the best it can be. Lucky, man. 

 Cracking open that box also reminded me that every single book I write is a highwire act and a sleight-of-hand trick and a mystery all smooshed together. Because there’s always that nattering question buried beneath the wonder of holding your book in your hands for the first time. Always the same thing: How the hell did I do this? And will I ever manage to do it again?

Early drafts of Fever House were written in my kid’s bedroom while she was in kindergarten. We live in a small house where space is at a premium, and during the day – this was that first tumultuous year when the schools reopened – was unoccupied. The irony is not lost on me, that I penned this wildly violent, propulsive horror novel in which the severed body parts of a possibly slain devil are a not inconsequential plot-point, and I did all of it while sitting at a desk under my kid’s finger paintings of Pikachu and unicorns and rainbows and stuff. Let it be a testament, I guess – if you really want to write, you’ll find a way.

It was a tremendous release valve, this book. During those early drafts, my partner and I had just become foster parents of two little girls, aged two and three at the time, and I found myself, with zero experience as a parent, suddenly flung into the exacting demands of fatherhood. The sudden caregiver for these two young kids who had been run through the trauma of the foster care system; it was very much, for all of us, a trial by fire.

And then – ta-da! – about a month after we got them, COVID ripped its way across the country and our state was placed in lockdown.

So I was new father to challenging, wounded, terribly frightened children. And all of the sudden we’re in the midst of a pandemic and none of us can leave the house.

I was the stay-at-home parent that first year. So many times I felt like I was failing – failing everyone, constantly – and there was this profound sense of encapsulation. Claustrophobia. I think we all experienced it, or something like it. A period there in those first months where only essential workers went outside, ostensibly kept the world running; we hardly went anywhere. Our local playground had yellow caution tape around it. Had signs warning everyone away. We lived inside.

Fever House kickstarts with a pair of legbreakers who discover a severed hand in a freezer while collecting debts for their boss; proximity to the hand induces a near-uncontrollable desire for violence to those in its proximity. There is a sense of steeped paranoia all throughout the book – its dark-funded black ops agencies, its twisting, ricocheting narrative through multiple POVs, it’s veering, historied world-building. In retrospect, I can see where it all came from, tapping away in my kid’s room under those rainbows and Pokemon drawings; it was me trying to quell the fear that the world was dying, to counterbalance that feeling that I was profoundly fucking up and was ill-equipped to be a parent of any lasting decency or accord, you know?

All of that personal stuff – the COVID-bubble, the panic around my new responsibilities – butted up against the political, too. Portland – where the novel takes place – became an absolute hellhouse of egregious law enforcement overstep and violence in the weeks following the murder of George Floyd. While it sparked the mass-mobilization of some of the largest protests in history, Portland uniquely stepped it up and kept street-bound protests going for over 100 days straight, every single night. Often multiple that ranged in the thousands to, sometimes, a hundred or so black bloc folks. Chad Wolf – acting-head of Homeland Security at the time, at the behest of President Trump, decided to send in a mish-mash of officers from a number of federal law enforcement agencies, agencies which were allowed to remove insignia and badge numbers. It was madness. So much tear gas was fired in Portland, and with such impunity, later studies showed that protestors were exposed to CS gas at a level more than 50 times what federal regulators consider “immediately dangerous to life or health.”[1] People had their arms and legs broken with batons, had their skulls fractured. You’d find tear gas canisters and bean bag projectiles in the gutter the following morning. People were being pulled off the street into unmarked, rented vans and brought into the bowels of the Justice Center for interrogation.[2] The Federal Courthouse and PPB police union buildings were broken into and lit on fire. Again, madness, and while so much of it felt like the world was careening out of control, it also felt like some notion of justice was being metered out against malevolent institutions that felt impervious and untouchable. Like these untouchable entities might actually face some modicum of change or alteration in the face of this massive, global upheaval. I went to protests, marched, had friends who were “legal watchdogs” for the ACLU and had to crowdfund for a bulletproof vest after getting with munitions, watched countless acts of police violence on social media; the vast majority of injuries committed during those protests were by law enforcement officers without identifying marks on their uniforms or helmets. And to this day the Portland Police Bureau, despite being rocked with scandal after scandal and bucking multiple federal orders regarding use-of-force protocol or tear gas/munitions allowances, have not faced any significant consequences for their actions during the protests.

