Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 31

Jeremy Szal: Five Things I Learned Writing Stormblood

 

Vakov Fukasawa used to be a Reaper: an elite soldier fighting for Harmony, against a brutal invading empire. Harmony made him elite by injecting him, and thousands of other Reapers, with the DNA of an extinct alien race, altering his body chemistry to make him addicted to adrenaline and aggression, making him stronger, faster, and more aggressive and more powerful. And it worked. At a cost. Because alongside their supersoldiers, Harmony created an illicit drug market that left millions hopelessly addicted to stormtech.

Disgusted and disillusioned, Vakov walked away when the war was over.

Only, Harmony never took their eye of him. He may want nothing to do with them, but when his former Reaper colleagues start being taken out, Vakov is horrified to discover his estranged brother is the prime murder suspect, and has to investigate. Even though the closer he comes to the truth, the more addicted to stormtech he becomes.

WRITE WHAT YOU’RE PASSIONATE ABOUT

Sure, you can write what you know. That’s easy. It’s also methodical. Clinical. I wrote that way up until STORMBLOOD, where I decided that I was going to cram the pages with as much cool and wacky and absurd stuff as I could.

I decided to write what I was passionate about.

A character-driven, first-person space opera? Pierce Brown did it, so can I. Seedy alien drug dealers and smugglers? Sure. An entire asteroid, filled with hundreds of cities stacked on top of cities like the floors of a building, each with their own style, class and visual aesthetic? Go for it. A protagonist who wears a full suit of armour pretty much everywhere he goes?  Sounds great. Space cults? Why the hell not? AIs that create avatars that look like animals they’re fond of? Who says I can’t?

In the past, I sometimes felt inclined to gravitate towards the common genre tropes. The done things. The things successful people were writing about. With STORMBLOOD, I decided to screw the rules. I was going to write exactly what I wanted to write. I wanted to write a voice-driven, first-person protagonist who literally gets high on the alien DNA pumping through his body. I wanted to make it intense, delightfully weird, in your face, and a little bit gross. I wanted this book to ooze passion and craziness. I wanted this book to be me.

And it worked.

WRITE FROM THE HEART, NOT THE BRAIN

I was a plot-driven guy. For a while, at least. When I started creating the character of Vakov Fukasawa, I was more interested in his story. Rather than letting the plot dictate the course of events, I let his emotional state drive the narrative. How trauma has turned him into someone filled with rage.  How his childhood, and his relationship with his brother, his Reaper colleagues, has shaped his personality. Why loyalty and family and brotherhood mean so much to him. And how much it truly hurts to see the damage being done to them.

I wrote about these themes because they matter to me. I gave Vakov Fukasawa these values, these emotional soft points, but they’re my values. When I wrote about the pain, the loss, the heart-break, and the determination to do better, to do right by the people you love, I wanted them to come from a place of truth, from the heart. Not just from him, but from me. I wanted to believe what I was writing. When I went for the gut and for the throat, I wanted it to mean something.

I learned that, at the end of the day, I want my writing to touch the heart of anyone who reads it.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO GO THERE

I’ve always liked fiction that was confronting, unexpected. That got you sitting up straight, lighting shooting through your veins, and a knot tightening in your stomach.

But doing that means taking a risk, and I don’t think I was brave enough to take it. Looking back, some of my fiction was a little passive. Inoffensive. But as STORMBLOOD started to take shape, I wondered how far I could go. If I was prepared to take risks with my characters and world-building. If I could really weird it up.

So I did. Given that the protagonist has an alien organism sniffing inside his body, there’s no lack of mentions about sweat prickling his back, his body hairs going stiff, or the alien DNA slithering down his ribs. What it’s like to really get high on an adrenaline rush, to feel an alien organism cranking your senses up to eleven in all its maddening and sticky glory (as well as the very messy after-effects). I threw my protagonist into terrifying, dread-filled situations, either where truly horrible things are done to him, or he’s forced to do horrible things to survive. Wasn’t sure if I had the skill to do justice to those scenes. If I wanted to damage my character in this way. If writing a protagonist who did and said these things would make him unlikeable. But I learned it’s necessary to push myself, to step out of my comfort zone and see if I could cook up a smorgasbord of insanity that really got the reader wondering what the hell they just read.

I won’t lie; I had a lot of stuff cooking up bizarre things to include that went the extra mile. Gothic Victorian space stations. Spaceships designed like cathedrals. Insane AIs used in interrogation that look like monsters. Suits of armour that like being worn. Drug dealers who have fused their DNA into the walls, turning entire rooms to an extension of their own body. Aliens who sell their own keratin and spinal fluid.

Go big or go home.

THE DARKER THE STORY, THE MORE IMPORTANT HOPE IS

STORMBLOOD is about war, trauma, domestic violence, drug abuse, human exploitation, and suffering on a galaxy-wide scale. Characters are not treated kindly. As the themes started to take shape, I knew if I screwed this up, this could be a relentlessly bleak ride. But soon, I saw the way to balance the scales. By developing relationships between the characters.

There’s some dark moments, to be sure. Characters get put right through the ringer and back. But I learned never to slip into nihilism or wallowing. The characters always had to be there to support each other, to have each other’s back no matter what. There had to be moments of peace and quiet. Where characters get to talk about their passions or relate a happy memory. Even when a very real threat was hanging in the air, Vakov and his best friend Grim had to have banter, little moments of comradeship and empathy (like having a drinking game and getting smashed in an alien bar. I’d fill a whole book of those, if I could). And when things got really dark, I learned to have moments where the characters reminded themselves who they were fighting for. Why their friends and family mattered so much to them, and why they’d let that hope, that love, give them courage to do the impossible. That darkness makes the light of hope that much stronger, and having characters be apart of that hope gave my narrative a human subtext.

VOICE IS EVERYTHING

I’m a sucker for loving descriptions of tech. I write space opera, so obviously world-building is on the table. And we already know how important character is to me. I went to great lengths with my previous projects to make every paragraph sing off the page.

But it wasn’t until I was editing STORMBLOOD that it hit home what I’d been doing wrong. None of that mattered unless it was infused with a strong voice. And by voice, I mean the protagonist’s voice. I want every word of these books to be filtered, coloured, and tainted by my protagonist’s mind. Sure, that’s a great description of a spaceship, but what does this spaceship mean to him? What’s the emotion, the history? It’s about how he sees things, the way he’d describe them with his dark and morbid sense of humour. More than that: I realised the prose, the sentence structure, needed to reflect his personality, as if he was speaking aloud. That meant going back and downgrading some of the language, making the narration more conversational, more terse and in your face. I chopped out any flowery phrases or pretty adjectives, made the language more visceral and gutsy.

That meant undoing many, many hours of work. That meant having a turn of phrase that’s rough around the edges. But I learned that, more than anything else, it was worth it. The book feels more organic, more raw than anything else I’ve written, because every sentence is drenched to the bone with the character’s voice. Hell, it even smells like him.

So if you don’t like it, blame him, not me.

***

Jeremy Szal was born in 1995 in the outback of Australia and raised by wild dingos. He is the author of many short stories and the space opera novel, STORMBLOOD, which was published by Gollancz in 2020 as the first of a trilogy. 

Jeremy Szal: Website | Twitter

Stormblood: Amazon | Authors Website

Emmie Mears: Five Things I’ve Learned Building a Writing Career the Wrong Way

Have you ever wanted to write a novel? How about twenty-two of them? Do you like being told no hundreds of times for a living? Great, me too!

What a rubbish sales pitch that would be.

I used to talk about writing a lot. For a while, I literally blogged every day. A lot of that was about writing. About writing books, trying to find an agent for those books, writing about other people’s advice about writing books, and eventually about signing contracts for books I wrote. And then everything went to hell, and I slipped back into the bushes like that Homer Simpson GIF.

I’ve tried to write this post about five times and have scrapped about two thousand words of it. I am leading with that, because it feels relevant.

I even hyperbolically labeled the document “attempt a billion” because I feel like I have been staring at it since the Cretaceous Period.

I’ve hit some strange milestones this year in my writing career, and while I had a lot to say about it, I didn’t know how to say it. So instead, I’m going to give it a go in five chunks. Five things I’ve learned, five wheels you shouldn’t have to reinvent, five lessons, five shouts into the windy void.

This Isn’t Over

Maybe it’s weird to start out by saying something isn’t over, but I feel like it’s worth hammering into place with very large nails.

There was a not-insignificant amount of time where I believed my publishing career was dead before it had even begun. For those of you who don’t know me, my debut was put up for sale in a box set with three other authors’ books, released as a solo just in time to get orphaned, and removed from sale within six months of publication. Without going too in-depth into the other exciting points of that sob story (three orphaned books and an untenable contract and Agent Hunt the Third within three months of each other), when your debut barely sells three hundred copies, let’s just say acquisitions teams are not so keen on taking a risk on your next one.

From that point on, I spent a couple years self-publishing to a decent amount of success with my Ayala Storme series. But I had always wanted to sell traditionally, and it increasingly looked like it wasn’t going to happen.

My books started failing—and I do mean failing. The Storme sales dried up, partly because I took a sharp turn genre-wise, none of my novels was selling in the traditional world, and I was floundering.

But I held onto one thing. I told myself that everything I was doing was fertiliser. That I was sowing seeds in the earth below my feet, and that if I kept tending them, maybe they would grow.

I wrote new categories and subgenres. I started freelancing as an editor. I read craft books and style guides and kept writing new things. I tried short stories for the first time. I started a Patreon. I learned Gaelic to fluency. I started singing again. A brand new publisher decided to acquire my backlist and my shelved epic fantasy, and I decided to go for it.

It wasn’t over then, and it isn’t over now.

Seeds Take A While to Sprout

In 2018, one of my musical heroes disappeared and was found later, having died by suicide. I wanted to write something to honour Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, to process his death and the connections I’d had to his music and his mental illnesses—his words resonated with many people who shared his depression. But nothing I wrote seemed right.

Then, after a week-long Gaelic immersion course at Ceòlas in South Uist, something clicked. I came home and wrote “Seonag and the Sea-wolves” in pretty much one sitting and fired it off to Jen Gunnels at Tor who also reads for Tor.com. She bought the story within a month, with me writing as M. Evan MacGriogair. It ended up making the Hugo longlist and has been reprinted now twice, with a third contracted.

In 2017, I’d written a YA. It came close to selling many times, but it didn’t. Like many of my novels, it seemed promising when it went on sub only to fizzle out after a year or so, I suspect because according to BookScan, I’m a big, juicy trombone womp on the loss side of “profit and loss.” This was the twelfth or thirteenth novel-length work I’d written. We were about to shelve it when my former agent got in contact, as she was acquiring YA after a spell of only doing younger categories.

In 2019, I sold that YA as Maya MacGregor. It comes out next year from Astra Books for Young Readers, and it’s called THE MANY HALF-LIVED LIVES OF SAM SYLVESTER. My acquiring editor told me over a plate of chimichangas that when she’d brought the book to the team, they’d asked her how the hell I hadn’t been snapped up yet. I may have cried into my margarita.

And as a final example, way back in 2016 (remember when we thought that year was the Worst? Bless), I had the absolutely, lolsob-worthy timing of releasing a book about a city slipping into the pit of fascism the very week the US elected Trump. It wasn’t a coincidence that I wrote that book—my degree is in history, and a big part of that was spent studying the reemerging extremist cells in Europe and the US. But despite its painful topicality, the book sank. Hard.

