Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 48

If I Were Making The Sequel Trilogy (Part One: The Force Awakens)

[image error]As both a licensed Star Wars nerd and an unlicensed Story Doctor, I am somewhat fascinated with the question of, “What would I have done differently?” Now that the sequel trilogy (heretofore referred to as “the ST”) is over, I’m driven specifically to that span of films — what would I do if I magically got control of making these three movies from the beginning?

Let’s first and foremost note that I don’t mean, “What would I do to fix them?” because I don’t consider them broken. I like the ST movies a whole damn bunch, and do not consider the trilogy broken. But as a person who writes books for a living, I also recognize that we as storytellers put our own heart stamp on the tales we tell (at least, if we’re telling them right and true), and so I wonder then what would my version of the ST look like?

Why me? Well, I’m a jabroni with a blog, and I am allowed to just say stuff here. But I’m also a jabroni who has — and here you’ll need to excuse the not-so-humble flex — written a whole damn Star Wars trilogy himself, and there aren’t a lot of people who have done that. And I wrote the Marvel adaptation of the film, so I mean, I’m uniquely qualified.*

*not actually qualified, just a nerd

So, fuck it, let’s do this.

Mission Statement, and Caveats

Let’s start off with a massive lack of bravery (and work) on my part and say, I like the ST in its current iteration enough that, honestly, I’d keep most of it. Rey, Finn and Poe are my godsdamn favorites, and I wouldn’t ever want to lose them. They are a darling basket of warm cinnamon buns and don’t you dare touch them. Same with Kylo! And Rose! So, the goal is to keep the relative framework of these films, but see where I’d diverge. If we’re talking about creating a whole new sequel trilogy out of thin air — well, I’d need to get a paycheck for that kind of intellectual heavy lifting. *clears throat*

Final caveat here is that, and I hate I have to say this, but *turns on megaphone* THIS IS ALL JUST ONE JABRONI’S OPINION, I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER RETCONNING THIS FILM, YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MAD AT ME.

I’m not trying to rile anybody up, ease off the throttle.

So, let’s take this film by film, see what I’d keep, tweak, and where we diverge.

We begin with:

The Force Awakens

I totally love this movie. Unironically, unabashedly, I love it. It’s both a love letter to Star Wars and also an endeavor to use a familiar formula in a new way (that also helps re-center characters who are not, for instance, handsome white boys, Kylo excepted). It’s great. Like Return of the Jedi, I can re-watch this movie endlessly, and just not care about whatever is wrong with it. But, just the same, I have changes, because I am a Star Wars fan, and Star Wars fans have Star Wars opinions.

Here’s what I’d change:

It’s too fast, so I’d expand the timeline out a little.

I’ll write a longer, larger post at some point about how modern blockbusters have forsaken breathing room in their narrative for breathless plotting — and TFA falls right into that trap. Outside of Rey’s one instance of getting some sleep, the movie feels like it takes place in the span of its own running time, like an episode of 24, but in space. It feels hasty as shit. (A problem that tROS accelerates, especially in the first half of its running time.)

Why is this? I dunno. I think filmmakers feel like this will create urgency, but all it does it become a rhythmless din of noise and event. It used to be that, because resources were limited and CGI didn’t exist, you had to do a lot with a little. Which meant every scene couldn’t be WHIZ BANG BOOM, you had to… you know, actually have characters just sit around somewhere and talk. Like in Jaws, sometimes the shark breaks, and you learn that less is definitely more.

It offers the added value of letting us get to know the characters. And they’re why we come to the movies. We want to know who they are. We want to see them play off one another. We want to deepen our relationship with them as they deepen their relationships with one another. Just throwing automatons into danger again and again isn’t exciting, because we don’t give one cold fuck about a bunch of automatons. I’m not suggesting this film has that exact problem — it gives us reason to care enough. But it also shortcuts that journey a little.

So, here’s what we (read: I) do.

Halfway through the film. Finn has “rescued” Rey by which I mean, Rey has mostly rescued Finn. First Order attack. “The garbage will do!”

Finn and Rey steal the Falcon. They blast their way free, through the Ravager —

But from there they don’t go right into space. They hunker down somewhere on Jakku — somewhere Rey thinks is safe. Hiding from First Order patrols whizzing overhead, etc. The hunters are closing in. They know their time is dwindling. They’ll get found. But they can’t just escape, either. Remember: there’s supposed to be a goddamn blockade, but somehow in the film it gets relegated to like, one star destroyer? And despite them being in a known ship when they leave Jakku — literally nobody from the First Order is there in space waiting for them.

So, they stay on Jakku.

And that’s when Solo and Chewie track them there.

This is gonna cut the Rathtar business — it’s a fun scene, and I’m loathe to cut a franchise-appropriate creature scene (see: trash compactor, space worm, rancor), but it just doesn’t feel essential. Yes, the Rathtar bullshit gives us the sense that Solo is still a smuggler, back to his old ways, but there’s another way we can earn that.

Solo and Chewie show up and say, hey, yeah, we’re stealing the Falcon back. Finn and Rey decide to go with (because they gotta escape the First Order and also, c’mon, it’s Han Motherfucking Solo), but that still means escaping a First Order blockade. One of Solo’s great skills is blockade running, so let’s see it — a return to form. And then let’s complicate it further — as the Falcon blasts into space, Ren senses the ship. And also jumping into frame are the Guavian Death Gang and Kanjiklub, both attracted by seeing a Falcon ping on their Plot-Convenient Space Radars. So, you get a crazy space battle as they have to stunt-fly the Falcon through the chaos, playing the three separate forces off one another so they shoot each other instead. Meanwhile, Hyperdrive isn’t working, so Rey has to help fix that, still showing off her mechanical skills. (If we want her pilot skills shown off, maybe Chewie mans guns as she helps get the hyperdrive compressor working, showing off skills in two directions — co-piloting the ship and keeping it running.) Shit, maybe Unkar Plutt comes after them here instead of later (per deleted scenes), gets blasted out of the sky.

Just as Kylo Ren is about to descend upon the Falcon, they leap to hyperspace.

And then — we let that play out.

They don’t just leap to the next system.

The talk that Han gives her — “Hey, you’re good in a fight, join my crew?”

In this version, she takes him up on that offer. She says yes. See, TFA wants to set up this dichotomy where both Kylo and her consider Solo a father figure, but it lends the story no time to believably achieve that. (This isn’t new to Star Wars. Ben Kenobi is super-important to Luke, but their time in training consists of one scene with that little dickhead laser-bauble.) We need Rey to have a real relationship with Han Solo — so he becomes a proxy father figure. This is, in a sense, part of her journey, right? Realizing she doesn’t need whoever abandoned her on Jakku first, and relying on Found Family — and then also eventually coming to terms she doesn’t necessarily “need” them either, she needs herself. (Not in a way that diminishes her friends, but in a way that empowers herself as a singular being in the galaxy. With family by choice, not by reliance.)

So. Rey and Finn join his crew. BB-8 has important information, sure, and it needs to get to the Resistance — but remember, Finn is pretending to be a Resistance agent. And he likes Rey. (It’s unclear in TFA how much of this is that he like-likes her, but in this, we’d make that more explicit. More on this at the end of the post.) Further, Rey just wants to go back to Jakku soon as she has the chance. Either choice — they go find the Resistance base, they go back to Jakku — likely ends Finn’s journey, and it takes him away from Rey. So, he convinces her to stay with the crew. Go on a few adventures. And it’s not like Han wants to go to the Resistance, either. (More on that in a few.) That way, Finn gets to not be a stormtrooper and continue the illusion that he’s… somebody, a Resistance agent, a smuggler, anybody at all but the unnamed soldier.

(Here we get to the heart of a lot of this trilogy: people trying to figure out who they are, and where they belong. It’s a beautiful thing. And as true a story as any, in terms of a story we all understand.)

Now, we don’t need to see them go on a bunch of missions with Han Solo. (Though a montage would be doable, I guess.) We just need to move the needle forward in time. We need to see them come out of hyperspace, going to Maz Kanata’s castle, with the sense that they’ve had some adventures. Weeks. Months. Whatever. New outfits, a new rapport, some mild drama and conflict between the “crew,” and so on. Stretch out the narrative. Just make it a little more lived in. And we also know that Han’s onto Finn (“Big Deal”). Maybe BB-8 is getting antsy, and someone gets the droid to spill what he’s carrying (leading to the “It’s true, all of it,” scene with Han talking about Luke).

