Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 25

Writer’s Resolution 2023: Mounting An Aggressive Defense

(If you’d care to read last year’s 2022 resolution — here ’tis.)

This year’s resolution is simple on the surface, if difficult to implement:

Be vigorous in your defense of your work.

Now, already I want to be clear that I don’t mean “defend it against bad reviews” or “against healthy criticism” or “editors” or whatever.

So, let’s unpack what I do mean.

As a writer, everyone wants a piece of you. They treat the act of writing as an unserious endeavor, failing to see it as the result of the three corners of art, craft and work. It’s something anyone can do, they think. You’re replaceable. None of this matters. And so on. But writing does matter, we know. Writing goes into everything. Writing is bricklaying — it holds up the world. The stories built from the written word can change the world, too. Maybe not the whole world, but often, one person’s world. And that ain’t nothing.

But I don’t know that everyone… agrees with that? Or understands that? And I think there’s a very real threat against writers that comes from all directions. People want your time. They want to take your place. You are the singular summation of your experiences and have stories to tell, but sometimes people want you to tell a different story — one better designed to sell books or one that is simply someone else’s story that they want to put in your mouth. And this is definitely the year where I feel like I’m hearing from a lot of writers who are feeling somewhat beaten down by all of it — by others’ estimation of writers, by the industry, by the doom of Twitter, by just the pandemic in general. They feel taken advantage of, in some cases. They feel whittled to splinters.

So, I think this is a good year to dig in your heels a little.

It’s a good year to ensure that you take the time to write when you need to take that time. And also to carve out a place — a literal place! — for yourself to write, be it a room, a desk, a kitchen table, a shed, whatever, wherever.

It’s a good year to worry less about killing your darlings and instead start to learn what hills you’re willing to die on.

It’s a good year to think about what you want out of this career — what matters most to you, what stories you want to tell, you must tell — and to seek out those desires as if you deserve them. (Because, spoiler warning, you do.)

It’s a good year to make sure you’re not sacrificing things to anyone (publisher, family members, whoever) just to further their needs and not the needs of you, your stories, your career. Don’t let them ding your future. You deserve to get paid. You deserve your rights. You deserve to have your voice heard.

It’s a good year to make sure we stop believing that writing and storytelling is just some precious privilege and you’re so lucky to be doing it that you should be willing to give everything up just to be allowed to stay near to it.

It’s a good year to understand your power and to hold onto it.

To express it when you can, or when you must.

Again, this is not an exhortation against criticism or review or editorial oversight. It is not to say your story is so good it must be published and damn anyone who doesn’t listen. This is not to say you are a perfect being with perfect stories. This is also not a refusal to compromise. Compromise is vital. Writing, even when it’s just you, is a collaborative act in a sense, and there will be compromises that must must must be made to improve the work at hand.

Rather, this is all a reminder that you do this thing because you love it, because you have stories to tell. And it’s a reminder that people will try to take a little of your magic away for themselves — and that this can come from people in your life, it can come from big licensed intellectual property machines, it can come from publishers, it can come from whoever and whenever, and it’s important to know when it’s time to say no, when it’s time to say I deserve better, when it’s time to demand respect in service to your art, your craft, your work. In a sense, this is sometimes about good relationships — and you’ll know when you’re in one because they’re going to join you in this defense of the work. That could mean a spouse, an editor, an agent, whoever. They can still challenge you, but that challenge is about bringing the best version of yourself and your stories to bear — it’s not about taking something away, not about reducing you, but sharpening the knife that’s already in your hand. Some people want to brighten your light. Others just wanna throw a blanket on it.

Stand tall for yourself and your work. And stand tall for others who need that defense, too. (For instance, keep up with the Harper-Collins strike here. Support them when you can, because a healthy bookish ecosystem is good for everyone. Look too to how Brandon Sanderson talks about Audible and how that affects authors.) Stand tall for your writing, for the writing of others, for the good of your own support systems inside the publishing machine.

We only get one good turn on this carousel, so make it count.

I hope your 2023 is a good one, a productive one, and one where you make a stand for the stories you want to tell.

I selfishly remind I have a new writing book out this year —

I mean c’mon it has a BIRD flying out of someone’s HEADCAGE.

Preorder from Doylestown Bookshop and I can sign and personalize, if so desired. Comes out June 6th, 2023.

Have a great year. See you in the word mines.

The Death And Rebirth Of A Year: What Happened In 2022, What May Happen In 2023

TIME HAS SUCCESSFULLY PASSED, I say, though I don’t find nearly as much evidence of that as I’d like. My wife compared Pandemic Time to defragging your hard drive — the relevant data bits are fewer, and so they get juggled together to free up space, which makes time and memory collapse and crumble in really weird, off-putting ways.

I definitely exist, mentally, in this strange in-between zone. It is, I expect, purely the nature of the pandemic that has caused this — I am increasingly aware that the pandemic made us all Definitely Not Okay, and that there are a great many tremors and temblors rolling deep beneath the surface that we are only peripherally aware of (but are pretending not to feel at all). Lots of little micro-fractures and fissures forming that we don’t notice or are assured will be fine, just fine, don’t worry about it, the bridge is still up, keep driving over it, don’t worry about falling into the river below.

It’s been weird in that sense, as 2022 definitely felt like the year we were all collectively going to decide THIS PANDEMIC IS OVER, even though it is plainly not. And when I say “we all,” note that I don’t necessarily mean you and me, I only mean that collectively, shit has been forced into normal. The square peg had its corners sheared off with a chainsaw so it could fit in the circle fucking hole, geometry be damned. This isn’t our fault, necessarily. The leadership isn’t there. The messaging isn’t there. The CDC is a clown orgy, these days.

And of course, there’s Twitter. The wheels have been coming off Twitter for a few years now, though we’ve all dutifully done the work of jury-rigging up new wheels and tank treads and ice skates to keep that thing upright and moving. But then Musk came along and, I dunno, musked all over it, and now it’s swiftly degrading. I don’t need to reiterate alla that — I covered it here in THE BIRD SITE IS FUCKED. But, y’know, TERFs and antisemitism and anti-vax and welcoming Nazis back and and and, the whole thing is set to go up in flames like your average Tesla. Never mind the fact that the site was hacked, had 400 million accounts exposed, and also, the damn thing doesn’t even work that well. For all the people who lamented how unstable and unsafe Hive is or was, Twitter doesn’t have much room to talk. It’s janky shit right now.

And that to me is maybe the ultimate theme, if you will, of 2022 —

It’s janky.

Total jankiness.

Welcome to Janktown, Population All Of Us.

It’s janky, hinky, wonky-ass business. Airlines (looking at you, Southwest) and inflation and people attacking power substations and god publishing is fucking weird right now and oh there’s still a pandemic even though we’re pretending there’s not — I’m just saying, does it feel to anyone else like the seams aren’t lining up anymore? That we’ve lost symmetry? The edges are fraying, the paint is chipping off, there’s a sound in the engine we can’t quite identify, kind of a tink tink tink, a thwup thwup, maybe a belt is loose, maybe a mouse is dead in there and the gears and flywheels are passing its body around? Janky-ass vibes, all the way down. Not broken, necessarily. But breaking. That’s not to say shit won’t get fixed, or that it’s unfixable. It just sense the vibration in my bones: the gentle hum of entropy, of chaos settling into the marrow.

It’s fine.

I’m probably just imagining it.

Pay no attention to the TREMBLING CICADA-SHRIEK VOID behind the curtain.

To be clear, it’s not all bad. As much as things feel janky, sometimes it also feels like maybe some stuff is starting to get glued back together. The election was way better than we thought it was going to be. Progress is happening. I have… I don’t want to say optimism in that regard, but a general sense that it’ll all come together eventually. And that even in the turbulence and the cascading failures we’ll be all right. But I do think it means the turbulence and the cascading chaos isn’t… done yet. Not by a country mile. So, we hold tight and link arms and stand against the tide and help each other where we can, right?

Anyway.

Me, personally, 2022 was… good? I say hesitantly? I try to note every year that I’m a pretty lucky ducky, a very fortunate soul shoed with the iron of privilege and as such, I am fairly well taken care of. I had a book out, Wayward, and I think people liked it? I hope people continue to buy it and like it? (Consider this my not-so-subtle nudge to please review the book if you’re willing and able.) My middle grade novel, Dust & Grim, came out in paperback and… somehow hit the New York Times’ bestseller list? That’s pretty wild and I’m very geeked about it. D&G also landed on the Lone Star list in Texas, which — woo hoo!

