Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 32

Delilah S. Dawson: Ten Ways To Torture People (In Fiction)

Most of us move through life hoping everything will go well and turn out exactly as we’ve imagined it. Most of us are therefore disappointed. This is even more true for characters in books, because without failure and pain and chaos, there is no story. A book in which everything goes right is exactly one sentence long. That means it’s up to the writer to uniquely torture their characters. In my most recent book, THE VIOLENCE, three generations of women use a pandemic of random violence to escape the cycle of abuse they’ve been stuck in. These three women have to fight everything from a new pandemic to their loved ones to the police to the cashier at a drug store to professional wrestlers. This book was an exercise for me in torturing your characters for the most satisfying and cathartic ending possible. Here’s how to do that.

Make torture part of the premise. When you’re developing the idea for your book, you don’t want to start with a perfect person in a perfect world. You want a character with specific flaws and fears who is uniquely challenged by their world. Pain should be baked right into that backstory. Even if you want to start with a generally happy character and take everything away from them, they should still have flaws and fears you can prey on while melting them down and forging them in a crucible of pain.

Throw thumbtacks in the cake mix. When I wrote my first few books, I wanted the characters to be relatable to literally everyone, which never works. We don’t want mild, smiling cardboard cutouts; we want characters so real and rich and messed up that it’s like we already know them. That means they have to be flawed—and not, “he’s so handsome no one believes he’s a spy”. Real flaws. Deep wounds. Troubled backstory that comes up at the most inconvenient of times. The key is to make them flawed but somehow likeable, meaning that if he’s a gruff jerk, we immediately learn it’s because he lost his entire family in a werewolf attack—and then we see him save a kitten when no one is looking. Maybe giving a character flaws and fears isn’t technically torturing them… but it’s more like throwing thumbtacks into the cake mix. Make it real enough and they’ll torture themselves.

Kick off with failure. I wrote an article for Crimereads called ‘Make the Face Match the Ass’ (https://crimereads.com/delilah-s-daws... focuses on creating symmetry between the beginning and ending of a book. Since your protagonist generally triumphs at the end of the book, it’s nice to give them a symmetrical failure at the beginning. That means that if your character beats the bad guy in a hula hooping competition at the end, we see him suffer a tragic hula hoop-related accident at the beginning of the book. This failure can be as simple as being too shy to talk to a crush or as huge and terrible as Louis allowing his toddler to get run over in Pet Sematary. The bigger the fall, the better the rise.

The obstacle is the way. From the very beginning, make sure that there are all sorts of built-in problems for your character—don’t make it easy for them. You want to keep your reader on the edge of their seat, not knowing what will happen next. If possible, end every chapter on a cliffhanger or a question. If a chapter ends with a character happily falling asleep, it’s easy to put the book down and scroll through Instagram. If the character is falling asleep and hears a noise downstairs when they live alone, the reader may be compelled to keep reading.

When you’re not sure what to do next, think about the worst possible thing that could happen—and make it happen. Unless you’re a very strict outliner, chances are you’ve left some wiggle room for discovery in your first draft. Sometimes, you come up with the perfect idea while driving to work and feel like you’ve been tongue-kissed by the muse. Sometimes you come to a roadblock and your character is basically staring up at you like God in heaven, asking what comes next. That’s the perfect moment to throw a boulder at them. Let tragedy strike. Have them be attacked. Have their ex show up. Hit them with food poisoning. At the very least, throw a terrible, thundering downpour on them. Then they can’t stare up at you anymore.

Find your Jayne Cobb. It can be tempting to create a cast of characters who are all beautiful and perfect and lovely and get along famously, but again, that’s not a story—that’s a Publix commercial. When you add secondary characters, love interests, and acquaintances, build in that friction. Old grievances, moral differences, annoying habits, opposing wants and needs. Give your characters a reason to argue, to fight, to seethe. Sometimes the most interesting parts of the story come from what naturally happens between characters in quiet moments. It never hurts to throw a raging asshole into the mix and see what is extruded on the other side.

Even one small pebble can feel like the end of the world. Sure, a car accident or alien attack brings strife, but don’t forget how quickly the little things add up. If you don’t believe me, just put a pebble in your shoe and leave it there all day. Raccoons stealing food, a sneeze when silence is necessary, a child who won’t stop crying—it all adds up. If your character is on a journey through the forest and time is of the essence, a horse throwing a shoe is the biggest problem in the world. Don’t neglect the small things that become big things.