Point is, they still get to go to Maz’s place, and with minimal narrative rejiggering, you’ve created a whole different impact while keeping structure relatively the same. We can have a moment of quiet contemplation still where Rey regards so much green in the galaxy (play it out like the opposite of Luke regarding the twin suns of Tatooine, because there he’s regarding a galaxy he yearns yet to see, and here she’s regarding a galaxy she didn’t know existed). Then it… roughly works out the same. The one obvious difference is that I don’t think you can have Finn bailing for the same reason of theoretical cowardice — I think it’s more that he knows the adventure is about at its end, Rey and BB-8 will go on without him, and he doesn’t know what to do.

Poe’s Return

I’m torn on this, but fuck it, this is all theoretical — I think I’d like to see Poe’s return to the world play out on screen. His escape from Jakku could even coincide with the Falcon leaving the planet, seeing it fly overhead. I don’t think it needs to be like, 20 minutes of screentime — but a short bit of him crawling his way into Niima Outpost or some shit.

I say this because the reveal he’s alive in TFA feels less plotted as a “reveal” and more accidental, like we weren’t ever supposed to think he was dead in the first place.

(Which is likely accurate, since Poe was supposed to die, initially.)

That Dipshit Map

I don’t know why, but JJ Abrams loves himself a fetch quest. Find the droid, the map, the girl, find the Sith wayfinder, the saber, the Cosmic Porg, the whatever. It’s less mythic and more video game? Less Campbell and more Kojima.

It’s MacGuffins all the way down.

So: let’s talk about the “map” to find Luke.

Now, it’s not all video-gamey — there is something to a “treasure map” that’s intriguing here, but it just doesn’t make a lick of sense. That’s not a huge knock against Star Wars, because a lot of Star Wars… enh, doesn’t make a huge lick of sense. But this feels really unsound, especially since we’ve never really cared much before about “maps” in this galaxy. We care about planets and coordinates, and that’s easy enough, isn’t it? In Star Wars-ian terms, we know the galaxy is home to hundreds, maybe thousands of planets, and Luke Skywalker has gone to one of them, and we don’t know which one. Thassit. Easy. But he’s left behind the coordinates with one man, Max Von Sydow (shut up, I prefer to believe Max Von Sydow is the actual character, because honestly that’s a pretty Star Warsy name). So, when they finally get to the Resistance Base on D’Qar, they think, “We can go get Luke!”

But, turns out, the data is encoded. It’s gibberish. Locked behind a cipher.

And who has the key to that cipher? Artoo.

This also prevents us from having Artoo be nebulously “dormant,” which further prevents Threepio’s weird “As you know, BB-8” scene. (Sidenote: I petition all writing advice to refer to expository dialogue infodumps not as “As You Know, Bob” scenes, but rather, “As You Know, BB-8” scenes, please and thank you.)

Also, Why Don’t They Evacuate D’Qar?

Why don’t the Resistance fighters on D’Qar evacuate the base? They know they’re being targeted by BOMBAD DESTRUCTION from Starkiller Base, right? And yet they’re all like, “Gosh, I hope it doesn’t happen” instead of like, just running to spaceships and being like, “welp, fuck this shit, we out.” In Empire Strikes Back, the Hoth base isn’t in the sights of the Empire and they… evacuate. I guess there’s an argument here as to why they don’t evacuate Yavin IV in A New Hope, but I’d argue there it’s because the GIANT DEATH MOON is coming at you like a big laser-faced Pac-Man. Where you gonna go? Anyway. In my TFA, they simultaneously mount an evacuation while sending the rest of their forces to attack Starkiller.

(And yes, we keep Starkiller. Is it stupid that there’s DEATH STAR TRIPLE XXXTREME? Sure. But the First Order are Empire fanboys, and even in real life, mankind seems ever more interested in huge, nation-killing weapons.)

Clarity of Opposition

I’d also do a little work to establish what the First Order and the Resistance actually are — it’s never made super clear, and I’d clarify that the First Order is basically a rogue nation. Fascist Imperial fanboys who have glommed onto old Imperial tech and forbidden brainwashing techniques to bolster their forces (and this presages a bit of the Palpatine stuff, because, how’d they get all this shit?). Use the Crawl maybe and a few worldbuilding lines remind us that the New Republic has locked down the galaxy’s core, but its edges are wild fuckin’ space, man, full of rogue nations and criminal enterprises and they’re all jockeying for power. First Order has that power. They’re not the old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or even the Roman Empire — they’re somewhere between North Korea and an American militia, politically speaking. Been trying to get a superweapon, now they have one.

The Resistance operates in the shadow of the New Republic — an “unauthorized” A-Team of problem solvers who push back these rogue nations in an effort to protect worlds the New Republic can’t get support for in the Senate. They lead literal resistance movements around the galaxy — a seed planting as far back as The Clone Wars cartoon, and carried on in Aftermath. It would explain why they’re such a small fighting force — because they explicitly aren’t a rebellion. They train rebellions, something Leia is, and has been, good at. It’s also why they don’t have tons of support in the galaxy — they have some allies, but they’re not some massive galaxy-wide presence. They’re small, nimble, and leave few fingerprints. Get these pole positions right and it clarifies the “geopolitical” landscape of the films a bit more, I think.

The Lightsaber Dream

What if…? (That’s what this post is, in a lot of ways — a big bag of what ifs.) What if, when Rey was having her lightsaber dream, and she sees Kylo out there — he sees her, too? It establishes the first Force link between them. Just a touch. Maybe that’s what brings the First Order to Maz’s castle…

Han & Leia

The story needs to commit to their fracture. As it plays out, it feels dramatically weak — they seem to love each other, they’re just off doing shit away from one another. Commit to it, and actually have their son’s radicalization by Snoke be a breaking point. They had some blow-up, blow-out, and it broke them apart. Haven’t seen each other for some amount of time. It makes sense — the two of them run hot. They’re Hulk and Thor, two fires that fire together. We don’t want to infer Ben Solo came from a dysfunctional family (though perhaps a really busy one), but rather, that his fall to the dark side made them dysfunctional. Because it should.

The value-add here is that it gives us a chance to get Han and Leia back together — and in a way that’s a bit more romantic than the weird fatherly hug he gives her at the end? A call back to the I Love You / I Know scene, maybe, or just, like, they figure it out. They fall back in love, or realize they were never out of it. They crash back together like two celestial bodies. (Not inferring they make sexy-times in the Falcon refresher, to be clear.) But we definitely want that sense of two of our series’ epic heroes finding each other again. More than a gee-shucks nostalgia reunion.

Love Is Love Is Love

Here is the big one. One that has ramifications beyond this movie.

So. These films seem to stridently try to avoid most romantic entanglements. Right? Even Han and Leia’s romance now just seems soft, like old fruit. Part of me thinks this is because romance in these genres can be awfully tropey — ahh, of course there is a WOMAN and a MAN and they are gonna ROMANCE EACH OTHER. Something something destiny, just make out already, you hornballs.

Except… the tropey part of it is also a part I like. Though the romance in the prequel trilogy feels awfully strained, it’s still essential to the core of that story. And it should be essential to the core of this one, too. These films are space operas. Operas are… about drama, and conflict, and not just about BIG DAMN SPACE CONFLICTS but more about the relationships between characters. Love and hate and jealousy and friendship. The ST does well with friendship, and… not much else.

In TFA, then, the biggest change is yet a subtle one, and one that is already almost there — you gotta start planting seeds that these characters are gonna fall in love with each other. And I say “these characters” because I mean, all of them. The scope of the changes I’d make would be to put in play a love-triangle that becomes a love rhombus that becomes a love pentagram that becomes, I dunno, some kind of midichlorian fuck-pile. Or cuddle-kissy-pile. It is PG-13, after all.

This one sets up Finn being in love with Rey. (Suggested above, this romantic interesting beind why he doesn’t want to go back to Jakku or to D’Qar.)

It also sets him and Poe being a thing. They have chemistry. They flirt. It’s there already.

Rey needs to meet Poe, too, at the end of all this. Not at the end of TLJ. But here and now. (It doesn’t really add up that she never meets him, so put that shit on screen.)