That notion of overstep? Of agencies tasked with protecting us instead stomping over any measure of legality to get what they want? What they deem is right?

All of that sure as hell made it into the book. Writing – with Fever House, at least – really did serve as a kind of osmosis for me, an emotional tacking-on of a bunch of stuff that was happening at the time. The claustrophobia of lockdown, the panicked trial-by-fire of new parenthood, and the egregiousness of government agencies that believe might makes right.

I held the book in my hands. Those puzzle pieces interlocking, but that remains the quiet wonder of writing. When it goes well, when it works, it feels like magic.

Fever House: Bookshop | B&N | Powells | Amazon

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/n...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277...

Bloggy Update And Super Mario Dogshit Time

Hey, I’m updating the blog theme a little bit here (er, maybe more than a little bit) so forgive any digital debris. Bless this mess, as the cross-stitch in the Southern home might say. The site has long been sort of… erm, crappy looking since I ditched the vulnerable theme of the past, and so I’m messing around and maybe settled on this design? Though more tweaks may be inbound. I am not entirely thrilled with the font here in the individual posts and may try to futz with that. Which probably means I’ll break it. Shrug.

Anyway, so I’m also thinking of doing shorter form content here — a lot of my posts here end up being REALLY LONG (much like my books, zing), and as such I figure some shorter-form stuff might be nicer. Less stressful on my part to hop here and write three paragraphs instead of, I dunno, 300.

As such, here is a short-form thing:

The Super Mario Brothers movie was absolute dogshit. I don’t usually like to write negative reviews because, who cares? Not everybody likes everything, nothing to learn there. So what. It’s fine. You may have also like this movie I’m about to punch in in the neck, and that’s also totally okay. You should like the things you like. There is nothing wrong with you for that.

But it sucked bad and I figured I’d talk about it a little just because from a storytelling vantage, I think it’s instructive to me. And here’s why: the narrative structure of the movie suffers from what I call the AND THEN THIS HAPPENED mode of storytelling. It’s basically the same kind of storytelling quality you would receive from, say, a four-year-old. And not a very savvy four-year-old, you feel me? Your basic, mid-level four-year-old is what I’m talking here. And that kid will tell a story like this:

AND THE KNIGHT FOUGHT THE DRAGON AND THEN KILLED THE DRAGON AND THEN HE WAS HUNGRY SO HE ATE A SANDWICH AND THE SANDWICH WAS MADE OF SCORPIONS AND HE ATE THEM ANYWAY AND THEN

This type of story is essentially a value-less, consequence-free flow of abstract information. It is a sequence of events hung like pretty lights; they hang together in the gentlest dip and look nice and illuminate the patio but that’s it. There’s no there there. The saying, “put a hat on a hat” is one that indicates that you’ve maybe put too fine a point on something, right? This is the opposite. There’s no hat on a hat because there’s no first hat. And that’s the Super Mario Brothers movie. Things happen. They mean nothing. There’s no IF/THEN consequence, there’s no BUT WHAT IF questions, there’s no emotional stakes, there’s no arc, there’s just lights hung on a line, in a row, gently glowing. It’s kind of dogshit.

(And here you might say, well, what did you expect? It’s a game based on a really simplistic video game where a mustachioed Italian plumber punishes angry dickheaded mushroom men with turtle shells he violently ripped from his Koopa foes. It’s a linear video game and not much happens, and so no, I didn’t expect much. But the Sonic movie, which… listen, I dunno that it’s great, but it’s at least a story. Things happen, things matter, it’s a lot better than you’d think. So they could’ve done something here. But didn’t. It’s fine. It’s all good. It made a bajillion dollars until Barbie kicked it in the mustache. Whatever. There you go. Enjoy. Bye. Oh. Buy my apple book. Thanky.)

Forgive The Writers, For We Are So Tired

I said it a little while ago, but it bears repeating: being a writer right now is both weird and worrisome.

And in the short time since I wrote that other thing, it’s only gotten weirder and more worrisome. Consider:

, which Amazon initially wouldn’t take down until the bad publicity washed up on their shore?

Simon & Schuster sold to investment firm KKR for $1.62 billion, the same firm that also bought Toys R’ Us, a place that is definitely still around ha haha haa haahaha *nervous laughter*? (A note here that the KKR acquisition might be the best case scenario, and the fact that there is some employee ownership going into the deal seems like a good thing, and ultimately this is certainly better than PRH having scooped them up so that they get turned into a Kaiju MegaConglomerate, stomping over everything.)