A few weeks ago, that book—which I am writing this post to promote—earned me my first ever starred review for its new hardcover edition. Five years after it “failed.”

Publishing is a Luck Game

I think we can all recognise that publishing is far from a meritocracy. It doesn’t diminish the power or impact of wonderful work to say that getting a book on a shelf is a concoction of timing, the nebulous markets, what an editor just bought, whether an editor is vibing with something in particular, and a million other factors.

You can write an amazing book and not sell it. You can write a book people hate and sell millions of copies. (Not here for bashing Twilight—like it or not, Meyer did something very right.) You can yeet a book onto Amazon and do absolutely nothing and have it somehow sell a thousand copies in its first few weeks and then go on to sell almost twenty thousand more. You can pour your soul into a book and have it sink like a lead-covered stone dropped over the Mariana Trench.

There is relatively little in our control, and before I get a pitchfork to the gut, “little” is not nothing. It’s just possible to do everything “right” and not have a breakthrough book. But that also means that sometimes, just sometimes, lightning strikes.

Publishing is a Long Con

As I went through Point Two on this list, you probably can already guess the gist of this one, because they’re closely related.

It’s one thing to look back in hindsight and say wow, all those things I did five years ago ended up doing stuff! But it’s even more powerful to look around right now and say that what you’re doing today could bear fruit in five years.

One of the things I’ve been mulling over in the past couple years is the difference between recognition and intentionality. I can recognise good writing when I see it but not be aware of the techniques and specific devices used and how I can also utilise them in my own writing. The same is true for general effort—it’s easy to get into autopilot mode and forget that we have agency and that our agency can alter future outcomes.

t(w + c) = l

No, I’m not saying that luck is the product of Terribleminds and Chuck Wendig, but it would be handy if it did. (And just in case, Chuck, may I have your blessing?) [edit — YOU MAY — cw]

At the end of all this, the most important lesson I’ve learned has to do with those letters standing for different variables where t=time spent, w=work, c=craft, and l=luck.

Am I mathematician? No.

Is this any more scientific than saying luck is the product of Chuck Wendig and Terribleminds? Also no.

But it is something that helps me feel a little bit more in control when so many things are outside my control.

I cannot control geopolitics and global pandemics. I cannot control whether the editor who’s had my novel on their desk for nine months will happen to pick it up on a day they ate some bad charcuterie and can’t focus because they need to run to the loo every ten minutes. I can’t control markets, reviewers, who else publishes the day my book comes out, or even (very frequently on the trad side of publishing) my covers and titles.

But I can control other things. I control the effort I put into my craft. I’ve now written twenty-two novels, and by the time you read this, it might be twenty-three. LOOK TO THE SUN was my tenth.

I can control whether I keep going or take a break, whether I give up altogether or come running back to the game. I am responsible for whatever ends up on my pages.

And if there’s anything you learn after seeing a few rounds of the “ten year overnight success” in this business, it really is that luck is very frequently the product of work and craft over time. It’s not as simple as that, of course, but you have a much better chance of getting struck by lightning if you are in the plains of Kansas in tornado season than on a sunny day in a redwood forest. Don’t go get struck by lightning, but do work smart and sow your seeds in fertile ground.

Not all of us luck into the easier (note I didn’t say easy) route of writing one book, getting one agent, getting one book deal, and then getting successive book deals forever from there that allow us to live comfortably on our writing income until we retire. Most of us don’t, overwhelmingly. I certainly didn’t. Maybe I never will.

If you’re like me—the me of five years ago or the me of now—wondering if it’s worth it, I can’t answer that for you. I frequently avoid talking about my publishing experience because no one really wants to hear “on top of the gruelling process of writing one (1) book and finding one (1) agent, you might have to do it multiple times and might end up writing a fifteen books before getting one advance,” but I can tell you that it isn’t over until you decide it is.

(My stubbornness comes in handy sometimes.)

I can’t say what’s going to happen next. LOOK TO THE SUN’s grand re-opening might coincide with any number of catastrophes. Murder hornet-sharknado, who knows? What I can say is that none of us at all have that kind of predictive power, and whatever happens could be terrible! But it could also be something wonderful.

I’m a writer because I have a very active imagination. If you’re also a writer, it’s likely because you do too. I know how easy it is to imagine the worst possible outcomes or to imagine that the troubles of the past will also be the troubles of our future. So my challenge to myself and also to you is to apply that imagination to exploring new futures. New ideas, new good things, new solutions to old problems. Good things can still happen, even in the godforsaken hellscape of 2021.

I believe that for me, and I believe that for you too.

We’ve got this.

***

Emmie Mears is the author of over fifteen novels for adults and young adults, also writing as M. Evan MacGriogair, Maya MacGregor, and Sylvie Greenhart. Their English short fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine, and their Gaelic poetry and short fiction is in the Poet’s Republic and in Steall magazine. As a Gaelic singer, they have won awards as both a solo singer and as part of the Alba choir and the Glasgow Gaelic Musical Association. They live in Glasgow, Scotland with their two cats and dreams gu leòr.

Emmie Mears: Website | Twitter

Look to the Sun: BHC Press

Ryan O’Nan: Five Things I Learned Writing Winders

In this stunning debut by actor and screenwriter Ryan O’Nan (Skins, Marvel’s Legion, Queen of the South), time itself can be wound back like a clock. The power of Winding can fix mistakes and prevent disasters. Or, in the wrong hands, it can be used as a weapon against the world…

Juniper Trask is a prodigy, raised under the Council’s strict Code, which allows Winders to exist in secret among average humans. After the shocking murder of her mentor, she is chosen to take his seat on the Council. But as Juniper settles into her new role, cracks of dissension are forming around her, and she uncovers the dark truth behind their power. Juniper has just become a pawn in a game no one knows is being played, and as she begins to question the Code for the first time, her life spirals into a world of danger.

Charlie Ryan always knew he was different, ever since he saved his mother from a horrible car wreck that no one but him remembers. After meeting a mysterious man who claims he has the same ability, Charlie leaves home to chase him for answers. But the world Charlie’s stepped into is more dangerous than he could have imagined. Charlie’s powers are special, and there are those who would kill to get their hands on him.

Now, Juniper and Charlie need each other if they are going to survive the future—no matter which future that may be…

TIME TRAVEL RULES ARE HARD AS HELL

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure made time travel rules look easy. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar made them feel hard (for me at least). So, as I ventured into the swamp of time travel world building, I prepped myself for some struggle. But truthfully, the world building of the rules in Winders was one of my favorite parts. I love new rules in sci-fi. Rian Johnson’s Looper had a rule about people only being able to time travel in one direction through time, which shaped his story in a really fun way. As I approached my rules for Winders, I knew a couple of things. I knew I wanted the people in the story to wield this ability like Jedis somehow, and I also knew it wasn’t going to be actual time travel. The example I use is: If you cut your arm and you time traveled back one minute, you would still have the cut—it would just be a minute earlier. But with winding, if you cut your arm a minute ago, and then you wound back time a minute, the cut would go away. It would have been erased. Ok, so kinda time travel, kinda not. Definitely time travel adjacent.

But how could I make it like Jedis? The answer that changed everything for me came with three rules: 1. A stronger Winder can block the wind of a weaker one—unless the stronger Winder is distracted or too tired.  2. If two Winders are touching, then they wind together, and both perceive it happening together in real time. 3. Winding makes a sound. A sound which other Winders can hear, but normal humans can’t. Winders can tell if a wind has happened close by them, but if they’re focused, they can tell when a wind is just starting to happen, which gives them the chance to block it—if they can. And with those rules in place, let the jousting begin.

I WISH I HAD THIS POWER SO BADLY

For some, people and opportunities just seem to come to them, as if by gravitational force; while I’ve always felt myself balancing on a knife’s edge, trying desperately to make correct choices, fighting to say the right thing at the right time to the right people.

Call it trauma from moving around so much as a kid and constantly entering new schools and new social circles (or trying to). Whatever. Here’s the thing: the people we tell ourselves we are when we’re young never really leave us, I think. I’ve always felt like an imposter. In my life, I’ve been a skateboarder, I’ve toured around in an indie rock band, I’ve been an actor, a screenwriter and even a director, and never have I lost that feeling that I’m on a tight rope and one wrong move will send me spiraling down to my doom.

The power that Charlie and Juniper and the rest of the Winders have in this novel makes me incredibly jealous. There are so many advantages someone with this ability would have. An extra minute of knowledge of how stocks or international currencies will shift could lead to endless wealth. If a basketball player knew exactly what pattern the defense would form every time they had the ball… If a candidate in a presidential debate knew exactly what their opponent would say right before they said it… Or if you had endless chances to say all the right things to the girl, or boy, of your dreams…

Hell, I’d be using this ability on a regular basis to pick which lane of traffic I’m in. Every time I pick a lane, it seems like all other lanes start moving faster than the one I’m in. But maybe the traffic Gods are even more powerful than winding, and no matter what lane I picked, it would still be the slowest. Which leads me to the next thing I learned…

MAYBE I AM A CONSPIRACY THEORIST

I don’t like to think that the world and all of us sloshing around in it are being manipulated on a constant basis from unseen force, BUUUUTTT, isn’t that the nature of all power? To eventually control? To play God. There IS a reason that the Zuckerberg’s don’t let their kids participate in any kind of social media. There’s a reason why, when I have a private conversation with my friend about the incredible month I spent in Dubrovnik, Croatia a decade ago, suddenly I start getting sent ads on my phone for Croatia vacations. And that’s just a little dorky example. That’s not the multi-national corporations asserting their influence on countries across the globe, all for the sake of power and money. The time winding is the fiction; the world spanning puppet strings are very real. I think.

I LIKE TO KILL MOMS

My mother called me when she read the first line of Winders, which is: “My mother died twice.” She wanted to know why I always kill the moms in my stories. This is true. But I didn’t even realize it until she asked. I kill a lot of moms in my stories. I tried to examine it, and I this is what I eventually concluded… growing up without my mom sounds like scariest thing I can imagine. I grew up in a pretty damn chaotic childhood. Multiple factors involved. But there was a ton of criminal shit going on, and because of this, my family moved around like crazy. Not state to state, but from a nice home at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac to living in tents on the beach, and shitty motels, for years at a time. I’m the oldest of five kids, and when I was young, we ran like wolves. Very little supervision. But it forced us to be self-reliant, and to make our own games, and to get creative in order to have fun. But there were also scary times.  Danger and poverty are kissing cousins after all. Big danger in the world my father was involved in, and little danger in the rough areas I lived in at times. But through all of that, I had my mom. My mom was not perfect. She had her own demons. Definitely dealt with substance abuse issues, for which she’s been in recovery now for decades. But she was an amazing mom. She poured love into me and my siblings. And that made us braver. It made us feel safer—that there was a safety net for us when we failed. The scariest thing I could imagine was losing my mom at a time when I needed er most. I’m not sure me and my siblings would have survived what we went through without her. So, I suppose, because of that, my kneejerk reaction to the idea of making my characters less safe, and making their worlds more frightening, is to pull the net: kill the mom. So, both Charlie and Juniper are momless. Sorry, moms!!!

