Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 35

Should Writers Write Every Day?

Writers as individuals and as a community are often, maybe even always, in conversation with themselves and that community about the nature of writing. The predominant Badminton birdie that is whacked about comes in the form of writing advice — do this, don’t do that, definitely don’t do that other thing, never this, always that, holy fuck you did what, and so on and so forth.

This is normal, I think. It’s not that there’s not theoretical harm baked into it, because there damn well can be. Telling anybody, “This is how you walk up the mountain” is great, as long as the path remains stable for everyone and is not, say, already washed out and now serving as a dangerous trek fraught with tigers and bees. Writing advice is often given with this SACRED TABLET CARVED BY GOD HANDED TO AUTHOR FROM ON-HIGH vibe, as if it’s Gospel Good News instead of, say, a proclamation of preference marinated in a salty broth of survivorship bias.

So! That leads us to the question du jour, which I’ve seen going around social media a bit —

Should you write every day?

Because that’s sometimes the advice, right? Write every day. Butt in chair. Every damn day. Put words to paper. And then it goes farther — if you don’t write every day, are you really even a writer at all? Or are you just a poseur, a dilettante, an imposteur masquerading as a propeur autheurrrr. WHAT IF YOU DON’T WRITE EVERY DAY, WILL YOU DIE, YOU’LL PROBABLY DIE, YOU’LL FALL INTO THE ABYSS OF WORDLESSNESS, YOU FOOL, YOU ABSOLUTE FOOL.

“Ah-ha,” you say, “I’m picking up what you’re laying down. Your all-caps snark has made it clear to me that I, a writer, absolutely do not need to write every day. Got it. Boom. Done.”

Well.

Hold on.

(Only a Sith deals in absolutes, I say, absolutely.)

I don’t know what you need to do, is the point.

Here, let me tell it this way:

When I was a Young Writer, Wet Around The Neck (which is not a saying, I don’t think, but I like it and I’m going with it), I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. The act of writing was fine, but where I fell down was the discipline of it. I became a freelance writer and I had deadlines out the small and large colon, and to develop both discipline and skill, I wrote every day.

At that time, I had to write every day. Not just to keep up with word count, but also because it was useful to me. Dare I say, essential that I did so. Essential because I really needed to build that muscle and that schedule. It stopped me from falling behind on the work, but it also helped me get into a rhythm with that work. To some degree, it was like one does with exercise: as a runner, and with the weather getting warmer, I will run three times a week, even if I don’t want to. As long as I’m not injured, I’ll run. Even if it sucks and I hate it. I run.

So it was with writing.

That worked for me for a long time.

It worked, of course, until it didn’t.

There came a point, after transitioning from freelancing to novel-writing, where writing every day was burning me the fuck out. I couldn’t catch my breath. I was writing, what, four or five books a year? My output was profound, and for a good while, it worked fine. Until it didn’t. Then I was running parallel to burnout, nearly falling into it. I didn’t, though it came close. I relaxed. I eased off. I recognized what had happened and over time I changed how I wrote books. Further, I learned that I don’t actually know how to write books, and that’s been the greatest boon to my career — because I know with every book I’m starting over, I’m at Square Fucking One and though I know how to write in general, I don’t know how to write The Book In Front Of Me. Sure, I learned how to write the last one. But this one? It’s different. By nature and necessity, it is a whole other beast.

Things work until they don’t.

When I run, as I said, I run three times a week. Unless I don’t. And if I don’t, I forgive myself and move on to the week after, when hopefully I do (and so far, have, outside wintertime). If there comes a time I can’t, I still won’t kick myself — I’ll try to see why the schedule isn’t working, and what needs to change about it. Because things work until they don’t.

And when they don’t, you adjust. You course-correct.

Without shame or hard feeling. With kindness to yourself.

For a time during this pandemic I wasn’t writing much. (Read: at all.) Part of that was down to the fact I had a lot of editing to do (which, yes, is part of writing, admittedly; see how I already dinged myself on that one?). Part of it was, well, we were in a pandemic. In a year of violence. In an election year. It was hard to get going. All my processes had taken a beating. We’d all taken a beating — and I say that as a person of great privilege. But I got back to it. I pushed. Not hard. Just a little here and there. It’s like physical therapy: you won’t get there if you don’t exert, but you also can’t exert so hard you break the thing you’re trying to fix. You never want to break yourself. And yet the work is the work. Which is to say, sometimes you also have to realize that holding yourself to some high-yet-reasonable standards is itself a flavor of kindness. To trust in yourself, to say, I can fucking do this, is a favor from you to you. Sometimes, kindness is eating the ice cream. Other times, kindness is knowing you can’t always eat the ice cream. Balance and moderation.

That’s writing, to me, a lot of the times. Finding that sweet spot between self-accountability and self-forgiveness. There’s powerful magic found when wandering that interstitial terrain, and you only get there by reaching a different aspect of yourself:

Self-awareness.

The greatest advice I think I offer to writers these days is to Know Thyself. Which is to say, figure out who you are as a writer. Your processes are your own to discover. Your voice is your own to seek and to find. Who you are and what you write and further, how you write, is something literally nobody else can tell you. So, should you write every day? Some will tell you YES YES YES, some will tell you NO NO NO, but the answer is, well, shit, I dunno. It’s both. It’s neither. All/none of the above. Maybe it’ll help you. Maybe it’ll hurt you. Maybe it’ll do the one until it does the other, because things work… until they don’t. You only learn this by trying.

Writing advice, and the conversation around is, is always to help you crystalize and contextualize your own way of doing things. And sometimes, it’s there to challenge them. I was a pantser at the start of my career until I realized I had to — had to! — be a plotter to get a book done. But Wanderers was a book I wrote without an outline. So was Dust & Grim, Book of Accidents, and Wayward. I was a pantser, then a plotter, then a pantser. None of this is permanent. I’m not permanent. My works will change and how I approach them will change, too.

People want to tell you how to write because it helps to tell them how they write. It confirms for them that they are on the path of good, and it was successful, will continue to be successful, and if you do differently, then what does that say about them? But that’s hollow. That’s coming out of a place of fear and vulnerability. They want to tell you how to write because they’re afraid they don’t know how, themselves. By speaking advice aloud as “rules” they codify it and control it, but inadvertently, they might be giving you bad advice. And it could be harmful advice if internalized as The One True Way, especially when tangled up with a variety of mental illnesses like depression, anxiety, or ADHD.

So, write every day if you want to, and it feels right to do so.

Or don’t.

Maybe you can’t — maybe you work, or have a family, and it’s just not an option. The goal is to write when you can write, and like I said, push where you can push. That’s it. There’s no answer. There’s no equation with missing variables, solved when you answer for X. It’s just trying a bunch of stuff, failing at some of it, and succeeding sometimes. You zero on on what works for you today, while recognizing it may very well change for tomorrow. All while finding the Goldilocks just-rightness of working hard for yourself, and being kind to yourself.

That’s it.

Good luck.

Go write. If you wanna.

***

Coming in 2021…

Douglas Wynne: Five Things I Learned Writing His Own Devices

In 2016 an occult cabal activates a psychic trigger in a popular video game and a countdown to chaos begins.

While her husband is deployed in Afghanistan, Jessica Ritter finds herself navigating the pitfalls of parenting on her own. That includes moderating her ten-year-old son’s screen time—an obsession that hits a fever pitch when YouTube sensation Rainbow Dave releases an addictive new iPad game. Gavin knows he isn’t supposed to keep secrets from his parents, but when his achievements in the game unlock personal messages from Dave instructing him to embark on real world mini-quests, he can’t resist.

In the aftermath of an ambush that leaves her husband missing in action, Jessica grapples with fear and sorrow while clues to a threat closer to home evade her detection. Rainbow Dave, the charismatic host of Scream Time, is America’s cool big brother—a gamer who built a video empire on the strength of his personality. He is also the focus of a shadowy conspiracy hell-bent on sowing chaos with vast technological resources. Dave’s anonymous benefactors have granted him a glimpse of paradise between the pixels, and the real world hasn’t looked the same since. Now, wired with a head full of unholy revelations and a crate full of dangerous devices, he’s on a mission to help his fans “level up” at a live event. Scream Time is coming to town, and it may be too late to stop a deadly game.

* * *

SOMETIMES TIMING IS EVERYTHING

This book took me longer to write than any other since my first novel. The first draft came pretty quickly, but that was followed by several years of revisions before finding the right shape for the story in between working on other projects. I will generally tinker with a book for as long as I’m allowed to, but I knew this was a timely story, focused on a cultural and technological moment that would eventually pass. So while I spent years reworking the manuscript and pitching it to agents and editors, I had a panicky sense of urgency that it would eventually expire like a carton of milk before it was ever published.