Whatever that Prosecraft thing was? (I cannot speak to the legality of what that guy was up to, and I’m going to guess that his assertions of it being “AI” were more marketing than anything, but it doesn’t change the fact that he somehow had 27,000 books — many new, which were as-yet-inaccessible digitally — that he was using to create a site whose usefulness was definitely in the toilet, given that it made absolutely dubious assertions about passive voice, vivid prose, emotional beats, and the like. Storytelling isn’t math and we can’t wish it into becoming that way. Also, the English language is total chaos. It’s a flock of birds drunk on berries flying into an airplane turbine. Good luck divining narrative truth from the spray of blood and feathers, everyone.)

The AV Club using AI to put together their articles, but then also writing articles like, “Even The Merovingian from the Matrix movies doesn’t trust AI,” where you can find this sentence: “If a guy who played an evil computer program is warning us about the potential evil uses of a computer program, let’s listen to him!” Which sounds a whole lot like, “AI is really bad, except when we use it!”

We’re finding AI-generated imagery in weird places (D&D! Book covers! Your spouse! That’s right, your spouse was generated by artificial intelligence and that’s why they have seven fingers on their left hand! You fool!), we’re watching new social media sites pop up and fall down faster than coked-up gophers, the book banning has continued until morale has improved (it has not), Amazon has screwed up its subscription services so much that some SFF fiction magazines had to close shop, we’re seeing AI language pop up in boilerplate contracts that need to be cut down by diligent agents, and all around us the costs of living are going up up up while advances are staying the same or are going down and nobody knows what the fuck is going on anymore.

I mean, it’s not all bad, I get that. The economy hasn’t crashed (uhh, yet, anyway). The industry seems to me somewhat up (excepting YA and other children’s sales). I know some new bookstores that have opened. B&N, though they’re taking a bite out of hardcover sales, seem to be opening new stores at a better clip than before. And there are, of course, still really great books coming out (yesterday alone brought us scarily-awesome new work by Alma Katsu, Lauren Beukes, Daniel Kraus, Catriona Ward, Kiersten White, plus the exceptional horror guide by Sadie Hartmann, 101 Horror Books To Read Before You’re Murdered). But we’re still in a place where it’s getting harder to reach our audiences while at the same time we’re trying to swat away the flying goblins of so-called “artificial intelligence” and culture war book-ban bullshit, and if we complain about it some fuckface online will call us an “idea landlord” as if we’re the ones who built the system that is currently falling on our heads.

So, if we seem tired? If we seem like we’re a broken tooth with a squirming nerve poking out of it? If we look like we just crawled out of a sweaty bed after a night of no-sleep? Yeah, that’s all of this. We’re tired. We’re wired. We’re feeling weary and weird. We just want to write our little books and stories and articles and hope you read them. FILL OUR GRUEL BOWL WITH YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE.

That’s all.

And here I would be remiss if I did not remind you: I have Wayward coming out in paperback at the end of this month, and on 9/26, the harvest of evil apples arrives and the cult of Black River Orchard rises. So if you’re so inclined to seek them out and pre-order, I’d sure love you forever. Or at least until the next book release, when I’ll show up at our door again, looking like a feral Scottish terrier. If you need a good place to preorder the books — and get them signed and personalized! — you should look to my local Doylestown Bookshop, for both Wayward and for Black River Orchard. I will be doing a tour for Black River Orchard, as well (with bonus apple tastings!). Dates firming up soon, but my expectation is, I’m going to do a big ol’ happy loop of New England, and then also some other dates, potentially in the West / Northwest. More when I know it!

Letters from Covidtown

Hey, COVID is shitty! You already knew that, I assume, but I figured, just in case, I’d remind you. Two weeks ago, COVID colonized my body, and like all colonizers, it’s a real fucking asshole. I took Paxlovid, and it did a very quick job at knocking the thing to the ground, and I thought, yay, I fucking did it, but then a few days ago, I guess Thursday? I started to feel shitty.

And then I learned the joys of the PAXLOVID REBOUND, which is to say, it hit worse than it did before I took the Pax in the first place.

(I do not consider this a knock against the drug, to be clear — the goal with taking it for me was to file the teeth off of COVID and ideally push back the chances of Long COVID. Which, so far, knock on wood, seems to have been the case. And I also am to understand that a COVID rebound is just as likely without taking an antiviral as having taken one. So, shrug. Who knows.)

