Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 40

Cat Scully: Five Things I Learned Writing Jennifer Strange

Fifteen-year-old Jennifer Strange is the Sparrow, cursed with the ability to give ghosts and demonic spirits a body-a flesh and blood anchor in the mortal world-with the touch of her hand. When a ghost attacks her high school and awakens her powers, her father dumps her unceremoniously in the care of her estranged older sister Liz, leaving only his journal as an explanation.

Drawn to the power of the Sparrow, the supernatural creatures preying on Savannah, Georgia will do anything to receive Jennifer’s powerful gift. The sisters must learn to trust each other again and uncover the truth about their family history by deciphering their father’s journal…because if they can’t, Jennifer’s uncontrolled power will rip apart the veil that separates the living from the dead.

A fast-paced and splattery romp, fans of Supernatural, Buffy, and Evil Dead will enjoy JENNIFER STRANGE – the first illustrated novel in a trilogy of stylish queer young adult horror books with big scares for readers not quite ready for adult horror.

Cat Scully’s illustrations bring the ghosts and demons of her fictional world to eerie and beautiful life, harkening back to the style of SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK and Ransom Riggs’ MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN.

***

It’s okay to be gross

The nature of Jennifer’s power called for it. I mean, if you have the ability to give ghosts and demons a body, and that demon has to rip right out of the possessed host to be born into a physical form, things get…messy. As a female writing a young adult horror book, I got pushed in a lot of directions, most of them re-concepting Jennifer’s gift into the gothic and romantic arenas. I saw nothing wrong with being gothic or romantic. Both genres I tend to read voraciously, especially in dark fiction. But I had to face that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to write about Buffy before she became the Buffy of season one, the prequel early years as she transitioned from clueless teenage cheerleader into the Slayer. I watched Ash Williams fight Deadites, wise cracking the whole way, and found myself secretly fantasizing how cool it would be to see a girl in his shoes. I wanted girls to be allowed to make jokes and deal with gross horror situations. I’ve loved horror almost all of my life, but there was nothing between Strong Female Protagonist or the Final Girls of horror films to reference. I found myself holding a seed of an idea that wouldn’t leave me alone. I wanted to write something gross, something funny, a story where readers follow two sisters as they wrestle with a dark power in a family drama saga not unlike the Supernatural brothers Sam and Dean. Going down this route would mean ignoring a lot of advice, to gather the courage to write gore despite what everyone told me. Thanks to my agent and a slew of friends in the horror community, I discovered it was not only okay to be a female writer and write gross, but I wasn’t alone.

Get over your fear of meeting people, but don’t assume you own their time

It took me a lot of years to get this book published, about eleven all told. During those years, I gathered my courage and decided to meet as many writers as possible and give back as much as possible to learn the publishing business. I joined Pitch Wars as a mentor for five years, helped authors using my graphic design skills to create pre-order campaigns, I illustrated world maps for books, I was the Young Adult Editor for the Horror Writers Association, and ran conferences as a track director. Again and again, despite how afraid I was to go up and talk to writers who were further along in their careers, I did it. I tried to be bold, but never assume anything of their time. I genuinely wanted to get to know them and never assumed any of them would read my work, critique my book, or break me in. I had spent years in the south alone, not knowing any other writers who were into weird and dark speculative fiction like me. It wasn’t until I started being brave and genuine that I started to find my core tribe. I’m sure glad I did, because years later when it was my turn for my book to come out, my publishing house went through a seriously hard spring. I was left to handle most of the book publication process alone. I had to gather my tribe and ask for help to get the word out about my book, create swag, edit the book, get it on Netgalley, find trade reviews, and plan events during the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve had a campaign that went about the same as it would have (minus the in-person events) because of the people I’m lucky enough to call my friends. I really doubt anyone would know about my indie young adult horror series without them.

There is such a thing as taking too much advice

I’ve always been eager to follow new writer advice. When I was a baby writer querying Jennifer Strange back in 2012, I eagerly lapped up every article I could find. Every critique partner session, I took almost every piece of advice. They were just trying to help me, right? I needed to put the best novel out there that I could. From what every article told me, I was too close to my work to see what was wrong. After years of this, I ended up with a Frankenstein’s monster of a novel. I didn’t know what the story was or where it was going anymore. I had completely fallen out of love with the idea and had tossed it in a trunk. After chucking Jennifer Strange, I rage-wrote an entire novel about a seafood chef fighting fish monsters. I did whatever the heck I wanted with no input from anyone for the first time in years and finally started to hear my own voice again. That novel landed my current agent. Trust your gut. Not to the point you don’t take any advice or critique at all! I’m not saying swing completely in that direction, but not everyone is going to get your book or your work. After retrieving Jennifer Strange out of a dirty garbage shoot, dusting it off, and getting it published, I had to learn to find what I loved about my work and my voice again. It wasn’t for everyone, and that was okay. I’d rather my book not be for everyone than try to please everyone by writing a patchwork quilt of broken story ever again.

Researching “real-life” ghost encounters are way scarier than movie ones

For Jennifer Strange, I went down a rabbit hole of watching every ghost movie I could find. Being born in the late eighties, I didn’t grow up with the Warrens or the media frenzy surrounding them, but I found the entire narrative fascinating. Were they telling the truth and trying to protect people, or were they just after the money and publicity? I went down another research hole, but the stories of their encounters terrified me. So much of the details seemed like they could swing in either direction, but the idea of capitalizing on fear of the unknown interested me. This idea became a large part of the puzzle piece that fell into place while writing the overall series arc. I wanted to show rival ghost hunting families on either side of that argument–people in it for profit and people in it to protect the living. Researching the book became more terrifying when I turned around on a walking tour in Roswell, Georgia and found myself face-to-face with a ghost when I wasn’t looking for one. I think to this day that’s why I’m never afraid of book monsters and always of movie ones—I’ve seen something I can’t explain. I guess it really is like they say…real life is sometimes stranger than fiction.