Eventually, it factors in Rose and Kylo — AND PALPATINE HIMSELF okay lol no, not that one. Ew. *hurrk* Sorry. I went too far. But seriously: friendships are nice, and yay friendships, but these are young adults in a rough, raw galaxy, and sometimes the spark isn’t just about the rebellion, y’know? SOMETIMES IT’S ABOUT A SPARK IN YOUR SPACE PANTS. Also, your space heart. *audience awwws collectively*

And That’s It

Not much else to change here, I don’t think. Han still dies. Phasma still gives up Starkiller Base. It’s a good movie, it holds together, it’s a lot of fun. Again, were I doing a *total rewrite* I might do some stuff really different — it’d be all new characters, Snap Wexley and Mister Bones would be major protagonists, there’d probably be a sexy robot? I’d make changes. But again, going with the raw material of the film as-is, these are the changes I’d make. Probably. Ask me tomorrow, I’d probably change my mind. This shit ain’t math. It’s space math, and space math is some flyboy stuntwork.

Remember, too: Star Wars is junk.

Soon: my re-do of The Last Jedi.

RELEASE THE WENDIG CUT**

** there is no Wendig Cut***

*** there also isn’t likely a JJ Cut, or a Snyder Cut, or whatever, shut up

Writer Resolution, 2020: Write With A Knife To Your Back, The Cliff’s Edge At Your Feet

Every year, for those who don’t know, I like to do a kind of writerly resolution — a mission statement to guide you, and us, meaning mostly me, into the new year and out the other side. It’s not marching orders. It’s not even meant to be good advice. It’s a springboard, an idea, a notion, and one that will work for some and not for others.

You know the thing you do where you try to figure out, “If I had six months to live, what would I do in that time?” Learn basejumping? Fight a bear? Fuck a robot? I dunno. There is of course the authorial version of this, which is, what book would I write? What book would I write if i didn’t know if anyone would read it, if I’d even get to finish it before The End gets me, if it would even matter at all? What weird-ass, particular-as-hell, little-or-big book lives in the deep of my heart and would emerge ululating its mad goat song upon hearing a potential death sentence? What curious narrative creature would crawl out and hiss, giddily: “It’s my time, now, penmonkey!” — ?

Well, you’re dying.

Here it is: your terminal diagnosis.

You’re gonna die.

Whole world, too. Gonna die.

Kaput. Kathunk. Dead. Doornail. *fart noise* *flush sound*

No, I’m not saying it’s soon — I’m not standing behind you with, as the title suggests, a knife to your back. I don’t have ESP. But I needn’t be an oracle to confirm for you that it is, in fact, eventual. Assuming of course that you’re not Mumm-Ra the Ever-Living —

— you and me and everybody else are gonna eventually meet our makers. (Spoiler alert: your maker is a rogue 3-D printer in Schenectady.) And, I dunno if you’ve looked around recently but, uhhhh.

*clears throat*

Shit is weird.

Shit is weird.

SHIT

IS

W E I R D.

It’s not even that it’s bad —

I mean, ha ha, it is. It definitely is. But it’s also just fucking goofy. Our world is theater, and it’s currently being staged by a gaggle of goony dipshits. Political upheaval and social chaos and huge leaps forward in technology and regressive tumblebacks of justice and progress — it’s weed and fireworks and drones, it’s Twitter President and hellscape wildfires and flat-earthers, it’s coins to witchers and yoda-babbies and for some reason people are watching Friends? It’s way the fuck off the map. It’s not really dystopian — it’s dyspeptic, it’s twist-topian, it’s what-the-fuck-a-lyptic.

We know that. We can see it.

And we can then couple that with the recognition that, yep, we’re all dead. Not today, probably. Ideally not tomorrow. But tock’s ticking. Fuse is hissing.

Pair those facts together, and from that you get what is for me — and maybe also for you! — a writing resolution for 2020.

And that resolution is this:

The world has gone weird.

So meet it on equal footing.

Get weird in return. In revenge. In recompense.

Write whatever the fuck you want. Because, honestly, why not? This year, I’ve had the privilege of continuing to know and meet writers of great repute and wonder, who are telling stories that are brave and bold and uncompromising — and I don’t mean “unflinching” in the sense of wow that was brutal, I mean uncompromising in the sense that these writers did not compromise against anybody else’s vision. Sure, they have publishers, and yes they have editors, but the book that exists — be it Starless Sea, or Steel Crow Saga, or Cabin at the End of the World, or Book of M, or Calculating Stars, or The Warehouse, or Nobody People — are books that came not merely from these authors but rather, out of them. Like a spirit, summoned. Books that are emblems of these writers, that are (or at least feel like) the culminations of who they are and what they think and what gives them both fear and hope. These books are summations, the end of an authorial equation, and I really love that. In a less dire, more consumerist age, I think the advice would be (or used to be): you need to write to a market. Examine what sells. Blah blah blah.

But, as noted, shit’s weird.

Nobody knows what sells.

Nobody knows what the audience wants, or needs.

It’s all gone cuckoo. The old rules are broken. The expectations of what is ABC ends up being XYZ — the compass is spinning wildly and we cannot figure out what the alethiometer is trying to tell us.

So? Fuck it.

Not “fuck it” as in, don’t write anything.

“Fuck it” as in, write the thing you wanna write because there are no guarantees anyway. There’s no certainty it’ll get published. Or you won’t be dead before you finish. Or the world won’t die under the fist of a meteor we somehow didn’t notice. There’s no way to know if there will be an editor for it, or an audience to read it, or anything. But we hope. We write. We pull something out of us and then we pull another half-dozen things out, and we mash them together and see what monstrous thing we have made. We meet weird with weird. We tell the tale that our heart must tell.

I’m not saying to tell it poorly. Or not to think about an audience — that first draft is for us, but all the subsequent drafts are for them, for the audience, for you more than for me. This isn’t saying your narrative vision is impervious to criticism, that no editorial oversight is needed to course correct. You still want to tell the best version of that story, whatever it may be. But don’t pre-reject your weird-ass idea before it’s out there. Give it legs, let it run.

I’m often noting that writing is a song sung into the void — a song of hope, where we hope our words will reach someone else’s ears, and that the act of telling a story is a plea with the universe that begs, please tell me I’m not alone. If even one reader out there likes the curious peccadilloes you popped onto the page, that’s not nothing. It’s something. It’s a huge something, because it means there are others like you out there. That you’re not alone. Storytelling is that act: setting down in front of the firelight with the hope others will come to join you and hear whatever tale you gotta tell.

So, do that.

Tell the tale. The one that’s yours. The one that’s weird. The one that feels off-kilter, that other people aren’t sure about. This is not a safe era, and so we are not beholden to safe storytelling. Go as big and bold or as small and strange as you see fit. The world’s gone wacky and we gonna die (someday!), so step into the firelight, and we’ll join you by the fire to hear what you have to say.

And together we’ll push back the dark.

Cheers.

Onward into 2020.

Go write.

The Oughts Are Dead, Long Live The Twenties

I don’t think time works well anymore.

Obviously, it seems to exist — there is a flow of time, stuff happens. It’s not like I’m getting younger or people around me are suddenly babies (*stares suspiciously at Yoda*), but there is definitely the feeling of being out of sync with time’s movement. Any watch-tuned precision I might have felt — where a unit of time felt like a unit of time — has gone out the window. It’s just chaos, now. A heady broth of temporal muck. If you asked me how long ten years ago was, I’d say, “2016,” because of course it feels like that was a decade ago. Maybe a lifetime. But how long ago was the 1990s? Also a decade? Shit. And if you told me 2009 was ten years ago, I’m not sure I’d agree — I’d also look back and see who I was ten years ago and swear that was 20, even 30 years past.

Christ, I don’t even know what day it is.

I had to look at a calendar. “Oh, it’s Monday? What the fuck?” That interstitial period between Christmas and New Years is a bewildering wasteland. A dark forest. An Ikea store.

So, having to do one of those year-end wrap-ups, much less a decade-level summary, is fucking hard. It’s a mountain to climb, dizzying in its vertiginous ascent.

Let’s try the year, first.

2019, you raggedy scamp. You were good for me and bad for the world.

(As seems to increasingly be the case.)

In 2019, right at the cusp of the year, I released the last book in my Miriam Black series, Vultures. It landed with little fanfare, woefully — real-talk, the publisher turned out to be not an ideal fit for these books, and was a fairly fraught relationship with lots of red, red flags. Which means some of my most favoritest work, the Miriam Black books, were in the hands of someone who didn’t seem to care about them very much. Or know what to do with them. Or want to do anything at all. So — that book came out, and it exists, and I’m very proud of how it wrapped up, and I hope that over time, we will see that series find its readership. I so far can’t technically say that it’s been optioned for a couple years now, and it’s in fact optioned by a team of all-women creators, so pretend I didn’t say anything at all.

