Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 43

Writing Advice In The Age Of The Pandemic

I’ve seen a lot of writing advice slung around, and I’ve had a lot of folks ask for it, too — sometimes it’s specific questions, but a lot of times it’s an aimless sort of well what the fuck do I do now feeling. Some of it spurred on by the fact that a few folks have encouraged (perhaps too vigorously) increased productivity during this time, not just in writing but in all things, as if we all magically have more time now, now less. Spoiler warning: I have less time now. Because there’s a kid at home and some of my day is devoted toward either whatever he’s doing and increased cooking and increased digital hunter-gathering as I try to find like, a black market dark web source for eggs or flour. That’s not to mention the rampant ennui bogging us all down. I know I find myself lost in the temporal river of the day, just swept away by it until I blink and it’s wait whoa 3pm already?

So, what does that mean for writers?

What does that mean for me?

I’m managing.

Not in a big way. My output is cut. I don’t feel burned out, exactly, but I definitely feel like I’m proceeding more slowly, more gingerly, through the work. I have to do a lot to suppress the feelings of guilt and pressure that arise as a result — as a once-freelancer, my life was driven so keenly toward GO GO GO and DEADLINES ARE LIFELINES, that it’s hard to break that. If I’m not turning out 2,000 words a day, what the hell am I doing? Who am I? So, I’m managing, but managing comes part and parcel with the feeling that mere “managing” is equivalent to treading water, or worse, just being two nostrils above the surface of the water — rising floodwaters and I’m breathing, but barely.

It isn’t that bad, and I have to remind myself of that.

Here’s where I land on all of this, or more to the point, what I try to remind myself semi-daily — this is for me, and maybe also for you, if you feel the need to borrow it.

The goal is simply to move forward.

The goal is to progress, however slowly, in a productive direction.

It is the realization that this is, now more than ever, a game of inches and not of miles.

It’s okay if you’re striding whole miles, of course. It’s great if you’re turning out five thousand words in a sitting. No shame in that — disappear into it, do what you need to do. Once I’m done editing Dust & Grim, I get to start work on a dream project — a big damn SECRET BOOK that I think I might be able to use to break into a sprint. But I’m not there now. Even this blog post has been a poke-and-peck endeavor. One sentence, then another, then a gentle slack-jawed hyuuuunngghh while I space the fuck out and lose my grip on the singular moment in favor of splaying out across all the moments. And then I’m back, and writing another sentence.

So, the advice is simply to do, to gain, to make, to write. Something, anything, as much as you can manage — write, yes, but cut the pressure, don’t let something need to be everything. Some days will be better than others, some will be worse, but the goal isn’t to force the bones to break, but to give time for muscles to knit. Time to heal, but time to walk, too. If that makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t. Am I talking words? AM I WRITING SEMPENCES AHHHHH

Ahem.

Just move forward.

Do what you can do.

Push a little, but don’t push so hard you break.

Push a little harder tomorrow, if you can. If you can’t, ease off.

Test your limits every day, but detect the warning sensors going off.

Write some words.

Put them together.

A story forms, like a wall from bricks.

And those bricks will remain for a good while, despite the time, despite the weather, and you can build on them tomorrow, whether with one brick or ten. An act of building, and in a way, an act of erosion, too — like a trickle of water licking a canyon into stone over time.

A.J. Hartley: Five Things I Learned Writing Impervious

Trina Warren didn’t think she was going to be a hero. She thought she was going to go to fourth period, hopefully avoiding any more hassle from the jocks about dropping their plates at her waitressing job the night before. Then there was a bang, and an overturned chair, and everything was different.

Now Trina finds herself in a fantasy world, pursued by a faceless, nameless monster that only she can stop. But she doesn’t know how to stop it, she doesn’t have any weapons, and her only clue is the necklace that arrived in a mysterious package that morning, with no return address and a cryptic note inside. She must navigate an unfamiliar world full of monsters, magic, and danger if she is to defeat the mysterious Soulless One and save her friends. And herself.

* * *

In extraordinary circumstances, ordinary people show themselves to be extraordinary

Just under a year ago I survived a mass shooting on the campus of the university where I teach. I say survived, but that feels wrong. I mean, it’s not like I got shot. I was in a building a couple over from where the attack began where I hid in a locked room with my students. Though it took a couple of hours for us to be freed by the police, the incident itself was over very quickly. We just didn’t know it. For us it was two hours of watching our (muted) phones, trying to figure out what was going on and just how much danger we were in, and listening for footsteps outside. What we learned later is that the speed with which the police were able to take charge of the situation was due to the actions of one of the victims, Riley Howel who overpowered the shooter, running at him, and taking eight bullets to various parts of his body. Eight bullets, and he kept going, driven by what? I can barely imagine. In those horrific moments his will power, courage, greatness of heart—call it what you like—allowed most of the other students in that room to get out alive.

Writing is my way through trauma

Not for the first time in my life I came out of a bad situation with the need to talk about it not as it actually happened, but through the distorting lens of fiction. I did it after my wife’s cancer. I did it after the death of my father. And I did it after this glimpse of the appalling fragility of normal life. It’s a fantasy novel, swords and sorcery meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except that it’s finally not at all. It’s about the terrible and arbitrary ordinariness of certain kinds of violence. And I’m not kidding when I said I needed to write it. At the time I was ok, but within a few days I was very clearly not. I would suddenly be overcome with grief, panic or terror. I wrote the first draft in two breathless weeks, and felt a little better.

I’m not interested in purely escapist fantasy

I‘ve known this for a while but it has been a little surprising nonetheless. I always loved the idea of books which took you away from the real world and put your everyday problems on hold, but as I’ve got older I’ve found that less and less satisfying. Yes, I love the unreal, the paranormal, the magical, the preposterous in art, but somewhere deep inside, like the flaw at the heart of a crystal, I like to feel that for all its un reality those TV shows, movies and books all tap into something real, something true. I’m quite capable of investing in the strictly imaginary, but I like that imaginary to have just enough of a tether to the life I lead that some subconscious part of me will make use of it as I wrestle with ordinary issues.