It’s okay to find a writing method and then totally change it

I didn’t know I had heart failure until I was in the hospital facing an impossible diagnosis. It was genetic mutation, a rare misfire of the heart that causes it to balloon and then fail under stress. Before my heart failed down to ten percent in 2018, I had a method as a writer that worked for me. Without fail, I’d put on my playlist and write no matter the noise or interruption at two thousand words an hour speed. I would plot everything out in advance, and I was lightning across the keyboard, sure and steady. After 2018, everything changed. With my heart failure came the loss of being able to read, and subsequently, to write. I left the hospital to find my first book Jennifer Strange had finally sold. First came the joy and then came the panic. I couldn’t read a sticky note to myself much less my own manuscript. Coming from clocking the pace I used to pull, going back to the drawing board in my methods was the most painful thing I’ve ever gone through. I had to teach myself how to write and read when the words swam and every noise would send my brain reeling into fog. I pushed the book’s publication date back from 2019 to 2020 and was patient with myself. I found audio books and subsequently Microsoft Word’s “Read Aloud” feature helped me read again. Slowly but surely being only able to read auditorily turned to being able to read sentences, and then paragraphs, and then pages. Writing became a muscle I had to train all over again from square one, with new methods and workarounds and tricks to get me writing, like exercise to get the blood flowing to my brain. And you know what? All of it was okay. All of it was worth it. I learned to start over and rethink my method when my health called for it. Writing as a practice has always been built by inches, not by miles. In some ways, I’m glad my health took a wrecking ball to my previous writing habits. I’m more thoughtful now, more careful in my word choice, because I have to slowly digest every word then read it aloud to hear if it translated to the page. And for that lesson, I’m grateful.

…

Cat Scully is the author and illustrator of the young adult illustrated horror series JENNIFER STRANGE, out July 21, 2020 from Haverhill House Publishing. Cat is best known for her world maps featured in Brooklyn Brujas trilogy by Zoraida Cordova, Winterspell by Claire Legrand, and Give the Dark My Love by Beth Revis. She works in video game development for the Deep End Games, working hard on their next title. She lives off Earl Grey tea, plays a lot of Bioshock, is a huge Evil Dead fan, and plays the drums with her musician husband. She lives outside of Boston and is represented by Miriam Kriss of the Irene Goodman Literary Agency.​ Follow her on Instagram or Twitter at @CatMScully or visit her at 

Cat Scully: Website | Twitter

Jennifer Strange: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

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Django Wexler: Star Wars and the Beginnings of Ashes of the Sun

It’s just one of those true things that for many, the DNA of Star Wars is in what we do — either because we’re fans or because it’s so pervasive, for good or ill. Here’s one author talking about that very thing — Django Wexler!

***

I wanted to tell the story of the inspiration for Ashes of the Sun, and that means talking about Star Wars.  So let me get this out the way up front: I love Star Wars.  It’s quite possible that no other single franchise has taken up so much of my fan energy over the decades.  I have a story in a new Star Wars anthology, and you have no idea how much fanboy-squee that makes me feel.

I say all this because this story involves a certain amount of nitpicking, and I want to make it clear that for a person like me (that is, a world-building obsessed turbo-nerd) this kind of fascinated close analysis is the highest form of affection, rather than trying to put down something I don’t like.  I can love The Empire Strikes Back with a fervent passion and also ask importunate questions like “How did they get from Hoth to Bespin if the hyperdrive was broken?”

Anyway, with that caveat understood, the story of Ashes begins with the Jedi, and specifically the way Jedi recruitment is pictured in the SW prequels and The Clone Wars TV show.  In the prequels, we see very young children (maybe five or six?) being trained by Yoda.  In The Clone Wars, we see younglings brought in for training who are maybe slightly older (starting in S5E6 “The Gathering”) and put through a bunch of harrowing tests in order to get their lightsaber crystals.  Watching this, I couldn’t help but start thinking — this is creepy as hell, right?

The thing is, the Jedi aren’t just a training society for force-sensitives, where you might send your kid to pick a few tricks like going to karate class at the mall.  They are a religious order of ascetic warrior monks, who swear an oath to uphold an extremely strict code of behavior.  This is, to put it mildly, not a thing which it is in a five-year-old’s power to understand or agree to.  (I find myself agreeing with the Harry Plinkett review when he says the whole “not permitted to love” thing means they must lose a lot of Jedi teenagers.)

It’s also not completely clear what happens if the parents aren’t on board with this.  We see some parents who are sad about it, but they’re all ultimately convinced.  If they weren’t, though, it’s not hard to image the kids would be brought along for their own good — the Jedi Order has some unspecified-but-vast legal authority in the Galactic Republic, and a strong interest in making sure Force-sensitives grow up to be Jedi.  Clone Wars’ narrator tells us that the younglings soon understand that the Order is their true family, which sounds extremely like a thing a cult leader would say.

(A related weirdness of Clone Wars is that the enormous authority of the Jedi within the Republic results in situations where fourteen-year-old girls are given command authority over literally thousands of soldiers, in addition to the law enforcement and other powers they already have.  Try to imagine a situation where your local teen, who was already an FBI Special Agent, was also commissioned a brigadier general on the spot.)

Okay, so, weird, right?  But in-universe, we have the Force, which makes it all work.  Younglings want to become Jedi, and their parents are okay with it, because presumably the Force wouldn’t allow things to be otherwise.  (And maybe making kids military commanders makes more sense when those kids have provably-correct magical insights, in addition to being combat gods.)  Again, this is not a critique of Star Wars, it’s just the kind of thing that gets me thinking as a world-builder and a writer.  And it got me asking the question — what if you didn’t have the Force to make things better?

More precisely, what if you had the magic-powers part of the Force, but not the semi-divine guidance part?  After all, in Star Wars, the Jedi are in charge because they’re wise and good, but also, it’s pretty clear, because nobody can stop them.  (The SW MMO The Old Republic storylines depicted this wonderfully on the Empire side — it was clear that nobody thought having a bunch of Sith religious lunatics running the government was a good idea, but since they were also a bunch of unstoppable killing machine … shrug emoji?)  And this, finally, brings us around to Ashes of the Sun.

(As an aside, it’s not the first time I’ve been inspired by this kind of theme.  My middle-grade series, The Forbidden Library, came from the observation that Dumbledore sure does spend a lot of time allowing Harry and his friends to get into life-threatening danger in order to accomplish things that he, Dumbledore, could do easily and safely.  In the books, we trust Dumbledore because he’s both well-meaning and knows what’s best, but removing this element — what TVTropes calls the Omniscient Morality License — gives us what I described as the Sketchy Dumbledore Scenario, where an old guy tells you “Hey, you’re a wizard and the Chosen One!  Now fight these guys I don’t like for me.”)