“LET ME PLAY THE LION, TOO”

There’s this part of me that has always wanted to be and play everything. Like the character of Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I’ve always wanted to play the lover, and the tyrant, and the lion. Everything. “I will roar, that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me”. He’s the fool in this play, because obviously you can’t do everything. But the beautiful thing about writing—that I learned specifically with this novel—is that you actually get to do that. While writing Winders, I got to be Charlie, the troubled young man fresh out of a military prison and yearning to reconnect with life; and I got to be Juniper, a young woman scientist warrior, whose life gets completely uprooted when she suddenly discovers that everything she knows to be true is different than she believed. And I also got to be the psychotic villain, Trevor, bent on world domination, still reeling from a brutally violent childhood and making the world pay for it. And I even briefly got to slide into the skin of Grams, an old woman who raised two orphaned boys who were in desperate need of the love she poured into them. I got to be all of them for a small amount of time; and in the end, they all have little pieces of me sewn into each of them on an elemental level. The good, the bad and the ugly. All of it. I’ve always been so grateful to writing for being a medium in which you get to take the very best part of yourself and the very worst part—the apotheosis of your personal experiences and the most brutal and humiliating moments in your life—and temper all of that into something to offer up to the world. I loved writing this novel. Whether or not anyone likes it (which I really hope they do) the story has given me a ton of joy, and that has meant the world to me.

***

Ryan O’Nan is an award-winning screenwriter, actor and director. He has written on such series as Marvel’s Legion on FX, as well as the edgy teenage drama Skins, Queen of the South on USA, and Wu-Tang: An American Saga on Hulu. Currently, Ryan writes and produces on Big Sky on ABC. On the film side, he wrote/directed the hit indie film Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best, which was released theatrically by Adam Yauch’s (Beastie Boys) company Oscilloscope Laboratories, where it received several awards. Ryan has been featured in both Filmmaker Magazine and Creative Screenwriting Magazine. As an actor, Ryan is best known for playing King George on the series Queen of the South. Ryan lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and three cats: Bosco Beanbag, Fantine the Bean, and Amelia Wolfman. Winders is Ryan’s debut novel.

Ryan O’Nan: Twitter

Winders: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

Wendig’s Heirloom Apple Review, 2021

WE HAVE APPLESIGN THE LIKES OF WHICH EVEN GOD HAS NEVER SEEN. Ahem. Sorry. What I mean is, hey! Guess what? It’s that time of the year again. The time of strange, mysterious apples. The era of apples that don’t show up in your grocery store. The epoch of apples that you can only procure from shadowy fruit carts in forgotten alleys that only appear under the light of the harvest moon. Apples that summon scarecrows to steal them. Dread, sinister apples.

Meaning, heirloom apples.

To give a little context, for those that somehow have failed to realize my obsession with apples, it’s this: years back I found an orchard at our farmer’s market, North Star Orchard, and they had boxes upon boxes of apples I was sure were a prank. Each sounded like some kind of hobbit bullshit, and I said, “These are all made up, they’re fantasy apples.” But no, as it turns out, they’re entirely real. There are thousands of apple varieties, and you only get like, five or six at your local grocery store. And those apples at your local grocery store have been in storage and transportation for a while. They’re old-ass apples, cultivated so that they stored well and traveled well. Tough, unruly apples, like the Red Delicious — once truly delicious, now only red. The Liar Apple. The Judas Apple.

So, I thought, I’ll take these strange apples home and review them, because that’s what you do on the Internet. You review things. Japanese Kit-Kats, and Odd Spatulas, and Those Teeth You Find In Your Nightstand Drawer. So began #heirloomapplereview, where I did exactly that. Except it’s Twitter, and Twitter kinda sucks, and mostly I feel like I was just starting to annoy people with it. So, I decided it was best to sequester this apple goodness in the ancient puzzle-box that it is the dusty ol’ blog. Remember those? Blogs? Good times.

Some administrative stuff before I begin:

Most of these apples are from Scott Farm in Vermont. A few of them are from North Star Orchard in Chester County, PA. This was a weird year for apples, honestly — the Scott Farm ones have always been sublime, but this year, they weren’t quite as amazing. Some were surprisingly small? (See photo below for a little Winesap dwarfed by the palm of my hand.) A few of them had some off-flavors. Not the farm’s fault, to be clear. Could be an odd year in general (certainly 2021 has been that in many ways), and maybe climate change is a factor. Not yet sure. Also, some variants below I had multiple versions of. So that let me get taste across a different spectrum. The apple spectrum.

Let us begin.

Black Gilliflower (Sheepnose)

AKA: Long Tall Apple, Skinny Jim, Brumley’s Gangle

Looks reportedly like a sheep’s nose, but I dunno what kind of monstrous clown livestock produces that as its nose. “Oh, that old pasture clown, we call Ol’ Scratch. Wool like the Devil’s taint, I say. Got that big ol’ red nose, like a drunk. They say you can eat the nose, if you’re brave enough.”

Anyway. I’ve understood that Black Gilliflowers are an acquired taste, and if that is the case, I have most certainly acquired it. Upon cutting into it, I gave a good long sniff (for one must attempt to detect the scents as apple esters are released into the world, and also this is how you become addicted to apples, by snorting their essence). First thing was an off odor — hard to say what it was, but it was almost chemically, oily. It didn’t last. I bit in, found it to be pretty fucking great. That’s it. That’s my sophisticated review. “Pretty fucking great.”

Okay fine you want more details. Medium texture, tender, coarsely grained. Supposed to be dry but I found it plenty juicy — not like, juice bomb, not an apple assault on my face, but not a dry bite. That bite contained a mix of honey, pear, and pineapple. Had a nice mouthfeel too.

Rating: 8/10

Black Oxford

AKA: Dark Orb, Blood Lump, and Azazel’s Throbbing Goiter

This apple, often a dark purple like a bad bruise, is a good counterpart to the Arkansas Black — kind of the northeastern equivalent. This year’s example (see above) wasn’t too dark. It had not yet turned evil enough, I suppose.

In years past, the Black Oxford was a rare treat, always one of the best apples I’d eat in that given year. I had two now, and they were not, uhhh, ideal. Right from the knife, I got a sulfur smell, which is not what you want. An apple that smells like a gassy cave does not make you want to eat it. But then the follow-up bite was no better. It was chewy, and chewy in the way that biting an old callused thumb would be chewy. It tasted more like a Winesap than I expected, and then on the finish, was redolent with notes of horseradish. Which is not what I fucking want when I eat an apple, what the fuck. Horseradish? Jesus. So, this was a bummer. I have one more, and they’re keeper apples — late-season apples often store well, sometimes into deep winter.

I might hold onto this one, let the flavors develop into December.

Rating: 2/10

Blue Pearmain

AKA Cerulean Crustknobbin, LeMarchand’s Azure Bauble, John Stamos

There are some apples whose flavor I self-referentially can only think of as “apple-flavored.” They are, in some sense to me, the Platonic ideal — the tasty epitome — of apple taste. “What flavor are you getting?” you ask, expecting me to offer up notes of pipesmoke, mango, and regret, and instead I say, bluntly and in a honking voice, “APPLE. TASTES LIKE APPLE.” It is reductive and simplistic and yet, that’s what this tastes like. Like pure apple goodness. In trying to understand what that means, I think it means sweetness and tartness doing the perfect tango. You don’t taste honey, or pear, or Cheetos or treebark. It’s an apple that tastes like an apple. What a wonderful concept.

The flesh in this one was dense, with a crisp, impactful bite.

The exterior is obviously a showstopper, too — this specimen had quite a roadmap of russeting going on (kind of a woody, corky network on the exterior, rough to the touch, like an old man’s knee), but the joy is in that trademark blue shine. It’s a bloom you can actually wipe off somewhat. I tried to capture it with the image above. I don’t know what makes it that way. Ectoplasm in the form of ghost tears, I guess. Ha ha cry more, ghosts. Snowflakes. Psssh.

Rating: 9/10

Cox’s Orange Pippin

AKA: Burnt Knobling, Ruddy Merry, and Southfarthing Fool-of-a-Took

The Cox’s Orange Pippin is a British apple, which is unsurprising because it is about as British a name as an apple can have. In the year 1937 this was actually the most popular name for young boys. “Cox’s Orange Pippin, come eat your Bangers and Mash or you can’t have any Spotted Dick!” your mum would yell at you from her bedroom in Big Ben. (Though this being an English apple is curious, given that I think in England the only good fruit they grow is sausages.)

Exterior has a trademark orange blush, and fits in the hand just-so, as if it begs you to throw it at passersby. But do not! Dare not relinquish the treasure you have in your grip. For it may be my favorite apple, year after year. Smells a bit like aerosolized pear as you cut into it. A medium-texture, medium-grained bite awaits, juicy but not embarrassingly so, fresh with tastes of lemon, honey, and tropical fruits. I’ve heard them called subacid, but I find the tartness to be in harmony with the sugar.

You will eat it and you will be happy, if you are a person who likes apples.

I am at my happiest in life eating one of these. Everything else is downhill.

This apple is the parent of many varieties, for it is hard to grow and so they’ve tried to grow hardier beasts that boast of equal or better flavor, and few I’ve found really rival it, with the exception of maybe the Holstein. Which is a cow, but also, an apple. Fruit is mysterious.

Rating: 10/10

Golden Russet

AKA: Angry Tom, Lord Fauntleroy’s Bunion, Ol’ Russell

I always like a good russet because they’re weird. A knobbed russet, for instance, looks like some kind of plague bubo. They’re scratchy and rough and not gold, not really, but more an eerie green, the green of the ghost of a swamp witch.

I had the advantage here of having two varieties of golden russet this year — the first photo is the Scott Farm, the second is from North Star. The NSO apple was a bit tough, quite dense, and tarter than I expected, though still with a preponderance of honeyed sugar taste. There came what for me is a trademark anise flavor, and curiously, a hazelnut finish I found quite pleasing. The Scott Farm variant was also good, and juicier, more tender — but sweeter, no tartness, and without as much overall complexity. Some grassiness on the finish. Perhaps better as a keeper.

They’re also tough enough to sand wood, if you care to.

Rating: 6/10, 8/10, respectively

Gravenstein

AKA: Doctor Gravenstein’s Monster

Love Gravensteins. Didn’t love this Gravenstein. Mild in every way. Mild texture, mild honey flavor, middling tartness, mediocre existence. Not every apple is a good apple.

THAT’S LIFE IN APPLE CITY, KID.

Rating: Meh out of Ennh

Hudson’s Golden Gem

AKA: Gormley’s Gilded Panacea, Dobblin’s Cures-What-Ails-Ya, Steve

Initially I figured, okay, this is just a golden russet in big sneakers.

But it got weird.

Good weird.

But weird.

First up: it’s a chonky apple.

Second: cutting into it instantly reveals the scent of banana and vanilla. Which, as you may suspect is entirely un-apple in its essence. Apples can definitely have curious smells and flavors. Banana isn’t even all that unusual. But this one was really strong with it.

Third: okay so sometimes you smell something zesty or strange with a cut apple, but it doesn’t translate to taste, it’s just part of the cipher of esters released — but yeah no, you bite into this apple and it’s like, “What if an apple had a threesome with a banana and some Nilla wafers.” It’s pretty amazing, if entirely out-of-sync with what you expect from an apple. The aftertaste is fascinating, too — the tartness of unripe pineapple hits your palate. It’s pretty cool.