There’s no such thing as apolitical fiction

My other fiction has similar handholds on reality and it can piss people off. I saw a one star Amazon review for one of my Steeplejack books which actually raised the outraged question: why put politics in fantasy? To which I say, because that’s where we live, and when authors say they don’t put politics in their fiction it’s because they are either writing about a place which bears no resemblance to the world or because they think that politics is for other people. The Steeplejack example is a case in point. It was read (rightly) as political because it was about racial struggle in an unequal society, something some people would prefer not to think about, usually because they aren’t the ones being disenfranchised by such inequality. For me, ignoring such things is political; it’s wishful thinking of a particularly insidious kind. So yes, people will attack Impervious for being a political book. Fine. Show me a book that isn’t, and I’ll show you a book so utterly divorced from reality that I have no interest in it.

You can’t please everyone

No surprise there. What I realized in writing this book, however, is that the desire to please everyone is not just foolish, it’s cowardly. You have to pick your battles, for sure, but there should be a point where you say, this is the hill I’m prepared to die on. Hell, if Riley Howel can take eight bullets to save his classmates, I ought to be able to write a damn novel with an ounce of integrity, and if I can’t, I should hang it up.

* * *

Author A.J. Hartley is the bestselling writer of mystery/thriller, fantasy, historical fiction, and young adult novels. He was born in northern England, but has lived in many places including Japan, and is currently the Robinson Professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he specializes in the performance history, theory and criticism of Renaissance English drama, and works as a director and dramaturg.

AJ Hartley: Website

Impervious: Amazon | Everywhere Else

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Announcing: Dust & Grim

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Sooooo, hey, look at that? If you’ll remember a little while ago I tweeted that I’d written a middle grade about a girl who inherits a funeral home and cemetery for monsters? Welp, it sold! And here I’m able to announce that Dust & Grim is the first SEEEECRET BOOOOK I had waiting in the wings.

(Only three more to announce!)

I’m excited to see how people react to this — it’s very plainly a kids’ book, as I wanted to write something in line with what my son could read by the time he’s of that age, and this should time out pretty well for that. I’m in the middle of editing the book now, and am very pleased to be working with Deirdre Jones, who like my Del Rey editor Tricia has sought to bring out the best version of the vision I’m putting into the book, which is to me the ideal editor-author relationship. Thanks to Deirdre and LB for wanting this book, and for my wonderagent, Stacia Decker, for helping deliver that deal. Hopefully you all will dig it. We initially considered using a pseudonym for it, but there was the feeling that though I’m traditionally an adult author (though I’ve written YA, and those books are on sale this month at Amazon, btw) with a adult social media presence, it shouldn’t impact what kids that age look for or care about. But maybe that’ll change and you’ll find this book coming out under my carefully-crafted pseudonym, RICK RIORDAN. I don’t think anyone has taken that one yet! Failing that, I could always go with the name of my great grand-uncle, JOHN KENNEY ROWLING, though I think it’d be classier to use the first two initials? Whatever.

More as I have it, folks.

Also P.S. the name Michelle under that photo is not my name, but rather, the photographer credit.

Stephen Blackmoore: A Most Discourteous Death

Listen, I think my favoritest urban fantasy book of all time is Stephen Blackmoore’s Dead Things. And it’s since bloomed into a bad-ass series for LA necromancer Eric Carter, who is usually in deep with supernatural shenanigans — ghosts, gods, Death Herself. You know, the usual. I’m a book behind (as I’m awful about keeping up with series), but today the newest is out — Ghost Money is here, and so Blackmoore emerges from the ash and the mist to drop a guest post in your lap. Here, then, is a post about death and dying. (And check out his series — it’s important to support authors right now, and with a huge bonus, you also support yourself too because hey, BOOKS ARE AWESOME.)

* * *

This is a bad time for all of us. The world is in a swirling shitstorm and when the dust, poop, whatever just go with it, settles the world is going to look very different than it does today.

The middle of a pandemic is maybe not the best time to release a book, and certainly not a book where death is a central theme. I recognize this, and I hope this doesn’t come across as flippant, or in any way disrespecting the very real fact that someone reading this may very well have a friend or a loved one sick, in the hospital, dead.

Yes, this is marketing. Yes, I’m writing this because I hope some of you will be interested in my writing enough to buy my books. But stay with me for a minute, if you would. Marketing or no, I do have a couple of things to say on the topic of dying.

The Eric Carter series is urban fantasy about a modern-day necromancer in Los Angeles. His parents are dead, his best friend is not only dead but had his soul ripped to shreds, he’s married (read: shotgun wedding) to the folk-saint Santa Muerte / Aztec goddess of death Mictecacihuatl. He and Death are on a literal first name basis.

For all that death you’d think there’d be more talk about an afterlife. There’s some. Most of the third book, HUNGRY GHOSTS, takes place in Mictlan, the Aztec land of the dead. In Carter’s world gods are real, the dead go to wherever the dead are going to go, Valhalla, Heaven, Elysium, or the Void. But what does that mean? Carter knows about Mictlan firsthand, but beyond that? Hasn’t a clue.

And, of course, neither do I. How much of Carter’s view on the world is mine, just as how much of any character’s viewpoint is the author’s, is hard to nail down. I know I wouldn’t do half the shit he would. Mostly because he can be an idiot. But also because there are lines he’ll cross that I won’t. I’ll keep to myself which ones those are.

One place I know where he and I are in sync, however, is in my view of death and dying.

Regardless where a soul, if it exists, goes, if anywhere, when someone dies, they’re dead. I know that sounds like a remarkably stupid thing to point out, but how many times have you heard someone say, “They’re in a better place.” Really? Better? 24/7 booze fountains and cocaine roadways? Strippers of every stripe giving out lapdances and handjobs?