Like I said, you can feel… publishing going through some things, though. Not just PRH losing the S&S bid, not just the Harper-Collions union strike (keep up with the union here, and solidarity to the striking workers who deserve to be paid a living wage), but — I dunno that it’s any one thing? Paper shortages, bookstore sales dropping, just a general sense of not knowing what works and what doesn’t. It’s definitely problematic that one of the primary vectors of BOOK LOVE, Twitter, is violently shitting the bed, leaving an authorial community without stable ground, without as much access to a readership, without (perhaps even more importantly) access to an author community. It wasn’t always perfect and it was often messy, but it was essential, and it’s really just not there like it was before. If at all.

And I think for so long publishers have kind of leaned on authors to have these (vigorous air-quotes) PLATFORMS and BRANDS and those things both really require social media to implement — never mind the fact it also requires authors to be the architects of something in which they are largely inexpert and that, arguably, this is something publishers should be there to handle or at the very least coach you on. (Some are far better at this than others, lemme tell ya.) And even when they’re not relying on authors to do it, I think publishers have still been leaning — understandably — on social media and the internet at large to convey that necessary BOOK LOVE, but that all seems to be crumbling. And it’s possible it was never really as useful as thought to be. Traditional legacy media still seems to actually work at generating buzz and selling books, but fewer and fewer of those outlets exist, and the ones that do — well, they don’t have as much space dedicated to BOOKS anymore, which fucking sucks.

And, I suspect the pandemic damaged a lot of institutional knowledge.

So, authors and publishers and by proxy readers are in this interstitial space. It’s not that there’s not a lot of good books out there. There are. It’s a great time for books. (A great time for horror, actually, if I’m being honest.) But the pipelines and wires with which we connect books to readers are fewer now, and tangled in general, and so I think there’s this great rebalancing going on. We don’t yet understand what comes out of all of this and how it’ll work. Which is not a fun time to go through, because… it’s uncertain and it’s janky and once again we return to the core problem of 2022: AMBIENT JANKINESS.

Anyway. Back to me, because, I dunno, this is my blog and I’m selfish.

Things are good. My books are doing fine. I earned out Wanderers and Book of Accidents in this past year, which is big. And I earned them out internationally, too, across a handful of countries, so I thank readers for that.

Family is good. Dogs are good. (Though our one dog became so plagued by her FART GHOSTS it started to impact her quality of life, and so we put her HAUNTED BUTT on Prozac and… well, that really helped, to be honest.)

And into 2023 we go.

What do I have going on in 2023?

Well.

There’s this.

A proper cover will come in the new year, but for now, may my hasty Photoshop suffice: BLACK RIVER ORCHARD is my new horror novel, coming out in September of 2023 from Del Rey Books. A very bad apple comes to town, and those who eat it are not the same as they were before. It’s all about small-town horror, troubled American history, ingrained wealth, folk horror cults, violent ego, all that good fun stuff. Plus, y’know, APPLES. Apples apples apples. You can pre-order now, I think, from most sites, though I’ll note that first out of the gate was Gibson’s in Concord (and I ordered a book from them recently and got it lickety-quick), so you can pre-order from them if you so desire. You can also pre-order from my local store, Doylestown Bookshop, to get signed and personalized.

I’m just finishing up edits on that book right now, so yay for that.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a spooky MG I wanna write, and also have another horror novel for Del Rey to write and turn in (codename: STAIRCASE, coming ~2024). For those who want to ask, “Will there be more Dust & Grim?” my answer to you is, I hope so, but there’s no current deal, only a couple pitches. I honestly like to hope that after a NYT list hit and the Lone Star list, they’d want more, but so far the publisher hasn’t committed — if you wanna ping LBYR on Twitter and tell them you or your kids would like to read more, you’re certainly welcome to!

Finally, I’m going to… Spain??

Yep, in July 2023, I’ll be at Celsius 232 (with Alma Katsu, too!) in Aviles, Spain, which should be super awesome. I speak… approximately none of the language, so I’ve got some work to do there, but they will of course have translators to make my guttural Pennsyltucky tongue sound like poetry.

ANYWAY.

I’m sure there’s more, but my brain is as janky as the world.

So, to close this post (and this blog) out for the year 2022, here are some of my favorite photos I’ve taken in the last 12 months —

All right that’s probably enough.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, NERDS

*waves*

*turns into a pillar of salt*

I Saw The Blue Goat Cat Fish People Sequel Movie, And It Was Definitely A Movie That I Saw

I have a theory as to why people kept going back to see the first Avatar in the theaters, and it has nothing to do with the beautiful CGI world or the powerful 3D effects. It has everything to do with simply trying to remember the thing you just spent a lot of money and time to see.

I mean, that’s the joke, right? The first movie was one of the biggest movies of all time, and yet left very little imprint on our pop culture consciousness. We don’t meme it. We don’t talk about it. We don’t think much about it. We can’t remember the character’s names. And so, I’m wondering now, did we return to the theater again and again just to try to recall it? To seek out some effect, some memory, some imprint upon us, because surely such a movie would offer that? Were we cuckoo bananapants? Did the movie even exist? Was it really just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing?

What I’m trying to say is, I saw Avatar 2: The Next One, and I don’t really have any feelings about it.

I spent three-plus hours in a theater.

I saw a movie.

A movie happened in front of my eyes.

Then I left the movie and now I have almost no feeling about it. Very little impression at all beyond the knowledge that I saw it and it exists. Probably.

Maybe this is just a pandemic effect. Hell, maybe I’m just depressed. But I got into the car with my son and wife and usually, we go see a movie (rarer now because, well, pandemic) and we talk about it on the drive home. That’s part of the great thing about seeing movies with other people: the conversation after.

But this talk? It umm, it wasn’t deep.

Son: “I liked it.”

Wife: “Yeah, it was good.”

Me: “It was certainly pretty in parts.”

And then…

A kind of collective sigh as we sought for more to say but there was no more to say, and so little more was said. We talked about other things.

Still, even now, I’m like, what the fuck. That movie was three fucking hours. More than that. And it cost, what, a hundred billion dollars to make. Surely, surely there’s more to say about it.

In trying to gather my thoughts, though, I’m less Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters certain that his sculpted pile of mashed potatoes means something and instead I’m increasingly aware this unsculpted pile of mashed potatoes means absolutely nothing at all and carries with it no cultural cachet or narrative meaning beyond the plop of pale starch it was, and is, and shall be.

That’s Avatar. A pale plop of narrative starch. Delicious, in its way. Satisfying in its moment. But beyond that, did I get anything more? I am full, but only temporarily. It was calories. I ate them. It is done now.

And yet! AND YET. And yet I try, again flailing for meaning, for memory, for something, for anything. So here are some impressions, some crumbs of thought brushed off the counter and into my cupped hand.

The frame rate change is super weird and doesn’t work.

For those who don’t know, it goes from (I think, I’m not going to look this up) 48 frames per second to 24 frames per second. We are used to 24 frames per second in films and it ostensibly clicks with our brain as it tricks our monkey minds into feeling more authentic, because it’s how our brains interpolate visual data. Or something. I dunno. So 48 is *does some quick math on cool calculator watch* twice the standard frame rate.

Put differently, you know how the very first thing you do when you get a new TV is find MOTION SMOOTHING and hit it with the heel of your shoe until it turns off and never can turn on again, and when you go over your elderly parents’ house and they have that shit still on you find yourself irrationally angry at them even though it’s not their fault, this is how the stupid TV showed up in their house? Yeah, James Cameron turns it back on for this movie. He undid all our hard collective work and said MOTION SMOOTHING IS THE WAY OF THE FUTURE.

Except, he then added as a caveat, I MEAN, SOMETIMES, I GUESS, because the movie never commits to this fully. I do not know how much of the movie is in this format, but I’d guess about… 50% of it. It switches back and forth, often multiple times in a single scene or sequence. Back and forth it flips and you never ever get settled into one frame rate. What that means is, you experience this jarring flip between:

“This looks like the slickest video game cutscene ever”

To

“Wait now this looks weird, like Claymation.”

Because it goes from eerily smooth to half that, which looks jerky, hitching, erratic. To clarify, this switch makes normal filmmaking at 24 frames-per-second look wrong somehow.

And the result is, neither looks “normal” for the movie because one minute it’s one thing, the next it’s another, and it keeps flip-flopping.

And for me this didn’t allow me to ever lose myself in the story. It constantly made my brain re-adjust to the visuals, so every few minutes I was forced to reacclimatize myself and willfully think about that acclimation.

There are times when it breaks through and that hyper-smooth filmmaking approaches actual beauty. But it doesn’t last for long and you ultimately realize none of this is real anyway and all of this is a big tech demo.