(But I did find out the Miriam Black books are big in China, apparently?)

Then, in July: Wanderers. Arguably an entirely opposite publishing experience — the book found an editor, an imprint, and a parent publisher who appeared to care very much about the book, and who had a plan, and who executed well on that plan. And as such, it’s a book that’s done very well. Hit a bunch of bestseller lists, and then at year’s end hit a bunch of those. I’m very proud of it, and glad that Tricia is my editor there, because her editorial hand is deft — it’s like having a doctor who cares about your health and isn’t just there to make a buck. Yeah, they’re gonna wanna cut parts off and stitch pieces up, but it’s in service of your health, not just a butcher’s desire to see you bleed.

I got to go on tour. I met wonderful readers and fans. (And I met Lin-Manuel Miranda, one of the loveliest people.) I got to hang with so many great writer pals, like Erin Morgenstern, Delilah Dawson, Kevin Hearne, Paul Krueger, Adam Christopher. And hey, I had no idea I could turn out a crowd — I knew, okay, I could turn out 20-30 people, probably. But in Portland, I was coming up on a hundred people showing up. Most events were packed rooms. And it was fascinating to see how people came to me not just from one book, but at different points — people hopping on the Wendig Train (okay I immediately regret writing “the Wendig Train” but here we all are, deal with it) from Blackbirds, or Star Wars, or the blog, or the writing books, or even as far back as my RPG work. I compared this to forming geological strata — not just one cataclysmic event forming lava rock, but rather, years and years of bedrock and granite and schist and fossil. It’s nice to see that slow and steady build.

Wanderers was optioned by QC Entertainment, which has been great — obviously, anytime anything is optioned you have to reckon with the reality that the likelihood of that thing getting made is a lot closer to zero than any other number, but just the same, I’m hopeful. I at least know that the right people have it, which is as good a chance as you can give it.

I’ve also done some other things which I can’t even talk about. Which is always weird to have like, ohh, let’s say hypothetically three book deals — three separate book deals! — you can’t even talk about, yet. Not that I have three book deals, of course. *looks shiftily left and right* It’s pure conjecture on your part. You weirdo. Quit making things up.

I went to Hawaii with my wonderful family.

I ate a lot of apples.

My mother died.

That last one is hard. Now, especially — the holidays have a big piece removed, an essential organ. They live and go on, but not without pain, not without feeling that blank space where something essential once existed. My father died around this time twelve years ago. My mother, this year. It’s weird thinking of yourself as an orphan, but here we are. It’s not that I was necessarily looking to my parents for any kind of help anymore — but without them, you really start to feel like, you’re it. I’m the terminus of this line, now. I was already a functional adult (shocking, I know!) but now, I really have to be. Because people are counting on me to be that. And then you look down the line too and you see, well, one day this is what my son will endure. I’ll go. My wife will go. And he’ll be looking back as I am now — hopefully with love and fondness and a true sorrow. Hopefully not like, with a HAHA MY FUCKIN DAD IS DEAD LET’S GET LIT party.

So, here we are.

A year gone, nearly.

And a decade almost in the rear-view.

It’s strange to think my career as a novelist (which sounds less haughty than “author” but more self-important than “bookmonkey”) has been made in this last decade. It feels like I’ve been doing this forever. And Christ, I’ve written a lot of books. I’ve written and published (*does a hasty, clumsy count*) 25 books in the last decade. Actually, since around 2011. That fails to include some self-pubbed writing books, or comics, or film/TV work, or, or, or.

I had a writing career before that — as noted, RPG books, having contributed to like, 70-80 of the damn things. But the goal was always books, and somehow, I did it. Mostly by luck and privilege and sheer bloody-mindedness. I put the bucket on my head and I headbutted the wall until the wall fell down and I was only mildly brain-disordered.

It’s also strange to think I have a kid now, and didn’t ten years ago. That’s weird. He’s wonderful and hilarious and gifted and artistic. I’m a lucky guy. We’re lucky parents.

Amazing how much can happen in ten years. It’s tempting to see myself, at the low-end of my 40s, as being somehow nearer to the end than the beginning. And one supposes that’s true, but that’s not to say a lot won’t change or happen still. Because ten years is a long time. And every decade can be transformative, in its way. You’re never too old. Even a year can see wild swings and shifts.

What comes next? I’ve little idea. As a writer I’m oft to espouse writers should try to plan for the year-ahead, but also for five years, and ten — though the further out you go, the hazier that plan gets. The more it becomes less a “straight line” and more a “sinister glowing cloud.” In the next year I have a book coming out — The Book of Accidents. Not sure of a date yet, I think around October. (Was originally in the summer, but I don’t think it’s a summer book.) And then 2021 I think I’ll have… two books? Maybe three. But again, I can’t talk about those, and they’re not even real yet, I’m definitely not talking about real books. *clears throat, looks around nervously, sweats*

The decade ahead is, well.

I don’t know.

I’m hoping we’ll come through 2020 with a new president — I’ll speak more on in a different post, but we gotta get rid of this fucking asshole by burying him under a tide of votes. I’m an Elizabeth Warren voter, because I think she’s got big ideas and plans to bolster them. But I like a lot of the candidates running, and I’ll vote for any one of them before I vote for the oleaginous sack-of-baby-diarrhea currently in the White House. I’m hoping we fix that error and can course correct, maybe start addressing some of the existential threats ahead of us — climate change being the biggest. Because if we fail to do that, we’re going to get a front-row seat to a coming apocalypse. Maybe we already have that seat, I don’t know.

But I like to be optimistic. Optimism is rebellion, in its way, just as art is resistance. Margaret Atwood is fond of saying that writing is an act of optimism, because you’re envisioning someone out there to read it. So, I will continue to engage in that act of optimism, because I’m going to place a bet that we’ll all be around to read it — in one year, in ten, in a hundred. So, let’s all pinky-swear that we’re gonna get our shit together, okay? Okay.

Onward, we go. Into 2020, and the years beyond.

Thanks for reading, and see you on the other side of the (time) war.

p.s. it’s weird we’re gonna be in The Twenties, because historically that evokes a very specific thing to me, which means if we’re not all wearing Mad Max flapper dresses and tattooing ourselves in apocalyptic art deco I will seriously be disappointed

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Psst. Psst! Hey, Kid. Hey. You Want Some Wanderers?

I drop in briefly to wangjangle some small and potentially useful news before you: hey, Wanderers on Kindle is a mere $2.99 for today, December 27th. Only today. So, if you were thinking of getting it but were like, harrumph, that e-book is too damn pricey, well, here’s your chance to scoop it up at a low, low price. I mean, it’s 800 pages, so that’s like, a third of a cent per page. C’mon. That’s narrative value. (I kid, of course, as value of story and art cannot neatly be contained by or derived from monetary price. I’m just saying, three bucks ain’t a lot and we all gotta save coin where we can.)

Link here, if you want it.

IT’LL MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD.

I mean, maybe — it is about the end of the world, after all. But it’s twisty and turny and I like to think full of hope and humor even as it, uhhh, ends the world.

Enjoy!

Here is a photo of an apple, in recompense. Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to go watch the final episode of this season of The Baby Yoda Power Hour.

The Rise Of Skywalker, And How Star Wars Is Junk

Star Wars is junk.

No, no, I know, but bear with me.

Junk, let’s just say this now, is not necessarily a pejorative.

Junk can be wonderful. Have you ever been to a junkyard? An old-timey one with appliances and cars and secret treasures buried throughout? Have you ever eaten a cookie, or had ice cream? They’re junk, too. Ever seen a kid play with an empty box? An empty box is junk. But what they do with it — I mean, it’s a pirate ship, a boat, it’s knight armor, it’s an action figure base.Some junk is just trash, admittedly. But some junk is artful. Masterful. Just because it’s old — or cobbled together from various pieces — doesn’t make it bad. It just makes it junk.

