Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 49
March 19, 2020
It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay
These are extraordinary times. And I don’t say that as a compliment, necessarily — it is not said with Spielbergian awe, but rather, with a kind of bamfoozled dread. As if you came upon a strange hole in the ground full of old-timey baby-dolls. You know, the creepy, haunted ones? You’d say, “That’s extraordinary,” and you wouldn’t mean it in the good way.
You might also say, “That’s fucked up.”
What I’m trying to say is:
These are fucked up times.
Shit’s fucked up. It just is. As I noted yesterday, it’s as if we’re witnessing the ghost of normalcy rather than normalcy itself — it died so fast, it hasn’t yet left this plane of existence, and so it lingers, refusing to be banished until an exorcism finally sends it packing. These are abnormal, bizarre, confounding, dipshitted, batshitted, extraordinarily fucked-up times.
You don’t have to be okay with that.
You probably shouldn’t be okay with that.
More to the point, you also don’t need to do it all. You don’t need to get it all done. You don’t need to clean your house from top to bottom. You don’t need to homeschool your kids into super-geniuses. You don’t need to write King Fucking Lear or discover a new scientific principle. You don’t need to be happy. We’re all in mourning from the death of normalcy. We’re all knocked off balance, like someone just kicked your bike as you were riding it. You ended up in the ditch. We’re all in the ditch with you. It’s okay to just sit here in the ditch for a while and say, “Fuck.” It’s okay to wait before you stretch, before you stand up with a groan and see what’s broken. It’s okay to sit on your couch and gorge on bad TV. It’s okay to read a shitty book. It’s okay to not finish the shitty book. It’s okay to let your kids be kids and just tell them they’re on spring break right now. You don’t need to be an A+ parent, and they don’t need to be A+ kids, and you don’t need to be an A+ spouse. Christ, you don’t even need to be an A+ human. Aim for B, maybe B-, C+, just hold it the fuck together.
Forgive it in yourself and forgive it in those around you, too.
That’s not to say this is the time to let all the rope slip through your fingers. Your kids need food. You need food too, and water. Everybody needs things and this is a crisis — though a weird-feeling slo-mo crisis, as if we’re watching two whales collide underwater, with us between them — but you don’t need to be a hero. You don’t even need to be normal.
You just need to be you, and go with it.
You’re allowed to feel all of what you feel.
Hell, I don’t know what to feel. I keep thinking, YEAH OKAY I’VE BEEN PREPARING FOR THIS MY WHOLE LIFE, TIME TO WRITE A BOOK, A WHOLE BOOK, HERE WE GO, HERE WE FUCKING GO, and then I just sit there and I’m like, hey that’s not happening yet? And I go to eat and it’s mostly just grazing. My kid’s like, “Can I play the Switch?” and I’m like, “Yeah, hell yeah, it’s Spring Break, go hog wild, dude.” I tell him to read a book after, and he does (Percy Jackson, the first book, if you must know), but I’m not running him through the wringer. No math flash cards or quizzes. Life is slower right now, and stranger, and I feel this mad pinball bounce of emotions: I go from panic to dread to a weird kind of giddy elation that has no comprehensible logic to it, and then I land on tired, and then I land on sad, and then I land on gratitude because if all else fails this has at least made me appreciate things more, and then I feel shitty for appreciating things more because this isn’t the time to appreciate anything, is it? Then I feel shitty for feeling shitty like, what is wrong with appreciation? What is wrong with finding joy? Guilt ensues. And a refutation of guilt. And a weird feeling of relief for the earth because I’ve seen photos of dolphins in Italy and I think back to the line I wrote in Wanderers (“Humankind was a disease. The earth was the body. Climate change was the fever. And in that fever, in that rising of global temperature, the earth was able to release new defenses.”) and then I just feel bad for writing that. AITA? Probably.
And so the drunken carousel of wildly-spinning emotions goes on, staffed by octopods, ridden by monkeys, narrated by a short-circuiting robot.