A thin, thin narrative gravy.

There’s the (approximated, paraphrased) saying of, “Trying to fit a 100-pound pig in a 10-pound bucket,” meaning a thing is overstuffed, crammed in, trying to do too much. Avatar 2 does not have this problem.

It has the opposite problem. There is a little baby piglet inside a cauldron. It is bleating. Its bleats echo in the hollow iron. The piglet is sad.

Cameron has crafted a huge storytelling container — a three-hour tour, so to speak — of Pandora. And he brings very little story to fit in it. The story is… fine. It’s there. Things happen, but when you chart the broad strokes, you can count them on the fingers of one hand. And the narrow strokes, the smaller character arcs, there aren’t many. They’re usually two-beat arcs. “This character is THIS, and now they’re THIS, the end.” Some have one only one beat. A narrative arc that is less an arc and more a single blip on a radar screen: ping.

When you chart out the story, it doesn’t even make sense in its entirety. In revisiting the story with my wife, I was like, “Wait, why did they do that again? Why did they go there?” And the response is mostly a shrug. “Because the movie wanted them to?” Which is probably a pretty accurate answer.

A lack of stickiness?

Some books, shows, movies — they’re sticky. Meaning, they stick to us. Good or bad or whatever, they live with us and it’s the thing that makes us care about them. We remember certain parts, certain characters, the way it made us feel. And I think the first film suffers in a way from a lack of that stickiness. Nothing really gets under your skin or buries itself in your mind — for good or ill, it just doesn’t resonate deeply. That’s okay, I guess, sometimes things are that way.

I think the sequel is even less sticky than the first one. When later my family talked about the movie more, we tried to discuss it — as one does — by using character names. And we had almost none of them. We remembered Jake Sully and Neytiri. We remembered the tiniest child. And the rest… no idea. I just looked them up now and without the CGI blue goat cat fish people faces to go with them, I couldn’t tell you who they were. I mean this with all seriousness: I have no memory of their names. Or the names of locations. Or any of it. It just slid off me, a fried egg from a non-stick pan. And I try to think, maybe this is just me, maybe this is the pandemic, certainly my brain has felt weird since all of this began — but I think back to movies this year I did like and I find them to have had a pretty sticky factor. I remember scenes and names and lines of movies for the most part. But this one I’m like, “The older brother. Wait, was he the younger brother? And the girl. The one who is Sigourney Weaver Junior for some reason. And the village elder. Him. That guy. No no the other one. And the bad guy, you know, the guy from Don’t Breathe, yeah, Commander Cumsack or whatever they call him. Colonel Quiddich? No. QUARICH. Right right right.”

It’s made all the worse that this movie is clearly a setup for the next 47 of these. Stuff happens but leaves little impact. And this movie undoes the larger Pandora-global effects of the first film without exploring what that even means. I dunno. It’s a movie. It happened. It was fine? It was fine.

This does not sound like a winning endorsement, Wendig.

Well, see, here’s the thing. I really like James Cameron and even when I don’t like a movie of his, I still appreciate the work that went into it. And some of his movies are some of my favorite movies.

This movie was made with an impeccable attention to detail and craft. I don’t know that it adds up to much, but it has some moments of genuine beauty and emotion. Maybe not as many as the movie intends, but they’re there. (The space whale storyline is proabably the one that stays with me. I remember the space whales, I remember the one’s name, even. Payakan! I might be spelling that wrong! But that’s the name!)

So, people ask, should I see it? Should I not see it?

My answer is —

If you’re intending to see it ever, then seeing it in the theater with the full 3D frame-rate big sound big screen IMAX or RPX thing — that’s the way to see it. Probably the only way. Maybe it’s better without all that dressing, but this is, I believe, Cameron’s intended way for you to see it, so if you’re going to see this movie one way or another, then you might as well skip out on a mortgage payment or two and take your family to check it out.

If you genuinely do not care, and I don’t blame you if you don’t?

Don’t go.

It’s fine? It’s fine. It’s perfectly fine. It’s a movie that exists and you will not be harmed by it (insert some conversation here about the problematic nature of this movie and how it even more than the first one appears to be co-opting specific indigenous cultures and though it’s certainly not my place to make assertions please note there is a boycott of the movie which is worth reading about here). It’s even quite pretty. It’s fine. It exists. It’s fine.

Anyway. I have a number of plot holes and spoilers I could talk about, but I honestly don’t know that I can muster the interest in understanding them, or even asking them in the first place? Suffice to say a number of things didn’t really make sense for me, but that’s probably not the point of the movie anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. If you’re one of those people who goes onto YouTube and enjoys watching like, video game graphic engine tech demos for Unreal Engine 9, then this is your movie. Enjoy the goat cat fish people movie.

Also buy my book Wayward or I die in the abyss. I hope it’s good. You might like it. I hope it’s quite sticky, narratively speaking, and even if it’s not, I covered it in strawberry jam so it is definitely actually sticky. Okay thank you goodbye.

The Bird Site Is Fucked

It is, I think, the sensation of a phantom limb: it itches, the limb that doesn’t exist anymore, and so I want to scratch it even though nothing will ever satisfy or resolve that sensation. It’s like how I sometimes want to call one of my parents even though moments later I am reminded, “That’s right, they’re both dead.” This is Twitter for me at this point. It’s a severed limb, a dead place, a broken tooth, and yet the old urge to poke at it remains present. So I go over there, even though I’m mostly gone from it, and I rubberneck — and oh boy, there’s always something to rubberneck. Twitter right now is a live camera feed watching a highway in an ice storm — you tune in and watch car crash after car crash, the constant shriek of metal, the spinning out of vehicles, carfires burning effulgent in the whiteout blizzard, and when you get a clear moment, when you squint, you realize every last one of those burning cars is a fucking Tesla.

I don’t need to regale the entire stretch of the Musky Reign so far, but the short and sweet is, a billionaire narcissist with skin thinner than shaved prosciutto stretched precariously over a honeydew melon is, nearly every hour of every day, cocainedly shoving more and more of Twitter into the shit-tubes. He’s re-platforming Nazis. He’s de-platforming journalists. He’s replying to every Arkham Asylum villain as if they’re serious pundits and thinkers. He’s winking at Q-Anon. And that’s just in the last few fucking days.

It isn’t going great.

It’s also hella glitchy. And bots are having a field day. I’ve gotten promoted tweets from accounts that are clearly faking real businesses — I saw on from a Dr. Marty’s Pet Food that had 1 follower, and was pretending to sell the dog food but leading you to a janky, insecure link that was absolutely not the website of that company, nor was it from the Twitter account of that company. Not that blue-checks even matter anymore, because you can buy one for a back alley handjob. Plus, Twitter is forcing me to see Tesla tweets and Musk tweets — I don’t get them as promoted tweets. I get them just in my feed, as if I follow those accounts, which I most certainly do not. Hell, I blocked Musk — and mysteriously, he’s unblocked, now. What fun.

Twitter is no longer working as intended. Maybe it’s working as intended for him, though even there, I’m dubious. (His tantrum last night in Twitter Spaces — before he swiftly deleted all of Twitter Spaces — is telling.)

Like Tesla stock, and arguably like the cars themselves, he’s crashing and burning the whole thing. Maybe on purpose. I dunno. Probably to some degree on purpose, though I don’t know that he knows he’s crashing it and letting it burn. Part of me thinks he’s simply following his egomaniacal urges and trying to apply autocratic control over any space online that has ever been mean to him. A user suggested he buy Substack to control the “narrative layer” of the Internet, and he said he was open to the idea, because really, that’s what he wants. He wants to control the flow of information, and will make lots of lofty proclamations about free speech and both sides and wank-wank-wank, but really he just wants to make sure you’re not being mean to him or telling people where his plane has flown recently. It is deeply pathetic. We should expect his $99 NFT collection in short order.

And all of this would be fun to watch if he weren’t also using it to shield himself in a ring of Neo-Nazis and insurrectionists and *-gater types. He’s invited every Wormtongue in the digital kingdom to whisper in his ear, and he’s listening. And he’s using it to elevate antisemitism, transphobia, crusades against his enemies, and so on. Which means the longer we stay there, the more we are also helping to elevate it, because at the end of the day, Twitter is a platform that relies on advertising. And advertising will be propped up by numbers, and those numbers are not just about users, but about user engagement. So, if we’re over there engaging wildly and wantonly, over time that’s going to give cover to advertisers to come back. And it’ll be difficult to say to, f’rex, Apple, “Hey, are you sure you want your advertising next to all this bigotry?” while also tweeting from the very stage that is centering that bigotry. All our tweets are advertising, in a sense, and so one wonders if it’s really fair to ask advertisers to stop using the site if we cannot commit to the same.