Star Wars, particularly the original trilogy and the new sequel trilogy, live in a galaxy of junk. Tatooine to Jakku, trash compactors to Jawa crawlers, it’s a galaxy of junk. A glimmer of the upper echelons of Cloud City swiftly give way to its bowels, of hissing steam and grim industry and those little junk monkeys, the Ugnaughts (sorry, Kuiil), who turn C-3P0 into, you guessed it, junk. (C-3P0, whose one leg was already junk, in fact. And later, an arm, too.) The prequels have a little bit of junk, of course — Anakin is born into it. But the worlds there are mostly shiny and new, and the CGI reflects it, having eschewed practical SFX built out of, well —

Junk.

The greatest piece of junk in Star Wars is the Millennium Falcon.

It’s a hunk of metal, lumpy and odd. It’s routinely shown being cobbled together at the same time it’s been damaged left and right. It’s name, the Falcon, is an ironic one — it looks less like a falcon and more like a, I dunno, a manhole cover. It’s not a sleek fighter. It’s a cargo ship. It carries things.

It’s also the coolest ship in the damn galaxy.

And that, to me, is Star Wars. Star Wars is the Millennium Falcon — they both are ill-fitted, cobbled-together hunks of space junk that carry a lot of weight and somehow still fly crazy fast, pulling off unbelievable stunts time and time again. And we love it. Despite its look, despite the junk, we love it.

Star Wars is junk.

* * *

I saw the Rise of Skywalker, and it is, indeed, junk.

It’s junk cobbled together from all the other detritus and debris from this galaxy — in many cases, literally so, as it endeavors to climb to the top of the pile of this wonderfully broken galaxy and culminate both three films (this trilogy) and nine films (the trilogy of trilogies). It makes this attempt, and mostly, gets it right. “Gets it right,” is subjective, obviously, and I’m not making any declarations here for how it objectively does this or that. Some people are going to love this film and some are going to hate it and all of those people, I think, could stand to remember that Star Wars is junk, and so is this movie. Just as Return of the Jedi was — just as, in a way, all of them are. Some are more “elevated” than others. Certainly Empire is often thought to be the pinnacle of Star Wars storytelling — and then comes along scrappy ROTJ, to bork it all up. I say that lovingly. Empire is the better film. Jedi is my favorite of the two. Just as The Last Jedi is probably the best of the sequel trilogy, but also, my favorite is (so far), The Force Awakens. Sometimes it’s good to see the art in junk and regard it as such, while also acknowledging that sometimes it is not the most artful things that spark joy.

We like what we like, you know?

So, before we begin any spoiler talk, my assessment of Rise of Skywalker is that it fits in neatly in the tradition of being delightful junk. It also remixes Return of the Jedi, same as the two earlier Sequel Trilogy films are broken mirrors of the first two Original Trilogy films. It does a lot of heavy lifting. It wants to show you so many things that it has cobbled together (put more crassly, it wants to show you its junk, hurr hurr, hurr hurr), and it’s like an eager kid telling you a story. AND THEN THEY DID THIS, AND THEN THEY WENT HERE, AND THEN AND THEN THIS AND THAT AND THIS AND AND *deep breath* AND THEN THIS. It is almost desperate to please you. (And, mostly, for me, that gambit paid off. I was indeed pleased and tickled. Mostly.)

Is it good? I dunno. It’s junk, and I liked it.

Does it have high points? It sure does.

Does it have low points? Well, yeah, it has those, too. And for all the wonderful talk of The Last Jedi, that has low points, too. CASINO PLANET, while admirable, doesn’t work for me in execution, only in idea. DJ is a stuttering cipher who has no meat on his narrative bones except to be a carrier of theme — he’s not a character, he’s a purpose. It’s fine.

(We don’t have to love a thing entirely to still love it.)

Does Rise of Skywalker hit emotional beats? It does, it really does. I got misty-eyed at parts, because these are films I love dearly, and someone like JJ Abrams — like Rian Johnson before him and *checks notes* JJ Abrams before him — knows how to orchestrate feelings even when they can’t always orchestrate plot. Are sometimes these emotional beats right on the edge of manipulative? They are. And you can almost feel it, but it’s like how you know a roller coaster is designed to elicit your thrills — it doesn’t stop the thrills from happening.

So, if you want to stop reading here, that’s it, that’s my capsule review. I liked it. It’s junk, wonderful junk. I’ll see it again tomorrow, and I’ll see it dozens more times and dozens more after that, because I am a sucker for Star Wars, and I love these characters, and Star Wars, like pizza (another junk food), is great even when it’s not great.

But I like also to pick apart story, to see what lessons we can learn as storytellers.

And that part comes next.

Which means: spoilers inbound.

Spoilers, spoilers, spoooooiiiiilers. These will not be encoded with ROT13 as I do on Twitter, but rather, BOLD, FACE-SLAPPING SPOILERS. Ye be warned.

* * *

Let’s start off with pacing.

Pacing is hard. Doubly hard in action or adventure films.

Star Wars does pacing badly. Almost always. Even at its best, the films are nearly always paced super goofily. Now, there’s two aspects of pacing — what I would consider external pacing, and internal pacing. Internal is about the passage of time in the story itself. External is how we, the audience, perceive the rhythm of that passage.

Example:

Empire is amazing, but it kinda shrugs away how much time they’re spending in different places. So its internal pacing — the timeline — is confusing. How long is Luke on Dagobah? Does it perfectly line up with how long Han and Leia are on the lam? Ennnh. Answer unclear, ask again later. But the film does external pacing well! We feel a nice ebb and flow of narrative, we get moments of tension and action, and we get moments of conversation and exploration. In a video game sense, think of how Bioware encourages these long conversations with the other characters that seem like filler but are arguably the point — the treasure! — of the game. It’s not the shooting. It’s the talking. ESB does this well. So does, I’d argue, TLJ — though TLJ also has a muddy timeline, it does have a powerful rhythm to its narrative architecture.

On the other hand, TFA feels paced like the whole film fits in its own running time. Both internal and external pacing are largely in a rush. And that’s true here, too, at least for the first half — the first half of Rise of Skywalker is fucking breathless. It doesn’t stop. It just goes from place to place, from plot dongle to plot widget. It hastily hard-charges through the story and through action scenes without much pause. The second half is better paced. It takes more time. It is willing to stop.

And Star Wars is best when it’s willing to stop.

Think, if you will, of Luke regarding the binary sunset to the swelling score.

Think of Anakin in ROTS, staring out over Coruscant, clearly broken, but not realizing it.

Think of Rey in the desert, making her dinner, looking up at the sky.

These are moments of quiet contemplation — of, in SW terms, peace and purpose. And it does serve a purpose: it gives us a moment to catch our breath. To regard the vastness of the universe and the truth of these characters. In a more stripped down sense, these moments fill the room with oxygen — they are not building tension so much as they are building to the building of tension. We fill the room with oxygen so that eventually, we can set it aflame. We can blow it up, swallow it. It also gives us time to root ourselves, to care about the characters. Stories like Star Wars thrive on moments of quiet contemplation.

And Rise of Skywalker has too few of these moments.

* * *

I want the four-hour version of this film. I’m told one exists — a long, possibly clumsy cut. But I want it. Because there’s so much missing here.

Let me backtrack and explain: as I said, this film endeavors to culminate both three films, and nine films, and it does those things well. Sometimes, too well — it tries very hard to please everybody. Did you like TLJ? This film synthesizes it. Did you hate it? This film answers it. Did you want Leia to be a Jedi? Done. Did you want Rey to be both Somebody and Nobody, a Palpatine, a Skywalker? Done. All of it! Boom! Did you want Reylo? Done. Did you want Ben Solo’s redemption, but also, not too much of his redemption? Done. Palpatine? He’s back. Did you want Luke to catch a lightsaber instead of throwing it away? Done. But also, porgs? Yep, porgs. Han Solo as an almost Force Ghost? Fuck it, why not? Christ, are you still mad (as, admittedly, I was) that Chewie never got a fucking medal in A New Hope? WELL, THIS SHIT FIXES IT. It just throws everything at the wall. Sith! Jedi! Skywalkers! Death stars! Desert planets! Forest planets! Ewoks! AhhhHHHHHaaahhhh *hnnngh* narrative orgasm *hrrrrgggh*.

But as a film, it also forgets to be a singular unit.

It forgets to conclude itself.

It introduces things, and then… forgets them entirely.

Finn has something important to tell Rey. It’s referenced multiple times!

And then, forgotten.

Finn has a destiny, is maybe Force sensitive! But it’s mostly a plot thing. More a “cake and eat it too” component, or a piece designed to simply urge the plot forward (“How do we get from A to B? Uhh, Finn has a ‘feeling’!”).