Got a fever, head-cold, cough. Fever was short-lived, and never scary-high, and the overall effects have probably been less than when I’ve had a flu. That isn’t me saying “oh COVID isn’t bad,” or “oh it’s just a flu,” it’s just me telling you my experience here, which luckily (so far) was not severe, and ultimately fairly mild. My family has it, too — kiddo had almost no illness to speak of (again, knock on wood), wife was a little worse than me all throughout, so fingers crossed this thing is mostly headed out to sea. I expect to have this rough voice and cough for a little while, which should be interesting given that I have to do a virtual talk this weekend and then the following weekend I’m delivering a keynote address at the Writer’s Digest conference in New York! Soooo, fingers crossed I am not hacking up BRONCHIAL GOO while trying to dispense my dubious brand of vigorous-air-quote “writing wisdom.”

Anyway! COVID sucks, it’s definitely surging right now as I know a whole lotta fucking people who caught it suddenly. Mask up, be smart, pray to whatever weird gods you hold dear. Or something.

More soon!

Miles Cameron: Five Things I Learned While Writing Storming Heaven

Before iron helmets and steel swords, when dragons roamed the world, was an age of bronze and stone, when the Gods walked the earth, and people lived in terror.

A scribe, a warlord, a dancer, a mute insect and a child should have no chance against the might of the bickering gods and their cruel games. But the gods themselves are old, addicted to their own games of power, and now their fates may lie in the hands of mere mortals . . .

By divine plan a plague of cannibals has been unleashed across the world, forming an armada which preys on all who cross their path. Meanwhile the people who allied against the gods have been divided, each taking their own path to attack the heavens – if they can survive the tide of war which has been sent against them. All they need is the right distraction, and the right opportunity, to deal a blow against the gods themselves . . .

An original, visceral epic weaving together the mythologies of a dozen pantheons of gods and heroes to create something new and magical, this tale of the revolt against the tyranny which began in Against All Gods is a must read from a master of the fantasy genre.

***

I like to think of myself as a method writer. I come from a family of actors, and the term ‘Method actor’ was around the house throughout my childhood, and in addition, my dad, who was both a playwright and a prolific author of fiction, used to do things like building medieval handgonnes and making Tudor era clothing as part of his writing system. Let me add that this is great fun if you are a young person; everything was exploration and discovery, although I still remember the experiment with urine as a mordaunt for dyes, and my mother put her foot down on experimenting with seventeenth century poisons when dad was writing about the court of Louis the XIV…

Anyway, I learned from them. When I get stuck in to a book idea, long before the first word is typed, there are things I need to know. I’ve now done this often enough that I have a method within my method, so the learning process is structured, which I hope will still be entertaining. When writing fantasy, I get to pick and choose my cultural references, which is fun all by itself, and do. With my ‘Age of Bronze’ books, as the series title might suggest, I was picking and choosing from the Bronze Age, right across the world, from the Pre-Inca South Americans called we call Poche to the Indus Valley Culture in what is now India and Pakistan.

And finally, because I wrote what I call ‘immersive detail’ and may be considered ‘really boring detail’ by some, I want to know about cooking, dance, literature, architecture both grandiose and vernacular, music, trade, politics, religion, and martial arts. Probably other things too, but that gives you an idea of the foundations of my ‘method.’

How Bronze Age combat worked

I teach various forms of historical swordsmanship; sometimes I even compete in tournaments. Years ago, I stood at the display cases in Heraklion, on Crete, looking at the hundreds of bronze swords on display; looking at the damage evident on some of them, trying to imagine how they were used, and whether there was a system I could discern from forensic examination, but only while I was writing Storming Heaven did I finally come into possession of an accurate reproduction of a Mycenaean ‘Type G’ sword. I played with it for weeks, and I learned more than five things just from that one artifact; because I write fight scenes, and because I have some background in swords, perhaps I’ll go into too much detail, but here goes:

First, the grip of the type G is so modern that once a sword person grips one, he or she is likely to smile and comment. I’ve now seen this with a dozen trained people. What look like quillons, or ‘guards’ for the hand on the grip, are really spurs, like modern fencing foils have; a spur for your index finger, to make sure you grasp the sword exactly right each time.  The grip also orients you hand; this is a thrusting weapon, and it is now comfortably available for thrusting, although there’s also a nice area to rest your thumb on the widest portion of the blade, for small, controlled slashes, like under a shield.