I’m not okay.
I’m not broken.
But I’m definitely, absolutely, unfuckwithably not okay.
And I’m going to let that be okay.
I hope you will, too.
These are weird days, friends. It’d be weird if you weren’t weird about that.
Carry on.
Here is a photo of a flower. Happy spring.
Anne Charnock: Five Things I Learned While Writing Bridge 108
Late in the twenty-first century, drought and wildfires prompt an exodus from southern Europe. When twelve-year-old Caleb is separated from his mother during their trek north, he soon falls prey to traffickers. Enslaved in an enclave outside Manchester, the resourceful and determined Caleb never loses hope of bettering himself.
After Caleb is befriended by a fellow victim of trafficking, another road opens. Hiding in the woodlands by day, guided by the stars at night, he begins a new journey—to escape to a better life, to meet someone he can trust, and to find his family. For Caleb, only one thing is certain: making his way in the world will be far more difficult than his mother imagined.
Told through multiple voices and set against the backdrop of a haunting and frighteningly believable future, Bridge 108 charts the passage of a young boy into adulthood amid oppressive circumstances that are increasingly relevant to our present day.
* * *
THE PERILS OF A MOSAIC NOVEL
Bridge 108 has six viewpoint characters, and the central story is about a young climate migrant who is trafficked into slavery in a post-Brexit England. As I tapped away at this novel, I wondered if the reader would confuse the different voices. I honestly didn’t think so—the characters themselves are distinct. However, when I’d finished the first full draft (I edit as I go along, so my first full draft is almost the done deal), I suspected I could do more to fine tune the six voices. Sure, at the end of the first draft they each had their own distinct vocabulary to match their background and personality, their own favoured profanities! But I felt I could do more.
In particular, I decided to further separate the voices of a twenty-something female trafficker, Skylark, from a thirty-something female illegal business operator, Ma Lexie. They had similar tough backgrounds though Ma Lexie had hoped to stay in education longer. My solution: when re-drafting Skylark’s chapter I adopted a prose style of long, meandering sentences to suggest her life of ‘ducking and weaving’ and her slightly more youthful, flitting mindset. Ma Lexie had experienced more hard knocks, and I shifted her voice to be a tad more clinical, to reflect her more strategic, more hard-headed approach to life.
TREASURE YOUR WRITING FAMILY
Bridge 108 is my fourth novel, and I now have more writing support than I had ten years ago. I knew no other fiction writers when I started writing my first novel, A Calculated Life. But I did have fantastic support close at hand. I relied heavily on my immediate family as first-readers. My husband is an ex-journalist, so he has a good eye. And our two sons gave me fantastic tips and advice based on their knowledge of the tech world, economics, maths and so on. With Bridge 108, once again they have all helped enormously. In addition, I could turn to my new writer friends to ask for help. It’s so important to have a writing family!
My advice to anyone asking for help from family, friends, writing colleagues, is to keep them posted on when your manuscript is likely to be ready for reading. Keep them updated if the schedule changes. Be flexible! If one of your readers has a time slot when they’ll be able to look over the manuscript, send them whatever you have, explaining it still needs some work/proofing etc. I wrote Bridge 108 to a tight deadline, and I am so incredibly grateful that my family and two close writer friends were prepared to read the completed manuscript as soon as it landed in their inboxes. Of course, I am ready to reciprocate! That’s how it works.
I CAN FEEL EMPATHY FOR A DESPICABLE CHARACTER
I admit I had mixed feelings about writing the character of Jaspar, the head of an enclave recycling clan. He enslaves migrants in his waste collection operation and at his recycling warehouse. See, I did not know if I could write a truly bad guy. Some of the characters in my earlier novels have appalling character traits, but none reach Jaspar’s levels of violent disregard for other people. Well, I needn’t have worried. I loved writing Jaspar’s viewpoint chapter and if anything it unnerved me how energised I felt in creating this despicable person. I shocked myself, and I feel his chapter is one of the strongest in Bridge 108. Having said that, there were aspects to Jaspar’s personality that struck me as endearing, even commendable. I feel that nuance is so important in creating believable characters.