Finn and Poe are at odds for… reasons? Maybe romantic reasons?

And then it’s gone.

Chewie is dead, but then he’s not… somehow? I have to see it again, but I don’t remember there being two transports. And Rey certainly should’ve been able to sense his life presence — as she is able to do literally 20 minutes later in the movie.

The film seems to forget that it has characters whose arcs need an end. It mostly eschews them to finish off Rey and Kylo’s arcs — Finn and Poe and muddled. Poe seems to be relitigating his same lessons from the first film, oh he’s a hothead, and now also he’s an ex-criminal which makes him shady. Finn is Force-sensitive, and maybe loves Rey, but maybe doesn’t, and maybe he loves Rose, but maybe Jannah, but then, nah, nobody. None of it concludes. Poe maybe loves Zorii Bliss, and she wants to kill him until conveniently she doesn’t want to kill him anymore For Reasons, and then even at the end, Poe doesn’t get to kiss anybody, which seems like a crime punishable by the Hague. Doubly so because it’s not Finn he’s kissing, because at the end of the day the two characters with the most onscreen chemistry are those two. (Don’t worry, we’ll talk about the LGBT thing.)

Lotta love in the air.

None of it fulfilled.

Except between Rey and Kylo — by then, Ben. I don’t know that I’d say it’s forced. I think it’s there, and it’s not surprising, and it’s earned. But it then fails to address that there should be complexity and consequence to that choice. By redeeming him and kissing him and then watching him die, Rey has gone through some shit. And there’s no real consequence for that because by then, we’re at the end of the film, and there’s little more to see, or do, except to see our trio of friends back together one last time. Which warms the heart, and brings the tears, but also makes me wish for more with these characters. I want to see them navigate that fallout in a way that’s real, that’s earned. I’d honestly want to see them be together — romantically. Either earn the earlier tension between them, or dissipate it by bringing them all together, literally, romantically.

The film earns an ending to its trilogy.

It somewhat earns an ending to the trilogy of trilogies.

But it doesn’t really conclude itself. To thine ownself, it is not true.

And I think it could get there with another 20-30 minutes — or, ideally, a whole other film, way the last Avengers film was split in twain. But I suppose we won’t get that. I’ll always wish for it. I’ll always wish to see the bigger emotional panorama, because it’s clear a lot was flayed from the emotional meat in order to accommodate the swiftly-moving plot.

* * *

Small stories are why we care about stories.

It’s not big stories. Big stories are too big. They’re just architecture — when done right — for small stories. Luke as a kid who wants off a planet, who is struggling with finding out he has a bad dad. Han as a gambler with debts, selfish to selfless. Leia as a princess without a home.

Rise of Skywalker cares about Rey’s small story. Maybe Kylo’s, too.

It mostly forgets about everyone else’s small story.

Their stories are lost in the crashing tides of the galaxy’s churning narrative seas.

* * *

It suggests, perhaps, that films are no longer the best way to tell these stories.

Ironically, Mandolorian (so far) feels stretched thin over its episodic structure (though Chapter 7 was amazing), but Rise of Skywalker could play better over 8, 10, even 12 episodes. Gosh, I wish it would. Could you imagine seeing this story told more in the framework of Avatar: The Last Airbender? As a structure, how amazing would that be? To give the big emotional beats the time to percolate, to boil over, to be earned?

Alas.

* * *

Babu Frik forever. Babu Frik for life.

* * *

Palpatine fucks, I guess? Ew.

* * *

Okay real talk I thought we’d get more, there. Thought we’d learn that Palpatine created Anakin, we’d hear more about Plagueis and his ability to never die, thought if Rey was part of him at all she was like Anakin — manifested from the living Force, or drawn from the Dark Side. Not that Palpatine literally fucks. Because I guess he literally fucks. What the fuck.

Seriously, what the fuck.

I don’t want to bow-chicka-bow-wow that wizened scrotal Sith goblin. Ugh. JFC.

* * *

Okay.

Ahem.

Let’s reset.

* * *

The last thing to talk about is the worst thing to talk about. Not worst as it, unnecessary. Worst as in, the least satisfying aspect of the film.

There exists a much-vaunted LGBT kiss in the film. It’s about a half-second of screen-time. I guess to their credit, it’s at least a named character from TLJ — er, though I confess, I forget her name. But it’s hasty. It gets less time than the banana slug. It gets less time than nearly everything. You might miss it. Many probably did.

The reasons for this are potentially so it’s easy to cut out for Chinese censors — but even that feels like an excuse. Because a film could always be cut in a way to excise that. Not that one should do so just to make money, to be clear! Only that, we still could’ve gotten Finn and Poe tongue-fucking in a Millennium Falcon cargo bin and they could’ve clipped that for Chinese audiences. This sort of thing should be present. On-screen. And I joke about the tongue-fucking, but it doesn’t need to be explicit — LGBT characters should be allowed to exist in this universe, on screen, in a lived-in, live-there way. Not backgrounded. Just present. Always present. We can have aliens and robots but not LGBT representation? C’mon. We watch a lot of cartoons with our kid, and they’re doing it better. Way better! Craig of the Creek! We Bare Bears! She-Ra! Dragon Prince! Steven Universe! Star Vs The Forces Of Evil! C’mon, Star Wars. Get it done. JFC.

Certainly others are better equipped too to talk about the film’s representation in other directions. Finn being largely underused, chasing after Rey, is not ideal. Poe being hot-headed again and now, a criminal, and having to re-do the same character arc as before — that’s not great, either. But Jannah and Finn have good moments. Lando, too. Rose being totally sidelined? And I mean, totally sidelined?

Oof.

It’s certainly a place where the film could’ve done more work.

A lot more work, probably.

* * *

Star Wars is junk, and so is this movie.

It’s a candy bar, but a really good one.

It’s a junker car, but one that feels great when you’re driving it, even if it sometimes looks janky as fuck bounding down the road.

It’s the Falcon, it’s Threepio, it’s the Jakku desert. Junk strewn everywhere, but often to artful purpose, to articulate a feeling, to paint a picture.

I know the cool thing to do is “rank” the films — I’m always dubious of that because my rankings fluctuate wildly. And also I have two rankings: how much I like a movie, as noted, is not always the same as how “good” I think the movie is. I guess if I had to rank this one, right now it’d fall somewhere in the middle? Above nearly all the prequel films (including RO and Solo), but below a lot of the others. It satisfied me like a Snickers, but like a Snickers, it did not always feel like a complete meal — satisfying texturally, satisfying to the dopamine hit, satisfying in its sweetness and its crunch, but not in how long it leaves me feeling good. Maybe sometimes too sweet. Maybe other times not enough. And maybe sometimes I question my decision to have eaten candy in the first place.

I look forward to the next thing. Because I always do. And perhaps the greatest compliment I can give this movie is it makes me want to write Star Wars again — not to fix anything, not to patch over this film, but to play in the galaxy again, to extend out what was done here, to keep seeing these characters come back. Because I don’t want their tales to be done. Their tales can’t be done. There has to be more — otherwise, whatever was the point?

I could say more. It’s Star Wars, after all. Gimme a pot of coffee and a slice of pie and we could sit at this diner all night. But I’ve said my piece. And as with all these movies — which mean a lot to me, for good and for ill — I’ll keep thinking about them, and finding things I love, bits of preciousness among the debris. I’m sure you will, too.

For now, we rest.

And wait for the ending of the Mandalorian because NO BABY YODA NO I LOVE YOU BABY YODA I WILL GIVE MY LIFE FOR YOU AHHHHH ahem.

What I’m trying to say is:

MTFBWY. See you on the other side of the (Star) War.

Macro Monday Masticates Morgue Meat

No, I don’t know what that means, but I do know that it means at the bottom of this post I have some photos, including a photo of vultures. Because vultures are awesome, that’s why. Don’t forget that one of their self-defense mechanisms is HOT ROTTEN VOMIT.

Merry Christmas!

Anyway, just some quick newsy bits before we get to the photos —

Do not forget that I give gift ideas for THE WEIRDO WRITERS IN YOUR LIFE.

Wanderers has also hit more year-end lists, to my shock and delight —

Polygon lists it as a top of 2019.

As does Rob Hart at LitReactor Staff Picks of 2019. (Quote from him on the book that I love: “800-something pages and I read it in three days. Wendig took everything you see on Twitter that keeps you awake at night and condenses it all into a cohesive narrative about our garbage-fire reality, and makes it a ripping thriller on top of that.” Also, if you’ve not yet read The Warehouse, get on it.)