I also cut a bunch of things with my bronze sword, and I thrust at others. Let me say that I do know a little about the metallurgy of bronze; bronze can be complex, and most modern bronzes aren’t very much like ancient bronze in their alloy. Regardless, what I learned was that with work hardening the edges, I could get the sword very sharp indeed; but that the edge was, compared to steel, somewhat fragile, and that I needed to keep my cuts very straight; I needed to deliver them (in mechanical terms) with my edge aligned with my arm and body structure, so that I didn’t bend the blade when I cut. That suggests to me that first, they didn’t make Hollywoodesque, round-house blows against each other’s shields, and second, that they were well-trained to use these weapons, because in this case, training could overcome most of the apparent fragility.

From the artifact, then, I was able to move a long way towards reconstruction of the martial art that it was produced to support. And that was fun. Speculative, resting on some questionable evidence, but luckily, I’m writing fantasy. 

There’s always new inspiration to be found, even in places you’ve been before

I love to travel to see the hard evidence of the past, and so the second thing came to me at the so-called ‘Treasury of Atreus.’ If you haven’t been, it’s a magnificent, enormous beehive tomb constructed of stone blocks, some of them so huge that even though I’ve been there five times I’m literally awed each time. The Lion Gate of the fortress town is impressive, but the tomb is… incredible.

I was just about to start writing Storming Heaven last year, and I had just completed a reenactment in Greece (the Battle of Plataea, and you can see some of our pictures at www.plataea2022.com) and I’d promised my daughter and her friend a few days on beaches. I had no pans to visit Mycenae again, but that’s how it worked out; a rushed visit on a Tuesday morning. There’s a great deal to see at Mycenae, but I found myself standing in front of the Treasury of Atreus, just looking at the lintel and the entrance way. I’ve read articles on how it was built, or how it might have been built. Then I walked inside, still in a state of awe, wondering to myself as to why this one monument had such impact; I peeked in the side chamber, and there was a smell…

I can’t say it was the smell of death, or mortality. But it was more than the smell of slightly damp earth; it was very evocative. Smell is, for me, one of the most important senses; maybe it is for everyone, but the smell of the side chamber wasn’t something I’d encountered before, and in that moment, the structure and narrative of Storming Heaven changed. I needed the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ in my book, and I needed… death. More than death. A grandiose God of Death.  Someone who might live in something like the ‘Treasury of Atreus.’ And I knew how he should smell.

To be fair, I also learned that the beehive tomb at Mycenae was the largest arched vault in the world for over fifteen hundred years; I learned that no one knows for whom it was built; I learned that its construction was unique among the hundreds of beehive tombs in Bronze Age Greece. I also stared in wonder at the artifacts in the museum; there’s something about Linear B tablets, which are quite small and were only preserved because everything ended in flames, routine documents of a modestly efficient bureaucracy; something very real. People really lived then. They really paid taxes. They really had babies.  The gold artifacts don’t bring that to me like the linear B tablets do.

Practical and sensory experiences can add to your understanding

I’ve already mentioned that I was at a reenactment of the Battle of Plataea. Now, Plataea happened in 479BCE according to our best evidence, and that’s long after the collapse of the Bronze Age, which is set variously in the eleventh or tenth centuries BCE. Nonetheless I learned something there, in my bronze panoply and my wool chiton in forty-degree Greek heat. I learned that light wool is very comfortable in high heat; I learned that it doesn’t seem to pick up sweat like cotton or even linen, and I learned that a big, but light, wool ‘gown’ made an excellent layer under bronze armour. All of that was interesting, but what I really learned was, again, olfactory.

I learned that bronze armour has a smell. It’s not a good smell; its coppery, and it resembles the scent you get in your nose when you break it or have a nosebleed. Interesting? To me it was fascinating, because is my ‘style’ is immersion, the more scents I can include, the better, and the idea that bronze armour smells like spilled blood was virtually thematic. I’m pretty sure I amused my tent mate, Giannis, standing in the evening light, with half my thorakes in my hands, smelling it. 