In the world of Ashes, you can be born with the ability to access deiat, the power of creation.  Using special tools, deiat users called centarchs become almost unstoppable fighters.  The community of centarchs, the Twilight Order, see themselves as the last bastion of civilization, and this is not unreasonable: after a race of deiat-wielders called the Chosen went extinct and their great civilization collapsed, only the Order has access to the power to hold human society together and protect with from the monstrous plaguespawn on its borders.  Centarchs have unlimited authority, both legal and practical, because apart from another centarch, no one can stop them.  But they don’t have an all-powerful Force assuring them everything will come out for the best; deiat doesn’t provide guidance, it just blows things up.

Gyre is eight years old, and his sister Maya five, when a centarch comes to their home and declares that Maya has the gift and will be taken to join the Order.  Maya doesn’t want to go (what five-year-old would, right?) and Gyre tries to help her, and gets badly injured for his troubles.  The incident sets them on opposite paths: twelve years late, Maya is a loyal member of the Order and devoted to her mentor and friends, while Gyre has become a thief and a rebel, scouring the dark places of the world for forbidden power that will let him stand up to the centarchs.

There’s a lot more to Ashes then that, of course.  Like any good story, once I started working on it it took on a life of its own, and there’s a few other big threads and themes that got drawn in.  But the original idea, and the core argument between these two characters, comes back to my Star Wars thought experiment — if you have people who are born with the potential for great power, can you justify forcing them to use it for the common good?  And, if you do, is it fair to assign authority based on what is after all just the luck of the genetic draw?  The Order, in Ashes, would answer yes to both questions, and they could easily be right; survival is a struggle in a world full of monsters.  But ruling classes — centarch or Jedi — like to construct elegant justifications for their dominance, when in the end it just comes down to who has the magic swords.

***

Long ago, a magical war destroyed an empire, and a new one was built in its ashes. But still the old grudges simmer, and two siblings will fight on opposite sides to save their world in the start of Django Wexler’s new epic fantasy trilogy.

Gyre hasn’t seen his beloved sister since their parents sold her to the mysterious Twilight Order. Now, twelve years after her disappearance, Gyre’s sole focus is revenge, and he’s willing to risk anything and anyone to claim enough power to destroy the Order.

Chasing rumors of a fabled city protecting a powerful artifact, Gyre comes face-to-face with his lost sister. But she isn’t who she once was. Trained to be a warrior Maya wields magic for the Twilight Order’s cause. Standing on opposite sides of a looming civil war, the two siblings will learn that not even the ties of blood will keep them from splitting the world in two.

About the author: Django Wexler is the bestselling fantasy author of the Shadow Campaigns series and the Wells of Sorcery young adult series. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science, and worked for the university in artificial intelligence research. Eventually he migrated to Microsoft in Seattle, where he now lives with two cats and a teetering mountain of books. When not writing, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts. 

Django Wexler: Website

Ashes of the Sun: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

Gabbling Into The Void 6: Billy Peltzer’s Mogwai Problem

Welcome once again to the Pandora’s Box of Little Baby Blog Posts, where I again prove my inability to focus on a single blog post and instead loose unto the world a flock of little half-ass blog posts. Fly, my pretties, fly.

Gremlin problems abound. All of our issues — I don’t mean personal issues, I mean our national and to a different degree global ones — feed off each other. They’re gremlins, getting wet, eating after midnight, and whatever the third thing was. Don’t let them watch YouTube? Don’t let them read Jonathan Franzen? Whatever. Our problems are chained together, and suffer force multipliers when chained this way, like an inescapable Mortal Kombat combo. Take the school problem. The problem is being framed as, well, kids either need to go back to school or kids can’t go back to school. Going back to school means maybe they get sick, but it also means that if they don’t go, parents may not be able to work. And it’s being framed as the one thing versus the other, but it ignores the fact there’s an unholy host of other problems that lead to this false dichotomy crisis: we don’t have a robust social safety net, we don’t have health care, we don’t take care of teachers, we make teachers buy their own school supplies (like, say, boxes of tissues), and we have an utter failure of leadership at the top that has let this pandemic run roughshod over us like a brushfire. Everything is a spark and the GOP is the Johnny Appleseed of kindling. If we had a robust pandemic response federally, if we had a social safety net that helped people through these chaotic times, if we had health care, if we took care of teachers, we might have this problem better shored up. But now, it isn’t. And now we’re all staring down the barrel of a soon-to-start school year in the midst of a pandemic whose effects on everyone (teachers, kids, relatives, admin, literally goddamn everyone) remain only faintly seen.

Okay, probably also our personal issues. I mean, I’m not sayin, but I’m just sayin.

Speaking of problems, I’m having computer problems. Weeks ago, I was having heavy slowdown issues — slow booting, slow opening programs, everything. I updated my Mac to the newest OS, Catalina, and poof, problems gone. Now, they’re back. It’s not as sluggish, but it seems to have to do with rendering graphics — sometimes I get flashy, strobing panels on animated menus, sometimes a graphic takes a while to resolve (whether on web or in Photos), things just seem to take a while to spin up. Not sure if I’m having memory issues or GPU problems. But it’s fucking annoying. The system is useable (evidenced by me typing this now). Didn’t find viruses or malware. Didn’t find any HD issues. Sometimes I’m getting high activity on kernel_task via the activity monitor? And it’s still slow(er) to boot, too, suggesting something beyond just GPU. I dunno. Shit. Once again, I blame gremlins. Real gremlins this time, not metaphorical ones.

Two books are out this week that I’m hungry to read. And maybe you are too. S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland is out, as is Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians. I’ve not read Cosby before, but Jones is amazing (I submit Mongrels as evidence, yer honor.) Note, those two links are affiliate links at Bookshop.org. Anyway. I’ve heard amazing things from trusted folks about both, and so I’m eager to get my fangs into them. Almost done Survivor Song by Noted Monster Paul Tremblay, and unsurprisingly, that book cuts deeeeep. Because, as noted, Paul Tremblay is a monster.

Billy Butcher is in a bad situation. Finished The Boys S1, with S2 premiering in fall. That’s a cracking show. I really thought I’d hate it. But I loved it a whole lot — I mean, it’s gross and dark as fuck. It’s a nasty, menacing show, but there’s a good heart in there somewhere, underneath a lot of spilled viscera. Seriously, it’s a gory show. Lotta ew going on there. But good ew! If you like ew.