And finally, NPR! Holy crap. It hit their Book Concierge list, and I’m floored.

So, not that anybody’s counting (okay, I’m counting), it’s hit best of the year lists at:

Bookpage

Guardian

Kirkus

Library Journal

LitReactor

NPR

Polygon

Publishers Weekly

Washington Post

It’s very exciting. It’s the first time any of my books has had this kind of reach.

Anyway! What else?

Some books of mine are still on sale:

Invasive is still $1.99 for your Kindlemachine. It’s probably the best precursor to Wanderers, in fact. (It does not require having read Zer0es, despite what some sites will say.)

Atlanta Burns is $0.99, so if you like Nazis getting punched, well.

Under the Empyrean Sky is $0.99, too, as are the rest of the books in that series — cornpunk YA, Star Wars by way of John Steinbeck and Hunger Games.

Damn Fine Story is only $4.99 for your Kindle, too.

And if you want a Hydrate and Read Books t-shirt, Worldbuilders has you covered. And don’t forget about their year’s end charity run, which ends tomorrow, and affords you a chance to win a bunch of my books.

Finally, pretty cool that Aftermath gets a shout-out from Chris Terrio, the screenwriter of Rise of Skywalker. No, I don’t expect this means the movie does anything with the books! But it’s happy to see, just the same.

ANYWAY

HERE HAVE SOME PHOTOS, FRANDOLORIANS

Gifts For Writers 2019

[image error]SWEET JESUS, THESE HOLIDAYS, THEY JUST KEEP HAPPENING. And each year, you surely look to the heavens for an answer to the plaguing question: “What the hell do I get for the writer in my life?” (Because surely, you only have one writer in your life. It’s kind of a Highlander situation.)

And so once again I arrive, like the Riders of Rohan, galloping over the hill with a beaming light of Gift Ideas For Writers.

Gonna make this one pretty quick and snappy, because we all got shit to do.

For The Wealthiest Landowner

Long now have I gone without a writing shed (by “long” I mean like, two months) and it’s fucking killing me. IT IS KILLING ME, I said, and I’m definitely not being melodramatic at all, because even now my creative spirit atrophies as I am away from my horcrux I mean writing shed. Okay, more seriously, I’m managing fine, but will eventually get a shiny new shed in which to masturbauhhh I mean write stories. Shut up. Quit lookin’ at me. *hisses*

So, if you’re somewhat wealthy and have land, maybe you too want to get a writing space for your Writer Friend. Studio Sheds are an option, is what I’m saying.

For The Under-Caffeinated

Y’all need some coffee. Coffee is how the words are made. “But Chuck,” you say, “not all writers drink coffee,” and that’s true, except those writers are exiled from the Authorial Star Chamber and their name goes on a list, a dangerous list. Okay fine there’s no list, but seriously, coffee is good, and a coffee subscription is a helpful thing. You might find some nice options here, in fact. Though Angel’s Cup tends to be my favorite just for the sheer wild variety of what you get. There’s also the Yes Plz Beans & Zines approach if you want a little reading with your brewing.

For The Ink Addicts Among Us

I don’t do fountain pens and I don’t handwrite my books, but I do like a good pen now and again, and for my mileage, the best pen I own is the Squire from Baron Fig. They sent me one a while back and it’s legit. Writes like a dream and is sturdy, feels good in the hand. Isn’t cheap. Remains worth it. I also don’t know where mine is — it’s been jangled up in the move somehow, and I assume I’ll find it in the year 2024, located in some box containing random action figures and sex toys. Needless to say, I shouldn’t be trusted to pack anything. But get this pen. (There’s a neat “red pen” variant for editors.) Also, they have great notebooks, too, including some nifty “guided” notebooks that help you keep specific kinds of journals, like this one here.

For The Perpetually Icy

Typing and tweeting requires nimble, naked fingers, but it’s wintertimes and you may want warm hands, and so I recommend to you: fingerless gloves.

For Those Who Like Hot Dudes Reading

There’s Hot Dudes Reading. Just in case we need a reminder that books are hella sexy.

For Those With Writer’s Block

Here’s an actual writer’s block — I mean, sorta. It’s a block of wood. Bonus: it’s a lamp too whose light will shine the way forward through the dark forest of the writer’s life.

For Those Who Storify Their Games Or Gamify Their Stories Or Whatever

Let’s see. There’s Storymatic’s Synapsis! Or the Wordsmith Deck. Or the classic, and my favorite, the Writer Emergency deck.

For The Software-Minded

Scrivener is of course the classic, but have you seen their other product, Scapple? Scapple has some serious outlining organization-fu.

For The Everyone Who Writes Just Shut Up And Buy This

Dreyer’s English. If the writer in your life doesn’t have this? They need this. (There’s gonna be a game, too. But that’s later.) This is an immensely good, funny, and kind look at the English language. Flexible where appropriate, and will give a good look at the granular side of this thing we do.

For The August Among Us

Venerable scriptwriter (and now, novelist) John August provides access to his Scriptnotes podcast alongside transcripts and such, for a nicely neat low price. Check it.

For The Visual Writer

DSLR cameras are hella cheap right now because: holidays. A good, if not entirely cheap, gift for a writer — a camera to let them go out into the world, snap some snaps, bring it back to the page. You might say, “But our phones now have great cameras on them, dipshit,” and yes, that is true — but there is a high value placed on putting down the phone. Pick up the phone it’s like, suddenly there are tweets and texts and various alarms alarming you of alarming things. The camera is pure. It escapes the verbal. It puts you in the moment.

For, Well, Everyone

We like it when you buy our books.

We like it when you review them.

So maybe do that.

I do of course have a couple books on writing ahem ahem ahem — Kick-Ass Writer and Damn Fine Story. And I also have a shiny new biggum book, Wanderers, which I’m sure you’ve never heard about because I never talk about it. *shifts uncomfortably*

You can find my books at Indiebound, Amazon, Apple, Kobo, B&N, Powells, etc.

And if you wanted signed and personalized copies of my books?

Doylestown Bookshop will gladly ship to you! Contact them for personalization.

Prior Year Lists

If you wanna check older lists, here are links to 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014.

MERRY NON-DENOMINATIONAL SOLSTICEDAY EVERYBUGGY

A.R. Moxon: Five Things I Learned Writing The Revisionaries

All is not boding well for Father Julius. . .

 

A street preacher decked out in denim robes and running shoes, Julius is a source of inspiration for a community that knows nothing of his scandalous origins.

 

But when a nearby mental hospital releases its patients to run amok in his neighborhood, his trusted if bedraggled flock turns expectantly to Julius to find out what’s going on. Amid the descending chaos, Julius encounters a hospital escapee who babbles prophecies of doom, and the growing palpable sense of impending danger intensifies. . . as does the feeling that everyone may be relying on a street preacher just a little too much.

 

Still, Julius decides he must confront the forces that threaten his congregation—including the peculiar followers of a religious cult, the mysterious men and women dressed all in red seen fleetingly amid the bedlam, and an enigmatic smoking figure who seems to know what’s going to happen just before it does.

* * *

My debut novel, The Revisionaries, will be released on December 3.

A little secret, now: It wasn’t supposed to get published—according to me. Before I started, I told myself that the book wouldn’t get published.

I sure showed me!

Let me back up. I wanted it to be published; I simply knew that it wouldn’t be. By this I mean that in late 2011, before I began writing, I made a rough plot outline and did a little bit of math based on the pages I’d already completed, to arrive at an estimated page count around 400,000 words. Seized with a creeping suspicion, I performed a little bit of online research, which immediately confirmed my instinct. I was utterly screwed.

For those of you who don’t know, general wisdom states that a debut author is supposed to write about 80,000 to 110,000-word manuscripts, depending on genre, making the scope of my project, if you’ll permit me use of a little industry jargon, “absolutely insane.” But I had the story I wanted to write, and I wanted to write it all, so I shrugged and decided to tilt at the windmill, promising myself that if it weren’t published by my birthday in 2020, I’d self-publish a couple vanity copies to sit on my shelf, and then write a shorter second novel. Thus I insulated myself against self-loathing; I would be an idiot, but not a fool.