Violence isn’t always the answer

Very early in the research for Storming Heaven I discovered the ‘Indus Valley Culture,’ one of the most interesting of all the Bronze Age civilizations I examined, and I’m ashamed to say that before I stumbled across it while looking up something on Babylon, I’d just barely heard of it. So my fourth thing might be the whole of the Indus Valley civilization, but one thing sticks out, and that is something worth everyone’s attention: there are very, very few weapons associated with the Indus Valley Culture. There are so few weapons, in fact, that some theorists have proposed that they were pacifistic, or even proto-Jains. Amidst the cloud of spears, swords, sickles, axes, arrow points and chariots of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt and Mycenae, the paucity of weapons really stands out. 

I was lucky enough to be an a Fantasy Con last year where a group of us, all writers who like writing a good fight scene, all began to discuss the purpose of violence in any literature; the over-representation of heroic violence in fantasy, and the sheer difficulty of representing heroism and epic without resort to violence. I won’t pretend I hadn’t thought about all this before; I’ll just say I walked away determined to show some heroic pacifism, and here, before my eyes, was a whole culture that at least archaeologically speaking seems to have eschewed violence. Maybe that was the most important thing that I learned while writing Storming Heaven. Maybe.

The Big monuments weren’t built without a price

I was almost done writing Storming Heaven, which, if you don’t know, is about a group of mortals banding together to overturn some particularly loathsome (but sometimes funny) gods. I had all my cultural references in order, pages of outlines and notes, and I’d written about three hundred pages. For Christmas, my partner gave me a copy of a new book by two anthropologists called The Dawn of Everything. 

Let me be brief; I read it and discovered that I don’t know anything. It’s a wonderful book; I’m sure it is full of flaws, and I saw a few things that, even as an amateur, I saw as questionable, but the authors’ contention that the growth of government and kingship and tyranny and war is not inevitable, and that early societies managed quite well without, thanks, and that some civilizations have turned their backs on the excesses of oppression as firmly as the Japanese turned their back on gunpowder in war, all of that was new to me. And wonderful, and allowed me to reexamine everything I thought I knew about Egypt and Sumeria, Babylon, and the Mayans. A single thought will encapsulate what I learned…

All the archaeological monuments that we use to symbolize ancient cultures, every pyramid, every temple, and every obelisk, is dedicated to someone’s ‘great project,’ that involved forced or at least coerced labour by thousands of people under the direction of a few or a single person; whereas successful communal cultures mostly leave uniform small houses, and maybe a public bath, difficult to date and not particularly imposing. Academic and popular history are drawn to the great monuments; who goes to see an early Bronze Age seaside trading town like Thermi on Lesvos? There’s almost nothing to see!

Bonus thing

I went to Thermi on Lesvos. There’s very little to see except the outlines of some private houses set in modern concrete; it’s nothing like visiting the great fortresses of Orchomenos or Mycenae, the Pyramids of Giza, the magnificent ruins of the Mayans or the Inca. But it does tell a story; small houses, close together; people living together, and choosing to do so, without much in the way of gold, or weapons (one copper knife, I believe) or statues, or temples. It looks like a nice place to live.  For everyone.

Storming Heaven: Bookshop | Amazon

Welcome to Covidtown, Population: Me

Hey!

Guess what?

I have COVID, of the 2019 vintage but blended with a soupcon of whatever the latest variant/subvariant combination is. As I just returned from overseas, I like to think it’s a fancy European variant — the Champagne to America’s sparkling COVID. Bubbly and effervescent. And such terroir.

Point is, I’m a little down for the count at present — feeling mostly okay, have the Paxlovid (which is to say, my mouth tastes of hairspray and robot ass), but the rest of the family has it too, so we’re hunkering down. If you need something from me at present, you are unlikely to get it.

More as I know it!

Bye!

Where I’ll Be And What I’m Up To

Figured I’d teleport briefly into your lives and tell you what I’m up to, currently, and tell you where I’ll be —

Did I finish up and turn in the first draft of my new middle grade horror novel, Monster Movie! –? I did, and should be getting edits back soon.

Am I working on a new novella collection with most excellent buddies Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson? Could be, rabbit, could be.

Have I received an unholy number of wonderful, gasp-inducing blurbs for Black River Orchard, a book that also recently received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly (which you can find right here), where the review said some very nice things like “Wendig is brilliant at slowly raising the plot’s emotional temperature and making his characters, caught in a creeping nightmare, feel both real and empathetic. This masterful outing should continue to earn Wendig comparisons to Stephen King.”…? Indeed, indeed, indeed. I’ll show off the blurbs soon — and here I selfishly note that ahem ahem ahem, you can preorder the book, out 9/26, at any and all of the cool places where the books live? Though if you want a signed, personalized copy, Doylestown Bookshop will be your best friend in this regard. Pre-ordering books is good for the author, good for the bookstore, and sends a vital signal to the publisher about what you want to read and what authors you like. So! Yeah.