I did not know Grant Imahara. I saw him in passing at a couple cons, but I know a lot of people who knew him, were close to him, and by every report he was a genuine spirit, and a lovely person. And I know just from watching him on TV, he had a light and a love of learning and exploration and engineering that was catchy, and the loss of him is brutal. And then there’s Naya Rivera and Kelly Preston. It’s just, 2020 needs to get into the sea. This year. This fucking year.

I mean, I try to have perspective. If this year happened 20 years ago, or 100, it would’ve been considerably worse in a lot of ways. It’s not good now, but the circumstances could’ve been considerably harder earlier on. I don’t know how helpful that is, or even how true, but I try to have some tiny mote of optimism in the dark, like one lone lightning bug over a nighttime field, looking for a friend. One little light. One little flickering light.

Speaking of perspective? Go play Superliminal. Just do it. Go. Go!

I’ve been baking again. Send help. You can see the results at IG.

And now, a photo. This is of a cranky little old man baby bird. Just as human babies sometimes look like old man, so do fledglings. This one flew out of our hazelnut tree.

How The Sweet Hot Hell Are We Gonna Open Schools?

[image error]So, there’s this pandemic, right? A real corker of a coronavirus — some people get li’l colds, some people get pneumonia, others have organs attacked, suffer strokes, or endure long-lasting neurological symptoms. And we’ve no idea if there are longer-term problems waiting in the wings. Like I said the other day, polio could wage additional damage decades after you had it.

In this pandemic, we shut the country down. Sorta. Partly. Some states went whole hog, others half-assed it, and now we’re all varying degrees of “reopened,” and cases are surging. All because we didn’t do shit, really, as a country. Some states did well. My state, PA, is doing… pretty okay? Better than a lot, not as good as some of our Northeast counterparts. But nationwide, as a whole, we took allllllll that time locked down to accomplish… eeeyyyyeaaaannnhhh, very, very little.

And now, in many places, it’s worse than it was in March. Worse than the conditions that triggered the lockdown in the first place.

We were on a train driving toward a broken track over the edge of the cliff, and we wisely said, “We’d better slow this beast down, lest we go off the edge,” so we slowed it down… but then… kinda did nothing? We didn’t build new tracks. We didn’t construct a bridge. We didn’t even cover the train in pillows and bounce-houses in the hopes it lessened our impact, if we had to go over the cliff.

We just bided our time and then started speeding up again.

The track is still broken.

The cliff is still ahead.

And the train is full of children.

What I’m saying is, how the hell are we supposed to open schools again?

Consider the following problem —

Soon, it’s going to be cold-and-flu season. That can start as early as September around these parts, and really gets its roots in by winter. Hell, autumn brings allergies, too.

Now, let’s say a kid, or a teacher, starts to have symptoms of one or the other.

Sniffles, sneezes, runny noses, coughs. A temperature.

Is it COVID-19?

Well, you won’t know, so whaddya gonna do? Just casually remove them? The virus is catchier than a Rick-Roll, and often before you even show symptoms. You pretend it’s fine, you could make sure that everyone gets it, that it runs a race around everyone in school.

So, the likely answer is, you have to shut down the school, or at least that class, until the person is tested. And once again, testing is harder to get across the country. If you can get a test, then some people are receiving results in 7-14 days. For a while there it was faster, but remember SLOW DOWN THE TESTING, PLEASE, from our erstwhile shitberg of a president? Yeah. His wish was our command, and now testing is half-fucked again. So, if the person with the coughing-sniffles gets a test, it could be two weeks before results roll in.

Two weeks where people have to freak the fuck out that maybe their kids, or the teachers, or the parents, or whoever, caught the thing that may or may not be the virus that may or may not leave you with lasting long-time damage. That’s a very big Schroedinger’s Cat situation, isn’t it?

Then, then, assume that people are going to also get this thing. Not just cold. Not just flu. But people are going to get it. Statistically, that’s gonna happen, and I’m betting it happens in the first month of school. A kid, a teacher, an admin, a parent, or even someone secondarily connected to those people — a grandparent, a neighbor, whatever, someone where there has been exposure.

Now what?

Well, again, you probably gotta shut shit down.

So, best case scenario, you’ve got a rolling series of openings and shutdowns, blunting any educational momentum the kids and teachers gain. All while school is surely hamstrung anyway, because there’s no way you can run a school the way you did before in the midst of all this.

Given that even a single cough or elevated temperature could totally knee-cap your entire school for two weeks… how’s this supposed to work? What’s the point? Why even bother opening? It’s a futile gesture, like trying to thread a needle with a blowdart from across a crowded room. I guess it’s not impossible but oof. Of course, the Sword of Damocles hanging over everyone’s head is that parents have to work and that means they have to send their kids to school and then there are kids who need school for meals and education (obviously) and social growth and maybe even an escape from abusive or problematic families. But federally, we have no response for this, no planning, no way forward — and a lot of states don’t have much of a clue, either. So onward the train goes, chug-chug-chug, choo-choo, and we know the tracks are busted, we know there’s no bridge, it’s only a cliff ahead and a damning drop to the hard ground below. But we keep going. The train keeps a rollin’.

Follow The River, No Matter Its Rapids, No Matter Its Turns

It’s a lot right now.

I think if we can agree on anything, anything at all between us, it’s that everything is a whole lot. It’s too much. It’s a pandemic and an election and protests (which are good!) and we’re all trapped in a glowing LeMarchand’s Box with Trump and there’s climate change on the near horizon and did I mention there’s a pandemic? A big, scary, lung-punching, brain-tweaking pandemic? If you’re not screaming into a couch cushion soaked with gin right now, who even are you?

There’s been renewed interest in a post I wrote in 2017 — Ways to Stay Motivated in this Shit-Shellacked Era of Stupid — and with the rise on views on that post, there’s also been a renewed bevy of emails headed by way from writers who are foundering and floundering in all of this *gesticulates wildly* going on around us. Certainly these emails echo my own mindset, which is — after a garbled gargle of inchoate rage and bewilderment — how are we supposed to write during this? How the hell am I supposed to put pen to paper, fingers to keys, and type out something that is even vaguely cogent, much less even a little bit escapist? How are sentences not just strings of profanity and ASCII garbage, how are our stories not just 300 pages of wasps stinging ignorant bigots in their mouths? How do you not type with your fists, how do you not tell these stories through your clenched and cracking teeth? How are our books not just screams?