I CAN ONLY WRITE FOR MYSELF
In the midst of drafting any novel, I can hear the critical voices of future readers, but I have learned to ignore them, especially so while writing Bridge 108. From the outset, I saw Bridge 108 as being more than ‘Caleb’s story’. I knew I’d become bored writing from his point of view for the entire novel – that’s just me, other writers might love to do exactly that. With the multiple voices, I could reveal more about how the enclaves operate, how the recycling clans operate in a shadow economy, how the state institutions exploit the climate migrants for economic gain, how each of my characters is both perpetrator and victim.
But throughout the many months of drafting and editing I could hear a future reader saying, “The story jumps around too much” or “I only want to know Caleb’s story”.
The fact is this: I can’t always give readers what they want! I have to trust my own writing instinct, stick to my own vision, and hope my novel that will be judged on its own terms.
CREATIVITY IS KEY, BUT SO TOO IS A WEIRD SPREADSHEETING
There’s a time for creativity—all that staring into thin air, imagining the next great twist in the plot, going with the writing flow etc—but there’s also a time for writing a journal, filling in spreadsheets and making checklists too. I love the beginning of a writing project when I buy an A4 hardback notebook (spending time choosing the colour!), which I use for sketching out ideas, working out timelines, outlining characters, etc. At the outset, I also set up two spreadsheets. In one spreadsheet I log my daily writing activity, specifying whether I’m outlining, drafting, editing, proofing, and adding my word count. I don’t stress about my word count (maybe a little), but I love to look back on a project to assess it in terms of cold metrics! Weird, I know. I also start a spreadsheet for the novel’s chapter-by-chapter story, with columns for chapter setting, chapter characters, story development, key events in the plot, additional notes, reminders for later edits. All gloriously colour coded. If I’m too tired to draft the next section of the novel, I joyously fill in my spreadsheets. Yes, definitely weird!
* * *
Following her education at the University of East Anglia, where she studied environmental sciences, Anne Charnock’s writing career began in journalism and her reports appeared in New Scientist, The Guardian, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and Geographical, among others. As a foreign correspondent, she traveled widely in the Middle East, Africa and India, and spent a year overlanding through Egypt, Sudan and Kenya with her journalist husband, Garry.
She went on to attend The Manchester School of Art, where she gained a Masters in Fine Art. Between art projects and exhibitions, she began writing her first novel, A Calculated Life, which she self-published. She signed a publishing deal with
47North for a new edition and, four months later, A Calculated Life was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award 2013 and for The 2013 Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award (Debut Novel).
Her second novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind (47North), is set in the past, present and future. The research for this novel took her to Shanghai and Suzhou in China, and to Florence and Bologna in Italy. The Guardian included this novel in “Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2015.” Her third novel, Dreams Before the Start of Time (47North), won the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association 2017 Award for Best Novel.
She returned to the world of A Calculated Life in writing the novella The Enclave (NewCon Press). This won the British Science Fiction Association 2017 Award for Best Short Fiction.
In 2017, she was delighted to become “interviewer in residence” for the Arthur C. Clarke Award as part of the award’s collaboration with the Ada Lovelace Day.
Anne Charnock: Website | Twitter
Bridge 108: Amazon
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Ann VanderMeer: Five Things I Learned Editing Avatars, Inc.
Mars 2080.
While on a mission to Mars in the year 2080, a young astronaut encounters a decommissioned robotic Avatar unit, partially buried in the Martian dust. She pops open the cranial casing to find its central processing chip, still intact. She holds the chip up to her visual display unit to reveal its contents. Within moments, she is flooded with what-seem-to-be “memories” from the life of the avatar. This is Avatar Inc’s 24th successful mission, as part of an overall campaign to physically retrieve, preserve and archive the memory cards from their most valuable robotic avatar units. They searched the world, and deep into the solar system, to acquire the chips that contain avatar memories spanning the 21st century. These are those memories.