Texture is medium-soft. Not mushy or anything.

Really cool apple.

Even if it sounds like snake oil.

Rating: 8/10

Karmijn de Sonnaville

AKA: Carmine Sabatini, Carl Sunnydale

I’ve heard good things about these apples, and despite it’s fancy lad name, it’s not a particularly old apple — it’s from the late 1940s. (Sometimes you hear a fancy French name on an apple and that means it was an apple beloved by the monarchs of France, used both to eat and to pummel the unwashed poors.) So I was expecting big things with this one.

I… eennnh well yeah not so much.

It was fine! Totally fine. Floral and juicy, which is nice. But the juice wasn’t full of flavor and mostly it just tasted like someone watered down an apple. Had a nice crisp bite to it, at least. Though there was an aftertaste to it, bitter, like you licked the outside of a lemon and not the inside.

Rating: 5/10

Keepsake

AKA: Corn Pop

Remember how I said the Hudson’s Golden Gem was a weird apple?

This one is even weirder.

So! Keepsake. Not sure if it really constitutes a proper “heirloom” apple, as it’s from the 1970s, but at this point that’s 50 years, so, who the fuck knows. Though I suppose that would suggest I am in fact an heirloom human. That’s what we should call the elderly from now on, by the way. How lovely is that? Heirloom. Whatever. Anyway. The Keepsake is known mostly as one of the parents of the much vaunted (and to me, mostly meh) grocery store apple varieties, the Honeycrisp. (Aka the HINEYCRISP ha ha I burned you, Honeycrisp, I burned you good.) (I’m so sorry.)

Your first impression, one not entirely clear in the photo I took, is that it’s oddly shaped. It’s like if you were looking at an apple on LSD — it has bulges and off geometry. A ferrofluid apple —

Ever pulsing.

Then, I cut into it.

Sour smell. Instantly. Sour citrus, like a soursop or custard apple fruit.

Then, then, I bit it and —

What the fuck this tastes like corn.

Sweet corn, and a little apple, but also, corn. CORN. Corn? Corn.

I have never tasted an apple that tasted like corn. I was honestly convinced I’d fucked up my mouth somehow, that maybe I was on the COVID now, and it had begun destroying my taste buds with its insidiousness. My wife tried it and while she didn’t identify the corn flavor on her own, once I called it out, she was like, “Okay, yeah.” So, I knew my mouth was not broken.

C O R N.

The rest of it is kind of a syrupy sweetness, juicy and crisp. Not a bad apple, and I can taste now what it contributed to the Honeycrisp (an apple I honestly believe is too sweet for its own good and not nearly tart enough). Weird, weird apple.

Rating: 6/10

Lamb Abbey Pearmain

AKA: Damn Crabby Bearstain, Wham Stabby Hairpain, Cram Flabby Sparebrain

Two words: white wine and elderflower. Wait that’s more than two words. Shit. Shut up, I can too do math. Good texture, not grainy, juicy, mild, some bites almost lean savory.

What I’m trying to say is: nice apple. The kind of apple you take on a few dates, nothing really happens, but it was nice and occasionally you think fondly of said apple and you wonder where it’s been, what’s it’s up to, is it okay? Maybe you check its Twitter account, you DM and say hey how are you and the apple answers back and you have a polite exchange but not much really comes of it, and then once more the both of you fade into each other’s backgrounds.

Rating: 6/10

Orleans Reinette

AKA: Betty

I had two versions of this apple, both from the same orchard (Scott Farm), and it showed the variance between two apples of one type grown by the same people in the same place —

First apple was a little nutty, a little bit honeyed, but like, funky honey. Not clover honey, but more alfalfa honey, or sourwood, something a little more mysterious.

Sweet and juicy, finely textured, dense.

Second go around, a couple weeks later, this iteration was both milder (it had lost its funk) and brighter (gained some tartness). Whether this is due to the variation from fruit to fruit, tree to tree, or because it spent just a couple-few additional weeks in storage, developing flavors, I cannot say. Maybe it went through a transformational experience. Maybe it explored itself on an international summer trip and really came into its own. It came to realize who it really was, down deep, and that’s no small thing. Of course eventually it’ll sit too long and wrinkle and rot, AS WILL WE ALL. What I’m saying is, relish your sweetness and complexity now before you decay and are eaten by squirrels who want to get drunk on your fermentedness. This has gone off the rails so I’m going to stop now.

Rating: Both a 7/10, for different reasons

Reine des Reinettes

AKA: The King of Pippins, The Queen of Queens, O Captain My Appleton

Oof. In 2019 I had one of these and it was one of the best fucking apples I’d ever eaten. This year I had one and I wanted to punch myself in the mouth after eating it.

Here is the journey I went through:

“TART TART TART”

“Why is it so dense”

“Oh ew it’s grainy like weird mustard”

“IT IS STEALING MOISTURE FROM MY MOUTH WHY”

“My tongue hurts and this is bad.”

“GIVE ME MY SALIVA BACK YOU SPIT-THIEF.”

“Now I taste lawn clippings, the end.”

So, ennnh, not great, Bob. Not great. It just goes to show, sometimes an individual expression of a type of apple can be total shit. Unfortunate, but whaddya gonna do. Onward and upward.

Rating: Fuck This / Goddamn Apple

Winesap

AKA: The Town Drunk, Osbaldeston’s Cherry Fist, Tuckerton Bezoar

Pretty classic apple, the winesap — note that this is not the same apple as a Stayman Winesap, which was reportedly a seedling of a Winesap, which is to say, has nothing to do with a Winesap at all. For those who don’t know, apple seeds are more or less a genetic lottery. The seeds from one type of apple will not make more of that apple in tree-form. For that, you must graft. No, the seeds from an apple will be a roughly random carousel of apple possibilities, and most of them will be assy-tasting tannin-heavy apples that at best will work for cider and at worst will make you hurk.

This was not the best version of a winesap I’ve eaten but it was fine — it hits with that red wine and rose petal vibe, lots of floral esters suffusing the air and your nose and your mouth AND YOUR EYES AND NOW THE APPLE CONTROLS YOU wait I mean, not that last part. Hard-breaking apple. Bit chewy, but that’s not uncommon, I’ve found.

Oddly bitter finish, bitter enough to sully the experience.

Also, surprisingly tiny, this one. Sat in my hand like a li’l crabapple.

Rating: 4/10

Okay, that’s it

You can go home now.

Buy The Book of Accidents or Dust & Grim or I perish in the void.

Also Wanderers e-book is on sale for $3.99 for a few days, I dunno why, but go grabby.

(Also, to remind, I was on Felicia Day’s podcast, Felicitations, talking about AAAAAPPLES.)

Elsa Sjunneson: The Blanked Out Space Where We Should Be

A deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else.

As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they’re whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be.

As a media studies professor, she’s also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.

[this book is essential and instructive! — cw]

***

I have always known that I was occupying a space that is considered impossible. The collective imagination of what is possible in a non-disabled society is narrow, and I live in unimagined space.

Here, I’ll give you an example:

There are no books about blind women for kids that aren’t about Helen Keller. Okay, there’s one. But it’s about a blind mom. 

When I met my partner’s kids for the first time, I wanted to bring them a book to explain a little about why my eye is the way it is. Why I use a cane. Why I wear hearing aids. There was nothing in the bookstore for me to bring them. No gift that would ease my entry into their world. 

At my local bookstore a few months later, I mentioned that I hadn’t found anything – and that my experience of kids books had been somewhat challenging. They all had small font. They weren’t written for non-sighted people to read. 

These things belied an absence in the imagination of publishers, a space dominated by the non-disabled  – but that’s only one place. The fact is there are blank spaces where disabled people should be everywhere you care to look. 

When I was writing Being Seen, I was looking at the spaces where blind people and Deaf people were. Where we were being misrepresented, where our stories were being told poorly. I was deliberately exposing myself to the many bad choices that writers, filmmakers and artists have made when they have displayed disabled bodies on the page, stage and screen. 

But it is the absence that I want to talk about now. 

It isn’t just that there aren’t children’s books about blind people. It’s that there aren’t children’s books being printed for the blind people in their lives to read to them. 

It isn’t just that as a kid I was the only Deafblind student in my classroom or school – it’s that there was an absence of other kids like me at all. 

Non-disabled society doesn’t want to see us. It wants us to go away. The way that we are told this is through the lack of presence that I experience in my day to day life. 

It is the absence of disabled women that is killing us. Absence in teaching professions, in medical professions, in leadership roles. Absence in stories that matter to us. Absence in representation.

The blanked out space where we should be is horrifying.

This is one of the carryovers of the era of institutionalization. In 1985 my parents were told to give me over to one, and to have another child. Would I be writing Being Seen if I had been placed in one of those places? No. I would be yet another blank spot in the world that should have been.

Being Seen is not merely about what blind and Deaf women are depicted as – who the world assumes we are as disabled women. It is about how the absence of us in the world’s imagination is killing us – it is a symptom of the sickness that our society has:  ableism. 

Being Seen isn’t just a book. It’s not only a piece of text that you can read. It’s an ask. 

I’m asking every non-disabled person who reads it to take stock of what they believe about blindness and Deafness. I’m asking every sighted disabled person to dismantle their own misunderstandings. 

I am hoping that this book helps me be better seen by the world that I live in. 

***

Elsa Sjunneson is a Deafblind author and editor living in Seattle, Washington. Her fiction and nonfiction writing has been praised as “eloquence and activism in lockstep” and has been published in dozens of venues around the world. She has been a Hugo Award finalist seven times, and has won Hugo, Aurora, and BFA awards for her editorial work. When she isn’t writing, Sjunneson works to dismantle structural ableism and rebuild community support for disabled people everywhere.

Elsa Sjunneson: Website | Twitter

Being Seen: Indiebound | Bookshop.org | Amazon

The Worldbuilding In Villeneuve’s Dune

The inevitable Dune post has arrived.

I mean, c’mon, you knew it was coming.

We will just get out of the way right now my review: I loved it. I did not expect to love it. I adore Villeneuve’s work pretty universally, not a bad note in that fella’s song so far, but I have a lot of squirrelly feelings about Dune. They’re not particularly complicated or controversial, these thoughts, they’re just a loose tangle of snarls and burrs that make me generally disinterested in it. To try to name the three legs of this stool: first, I read the book in high school and found it to be fine, and, like a lot of weighty sci-fi, firmly up its own ass; second, I really love the David Lynch version for maybe no good reason except I love Lynch and it’s such a weird and brave adaptation for its time (even if Lynch’s vision was itself compromised); third, as a writer of genre fiction and reader of it and as a friend to many genre writers, I’m always like, hey there are other books, you can make other books, you don’t need to keep hacking away at this one, JFC.

Any doubts I had were dashed against the rocks. I watched the film at home, which rankles some cinema purists*, but I have a pretty TV with surround sound that makes my living room better than most theatrical experiences (barring, say, IMAX), with the bonus that I can pause the movie to get up to go pee (sorry, I mean, “refill my stillsuit”). And I was held rapt by it. I watched it a second time last night, this time with my 10-year-old, and to my surprise, he seemed to like it, too (with the exception of him reaching the end and being like, “wait what where’s the next part” and I said, “I think in about two, three years” whereupon he made a face like he’d just eaten a cat turd).