As noted before, I understand the impulse to think you can somehow claim Twitter is “ours” and rah-rah-rah, we will defend our communities and fight Musk on the digital beaches, but they’re his digital beaches, your tweets are his tweets, he has the whole thing. It’s a private company and he mostly likes that you’re mad because it creates engagement. And engagement makes money.

I don’t begrudge folks for not leaving. As noted, I’m still technically there, and I don’t intend to delete. We have communities there, and for artists and authors and such, it’s a place we’ve long used to try to peddle the weird things we’ve made, and losing that is a very serious loss. So, there’s no harm or foul in continuing to be there, but I do think we are at the point you need to vigorously be planning your escape vector and eyeing that Eject Button. I’ll continue to RT anti-Muskian stuff because, fuck that fucking guy. I’ll continue to try to use the site as a loose and shallow vector for promotion and signal boosting other good books and such. But beyond that I’m not going to use it to provide quote-unquote CONTENT. I’m not looking for virality or deep thoughts and I’m not gonna post photos or anything anymore. My usage there continues to dwindle and I hope you see you all elsewhere in the grand cyber-veldt.

(Failing all else, maybe I’ll just buy a phone line and start a BBS. Start that sweet, sweet SysOp life once more, baby. Woo! Retro! Lo-fi internet!)

Hive Social is back up, apparently resolving some janky security issues. I do not vouch for it or its security, but I’ll use it because, I dunno, I have to try something and for all its jank, I still like it. (Note, it’s app only, no desktop. Requires a new update to use.)

I’m at Post, too, @chuckwendig there. (Desktop only, no app.)

Of course, Instagram, @chuck_wendig.

Mastodon, sure, I’m there riding the elephant, @chuckwendig at mastodon dot social, link here.

Exodus and exile continues.

See you on the spiderwebs, frandos.

The Non-Comprehensive Non-Exhaustive List Of Cool Stuff I Liked In The Year 2022

If you are at all like me, time means nothing anymore. The pandemic has broken any and all sense of temporal flow I once had. My wife likens it to defragging a hard drive — the pandemic was such an erratic time that our brains defragged, moving all the relevant chunks together and largely ignoring the chunks where either nothing happened or where it contains stuff we wanna forget, which frees up a lot of space. Great, except? That space is a void of slippery timelessness.

So, trying to remember THINGS THAT HAPPENED THIS YEAR IN PARTICULAR is tough. Especially when it comes to remembering what I liked, read, listened to, and the like. Triply so when it comes to thinking about books that I read, because I also read a lot of books that aren’t out yet, or read 2022 releases in 2021, and as such, wires get crossed.

Meaning, I’m going to miss some stuff here. And I apologize for that.

BUT!

Still.

I saw stuff, I read stuff, I heard stuff, and a lot of stuff was good, so I figure I’ll make the valiant-if-completely-destined-to-fail effort to put some of that stuff in front of you.

Here, then, is a short, non-comprehensive, non-exhaustive list of COOL STUFF.

Books

aka, THE MOST IMPORTANT SECTION BECAUSE BOOKS ARE GOOD

I don’t read as much as I used to, in part because I don’t have the time, and my eyes get tired, and I also read a lot slower than I used to. Which lets me savor work more but also, just not read as much, which sucks a bit.

Still.

Here are some of the very cool books I read and liked this year.

Books

HIDE, Kiersten White (tense thriller, twisted American fable, true fave here)

MAYBE WE’LL MAKE IT, Margo Price (music memoir, anybody creative should read this, all about the love of the things you make and do)

THE VIOLENCE, Delilah S. Dawson (holy shit what the fuck, this book is a whole damn journey, don’t be turned away by the pandemic side of it)

THE PALLBEARER’S CLUB, Paul Tremblay (softer touch Tremblay, sweeter and funnier but he’s still gonna stick that knife in because Paul is a monster)

THE DEVIL TAKES YOU HOME, Gabino Iglesias (let’s just call this what it is: a real bolt-cutter of a book, it’ll gut you, IYKYK)

AN IMMENSE WORLD, Ed Yong (one of our greatest science writers, will make you really appreciate the animal world and why we need to protect it)

GHOST EATERS, Clay McLeod Chapman (my highest compliment is that it reminds me of playing World of Darkness games, and this vibes like a truly legendary Wraith: the Oblivion or Geist game)

THE FERVOR, Alma Katsu (haunting historical horror, written with elegant prose and heartbreaking vibes)

NO GODS FOR DROWNING, Hailey Piper (horror noir fantasy all rolled up in one, vibed kinda like ARCANE on Netflix a little but definitely bloodier, good stuff)

THE TREES GREW BECAUSE I BLED THERE, Eric LaRocca (I wrote the intro to this, suffice to say this is body horror that slides between your ribs)

THE HOLLOW KIND, Andy Davidson (creeping crawling roots-and-shoots mom-and-son-move-into-old-family-house story, goes places you don’t expect)

MARY, Nat Cassidy (spooky serial killery middle-age ladyey stuff, prose pops and the hook sinks in right from the first page)

THE CLACKITY, Lora Senf (middle grade, more serial killery fun, but also monstrous and creepy and really shows how far you can push MG horror)

BURNING QUESTIONS, Margaret Atwood (I mean, c’mon)

THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF APPLES IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA, Daniel Bussey (yes I bought a seven-volume apple encyclopedia, you shut your goddamn mouth and don’t judge me)

Also a lot of books that came out in 2021 or before like Mallory O’Meara’s fantastic GIRL DRINKS or Christopher Mims’ ARRIVING TODAY or Matt Siegel’s SECRET HISTORY OF FOOD. Plus I blurbed stuff that isn’t coming out until 2023 like Grady Hendrix’s horror-humor-heart trifecta of HOW TO SELL A HAUNTED HOUSE or the classic-feeling horror of Chris Goldens ALL HALLOW’S EVE or Eric LaRocca’s debut novel or Jaime Green’s non-fict THE POSSIBILITY OF LIFE. And again I’m sure there’s shit-tons of stuff I’m missing.

Finally, I just started WHITE HORSE by Erika Wurth, and so far it’s a thumb’s UP.

Movies

Everything Everywhere All At Once, Nope, X, The Adam Project, Confess Fletch, Top Gun Maverick, Barbarian, Emily the Criminal, Prey

TV Shows

White Lotus, Severance, Andor, What We Do In The Shadows, Yellowjackets, Peacemaker, Bad Sisters, Reboot, Stranger Things

(I’m behind on some great shows, too, like Better Call Saul, Abbot Elementary, Russian Doll, Reservation Dogs)

Music

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cool It Down

Metric, Formentera

K. Flay, Inside Voices / Outside Voices

The Linda Lindas, Growing Up

Oceanator, Nothing’s Ever Fine

Mitski, Laurel Hell

Alice Merton, S I D E S

Winnetka Bowling League, Pulp EP

Jack White, Entering Heaven Alive

Games

Inscryption (PS5), Stray, Cult of the Lamb, Vampire Survivors, Elden Ring, Beacon Pines, Goat Simulator 3, and also I got a Steam Deck and damn if that isn’t a pretty nifty device.

ANYWAY!

Thassit.

What did you like this year? Drop in the comments, recommend something. Anything! Across these categories or… like, literally anything, I don’t care, go hog-wild, get crazy, YOU ARE BOUND BY NO MORTAL LAW

Melissa Olson Delivers The Terribleminds Gift Guide For 2022

So, as noted in an earlier post, I just didn’t have time to put together a gift guide for 2022, but then friend and author and possible hallucination Melissa F. Olson was like HELL NO YOU AREN’T GETTING AWAY THAT EASY, WENDIG, and I was like, whoa, aggressive, Melissa, also how did you get in my pantry? And she was like HERE IS A GIFT GUIDE YOU WILL POST THIS OR I WILL TAKE OFF YOUR OTHER THUMB, and I like that thumb? So I’m posting this. Please take her seriously. Even if she’s a hallucination, she’s very dangerous!

***

Hello, friends, I’m Melissa F. Olson, urban fantasy author and longtime blah blah blah you can read my bio at the end, let’s get to the presents.

So you need a last-minute gift for the writer in your life…or, you ARE the writer in your life, and you don’t know what to put on your wish list, and you’re a little tired of receiving decent pens and a bunch of those fancy notebooks that you’ll never actually write in because they seem way too pretty to fill with the spidery dregs of the inside of your skull. Relatable!