His Own Devices is set in 2016, on the brink of what we now know will be a cataclysmic upheaval in America. Because I felt confident I had a story that spoke to the moment, I was willing to wait for the right allies to hopefully bring it to a mainstream audience. But that clock was ticking, and then Covid hit, and maybe it was me or my book but all of the sudden no one was answering those follow-up nudge emails. Eventually, after a lot of deliberation, I decided to self-publish and strike while the iron was hot. And to my surprise, all that time I’d spent working on the novel had only made its themes more prominent in the news. Russian psyops, YouTube horror memes like Momo, dark web open source domestic terrorism, and quasi-religious social media conspiracies were all more relevant than ever.

None of this gives me any joy as I finally arrive at promoting the book, but in the final drafts I realized I could enhance the resonance that was built into the story from the start by keeping it set in 2016. That year turned out to be the inflection point for much of the digital chaos we’re grappling with now. And that “foreknowledge” enabled me to calibrate the final version of the book to set the stage for every horrible thing we now know happens next.

TEST YOUR STORY BUT TRUST THE SPARK

Part of what took so long between the first draft and the last was my openness to criticism and feedback. After years of publishing with small presses, I felt like this could be the one to break out if I didn’t screw it up, so I gathered a lot of notes from beta readers, agents, mentors, and editors who read the early versions. At one point I even had the data scientists behind The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel run the manuscript through their “Bestseller-ometer,” which uses algorithms trained by thousands of blockbuster novels to run a diagnostic check on a text’s style, pacing, emotional beats, and character agency. I know how cynical that sounds, but the approach seemed consistent with a novel that’s mostly about the dark power of technology. (I’ll spare you the details of the forty-page report, but that version of the book scored 4 out of 5 stars, for whatever it’s worth.)

I do think the novel benefited from all of this feedback—or most of it, anyway. For one thing, I heard consistently that my main character came off as a bit of a high-strung helicopter parent, a criticism I haven’t heard repeated by the final readers of the final draft because I realized it was better to let the reader do a lot of her worrying for her. On the other hand, I also realized late in the game that I’d taken the advice of one agent too far and padded the opening with boring details intended to make the protagonist more “likable,” hindering the thriller pace in the process. That all ended up on the cutting room floor.

But there were some elements of the story that were never up for debate in my mind. Like the unnerving ambiguity that pervades the story and leaves us with some unanswered questions at the end. Fiction may satisfy because it often resolves things better than the Mueller Report, but I wanted to reflect the deep unease we live with in these times. That was the book I’d set out to write, the spark that got me excited about the story in the first place. To betray it for a neat and tidy ending wasn’t on the table. So yeah, you can chew on feedback until you don’t know if you’re making a book better or worse, but never sacrifice the story spark that got you invested in the first place. It’s your North Star.

THE APOCALYPSE HAS BEEN HAPPENING ON THE DARK WEB FOR A WHILE

My villain uses the dark web to research some dangerous terrorist plans. I also researched enough of that to know what was plausible while leaving out any details someone would need to cause real trouble. And hoo-boy! We’ve come a long way since the paperback copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook we used to stock when I worked at Tower Records in the 90s. I did my homework using the anonymous Tor browser so I wouldn’t end up on more government watch lists than I’m already on as a horror writer, but when you bump into a recipe that starts with the disclaimer “Do Not Make This Until TSHTF,” you realize that some of the preppers among us are not invested in the promise of a peaceful and prosperous society. It’ll put a chill down your spine.

STORY FIRST, IN ALL THINGS

Writers, especially indie writers, have to learn to wear many hats these days. It took me a few years and a lot of frustration to get the hang of writing back cover story blurbs. It’s a different kind of writing from the fiction it endeavors to sell, with a different set of rules and techniques. And that’s just one example. I’ve had to learn how to write newsletters, pitch emails, bookstore banter, and blog posts like this one. As I set out to self-publish a full-length novel for the first time, I discovered there were all kinds of techniques I could learn from successful indie authors—like using a “reader magnet” to cultivate an audience for a book before the release. That kind of marketing speak usually makes my eyes glaze over, but then I realized it wasn’t about sleazy marketing tactics. It was about storytelling. The only thing that makes people want to download a free novella as a newsletter subscription reward, and the only thing that makes them want to read that newsletter long enough to hear about your next book, is compelling storytelling.

It was liberating to realize that every email or promo piece I dreaded writing would also be dreadful for readers unless I viewed it as one more effort to do what I’m trying to do in the first place, which is tell a story. I may not always succeed, but it has to be the intention. Realizing that led me to write a prequel for His Own Devices called Random Access, which became a way to expand on the characters and hint at some intriguing answers to those questions I left dangling at the end of the novel. In trying to write a freebie that would both hook people who have never heard of me and also reward people who had already read the book, I ended up expanding my fictional world in some surprising ways.

FORGET IMITATION—LIFE AND ART ARE IN A WEIRD FEEDBACK LOOP

Any fiction writer who’s been at it for a while will tell you they start to notice things in the real world that are uncomfortably synchronous with whatever weird shit they happen to be making up at the time. Just ask Chuck: he wrote a book in which a pandemic called White Mask competes with a white supremacist insurrection to destroy America. And he published it the year before it actually happened, which I think earns him the Carl Jung Medal of the Cosmic Mindfuck.

I can’t compete with that. But remember I told you about how I watched the country creep closer to a state of chaos wrought by shady digital actors in the few years between the conception and publication of His Own Devices? Well, when it came time to pick a publication date, I went with March 4th for the private joke inherent in the pun (March forth and conquer, little book!). I picked that date about a month ago when I set up the Amazon pre-order, and just a few days ago I saw on CNN that the latest Q-Anon theory is that “the storm” will finally result in Trump reclaiming power on March 4th. Let me tell you, friends…I’ve had enough of relevance for a while.

* * *

Douglas Wynne is the author of the horror/thriller novels The Devil of Echo Lake, The Wind In My Heart, and Red Equinox. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and his writing workshops have been featured at genre conventions and schools throughout New England. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son and a houseful of animals.

Douglas Wynne: Website | Twitter

His Own Devices: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Kali Wallace: Five Things I Learned Writing Dead Space

Hester Marley used to have a plan for her life. But when a catastrophic attack left her injured, indebted, and stranded far from home, she was forced to take a dead-end security job with a powerful mining company in the asteroid belt. Now she spends her days investigating petty crimes to help her employer maximize its profits. She’s surprised to hear from an old friend and fellow victim of the terrorist attack that ruined her life—and that surprise quickly turns to suspicion when he claims to have discovered something shocking about their shared history and the tragedy that neither of them can leave behind. 

Before Hester can learn more, her friend is violently murdered at a remote asteroid mine. Hester joins the investigation to find the truth, both about her friend’s death and the information he believed he had uncovered. But catching a killer is only the beginning of Hester’s worries, and she soon realizes that everything she learns about her friend, his fellow miners, and the outpost they call home brings her closer to revealing secrets that very powerful and very dangerous people would rather keep hidden in the depths of space.

***

Nobody knows where AI is going.

Writing a book that features artificial intelligence in a major role was not, perhaps, the wisest idea I ever had. I am not an AI expert. I am not even an AI amateur. As soon as I start writing, I had a huge amount of research to do. I started reading through a great pile of articles and books and learned a few key things. The first is that everybody who does AI research disagrees with everybody else who does AI research. The second is that nobody who does AI research truly knows how AI will evolve in the future. The third, and most interesting, is that AI is every bit as flawed and messy as the humans who create it.

These things might be annoying for the scientists, but for me, lowly sci fi writer, it was a huge relief. I was writing a mystery/thriller, which meant that in-fighting, uncertainty, and fucked-up humans were exactly what I needed.

The asteroid belt is a big, weird, mysterious place.

In the real estate of our solar system, the asteroid belt is like that creepy empty lot that’s sitting between the cute bungalows on one end of the street and the imposing mansions on the other, the one that’s so overgrown you can’t really see what’s been dumped there, except for how sometimes you catch a glimpse of a something that might be a rusty bicycle frame or might be a discarded murder weapon, and there might be a shortcut through it but you know better than to take that path after dark.

The asteroid belt is huge, it’s mostly empty, and everything is unimaginably far from everything else. Until last year the closest we ever got was photos from targeted flybys. I didn’t appreciate its scope and mystery before I started writing Dead Space. Now I know better, and I understand why so many sci fi writers love to set things in the asteroid belt.

You can handwave more than you think in sci fi.

On a similar note, writing my second thriller set in space taught me some valuable lessons about what kind of details you can handwave when writing sci fi.