It’s rare I want to rewatch a movie so quickly, if at all. This felt like a seven-course meal and a strange dream in equal parts, and I wanted to keep going back to it, to experience new tastes and to try to decipher little bits, savoring this bite, pondering over another. It’s not a happy movie. It’s a tragedy. And the film wisely doesn’t divert away from the fact that the prophecy of this desert Messiah is one that is propped up, invented, seeded by the Inscrutable Witch-Nuns. I also really enjoyed that for what is traditionally to me a very cold, speculative story, Villeneuve and the actors went the extra distance to make me feel the humanity of some of these characters. Not overmuch, not so that it feels ham-fisted, but there is I think a habit of getting so lost in the weeds of the political maneuvering and prophetic machinations that you can very easily lose the people in that equation. (Though I also could’ve used a little more here. I enjoy that the Emperor’s jealousy is kept far from us, like a shadow threatening to overtake the light — but I really wanted more character from the Baron, whose hatred of Duke Leto feels so intensely personal but has no expressed reason to be. His character in the film ends up being mostly just Wow What A Bad Guy, which isn’t quite enough.)

As usual, I also like to pick apart a thing, at least a little bit, to try to understand what went into the architecture and articulation of a particular story. If not necessary to provide a “lesson,” then to consider how other creators choose to organize and design narrative. Choices are made in the telling of a tale, and I like to try to understand those choices. Both as a “firmly up my own ass” thought exercise and also to see if there’s anything to help me sharpen how I tell my own stories. Right? Right.

Here, I think the big takeaway for me — though surely there are more to come — is in how the film hands its worldbuilding. Dune as a storyworld has a lot of it — the story of this first book is one that sits atop a rather prodigious history of its own galaxy, and one with a lot of fiddly, crunchy bits on which the story seemingly relies. It’s actually so crunchy and obtuse I’m not even sure I entirely understood it —

Up until now. Until this movie.

Which is a helluva thing, really.

I really, really love its approach to worldbuilding, which seems to match with what my own desires for worldbuilding happen to be. In capsule, I’d describe the approach as this:

When the worldbuilding is inessential to the movement of the story, it discards it.

When the worldbuilding is essential to it, it folds it into the experiences of the characters.

It does not promote worldbuilding as the story’s priority. It demotes it to being only support.

(Which, in my mind, is what worldbuilding is there to do, lest your story become an RPG manual.)

Most importantly, Villeneuve trusts the audience.

To unpack this a little more —

There can be a habit in some movies or books to tell some of the background worldbuilding in a display of grand exposition — a voiceover, an encyclopedic chapter, a speech by a character Haughtily Explaining Things In A History Lesson. The story becomes a temporarily mouthpiece for Exposition Delivery. Now, the writing advice of Show Don’t Tell is well-meaning but not universally applicable, because sometimes it’s far more direct and empathetic to the audience to just tell them a thing rather than go through the shadow puppet play in order to demonstrate it. Just the same, it can also be true that Capital-T Telling can become very boring, very quickly. Nobody wants a story to be a lecture, even if that lecture is just trying to teach a class about its own history, culture, science, food, religion, what-have-you. This is especially true in film, where you need to be particularly judicious with your time. A minute of movie can be $100k or more in cost.

In Dune, Villeneuve is glad mostly to expect that the characters of this world know what’s happening, and to just move through it, and past it. (Contrast this with the godawful worldbuilding exposition found in a movie I otherwise quite like, The Force Awakens. The C3P0 “As you know, Bob, er, I mean, BB8” scene is so jarringly bad, as are any scenes where Leia explains to Han things that Han obviously definitely knows already.)

I’m spoiling a bit here (though it’s also difficult to spoil a story that has been around for over 50 years in a variety of iterations), so close your eyes now if you don’t want any spoilers at all —

But in the early scene where Duke Leto receives the Imperial Decree or whatever-the-fuck-it-is, we don’t need a lot of data. Simply by pushing forward into that scene without waiting for you to catch up, we swiftly learn there’s an Emperor, he spent a lot of money to send his envoy here, Leto’s signet ring is important in asserting his authority, and this is a moment of great significance for the Atreides family (one they hope is ascendant but that is ultimately tragic). We get a very brief glimpse of a Bene Gesserit witch but we really don’t know who all the Daft Punk motherfuckers are who are hanging out there, and it doesn’t really matter. I mean, it matters if you view story as a collection of details and data, but if you care about the broad human strokes of it, it really doesn’t add up to anything useful except trivia. (That said, there are those readers and genre fans for whom it is the trivia that matters most, and these tend to be the readers and watchers that care most about the notion of “canon.”) Villeneuve trusts you, the audience, to gather the context clues and to move on.

When context clues aren’t enough, the worldbuilding is delivered in merciless, in-narrative experiences. When it’s time to know what a Stillsuit is, the narrative is allowed do double-duty in the story — it’s about the suit being fitted to the Duke and to Paul, and in that we get a host of vital narrative bits: we meet Liet Kynes; we see how fiercely protective Gurney is over Leto; we see that Paul is able to intuit things about Fremen life and culture, and also that Kynes recognizes it and is aware of the prophecy. It’s a lot of juiciness while simultaneously telling us what a Stillsuit is. Later, we learn of a “sand compactor,” and Villeneuve doesn’t stop to explain it — he’s just like, “Fuck you, it is what is says it is, and you’ll see it later, it’s fine.” Then he just… ushers you past it.

It’s a good approach, because it doesn’t bog you down in details, and it makes sure that the focus of the story is on what matters most in the story: the characters. They’re why we’re here — we’re not here for the internecine grappling of empires and fiefdoms. We’re here for the people inside that internecine struggle, because without them, the story just becomes another bad high school history lesson where they fail to focus on why individuals matter and instead demand you simply know the dates of their kingly or presidential reigns, as if that’s all that really matters.

It’s wonderful. I like it.

Not to mention, it’s a beautiful movie. Truly.

I may have more thoughts on it at some point, but for now —

I HAVE COMMITTED BLOGGERY.

*presses big fat chonky ring into blob of wax*

*signet ring image is a screaming possum*

HOUSE WENDIG IS TRIUMPHANT.

Now buy my books (Book of Accidents, Dust & Grim) or I die in the desert of obscurity.

BYE

* okay to unpack “cinema purists” a little, there has, particularly with Dune, been this attitude that somehow seeing a movie in a movie theater is How You Must See Filmses, which of course utterly disregards the fact that the life-span of a movie is at best 5-10% of its total experience, and the rest of it will be on televisions and tablet screens and, I dunno, eventually on the control panel of your SmartFridge or some shit. It’s also ableist and pretentious and is a weird attitude to shove in people’s faces during a fucking global pandemic, AH YES THE ONLY WAY TO SEE A MOVIE IS TO GO OUT AMONG THE UNWASHED LUNG-HORKING MASSES AND ENJOY THEIR RESPIRATORY MIASMA, WHICH WILL BE THRUMMED INTO YOUR BRONCHIAL TUBES, FOR NO MASK IS A DEFENSE AGAINST THE MIGHT OF DOLBY ATMOS. Plus in this day and age people have 4k tablets and 8k TVs and room-filling surround sound or killer headphones. Shit, some of my favorite movies I watched on crappy CRT televisions in the 80s and 90s. It’s fine. If you like watching movies in theaters, do so! Huzzah and hooray. Just don’t judge me for not wanting to go to one of our local shitbox theaters where someone will bring a screaming baby and another person will be texting the whole time in front of me and a third jerk will be dully kneeing my chair every 47 seconds.

Various Warblings And Ululations

Once again, I arrive with clumsy flourish, to bring you whatever thoughts I can squeeze from my soggy braincake. (I saw Soggy Braincake on the side stage at Lollapalooza, 1994.) Increasingly I am of a mind that treating this blog occasionally like a newsletter is not the worst idea, as those who subscribe get this neat little bundle hand-delivered by digital elves upon me clicking Publish. So, let’s get to it, shall we?

Go Watch Only Murders In The Building Now, Right Now, Hurry Up

Did you like Ted Lasso? Did you want to feel that way again? Then I have the show for you. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez fucking kill it in this murder-mystery — it’s got more NYC sensibilities than Ted Laddo’s melange of Midwest and UK vibes, but it’s ultimately still not overly cynical. It’s funny, it’s murdery, it’s occasionally sweet. I won’t spoil it but the finale had me laughing so hard we had to pause the show so we didn’t miss anything. It’s really fucking great, and it deserves your eyeballs. And awards. And a puppy. Sidenote: Selena Gomez should be on deck to play Miriam Black in a Blackbirds adaptation for television. Dear universe, please make this happen, thank you. *stares very hard at the universe*

On The Other Hand, Succession?

I continue to bounce very hard off this show. It’s not the show’s fault. The show is brilliant. It’s a me problem, not a them problem. I’ve tried watching it a few times now, and I’ve never made it through the first season. I find the characters not merely reprehensible, but each of them bleeds this miasma of second-hand-embarrassment that makes me almost literally recoil. Again, to the credit of the show, I recognize this is intentional — and the actors are very clearly nailing it. They’re exceptional. But I can’t crack it. It’s also possible I’m watching it at the wrong time — not the wrong time in the world (though that’s part of it, too, in that I don’t necessarily want to watch a bunch of Murdochian fuckheads traipse about being epic douchebags), but I mean, literally, the wrong time of day. As we have a kidlet running around, I tend to watch more (ahem ahem) mature programming at night before bed, and before bed is not when I want to feel tense from watching Murdochian fuckheads. Part of me thinks, what if I watch it during the day? Maybe. Hmm.

It’s interesting to me, because a show like Billions works for me, and yet those characters are reprehensible, too. Sopranos, Breaking Bad, all of them contain largely reprehensible and irredeemable characters, but they’re… even when not necessarily redeemable, still human. The characters of Succession are satirical, in part, and that means they’re more openly cartoonish, buffoonish, and sinister. Their humanity is harder to find. I think there’s a trick to making unlikable characters, and as I’ve long said, it’s to worry less about likability and more about livability. Like, can you live with these characters as narrative roommates, even if they’re fuckheads? You can get away with more of this when the story is in a shorter format, right? Like, a movie makes it easier, because it’s 90-120 minutes in, then you’re out. But a TV show demands you stew in it, and sometimes it feels like hanging out in a septic tank instead of a spa tub.

But, again, I note: brilliant show, and I think I just need to approach it differently.

That, or it’s not just a show for me, which is also totally a thing!

Children Ask Amazing Questions

So, in case I haven’t crammed it into your eyeholes enough, hey, I wrote a middle grade book! Molly Grim inherits a funeral home for monsters and has to share the inheritance with a brother, Dustin, she’s never met. Dust & Grim! Please go buy it or get it from a library lest I wither like a dying spider, legs curling inward as I gently turn over onto my back! Or something.

Anyway!

So, this week I’ve done my first ever school visits (well, not really first ever as I’d visited my son’s school in the past), but at the very least, the first in support of a single book, and the first done over Zoom. And it’s weird, of course, because basically you get up there and talk at a screen for 20, 30 minutes, and I just sort of blather and stammer about my book and hope that I’m not totally boring the children to absolute tears. But! But. Then we get to the Q&A portion, and that is my favorite. Because kids ask amazing questions.