Stories can heal and also bring us closer together, even when we’re miles apart
Even as we are faced with what seem to be insurmountable odds, the human spirit still rises to the occasion. Keep in mind that the avatars are controlled by humans. And they make mistakes but also decisions that help save lives even to their own detriment. I see this in Ken Liu’s “Uma,” when the person behind the maintenance avatar decides to go against protocol and save a family. I see it again in “Oannes, From the Flood” by Adrian Tchaikovsky, when people on an archaeological dig are faced with that same dilemma. What this tells me is that even in our most dire circumstances, our inclination is to do what we can to help others, no matter where they are or where they come from. Beyond the excitement of the gadgets, technology and devices, it is the human element that brings us all together.
This anthology is launching in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and each hour the news seems to be getting worse and worse. Some may think this is the wrong time to be reading stories. But I disagree. I see many people online posting and engaging with the stories. What better way to take a break and still connect with others? These connections make me hopeful for what can be.
Writers may veer from the original prompt but that’s ok
Establishing a prompt that is provided to each contributing writer is an important way to design a cohesive theme and an enjoyable experience for the readers, but you also don’t want to creatively hamper the writers or have the prompt be so limiting that you start to see repetition across the stories. For Avatars Inc, we noticed that writers slightly deviated from the original prompt, which forced us to take a hard look at the overall narrative of the campaign. We ended up adjusting the prompt in response to the authors’ interpretations, and we are thrilled with the result.
I know that sometimes giving more freedom to a writer can be a dangerous thing (insert smiley face here) but in this case, it was a marvelous idea that generated extraordinary fiction.
Science Fiction stories never cease to amaze me
I’ve spent the last few years heavily immersed in fantasy stories after editing THE BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION and THE TIME TRAVELER’S ALMANAC. Fantasy was a nice break for me. As I worked on Avatars Inc, I was reminded of why I love science fiction so very much. I feel challenged and comforted at the same time. How can that be? The stories in this anthology forced me to take a different look at the world as it is today, but also to feel hopeful that humanity will rise to the occasion to deal with complicated issues. Are all the futures generated in science fiction stories hopeful? Of course not. Right now, we’re inundated with dystopian fiction worldwide. But as long as we can reach for the stars, and writers keep sharing their vision of what could be, I can take comfort in that.
The relationship between Art and Science is getting stronger
I’ve always known there was a relationship between art and science. I’ve seen it while working on various projects in how writers approach their work, riffing off of current events and yet extrapolating into the future. And I am also seeing so many science experts reaching across the divide to include writers in storytelling, to help get messages across to the larger public. Just as many universities are having multidisciplinary conferences that bring scientists and artists together, organizations like XPRIZE also recognize this important relationship.
The Use of Avatars can be much greater and more creative than I ever thought possible
I was surprised by all the different ways avatars were being used in the stories. I knew there would be space stories, of course. But I never thought of crime scene cleanup, as an example, and it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Nino Cipri came up with that idea in their story “At the End of a Most Perfect Day.” I also was intrigued with Johanna Sinisalo’s story “A Bird Does Not Sing Because It Has an Answer.” We think in terms of using avatars to go where it would be dangerous for humans. However, in this story the avatar is adopted because humans are dangerous to the natural world! And in “La Mer Donne” by Sarah Pinsker, the avatar is operated for weather reporting in the middle of a storm. Living in Florida, I am very used to seeing reporters trying to stay put on solid ground while a storm whips around them. I expect that, just as I was surprised to read about novel avatar use-cases in the stories, that I will also be surprised to see what teams are developing as part of the real-life ANA Avatar XPRIZE.