But don’t forget the big things. So we’ve got little things and people and fears and flaws that can create friction, but there’s so much more! Most characters are at odds with big things, too—the very foundations of the world. Culture, economics, laws, mores, religion. If a character loses their shoes in the swamp, they might not be allowed in the gas station if the guy up front is really serious about No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service. I’ll never forget Louis (yes, another Louis) from Ghostbusters trying every door and window of the upscale restaurant that wouldn’t let him in and then falling prey to the Terror Dog because of a few locked doors and some snooty waiters. When in doubt, put your character in an altercation with some authority and see where they end up.

At the All Is Lost moment, dial the torture up to 11. Right before The Big Fight or whatever you have as a climax, there’s always an All Is Lost moment. That’s when it feels like your character can never possibly win and, well, all is lost. It’s the dark night of the soul, the moment the protagonist wants to give up. Your job is to push this moment as far as you can—mentally, emotionally, physically. You need your backstory, flaws, fears, wounds, discomfort, betrayal, and hopelessness to all come together in one hot, lumpy stew for your protagonist to swallow down and fight past. We really have to believe they can’t win or can’t go on.

All this pain will be valuable to you someday. When you hit the climax of the story, that’s when you take your long list of tortures and show how your protagonist uses what they’ve learned to fight back. Take that pebble out of their shoe and load it into a slingshot. The purpose of all that torture was to mold your protagonist into someone capable of defeating not only the bad guy—but also that poor sap they were at the beginning, the weak wiener with all the worries. The harder you’ve pushed them, the higher they can rise when it’s go time. That’s what makes us stand up and cheer—having watched this character go through hell, keep on crawling, and finally triump, just like we all wish we could do (without having to suffer all the torture, of course).

But if you really want to see how I torture my characters, please pick up a copy of THE VIOLENCE. It’s available in all the usual places as a hardcover, e-book, or audiobook. Chuck liked it, so it must be good, right? [ed: I totally fucking loved this book and from page one you get the sense it’s something special, also here is where I note Delilah, myself, and Kevin Hearne will be going on a short li’l book tour next month: NYC, Rhode Island, Boston-area.]

Also, someone is bludgeoned to death with a bottle of Thousand Island dressing, and that has to count for something.

***

Delilah S. Dawson is the author of the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: Phasma and Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge: Black Spire, The Violence, Mine, Camp Scare, the Minecraft: Mob Squad series, the Hit series, the Blud series, the Tales of Pell (with Kevin Hearne), and the Shadow series (written as Lila Bowen), as well as the creator-owned comics Ladycastle, Sparrowhawk, and Star Pig, plus comics in the worlds of Firefly, Star Wars, the X-Files, Adventure Time, Rick & Morty, Marvel Action: Spider-Man, Disney Descendants, Labyrinth, and more.  Find her online at delilahsdawson.com.

Update To The Tiny Tour!

We have officially added a third date!

CHECK IT OUT.

Wednesday, March 16 at 7:00pm

Strand Book Store

828 Broadway, New York, NY

Link for tickets.

Thursday, March 17 at 7:00pm

The United Theatre

5 Canal Street, Westerly, RI

*Presented by Savoy Bookshop & Café

Link for tickets.

Friday, March 18 at 7:00pm (or 6:30pm?)

Barnes & Noble

1 Worcester Rd, Framingham, MA

Store info here.

It’s me, Kevin Hearne, Delilah S. Dawson, and again we are tentatively doing an in-person tour next month, like, literally a month from today, holy crap. We will sign books. We will sign babies. We will ask that you be masked and vaxxed. We will talk and engage in various shenanigans. It will be great. As long as none of you cook up some new OMEGATRON variant in the next four weeks. BE COOL, EVERYBODY. Just. Be. Cool.

See you in NY, RI, and MA! Er, hopefully!

(*We’re doing this in support of The Violence, the paperback release of The Book of Accidents, and the new editions of The Iron Druid!)