I do enjoy the intellectual challenge of solving scientific problems in fiction. But more and more I come down on the side of “exactly what you need and no more” when it comes to scientific rigor in books. That’s not always a simple thing to figure out. Does it strengthen the emotional impact to know how the spaceship works? Do the stakes rise if you know how the life support systems function? Does detail about the state of futuristic medicine draw the reader in deeper? Sometimes the answer is yes, because sometimes key parts of the story are in the scientific and technical details.. Sometimes the answer is no, and what the book needs instead is more corpses and explosions and sadness and space crime. Writing sci fi is an ongoing exercise is figuring out what your story needs every step of the way.

You need to know what works in a story as much as what doesn’t.

While my previous books had taught me to be pretty good at identifying where a story has serious problems, somewhere during writing this one I lost the ability to know where it was working. I don’t know why this happened. Maybe it was my natural evolution as a writer, my emotional state, the editors and readers I was working with, the state of the world, the nature of this book, or all of the above. I have no idea.

Whatever the case, I found that trying to figure out what aspects of the book were strong and effective was a bit like trying to determine which kinds of wallpaper paste have the best flavor or which kinds of pebbles feel the nicest when stuck inside your shoes. And that made it very hard to write. What made it even harder was that I didn’t know how to ask for that kind of feedback.

We talk a lot about how authors need to accept criticism; editors joke about the “compliment sandwich” to protect delicate author feelings. But I think we forget that its not actually about accepting criticism or delicate feelings. It’s about making the story the best story it can be. To do that we need to know what could be better, but we also need to know what’s already strong, compelling, and interesting.

Every book grows out of the environment in which it is written.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate Dead Space from the year 2020. This is unfortunate, because I think it’s a pretty good book that doesn’t deserve such a scurrilous association.

But I spent the first half of 2020 revising Dead Space, and it was only after the novel was finished did I realize just how much that experience had altered book. My revisions took it farther away from science fictional ideas of AI and space exploration, while at the same time pushing it much deeper into an exploration of corporate capitalism, political corruption, the perceived value (or lack thereof) of human labor, and the many ways in which human systems of economics and politics can fail.

I was also learning just how important it is to recognize that human social systems rely on humans, and humans make terrible choices. I was also learning to have a great deal of sympathy for people stuck in relentlessly shitty situations. Sometimes all of our possible choices are bad choices. Sometimes the whole game is rigged against us.

I suspect the feelings of helpless, unending rage have also seeped into the book in ways I don’t even recognize. I haven’t read a word of it since I turned in the last proofs. I’m a little bit afraid of what I’ll find.

***

Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels for adults, teens, and children, as well as a number of short stories and essays. After spending most of her life in Colorado, she now lives in southern California.

Kali Wallace: Website | Substack | Instagram

Dead Space: Mysterious Galaxy | Powells | B&N | Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

Emily R. King: Five Things I Learned Writing Wings of Fury

Althea’s world is ruled by Cronus, the God of Gods, whose inheritance is the world and women, his playthings. He takes mortal women as prizes and discards them when he’s through. No woman dares to defy him.

After her mother is taken from her and dies as a result of Cronus’s cruelty, Althea is determined not to suffer the same fate as so many women before her. To honor the dying wish of her mother, Althea promises to take care of her sisters no matter the cost.

Following the vision that has been revealed to her by the Fates—that she will crush the Almighty and free the world from his terror—Althea travels to the southern isle of Crete, where women who seek refuge from Cronus live hidden among the exalted Boy God. The Boy God, Zeus, the only son of Cronus, is believed by most of the world to be dead. But he is very much alive and his destiny is tied with Althea, for the Fates foretold that he too will destroy his father.

As Althea and the Boy God train and gain support for their fated journey, Cronus learns of the rebellion and begins amassing his own army to quell any resistance. Cronus may be The Almighty, but Althea will not fail her mother, sisters, or the imprisoned women helpless against the cruel god. 

***

It’s…complicated

Writing a book based on Greek Mythology required loads of research. Those clever, creative Greeks often had more than one version of the tales about their gods. For example, take the origin story of Aphrodite. Some say the Goddess of Love was born from the blood Uranus shed during his castration. Drops fell upon the sea and turned into foam, and Aphrodite arose from the foamy water as a fully formed woman. A less dramatic version tells that Aphrodite was the daughter of Zeus and Dione.

Greek Mythology is full of conflicting stories. To write Wings of Fury, I had to research them all, select one version to bet on, and then be prepared to back up my decision. Some could say this mythology is as complicated as the gods for which it’s about, and they would be right.

Zeus was a sack of shit

Zeus was known for his wandering eye. His first wife, Metis, Goddess of Wisdom, didn’t have to put up with it for long, but only because Zeus swallowed her. (Talk about an unhealthy marriage.) Metis was pregnant when he ate her, and while inside of him, she gave birth to their daughter, Athena, who then hatched from his head. Of course, the oh-so-humble Zeus took full credit for birthing one of the fiercest warriors of all time.

Meanwhile, Zeus was hooking up with Leto, Goddess of Motherhood, who later birthed twins, Artemis and Apollo. Hera, Zeus’s second wife, refused his marriage proposal, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so he tricked her and seduced her into matrimony. Hera became known as the Goddess of Marriage. Sad, isn’t it? Hera was forced into wedlock and then gained the reputation as a jealous queen who had multiple fits of temper, usually regarding her sleezy husband. I’m not going to delve into Zeus’s countless indiscretions. All I’ll say is this: Zeus was consistent.

Cronus was a bigger sack of shit

Cronus was one of six sons of Uranus and Gaea. When it came to dethroning his father, Cronus was the only one willing to pick up the adamant sickle and castrate him. Sounds pretty personal, doesn’t it?

After Cronus usurped the throne, he was paranoid that one of his children might do the same to him, so every time his consort, Rhea, had a child he swallowed their infants. He devoured Hestia, Demeter, Poseidon, Hades, and Hera. But when it came to their youngest, Zeus, Cronus’s mother had other plans. Not only was Cronus power-hungry and paranoid, he was a liar. Gaea had given him the sickle to take down Uranus, and in return, Cronus was supposed to release her imprisoned children—the hundred-handed monsters and the Cyclopes—from the underworld. Cronus did no such thing, so Gaea waited until Rhea was pregnant with Zeus and then helped her stash away the newborn on the island of Crete. Rhea gave Cronus a stone to swallow instead. Apparently, Cronus was more brawn than brains, because he was none the wiser, until Metis (remember Zeus’s first wife?) tricked him into eating an herb that forced him to throw up his children.

Bad father. Bad husband. Bad son. Cronus was the worst.

Oceanus was a badass

Not all Titans were dirtbags. Oceanus was one of the six sons of Gaea and Uranus. When Cronus took up the sickle to castrate their father, he had help. His brothers Iapetus, Coeus, Crius, and Hyperion pinned down dear ol’ dad while Cronus swung the blade. You can imagine how big of a fight Uranus put up to protect his family jewels… Anyhoo, Oceanus was the only son who didn’t offer aid. For this, Cronus cast him out.

Maybe Oceanus knew Cronus would be a terrible leader. Maybe he was loyal to his father. Or maybe he was simply a peacemaker. Whatever the reason, Oceanus stood up to Cronus first, long before Zeus was a twinkle in his mother’s eye.

The Titanesses kicked ass too

Gaea and Uranus had six daughters—Tethys, Theia, Phoebe, Themis, and Mnemosyne. I highly doubt the Titanesses sat by and watched while their brothers (and in many cases husbands…yay for royal incest) dethroned daddy. When their brothers held down Uranus so Cronus could spay him, they must have had an opinion about it. Perhaps they helped pin him down too, or maybe they tried to stop their brothers. We don’t actually know.

Fast-forward to the next generation of goddesses: Cronus’s daughters—Hera, Demeter, and Hestia—didn’t sit by idly. They united with Zeus and battled Cronus and his allies in a ten-year war that earned them the honored title of Olympians.

The Titanesses deserve their time in the spotlight. In Wings of Fury, these goddesses finally get their moment.

***

Emily R. King is the author of the Hundredth Queen series, as well as Before the Broken Star, Into the Hourglass, and Everafter Songin the Evermore Chronicles. Her latest novel, WINGS OF FURY, will be released March 1, 2021, the first in the Wings of Fury duology. The second book, Crown of Cinders, will be released October 5, 2021Born in Canada and raised in the United States, she is a shark advocate, a consumer of gummy bears, and an islander at heart, but her greatest interests are her children and three cantankerous cats.

Emily R. King: Website | Twitter | Instagram

Wings of Fury: Amazon

Amanda Cherry: Five Things I Learned Writing The Dragon Stone Conspiracy

When the Fäe go to war with a Nazi cult, one woman will protect humanity’s future.