* * *
Over a 30-year career, Ann VanderMeer has won numerous awards for her editing work, including the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award. Whether as editor-in-chief for Weird Tales for five years or in her current role as an acquiring editor for Tor.com, Ann has built her reputation on acquiring fiction from diverse and interesting new talents. As co-founder of Cheeky Frawg Books, she has helped develop a wide-ranging line of mostly translated fiction. Featuring a who’s who of world literature, Ann’s anthologies include the critically acclaimed Best American Fantasy series, The Weird, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, Sisters of the Revolution, The Big Book of Science Fiction, The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, and the forthcoming Big Book of Modern Fantasy (Vintage).
Avatars, Inc.: Digital anthology (free)!
March 18, 2020
The Ghost Of Normalcy Lingering Past Its Time
Everything seems mostly normal.
And it’s that word, that one word — “mostly” — that’s getting me.
A day begins, a day ends. Cars go past. Some cyclists, too. I make breakfast, I write some things, I make dinner, the family tosses a baseball around the yard. And then while we’re out there playing baseball, a plane goes overhead, and I make a quick joke to my wife and son — “Now, those people really know how to win at social distancing.” Because, y’know, forget six feet. They’re up in the sky and we’re on the ground. Only people doing it better are the people on the ISS, right?
But that joke, it’s not a normal joke. It’s normal to make jokes, to be clear; in times of standard operating procedure and in times of tumult, we make jokes. Light-hearted jokes and gallows humor alike. It wasn’t the joking — it was the joke.
That wasn’t a joke I could’ve made two weeks ago.
Shit, maybe even a week ago.
I wouldn’t have understood it. It wasn’t a thing. And now, it’s a thing.
A week ago, we went out to breakfast with a couple friends, and even though things were starting to get a little weird (my son’s school closed for a day due to “The Rona,” or are we calling it “The Cove?”) we still felt, you know, fairly normal. The blips and glitches in everything felt expected and unexceptional in the sense we knew we lived in strange times, what with the unbridled fuckery of the Trump Era, and we’d grown accustomed to those little bumpy hitches and pulled stitches. But now, looking back, that breakfast feels somehow indulgent. Like we didn’t appreciate it enough. And we don’t know when, or even how, a breakfast like that will happen again.
That’s what gets me, most. It’s that we’re living presently beneath a veneer, a shiny shellacking, of normal. Are things broken? No, not yet. Will they break? Probably somewhat, though to what extent, who can say? But right now we’re still in this interstitial space where things feel mostly normal, until something hits us that really, really doesn’t feel normal at all. A photo of emptied shelves, a cart full of toilet paper (stop hoarding toilet paper, by the way, you’re not going to poop more in the apocalypse, settle down), a picture of the stock market, a mumbly-mouthed presser with Trump, a new picture of the stock market as it plunges during his mumbly-mouthed nonsense, and then a Facetime call between kids because they can’t see each other, and then an e-mail from a local business about how they’re weathering the quarantine, then the quiet fear that the ground is shifting underneath your feet in a way that is as-yet-unperceived, a silent and unmoving earthquake, as much spiritual and emotional as anything else —
And then you look back outside. Cars and cyclists. Birds birbing. A plane overhead.
It feels normal, but that seems like an illusion. Like you can run your hand right through it — passing your fingers through a ghost. I suspect the illusion will continue. Until it doesn’t. How long will it be before something I did today feels rare, like a gift I didn’t appreciate enough at the time?
I think we’ll be fine, of course.
Not now. Maybe not soon. But eventually, eventually, we’ll be fine.
And eventually, we’ll find a new normal, whatever that will be.
Bit Of News, Couple Of Sales, Yadda Yadda
[image error]HEY Y’ALL, it’s me, your Pandemic Pal, your Apocalypse Acquaintance, your Coronavirus Cohort, your Quarantine… uhh, Qu… Quester? Fuck, I don’t know.
Anyway! Just some quick bits while we all hide in our submarines and spaceships:
First up, if you need a little escapism, here’s a 50% off coupon for both of my Mookie Pearl books — use coupon code MOOKIEPEARL to get 50% off both — EDIT: I’m taking this down for now because Paypal is losing its fucking mind. I’m getting email after email of payment, and then payment canceled, and then again and again. I’ll look into it. Sigh.