Wonky Site Goblins

So, you may have noticed as of late the site has been… uhh, let’s go with erratic. The basic story is this, and I’m typing this now under the assumption it may return to wonky goblin-fed shitmess in the next few hours —

So, a few months ago, the site went down a couple times. Just down. Gone. Erased. Brought from back up, fine. Updated everything, that stopped happening. Then it was replaced by a Chinese search engine. Replaced from backup, fixed again. Then, a couple week ago — ads started showing up on the site. Google ads.

First, found the ad code in widgets.

Deleted the code.

Ads went away.

Then, two days later, ads came back up, this time found that plugins had been installed without my permission — !! — and those plugins were creating widgets and using the code. Deleted plugins, shored up security.

Ads went away.

Two days later — ads were back. Took forever to find where they were — it was code in my theme. So I disabled that theme, went to the default theme annnd —

Ads went away.

Six hours later, they came back. And this time they were cascading through the backend of the site, and it became largely unusable. So, we shut down the site and applied new security protocols and here we are, once again, no ads.

No idea how long it lasts! So, I’m sending out this message in a bottle to update you. Still chasing down goblins in case. More as I know it! Apologies for chaos!

Merch? Merch!

So, I used to do merch. Art Harder, Motherfucker, and Certified Penmonkey and all that fun stuff. Except, time took its toll and I dunno, I got distracted by a shiny object, because essentially at the core I am an easily-distractible crow. The merch faded with time, into the mists.

But now. Merch hath returned.

Check it out right here.

I’ve partnered with awesome human, Jordan Shiveley, who designs and operates the merch-realm known as voidmerch, and as such, he’s begin to upload a number of Wendig-slash-terribleminds-slash-novel-themed designs.

You’ll find a panoply of sinister designs that will break your mind and steal your teeth. I mean, that or just make you look fashionable as fuck decked out in your fancy Wendigalia. Which is not a word. But it is now, shut up.

I mean, this is just a sample of what’s there:

You’ll also find a new ART HARDER, MOTHERFUCKER design (clean version also available) there. Plus Black Swan, Magic Skeleton, Ramble Rocks, and more.

And there will be more designs to come.

Please to enjoy, slavering merchwolves.

(As a sidenote, I recognize my website is showing advertisements. It shouldn’t be! Something has gone wrong, and I’m working on it. Every time I get rid of them, they come back, which is suggestive of a hack, so I’m going to have to start kicking in doors to see what the hell is happening in the code. More as I know it.)

Lickity-Quick News Kick, Slick

Very quick, let me light a news-scented candle and waft the gentle perfume in your direction:

First up: The Book of Accidents is on the long list for the Stoker Awards. Thanks, all! Here’s hoping it ends up there. That’s really cool and I’m in really great company. Sidenote, I re-upped my HWA membership after many, many, maaaany moons.

Then, I got to talk about creepypasta on Gavin Purcell’s very cool podcast, Way Too Interested. The creepypasta expert was the wonderful Lucia Peters. It’s a fun podcast where you basically are interested in a weird topic, and Gavin invites on an expert in said topic, then you all… talk about it. Check it out here. Or don’t. I’m not your dad. Yet.

And over at LitReactor, Gabino Iglesias talks about the books he’s looking forward to that are coming out in 2022 — some real classy picks on there from the likes of Alma Katsu, Paul Tremblay, Ursula Vernon as T. Kingfisher, Clay McLeod Chapman, Eric LaRocca, Cassandra Khaw, and more. “And more,” by the way, is a not-subtle hint that maybe just maaaaaybe Wayward, the sequel to Wanderers, is on that list, which you can find here. And here I note too that Gabino has a fistful-of-teeth book coming out soon, a shiv-in-the-kidney read that will blow your ass away — The Devil Takes You Home, out the same day as Wayward, August 2nd, 2022.

Finally, speaking of Wayward, you can preorder it at B&N today using the code PREORDER25, for 25% off. That is, if you’re so inclined. Link here.

HOKAY BYE

A Little Tiny Baby Of A Book Tour?

Hey, guess what?

I might maybe mayhaps kinda sorta could be coming to your neck of the woods soon, in person, assuming that a) your neck of the woods is somewhere in the Northeastern United States and b) some new COVID fuckery doesn’t rise up and bite us on the ass in the next two months.

What I mean to say is —

Hey! Me, Kevin Hearne, and Delilah S. Dawson are doing a few bookish visits in March!