As World War II rages, accidental immortal Pepper Elizabeth Jones is on the run from government agents on both sides of the Atlantic. Hidden in neutral Ireland, she is summoned to meet with a mysterious general, The Righ, who tasks her to save magic itself from the Nazis. Now, she must race against the clock to stop an evil ritual and prevent the Nazis from gaining a world-shattering supernatural power.

This book is part of the Strowlers Shared Cinematic Universe, a collaborative global story that anyone can join.

Tell your story. Change the world.

PREPCRASTINATION IS POWERFUL

My first book was a contemporary fantasy set in an imaginary city. If I needed a point of fact, I probably knew it off the top of my head. And if I didn’t just know? I was free to make it up. Making things up is, as it turns out, one of the chief skills involved in being a writer. And, I came to learn, I am actually quite good at making things up. Need a fancy bar? Make it up! Need a traffic light so the character has to stop driving and see something? Make it up!

Making things up is so satisfying. And easy! And awesome!

And did I mention easy?

Writing historical urban fantasy that [partially] takes place in real locations is an entirely different animal. It is not easy. It is, quite honestly, the opposite of easy. Unless you don’t care about accuracy (but, then, why are you writing historical urban fantasy when you could instead be writing just-regular-fantasy and saving yourself a lot of difficulty: see above re: making things up)

I am a history nerd, and I wanted an accurate book! I wanted all google-able real-world things to be as real as real can be. This was both for my own edification and also to keep the vultures of popular review platforms from screaming ugly things in my general direction.

The desire to make the historical reality as accurate as possible led me down such research rabbit holes as maps of the pre-WWII Berlin subway (which I found!) & the price of bus fare from Donegal to Dublin in 1943 (which I did not find). There were days I spent so much time trying to figure out what car to put on a road, how far X was from Y, or whether or not there would have been streetlights someplace that I barely got any words on the page at all.

These deep dives into time and place are some of the best procrastination techniques I have ever stumbled upon. I mean: copious researching is a super-easy way to keep from having to do any actual writing while still feeling all, “Whee! Look at me! I am Very Much on task!”. Y’all: IT’S A TRAP.

Yes, I had to do the research, but I also had to do the writing. Because even the best-researched books patently refuse to write themselves.

Dangit.

WHERE IT’S BETTER NOT TO BE ACCURATE

So, there’s research, and then there’s reality, and then there’s perspective. And when writing about history, especially the ugly parts, balancing those things can be um…well…challenging.

There are parts of the past most of us find nostalgic and delightful. Just look around at the Rockabilly movement and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Fedoras. Victory rolls. Benny Goodman. Yes. Yes. Yes. Give me the music and the dancing and the clothes and slang words like “Murgatroyd,” and Casablanca on the marquee at the Bijou. All of it.

Ok. Not all of it. Because things were happening in the world of my book that are much better left in the past.

Jim Crow, Eugenics, that time Hitler was Look Magazine’s Man of the year.

Yeah, no.

There is at least as much NOPE in the 1940’s as there is wonderful- and figuring out which parts of 1943 to keep and which to toss was an adventure I wasn’t aware I was signing up for. I wanted to evoke the era with enough delight to keep the reader happy to be there, but also with enough dread to remind y’all that the stakes are serious.

And as though that wasn’t a fine enough line to be walking, I discovered pretty early on in my writing process that I had bought myself a ticket on the evolution-of-language-train.

Figuring out how to be period-immersive while leaving behind harmful language was a lesson I’m glad I learned, but it didn’t come easy.

Just because the book is set in 1943 doesn’t mean I have to bring all of 1943’s problems into it. So much easier said than done….

When it came time to introduce a character with Romani heritage, I was a big mumbling mess of yikes. The only word Pepper would have known to describe this character is considered a slur these days; y’all know the “G” word. I’m not gonna write it here any more than I did in the book.

There we stood: a character who, without malice, wouldn’t have known better and an author who does know better but isn’t sure how to go about making this work in a way that neither pulls the reader out of the world of the story nor puts a slur in my book.

Writing around your protagonist’s prejudices, especially those borne of the time in which they live, double especially when they’re your sole POV character is a whole ball of wax. But with the help of my editors and the support of awesome friends with Romani heritage, we made it work.

Because, in the end, it’s about the reader’s experience, and since we don’t live in 1943, I’m not confined to the vocabulary of the era.

AND WHERE HISTORY IS HELPFUL

This book is about some imaginary magic in a real place. Real people rub shoulders with fictional ones, and my adventuring protagonist goes back and forth between actual historical locations and the world of the fantastic.

In order to make this work, I had to ground the adventure in actual historical time and place.

Starting with time.

When this book could possibly happen was the first problem I had to solve. I had constraints on all sides, both in-universe and real-world. Can’t be before THIS can’t be after THAT, and I need to get this guy out of the way.

You know how, when you’re writing a fanfic and you need to shoehorn this very intense conversation between your favorite pair into the cut between scenes in the movie? It was like that, only with Nazis.

And this, my friends, was 100% a job for history-nerdery. Putting those old fanfic muscles to good use, I dove deep into Things I Learned in College and found just the right historical moment to exploit for my purposes (insert evil laugh here). I got rid of Himmler and I did it with a real-world reason. Go me.

Sometimes history gives you just what you need—you just have to bother to go and look for it.

If you’re the type of reader who likes to Google what else was happening on the very specific dates given for the events of a piece of historical fiction, I see you, and you won’t be mad about this one.

Or maybe you will, but at least you’ll know I did my homework.

HOW TO USE “STET” WHEN I MEAN “STFU”

One of the things that happens when you write a book is that you’re not actually done writing it when you think you’re done writing it. Other people get to tell you things about what you wrote and how you wrote it and then you have to write more things in your book (or take some things out of your book—ugh.) based on what those other people say.

Those people are called Editors and in my case they do the very heroic thing of turning my long rambles of storytelling into something people are willing to buy and read. It’s neat!

One of the things I learned from my first book was how working with an editor happens—the processes and power balance and all that jazz. For me, a big part of learning to work with an editor was learning when to accept their suggestion and when to shake my head and say STET. For those of y’all unfamiliar with the term (as I was just one book ago), that’s a word writers use when we choose not to accept the editor’s version of something and instead want to leave the words the way we had them in the first place.

With THE DRAGON STONE CONSPIRACY, there were far more fingers in the pie than there were with RITES & DESIRES (a thing to be expected with a larger IP, no worries) and some of those fingers were really long and over-stretchy. And one of them just…didn’t like the way I write. Like… not at all.

Reading through and responding to those notes kind of sucked. Ok, no—it didn’t kind of suck, it sucked bigtime.

I wanted to get *so* defensive. I wanted to yell and scream and stomp my foot and explain in the greatest of detail not only that the person was wrong but also how much and how come. However, authors throwing temper tantrums in the general direction of their editors (especially when those editors weren’t the source of the offending comments) is generally frowned upon.

Luckily, the industry has gifted me the beautiful tool which is STET. And boy did I make use of it.

It’s now fighting “snollygoster” for the title of my Very Favorite English word (although it’s technically Latin, so I suppose it’s actually fighting “Post hoc ergo Propter hoc” to be my favorite Latin).

STET is good. As an early-career author, it was kind of empowering to stand up for my writing, my voice, and my choices. Self esteem not really being the biggest thing for most of us writer-types (especially those of us who are new to the business), it was uncomfortable, but rewarding, to use all caps and demand my words be respected.

It was also way more professional than some of the other words I might have chosen.

Good times!

WORD RATIONING

I write books, and sometimes other things (like guest blog posts) as my job. All of these things, books and otherwise, are made up of words. Words are the tools of my trade the same as wrenches and hammers are the tools of a mechanic’s trade. And I love words—I always have.

When I was in second grade, we were doing a phonics exercise wherein we were each assigned a letter of the alphabet and tasked with going to the blackboard (yes, I’m showing my age here, but whatever) and writing down a word beginning with our letter. I got the letter “T”. I then proceeded to that chalk board and proudly wrote “totalitarianism” for my whole class to read.

My teacher called my parents.

Words are my stock and trade, and they’re also my hobby. And there are some I apparently like way more than a person really ought to. I have a particular affinity for oddball words (see above re: snollygoster) and I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t use my favorite words in my writing. Words are good, and we should use them!

In getting RITES & DESIRES revised and ready for primetime I learned all about my addiction to “that”— which is a thing I continue to work on. But while working through revisions on THE DRAGON STONE CONSPIRACY I learned that isn’t my only word problem.