I don’t know if they’re in a better place. I don’t know if it’s all sparkly unicorn shit, or fire and elephant farts. All I know is that they’re gone. Elvis has left the building, as they say. They are gone and I will never see them again. They’ve left behind an empty shell of rotting meat and we’re supposed to take it stoically and say, “Oh, they’re in a better place.”

Fuck that.

GHOST MONEY opens with the line, “Dying is easy. Grieving is hard.” I believe that. Not saying that dying can’t be agonizing. I know it is. Whether it takes five minutes or fifty years. Our bodies don’t want to die. They fight, sometimes far longer than anyone else will. They’ll sacrifice key systems in a desperate bid to keep the brain alive. But I think it’s still easier than being left behind.

Grieving IS hard. I have a feeling that right now some of you are grieving and it is the hardest thing you have ever done. And I am so, so sorry for that. You are being forced, and I mean forced like ripping a door open with a crowbar is forced, to say goodbye to someone you love. How dare they be taken away from us. How dare death tear them out of our lives and leave a gaping hole that nothing is going to fill.

Death is RUDE. Who said you could come into MY house and steal MY love, MY memories? I don’t care if they’re in a better place, they’re not HERE. They’ll never be here. It’s over. It’s done.

That’s how I see death. Rude. Insolent. The greatest of faux pas. A discourtesy that cannot ever be forgiven. You are, will be, and have been grieving. You and I share that if nothing else. We all know loss. We know what it’s like to have our worlds upended because someone was ripped away from us. Your grief is different from my grief, but it doesn’t make it any easier, any less valid.

I hope that as time goes by, you’ll grieve a little less. You might, you might not. You might mourn the rest of your life or wake up in a week and feel fine. Those rages of gut-wrenching emotion coming out of nowhere might ease. I won’t blow smoke up your ass and say that they will.

But I sincerely hope that they do.

* * *

The Los Angeles Firestorm killed over a hundred thousand people, set in revenge against necromancer Eric Carter for defying the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Carter feels every drop of that blood on his hands. But now there’s a new problem.

Too many ghosts in one spot and the barrier separating them from the living cracks. And when they cross it, they feed off all the life they can get hold of. People die. L.A. suddenly has a lot more ghosts.

But it’s not just one or two ghosts breaking through: it’s dozens. Another mage is pulling them through the cracks and turning them into deadly weapons. Eric follows a trail that takes him through the world of the Chinese Triads, old associates, old crimes. And a past that he thought he was done with.

Carter needs to find out how to get things under control, because if more ghosts break through, there’s going to be even more blood on his hands.

Stephen Blackmoore: website | twitter

Ghost Money: print | eBook

I Made A Bread

I’m a pretty inventive guy and so I think we can all agree that I’m the first person who thought to bake a loaf of bread during these here Quarantimes. I’m a pioneer on this one, a bonafide frontiersperson — I thought, gosh, there’s all this flour around, and there’s yeast in the fucking air like a miasma of squirming microbial mist, and so I decided to invent the very concept of baking bread during lockdown. I know, I know. You don’t need to thank me. Acknowledging my originality is enough.

Okay, not really. I have, as Maryn McKenna said of herself on Instagram, become a quarantine cliche. I decided it was time to join the CARBOLOADING MASSES and make some goddamn bread.

I’ve always wanted to do it, and never really had the courage or the patience to try it — I’m generally not the baker in the family. I do all the cooking, but nearly zero of the baking. My wife has an orderly, well-kept mind, and my brain is like a box of otters shaken up and dropped into a tiny tornado? So, cooking works for me. Lotta improv. Lotta feeling your way through it. Lotta just… having a sense of how to build and layer flavors over time.

Baking is unforgiving, though. YOU FUCKED UP, say the baking gods. YOU DID NOT ACCOUNT FOR HUMIDITY AND THE AGE OF YOUR BAKING SODA AND NOW THOSE COOKIES ARE LIKE SOFT LUMPS OF HALF-ROTTEN TREE BARK, YOU PIECE OF SHIT. I do not know how to appease the gods of flour and sugar. Just the same, I’ve always wanted to smell the scent of baking bread in our house. Just to see. Just to try it.

We of course couldn’t find yeast, so I decided to, as all of you have, make my own sourdough starter, and at about seven days it was looking aerated and frothy, and smelled good — but I was also not sure it was ready for primetime. So, I decided to use some discarded starter and put that in this recipe that I found from author and awesome human Amal El-Mohtar’s Twitter feed. (You follow her, yeah?) And I’d long been taking inspiration from Seamus Blackley, who, sure, whatever, is the father of the Xbox and all that, but who also has made BREAD from ANCIENT SUMERIAN MOON YEAST (I might be misremembering the details on that). So, I knew I was not the person for this job, but I decided, fuck it, let’s do it anyway. Lockdown Quarantimes are all about experimentation and failure and so away I went. (I did eventually find yeast thanks to a friend.)

The key to the recipe I used above was the sourdough starter discard replaced a 1/2 cup of the water and 3/4 cup of the flour — and in that recipe I cut the yeast requirement in half, too.

And then I did it in a Le Creuset enameled dutch oven, 7-qt.

And this is what emerged:

It was… pretty great?

I tried it: plain, with butter, with butter and strawberry-basil jam, with cheddar cheese, and then this morning with melted cheddar and a runny egg and a splash of olive oil in a breakfast sandwich and damn. It was really good every time. Soft on the inside, crusty on the outside. A little overdone in some patches on the bottom in terms of its toughness (not flavor), but for a first loaf, I’m exceedingly happy. And proud of myself just for trying it.

THEN I was like, fuck it, I’m doing it again. So this morning I baked up a proper sourdough loaf, starter only, using bolted wheat flour. Stuck to the enamel a little, but got it out. Haven’t consumed it yet. Visual results here.