March 16th, the three of us will be at The Strand in NYC, at 7:00PM. (Details.)

March 17th, we will be at the United Theater (via the Savoy Bookshop) in Westerly, RI (Details.)

And March 18th, we hope to be… somewhere in or around Boston, MA? TBD!

These events will require both masks and vaccinations, because we are not monsters.

And of course, again, it behooves me to note that chaos could come to roost upon us once more if COVID coughs up some new ROBERT LUDLUM’S OMEGA VARIANT that entirely botches our efforts to show up anywhere in person. But! We’re trying it. And we hope you’ll be there. I’ll be out in support of The Book of Accidents in paperback, Kevin will be shouting about the awesome new reissues of his Iron Druid series, and Delilah will be celebrating the truly amazing book, The Violence. Come see us. We will talk about stuff and try to be funny. We will devalue any and all books we can with our signatures. Here’s hoping Omicron is truly peaking and waning and we have a chance to do our (gasp) first in-person events in like, years. I dunno what that’s even going to feel like?

*panic attack ensues*

(And ideally I will be touring this summer for Wayward, but we will know if that’s possible as we get closer to that time. Keep your eyes peeled. Also, ew. Don’t peel your eyes. That’s nasty.)

Three Bucks Gets You An Apocalypse

Hey, in preparation for Wayward, the sequel to Wanderers, coming out this year (August 2022!)… guess what? You can nab the first book for a cool TWO DUCATS AND NINETY-NINE CHITS.

You can do this at:

Amazon

Apple

Kobo

B&N

And any other e-book retailer.

It’s 280,000 words, 800+ pages, which means you get roughly, oh, I dunno, one novel per buck? Let’s say that. Sure, it’s about a pandemic, but it’s also about artificial intelligence and creepy sleepwalking people and rock-and-roll. So, go check it out. And while you’re at it, feel free to pre-order Wayward at your favorite independent bookstore — or pre-order from Doylestown Bookshop, and get yourself a fancy copy devalued with a personalization and autograph.

Go forth and enjoy.

The Great Surrender: How We Gave Up And Let COVID Win

I feel like I’ve lost my goddamn mind, but we’ll get back to that point soon. Let’s start with this. Two things seem to be true at this moment in the pandemic:

First, that our numbers are higher than they’ve ever been, in most cases not just by a hair’s breadth, but often by two, three, even four times their previous peaks.

Second, that we are doing less now to mitigate cases than ever before.

This happened alarmingly fast. Delta took a couple months to simmer here. Omicron, the dominant variant, boiled as soon as it hit the stove. It rolled over us in a matter of weeks, not months. Hey, we flattened the curve — just in the wrong fucking direction, as our leap in cases is now a billionaire’s rocketship, launching straight up and into orbit.

With this new variant came the assumption that it is a milder form of the disease, and from that single assumption arrived a number of decisions. The CDC changed all its policies in a sudden, confusing barf of protection reductions. (Though in fairness, Carl Bergstrom notes on a Twitter thread that, despite the piss-poor communication, there might be some value in these changes.) The CDC’s head, Rochelle Walensky, offered a (correctly) maligned soundbite, explaining that “the overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.” Never mind the fact that comorbidities such obesity, diabetes, depression are not uncommon, particularly as one enters middle-age (and never mind that were they uncommon, it is not actually encouraging to be told that you are unwell and will be the ones to bear the brunt of the disease that nobody is protecting you from). The Biden administration has relied on vaccines and mandates, but not fully — they refuse, even still, to make vaccines a requirement of domestic flights. And the current business mandate is being challenged in the Supreme Court, with a not-unreasonable chance for it to fail. There are supposed to be tests coming to us by mail, though I’m not sure when, and we’re not even sure how well the home tests detect Omicron, particularly in its early stages. There exists little clarity on what anybody is doing, which mostly means, nobody is doing anything.