Too much of a commonplace word is one thing. But multiple instances of a beloved-but-uncommon word is enough to be disruptive. So I’m told.

I have now learned to read my own work with a critical eye for overuse of words that aren’t part of everyday speech for people who are not me.

I am now allowed only one “hodgepodge” per manuscript. One “slapdash”. One “ramshackle”. And I only get a “snollygoster” every other book. It’s a hard-knock life, y’all. But it is what it is.

Learning to parcel out the more peculiar words in my vocabulary has been a useful tool as far as making my work more approachable, but I still love my weird darlings and won’t be giving them up entirely any time soon.

***

Amanda Cherry is an author/actor who still can’t believe people will pay her to write books. She enjoys documentary films, fried food, and spending time on her boat. In her spare time, Amanda volunteers as an announcer and referee for Flat Track Roller Derby. Amanda lives in the Seattle area with her husband, son, and the world’s cutest puggle. She is represented by Claire Draper of the Bent Agency.

Amanda Cherry: Website

The Dragon Stone Conspiracy: Amazon | Bookshop

Why “Gentle Writing Advice,” Exactly?

If you follow me on Twitter (you fool), you may have seen that I have been doing a thread over there of so-called GENTLE WRITING ADVICE. (That thread is here.)

And I just wanted to talk about, for a moment, why I’m doing that.

So, an indeterminate amount of time ago — my Pandemic Brain tells me it was either a few weeks or seven-and-a-half years — some anonymous individual popped onto Twitter and pooped out some manner of self-identified HARSH WRITING ADVICE. And it was framed as much of this kind of advice often is, which is like, BOOM, FACT CHECK, IF YOU CAN’T WRITE 5000 WORDS A DAY WHILE HARBORING A VENGEFUL INTESTINAL PARASITE, YOU’LL NEVER SUCCEED. Or something. I honestly don’t remember what the advice was. (Correction: I found it. It was worse than I remembered.)

And I did a funny thread of how this advice often sounds, which is, blah blah blah, kill and eat your fellow creatives, if you use adverbs you’ll get butt cankers, whatever. But then I also started doing the opposite of that, a series of gentler, softer pieces of advice — not as a goof, but as a real thing. I thought it useful to talk about why I’m doing that, and am continuing to do it still.

A lot of writing advice is frequently prescriptive. Meaning, it is there to impose law and order onto the chaotic act of writing and art making. Creativity is a lawless land, and art/writing is the act of refining that chaos into order, and so it makes sense in a way that advice is frequently about the imposition of that structure. And artists and authors are viewed as these wifty, wispy spirits who can’t keep it together and who would starve if you didn’t press a taco into their searching hands once in a goddamn while. Certainly my own career is one made out learning that, indeed, if you wanna do this thing, then that requires work and effort, and it isn’t always pleasant, it isn’t always fun, and so it behooves writers to learn that lesson. So, writing advice tends to drift away from the chaotic, unpredictable tangle of writing and storytelling and into the “reality check” style of harsh writing advice — it is often presented as if one is doing a favor by delivering it. “Here,” says the author, “is a hard truth someone may not have told you, you’re welcome.”

I don’t think this is malicious. I even think that some part of it is designed to counter advice from charlatans and abusers who want to sell you fake empowerment or some kind of self-help advice in that direction. I think it often comes from a good place: “I learned these hard lessons, and most people won’t tell them to you.”

Here’s the current problem du jour —

These days, most people will tell them to you.

They will, in fact, mostly give advice in exactly this fashion.

I mean, how often do we endure lists from big authors where it’s TEN WRITING RULES and it’s a deeply prohibitive listicle of Dos and Don’ts, and if you violate them, you’ll never be published and your stories will suck open ass and you will die in a lightless, artless abyss as the God of Story will have turned His Sacred Gaze from you. How many times must we be told that adverbs are BAD BAD BAD (even though adverbs are a necessary part of language that includes words like “often” and “everywhere” and “after”). Or how if you use dialogue tags other than ‘said,’ you’ll get a chafing thigh rash? I mean, sure, yes, okay, if you write —

“I went to the mall!” Derek yammered hydroponically

— then you deserve the side-eye from an editor, but that’s not because of adverbs or dialogue tags, it’s because you wrote a… ennhyeah, a not-great sentence. You eschewed clarity in favor of stunt writing. Stunt writing is okay sometimes. But sacrificing clarity, probably not. But again, the problem there isn’t adverbs or dialogue tags, and assigning writing advice to tackle those specific things is not necessarily helpful. It demonizes the wrong stuff.

Think about it. How often have we been told to kill our darlings without also being told we have to learn what hills we need to die on? How often have we been told you have to sit and write 2000 words a day and not been told that some days you’ll be unable to do that, and you need to not write those words because some days are genuinely for sitting there and staring at the wall and then saying “oh fuck it” before going to look at some birds? And then, in looking at birds, you find an answer you didn’t expect to find because you were able to clear your damn head for five minutes. Some advice says we must write in short, declarative sentences — but sometimes, only a long sentence will do, and it is in some long sentences that we can both contain a world of information and metaphor while also creating rhythm and beauty in the flow of that very sentence.

My point here is that harsh writing advice is in ample supply these days.

And, frequently, it’s a very masculine style of advice, very Western, very pedagogical with a lot of stern grumpy faces and lectern-pounding.

It lends the very act of talking about writing this feeling that there are answers to how we do this thing that we do — that writing and storytelling is an equation, and as long as we adhere to the formula and plug in the proper variables, we will Properly Compose Content. And we will win awards and become bestsellers, huzzah and hooray.

Writing is a craft, and storytelling is an art, and together they form this nebulous interstice where it’s just clowns juggling medium-sized cats and those cats are juggling little cat-sized chainsaws and the whole place is on fire and did I mention the “place” is actually a blimp and it’s drifting swiftly toward a flickering lighthouse operated by orphans? All the harsh writing advice is all about how to steer out of disaster and how to not get cut by cats wielding chainsaws but it all too often fails to acknowledge the glorious chaos of the act, the strangeness of it, the unpredictability. It fails to give you advice on how to go with that chaos instead of against it — how to appease the clowns, how to become a cat, how to turn the light in the lighthouse on once more. It also fails to teach you how to crash. So much of writing and storytelling is in the crashing. So much good comes out of that part.

Too much of our advice presents for us a map, a magic incantation, an instruction manual, but those inevitably fail under rigorous testing. The map is to a forgotten world, the incantation was unique to the wizard who first spoke it, and the instruction manual is in Swedish.

Further, we are currently mired in a fucking pandemic. (In case you haven’t noticed. And going out in the world, it definitely seems like some people haven’t noticed.) Everything is harsh. Shit sucks. It’s very hard to write anything in this situation, I’ve found — the last four years in general have been pretty corrosive to creativity. So I just don’t feel like this is the best time to say, HEY HERE ARE THE HARD TRUTH RULES, YOU PIECE OF SHIT, YOU BETTER DO ‘EM OR YOU’RE GONNA DIE. Like, when our 9-year-old is having A Day, you can’t just pound your fist and growl at him and tell him to JUST GET IT DONE, whatever “it” happens to be. Sometimes you need to sit down and talk him through it, and appeal to him on a human level, a compassionate level, and allow some days to be hard. And on those days where he commits to just doing a little of whatever it is that needs doing, he often goes ahead and gets it all done anyway, because you didn’t try to force it. Some things you can’t force. Emotions are one of them. And emotions are all bound up in the creation of art and the telling of stories.

Now, I’ve also learned that this thing that we do must walk the line between self-care and ass-busting-work. It is work. It is good to acknowledge that it takes work. But we also need time to decompress, and to be kind to ourselves. While also at the same time recognizing that an overage of kindness can start to drift into the making of excuses, and if your self-care stands in the way of getting anything done ever, then it has become the opposite of self-care — it has ceased to be a way out and instead, become just another trap. Just in the same way that hard-grr-bust-your-assery can lock you up, burn you out, and do the opposite of what you needed done.

I’ve certainly been the guy who has pounded that lectern, and told you what to do and what not to do. I don’t even want to look back at old writing advice for fear of what hell I unleashed upon you. I’m sure some of it was helpful, and some of it wasn’t. And some of it may have been helpful then, and not helpful now, because context matters, and times change, and who we are as writers change, too. I mean, Christ, once upon a time I was like, DON’T BE A SNOWFLAKE, WRITERS CAN’T BE SNOWFLAKES, but…

… maybe writers are snowflakes? We’re all pretty unique. Sometimes we melt. And when we all get together, we can form an avalanche of awesome stories. I dunno. Maybe it’s okay to be a snowflake, a fingerprint, a singular being — as long as we don’t become too fragile or narcissistic about it?