I’m pretty geeked. Might fuck with some pretzels or even bagels, I dunno. I did find that breadmaking was closer to cooking than traditional baking — there’s definitely some improv in there, some culinary carbo-jazz, some room for imagination and fuckery. A bit of art to go with the science. Which I like. That suits me. Maybe it’ll suit you too.

Disjecta Membra: 5

Once again, there is not One Ring to bind them, but actually a bunch of littler, shittier rings, and these are those less valuable rings — or, rather, think of this as not one blog post, but a bunch of baby blog posts running around, arms flailing, snot bubbles on their ruddy little noses. Hmm, are they baby blog posts, or just mega-tweets? I’ve no idea. Let’s do this.

It’s weird having a president who is literally the least most intellectual person on the planet. Further, one for whom you are required to give your kids warnings about. This isn’t new for him, but it’s a continuing tradition of us having to sit down with our child and give him the frank assessment of what the president said, and why you shouldn’t trust the president. Our kid is going to grow up utterly distrusting the government, which is arguably the whole point of King Dump in the first place. So, it requires the nuanced conversation of, no, the government is not implicitly broken, but a lot of things are and we have to do our best to vote and shore up social systems and education and — and the kid is eight-years-old, he doesn’t know what the fuck is up. But he damn sure knows not to drink bleach or try to eat a tanning bed or whatever the fuck that corrupt criminal dipshit was talking about. God, what the fuck. [Edit: now King Dump says he was just being sarcastic. Ah, the classic “NUH-UH” defense of your average six-year-old. “I MEANT TO PEE MY PANTS.”)

It’s still daily where I have a moment like, wow, this is really our reality. Not just the pandemic. But all of it. All of it. And it never gets old — in the worst way. It feels fresh in its dire dumbassery.

I’ve been saying “Jesus Fucking Christ” a lot more. I’m sure that’s blasphemous in some circles, but I’m of a mind that Jesus is also saying Jesus Fucking Christ a lot more these days.

There are other variants, of course. Christ on a pogo stick, Christ on a carousel, Christ on a cookie, Christ in a crab trap, Jesus Christ on crutches, etc. etc. Get creative with your blasphemy.

All right, onto some happier shit. I miss my mother since she died. Wait, that’s not happier, is it? Whatever, shut up. I’m just saying, normally I’d be calling her to check in, and we moved specifically to be closer to her — just in time for her to pass away. And it was my birthday this week, the first since she’s been gone, and I half-expected a phone call from her. And mother’s day is coming up, too. So it’s hard. Hard also being “The Adult” now — like, okay, I have a kid, a house, a car, a wife, a “””job”””, so I’ve been a functioning adult for a while. But when you lose both your parents, you really start to feel like, this is it, you’re all there is now. No one to call for advice, no more guide rope, no more training wheels, or even a chance at training wheels. That’s not the sad-making part, but it’s occasionally jarring.

Though, awfully, I’m also glad now she’s not here. My mother a couple-few years ago was almost killed my a common cold. A bad cold, but a cold. Because her lungs were not in good shape. (Don’t smoke, kids.) And it really almost killed her. So now, if she were around, she’d be an A+ target for the virus, and worse, if she were going through the cancer right now, oof. Could we see her? Should she see us? How would hospice have worked? I don’t even know, and I’m glad I don’t have to find out. (She also would’ve bristled at the lockdown — less about going out, because she was pretty locked down already, but more at her inability to see family or friends.)

Okay, happy shit for real in 3, 2, 1. My son made me an owl for my birthday, so that was rad. My wife made me a cheesecake that is literally the best cheesecake I’ve ever had, and also her first cheesecake. I have joined the ranks of the sourdough starter crowd, about seven days in and it’s getting effervescent, though I won’t bore you with its diary or anything. (Its name is Steve, though.) I’m about halfway through edits on this secret book, and I think I like it? It’s something very different for me. I’m reading a book about Johnny Appleseed and it’s fascinating. I’m reading Lauren Beukes’ newest and I’m having a hard time reading fiction at all, but her book is incredibly good, as her books always are, for me. Reading some Calvin & Hobbes too these days. Yeah.

We’re good here. “Good.” Some version of good. Definitely lucky, definitely fortunate. I try to keep reminding myself of that while also trying to not force myself into willful rigor-mortis glee over it — like, trying to walk that line between “recognize our fortune and privilege” and also “but it’s okay to feel like this sucks sometimes.”

Some people are not social distancing, but think they are. Sometimes you talk to people and they’re like, ugh oh my god social distancing is hard, this week I could only go to four grocery stores and get my hair cut and take my kids to their friends’ house once and — and holy shit you’re not supposed to be doing most of that. Stay in your goddamn houses. (For the record, this is not an admonishment against people who have things to do, or jobs to do, or groceries to buy, or whatever. It’s people who are defying the lockdown to do what are effectively frivolous bullshit things.)

I’m thinking vaguely maybe kinda sorta of getting a gaming PC. Part of it is simply that I really wanna play Half Life: Alyx, and I have the Oculus Quest, but can only play it if I get a VR-ready PC rig to pass-through to. It’s a stupid idea. I have other shit to do. But it tantalizes.

Time is weird now. Mornings zip by. Afternoons happen before I realize the morning has already eaten its own tail, a temporal ouroboros. A slow-moving, melty maelstrom.

I’ve long said that birds help me. Er, I don’t mean help me — as in, help me get dressed, help me find my glasses. I just mean, they help me cope. I go outside, listen to birds, and it’s nice. But now I have an indoor version of birds helping me to cope — Wingspan. A beautiful game about letting birds settle into various habitats. It’s not hyper-competitive and it’s quite lovely.

Exquisite Corpse is a fun game about collaborative storytelling. And Penguin Random House has put one together today with a whole buncha cool author types like Sarah Pinsker, Kevin Hearne, Charles Yu, Samantha Irby, and more. I kicked it off this morning with this tweet, so go follow the tale of Imogen and the Blue Door.

And I think that’s it.

Here are some photos.