From this, you can feel the lack of leadership and the loss of focus and good communication cascading out through the populace like a wave of surrender. Masks? Fuck ’em. Gone! Gone. I mean, to be clear, they were gone mostly when the CDC botched that communication early on, but here, now, I go out and I don’t see a mask on a face. Not from anybody. Not even as our cases are triple where they were in this county. Vaccine mandates? Temporarily gone, and probably full gone soon enough, with no seeming plans to introduce them. Testing? Quarantine? Isolation? Contact tracing? Can’t find tests, and the CDC has changed who should get them. Quarantine and isolation is already limited now, and for the most part here, parents and workers are subtly encouraged in schools and in jobs to just… casually not test at all because if you test, you might find it, and then your kids might not be in school (THE HORROR) and you might not get to come in to do your job (OH SHIT) and so maybe, y’know, I dunno, don’t go looking for COVID and you won’t find it. (This, a particularly Trumpy echo.) Contact tracing? Hahaha. Haha. Hahahhahgaaaaaaah yeah nobody is tracing shit anymore. It’s on you if you wanna do that. Good luck.

And from all this has cascaded a particular attitude, even among people who were once maybe careful, who are vaccinated and are not necessarily thoughtless people —

The attitude is, I give up.

It’s, “I don’t like this anymore, so I’m not going to do it.”

It’s, “Well, we’re all going to catch it anyway, gotta live my life.”

It’s, “I don’t want to hear anymore about how the bridge is out, I’m just going to accelerate the car and assume they’ll put the bridge back up before I get there, or at the very least, I’ll just jump the ravine in my Toyota Camry.”

They are bored with the pandemic.

They are tired of it.

They don’t want restrictions.

They don’t want to stop or even slow down.

And it has led to this peculiar, troubling moment —

Cases are worse than they’ve ever been.

And people are done caring.

If you ask them, they will say — to go back to the beginning of this — oh, I hear Omicron is mild. Is it? Is it mild? Maybe. It may be milder. I know a lot of people who have COVID — more now than cumulatively throughout the entire pandemic — and they’re all vaxxed and boosted and experiencing a relatively mild sickness. Of course, when you realize that before now, there was Delta, and vaxxed/boosted people did not catch Delta easily, it starts to feel like it’s weird to call Omicron — which is kicking down the doors of your body’s protections — milder. Is it mild? It’s mild in that it doesn’t seem to lead to as much hospitalization and death, though that’s not the only metric by which we live. A lot of the people I know who have or had Omicron experienced a rough ride, even if it didn’t include an ambulance ride. Hospitalizations have not yet made the epic leap with the case rates, though hospitalizations are usually a couple-few weeks behind, and deaths behind that. And even still, hospitalizations are boiling over (yes, even with kids) and our healthcare system is wobbling toward collapse, and none of this even seems to consider the unknown potential of Omicron to lead to Long COVID, which would be a mass disabling event that would create some of those pesky comorbidities the CDC is so eager to dismiss. Does COVID significantly increase the chance of developing Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes in children? Seems like it does.

If you’re starting to feel like, “Hey, maybe this doesn’t sound good,” check this out:

Let’s go to Buzzfeed, where they asked experts to clarify some of the questions about kids and COVID. (Please, no jokes here about Buzzfeed — they have a pretty robust journalistic wing, and have at times done some fantastic reporting.) In this article, you will find first this:

‘“You don’t want colds passed around schools either, right?” Rutherford said. “But on the other hand, one of the reasons we have preschools is so parents can go work. That’s a benefit of it. And if you send them home every time they sneeze, you’re going to have a lot of unhappy parents.”’ Rutherford said it makes sense for schools to continue to follow whatever pre-COVID sickness policies they had in place, with an added layer of COVID testing for children with more severe upper respiratory symptoms. But he said this testing should be rapid, not PCR, which usually takes multiple days to deliver results.

Because, ha ha, yeah, exactly, you can’t be too STRICT with this shit, right? But then:

‘About 20% to 40% of teens who get infected may develop long COVID, said Blumberg. “In younger children, it’s less, but we don’t have good numbers on that.”’

Wait, wait, what? Fucking what now? Twenty to forty percent? Uh, first, that’s a huge unknown gap between those two numbers, but even on the low end, that’s one out of five teenagers.

But we’re just like, nah, fuck it? Ha ha, eat shit, teenagers!