All of this is a very long way of saying, I think harsh writing advice is too plentiful, and the pandemic is hard, so maybe it’s time to try the gentle stuff for a while. With the asterisk footnote that says, all writing advice is bullshit anyway, but bullshit can sometimes fertilize.

Be good to yourself.

Progress is progress.

Write on.

Susan Mihalic: Five Things I Learned Writing Dark Horses

Fifteen-year-old equestrian prodigy Roan Montgomery has only ever known two worlds: inside the riding arena, and outside of it. Both, for as long as she can remember, have been ruled by her father, who demands strict obedience in all areas of her life. The warped power dynamic of coach and rider extends far beyond the stables, and Roan’s relationship with her father has long been inappropriate. She has been able to compartmentalize that dark aspect of her life, ruthlessly focusing on her ambitions as a rider heading for the Olympics, just as her father had done. However, her developing relationship with Will Howard, a boy her own age, broadens the scope of her vision.  

At the intersection of a commercial page-turner and urgent survivor story, Dark Horses combines the searing themes of abuse and resilience with the compelling exploration of female strength.

I will never be in a “30 under 30” roundup of impressive young writers.

Although I showed early promise, I’m a late bloomer. I’m making my debut at age 59. It is the new 39, but even that isn’t under 30. While I’m all for nurturing young talent, I object to the suggestion that talent has an expiration date. Don’t write yourself off—and don’t let anyone else write you off, either—simply because of your age.

We write in an imperfect world.

One midwinter day in 2007, I received a rejection letter from Yaddo, where I’d applied for an extended residency. I would have rejected me, too. I’d written only three short chapters—later combined into a single first chapter—of my WIP. Ostensibly, the “P” in “WIP” stands for progress, but I’d made little of that. I began writing Dark Horses in the early 2000s, but for years at a time I didn’t touch the manuscript.

The Yaddo rejection was a dash of ice water on any dreamy notion I’d had of one day finishing my book. If I waited for all those perfect conditions I thought I needed—a stretch of uninterrupted time, a book-lined study (you know the one), no day job, no financial stressors—I would never finish this book or write any other. I would have to write in an imperfect world.

I made a deal with myself that day. Each evening when I got home from the day job, I would eat a quick dinner of cereal (perfect writer kibble) and then write. At the end of five days, I’d made more progress on the manuscript than I’d made in years. It felt good—so I decided to do it the following week, and at the end of two weeks, a habit was formed. That’s how I finished the book, writing for two or three hours every evening and indulging in write-a-thons on the weekends. I turned down invitations for drinks after work, dinner, coffee, and other social activities. No one else will make your writing a priority. Only you can do this.

In which I find an agent.

I finished the manuscript in August 2009 and spent the next year self-editing, a process during which I wasn’t nearly as hard on myself as I should have been, because all of us think, “This will be the cleanest, most perfect manuscript ever submitted to an agent.” HAAAAhahahahahaha. Clearly I hadn’t left all my delusions behind me. Have you seen the dragon in the kitchen?

I contacted an old publishing acquaintance who was now an agent. Of course I could send the manuscript to her. She read it and told me to cut 100 pages and send it back to her. I did. And—oooooooooo, children—she was never heard from again. There was only a hook dangling from my car door. A year passed, during which there were a couple of life-giving, hope-raising messages in which she promised my revised manuscript was next in her TBR pile, but in fact I’d been given the hook.

Slightly daunted, I regrouped and sent it to a friend’s agent, and exactly the same thing happened. After another solid year, another hook dangled from my car door.

Now deeply daunted and in possession of two useless hooks, I put the manuscript away for a year. At the end of that year, four years had passed since I’d completed the first draft. What was I doing with my life? Did I or didn’t I want to be published?

Welcome to the sim-sub (simultaneous-submission) route. I took a week off from my day job and created a spreadsheet with nearly 100 agents on it, most of them gleaned from the pages of Poets & Writers. I visited the website of each agency, where agents specified what they wanted in the way of a query, and contacted the ones I thought were the best fit for my manuscript.

By the end of the week, I’d found my agent. When we spoke on the phone, she asked if I were willing to revise. My reply: “Absolutely, but if I do . . . will I ever hear from you again?”

Her reply: “Yes, because I’ve already invested more time and energy in this than I would if I didn’t intend to represent you.”

Don’t be discouraged to discover you aren’t even close to being finished.

I love revising and editing, which is good, because my agent and I went through round after round of revisions. I was trying my best, but something wasn’t clicking. To my everlasting gratitude, she hung in there with me. Finally, when I thought I’d produced the best possible manuscript, she said, “Cut it by a third, and then I’ll read it.”

Part of me thought I couldn’t do it. The rest of me made a sign that read ENDURANCE, tacked it above my desk, and got to work. I brought Dark Horses in at a sleek 98,000 words and delivered a manuscript my agent could sell—and sell it she did, approaching exactly the right editor at exactly the right publisher. My editor requested further edits, which added slightly to the word count (I got to put back some material I’d deleted), but my agent had been so rigorous that at this point, editing felt like play.

Your path is yours, not ANYONE else’s.

In the critique group I’ve run for 20 years, I advocate heeding feedback that resonates and disregarding feedback that doesn’t—but this works only if you’re honest with yourself. My agent had a keen editorial sense, and I’d have been foolish not to listen to her.

“With your next book, you won’t have to listen to your agent and your editor,” one person said.

“Do you even feel like it’s your book anymore?” said another.

First, why wouldn’t I listen to an agent and an editor I trust? They want a book that will sell, and so do I. Second, it’s more my book than ever, forged by criticism and revision that burned away everything that wasn’t the story.

Only you can write your story, but regardless of whether you take the traditional route to publication, you’ll need to discern between advice that rings true and advice that’s off the mark. Know what to let go of, even if you’re attached to it. My words aren’t gold. Neither are yours. Be professional, listen to your team, and honestly assess their feedback.

Also, know what to hold on to. Tip: It won’t be as much as you think. Good editors, agents, and critique partners don’t want to make your story theirs. They want to help you make your story the best it can be.

***

Susan has worked as a book editor, curriculum writer, writing instructor, and freelance writer and editor. She has also taught therapeutic horseback riding. Dark Horses will be released by Simon & Schuster’s Scout Press on February 16. It has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Book List, and Library Journal. Susan lives in Taos, New Mexico, where she loves riding her dream horse, Goldmark, on the mountain trails. She is working on another novel.

Susan Mihalic: Twitter

Dark Horses: Indiebound | Bookshop | B&N | Amazon

Cover Reveal: Dust & Grim!

WELL, HEY THERE. What’s this? Why, it’s just the cover to my new book, Dust & Grim, out October 5th. In it, a girl inherits a funeral home for monsters from her parents, but must share that inheritance with a brother she’s never met. There are: mysterious doors! Talking wolves! A rogue devourer! Something in the wallpaper! A secret cemetery! And also, a Florg. (You’ll see.) The cover and interior art is by the inimitable Jensine Eckwall.

The biggest excitement for me is to have a book coming out that my own kiddo can read. He’s already seen the arcs and is, for the first time, actually excited that I’m a writer? Amazing! Anyway, hope you’ll check it out. If you need some pre-order links, the publisher has ’em lined up right here.

For those not yet caught up, that means I’ve got three (!) books out this year, which means the number of books I had out last year, which was, uhhh, zero.

Release dates:

April 6th: YOU CAN DO ANYTHING, MAGIC SKELETON

July 20th: THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS

October 5th: DUST & GRIM

Each book, I think, is a book of monsters.

Some wonderful. Some not so much.

Okay, bye!

*disappears in a cloud of moths*

Building Bridges Made Of Breakfast

This is not going to be one of those RECIPE BLOG POSTS where you first must endure a wall of text about the author’s magical visit to Tuscany where they met Mime King Marcel Marceau and picked fresh herbs while simultaneously making love to a secret paramour who then cooked them a frittata so wondrous it made them pregnant with a baby Iron Chef. It’s also not going to be one of the ones where I provide you with easy-to-gather ingredient lists, because I am a monster. It’s mostly just, hey, breakfast is good. I like breakfast. You like breakfast, unless you’re a face-stealing Hellgoblin — are you? A face-stealing Hellgoblin? No? Then prove it with your love of breakfast.

Mostly I just figure, I want to talk about some stuff other than the nightmare pit that opened up underneath us in the prior 4-5 years, and it’s honestly been a while since I catapulted a “””recipe””” into your eyeballs. And we are in a country now in dire need of unity, and there is no greater bridge to build between people than breakfast. We all eat it. We all like it. Except goblins. And goblins aren’t Americans or even citizens of the world, but rather, creatures that emerge from the steaming sulphur sphincters that lead straight to Hell. They are joy-hating mine-crawlers, and you can tell they’re evil because they don’t like breakfast.