May The 4s Be With Me, Get It, Because I Turn 44, Never Mind, Shut Up

I don’t think there should be birthdays during the pandemic. Time has melted into a waxen lump, and I don’t feel like we should have to acknowledge the passing of time. Honestly, I think I should get to turn 44 next year, not this year, and this one is a mulligan, a freebie, a practice run. Scrap the calendar, forget the school year, dump all deadlines into a shallow grave, and we will wait out the end of this thing whenever it may come.

But alas, it’s not to be, so a birthday I shall have.

HAPPY BLIGHTSDAY TO ME.

*lights candles on trashcan lid with a flamethrower, extinguishes them with spray cheese*

TA-DA, ‘TIS CAKE

Birthdays are not usually a day I take with great significance anyway, but now I wish I had made a big deal out of each of them before this one, because this one, I’m just sorta here. Floating in the sensory deprivation tank. Natal and womblike in its warm bathwater oblivion. Birthdays by their nature have always felt a little anti-climactic, but I had no idea how anti-climactic they could be until you have one in lockdown. It suddenly makes all the ones prior feels weighty and precious, while this one is naught but a lead fishing weight plonking without fanfare to the bottom of the river. I’m not sad about it, exactly, but it feels especially hollow and strange. My wife made me a cheesecake, because we were lucky enough to actually find cheesecake ingredients out there in The Wasteland, and my kid has been extra attentive this morning to me and the birthday, which is honestly a delight and provides some light in these… if not dark times, let’s call them gray times. Gray like a mist, like a fog. Again, I’m lucky and fortunate, I don’t mean to downplay it — things for me could be considerably worse. It also still feels really weird and off-putting, like you’re smelling food that’s only one day off, one day rancid, and you can still detect the scrumptious ghost of the good food it was, and you’re like, “Maybe I could still eat it and not get sick if I microwave it enough?” This is that. A day not all the way rotten, but one that has begun to break down. All of life now a half-assed sourdough starter.

At least someone could’ve sent me some birthday toilet paper.

Also, it’s Earth Day, because my birthday is an Earth Day birthday, and maybe at least with all of us humans stuck in our homes we’re giving the Earth a small reprieve. (I know there are arguments that note that the pandemic might be overall bad for climate change, but for now, I’ll take solace that the price of a barrel of oil is somehow less than the price of a kick to the gonads. I’m pretty sure that with every barrel of oil you get a roll of Ski-Ball tickets.)

I shouldn’t complain. Things are good. I have a great family, a yard, it’s sunny out, I’ve got books to write, and edit, and write, and edit. It’s honestly been a nice year with WANDERERS out there — if book sales are a thing you care about, it’s sold considerably higher than most of my other books, with the exception of the AFTERMATH trilogy, and even there it’s creeping up on the sales of EMPIRE’S END. I was initially a bit sad that the next book I’ve got coming out, THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS, isn’t coming out this year (thanks to the election), but now given everything, I’m glad to have the space. It’s hard launching a book right now and it’s good to get as much runway as you can get for it.

What will 44 bring? No idea. Obviously more lockdown. This thing isn’t ending overnight, and really won’t go away until we’ve a treatment or a vaccine or by some miracle a robust herd immunity. I’ve got a secret book to edit, a secret book to write, got friends and family, got whiskey to drink and good dogs for company, and hopefully a world changed and improved at the end of all this. Maybe a few hill cannibals or COVID-mutants to slay. Who can say?

I will say, if you’re in the mood to get me a present, I have a polite request:

Go buy a book today from an independent bookstore.

Not Amazon.

But an indie. A local if you have one, or any one nationwide.

Many ship right to you. Doylestown Bookshop and Let’s Play Books, my two locals, do. And Indiebound and bookshop.org are both good resources. So, buy a book. I’m not even saying to buy one of mine. (Though here I shamelessly note that the Washington Post just said WANDERERS is a good book to read during these Quarantimes, ahem cough cough cough.) Just buy any damn book. Help bookstores and help yourself to, well, a book. Samantha Irby’s newest. Or Sarah Kendzior. Or Claribel Ortega’s Ghost Squad. You got options is what I’m saying.

Failing that, if you want to get me something different —

Just fix it. Fix all of this. We’re done with it now, so please fix it. Thank you.

Also tip all your delivery people very, very generously.

OKAY HABBY BIRDDAY TO ME

How To Make Your Kids Like Spinach

Maybe it’s just me, but although veggies are increasingly hard to come by in this area, one vegetable lingers, reluctantly available: spinach. And I don’t know why. Spinach is goddamn amazing. It’s a nutritional powerhouse, for one. For two, it tastes amazing. No, it may not have the COLON LOCOMOTIVE powers of, say, kale, it’s still green and healthy and all that happy shit.

But, for some reason, people aren’t buying it. Again, around here. Maybe where you are, everybody’s Popeye looking for muscles, but here, they’re leaving that and Brussels sprouts on the shelf. Lockdown still won’t push them to the fringes of the produce aisle, I guess?

(Here’s my Brussels sprouts recipe, before you ask.)

Maybe it’s because The Kids Today are like The Kids Of Yesteryear and just won’t eat spinach. (And only now is it occurring to me that Popeye was some kind of vegetable propaganda. Same way an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and carrots “help” your “eyesight” and other such vegetable legends.) I sure didn’t eat spinach when I was a kid, are you nuts? No, no, I had a discerning palate. It was Spaghetti-Os or nothing, you vulgarian. Toss a couple hot dogs in there? C’est magnifique.

More seriously, I’ve come to believe that the parents of yesteryear — like, let’s say of the 80s — really didn’t get how to cook vegetables all the time. And a lot of veggies available were in cans? It wasn’t a good time for vegetables, no wonder we were all sick and weak. Mushy asparagus. Mushrooms that tastes less like graceful wood ear and more like human baby ears. Steam it, boil it, meh. So, entirely possible spinach just wasn’t winning any awards back then. But we’ve grown smarter when it comes to cooking vegetables and I have a super-hella-stupid-easy spinach dish that will —

Wait, what are you looking at?