Now, I want you to go check out the CHOP guidance for the new year — Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a generally reputable source on all things children-health-related, yeah? They begin their piece by noting how COVID has pushed the healthcare system to its limits and how dangerous it is, yadda yadda yadda, but then they land on their actual guidance, which begins with:

‘With evidence that COVID-19 is becoming a milder infection in most children, and at a time when all adults and youth in K-12 settings have been offered vaccination, our PolicyLab experts and CHOP clinical leadership have reached a consensus that preserving as much in-person schooling as possible outweighs the risks of infection to children and school staff at this stage of the pandemic.‘

To translate: keeping kids out of school for any period is a sickness greater than COVID.

And here, again, is where I reiterate:

I feel like I’m losing my mind.

Am I losing my mind? Are you?

I sure feel that way.

I feel like someone just told me 2 + 2 now equals 22, and a lot of people seem to agree with that, even though we all know math doesn’t work that fucking way.

I feel like I’m seeing and hearing how bad the pandemic is presently, how the systems are straining, how teachers and healthcare workers are quitting in droves and are pushed to their limits, how friends and family are seeing workplaces and schools hamstrung by all this shit, and then, at the same time… I’m seeing nobody do anything about it. Like, not a fucking thing. In fact, less is being done.

We’ve given up.

We’ve surrendered.

This is the Great Surrender.

(Credit to Twitter user @caedsmama for giving it that unofficial name.)

We acknowledge, oh yeah it’s not good, and then we just keep doing what we were doing. No slow down. Only acceleration. We will violently shoulder our way through this pandemic, because we are so done with it, even as it is clearly, clearly not done with us. Schools are open because jobs are open because the economy must be fed. And people defend it. Like they’re people who know they’re in the Matrix and they defend it. Everybody’s Cipher from the first movie, YEAH I LIKE THE TASTE OF THE STEAK, FUCK YOU. Long Covid? Ennh, fuck it. Masks? Fuck it. Restrictions, lockdowns, any mitigation efforts? Fuckity fuck it all. We give up. Game over. Get COVID. Who cares. ISN’T IT TIME WE ALL GET IT, says Agent Smith as he coughs into your mouth.

It feels like gaslighting not from a single-source, but in a miasma that surrounds you. It’s area-of-effect gaslighting. You feel like you wanna say, “Hey things seem really bad right now, maybe we should give things a pause,” and then you get a look like, WOW LOOK AT MISTER LOVES-THE-PANDEMIC OVER HERE, CHECK OUT THE PLAGUE FETISHIST, THE MASK-HUMPER, THE GUY WHO REALLY LOVES HURTING CHILDREN BY SUGGESTING THEY NOT GO TO A SCHOOL WHERE HALF THEIR PEERS ARE OUT, HALF THE TEACHERS ARE OUT, BUT THAT’S FINE IT’LL MAKE THEM TOUGH. It’s like we’re trying to John Wayne our way through a global pandemic, like we can bootstrap it. I mean, sure, kids are barely vaccinated. But jobs! Jobs. Jobs jobs jobs. Gotta churn that crank. Gotta turn out the widgets, and you can’t churn widgets unless your kids are in school. Feed the beast!

(Here I recognize that yes, some kids do need to be in school, not just for education and social development, but also for food. But it’s also worth recognizing that these are systemic failures, in part, and punishing them by forcing them through a boiling pandemic comes with its own obvious deleterious consequences.)

It’s like we’re done with the finding out part and want to get back to the fucking around part, even though it’s not usually supposed to go in that order.

We just… deflated.

I don’t have any great conclusion here. I only write this because I want it written somewhere that I feel like I’m losing my mind. And maybe I am. Maybe I’m the wrong one.

It’s just — what the fuck.

I am blown away. Once we celebrated our healthcare workers and teachers, once we at least tried to band together and flatten the curve (if in our limited way), but now we’re like, nah, fuck it. Nah. Just nah. I mean, sure, other countries are addressing the problem. Sure, if we had just cooled our heels for two, maybe three weeks, we could’ve taken this sharp rise and spiked that volleyball back to the ground. But this is America. We do everything bigger and better. We’ll make this the biggest spike the world has ever seen. We’ll never let it go. We learned to stop worrying and love the COVID.

Mission Accomplished. That’s the banner COVID is hanging right now.

It won.

And we are good with that.