And I don’t…

…have a great answer for that.

Because there is no great answer. There is only — as there often is in hospitals right now — triage. We’re all just trying to hold it together. Deadlines or no deadlines, the words must flow, but sometimes it’s a trickle, and sometimes it’s a violent bar-night vomiting.

But here’s what I’m thinking.

I’m thinking all of this is a river. It’s a dark, fast river. It crawls serpentine through the earth, through the forests. Sometimes it moves slow, other times it’s all rapids. Sometimes it is eerily serene, and sometimes it’s rough enough to knock your teeth into your knees and draw blood. It’s waterfalls and eddies, it’s deep and it’s cold. Like all rivers, it can soothe you, and it can betray you.

This river, the river we’re in and on now — it’s harder, meaner, a river after a flood, a river whose waters are not sated, who will not abate. It’s mudded up and frothing like the muzzle of a rabid wolf.

You can fight against that river.

We often do, in writing. We often go against our own moods, against the news of the world, against bad reviews and against poisoned thinking. Our work is often an act of anchoring our boots against the soft slick weeds and the water-smoothed stones and move against the current.

Upstream, stories can be born.

Sometimes, though, I think you gotta do the other thing.

Sometimes, you go the other way.

You go with the flow.

You run with the river, not against it.

And what that means, practically speaking is, you let it happen. What you’re feeling, what you’re seeing, sometimes those elements demand to be seen in the work. Sometimes the river is the channel that feeds the narrative sea, and that means you need to put it in there, out there, all over it. You don’t escape. You confront. You ride the turns, you rough out the rapids, you take all your fear and your anger and your confusion and you put it on the page. And not even in a way of trying to write something that’s marketable or sellable — but just trying to speak honestly about who you are, about the world in which we’re living, and about your grappling with all of it. It’s not even about writing a cogent book or a collective piece. It can be about taking the time to punch that keyboard and scream onto the page — if only to clear the water and find time to climb back onto shore to write something else. It can be the thing you’re writing, or it can be a way to get to the thing you’re writing.

I don’t mean to suggest this as good “advice” — it’s certainly no requirement. You have to do what feels best and right — and, further, what feels most productive in the direction you need to be going. I’m only saying that, if it’s that much of a slog, if the slow churning march upriver and against the current feels like you’re fighting too hard and losing to the pressure, turn around and go the other way. Sometimes we want to, even need to, write about what’s going on inside our heads and our hearts. Sometimes we can’t ignore the room on fire. Sometimes we can’t get out of the river or go against it. And in those cases, let the waters take you. Write what needs to be written. Write what the river tells you to write. Follow the water, and see where you go.

(P.S.? You can always edit it later.)

Gabbling Into The Void 5: The Void, in 3-D

[image error]HULLO HULLO. It is I, your bearded Charon guiding you down the rivers of the Underworld. Come, take a boat ride with me to the bubbliest, barmiest of blogtowns.

I’m reminded of polio. I know, starting off real exciting, right? Polio? JFC. I’m just saying, polio is one of those diseases where it infected a lot of people — but a bunch didn’t show symptoms, a bunch got the equivalent of a flu, and a smaller percentage ended up with muscle problems, paralysis, and death. Then, as if that weren’t sucky enough, some folks got a follow-up round of PPS (Post-Polio Syndrome) anywhere from 15-40 years later. And they don’t know why. Because viruses are weird.

What I’m trying to say is, take COVID very seriously. In particular, take warnings about neurological damage with considerable concern. Further, it’s worth realizing that survival — while good! — doesn’t mean a life free from symptoms or problems. We need to stop pretending like this is just the flu, like you get it and move on, like we understand the margins of this thing. We don’t. Even with a vaccine, its effects will be with us for a while. Wear a mask. Try to remain distant. Stop going to parties and bars, for shit’s sake.

In better news, Far Side is back. I mean, holy shit. The Far Side is back?!

Some TV I’m enjoying? I started up both The Boys and Doom Patrol and… okay, listen, I wasn’t sure about The Boys. I kinda figured it was gonna be a bro-town meh-fest, but I should’ve have doubted. It’s great. I’m digging it. And Doom Patrol? Who knew? Both are squirrely, dark takes on the superhero thing, and I’m not super into the dark takes right now, but what can I say? What works, works. And these work. What shows or movies have you been digging?

I got a hammock. Its singular purpose was for reading — to disconnect from the world and to pick up a physical book and just read it. My pleasure reading has been erratic as hell since all this started, but lemme tell you, I started Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song yesterday, and in a blink, I was 100 pages deep. I haven’t read 100 pages of a book in one sitting since before the Quarantimes. Ironically, it’s a book about a virus — an upgraded rabies virus. It’s horrifying. Tremblay is a monster. A wonderful monster who is a helluva writer. What are you reading right now?

I saw a video that has made me laugh so hard I wept. It’s Akilah and Milana. Just watch it and improve your life one thousand percent.

A casual reminder that you can find me on Instagram. It’s @chuck_wendig over yonder.

Our garden doth grow. Been eating snap peas, which have been sweet. Our radish days are gone. Got kale that needs harvesting. Shishito peppers blooming. Peas starting. And something called “Dragon Beans” which are, no joke, growing taller than anything we have supporting them, so I’m pretty sure they’re some kind of mythological legume. We also used compost to help jump start our blueberries, but I guess the compost had squash seeds in them because now the blueberries have some squash buddies growing alongside them? I’m sure that’s fine.

Beer me, barkeep. I had something called Cocoa Cow from Sunriver and hot dang that was good. It’s like dessert, except it’s beer? I wanna put some vanilla ice cream in it. Because if you’re going to be unhealthy, you might as well press pedal and pitter-patter.