Hashtag, worldbuilding.

Anyway.

Here, then, are some breakfast foods I make in the morning for myself, my wife, my child, or the various people I have trapped in my cellar. Ha ha ha just kidding I don’t have people in my cellar. They’re in the attic! Where there’s a view!

B-Dub’s Breakfast Buddy

My kid is generally not a fickle eater. He’ll eat… nnnyeah, mostly anything. His first time eating calamari, we put the plate down and he didn’t even ask what it was, he just started eating it. We were like, “You know that’s squid, right?” And he shrugged and kept going. He’s a good eater. One of his favorite foods is Brussels sprouts (my recipe for those little demon cabbages here). Long as something isn’t too spicy, he’s in.

Except eggs.

I don’t know what happened there. He loved eggs. Eggs were a comfort food. Then he went over another kid’s house, and the Dad was both vegan and an asshole, and the veganism isn’t the problem, but the asshole part definitely is, and somehow our son emerged from that experience hating eggs. I dunno why. He swears nobody told him that eggs were bad. But we also know that guy has turned other kids away from eating non-vegan foodstuffs with some real horror stories. We tried to tell him, “You know you’re not eating baby chickens, right, there’s no baby chicken in here,” and he seems to get that? But he won’t eat eggs anymore.

(My grandmother, Mom-Mom, wouldn’t eat cheese, though she’d eat anything else. She could detect the presence of cheese on an incoming meal when the waitress was still twenty feet from the table. She also lived to 89, and survived with mesothelioma for six years after they gave her six months, so who knows. Maybe not eating cheese is good.)

(I mean, I’m still going to eat cheese. I mean, obviously, JFC.)

(This is fast turning into my Magical Visit to Tuscany, isn’t it?)

(Oh well. This content is free!)

POINT IS, removing eggs from breakfast options was tricky at first because, honestly, breakfast is a world built on eggs, at least in our house. Further, the kidlet still wanted a breakfast sandwich to eat, too, and one that did not include eggs.

So, here’s that sandwich:

Toast an English muffin. Bay’s is our brand, in part because I hate the ritual of having to fork-open the forkin’ motherforker Thomas’ English muffins version.

When toasted, you drizzle a little maple syrup on the inside of the one half.

Then: some manner of meat goes upon it. Bacon is great, but so are sausage patties — the Beyond Sausage patties are good, too, if you want something plant-based.

Upon that goes cheese.

The perfect cheese for this is Cooper Cheese, which is the greatest meltiest cheese known to man, and anybody who tells you different can get fucked. It is the best. It’s American cheese, and I feel you already buckling, but stop. I’ve ranted about this before, but get shut of any judgment you may have about American cheese and how it’s not really “cheese” and how it’s a “cheese product,” and STOW YOUR CHEESE CLASSISM, JUDGEY MCJUDGEYBUTT. Anyway, let J. Kenji Lopez-Alt tell you the truth about American cheese. I have also used a good sharp cheddar, but it does change the profile significantly, and cheddar doesn’t always melt as nice.

So, maple syrup, then meat, then cheese. Cheese on both halves, btw.

Toast again, just till the cheese melts.

Slap halves together, put into face, send me money to pay me for the delight I have given you.

If you like eggs, unlike my anarchist son, cook one to your liking and put it on before the “slap halves” stage of the sandwich construction.

Also, in the name, I understand this is not a proper British butty, so I have named it a Buddy so as not to falsely appropriate British cuisine. You should read that prior sentence as sarcastically as you like.

Cheesy Eggs And Rice

Our Chinese food place gives you a whole container of rice for every dish you order, and that usually means we end up with enough leftover rice to choke a bear. But I don’t want to choke a bear. I like bears. So, instead I try to use the rice in a variety of ways, chief among them is fried rice, which I just mistyped as “friend rice.” Which sounds nice until you realize it might be a Soylent Green thing? Whatever. But for breakfast, I do a different thing with the rice, and this is that different thing —

Skillet on medium-high heat. Toss in there the OIL OF YOUR CHOICE, which here I recommend either unrefined coconut oil (nice coconutty taste) or butter. Why butter? Because butter.

Then, take a bunch of rice and dump it in. How much? Jesus, I dunno. How do you measure rice? By the fistful? One FIST OF RICE. There. The goal of this is you want the rice to get cooked on the bottom but stay somewhat pillowy-ricey on top. Spread it out. Think: layer.

While that’s cooking, lay a slice or two — broken up — of melty cheese atop the rice. Again, I will recommend to you Cooper Cheese for this vital task.

Now, to the eggs.

I do this two ways, depending on my druthers. The fuck is a druther, anyway? It sounds like the last name of a nosy neighbor in an old sitcom. “Oh, no, here comes our landlord, Mister Druthers, again — careful, or he’s going to figure out that one of us roommates is actually a haunted mannequin!”

First way is, scramble the fuck out of it. Then, when you feel the rice is sufficiently ready, you use your spatula and get that eggy scramble into the rice. Give it a stir, keep stirring, don’t let it scramble too much, and then put it on a bowl.

But, I find the second way a bit more satisfying.

I make two nests — two egg craters, you might say — in the rice. Like a fish swooping out the riverbed to lay its future fishchildren. Then put in a little more fat in those culinary rice pockets, and crack an egg into each. Let it cook a bit, then flip each yolk. Once they firm up a little bit, so that they’re starting to get jammy (jammy is one of those food words that I find enticing when used appropriately, so like, with caramelized onions, or egg yolks, but not, say, tuna fish). Then break the jammy yolks, stir them into the rice, and serve.

The cheese should be melty. The rice will be both soft and chewy. The eggs will incorporate throughout, a kind of ricey-eggy-custardy pillow. I use a little sweet soy sauce (buy it separate or make your own with soy, mirin, bit of vinegar, bit of sugar, garlic, ginger). I sometimes use Penzey’s Fox Point or Shallot Pepper too to finish. You can do other stuff to dress this up, too: start with onion, garlic, ginger. Maybe add in a dash of sesame oil. Greens go well here, too, like spinach or bok choy. Shit, this would probably taste good speckled with lawn clippings and eaten out of an old shoebox.

It’s delightful.

Also to be clear, I’m quite certain there are Chinese or Korean breakfasts that are similar to this — I’m not attempting to appropriate or claim some kind of culinary genius. I just put things I like together and they taste good and hopefully they taste good to you, too.

Broken Yolk On Homemade Toast

This one’s easy. Even obvious. But it’s a favorite here. I make my own sourdough toast — er, I guess I actually make the bread because the toast part is always on us to make — so, okay, fine, I make BREAD, you pedants, and then I TOAST that bread.

Then I re-toast in order to melt some cheese on it. Cheese of choice.

Then, I fry two eggs, flip, and break open the yolks at the end, and yet the jammy (there’s that word again) yolks spread out like a blanket of goodness over the whites.

Onto the toast goes a bed of arugula.

Onto the arugula go the eggs.

Season accordingly (salt, pepper, and for me, more of that Penzey’s Fox Point). Then use a painter’s trowel to shovel it into your unhinged maw.

You can dress it up with avocado. Or a fried green tomato for that crunchy tartness. Or a little maple syrup under the cheese for a hit of sweetness. Or, or, or, sweet onion jam or some kinda savory chutney. I also like saying “chutney.” “Jammy Chutney.” That’s my spy name.

*kicks down door* JAMMY CHUTNEY, DOUBLE O CIFIBIA

I dunno. Fuck around with it and report back.

(Note, this image is kind of a combination of this and a breakfast sandwich.)

Oatmeal

My current oatmeal is this apple-based oatmeal. The apples require a special shout-out, I think, because the topping I make is particularly good on all kinds of things — cook the apples in cinnamon and butter, then add orange juice, maple syrup, and reduce down till syrupy. No mushy apples for this. Get something that’ll hold up, but that has a natural tartness. GoldRush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, even a Cosmic Crisp.

Also, oatmeal is really good if you cook it in oatmilk.

I know, that sounds like too much oats. Insert Xzibit meme about putting oats in oats. But trust me, it’s just right. It’s a whole oat galaxy, an OATIVERSE, if you will. An OATPOCALYPSE. Good too if you throw some berries on there, some cacao nibs, some walnuts, a salamander egg, a cursed chicken toe, ash from a burned Bible page, and ha ha no this isn’t a evil spell it’s just a “recipe” it’s “fine” don’t “ask questions” you fucking heretic.