Is there now not just one but two UK covers revealed, one for the ARC (advanced reader copy) and one for the full-on release? Heck yeah, and here are both of those for the pleasure of your eyeballs —

And then, am I going to be in Spain for the Celsius-232 festival at the end of July? Fuck yeah, I am. It’s from the 18th to the 22nd, in Aviles, Spain, and there’s a bunch of excellent authors attending as professionals, like Kiersten White, Joe Abercrombie, Alma Katsu, Charlaine Harris, Neon Yang, P Djéli Clark, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. (I think they also just announced Mike Flanagan attending? Which, needless to say, is pretty damn exciting.) I’ll also be bopping around the Netherlands and Germany prior to that, but more in a “wandering Wendig” way, not in a “official events” capacity.

Finally, will I be hanging out with Philip Fracassi at the Doylestown Bookshop on August 23rd, with him talking about Boys in the Valley, and me chatting a bit about the paperback release of Wayward? Yes, yes, and yes. Details here.

(And yes, there will be a Black River Orchard tour — it’s getting cobbled together now, but the hope is to do a run through the northeast, maybe bring along some WEIRD-ASS APPLES from various local orchards, and then after that, maybe some dates out on the West Coast? More as I know it!)

Rebecca Zahabi: Five Things I Learned Writing The Collarbound

Rebellion is brewing and refugees have begun to trickle into the city at the edge of the world. Looming high on the cliff is the Nest, a fortress full of mages who offer protection, but also embody everything the rebellion is fighting against: a strict hierarchy based on magic abilities.

When Isha arrives as a refugee, she attempts to fit in amongst the other mages, but her kher tattoo brands her as an outcast. She can’t remember her past or why she has the tattoo – only that she survived.

Tatters, who wears the golden collar of a slave, was once one of the rebels. He plans to stay in the shadows, until Isha appears in his tavern. He’s never seen a human with a tattoo, and the markings look eerily familiar . . .

As the rebellion carves a path of destruction towards the city, an unlikely friendship forms between a man trying to escape his past and a woman trying to uncover hers, until their secrets threaten to tear them apart.

1. Trust the muse.

When I started working on The Collarbound, it wasn’t the story I had planned on writing. I didn’t intend to write a trilogy, I didn’t intend to start the story in a tavern, I didn’t intend to write a dual magic system of mind and flesh. It was all happening in an epic fantasy setting, with rebels and mages and giant glowing lightborns flying in the sky, yet it was focused on people, nearly entirely character-driven. As I delved into the manuscript, I worried who on earth would read this slow-burn character exploration, this piecing-together of backstory through mental battles, dreams and mind-games. Yet it was the novel that got me an agent, and a mainstream editor.

Trust the muse. It knows what it’s doing. Or at least, trust that what you love and what fascinates you will be fascinating to others, and that they might love it too. If you care, if it’s what your soul is singing about, write it. Other people will care too.

2. Make it worse.

But doing what you love doesn’t mean going easy on yourself. Quite the contrary. I would recommend always making it harder, for yourself, for your characters. No looking for the easy way out. No glossing over the hole in your magic system. You’ve spotted a gap, a way the magic can be abused or circumvented? Characters will as well. Let them exploit it.

For example, if mindlink means mages have to stand still when they occupy each other’s minds, as they’re focused on the mental worlds, then what happens when someone works out how to project mental images while throwing a punch? Or say the fleshbinding magic allows people to share sensations – it’s all very well that the grizzled characters think of this as a way to share pain to avoid succumbing to torture, but what does it mean when someone comes up with the idea to share pleasure? How does that change the way the first date goes? Actually, what does it look like coming from a culture that has had centuries to explore that idea and become familiar with it?

3. Names are hard.

While we’re on creating a new culture, one aspect I bumped against was names. I hate naming things – I tend to do that last, so characters and places are often called ‘XXX’ in the first draft. Naming is hard to get right. If you get it wrong, it can carry certain cultural associations. It can belong to the wrong language group, making people wonder why this fantasy term sounds like Anglo-Saxon or Latin; it can place your fantasy world in a certain cultural space which isn’t the one you wanted it to land in. People will make different assumptions about Anwen, Arushi or Anita, just from her name on the page.