Hello? Eyes down here.

Ah. Ah. Yeah, I get it, the photo at the top of the post contains no spinach. It’s tomatoes and okra and potatoes and tomatillo husks and I’m sorry, I don’t have any spinach photos. Settle down. It’s fine.

AS I WAS SAYING

This is a spinach dish my kid doesn’t just eat, but that he eats with delight.

Now, my kid is also a little weird. He likes veggies a whole lot. He likes sushi. For his birthday, he asks for me to make him Brussels sprouts. So, do recognize his tastes are skewed for a kid, but I also like to believe, perhaps mistakenly, it’s because I know how to make food tasty.

And this spinach? Is tasty.

Here’s what you do.

Skillet. Stainless steel for me.

Bit of olive oil or butter, depending on your predilections for particular FOOD LUBES.

Then, some chopped garlic. Again, your tastes matter here. Thinly sliced garlic is nice. Minced is fine. Maybe a shallot instead, who cares. Food is customizable, it’s a menu of possibility and delight. Honestly, if all you have is garlic powder in These Perilous Quarantimes, that’s fine, too, just don’t add it now, add it later. Just note that the bigger the chonks of garlic, the milder the garlic taste will be, because it’s got less cuts to the, I dunno, GARLICKIAN MICROSTRUCTURE and reduced GARLIC SQUARE FOOTAGE or something. Hashtag science. Hashtag shut up.

Get the garlic in the oil or butter.

Cook until fragrant, not until burned.

Then, fill the skillet with spinach.

Here the question is, fresh or frozen? Yes. Whatever. Either. Frozen is fine, and remember, frozen vegetables tend to be plunged into suspended animation at the peak of their freshness. I like the Woodstock brand, because it comes out looking like a batch of cryo-nuggs of sci-fi weed, and it has a delicate tea-leaf taste to it. Shit, maybe I’ve just been cooking tea leaves and weed? That might explain a lot about me. It’s fine. Point is, fresh or frozen.

And it can also be Swiss chard. Or other greens of your choosing.

This application is easy and applies to every cooking green I’ve tried it with.

So.

Heat on medium. Spinach in the pan.

Salt and pepper go onto it.

Cook it down until the leaves are reduced. If fresh, you’ll start with this massive APPLE CART of spinach, and end up with four thimbles, as all that water comes out and the leaves wilt. And in that case you can keep adding spinach to freshen it up. It’s pretty resilient long as you don’t burn it.

Add in couple splashes of chicken broth, just enough to coat the bottom of the pan.

A pinch of Italian seasoning or Herbs de Provence.

(That’s French for Herbert, of Provence.)

Cook, cook, cook.

Ten minutes, fifteen, I dunno. Like I said, spinach is resilient. A good food for these tough times. Spinach doesn’t give a fuck. It has green goodness and it doesn’t care if you don’t like it.

Then when it’s cooked down pretty good and has started to lose its emerald green in favor of a Bob Ross-painted pine-tree, you want to add first a splash of sherry vinegar. How much is a splash? I dunno. A splash. You can add more if you need to so like, think a tablespoon or two.

Then, cook a bit, just a minute or two to incorporate.

Final bit, add in a couple splashes of heavy cream. Twice the amount of the vinegar, let’s say.

Mix-a-mix-a-mix.

There. That’s it. Season again after tasting if need be.

It’s good. Your kids will like it. You will like it, too. Unless you’re one of those weird adults who won’t eat vegetables. Christ in a crab trap, eat your vegetables, you scurvy-sickened ricket-monsters.

All right, that’s it. Go eat some spinach. And buy my books or I die.

Molly Tanzer: Five Things I Learned Writing Creatures of Charm and Hunger

Two young witches, once inseparable, are set at odds by secrets and wildly dangerous magic.

In the waning days of World War II, with Allied victory all but certain, desperate Nazi diabolists search for a demonic superweapon to turn the tide. A secluded castle somewhere in the south of Germany serves as a laboratory for experiments conducted upon human prisoners, experiments as vile as they are deadly.

Across the English Channel, tucked into the sleepy Cumbrian countryside, lies the Library, the repository of occult knowledge for the Société des Éclairées, an international organization of diabolists. There, best friends Jane Blackwood and Miriam Cantor, tutored by the Société’s Librarian—and Jane’s mother—Nancy, prepare to undergo the Test that will determine their future as diabolists.

When Miriam learns her missing parents are suspected of betraying the Société to the Nazis, she embarks on a quest to clear their names, a quest involving dangerous diabolic practices that will demand more of her than she can imagine. Meanwhile Jane, struggling with dark obsessions of her own, embraces a forbidden use of the Art that could put everyone she loves in danger.

As their friendship buckles under the stress of too many secrets, Jane and Miriam will come face to face with unexpected truths that change everything they know about the war, the world, and most of all themselves. After all, some choices cannot be unmade–and a sacrifice made with the most noble intention might end up creating a monster.

* * *

Writing from experience can add verisimilitude to a fantastical narrative…

Creatures of Charm and Hunger is set at the tail end of WWII, in the Cumbria region of England (very near the place where Beatrix Potter lived, wrote, and drew). Miriam, one of the co-tagonists, is a 15-year-old German Jew who has been living with English family friends for years, after her parents sent her away. Miriam, her friend Jane, and Jane’s mother Nancy are all diabolists—they summon demons and traffic with them.

A lot of that is well beyond my experience, it’s true! So, to anchor the narrative I made a few choices. I decided to tell a story about being frustrated about feeling ineffective in a world gone mad, which is something highly relatable to most of us I’d guess. Of wanting to spread one’s wings and getting angry when they feel clipped. And I decided to inject a little of my own experience of having a complicated identity. Miriam is actually half-Jewish—or not Jewish at all, depending on how Talmudic one wishes to get about it. That’s my life, too. My father was Jewish, my mother is not, and I grew up not knowing how to feel about it. We didn’t do a lot of Jewish things, and I knew I wasn’t technically Jewish, but growing up in rural Georgia in the 1980s meant I felt pretty Jewish when I’d experience bouts of antisemitism from my neighbors. So I decided to mine that strange sensation to give Miriam some (hopefully) realistic characterization as a counterpoint to her using diabolic astral projection to kill Nazis.