Waffles, Pancakes, And Eating Babies

This is the waffle recipe I use: Aretha Frankenstein’s Waffles of Insane Greatness. Before now a lot of the waffle recipes I used required separating out the egg whites and whipping them before folding them in separately, but nobody has time for that nonsense. What am I, trapped in my house during a global pandemic? Sheesh. This recipe gets the same result but… doesn’t need that step, and so I use this with a Belgian wafflemaker. Note, it says “serves 2 to 4,” and that number for me is, “it serves 2.25” people, so if you have a quarter-human in your house, great. Otherwise, double the recipe.

This is the Dutch Baby recipe I use — it’s Alton Brown’s. It’s very good. I wish it and the waffle recipe above gave ingredients by weight (especially since his recipe here lists “digital scale” as useful equipment but gives you no weight measurements).

I don’t make pancakes, my wife does — I do 90% of the cooking, but she makes a few things I simply cannot manage to do well, like meatballs and pancakes. This is her recipe:

So, that’s 270g AP flour

1 TB + 2 1/4 tsp baking powder

2 1/4 cups milk (room temp)

2 eggs (room temp)

1/4 cup and 1 tsp butter, melted but cooled a little

Basic steps are: melt the butter, let it cool a little, mix dry goods together, marry eggs and milk together in wedded bliss, then make a throuple as you slowly pour and stir melted butter into egg-milk so as not to make scrambled eggs, then wet goes into dry, then onto cooking surface, flip when cooked on one side, eat eat eat. The crossed out stuff in the recipe is her old version — she’s been evolving this over a few years now. These are the best pancakes I have ever eaten, with the exception of maybe the pancake I had at the Mad Batter, in Cape May, NJ.

I don’t pour straight maple syrup on any of these, but rather, make a mix of melted butter and maple syrup whisked together right before pouring. It’s phenomenal.

(For maple syrup, I like Escuminiac, or Finding Home Farms.)

NOW GO FORTH AND BREAKFAST YOUR FACE

Healing Takes Time, And Healing Is Painful

This morning, as Donald Trump left the White House for (*knocks on wood*) the last time, it was snowing outside. Just a light sprinkling of little sugar flakes, sticking to some surfaces but not to others. And then as he took off, the sun poked through for a moment — a patch of blue sky amid the gray. Half the sky is turbid gray gunmetal. The other half a cornflower blue.

Which feels about right to me.

I kinda thought this day would come and I’d just be pure elation. Blue sky for miles! It’d be Champagne corks-a-poppin’ and mimosas, it’d be hooting and hollering, just 100% unrefined, uncut bliss. Electric schadenfreude. Freedom glee. But it’s not all that. It’s not all the way there. I’m also sort of sad, and exhausted, and feeling a little frizzled out. Don’t get me wrong. I’m also happy as fuck. Fuck that guy. We’ve been trapped in the man’s mind for four years, all part of a human centipede chain connecting to his mouth, which is also his asshole, as he steadily forced us all to contend with his hot piping bullshit. Him being plugged into social media like he was meant we never had to wonder what he was thinking, because there he sat, on his golden toilet, petulantly rage-tweeting his every hateful, lackwit impulse right into our skulls. You could mute him, block him, but someone would screengrab it and show it to you. Or the media would unceremoniously just grab whatever false, inane claim he made and use it as their headline without context or clarity. We lived inside his head. It’s nice to have broken out. We beat him. We cracked open his forehead, kicked past the curtain of his naughahyde flesh, and ran for the goddamn hills. We won. Let’s run.

So, yeah, I’m happy. It’s good to see Biden rise to meet the challenge. Day one, he’s showing up with a laundry list of priorities and plans, and further, actual actions to start turning this big-ass ship around. That takes time, but he’s doing it, and I commend him. I also feel bad for him, because what a fucking shitpile he’s going to have to clean up. (Not to mention the smell he’s going to have to get out of the White House. Hamberders, body dye, and exuded human greases. Shudder.)

But I’m also just feeling fucked up, and on examination, I think that’s pretty normal, and I wanted to talk about it — because maybe you’re feeling that way, too.

I feel like a hollowed-out pumpkin. A jack-o-lantern with the candle blown out– my eyes wide, my grin manic, but my middle all empty. And in retrospect, how could we not feel that way? We have been in a war for four years. We’ve been fighting misinformation, disinformation, and cruelty in every direction. We’ve secured considerable political victories at every election since, but their sweetness never lasted long because some new fuckery was always on its way in, a rolling sewage wave crashing down on our beaches.

The parade doesn’t come the day you win the war.

The parade comes later.

Day you win the war, you lay on the sand, you look up at the sky.

You laugh, maybe. You probably cry. You curl up and kick at the ground. You go through it — you go through all those emotions, round and round, a carousel of feelings whirling too fast inside you.

Because here’s the thing:

We’re traumatized as a nation.

We’re experiencing a sociological, widespread version of a complex trauma reaction from chronic exposure to feeling… under assault, to feeling captive. And please be aware, that whatever it is I’m feeling is going to be felt a thousand times worse by those who were truly in Trump’s crosshairs: anybody not white and male and of some wealth. He fostered an environment of hate and restriction against transgender and non-binary Americans. He pushed the racial divide, especially for Black Americans, who are literally standing in the sights of police weapons. He mocked disability. He increased wealth disparity and punished the poor. And his threat against women was profound, too — they were his targets, his prey, his tools. Grab them by the — well. He was a bigoted, rapey piece of shit who should be rotting in an oubliette somewhere.

He stole so much from us. He stole our peace of mind. He stole lives, jobs, a sense of hope, he stole some of our actual democracy — he basically opened the castle gates to COVID-19, which further came in and stole friends and loved ones, it stole work, it stole productivity, it stole our sense of self, it stole our time and our sense of time. He has taken so much.

And now he’s gone. Gone from the White House, soon gone from the presidency. Taking all that he stole with him, carrying it away with him, the fucking loser.

And I think it’s okay to feel fucked up about that. Not sad he’s gone, of course. Fuck him. Fuck his feelings, as sure as he fucked ours. I just mean it’s okay to feel weird. This is healing. We haven’t had that chance to heal yet. It hasn’t begun until… arguably, right now. And healing is rarely comfortable. It’s a good thing, healing — but it’s not a pure thing, a perfect thing. It’s stitches, it’s resetting of bone, it’s relearning how to walk, it’s a limb in a cast, it’s the itch of cells rejoining. It’s uncomfortable. It hurts. It feels strange. That, I suspect, is where we’re at right now. At the point just past trauma’s last mile marker, and onto the healing road. But healing takes time, and healing is painful.

We’re still in COVID-19. We’re still at the cusp of true, dangerous climatic change. We’re still going to contend with all the demons Trump released. We’re still pickling in GOP treachery and the stain of the insurrection they incited. Many of us still have family members whose rational minds are literally lost to this guy, to FOX, to the GOP. So, it’s okay to feel fucked up. To feel sad and angry and not just happy. To be clear, it’s also okay to feel happy, because for real, fuck that fucking loser. It can be all of those things. We can hold many emotions in us. They often compete.

That’s what makes us whole, and human.

You still might wake up anxious.

You still might feel uncertain.

You still can feel happy one minute, and angry the next.

That’s trauma. That’s loss. That’s healing.

We’ll be okay, I hope.

But we’ve learned a lot, I think, about how… well, everything is a garden. Democracy is a garden. Empathy is a garden. Civilization is a garden. And gardens do not just grow on their own — there are invasive species that can take root, there are thieves looking to steal the fruits, the fence can rot, the wind can blow. All of this requires cultivation and curation. It requires a collective effort and if there’s one huge positive, it’s that we figured that out. Trump is gone because of all of you (and Stacey Abrams gets special note, here). He’s gone because our democracy held — barely. It’s the classic American situation: we get ourselves in a bind, plunging the plane toward the ground and then at the last minute we figure out how to pull up on the stick. It’s not a great way to be, but we did it, we made it. And at the risk of continuing to mix my metaphors (settle down, it’s a blog, you’re not paying for it), the garden will grow anew, and it will require our effort to keep it going and growing. We must commit ourselves to that vigilance, to stewardship over this country and its democracy.

That’s how we heal, too.

But committing, and recommitting, to that fight.

That’s how we fight the trauma, I think. By acknowledging it, seeing that it’s real, by mourning what was lost — and then getting to work, the constant work, the diligent work.

Walking that healing road.

Anyway, thanks all for being here, still, and for enduring… whatever this is. It’s hard not to be angry and raaaaar all the time, but I tried to do it in a way that was… at least funny and entertaining, if nothing else. It’s been a hard row to hoe and I appreciate you all doing it with me. We’ll keep walking this road, together, I hope. And finally we can maybe talk about something else for a little while.