If you’re into a more cathartic kind of “escapism,” then WANDERERS is now dropped a bit in e-book to $11.99 over at Amazon.
And you can find me at SyFy talking about the book and our, uhhh, current level of fuckery? Both how the book compares to reality and also about hope and community and stuff.
In other news:
MY WRITING SHED IS DONE. Needs to earn its final permit, and then I’ll snap pics and point out the trapdoors (information only available to subscribers).
That’s it for now, I guess.
And here I ask, anything I can do for you? How are you all doing? Would you like it if I did a kind of AMA here? I’m starting to wrangle some “online appearances” upcoming — some digital panels and podcasty things. But what else can I do for you? I want to be of service in this dark time.
Meanwhile:
Here is a dog.
March 13, 2020
Wanderers News, When Wanderers Also Sort of IS The News?
The question is, is it glib to announce book news now? Is it gauche or otherwise in bad taste? What if that book is a book that… sometimes eerily mirrors the reality in which we’re living? Does that make it better, worse, or just weirder?
I have no idea! As I said yesterday on Twitter, this all feels like a slow-motion 9/11. Like we’re watching the planes hit, frame by frame, stretched out, instead of all at one time. But it’s also the aftermath of it, too, as if time itself has run together like wet paint.
Still. All I know is this: I’m a writer and I write books and this is what I do, and in the absence of much else, I’m gonna keep on writing books and editing books and talking about the books I have out in the world. Because otherwise I’ll just panic-eat cookies all day.
So, with that said, some book-ish news —
First, the slightly bad news: my next novel, The Book of Accidents, won’t be out this summer, as predicted. We talked about moving it to the fall, but given what is potentially to come in November, we felt it better to just… get out of the way of that trolley problem now, and move the book into 2021. I believe the expected publication date on that book is now July, 2021.
That said, the Wall Street Journal talks about how readers are, in the midst of COVID19, eagerly consuming pandemic fiction — and Wanderers gets a (fairly spoilery!) shout-out.
And I offered some brief thoughts at The Portalist about what it is to find hope in end-of-the-world stories. You can also find Mike Chen there, who would’ve been with me at the Tucson Book Fest. And here I remind you that with a lot of book events being canceled (see below for more about that), it’s a nice time to support indie bookstores and authors. Certainly I don’t mean to suggest it is your responsibility, as the difficulties going forward are likely to impact us all, but creative folks and the marketplaces for their work are often closer to the razor’s edge. The good news is, books make for an excellent dry good to stock up on for all your doomsday prepping needs! Bookshop.org (in beta) and indiebound.org are good places to start, but also I remind you that many, many indie bookstores will also sell and ship direct. Also note that another alternative (as with restaurants) is buying gift certificates from local stores to give flagging income a little goose.
(*honk*)
ANYWAY.
Finally, I can also announce that Wanderers is coming out in paperback!
If you want a little publishing industry inside baseball —
Because the book has done so well in its run so far (seriously, thank you, everyone), the initial paperback plan was to release it one year after hardcover, in July. And then I was going to maybe round that out with some bookstore and con events. But at this point, since all of that is suddenly fraught, Del Rey wisely decided to bump the paperback release sooner.
In the UK, it’ll be out on May 14th.
And in the US, it’ll be out May 19th.
Bonus: in the US it’s getting a revised cover:
* * *
WANDERERS: A Novel, out now.
A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. An astonishing tapestry of humanity that Harlan Coben calls “a suspenseful, twisty, satisfying, surprising, thought-provoking epic.”
A sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America. The real danger may not be the epidemic, but the fear of it. With society collapsing—and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers and the shepherds who guide them depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.