I, a longtime devotee of Chuck’s annual Gifts For Writers List, am here to help. As your new, only slightly unhinged personal shopper, let me present some last-minute items you can still get in time for Christmas:

Bath Crayons

Ooh, it seems weird right off the bat, but hear me out: Writers famously get ideas when it’s very inconvenient to write them down: while driving, in the shower, when we’re just about to fall asleep, etc (Chuck, insert something sciency about the brain relaxing here, okay, I can’t be bothered to Google). Now, you CAN buy fancy waterproof paper and pens that go in the shower, but it’s way more fun to spend $6 on bath crayons. Use the shower walls to jot down ideas, inspirational quotes, to-do list, whatever, and when you’re ready you can erase it with your hand and a little water.

(Bonus: when I’m on deadline, I often use my crayon to make a note of the day I last washed my hair, because Deadline Melissa is sloppy as hell.)

Hand Helpers

Let’s take care of our tools, shall we? No, not the brain, there are drugs for that; I’m talking about your hands. Chuck loves to recommend fancy-pants pens…and I admit, I absolutely love the Baron Fig Squire, which I first learned about on his 2019 gift list. But if you write a lot, or if, like me, you have issues with arthritis or other hand problems, putting a grip on that sucker is a life-saver (well, it’s a hand-saver, but we’re writers who bring actual imaginary WORLDS to LIFE, so by the transitive property of–you know what, you get it).

I like having this squishy purple thingy on my Squire, but there are dozens of options available for the pen of your choice. Perhaps you can make a little sample set (a “flight of grips,” if you will) for your writer to try out. It’s a nice way to show that you care about them and their ability to grip things going forward. You can also just buy the Super Big Fat Pen, which comes on a lanyard, although it’s not the delightful rollerball experience of a refillable pen. Warning: Do not let the Big Fat Pen fall into the hands of toddlers. They will LOVE that grip and your walls will not love you.

Here’s another great way to take care of hands: Chuck has mentioned fingerless gloves AND fun book clothing before, but it took me, the next generation apprentice Sith gift list writer, to bring together this thought masterpiece: the Storiarts fingerless gloves. Unlike CHUCK’S recommendation, these gloves are made from a lightweight, jersey-type material, so they keep your hands warm from freezing cold laptop metal without overheating or getting in the way of the ole typity-type. Plus they come with actual words from any number of great works of literature, so you can glance down if you feel you’re getting a little too full of yourself. (I’ve got Dracula, but I’ve been eyeing Frankenstein so I can run around wearing one of each.) Storiarts also has, I don’t know, scarves and blankets and shit, but the gloves are the coolest product.

On-the-Go Aids

Writers are often a nomadic workforce: those of us who can’t afford swanky work sheds tend to set up shop at libraries, coffee shops, cafes, etc, like pale, lonely word-nerds questing for social recognition and/or working in the car while we wait around to pick up children. I bought this Sonic Standing Pen Case several years ago, and I love it so much, I want it buried with me when I die (just kidding–we’re going to be cremated together). It’s a pencil bag that you can unzip and flip open to stand up as a pencil cup. When you’re done working, or you need to pack up and sprint to the Starbucks bathroom, just flip and zip and throw it in your laptop bag.

Another great on-the-go helper is a decent lap desk. The one I use is a little pricy at $55, but I’ve had it for over two years and it looks fresh out of the box, despite floating around my chaos habitat being used as a fast food tray, child art creator, pillow fight shield, etc. I bring it with me on long car trips (in which I am NOT driving) and curl up with it on the couch when I don’t feel like sitting at my desk. Actually, as I’m reading this back I realize that the lap desk and I may have a Relationship, and you know what, I’m okay with that.

CHUCK SAYS I GET TO SNEAK-PLUG MY BOOKS HERE

so please try one, or all, they’re delicious and — this is true — ZERO calories what a deal.

[okay as the person who runs this website I should probably also not-so-sneakily plug MY books like okay fine Damn Fine Story is probably good for writers and also there’s Wayward so that’s fun, or you could preorder my new writing book, Gentle Writing Advice, out in June, or there’s always Dust & Grim for the kids because hey kids apparently like Christmas too — cdw]

Cool-ass Lanyards

You know what us writers like to do? We convene. We convene like NOBODY’s business, at writing conferences, conventions, expos, etc. Our man Chuck convenes fairly constantly.  And when we convene, we usually have to wear badges on a lanyard around our necks –which means it’s the one thing everyone at the con has, and everyone else sees. Instead of using the crappy free lanyard that comes with convention registration, your writer could be using a cool-ass lanyard that will help them build confidence and start conversations while they strut the convention floor. Get them something that celebrates their favorite fandom, identifies them as a book nerd, or allows them to literally rappel out of a bad panel if needed. There might not be time before Christmas, but for extra gift-giving bonus points, you could even get lanyards printed with the name of their book or website.

For example, here is a picture of Chuck and me. One of us is wearing a boring freebie lanyard, and one of us got a rad lanyard printed with a bunch of her book covers. I ask you, who’s the greater success, really?

The Organised Writer by Antony Johnston

Chuck often recommends “craft books,” aka books that can help you write better, but I want to switch it up with this great volume on setting up your writing space, time, and business, written by the author of novels, comic books, and video games. (You can tell Antony is very smart and British because he spells “organized” with an “s” and just FLAUNTS it.) This book is chock-full of practical advice like how to organize paper files, run a project calendar, clear your mind before working, and so on. If you feel like your whole writing life is a slapdash attempt to peck a few words into a laptop while dashing around your house being chased by obligation to the tune of the Benny Hill theme song, this is the book to help you work that shit out.

And remember to hydrate

Chuck always goes on about coffee (too gross) and chocolate (too obvious), but you know what writers need even more universally? More water, preferably from an absolutely bitchin’ water bottle. Writers essentially have two modes: sitting at a desk all day or running around a reading/convention all day, and in both cases we definitely won’t drink enough water. If you really want to help and support your family writer, try getting them a great water bottle they can use for hot coffee OR cold water (I recommend Tervis or Hydroflask), plus a few writer-themed vinyl stickers and a bottle of Mio (Personal favorite is orange vanilla). It’s a great way to keep us alive so we can finish that next chapter.

***

Melissa F. Olson is the author of sixteen books in the Old World universe, the PI mystery The Big Keep, and numerous short stories and novellas, including the Nightshades trilogy for Tor.com. Her journalism and academic work has been published in The International Journal of Comic Art, the compilation Images of the Modern Vampire, Litreactor.com, and Tor.com, among other places.

Melissa has been a writing teacher, English professor, and TEDx presenter, but she now divides her time between writing, editing and attending the occasional convention, where she speaks about issues related to genre, feminism, disability, and parenting. Read more about her work and life at MelissaFOlson.com.

Why I’m Done Using And Boosting AI Art

Let’s just put it out there and up front — earlier, I was glad to play around with AI art, but that has ended. I have no intention at present of mucking around with AI art, signal-boosting it, or supporting it. I had a subscription to Midjourney, and I canceled it.

Now, to rewind a little —

I think AI art is pretty cool.

I know, I know — I just said, but I won’t support it, and that’s true.

But I think it’s neat, in a general sense. It’s like, we can make COMPUTER ROBOT GHOSTS do all kinds of cool things for us — they can tell us the weather, show us how to get to the mall, I can yell at my car to turn on the heat and it’ll totally do it, Gmail can already predict the response I’m going to make and start to prep it for me. The robot ghosts are cool. So, the ability to say, HEY ROBOT GHOST, SHOW ME WEREWOLF PIKACHU USING A NEW POKEMON MOVE CALLED “CORUSCATING ELECTRIC ANUS” ON A KAIJU VERSION OF JERRY SEINFELD and then somehow it sorta does it, well, I don’t hate that.

Now, admittedly, when I started mucking about with AI art in the long-times-ago epoch of, mmm, six months ago, what it produced was often fiddly and hilarious and straight-up fucking weird. It would still have eyeballs in places where there shouldn’t be. Some guy’s face might look like a smear of paint, and his hand would have sixteen fingers. You might squint and see Sophia from the Golden Girls mysteriously hiding in the wallpaper. It felt a bit like you watching a robot dream. Like you were privy to the growth of its creative mind.

(It’s a lie, of course. There’s no robot dreaming; that is a romantic, anthropomorphic notion.)

But it didn’t take long for the results to get… good. Real good. Freaky good. You plug in something and what returns is a foursquare array of nearly exactly what you asked for, in a variety of art styles and modes. Which, one might argue, is quite the point of this whole affair, and I suppose it is, though I’ll also note for my mileage it also kinda defeats if not the point, than rather, the delight of having a robot puke up something just super fucking weird instead of precisely what you asked for. We were training the robot well. And it was learning fast.