To avoid this, research is your friend. When writing the khers, a species of red-skinned, horned, nomadic humanoids, I studied the roots of an old Tuareg dialect. By looking at the language’s origins, finding words which had then split into several other words and spawned offspring to create various new languages, I was hoping to find sounds and names that were hard to place, that didn’t carry associations for the reader. For the two other main languages in The Collarbound, I based myself on Proto-Germanic and Sanskrit words. The result was distinct cultural sonorities: the Sunrisers had terms such nasivyati, stana, rohit; while the Duskdwellers had names like groniz, baina, raudaz.

Another workaround which I found useful was simply to translate words, or blend existing terms together. Languages are flexible, and you can play with them by merging words together: mindlink, fleshbinding, lawmage. Or invented words can be made to sound just right: lacunant, for people who suffer from a lacuna in their mind. Or why not simply call the cliff at the end of the world the Edge, or the high-perched castle full of mages and seagulls the Nest? It can work just as well.

4. Tropes are your friends.

The thing with writing is, you have to both zoom in and zoom out. The language is important – it’s all words, words, words, as Hamlet would put it – but the structure of the story is important as well. Knowing your tropes means knowing the building blocks of your story, and how to play with them. Sometimes a trope is a shortcut, a way to tell the reader that yes, this character is the comic relief, the foil to the main character. Nothing too bad will take place while he’s around, but beware the moment he’s seriously hurt, because it will spell serious trouble.

Once those tropes are established, they become ways to play with the reader, surprise them or tease them: how about we take ‘the rebel hero fighting the evil empire’ trope… But we’re firmly from the point of view of people living under the empire’s rule, and the horror they feel when the rebels destroy everything they’ve ever known. I love playing with known stories, twisting them into unexpected shapes, testing what they become if told from a different angle. Or telling a story in the wrong order, or after the facts. Sure, this character is a classic fantasy rogue hero, with too many skills to count, but it’s been years now, and what’s left of the adventures is mostly trauma, and he would like to live quietly in his tavern off his teaching job while pursuing romance, if you please.

5. You’re putting in a lot of stuff you’re not aware of.

I once heard Jeanette Winterson say that fiction is a lie detector. I think that’s particularly true of writers – we put stuff in our stories, convinced they’re things we invented, only to find out that they’re things we believed, or lived through, or worried about. I found myself writing about a mixed-race young girl, cut off from one of her cultural identities; about a White-passing man from a faraway land; about languages and mixed identities, trying to live at the threshold between three cultures; about violent revolutions failing and what we might do instead to make this world a better place. And then a friend, or a relative, points out that I’m mixed-race, White-passing, that two of the three cultures I’ve been influenced by – French and Iranian – both have violent revolutions which end with a worse dictature taking over in its wake, in 1789 and 1979 respectively.

It seems so obvious in retrospect, I’m not sure how I missed those themes while I was writing the manuscript. I was convinced the story was about two mages making friends or sometimes failing to, exploring mindmagic and fleshbinding powers, and fighting off the violent rebel army of Renegades – and it still is all of that, of course, but a lot more is hidden in there that I hadn’t realised I was putting in.

Maybe that’s why, in the end, it’s important to write what you love, what the muse whispers to you in your dreams. Because it’s what moves you, whether you realise it or not at the time. Because looking back on the book will be like looking into a mirror – and hopefully, you’re not the only person who will see themselves reflected there.

***

Rebecca Zahabi is a mixed-heritage writer (a third British, a third French and a third Iranian). She started writing in her home village in France at age 12 – a massive epic where women were knights and men were she-witches which set out to revolutionise feminism. Since, she learnt how to actually write, and has slightly re-jigged her expectations of what she can achieve with a keyboard and a blank page. The plan of taking over the world, however, has not changed.

After honing in her craft in a variety of genres – playwriting, short stories, an attempt at Icelandic sagas – she hopes to write novels that can make a difference. She is currently working on Tales of the Edge, an ambitious trilogy blending magic and structural violence.

Her début adult novel, The Collarbound, was longlisted for The Future Bookshelf program at Hachette UK before being acquired by Gollancz, and made it to the top 10 Sunday Times bestseller list.

The Collarbound: Bookshop | Amazon