So it’s been a year, now. Happy birthday, Wanderers. The little big book has been out for a full year, and it’s done very well and I’m happy, but do you remember when it was fiction hahaha aaaaghhaaAAAAGHHHH yeah me too. Also holy shit, it’s at 989 reviews at Amazon — ?! That’s a helluva thing. I’m still very proud of the book. It was serendipitous in the writing and the reception, and equally so — if more troubling — in how it occasionally would come to mirror some of reality. I don’t think the book’s journey is over, and it continues (somehow?) to sell pretty well, and I’m just glad it’s out there and did okay. I remember taking a road trip to do research for it and — wow, remember road trips? Remember going places? Remember doing stuff outside your house. Of course, because we live in Two Americas, there are lots of people who remember those things well, because they just did them like, last week. Half our local cases are from people who thought, “Now’s a good time to go to Myrtle Beach, where I can rub my nose in some coronavirus with lime, baby.” Seriously, our cases in PA are coming from out of state. Because people just can’t be smart and keep it under control. IF I DON’T GO TO THE BEACH I’LL DIE, they say, before going to beach and catching a disease that could kill them. Cool cool cool, extremely cool.

I have all kinds of news I can’t yet share. One day I’ll share it. For now I’m sitting on a nest of eggs that only I know are there. HATCH, LITTLE NEWS GOSLINGS, HATCH.

ANYWAY that’s all she wrote, I think.

Wear a mask.

Here’s a flower.

Andrea Phillips: The Corporation As Tool

I’m often wont to say that plot is Soylent Green — it’s made of people. Meaning, people make decisions, and that’s what forms an overarching plot or story, not some external hero’s myth, not some skeletal framework of A to B to C. And that’s in narrative, yes, but it also translates to the real world. Science and history are both driven by people — their decisions, their choices, their observations and recordings. And here, Andrea Phillips — with her new novel, America, Inc. out this week — talks a bit about the idea of the corporation, and how it relates to the individual:

***

My name is Andrea Phillips, I think corporations get a bad rap that they don’t entirely deserve. I even wrote a book called America Inc. that’s about a corporation running for president of the U.S. — and they’re the good guys. See, I think the corporation is just a tool, and like every tool, it can be used for good or for evil.

In the beginning, corporate personhood was a great idea. The whole point was to legally separate a business from its owners. That way they wouldn’t be ruined if something went wrong and the business went under — say a ship was lost at sea, or the shop burned down.

Recognizing the business as a separate legal entity created a shield that meant the people the business owed money to couldn’t come after the owner’s house, couldn’t take all of their life savings, couldn’t take the lollipops from the mouths of their children. That doesn’t seem so bad, right?

So why do people hate corporations today? That tool fell into the wrong hands. They’ve taken the legal and financial shield and applied it to other areas of responsibility. It’s become a moral shield, too.

When Deepwater Horizon spilled hundreds of millions of gallons into the Gulf of Mexico, we blamed BP. When researchers discovered diesel cars cheating their way through emissions testing, we blamed Volkswagen. When the 737 Max turned out to have gone into service with fatal flaws, we blamed Boeing.

But each one of those incidents is the result of decisions and actions taken by individual people — and not just one or two, but a cascade of people all choosing to do the wrong thing.

This also applies to business practices. It’s easy shorthand to talk about Amazon’s monopoly power or Wal-Mart’s decision to underpay their workers. But Amazon didn’t decide anything. Wal-Mart didn’t, either. In a very concrete way, neither Amazon nor Wal-Mart even exist. You can’t touch them, and you certainly can’t throw them in a jail cell. Every one of those actions is a choice that some asshole made — some asshole who took on the mantle of the corporation to shield him from the consequences.

The corporation isn’t the problem. The problem is a cultural and legal structure that absolves individuals of moral and criminal culpability for the choices they’ve made. The problem is letting those assholes run things without consequences.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

OK, fine. Sometimes, in the most egregious of cases, we’ll throw a few assholes in jail. Sometimes, though, the people who wind up in hot water aren’t the ones who made the original decision; they’re just water-carriers following orders for the people who sign their checks.

We could be doing a lot more. We could be exercising punishments for corporate malfeasance with more bite than skimming off a fraction of a percent of profits in fines. We could and should create a criminal framework that punishes both businesses and decision makers for their antisocial, anti-environmental, anticompetitive choices.

Creating sweeping change like that is hard and slow. In the meantime, all of us have to operate within this corrupt system. There’s no escaping it. But that doesn’t mean we have to be corrupt ourselves.

Individuals have much more power than they realize. Every day, we make choices, and our little choices can add up ripple by ripple to become a great wave of change. We’ve seen it in #MeToo, where each person calling out the instigator of their harassment emboldens others to share their experiences and enforce a new cultural acceptance that that kind of shit isn’t okay. We’re seeing it right now with Black Lives Matter, where years of tremendous work of Black activists has finally stirred even apathetic white people to protest and to support massive changes in police use of force, disciplinary processes, and funding.

I’m not saying that little by little we can change the complicated international financial-legal system on our own. But in your own workplace, you can be a sticky cog, finding ways to prevent evil and ways to do good. Every business that sent out an email supporting Black Lives Matter did that because an individual at that company made a choice — a moral choice. We can all find ways to try to make our workplaces less racist, or less exploitative, even if it’s just by example.

Me, I’m just a reclusive author. I can’t press my employer to, say, make Juneteenth a paid holiday because I don’t have one. So for my part, I’m donating 15% of net profits from sales of America Inc. to Common Cause, a nonprofit that works to protect voting writes in the United States.

Be the change. It’s got to start somewhere. And once you start, you just might discover you’re not as alone as you thought.

***

Andrea Phillips is an award-winning immersive experience designer and author. Her short fiction includes the critically acclaimed novelette The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike. America, Inc. is its novel-length sequel. Her other books include Revision, The Daring Adventures of Lucy Smokeheart, and A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. She also created the Serial Box LitRPG project Alternis, and co-authored Bookburners and ReMade. You can find her on Twitter at @andrhia. I mean, if you like that sort of thing.

Andrea Phillips: Website | Twitter

America, Inc.: Buy Now

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Matt Wallace: Five Things I Learned Writing Savage Legion

They call them Savages. Brutal. Efficient. Expendable.

The empire relies on them. The Savages are the greatest weapon they ever developed. Culled from the streets of their cities, they take the ones no one will miss and throw them, by the thousands, at the empire’s enemies. If they live, they fight again. If they die, there are always more to take their place.

Evie is not a Savage. She’s a warrior with a mission: to find the man she once loved, the man who holds the key to exposing the secret of the Savage Legion and ending the mass conscription of the empire’s poor and wretched.

But to find him, she must become one of them, to be marked in her blood, to fight in their wars, and to find her purpose. Evie will die a Savage if she has to, but not before showing the world who she really is and what the Savage Legion can really do.