And now, you see the so-called AI art everywhere, and you also see those who are mad at so-called AI art everywhere. And the latter category is often artists. Not always! But often enough.

As such, I’m going to side with the artists.

(Spoiler: you should always side with the artists.)

I’ll talk about why in a moment, though I will note here there is, of course, a nuanced discussion to be had here. I don’t think people using AI art are like, Cyber Hitlers or anything. I used it quite well looking for inspiration for my Evil Apples book (which has a title and I’ll soon tell you what it is, I promise), and it… actually worked, and given how many iterations it took to get that inspiration, I could not have easily paid an artist for that essentially throwaway act. I’ve seen some trans friends say that they like how some of the AI profile art makes them look and feel, and that’s pretty wonderful. I have artist friends who use it and like it and find it valuable — it is a tool to them, not a curse. Technology also tends to expedite tasks while also leaving human workers behind in ways that are sometimes good and sometimes bad and most often somewhere in the middle — the ability to have language translated for us is pretty useful in a broadly human sense, even as it puts actual translators out of work. And finally, I think we as people seize on beautiful things and weird things and odd memes, and AI art allows us to do all of that, allowing us to play and explore and just be inspired in weird ways. And connect with each other as we do so.

But, but, but.

But.

BUT.

I’m still saying, let’s cool it on the AI art.

And here’s why.

1. First, just watch Charlotte’s video here. It covers a lot of things I’d say, except smarter and cooler because she is smarter and cooler than I am.

2. It is demoralizing for young artists. Trust me when I tell you, it’s hard to muster the interest in making new art when you can poke a computer to do it for you with a sentence or three. Yes, there remains value in art for art’s sake, but I think if you were a young artist viewing a future in Making Art, this is definitely going to give you pause. Again, I know this because I’ve seen this exact feeling emerge. Now, once more, I know there is nuance to all of this — I’m sure professional photographers winced when every jabroni got a digital camera and could take 40,000 photos in a weekend. I’ve no doubt that musicians of a certain age felt like I DON’T LIKE THAT THESE YOUNG KIDS TODAY CAN JUST TAP BUTTONS AND MAKE SOME BEEP-BOOP MUSIC ON THEIR SYNTHESCISSORS. But I also note that AI art isn’t that. Digital photography is still photography. Electronic music is still music. AI art… well, this leads me to the next point.

3. No, this doesn’t make you an artist and I’m seeing way too many defenders of AI art take this line. Some stay back at the line of, “I’m now an art director, art-directing a robot,” which, ennnh. Okay? But some march full on ahead and are saying, hey, I’m an artist now too. Which… nnnghhhh, are you? I admit, this gives me a pit in my stomach because I don’t like telling people what art is or is not and what makes an artist. That kind of gatekeeping curdles my milk more than a little. Still, as someone who has used Midjourney and other AI art makers, I sure don’t think of myself as an artist. If anything, I was just a writer jamming ideas into a techbro’s art engine. I didn’t feel like an artist. I sure wouldn’t call myself an artist having used Midjourney. I guess if I was using it to generate images that I then sketched or manipulated, that counts — but to do that, I’d still have to feed the beast, and therein lies part of the problem.

4. Feeding the beast means feeding an engine that feeds techbros and not artists. That’s the heart of the problem, really. Artists are like dinosaurs getting mulched into oil to fuel this thing. And you can see it when the AI art reproduces material with artifacts of signatures and watermarks. It’s clearly harvesting pre-existing art. It’s not dreaming up new art. It’s using their art, human art, and nobody is getting compensated, nobody is getting their due for being the literal seed-bed for this entire thing. The only people compensated are tech people. The people who make the engine. They’re the ones glad to press the oil out of the artists to run the machine.

5. No, this isn’t the same thing as “being inspired by artists.” That’s one of the lines of argument that doesn’t well with me. “It’s not copying artists, it’s being inspired by them, same as a person would be.” Except it’s not that, and you know it’s not that. We’ve fallen for the same anthropomorphic bullshit I spewed above about this being some PRECIOUS ROBOT DREAMING, and AWWW SEE THE ART-BOT IS INSPIRED BY YOU, but that’s not what it is. It’s not sentient. It’s not alive. It’s not a person making artistic decisions. It’s software operating on algorithmic decisions driven by, again, engines of tech, not creatures of art. “But it’s just like Andy Warhol!” No it’s jolly well fucking not. And you know that. You know Andy Warhol was a person who, like him or not, made decisions about what images he used, how he would subvert them, how that would put the work in front of other humans. He was a human making human art from corporate material in order to affect other humans.

6. And of course some people are choosing this as a battleground to litigate the problems with our current copyright system. Look, we’re all out here making choices and sometimes those choices are choices that benefit our urges and interests rather than helping out the greater good, right? From water bottles to Spotify to this or that, we are morally compromised daily because it is difficult to get a clean 100% record on Best Human Practices. But there’s a special kind of person who then justifies their choices with a lot of bluster about how REALLY they’re actually doing the RIGHT THING — “I voted for Jill Stein because something-something third-parties.” And you’re seeing it now with this AI art thing. “Well, copyright in America is poisonous and we have to Defeat Capitalism and really artists should be paid a Universal Basic Income,” and yeah, okay, good point, except that’s not a thing right now and this certainly won’t make it a thing. Yes, copyright has its problems, but that doesn’t mean you should hand it over to a tech company to do with as they see fit. Yes, capitalism is fraught and fucked up but paying an AI art subscription isn’t you throwing a Molotov cocktail through a bank window. Artists are already people on the fringes and they deserve to be paid for their efforts. They deserve to eat. To pay rent. To buy cool things. Hell, I’d much rather an artist get rich than Tech Bro #483, okay?

7. There is an adjacency (is that a word? too late) to NFT/crypto culture that I find… off-putting. There’s an NFT publishing company which, I’ll be honest, seems super fucking scammy to me, and most of their Very Special Super Rare Non-Fungible Book Cover Tokens are… just random AI art. Ennh. Ugh. Yuck.

8. Finally, the biggest reason of all: because more artists are asking us to leave AI art behind. I dunno. I’m not an artist. So Imma listen to them when I can.

So, anyway, them’s my thoughts. I suspect (or at least, hope) this AI art thing burns out. I think we should share actual human art. No, I don’t think you’re Il Monstre for using AI art. I think artists should be compensated. It’s the holidays, buy their prints, commission them to do something cool, whatever. We humans are why the human experience matters. Side with WONDERFUL MEATBAG ARTISTS, not TECH BRO MAGPIES. Okay? Okay.

(And yes, I recognize they’re coming for writers, too. Our off-ramp is a few miles down the road yet, but the car is speeding up, not slowing down.)

And speaking of writers —

Hey, Wayward is out if you want a cool GIFTY BOOK THING for folks. (And curiously, it’s a book that has a lot of thoughts about artificial intelligence!)

Cut off date for ordering signed, personalized books of mine from Doylestown Bookshop is, I believe, end of day 12/12, so hop to it if that’s what you want.

And if you liked it, please talk about it, yell about it, shake people and demand they buy it, that sort of thing. Word-of-mouth is the most vital resource we have, and in this era of fracturing social media, it counts double, even triple.

I’m currently dialed back on Twitter (and locked down too), so I may not see stuff over there quickly, and if you’d care to share this there, that’s a-okay by me. (Twitter: another one of those questionable things these days. I’ve more thinking to do about that place, but for now, I’m busy with book edits and will take the break until after the holidays.)

Also, finally, for those looking to see me at the Bethlehem/Easton B&N this weekend — we’re going to reschedule it. Lot of illness going around (including in our own house), so feels like it’s best to maybe kick that can to after the holidays. Look for a rescheduling of that event into Jan or Feb!

What To Know About Wayward (Dogs, Dolly Parton, Divining the Future, And More)

I get emails. Realistically, I’ve been getting a certain kind of email since around, ohh, March of 2020, which often wants to dance around the question — or ask it directly — of whether or not I *booming voice* PREDICTED THE FUTURE. After all, in Wanderers, out in 2019, I wrote about a global pandemic that comes from bats that releases in a contentious election year during the rise of Christofascist white nationalism aaaand, well, yeah. Obviously, this isn’t the goal. I’m not setting out to predict the future, despite, um, also predicting Elon Musk was gonna be a bad guy (see: Invasive, 2017). Rather, I’m trying to talk about the present, hoping to contextualize what’s going on around me and, even more myopically, in my own crazy head. Like, I got anxieties, and I’m gonna put them on each page like a smashed butterfly.