…but writing truthfully, from outside of one’s experience, is crucial in other ways

While I consider myself a fantasist, I also consider myself a realist. I write about people, and I spend a lot of time trying to craft realistic interactions between those people, even when they’re in speculative situations. And one of my missions in my Diabolist’s Library series was to write about people from all walks of life interacting with demons and diablerie. So, Creatures of Will and Temper had lesbian romance and a bit of straight romance too in with the fencing and the art and the secret societies; Creatures of Want and Ruin featured a healthy polyamorous relationship as a counterpoint to the rigid moralism of the villains, and in Creatures of Charm and Hunger I’ve got an ace character, Jane, and a coalition of diabolists of all sorts teaming up to fight Nazis. Researching asexuality, as well as everything else, helped me understand my world a bit better, and also served to increase the realism of a fantastical narrative.

Joy moments are crucial, especially for dark stories

Years ago now I read a review of Prometheus, the now-notorious Alien sequel that featured some real head-scratchers like male-only surgery pods, gay impregnation panic, and scientists who don’t seem to know a whole lot of, well, science, that remarked upon how there is only one real moment of genuine joy in the film. They pointed to that scene where the cyborg (or whatever; I’m not googling it) played by Michael Fassbender stumbles upon a bunch of glowing technology balls (I really do refuse to google) and looks upon them in awe and astonishment. Fassbender seems to have an experience of the sublime in that moment, one that stands in stark, regrettable contrast to the scientists and explorers, who come across as both tense and inattentive most of the time. That sort of filmmaking doesn’t exactly inspire the audience to feel much (for another example of this, see the dour “space sure is boring” turkey Ad Astra). There’s no wonder, no sense of anticipation or excitement felt by anyone on board the ship when they land on Alien Planet. One wonders why they became scientists at all!

Fassbender’s joy moment is indeed so remarkable that it was used widely as the image associated with the film. And there’s something instructive in this—something I thought about when writing Creatures of Charm and Hunger. Creatures of Charm and Hunger is a dark story, about war, about the perils of growing up and the perils of refusing to, about what drives us to want to be seen and what drives us to wish not to see. And when I read my draft through the first time, I saw a lack in it—the same lack Prometheus has. No joy moments. And these girls—they’re teen diabolists doing fantastical things with bizarre reagents. There needed to be moments of “oh fuck this is so COOL” in there with all the big feelings of anxiety and pain and rage and uncertainty.

Figuring out “how magic works” is not for me…

The biggest thing I learned working on Creatures of Charm and Hunger is that I freaking hate writing about “how magic works.” And I’m pants at it it, too—my agent told me to cut most, if not all of the specifics of diabolism from the novel. I was only too happy to; it was not good writing. Lampshading it was the right choice, narratively and aesthetically, but even dialed-back it felt overwhelming to make choices of that sort. I hated it so much I texted a writer friend of mine the following:

Just in case…

Every writer has things they do well and things that challenge them. I learned from Creatures and Charm and Hunger that figuring out how magic works isn’t for me—and that’s okay! It’s something I’ll think about moving forward, since I don’t plan on stopping writing magical and fantastical stories.

…but writing about cats sure is

Creatures of Charm and Hunger is a cat book. “What’s a cat book?” you might ask, if you’re not a cat person. But cat people… we know that all books with a prominent cat in them are “cat books.” Sabriel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Bunnicula, The Castle of Llyr, The Master and Margarita—the list goes on and on. Cats end up in books because cats add a certain zest or whimsy to a narrative, and a prominent cat sticks in the mind, especially a well-written one.

Smudge, the cat in Creatures of Charm and Hunger is largely based on my own cat, the Toad. Toad… oh man, the Toad. He has always been a challenging kitty. Yes, I know the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic about how everyone (except replicants) thinks their cat is special, but as a life-long cat owner, I’ll tell you what: the Toad is a mess. (I hand raised him, and he has a lot of the problems that come from that, as well as other, weirder ones.) But, he’s my best boy, and I used a lot of his quirkiness to give life to Smudge, who ends up being even more unusual than most cats. Which is saying something…

I said above that I love writing people. It turns out, I love writing from life. Studying the Toad to add realism to my depictions of Smudge was no hardship. Most cat people will happily drop what they are doing to watch their cat clean their ears for minutes at a time! But this, for me, was different. I wasn’t just staring at him through my usual haze of toxoplasmosis; I was watching him to capture him, as I do with people. I’d never written a book with a prominent animal companion in it before, and I liked it so much, my next book is going to have one, too.

* * *

Molly Tanzer is the author of The Diabolist’s Library trilogy: Creatures of Will and Temper, the Locus Award-nominated Creatures of Want and Ruin, and Creatures of Charm and Hunger. She is also the author of the indie weird western Vermilion, an io9 and NPR “Best Book” of 2015, and the British Fantasy Award-nominated collection, A Pretty Mouth. For more information about her novels, her appearances, and her critically acclaimed short fiction, visit mollytanzer.com, or (better) follow her @molly_the_tanz on Twitter or @molly_tanzer on Instagram. She lives outside of Boulder, CO with her cat, the Toad.

Molly Tanzer: Website | Twitter

Creatures of Charm and Hunger: Indiebound | Amazon

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Disjecta Membra: 4

Once again, the big delicious cookie of a blog post I might have once planned has been stepped on and broken into fragments. A crime, to be sure, for now it is all crumbs, but just the same, crumbs is what I got. Please enjoy the broken bits.