***

I didn’t know how to write an epic fantasy novel.

I grew up reading sprawling fantasy sagas, from Dragonlance to Pern to Forgotten Realms. While that did a good job of schooling me on the tropes of those novels I wanted to avoid and/or examine, it did not, as it turns out, prepare me to write one. I tend towards short form fiction naturally, and structuring something so long and of such scope spun me around something fierce. I had to trash and restart SAVAGE LEGION at least twice, and oddly the only thing that ended up saving me was falling ass-backwards into writing a series of novellas. I solved my structuring problems by viewing my epic fantasy as three novellas which would compose three acts and feature three POV characters (the number three just started to make sense to me, I guess). If I hadn’t embedded that in my brain as a guide, I never would’ve finished the book.

The line between giving yourself time and living in fear is razor-thin.

It took me longer to write this novel than any other work I’ve ever produced. It was at least four or five years from the first word I typed to handing off the first draft to my agent. I needed the time to teach myself how to write this book, but there definitely came a point when I left it sitting for long periods because, quite simply, I’d become afraid of it. It was too much. Mentally, emotionally, physically. And the more time I left it alone, the easier it became to keep doing that and the harder it became to return to it. While I do believe some of those years were vital to figuring the book out and arriving at the final draft we did, if I’m being honest with myself I probably could’ve cut those years in half by dealing with the unhealthy caverns of that fear instead of letting it fester and so often steer me.

The smallest piece of advice can change your entire world. Literally.

This book was originally (in the long-long ago) going to be titled WILD MAN. After a time, the exclusiveness of that title began to bug me. I talked to author Kameron Hurley about it, who told me how she reacted when she first heard Star Trek’s famous opening narration make the change from “where no man has gone before” to “where no one has gone before” and her emotional reaction to it. Needless to say, it was a profound moment for her, one of inclusion she didn’t even know she craved that deeply. Her story, her perspective, not only led me to a new title, it ended up completely altering my view of the novel and its world. I’ve often and publicly credited Hurley with helping me reshape this novel, and Hurley always reacts incredulously and dismissively. “What, that thing about the title?” she once asked me when I brought it up. It was a brief and innocuous bit of craft exchange to her, but to me it was vital and formative.

Your novel is only as good as the village that helps you raise it.

My writing career up to this point had been very isolated and insular. I never liked anyone “telling me how to write,” as I saw it. SAVAGE LEGION completely changed my perspective on that. It started with my agent, who is also an experienced editor. My actual editor at Saga Press, Navah Wolfe, was as much collaborator as overseer. Our sensitivity readers who were integral to informing the experiences of the characters who aren’t like me. I needed them all, and I am 100% convinced SAVAGE LEGION wouldn’t be the book I believe it is without every single one of them. I’ve never allowed so many people inside my process before, and I am grateful that I did, but more importantly, I’m grateful they were the right people for this book. That dynamic is paramount. It’s not about getting a bunch of notes from a bunch of folks, it’s about finding the right perspectives to inform your process and the work itself.

It’s worth the years it took to write because you finished it.

This is a shitty time to have a book coming out. There are vastly more attention-consuming and frankly more important things happening than a story I wrote. Pandemics, civil uprising, rooting out predators and racism in every industry and field. There have also been a lot of behind-the-scenes issues with the publication of this book I won’t go into here. Needless to say, I’ve been very discouraged as we approach release day for SAVAGE LEGION. What I’ve ultimately learned, however, is you can’t replace time. No amount of fanfare or recognition or sales numbers will give me back the years I put into writing this book. In the end, it is either worth the cost of time to you as the author or it isn’t. For me, I’ve decided the years I spent on this book weren’t a waste, because I finished it. I did what I set out to do, and the book is exactly what I wanted it to be. Nothing else really matters, not in the final tally.

***

Matt Wallace is a retired professional wrestler and the author of the Sin du Jour novella series (Tor.com Publishing), as well as the Savage Rebellion series (Saga Press). His debut middle-grade novel, Bump, is scheduled to be released in 2021 by Katherine Tegen Books. In 2018, alongside co-host Mur Lafferty, he took home the Hugo Award for their podcast, Ditch Diggers. In addition to writing for several television series, Matt has also done extensive narrative work on video game titles for publishers such as inXile Entertainment. He currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife, Nikki, and maintains a steady Twitter presence @MattFnWallace, as well as a more sporadic presence on YouTube with his channel, Angry Writer.

Matt Wallace: Website | Twitter

Savage Legion: Print | eBook

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Gabbling Into The Void 4: The Quest For Quainter Quarantimes

OH HELLO I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE. All right. Let’s light the tires, kick the fires. Is that right? Whatever. Miniature blog posts in 3, 2, 1… *flips switch*

The dogs of authors, on display. Today! Do not forget: author pet show!

Wait, it’s fucking July already?! That’s it. Time is broken. The calendar is a shuddering, sparking machine. I’m surprised my watch doesn’t just show a man on fire shrugging vigorously.

Right now, as I type this, blue jays are shit mad at something outside. I’m curiously getting pretty good at discerning what precisely it is they’re mad at — for instance, there’s a Cooper’s Hawk around, and I know their alarm cries when it comes by. This isn’t that. I’m betting crow? They get salty as fuck at crows. One thing I saw and found fascinating about blue jays: one day our yard jays were sounding the beak-bells about the Cooper’s Hawk, and other jays showed up. Like, a lot of them. They streamed in from two different directions, all joining the din. They called in the goddamn blue jay air force. It was a thing to behold, and I don’t know that I was aware that birds of that sort had any level of… allegiance to one another? Either that, or they were rubber-neckers. Just a buncha oglers like people who come out of their houses when there’s sirens or noise outside. HEY WHAT’S GOING ON. YEAH NO I’M NOT INVESTED IN THIS I JUST WANNA SEE. ARE YOUSE GONNA FIGHT OR WHAT. I’M GOIN BACK INSIDE.

But, I do like that some birds flock together. We’ve long had flocks of certain birds flock together — it’s not unusual, for instance, for certain feeder birds to hang out. Chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, and the like. What’s been interesting this year is seeing a gaggle of chickadee fledglings and a flurry of titmice fledglings play together. Literally play. Chasing each other up and around trees, bopping about. Not for food, just zipping around this way and that. I’m perhaps anthropomorphizing this behavior, but I’m not a BIRDOLOGIST so I’m not married to scientific rigor, it just seems to me like the only explanation is some measure of play — which I’m sure has value for them as it does for humans. But it also is suggestive of a greater intelligence than you’d think for such a tiny little nitwit bird, and a greater sense of society, if it can possibly be called that.