Wayward is, of course, not a book I really intend to be itself a predictive engine either, despite one of its characters being a predictive intelligence called Black Swan. Still, I get a lot of questions over email — or at the book events I’ve done recently — and I thought, hey, why not talk about some of this stuff. Questions not just about the prediction stuff but about the book in general.

So, let’s do this.

Chuck, what the fuck did you unleash this time??

I have no idea. I will say that this book contains very little Actual Fucking Pandemic. It is not fresh pandemic. It is old, now-finished pandemic. It’s the world thereafter. (Five years after, actually.)

In fact, this book is way more about the plague of artificial intelligence rather than the plague of, um, plague. The virus isn’t a virus. It’s what can be wrought by artificial intelligence when it’s allowed to go unchecked, for better or for worse. Thankfully, I don’t think this will really be a big thing in the news —

*checks news*

Uhhh

*quickly closes news*

*checks social media*

Uhhhhhhh

*shuts down computer, throws it into the yard, lets the rain kill it*

Goddamnit, Wendig. What sentient machine hell did you set upon us?

Nothing, obviously — even in Wanderers, it was clear they were training Black Swan on making content (the book contains recipes and poems and such), which is not a notion I made up, obviously, and in fact, the expert in talking about such things is easily Janelle Shane, whose book You Look Like A Thing And I Love You is a wonderfully weird examination of this. So, I know right now it’s a bit of a boilover in terms of OH MY GOD ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS MAKING SORTA GOOD CONTENT NOW OH GOD OH SHIT, and I think that fear is (somewhat) warranted and I think it’s very important to have these conversations but I am definitely not having that conversation right now.

(I note though I’ve stopped using the AI Art generators for a whole host of reasons. That I’ll talk about soon enough.)

Definitely don’t go read this story about Loab, the creepy woman haunting the art made by artificial intelligence, though. I warned you. Don’t click it.

(You clicked it, didn’t you.)

Can’t you just write a book about puppies and save us all the hassle?

That has been the joke, quite often, and it’s why I put a dog in Wayward. A golden retriever. Gumball, the Very Good Boy.

Oh god, you kill the dog don’t you.

At present, there is no entry for Wayward at the vital online resource, Does The Dog Die, but certainly someone here could feel free to add one.

But, since you probably wanna know now —

Here’s the answer in ROT13 cipher.

Thzonyy gur Irel Tbbq Obl qbrf abg va snpg qvr, naq ur fheivirf gur obbx vagnpg. Ohg, yvxr nyy punenpgref va guvf obbx, Thzonyy qrsvavgryl tbrf guebhtu fbzr fuvg. Fbzr erny rzbgvbany fuvg. Ohg ur’f svar ng gur raq.

Plug that in at ROT13.com and you’re good to go.

I note the book is actually very animal-heavy. Which, I think, makes a sort of sense: as humanity has waned, the wild rises back up. Plus, I’m fundamentally lazy and greedy as a writer and I love to use things that interest me and delight me, so putting in foxes and wolves and other such critters is fun for me. It’s why the book contains so much rock-and-roll too. References and such. Hell, Dolly Parton is a character in the book. Sorta.

You leave Dolly Parton alone, you monster!

That’s not a question, but I’ll answer it anyway. She’s not a huge character in the book and it’s more that there are stories about Dolly Parton in the book told by another character. It’s that she has survived the end of the world and is still out there, Doing Good Things, and also, she’s Fighting Apocalypse Nazis in her own very Dolly Parton way, and I had a lot of fun writing that.

Though I also note there’s a whole bit in there about her and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which was also news recently, so. Um. Yeah. Oops?

Don’t lie. Is this book just really depressing? It’s about the end of the world after a global pandemic, for shit’s sake. Is it just an 800-page journey through the streets of Bummertown?

It sounds like it would be. Apocalyptic novels can be, of course. You read Cormac’s THE ROAD and ha ha, wow, that still lives on in some dark untouchable place inside of my soul. It’s like a tumor they can’t excise. Wonderful book, but that one hurts.

I talk about this in the acknowledgments of the book, but I had a really hard time… coming to the page on this initially. I was set to write it right as the pandemic started and when I went to access this story, all that met me on the screen was a howling void. This wasn’t writer’s block in the traditional way — it wasn’t just noodling over a story problem or a lack of confidence. It was like reaching for the milk in the fridge and finding someone already drank all of it. You remember how during the pandemic sometimes something would simply be not available? Toilet paper, for instance? It was like that. I went to the Story Store and the shelves were fucking empty, oh well, go home.

I don’t know that this was depression or anxiety, precisely, either? It was a kind of creative nothingness. Later I would realize that it was like breaking a bone. We were all broken and busted, and some people were able to soldier on and use that time creatively, and some of us were not. My creative leg was broken and I needed rest, and when that rest was over, I couldn’t sprint, but had to hobble about until everything fully healed.

When it did, and I set to writing this book, I realized that my experiences with the pandemic needed to be a part of it — a lens through which to see this story. And the most vital resource was, for me, hope. Not necessarily hope in systems or hope in some larger cosmic sense but rather, hope in communities, hope in friends, hope in spaces both small and strange. And it was about joy, too. Finding it. Seizing it. Cultivating it willfully when it would not be found. Joy was like those sourdough starters we were all growing in jars — trying to find simple ways to summon joy and let it grow effervescent in whatever quantity we could manage. Then trying to let that joy feed us without killing it in turn.

(Spoiler: I ended up murdering my sourdough starter on purpose. I grew to resent it. This has nothing to do with joy, and is not a metaphor.)

So, writing Wayward was very much about having characters finding hope and joy in troubled times, and seeking new beginnings after what felt like an ending. And it’s also about… you know, the guilt that can come of that, too, of finding and experiencing joy amid tumult. But hope is a real throughline for the book. I didn’t set out to write a dire, nihilistic story. I don’t have that in me right now.

That’s not to say it’s not a book with some tough stuff going down. It is a science-fiction novel with horror as its heart, and I embrace that. I don’t think you get to have the hope and the joy without the horror in a book like this. I only want you to know that the battle is ongoing. Hope has a chance. In this book and maybe, too, outside this book, too.

Anyway. I’ll let Alex White’s review at Tor.com speak to some of this —

“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.”

They understand the book better than maybe I even do, or did, and it’s (like their review of Wanderers) one of my favorite reviews of my books ever written. I feel very lucky to have received a review like that. And I feel very lucky that you might have picked up the book or are considering picking it up.

And here of course I note that if you’re able to share this, I’d be happy for it — I’m off Twitter through the new year, at least, and not really sure where my social media home will be besides this very blog going forward, what with Post being a bit boring, and Hive being a bit erm unstable.

If you’re looking to nab a copy of the book, you should check with your local indie bookstore, of course. I also can sign and personalize copies that can be sent to you — just buy from Doylestown Bookshop and let ’em know in the notes of the order. (Or call it in.) Bookshop.org is also a good place to nab. Your local library is also a wonderful place where the books live.

Thanks for reading.

Black Swan says, wake up.

What’s Up In Wacky Wild Wendigworld

WACKY WILD WENDIGWORLD: A new amusement park! Corkscrew through an apple on the WINDING WORM! Soar through the sky on the BIRDWATCHER EXPRESS! Test your stamina and lose your soul and RIDE THE BEARD.

I dunno. Shut up.

Let’s see. What’s going on?

This Sunday! December 4th! 3pm! I’m at Nowhere Coffee in Allentown, PA, talking to WFMZ’s Bo Koltnow about mah books (and Wayward specifically) on behalf of Let’s Play Books. Buy books. Bring books. I’ll sign books. I’ll eat books. Wait not that last one. Details here.

On Saturday December 10th, I’ll also be at B&N in Easton which is actually Bethlehem, or is it B&N Bethlehem but it’s actually Easton? I dunno. It’s in the Lehigh Valley! It’s this store right here. That’s at 1pm. Again: Wayward! Books! You! Me! Signing! Talking! Perhaps an erratic Tik-Tok dance! Wait is there a hyphen in Tik-Tok! TikTok? Fuck, I dunno. This is why Jesus invented copy editors. Which I don’t have for this blog. Shit.

Also, in addition to being a newly-minted New York Times Bestseller holy crap, Dust & Grim is on this year’s Lone Star Reading List put forth by the Texas Library Association, alongside such wonderful authors as Lora Senf, Dhonielle Clayton, Alex London, and others. Big honor, so thank you, TLA!