(Listen to me: If you are thinking of writing a book that long in defiance of all industry advice and expectation, be very ready for it to become extremely unpublished. That way if you get very very lucky—and I got very very lucky—it can be a nice surprise, and if you don’t, it won’t be a nasty one. Any other way lies regret.)

To avoid tedium now, I’ll fast-forward four years, after I’d finished the manuscript—which was not 400,000 words long, but rather a lean 330,000! My goodness, only three times longer than a sensible person would have made it! After a year shopping it, I found myself exactly where somebody with a debut doorstop should expect: writing a new shorter manuscript. But then, an astonishing thing happened. A publisher—that would be the delightful Dennis Johnson of Melville House—asked to take a look, and read it and decided he liked it enough to publish it.

“Just one thing,” Dennis said. “At this length I think the only thing many people will notice is the length. We’d want you to cut it down about a third. Do you think you could do that?”

“Yes, absolutely!” I replied. Please note, I had absolutely no idea how I could do that, but I knew the answer to that question. As I said, I’m an idiot but not a fool.

I told you all that because I want to pass on a few things you learn about yourself and the crafts of writing and editing when you’re cutting an entire normal-sized book out of your enormous book.

It’s going to hurt.

My friends, it is going to hurt. You’ll need to cut characters, which will allow you to cut down whole plotlines and entire chapters. You’re going to spend six months cleaning up your book to accommodate those decisions, and then another six months cleaning up the cleanup. You’re going to rewrite the entire beginning, and then take a call on Christmas Day a couple weeks before your deadline, because even though it’s better, it’s not yet good, and then you’re going to go back and read it and realize that this report is correct, and you’re going to plop yourself down in front of your screen on Boxing Day and you’re going to want to die but instead of dying you’re going to start re-writing your beginning again. Because that’s the process.

Being understood isn’t the mission.

Listen: Your editor will probably like your book and your writing a great deal—why else would they be publishing your book?—but it’s not your editor’s job to like your book. It’s your editor’s job to tell you what isn’t working. You made a choice, and the choice has resulted in a book that is not as good as it could be. This is hard, because you made those choices for a reason. You’ll want to explain those reasons.

However (though your editor will probably understand your book), it will begin to dawn on you it’s actually not your editor’s job to understand your book the way you understand it; rather, it’s your editor’s job to understand all the things about your book you don’t understand, and to explain them in a way that will help you understand why. (Honestly, editors are sort of magicians.) Often, these explanations will make sense, but sometimes they’ll be horrifying—because they haven’t understood your book exactly how you understand it, and for a very simple reason. They already have somebody who understands the book that way. They have you, dummy.

It’s your job to figure out what is meant by these suggestions, and then fix the problem in a very you sort of way. Because that’s the process.

Think of it as a game if you can.

Can you cut that character in a way that maintains the reason for the character to exist, and introduces even more fun and ambiguous mind-chewiness? Do that! Can you fix your editor’s objections in a way that still allows you to honor the reason you made the choice in the first place? Do that! Can you honor the spirit of the request rather than the letter of it, and make a fix that you actually like more than what you had? Do that! Watch the word count melt away to a trim and fit (but still baffling) 210,000. You’re winning! You’ll probably think you’re getting one over on your editor for a while, until it begins to occur to you that you’re, ah, fixing your book, which was the whole idea, because …

Everybody wants the book to succeed.

Obviously, right? It might really begin to sink in as you see the care with which the publishing team replicates your various story threads into different fonts to help convey the shifts, or the gorgeous art-deco poster designs inside, or the craft of the layout itself, the dust-jacket cover that really pops, the embossment on the spine, all of it. My friends, I’m here to tell you … it even smells

Everybody’s working to make a great book. Everybody believes it will be one.

If your book can lose 100,000 words and still work, it probably needed to lose them.

Jumping Jehoshaphat, what a lot of (fun) work. This one is exactly the length it needs to be now, and I think people will love it, and I can’t wait for people to let me know if I’m right. Perhaps I’ll give the audiobook reader’s voice a break next time and write short.

(If I can.)

* * *

A.R. Moxon: Twitter | Website

The Revisionaries: Print | eBook

Cyber Monday Brings The Deals Okay Just One Deal Shut Up

Hey, check it out — at Amazon, Invasive is $1.99 for today, CYBORG MONDAY. Offer open to non-cyborgs, as well, apparently? Whatever. More to the point, if you dug Wanderers, particularly the near-future sci-fi-horror aspect of it? Then Invasive is a good next read for you. It’s got ants! And fungus! And anxiety! And it’s also a very cheap vacation to Hawaii.

Speaking of Wanderers —

If you want signed, personalized copies this holiday season, Doylestown Bookshop is your jam. Actually, you can likely get most of my books from there signed and personalized, if you so choose. Give ’em a call — they will ship right to you.

Let’s see, what else. Wanderers has hit a couple more end-of-year-lists, much to my great delight: Bookpage and Guardian both listed it as top SFF picks from 2019. That’s in addition to Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, and also the top books of 2019 at Washington Post. So, I’m… pretty excited that this book has connected so well with readers and critics alike.

Tim Pratt also reviewed it at Locus:

“I’ve always liked big long books about the apocalypse. I read Stephen King’s The Stand as a teenager, and loved it, as millions of other read­ers did; it’s still the gold standard of the form, and Chuck Wendig name-checks King’s classic here. Like The Stand, and McCammon’s Swan Song, and Cronin’s The Passage, and Niven & Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (which is also obliquely referenced, I suspect, as Wanderers has a portentous comet in its opening pages), this isn’t just a post-apocalyptic story: it’s a pre-, peri-, and post-apocalyptic novel, viewed through the eyes of multiple viewpoint characters who have lots of room to strive and suffer across a gener­ous and sprawling page count. The Wanderers holds up just fine in their company.”

And Vultures got a Locus review, as well:

“What’s so great about this series are the characters that Wendig writes. Miriam isn’t the only one who leaps off of the page. Her girlfriend Gabby and neighbor Steve also pop, as does Wendig’s knack for energetic dialog and crackling prose. Vultures is a fun and un­expectedly moving way to close out this part of Miriam’s life.”

So, everything is coming up Wendig.

Thanks for checking out the books — if you read ’em and dug ’em, please be so kind as to leave a review at your favorite review receptacle. If you didn’t like my books, please go shout your angry reviews at a yak. Any yak will do.

Finally, if you wanna know where I’m going to be —

On 12/12, I’ll be at the Strand in NYC talking to Erin Morgenstern about her newest, STARLESS SEA. Also, gin, foxes, Game of Thrones, and more.

I’ll also be at the Tucson Book Festival in March, and Pike’s Peak Writers in April!

Finally, since it is Macro Monday and this is the first official macro photo I’ve taken at our new digs — that’s a good bit to end on, so here ’tis.

Sweet Baby Yoda, Do I Have Some News For You

Seriously, I would do anything for Baby Yoda. I’d kill for him. I’d die for him. I demand MERCH of him is really what I’m saying. ANYWAY hey hi hello, it’s me, your host, Chnark Moondog, here to drop THE NEWS upon you like pennies flung from the viewing platform of a very tall skyscraper.

First and biggest bit of news: hey, whoa, Wanderers landed on Washington Post’s 50 Notable Books from 2019 list, and I have no idea how it got there on a list filled with such literary luminaries. I assume it’s a mistake and will be corrected shortly but in the meantime I’m going to pretend it deserves to be there.

In addition to Kirkus and Pub Weekly’s best books of 2019 lists, Wanderers also hit Library Journal’s best horror of the year, alongside some notably fantastic books from Gabino Iglesias, T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon), Paul Tremblay, and John Hornor Jacobs.

It was also a Locus Bestseller for the month of November, too.

Finally, Frankie has found a very good use for the book here.

Wanderers is one of those books that keeps on going, and I have to thank you all for spreading the word about it — it means a lot and I’m so glad the book has connected with people so well. (The book did not make the final round of Goodreads Choice, which I assume is a conspiracy and an oversight, which is to say, it’s not there because there are simply so many damn good books this year.)

In non-bookish news, The Mary Sue talked to me about *checks notes* apples, and only apples. Hear me opine about the Greatest Fruit ever. And also you can now gaze back on the entire #heirloomapplereview2019 thread from Twitter, which is now (mostly) done. I’ll still do a few more, and I’ll definitely talk about the Cosmic Crisp when it comes out, since apparently that’s some kind of Future Moon Apple or some shit. (Link to last tweet in the thread here.)

And now, some photos.