Hey, did you know there’s still a pandemic? Turns out, yup, it’s still rockin’ and rollin’, this whole thing. But I don’t know that people believe it? Who needs facts and experts and reality, when literally anything can be politicized and turned into a both-sides argument?

I think what floors me the most is people who aren’t taking it seriously, but also, who think they’re taking it seriously. What I mean is, you hear stories of friends-of-friends who are like, “Yes, mmm, coronavirus, very bad, very bad, wear your masks everyone! Social distancing is important! Anyway, me and my family were in Myrtle Beach last night and had a great time at a bar, and we met some other friends from Florida and Texas, and then we went to three different house parties — oh man, the last one was a real rager, we all played this great new game called HOW MANY TIMES CAN YOU COUGH IN EACH OTHER’S MOUTHS, and gosh, it was wild. Anyway! We’re back home now and I’m eating in restaurants for every meal and inhaling toilet plumes to get high, but don’t forget, wear your masks and social distance.”

Our numbers remain low, but in two weeks, now that we’re effectively reopened? We’ll see. They’re talking about opening schools in the fall, which to be is paradoxically both a) essential and b) impossible. I just don’t know how you do it. And a lot of schools are demanding parents make a choice of EITHER/OR — you either choose to have your kid go to school physically, or choose a totally digital path, and, uhhh. Ennh? To me, a mix feels smartest — stagger kids going, so you can limit numbers in classrooms, get them as much outdoor time as possible, and so on. But a lot of schools, even good ones, have abysmal ventilation. And they’re not gonna make kids wear masks or socially distance. They’re guaranteeing… I think three feet? Which I appreciate is hard to get kids to not be near one another, so, I grok the problem. I just don’t know the fix, and the fix seems to be, “well, fuck it.” Which is kinda the fix for everything these days, isn’t it?

There’s a passage in Wanderers that I think has become the one most quoted to me. It’s not part of the book proper — it’s an epigraph, one of the “flavor text” chapter openers. I post it here for shits and giggles, because… well, it feels dangerously appropriate.

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A most troublesome thing is that people think they know this disease. And they don’t. “It’s just the flu, it’s just a respiratory disease, it won’t kill you.” We’ve a number of family friends who’ve had it, and it’s a wildly mixed bag. One is completely lost to the throes of autoimmune encephalitis, trapped in his own burning brain, staring down the barrel of a long or maybe eternal hospital or facility stay. Others report, even three months later, spikes of fatigue, or loss of smell and taste, or other strange little symptoms. Even in our area, I think the hospitals have said that “fever” isn’t even the most telling symptom anymore — so temperature checks aren’t worth a damn. We’re still a long ways out from really understanding what this thing is, and what it can do. Wear a mask. That seems to help. Socially distance, when you can. Wash your hands. JFC. And holy shit don’t go to bars or parties.

The best Mission: Impossible movie is Fallout. And that’s because of Henry Cavill locking and loading his fists in the bathroom fight scene. No, this isn’t relevant to anything, but I figured it was good to break the mood and stop talking about the pandemic, which will one day go away, but the Mission: Impossible films will remain.

What have we been watching lately? Hmmm. There’s a spate of dipshit game shows we’ve been liking. Holey Moley is like exxxtreme mini-golf, and that’s on Hulu. Floor is Lava is on Netflix, and though it gets a little repetitious, it’s still a delight watching people faceplant and then slide unceremoniously into lava. (And the show makes you think they’re being pulled under, never to return.) We watched Hercules on Disney+ because we’d never seen it and now I wish we could go back to that kinder era. (Okay it wasn’t that bad, it was fun and funny but basically a brainless Looney Tunes telling of Greek Myth.) I keep trying to watch the Birds of Prey movie, and I’m about 75% through it, and I like it a good deal, but it’s hard to watch proper R-rated movies when you’re in a house where your kid really can’t go anywhere for two hours. But we do watch Letterkenny. Twenty-minute bursts of foul-mouthed Canadian hicktown shenanigans. Think early Kevin Smith, but redneckier, and in Canada.

Speaking of madcap mini-golf… if you haven’t played What The Golf? on Nintendo Switch, fix your shit immediately. Boy that’s fun. And weird. And rarely difficult, but occasionally tricky. Brilliant game design that makes fun of itself and all of game design.

Just a reminder, I’m still off of Twitter right now. I think the account is still locked, though I’ll fix that… I dunno, eventually. But even then, I intend to trim it up and use it mostly for signal boost and book-stuff. I suspect my time there has largely sunsetted, and at this point I fear I’m giving a lot more to it than it is giving to me. (And a reminder too, the locking-of-said-account was due to the Internet Archive kerfuffle. I’d seen folks like Pablo Hidalgo go full lockdown, and honestly it seemed more peaceful, so I did that.)

Also to remind you, no I am not suing the Internet Archive. I got a handful of emails this week, some trolling, some earnest, asking me to stop my lawsuit against them, and I’d like to remind you not to believe everything that enters your eyeballs on this here internet. You can go check the suit — I am not named in it, nor are my books. I did not “lead the charge,” and in fact, outside of some dumb tweets, have absolutely nothing to do with it. I didn’t even ask them to remove my own books, much less get litigious about it. I do not want the Wayback Machine to go away, and am not responsible for anything that happens there. So, I cannot pull my lawsuit, because I have no lawsuit to pull. Go bother publishers, who are further not acting on my behalf. Cool? Cool.

I think that’s it for now. Here are some photos. Including those BABBY TITMICE.

Author Pet Show!

PSST. Hey! Wanna help the SF Bay-area bookstore, Comix Experience? Want to see me and a buncha authors parade around their pets for the purpose of supporting a cool bookstore? OF COURSE YOU DO. Tomorrow, I’m joining a bevy of amazing authors (Charlie Jane Anders, Mallory O’Meara, Seanan McGuire, Mike Chen, Annalee Newitz, Fonda Lee and Meg Elison) to show off my dogs (er, assuming that they are in canine compliance and won’t try to lick the laptop to death).

Tickets are available now — go forth!