Fiona Apple has a new album out wait what? I knew there was an album coming, as I’d read it in Emily Nussbaum’s phenomenal piece on Apple earlier this year. But I didn’t know the album would just one day be a thing I could have. And now I have it? And it’s amazing?! Okay, listen, Idler Wheel is probably one of my favorite albums of all time. A top tenner. It is raw-boned and throaty and barely constrained in its willing derangement, and it speaks to me in a thousand different ways. So I’m digging into this new one and finding it has its own lunacy — it’s a bit quirkier, but still feels like someone took their heart and their brain and blended them up in a Vitamix and dumped it on a countertop. It’s wonderful. More fun and less flensing than Idler Wheel, but still toothy as shit. Got bite. Got little shrieks. Got dog barks. Pitchfork gave it a rare 10, if you care about that sort of thing.

I remember how I found Fiona Apple. I mean, I didn’t “discover” her and give her to the world or anything. I was working in college for a coffee house — Dillworth, in Charlotte, NC — and we of course played a lot of “coffee house” music. (Think, y’know, Lilith Fair and weird jazz.) We would get random CD deliveries from… honestly, I’ve no idea who. Music companies? Demons? Whatever. They’d deliver weekly stacks of CDs and nine times out of ten they were half-shit. But one time, in the stack came Tidal. And I was working a shift with my good friend and roommate Jim at the time, and we put it in and… I dunno how many times during our shift we listened to it, but I knew it made me feel the same way I felt when I listened to, say, Portishead’s Dummy. And we were like, fuck this, this is too good for the coffee house. So, we took it. And listened to it constantly. Her work since then has been a journey, each album still irrevocably her, but each album also very much its own creature.

I aspire to have my books be that, by the way. I never found genre to be a thing I wanted to be trapped in, or by, but I also want you to read one of my novels and know it’s one of mine, and have it feel like I’m my own damn genre, even if the genre is sci-fi, or horror, or fantasy, or whatfuckingever. Which also is why I can see how some people bristled at the Aftermath series — I mean, besides the usual shitbirds who had problems with the ahh, “content” in terms of who is allowed on the page. But I remember reading a forum post at one point where someone lamented, “Doesn’t he [i.e. me] understand, all we read are Star Wars novels?” and that clarified a lot of things for me. I wasn’t just writing a Star Wars novel. I couldn’t. I had to still write a “me” novel, otherwise, what’s the fucking point? It’s my name on it, too. I have to own it. And that’s my feeling on all my books — that’s me on there, that’s my name, it has to be all of what I bring to the table. Which then makes me think, what are all the authorial things I’m bringing to the table without realizing it? Common themes, but also lazy bits? Hmm. Worth more study. When I’m not trapped in lockdown. This fragile era is not the best time for putting the self under the lens, maybe. Or maybe it is. Who knows.

Oh, to explain the aforementioned dog barks. Yeah, no, it literally has dog barks in it, the new album. It’s the perfect lockdown quarantine album. Because it feels like she just recorded it all last night, in a binge, in her house. (I think she actually did record a lot of it in her house.) Her dogs sometimes bark. It’s amazing. (And for the record, I know she didn’t just record it last night. Its chaos is far too artful — the power of it being in how it feels improvised and mad, but is no such thing. It is her design.)

Pennsylvania is champing at the bit to “reopen.” Which is, at this point, delusional, but never underestimate people’s ability to misread a moment. See, here in PA things aren’t as “bad” as people thought, so like the Y2k bug, you have people claiming it’s either a hoax or that people got it “wrong,” despite the fact that PA arguably did a lot more a lot earlier, and has since clamped down on some of the worst of things. (Also don’t forget, we’re still not testing like we should be. So the true numbers are wildly unclear.) To reopen everything, you gotta go slow, methodical, and increase testing or get antibody testing in play. But you have the local Republicans just wanting to hee-haw their way into kicking the doors open for everyone to come rushing in, back to business. Which will cause a certain spike and surge, because, a-duhhh, the virus didn’t magically go away. Listen, I want shit to get back to normal, too. But we cannot just ignore experts and embrace magical thinking just because we want businesses open. We need better leadership from the top that helps people weather this storm in a way that doesn’t just toss vulnerable folks into the pyre in the name of Mammon, for Chrissakes.

Just the same, I guess we’re doing okay here. I got yeast, thanks to a friend who did a driveby driveway drop-off. We stood 20 feet apart and yelled conversations to one another. It was both nice and super weird. With yeast, I guess I’ll now try my hand at bread like every other carboloading individual out there. If you have good bread recipes, hook me up, because I’ve zero idea what I’m doing.

We have VR, an Oculus Quest, and it’s great. This should be the Quest’s shining moment, because VR actually feels a little bit like an escape (and you can see how Ready Player One actually comes to be). But the supply chain is disrupted and the Quest is hard to get at a meaningful price so, oops. But there are some truly spectacular experiences for it. I need the new Half-Life, but it isn’t on Quest natively, and I don’t have a PC that will load or run it. Is now a good time to get back into PC gaming? Probably not, and yet, I wanna? Because I’m an idiot?

Speaking of apples, since apparently I like anything with the word “apple” in it: did you see about the lost apples, rediscovered? Or there’s this video of an apple detective. Which is what I wanna be when I grow up. I’ll be DETECTIVE COXWORTH “GOLDEN DELICIOUS” PIPPIN, aka “Doc Pippin” for short. I will solve all the apple mysteries. This is my design.

Got me a birthday next week. In the middle of all this, a fuckin’ birthday. That should be illegal. Also illegal: our current autocratic government ineptly and cruelly stomping on all our norms and freedoms. But also, the birthday thing.

Maybe next week I can announce a cool thing? Maybe I can tell you about one of my secret books. Maybe. We’ll see. No promises. Time is goopy. Everything is wet paint.

And now, a bird photo. It’s an oafish cardinal yelling HEY at you. And not a friendly hey but like a HEY QUIT LEANIN ON MY CAR, YOU JABRONI.