And now imagine:

Just wait till climate change really gets going. Every day is already a new story about how FIRE AND SNOW HAD A BABY AND A NEW ATMOSPHERIC RIVER IS DROPPING A BOMB CYCLONE OF HUMID HELL WASPS ON BOTH COASTS, and already we’re like, ennnh but fuck it. But I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’ll develop renewed patience just in time, I’m sure. Any time now. Any. Time.

(As a PS, I apologize if this feels like a bummer. But I honestly feel pretty anxious not just about the pandemic, but also about our sudden acquiescence to it, and I really wanted to talk about it somewhere that wasn’t just Twitter. It required unpacking and so here I am, unpacking. I will get back to fun writing advicey stuff soon. Buy my books or I die. Bye.)

Writer’s Resolution, 2022: The Necessary Act Of Selfishly Seeking Joy

Last year, my writer’s resolution was about healing and growth.

This year’s will be simpler, more visceral, and dare I say, more selfish.

To preface this, I remind folks who are new here (though is anybody here really new?) that every year I like to do some kind of authorial resolution, and this is more for me than it is for you, but mayyyybe, hey, it’s also for you, too. This resolution, like any piece of writing advice, is intensely personal and is something for you to pick up, hold in your hand, test its weight…

And either put it in your toolbox or chuck it into the dust.

This year, I’m resolving to find the joy in the work, and to embrace that joy the way a person in the ocean would cling to a piece of floating debris.

It’s like this:

I think in the midst of the chaos, which is considerable, I am reminded that nothing is promised, nothing is guaranteed. We are owed nothing but what we owe ourselves, and it is exactly that compact, that contract, that I want to cleave to this year.

Because what I owe myself is to find joy amidst that chaos.

Which for me is about finding the joy in the work.

Perhaps you owe yourself that, too.

I want to be clear: I don’t mean that every moment of writing must be done with a rigor mortis smile staple-gunned to your face. Writing is work. It can be an act of moving earth, sometimes. It can hurt. It be wearying. Joy isn’t on a conveyor belt, fed to you automagically.

I also want to note that joy as a metric is a hard one — you can’t really measure it, and sometimes joy is a giddy, lunatic moment, while other times it’s a slowly-spreading satisfaction. The easy warmth of a nice moment, or the electric thrill of success and surprise.

What it is, is this:

I think we get caught up in the process, in the product, and we forget to identify and embrace those parts of writing that bring us true satisfaction and happiness. We started writing for some reason or another, and it’s easy to lose a hold on that reason. We create content. We get on a treadmill of words. We try to churn out word count, tallying numbers as if the numbers matter in a sense more than just measurement. And I think it’s easy to lose the reason you write in there. I know at certain points I’ve lost the thread, for sure. And maybe you have, too.

Too often too we get caught up in the joy of publication, as if that’s the summary of the work. As if publishing is the reason to write. It’s not. It can’t be. It’s too uncertain, too unstable, to make that the thing that brings us satisfaction. That’s giving the world too much power over you. You’re taking your heart, and ripping it out of your chest, and plopping it bloodily into the hands of, who? A publisher? An audience? A reviewer? Some rando on Twitter? Yes, eventually that’s what happens, I get it — that heart of yours is going to end up out of your chest, served on a plate. It is, perhaps, inevitable. But before you get there, you can take a bloody bite for yourself.

Not just a bite.

The first bite.

In a year — or, hell, years — where things feel uncertain, where the very air around you feels taut like a strangling wire, it’s all the more important to go back to the basics. To seek joy. To just get a goddamn breath. If the chaos ensuing reminds us time to take a moment, to reflect, and to go back to the reasons why we started writing in the first place, then that to me is a considerable win. There is something you love about writing. I don’t know what it is. Maybe you love those serendipitous character moments, or the construction of unique turns-of-phrase, or engineering twists in the story. I love creating metaphor, I love chapter titles, I love finding the rhythm of a sentence. The things in which I find joy, I will pursue doggedly this year. Teeth out. Greedy hands, searching. I’ll make it happen. I’m also going to seek opportunity in writing to make myself happy first and foremost, to find something in every day’s work that gives me true, even if small, joy.

Something for me, not for you.

The first bite of the heart.

I hope you’ll do the same, if it suits you. I think it’s a noble pursuit, the joy in one’s work. The good news is, I think this suits not only you, but the work, too. The myth of the suffering artist is just that, a myth. It can make the work suffer, too. Let the work sing. Let yourself sing in the work.