They don’t come up and say HELLO THIS IS MORE OF A COMMENT THAN A QUESTION, they don’t ask convoluted fan questions or crawl-up-your-own-ass-with-pretension questions.

They just ask really cool questions.

Sometimes they’re really simple, like

HI MY NAME IS JORDAN WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MONSTER

And it’s like, uhh yeah, hell yeah, that’s a fun question, I want to answer that question. No sarcasm. That’s a delight. Other times, they ask really weird questions like

HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK ALL YOUR INTERNAL ORGANS WEIGH

And it’s like, okay, that’s a fun one, too, let’s game that out, let’s do the math.

Then! Then I had one group who was very clearly doing a unit on writing, because they asked some seriously hard-hitting questions about writing. This is no joke, these are not made-up questions:

HOW DO YOU BUILD SUSPENSE IN A BOOK

HOW DO YOU MAKE ANTAGONISTS LIKABLE

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN TO END A CHAPTER

HOW DO YOU USE THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF FORESHADOWING

WHERE AND HOW SHOULD YOU START A STORY

Like, uhh, haha, oh shit those are real questions. Can’t I just talk about my favorite monster again? Those are real-deal writing queries, and the kids were really thoughtful, and it was wonderful.

Kids are cool.

Anyway.

Our Dog, The Bug That Is Snoo

Hey, our dog is doing okay, for those who have asked (and thanks!). She had multiple courses of anti-b’s, and has to have her BUTT GHOSTS exorcised once a month at present, but so far, that’s holding the Wolves of Surgery at bay.

Advancing The Advance Conversation

I don’t know what started it, but on Twitter there has been quite a bit of fol-de-rol over the question: is $100,000 is a big advance or not? I take it some author said it wasn’t, or it wasn’t as big as you’d think, or what-have-you.

So, let me clear up my thoughts on this:

It’s a big advance.

It’s also not automagically life-changing.

It can be.

But it isn’t necessarily.

The thing is, as with nearly all discussions, there is a whole lot of nuance that has to get packed into it, and generally speaking, Twitter is a place where nuance goes to die. Nuance are bumps and splinters, and every conversation on that cursed bird-site sands those bumps and splinters down. Everything gotta be this or that over there. But the bumps and splinters are texture…

And texture is a necessity.

Consider:

Some advances are as low as $10,000.

So, a $100k advance is higher by 10x, which makes it pretty sizable.

And if you’re already working a full-time job, that money — on top of your other money — probably makes a big damn difference, and can change your life. Maybe not lottery money life-changing, but, hey, it’s a huge pressure off.

And yet, there are… considerations.

First, you’re going to give 15% of that to an agent. So now it’s a $85k advance.

Second, you’re going to give some portion of that to taxes. Assume, bare minimum, you’re going to give 25% of that to taxes, so you’re going to be left with ~$60k out of that initial $100k advance.

Third, that advance will not be paid to you all at one time. It will be divvied up in 3-5 payments. First, on signing. Then at various other mile-markers along the way: when you turn in a draft and it is accepted by the publisher, when it is published, when trade paperback comes out a year later, when there’s a Super Blue Blood Wolf Harvest Moon, when the Moon Hits Your Eye Like A Big Pizza Pie, when you finally kill your first man in Reno — whatever. There are gates, and you gotta walk through those gates to trigger a payment.

So, if in 1/3rds, you’re going to get roughly $20k each time.

And that can be paid out over the course of 1-2 years, depending on how long the process takes. Publishing a book is not fast. Drafting a book to reaching bookshelves is a journey.

Fourth, is it for one book, this deal? If so, well done, good job. If it’s $100k for, say, a three book deal, that hits real different. Because now it’s more books, more time, and less money per book.

Fifth, where do you live? Is it San Francisco? Then congrats, that advance just paid for your annual coffee budget. Is it Ohio? Congrats, you can put a payment down on a reasonable home! Where you live really matters as how far that dollar goes. That’s not to say living in San Francisco isn’t amazing — certainly you’re in the midst of a lot of culture in a city, culture you might not so easily access in, say, Centralia, Pennsylvania. (Aka, THE EVER-BURNING TOWN.) But access to that kind of culture is not cheap. Sadly. Cruelly. We continue to silo parts of our country and culture to the Already Wealthy. (Which writers generally are not, to remind.)

And a final consideration is that publishers, now trying to portion out the payments over more stages and longer periods, are also enjoying an industry that is on the rise — book sales are up, not down, during the pandemic. (Though no telling what supply chain issues will do to that.) And, my personal opinion is that they’re also spending less money to send authors out on tour or go to conventions, so, it does in fact feel like a bit of a sting to try to stretch those payments out even further, thus diminishing the very idea of what an “advance” is supposed to be. (The core idea of an advance is, or was, “Here is money you can live on while you edit this book and ideally, write the next one.”)

Anyway. All this is a very long-winded way to say, again:

Yes, $100k is a big advance. It is important to note that.

It’s also important to note it’s not as big as you think — or, rather, it doesn’t go as far as you think. And overselling a $100k advance as being this WHOA WOW LIFE-CHANGING EXPERIENCE runs the risk of empowering publishers in continuing to pretend that they’re doing you a favor. (As a reminder, publishers are not your friend. The people inside them are wonderful, and as an industry I am of a mind that it’s a whole lot healthier than many, many others. Even still, be careful about assuming that any scraps you receive are a gift to you, rather than what is owed — or less than what you should be owed.)

Moving on.

Where’s Wald–Uhh, I Mean, Where’s Wendig

I was super gonzo cuckoopants lucky to get to talk to the wonderful Felicia Day, who invited me onto her podcast, Felicitations, to talk about APPLES. Not the computer. Nay. The fruit. The gorgeous, weird, wonderful fruit. Heirloom apples and Johnny Appleseed and apple detectives and we also talked about books and I think cryptocurrency? I dunno. It got weird. Anyway! I had a ton of fun on this and thanks to Felicia for having me on. Go check it out.

What else?

Dust & Grim got a shout-out from Bloody Disgusting (!!) as one of ten horror books perfect for the Halloween reading season, saying: “Wendig offers a whimsical spooky tale full of ghosts, vampires, fairies, cryptids, and monsters of all types for the young and young at heart. Wendig crafts a middle school read that treats his target audience with respect. In other words, it may be a lighthearted horror fairy tale, but the author isn’t afraid to inflict pain or heighten the stakes.”

The Book of Accidents got listed by Kirkus as one of their 13 scariest books of 2021!

I did a Q&A with Publishers Weekly if you wanna read that interview. I mostly talk about writing Dust & Grim! But also a little about writing during a pandemic, too.

Tonight, I get to hang with one of my best homies, Delilah S. Dawson, where we’re *haughty tone* TWO AUTHORS IN CONVERSATION, talking about writing and middle grade and scary stuff and spoopy stuff and who knows what else. That’s at 7pm EST tonight, please come and check it out.

Finally, Dust & Grim got its third (!) starred review, this one from the BCCB, saying: “Wendig thrills, enchants, and amuses in equal measure with this uniquely bizarre fantasy adventure.” That full review will be published in their November issue.

What I Have Been Filling My Brain With Lately

Playing: Been rounding the bend on my Mass Effect playthrough, halfway through ME3, now. It’s such a fantastic series. There’s supposed to be an ME4, yeah?

Reading: Kiersten White’s Hide and Gabino Iglesias’ The Devil Takes You Home. The former is a sharp-toothed amusement-park thrill-ride where a game of reality show hide and seek goes, uhhh, let’s just go with “horribly awry.” And the latter is a gut-stabbing horrory noir about crime and consequence born of out of the struggle of poverty, and the tangled nightmare of grief. Both great reads. Now onto Alex Segura’s so-far-excellent Secret Identity. Crime novel set in the world of 1970s comic book industry.

Watching: Only Murders, obviously. Gonna try to watch Dune this weekend. Watching John Stewart’s new show, which was good, if a little pokey — not that I need or desire my news-explorations shows to be funny, but Last Week Tonight and Daily Show still do it better, I think. Stewart’s show still feels like it’s finding its feet, and honestly, I haven’t been too enamored that lately he went in on the “lab leak” notion for COVID-19 origins (which so far is an unsubstantiated theory), and also that he was supporting Chapelle with his anti-trans sentiment in The Closer — while I recognize that comedy is comedy, I also think these guys really want to have their cake and to eat it, too. They want comedy to be this truth-telling medium where the jokes are actually in some way revelatory, saying what we all think. But then when they’re called on it, the jokes suddenly become “just jokes, not serious, how dare you get mad at jokes, jokes are equal-opportunity offenders,” as if comedy requires a victim to be funny. Then they go in on cancel culture, claiming they’re victims of it from their streaming TV shows that backed the money truck up to their houses. I don’t mean to suggest the comedians are vile or monstrous people, but I really think they both want the power of comedy to be this epic, transcendent thing — until they receive the mildest of criticisms, at which point, they turtle up and say, OH WAIT THESE ARE JUST DUMB JOKES, YOU DICKHEADS, HOW DARE YOU TRY TO QUASH MY FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, ANYWAY, SEE YOU LATER ON MY TV SHOW. I’m not even picking on Stewart overmuch here, or really, even just Chapelle — it’s a deeper trend of very sensitive comedians, usually men, who can’t seem to take criticism. Jokes matter, until they don’t, etc. No one can just say, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.” Meanwhile, they’ll never choose to identify with right-wing Trumpy-types, even though their core message remains ultimately the same: “Fuck your feelings, I can say what I want.”

Wow, that was a longer rant than I intended. Hm.

Regardless, given the Netflix walkout, organized by Trans*, you should join me and consider a donation to an organization like The Trevor Project or the Audre Lorde Project.

ANYWAY, NOW HERE ARE SOME PHOTOS.

Some photos!

Okay, first photo up (and you can see all my photos at Flickr) is maybe one of my most favoritest photos of all time. Every year I try to capture shots of golden-crowned kinglets, and these little fuckers are hard to capture. They move like a blinking cursor. They often stay on the interior of evergreens. Usually my shots of them are just blurry bird-ass. But this year, they’ve been more personable, and there have been a lot of them. So, I got this shot:

Like HOLY CRAP look at the iridescence through the wing! Really lucky with that shot.

More below:

Dust & Grim Is Here!

“Monstrously fun…. A sure pick for those enamored by Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2008), and Tahereh Mafi’s Whichwood (2017).”—Booklist (starred review)

AHEM AHEM AHEM

*clears throat*

IT IS TIME, my friends, to seize your Dusty Grims, your Grim Dust, your *checks notes* Dust & Grim. That’s right! My MG debut is officially out in the world tomorrow (though I hear tell many folks are finding them in bookstores already, which is wonderful).

It’s a fun, spooky, spoopy book about a girl who inherits a funeral home for monsters and must share that inheritance with a brother she’s never met. It contains vampires and foxes and wolves and magic and one (1) Florg, plus many more creepy, kooky things. It is ostensibly for kids aged 8-12, but I’ve had adults read it and enjoy it (my take is that if you like Christopher Moore books, you’ll like Dust & Grim). It contains beautiful art by Jensine Eckwall. Art directed by Karina Granda. Edited by Deirdre Jones. I had a blast writing it. I hope you have a blast reading it.