Finally, I remind folks that if they’re looking for signed and personalized copies of Wayward (or any of my books) and you’re not coming to the events above, Doylestown Bookshop can facilitate and have the book sent to you wherever you may be. The cut off for this is, as I’m told, December 12th!

I’m also really glad that readers seem to be digging the book. Thanks for the love over social media about it and please don’t hesitate to TELL ME MORE because your comments give me life. Also leave a review. Also buy me candy. I mean, since we’re asking for things.

Oh! Finally, this’ll I think be the first year I’m not doing a gift guide here at terribleminds? I was intending to do it this week, but I got horsekicked by a rough bout of stomach nastiness (the kind where you have to ask, “am I going to shit myself while vomiting?”) and uhhh it wasn’t super great? Plus, I’m under an ever-tightening deadline on edits for MY EVIL APPLE HORROR NOVEL (which now I think has an official title that I’ll share soon). Certainly previous gift guides are pretty solid still, honestly, and here’s the one from 2021.

ANYWAY OKAY BYE HAVE A GOOD WEEKEND, stay safe out there, seems like there’s a hundred different ways to get sick right now, including, y’know, that old chestnut, COVID-19. Try not to die! Love you! Bye!

The Walking Ghost Phase Of Twitter, And Where The Hell Do We Go From Here

The walking ghost phase is, for those not in the know, when one suffers a heroic dose of radiation and appears to return to full health before eventually expiring badly. It is a time of false hope before certain death.

It feels like Twitter is in that phase, right now. That might be dramatic, but Musk buying it — and in just a matter of weeks tanking it, firing everyone, trolling everyone, and allowing some of the worst people to return — does not inspire confidence. Nor should it. It’s easy to see the hemorrhaging. You feel it, honestly. This great bleeding, blanching feeling — the color going out.

I don’t wish for this. Twitter has been routinely good and bad, a place of great joy and comfort and community while also serving up a maelstrom of harassment and bad faith and mis/disinformation. It was big and messy and chaotic, but I guess it was our big and messy and chaotic. I know there’s still this feeling that it still can be, or even still is, ours — that there is value in staying and fighting, in supporting who remains, in maintaining community, and I believe that can be true. But I also am now feeling like it’s a little like insisting you can fight J.K. Rowling by promoting Harry Potter — like somehow you can take ownership of this thing from the inside when really, you’re just enriching the worst people and only helping to boost them by remaining within their ranks.

It is different than that, to be clear. The metaphor fails in a number of ways. Certainly there has been some truth that staying and resisting Musk and his influence has been… well, I don’t know how useful it’s been, but it’s been fun to watch, and certainly he’s not making any friends except for the absolute worst fucking people. It can’t be great for his public profile to be mocked relentlessly by awesome people. The joke is of course, Musk bought Twitter, but he’s the one who got owned. As a result, I think there are an increasing number of people who before might’ve thought, “Hey, maybe a Tesla might be nice,” but are now going to reconsider that decision, at the very least wondering, “Will he put Donald Trump and Kanye West into my Tesla’s OS — at least, before the car autopilots me into a wall and catches fire?”

At the same time, Musk doesn’t seem to care, and as what I suspect is a total narcissist, seems to enjoy the negative attention. (Trust me when I say, the only real way to deal with a narcissist is “flat gray rock.” They thrive on even the worst attention. Attention is attention is attention.)

There’s certainly some suspicion too that his very goal is to detonate Twitter, and I can see that from the perspective of someone who really really wants to kick the teeth out of democracy’s mouth — but it’s also hard not to wonder if he’s just, as noted, a narcissist, and an incompetent one at that. One who has been convinced by his own money that he is in fact an Iron Man genius instead of what he really is: a third-tier Batman villain shitlord eager to let every psycho jabroni out of Arkham to keep the circus going. I can’t imagine this is doing his image any good. It’s hard to uphold the notion that he’s really this Good Guy trying to Save The World and interested in Free Speech when… you just look at all the stuff he says and does over there. And after a while, it gets both ugly being trapped with that, and also, as Lincoln Michel noted, pretty boring.

And yes, I recognize the irony here: I’m linking to Twitter in a post about how Twitter is shellacking the bed with shit. Twitter is bad, yet many of us hang on, because at the moment, it remains provably the bulwark of social media. But it’s also one under siege by its owner and under revolt by its users. Maybe it’ll fall to rubble and be rebuilt. Or maybe the Chief Shitlord in charge will simply bolster the walls and build his own social media apocalypse bunker, and the rest of us will find boltholes out before the Musknauts hunt us in the vents.

As for what I’ll do?

I used Twitter a lot on my book tour for Wayward this last week, but once again I’m deleting it from my phone. I don’t need that agitation readily accessible. I will retain my account and likely transition it more to broadcast only, using it to signal boost and such, but I expect to fade away, like Marty McFly in that family photo.

(Though no, I won’t delete my account.)

As to where I am at now?

Well, I’m here, obviously.

I’ve noodled on newsletter or substack, but no firm plans there.

Instagram is reliable.

I’m at Mastodon here. I like it but it’s also still really hard to explain and in part because I’m still not sure I understand it? And individual instances seem pretty hinky and subject to fickle laws? Each instance its own weird island?

I just got onto Post.news, too, @chuckwendig there. I have little impression of it except I like the typography, and it seems like a Very Serious Place.

Then there’s the opposite — Hive.social, which so far, is the “stickiest” (honey pun?) of the sites, meaning, it’s the one I use and keep going back to because it feels pretty good, pretty natural, pretty nice. It blew up over the last day or two, I think doubling their userbase, so there are bugs — and further, it’s still in the early days, and so it only has an app, no desktop, and works better on iOS than on Android, and so forth. So it’s still rough seas, but like I said, it’s snappy, peppy, has a lot of good fun conversation already there and has been nice to see writer pals and comic folk and so forth quickly find a niche. It’s a little like if Twitter and Instagram had a baby, with Myspace as the weird uncle.

(Note, they are not the Trump-affiliated Hive, that is a different company.)

(Oh I’m also chuckwendig there.)

There has also been some agita about this, that Power Users such as myself [lol] are Pied-Pipering other people off of Twitter to this new, untrustworthy island run by untrustworthy people. So please let me assure you, I am not standing on virtue for Hive.social. Assume it could be wildly unstable. Pretend it’ll go away in a week or Milkshake Duck itself into oblivion. I dunno. What I know is that I like it right now and it’s fairly happy over there and it seems like it has its heart in the right place in terms of community and harassment and moderation, but again, it’s new, run by people I can’t vouch for, and for all I know it’s operated by a sentient Russian botnet. No idea.

I do think panic over this is a little ironic if it’s coming from people still on Twitter, because Twitter is verifiably owned by a fucking lunatic, now, hemorrhaging staff and operating with almost no actual content moderation, with a steep rise in fresh harassment — so it’s not like Twitter is somehow stable and safe. Some have said not to trust my “information” with a new social media site like Hive, but I dunno what information one thinks I’m giving them. I didn’t send them a vial of my genetic material or something. If it sucks, I’ll ditch.

Certainly there is also some feeling too of betrayal, that leaving is abandoning, that choosing to not use the site as vigorously or remain at all is tantamount to watching others drown, and I understand this. At the same time, I don’t think anyone should remain on that place if it’s not fun or interesting or if it’s serving them up a largely negative experience. I think there’s a dangerous path thinking we must somehow be obligated to a space that could become harmful. I think that stops being community and starts being a cult.

Right now, it’s just nice to feel nice somewhere that isn’t Twitter.

ANYWAY.

I may write up a more proper tour report, but I am pleased to say that the book tour was really nice, I met some very cool readers, and if you were one of them, I thank you. I also signed a lot of books for folks who couldn’t make it (often due to sickness, since there are a passel of respiratory bugs parading around out there, which I was afraid to bring home but as it turns out it was already here waiting for me since my kid is sick, oh shit).

I hope people enjoy Wayward and I’d love it if you told folks about the book and shared reviews and also bought seven more copies for yourself and then seven more copies for those copies so they can each have a family, and soon you will have a pyramid of books, and from this pyramid you can command armies. Or something. Whatever. What I mean is, leave a review if you’re able?

The holidays approacheth so if you want me to sign and personalize Wayward –or any of my books! — then you should go through Doylestown Bookshop.

Also remember I’m doing Let’s Play Books (12/4) and B&N Bethlehem (12/10) still, so you can grab books from there and come see me.

Okay! See you… *checks notes* somewhere on the internet? I’m sure there will be another dozen new social media sites next week. I will be chuckwendig on Circlezero, Frandspottr, Apple-Eater, Gl0rm, Pfft, and Substation 69. Bye.