So, in 2022, that’s what I’m doing, and maybe that’s what you’re doing too.

Seek joy in the writing.

Be selfish.

A little bit, anyway.

Have a great one. Let’s all agree to make this year dance for us, instead of us dancing for it.

2021: Things What I Liked (That I Can Remember)

This is going to be hasty — I have an utterly broken memory of what actually existed in 2021. It’s curiously difficult to pinpoint this year as a year, to find its walls, to see its ceiling and its floor, to know what exists in this temporal room, this time-based structure. Because I barely acknowledge it as a structure at all. It is, in fact, more like a free-floating miasma.

Still, something happened in this sinister vapor. Let me try to suss out the stuff I liked this year.

Pop culture stuff, I mean. Media. CONTENT. Mmm. Chewy, granular content.

Again, this is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive. It’s just some stuff I really liked this year. If it’s not on this list, I may still have liked it — even loved it! — and forgot it existed in 2021, or forgot it existed at all, because that’s just how my brain is faring these days.

Albums:

Indigo de Souza, Any Shape You Take

illuminati hotties, Let Me Do One More

Hus KingPin, Portishus

Halsey, If I Can’t Have Love I Want Power

TMBG, Book

CHVRCHES, Screen Violence

Deap Vally, Marriage

Bo Burnham, Inside

Olivia Rodrigo, Sour

Or, for some good songs: Jenny Lewis, “Puppy and a Truck;” Margo Price, “Red Temple Prayer;” Japanese Breakfast, “Be Sweet;” Jack White, “Taking Me Back;” Moon Taxi, “The Beginning;” K. Flay, “Four Letter Words”

TV:

Only Murders In The Building, Ted Lasso, Hacks, Sex Lives of College Girls, CentaurWorld, White Lotus, did I mention Only Murders In The Building??, I Think You Should Leave, What We Do In The Shadows, Mare of Easttown, Midnight Mass, Reservation Dogs, Arcane, Owl House, Kid Cosmic, Maya and the Three

Movies:

Watched… surprisingly few actual movies this year, so let’s see how this goes?

Matrix: Resurrections (my initial review was me scratching my head, but I’ve revisited it and it has stuck with me more than I expected), The Mitchells Vs The Machines, Dune, Lost Daughter, The Green Knight, The Night House, Summer of Soul, Suicide Squad, is Bo Burnham’s Inside a movie or a show or what I dunno whatever just put it on all the lists, The Harder They Fall

Games:

It’s basic, but Halo: Infinite is deeply satisfying; Deathloop; Psychonauts 2; the new Outer Wilds expansion; Townscaper; Mass Effect: Legendary Edition which I know isn’t really a 2021 game but shut up; I really want to play Inscryption and Wildermyth but I don’t have a PC

Special shout-out to Root, by Leder Games, which is a truly delightful boardgame

Books:

God, this one is really hard, because a lot of stuff I read is from years outside 2021 — including coming out in 2022?

Catriona Ward’s Last House on Needless Street; Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife; Razorblade Tears, SA Cosby; Cassandra Khaw’s The All-Consuming World and Nothing but Blackened Teeth; Premee Mohamed’s Annual Migration of Clouds; Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanderMeer; Apples of North America, Tom Burford; Annalee Newitz’s Four Lost Cities; Amanda Montell’s Cultish; Samira Ahmed’s Amira & Hamza; Cina Pelayo’s Children of Chicago; Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca, Chistopher Mims’ Arriving Today

Right now I’m reading and loving David Perry and Matthew Gabriele’s The Bright Ages.

Plus I’ve read some really great stuff coming out in 2022: Alex Segura’s Secret Identity; Delilah S. Dawson’s The Violence; Kiersten White’s Hide; Alma Katsu’s The Fervor; Rob Hart’s Paradox Hotel

I know I’m missing things! I’m sure of it. Brain like a sieve in a year of fog.

BUT, hey, this gives you some stuff.

Also I wrote books this year, which may or may not have been any good at all:

You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton (with Natalie Metzger!)

The Book of Accidents

Dust & Grim

If you liked any of those, a review somewhere would be gosh darn delightful.

KAY BYE

(You should of course feel free to share your own Favorite Things in the comments.)