I’m going to reiterate some information here, so bear with me —

I am doing events this week and next, and there are some additions here:

Monday, 10/18, 6PM EST, Virtual launch event at Books of Wonder with Matt Wallace, tickets here. Pre-order Matt’s wonderful Supervillain’s Guide to Being a Fat Kid.

Tuesday, 10/19 6:30PM EST, presently virtual event at Let’s Play Books, Emmaus, PA, event details here.

Wednesday, 10/20, 7PM EST, Virtual event at Anderson’s bookshop with Greg Van Eekhout. Details here. And checkout Greg’s newest, Weird Kid, which my own kid adored.

Thursday, 10/21, 7PM EST, Ludington Library event! Details here.

Friday, 10/22, 7PM EST, Virtual event at Porter Square Books with Delilah S. Dawson. Details here. Grab Delilah’s spooky good time, Mine.

Tuesday, 10/26, 7PM EST, Scrawl Books Book Club Event, details here.

Wednesday, 10/27, 7PM EST, One More Page Books, a Halloween Vs Christmas Holiday Showdown Throwdown with me and author Tiffany Schmidt (author of next week’s release, I’m Dreaming of a Wyatt Christmas). Details here.

And there are a number of places to buy the book, as well —

Signed/personalized copies from Doylestown Bookshop, Let’s Play Books.

Or from the other bookstores above:

Books of Wonder, Scrawl Books, Porter Square, Anderson Bookshop, One More Page

You can also find a local indie through Indiebound, or buy through Bookshop.org.

B&N, too, is a good choice for print copies — and you can find other buy links here!

If you want to read some nice things said about the book:

“A clever, heartwarming tale of funerary rites, ghosts, and the undying power of family.”—Holly Black, Newbery Honor-winning author of Doll Bones and The Cruel Prince

“Wildly inventive, totally hilarious, and unexpectedly moving.”—Lev Grossman, bestselling author of The Silver Arrow and The Magicians

“A one-of-a-kind delight—mysterious, exciting, inventive, sometimes scary and always funny, Dust & Grim reads like a rollicking ghosts and monsters story, which it is. But just as important, it’s a compelling and tender story about family. Sibling duo Molly and Dustin will find their way into readers’ hearts as surely as they find their way into each other’s.”—Trenton Lee Stewart, bestselling author of The Mysterious Benedict Society

“Sucks you in with a wise-cracking zaniness that soon spirals into a delightful rampaging chaos of swarming vampires, thorny wolves, walking trees, and eldritch horrors. And yet even as the dangers for Molly and Dustin increase and the wise-cracks keep flying, the importance of family both lost and found grounds their story with a profound sense of heart.”—Paolo Bacigalupi, bestselling author of The Windup Girl, Ship Breaker, and Zombie Baseball Beatdown

“Spookily charming, bewitchingly creepy, full of hope, heart, and horror, Dust & Grim is the sort of book you gobble up in one sweet and salty bite.”—Delilah S. Dawson, author of Star Wars: PHASMA and Mine

“Every line of Dust & Grim is packed with a laugh, a sharp observation, or something radically cool, and sometimes all three at once. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Wendig is a welcome new voice in middle-grade fiction, and we are lucky to have him.”—Greg van Eekhout, author of Weird Kid, COG, and Voyage of the Dogs

“Siblings Molly and Dustin Grim are the most unlikely of heroes, and for that reason they are among the greatest. The fact that they must save the world from within a secret monster mortuary is only the first of many surprises that bestselling tale-spinner Chuck Wendig has created for this full-of-heart debut about trust, friendship, and the importance of having the perfect costume for every occasion. A fantastic, spooky adventure!”—Fran Wilde, Nebula Award winning author of Updraft and Riverland

“Playing to strengths demonstrated in his many comics and tales for older audiences, not only is Wendig a dab hand at concocting extremely creepy critters, but here he also pulls together a secondary cast of quarrelsome but supportive allies for the beleaguered teens.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Wendig offers a whimsical spooky tale full of ghosts, vampires, fairies, cryptids, and monsters of all types for the young and young at heart. Wendig crafts a middle school read that treats his target audience with respect. In other words, it may be a lighthearted horror fairy tale, but the author isn’t afraid to inflict pain or heighten the stakes.”—Bloody Disgusting

“Packed with pop-culture references and creepy beings, the novel is written from Molly’s sarcastic-beyond-her-years viewpoint and subtly threaded with life lessons that together create an engaging narrative.”—Publishers Weekly

Caitlin Starling: Five Things I Learned Writing The Death of Jane Lawrence

Practical, unassuming Jane Shoringfield has done the calculations, and decided that the most secure path forward is this: a husband, in a marriage of convenience, who will allow her to remain independent and occupied with meaningful work. Her first choice, the dashing but reclusive doctor Augustine Lawrence, agrees to her proposal with only one condition: that she must never visit Lindridge Hall, his crumbling family manor outside of town. 

Yet on their wedding night, an accident strands her at his door in a pitch-black rainstorm, and she finds him changed. Gone is the bold, courageous surgeon, and in his place is a terrified, paranoid man—one who cannot tell reality from nightmare, and fears Jane is an apparition, come to haunt him. By morning, Augustine is himself again, but Jane knows something is deeply wrong at Lindridge Hall, and with the man she has so hastily bound her safety to. 

Set in a dark-mirror version of post-war England, Caitlin Starling crafts a new kind of gothic horror from the bones of the beloved canon. This Crimson Peak-inspired story assembles, then upends, every expectation set in place by Shirley Jackson and Rebecca, and will leave readers shaken, desperate to begin again as soon as they are finished.

Abdominal surgery Calls To Me, and I don’t know why

The Death of Jane Lawrence makes book number two in which there is an early plot-central colostomy. (The first, of course, is Gyre’s suit hookup in The Luminous Dead.) It wasn’t always that way; in the first version of the book, it was a very standard, run-of-the-mill horrifying leg amputation, a Victorian surgical specialty that has the benefit of not risking serious death in a time period that is only just discovering antiseptic technique.

But then revisions happened, and I needed to make the injury that caused the surgery weird, and, well, now you’ve got a klein bottle for a large intestine and you need a colostomy if you’re going to live.

(And then I added five more abdominal surgeries to the book, and I only realized the extent of the infestation when I was writing up content warnings.)

Look. I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with rerouting bowels and excising eldritch lumps. Something about the centrality of it, maybe? How inherently violating it is? Maybe how, after, you have to deal with a fundamental change to how you live?

It did grant me the absolutely amazing experience of consulting with an ER doctor in the family about possible complications and medical limitations of the setting, in which said doctor coined the phrase “location of the magical insult”.

What I forgive in a character is not necessarily what readers forgive in a character.

In the very first draft of The Death of Jane Lawrence, Jane was, perhaps, a little too forgiving to her new husband. Secrets? Well, it’s reasonable not to dump your trauma onto your new wife! Gaslighting? He was only trying to insulate her from his problems! Delusional and uncalled for attempted surgery? He was just scared!

You can imagine how this made my critique partners tear their hair out. My goal had been to make Jane’s husband sympathetic, but in belaboring his motivations, the book became me making excuses and crying, Oh, he’s not that bad! (He was. He still is. This is a gothic we’re talking about.) It turned out that the way to actually make him sympathetic (or at least engaging) was to drop his POV, stop justifying – and to let Jane react with a little less acceptance and a lot more frustration.

This is why readers are so important at every stage of the process: what you take away from your own writing is not what other people will take away from it, and it can sometimes be hard to anticipate where the differences are.

(Note: Sometimes the mismatch is not actually a problem. There is a point near the end of the book, in which Jane does something which I found not only reasonable, but rather romantic.

My editor had to remind me that it was, in fact, horrifying. And since this is a horror novel, that’s a good thing.)

Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

A quick disclaimer: I’m pretty sure that if I am the last person who should ever take cocaine, for the sake of myself and everybody who has to deal with me.

But cocaine was a standard part of the Victorian pharmacopeia, and what better tool is there when you need to be functional after long nights without sleep thanks to your haunted mansion or, moreover, when you absolutely need to stay awake for several days straight for a touch of ritual magic?

It was entirely reasonable to give my characters cocaine. But cocaine, plus the close third person perspective the book is written in, plus the already constantly escalating and spiraling weirdness of the plot turned into something perfectly, wonderfully terrible. Suddenly, Jane, who is by any measure confident and a little outside the norms of general behavior, was taking even bigger risks.

The trick, of course, is to make each decision feel natural; being able to immediately dismiss it as, “Oh, our lead is now on drugs,” cheapens the impact. That’s where the perspective comes in: Jane’s concept of what she’s doing is entirely medical and practical, and the moment of dosing herself does not immediately precede her questionable cocaine decisions. There’s a delay, long enough and subtle enough that Jane, and therefore the narrative, can’t connect the dots. An attentive reader can, of course, but the mismatch between reader knowledge and narrative produces that necessary horror ingredient: dread.

Go weirder.

The Death of Jane Lawrence, for all its classic trappings, is a completely bonkers little book. (Did the cocaine tip you off? What if I tell you that Jane’s understanding of magic is based in calculus?) It didn’t start that way, though. In earlier drafts, I kept things simple and easy to explain, my few flourishes constrained to what exactly are ghosts in this world? and okay, what’s another gnarly medical thing I can add here?

That made for a nice book. But I just stopped worrying so much, it could be so much better.

Two things got in the way of that, at first. One: marketability. Money is good. Money is a necessary component of why I write. And writing something weird makes it less likely to sell, right? Turns out, that’s not exactly true. If The Luminous Dead’s relative success taught me anything, it’s that, if you can get the weird on the shelves, it sticks with people. If you just let your weird brain weasels out to play, and show them off at the best angles, people like that. They pay you money. They want more!

Which brings me to the second roadblock: I have spent my whole life trying not to be so weird. My brain occasionally goes way too hard in directions that the people I meet in my day to day life don’t get (or, worse, are disgusted by). That made trying to tap into that weird a very scary, vulnerable process. It wasn’t even that I looked at what I knew I wanted to do and went, “No, that’s scary, can’t do that.” I had buried some of this down so deep that I had forgotten what I wanted. It took a lot of excavating to find it again.

Absolutely worth it, but a bitch of an exercise.

Revisions make the heart grow fonder.

There have been a lot of iterations of this book. There have been at least two ground-up rewrites, maybe three, and a whole lot of tweaking at each step. It was one of the most frustrating experiences of my creative life: here was a book that I loved, beyond all reason, and it wasn’t right, and wasn’t right, and still wasn’t right. The things I loved about it just weren’t translating to my early readers, and I spent years tearing it apart and putting it back together, trying to find what was going wrong.

Over time, I made everything weirder, and made Jane take bigger risks, and just got loud about the parts that I enjoyed most. I let them take up more page count. I wallowed around in them, because, let’s face it – if I never fixed the book, I at least wanted to enjoy some of that failure. And if I wasn’t having fun, then what was the point of beating my head into a wall?

There were dark times, of course, but by the time we got to the final draft, I was still having fun. I was having more fun, actually. I wanted to yell about the book even louder, to more people, for longer. The story that started The Death of Jane Lawrence was good! But where we’ve ended up?

Well, that’s magical.

***

Caitlin Starling is an award-winning writer of horror-tinged speculative fiction. Her novel The Luminous Dead won the LOHF Best Debut award, and was nominated for both a Locus and a Bram Stoker award. Her other works include Yellow Jessamine and a novella in Vampire: The Masquerade: Walk Among Us. Her nonfiction has appeared in Nightmare and Uncanny. Caitlin also works in narrative design, and has been paid to invent body parts. Find her work at www.caitlinstarling.com and follow her at @see_starling on Twitter.

Caitlin Starling: Website | Twitter

The Death of Jane Lawrence: Indiebound | Powells | Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon

Gwenda Bond: Five Things I Learned Writing Not Your Average Hot Guy

A paranormal romantic comedy at the (possible) end of the world.

All Callie wanted was a quiet weekend with her best friend. She promised her mom she could handle running her family’s escape room business while her mom is out of town. Instead a Satanic cult shows up, claiming that the prop spell book in one of the rooms is the real deal, and they need it to summon the right hand of the devil. Naturally they take Callie and her friend, Mag, along with them. But when the summoning reveals a handsome demon in a leather jacket named Luke who offers to help Callie stop the cult from destroying the world, her night goes from weird to completely strange.

As the group tries to stay one step ahead of the cult, Callie finds herself drawn to the annoying (and annoyingly handsome) Luke. But what Callie doesn’t know is that Luke is none other than Luke Morningstar, Prince of Hell and son of the Devil himself. Callie never had time for love, and with the apocalypse coming closer, is there room for romance when all hell’s about to break loose?

From New York Times bestselling author Gwenda Bond, Not Your Average Hot Guy is a hilarious romantic comedy about two people falling in love, while the fate of the world rests on their shoulders.

Sometimes you have to get away from your desk.

Not Your Average Hot Guy has what I think is an interesting origin story. Winters are not my favorite. All those gray days just drag me down, and every year it seems worse (yes, I have the SAD light!). So I was already looking forward to just getting out of the house and driving down to Tennessee for a book festival by March–in this case the Southeastern Young Adult Book Festival (SE-YA for short), organized by the Four Librarians of the Apocalypse (this should’ve been my first hint). I wanted to do stuff with my friends! Fun things! So I switched into activities director mode, which I’m occasionally wont to do.

For instance, one night we went to play ski-ball at Chuck E. Cheese. I noticed there was an escape room business in the strip mall bordering the hotel we were all at. Over drinks that night, I found a group willing to give it a try and booked us a reservation. Which booked wrong! I panicked and called in the morning. They were supposed to be closing early for a wedding, but the lovely people at the business agreed they could make it work during the late afternoon for us. Whew, without that escape room trip, this book probably would never have existed.

We did a Baker Street/Sherlock Holmes-themed room with great effects. It was the perfect mix of people and we escaped within the allotted time. There was even a wonderful dog hanging out behind the desk.

On the drive back home, my brain spun out almost this entire book. I love writing about family businesses, and I wondered what it would be like if your family ran an escape room. And what if you accidentally put a real grimoire in a room? And also, what if it summoned a devil, and what if instead of the usual it was the devil’s son and that’s a whole different kind of family business…. AND what if it was a rom-com? When I got home, I sat back down at my desk and tweeted this, and then wrote what would stay the first few pages. Beginnings are usually impossibly hard for me. Sometimes you need to have a little adventure.

When you’re truly excited about an idea, ignore the reasons you shouldn’t write it.

On paper, in 2017, absolutely no one would’ve suggested I write this book. A rom-com with paranormal elements? Paranormal was dead, they said (which is never true, by the way; all genres are undead and everything in publishing cycles). Certainly, on paper, paranormal romance would be a hard sell. Also? A book with all these good vs. evil elements? A rom-com set during a (possible) apocalypse? I kept it to myself for awhile, but it fell out of my brain onto the page. I was having so much fun writing it, even while it was a difficult challenge for reasons I’ll discuss later in the list. I wasn’t initially sure if it was YA or for adults (it’s for adults, but has been deemed crossover, as the characters are early 20s).

When I showed a portion to my agent, I expected her to love it too, and she did! But she had a lot of questions. And advised that I needed to write the whole thing, not just a proposal. She was most certainly correct, but later admitted that she usually hates these kind of god/devil sorts of books. But she ended up loving this one when it was done, which is why she made that admission (whew). Still, I had to keep putting it aside to write other things, but then I’d come back to it. I was not at all confident anyone would like this book, let alone want to buy it.

But I decided not to care. And I kept coming back to the page. There’s a lot of me in this book, especially my sense of humor. I’ve never been the sort of writer who makes decisions based on anything other than the story that feels like I want to tell it and which is the most me. Even when I’m writing IP (intellectual property), like Stranger Things or Lois Lane, it has to be a good fit that I can put my voice into and feel like I’m bringing something with me.

Responses to this book on submission were almost universally positive, but a lot of people didn’t know what to do with it. I was convinced all along I’d have to make it less weird. I’m so happy it found first Tiffany Shelton, and then Jennie Conway, at St. Martin’s, who have supported this book like whoa, along with everyone else who worked on it there (you know who you are, but I’m going to shout you out anyway, because you don’t get enough recognition–Kerri Resnick for the cover direction and design, Mary Moates and Natalie Figueroa from publicity, Erica Martirano and Kejana Ayala on the marketing side). And during a pandemic.

I could’ve easily talked myself or let myself be talked out of writing this book–there’s a risk as you get further in a writing career to believe you somehow understand publishing and think maybe if you just did this, you’d get where you want to go. But publishing will always be unpredictable. That is the only predictable thing. Sure, be strategic, but your voice and what interests you, the weird way you combine all the art that made you, the you part of your books, all that is the only thing no one else can bring to the table. You have to trust it.

Comedy is hard.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” It’s so good, it’s no wonder it’s an iconic quote, despite the fact its origin and wording are difficult to source. I think one of the reasons besides other work the first draft of this took so long to complete is because it is a comedic novel. Yes, it’s right there in the rom-com part, and I wanted to make sure the book was funny… But comedy is hard. It’s delicate and intricate and must feel organic and it’s also extremely personal. I’ll explain.

I honestly don’t think I’d have been brave enough to write straight-up comedy until this point in my writing journey. In person, I like to think I’m funny (oh god, no one who thinks that is funny, but let’s set that aside–let’s say, I like to laugh, and I like to make other people laugh, and I think life is generally absurd and, even when it’s actually horrible, I tend to deal with it with humor, which is something my family always did too). In fact, one of my early mentors in grad school when I decided to start writing novels said, “This character pushes people away with humor right before things get real.” And I was like, “THIS ATTACK ON ME IS UNWARRANTED. But possibly accurate.” The thing is, though, humor is actually incredibly revealing and personal.

To put what you think is funny on the page is a different kind of vulnerability. Because senses of humor are very particular and personal. While, in general, people not liking your books sucks, but doesn’t equal a rejection of you, people rejecting your sense of humor…well, it kind of does feel that way. So, even more than on a craft level, which is incredibly tricky, it’s also nerve-wracking to write funny. As much or more so than entering a new, much-beloved genre…

You will end up writing the thing you don’t think you’ll ever write or have an interesting take on.

Almost anyone who knows me well will tell you I’ve long been obsessed with comedy and particularly the classic screwball rom-coms of the 1930s and ‘40s, but also modern rom-com. Much as I used to be obsessed with circus novels and the circus itself, but never thought I’d write a circus book, because what new did I have to add? Then I started Girl on a Wire, and then it became a whole circus series. So, yes, I’ve written romantic novels with humor in them–certainly the Lois Lane books fit–but I never really thought I’d get to write rom-coms. Particularly not with a kind of classic screwball sensibility mashed up with all the mythological and/or supernatural/occult stuff I love and romance.

And then, of course, just like with Girl on a Wire, I got hit by that lightning idea and it was happening.

Truth is, most of us have genres or things we’re low-key or major-key obsessed with, and often it’s those that will mug you. They’re deep in your subconscious. I love so many things about romantic comedy. Banter. Lightning wit. Two people who challenge and make each other better versions of themselves. Sheer absurd situations, and moments that will change the characters’ lives, and laughter. Some of my favorite comedic writing ever can be found in Preston Sturges’ scripts. When Christopher, my husband and sometime writing partner, and I first met and started dating, he got me a shooting script for The Palm Beach Story for my birthday (along with a fancy copy of the play Medea–I CONTAIN MULTITUDES). I’m obsessed with the books of Connie Willis, particularly the comedies. And with so many rom-coms I can’t begin to list them.

But I never thought I’d write an honest-to-god rom-com…. Because writer brain reasons. And yet, now that I have and still am, I have so many ideas for more. I love this genre deeply, and all the things it lets us explore. I love how science fiction and fantasy (and romance itself) allows us to replicate the constraints in fiction that made all the classic rom-coms with their class dynamics and other-reasons-not-to-be-together classic rom-coms. I used to argue with people about how SFF could be uniquely positioned to do this in a certain way, and, duh, now I’m writing them and hopefully the books make the argument better than I ever could

Romance is a genre for joy.

We have this persistent myth in our culture that things that are tragic or depressing or even just serious or cynical or whatever are somehow wiser and more important and more difficult to pull off. That they are more intrinsically valuable, and have more to say about life. Same problem often shows up with shows or stories that explore the complications of good people–Ted Lasso and Superman haters, I’m looking at you.

I read all over the map, and reading romance specifically has been a master class for me as a writer on emotional vulnerability and arcs. I snuck plenty of romance as a teen, but I started reading romance in a real way about ten years ago, though I’d already been reading urban fantasy with heavy romantic threads before that, and it quickly became a part of my reading diet. During the pandemic, it’s what kept me going. I wanted to laugh. I wanted the safe space of a book that ends with the closure of a happy for now or happy ever after. Those borders can allow you to take any emotional journey that exists. Romance is as varied as any other genre, in terms of mood and types of stories, and quality of writing. But there is always that sense that the author cares about you and your experience while reading. There is the sense that the book is a gift for you, the reader.

That’s very much how I approached writing this book. It’s the apocalypse, but it’s a fun apocalypse. I think we’ve all had enough of the other kind in reality at the moment (not that I don’t love a good fraught post-apocalyptic–like my host’s Wanderers, for instance).

But romance is–like YA–still much-maligned and looked down on because of its perceived status as being primarily for and about women, and, by extension, somehow disposable and frivolous. Imagine that. There are still people who act like romance and romance writers and readers have cooties. Guess what? COOTIES ARE FAKE. And romance readers and writers are smart as fuck.

Which is what makes it such a joy to write for them, for you. I hope you all dig this book, and its sequel, out next spring! I hope that they bring you joy. Many thanks to Chuck for letting me blather about all this here.

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Gwenda Bond is the New York Times bestselling author of many novels, including the first official Stranger Things novel, Suspicious Minds. She also clearly escaped from a classic screwball romantic comedy. Not Your Average Hot Guy (out now!) and The Date from Hell (April 2022!) are her first rom-coms for adults. She lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband, author Christopher Rowe, and a veritable zoo of adorable doggos and queenly cats. Visit her online at www.gwendabond.com or @gwenda on Twitter.

Gwenda Bond: Website | Twitter

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