Print: Indiebound | B&N | BAM | Amazon
eBook: Amazon | Apple Books | B&N | Kobo | Google Play | BAM
March 11, 2020
Anonymous: “I Got Swabbed For Covid-19 Today”
So, let’s say this up front: this post is not from me, but from a friend. A friend who wanted this kept anonymous due to — well, not just the Internet, I’m sure, but friends and family. You are wise not to trust this, because it’s an account from a person you don’t know, a person without a name. I know them. And I trust them. And this story isn’t even that salacious or terrifying, except for me in a kind of subtle, dystopian way. This person asked if I could post this somewhere, and so here I am, posting it.
* * *
I got swabbed for covid-19 today.
I went in to my rheumatologist for a routine appointment, and at admission, I was asked if I’d had any of the symptoms listed on the wall. As it happens, I’ve had a very mild fever (between normal and 99.6) off and on since Feb. 20 (it’s March 10 as I write this, so 18 days), and a cough intermittently for even longer —but I have asthma, I have a cough a lot of the time.
So I told the nice woman manning the desk. She very apologetically gave me a paper surgical mask, then told me to sit in the waiting room. Some time later, I was told to go into an exam room to wait instead.
Even later still, a PA came in with gloves, a gown, a surgical mask and visor, awkwardly tried to take my temperature without holding the thermometer, and when it fell out of the sleeve and onto the ground, she gave up. Then she said my rheumatologist would call me later, and I should go to urgent care to be tested. She gave me a bad photocopy showing three locations where testing for coronavirus was already set up.
When I left, all of the desk staff were wearing masks. They hadn’t been before.
Let me back up. I’m absolutely confident I don’t have coronavirus at this time. If nothing else, I have a pretty bad immune system, am on immunosuppressants, and suffer some comorbidities — I would expect to be much sicker than this.
OK, so, not especially sick, but I try to do the right thing. And so in the interest of public health, and feeling slightly ridiculous, I went to urgent care.
I put my mask back on, went in, waited for a while as the patient in front of my finished checking out. They were not wearing masks at this urgent care.
When I explained why I was there, the receptionist told me to go sit in my car and call her. So I did. I was checked in, she told me there were five patients ahead of me, and she’d call when it was time for me to come in.
OK. Abundance of caution. Also very, very frightening. I watched people around me come and go. I wondered if it was OK to have my car windows open or not.
An hour and change later, I called again from the parking lot wondering what my ETA was. She told me I was still behind five other patients — they had been waiting on a delivery of gowns — but there was no wait at an associated urgent care facility seven minutes away.
Fine. I went.
This place let me wait in the waiting room until I was called. Half the front desk staff had masks, but not everyone.
When I was called, the nice woman in a gown, gloves, and mask but no visor took my blood pressure and temperature (99), then swabbed both nostrils with the same two Q-tips (deeply uncomfortable but not painful.) “I’ve been testing for two or three days and haven’t seen any come back yet,” she said. “So it may be a while.”
I laughed. “So I should hear in, what, a week?”
“You’re optimistic,” she said. Then she sent me on my way.
I stopped at the front desk about my copay. “Should I pay here, or…?” I asked. I gestured at my mask. Handing over a credit card didn’t seem like the best idea.
The front desk staff consulted with each other and shrugged. “You can pay,” one said.
That seemed… wrong. Unhygienic. “Are you sure? I don’t want to…”
“We can bill you,” the other one said. “Have a nice day.”
Here are some things I have learned:
* When you are already short of breath, wearing a mask makes it worse.
* When you are already kinda freaked out, waiting alone in your car makes it worse.
* There is wildly inconsistent medical practice on protocols to prevent transmission.
All of these things are going to need to be addressed. The first two because the more isolating, uncomfortable, and flat out terrifying the experience of getting tested is, the less likely people are going to follow through. Note that there were several steps in here where I could have just not done my civic duty and no one would be the wiser.
And the third is a problem for obvious reasons. If even people working on the front lines aren’t taking consistent steps against transmission, what hope do the rest of us have?
This is going to be rough, friends. Take care of yourselves, wash your hands, and flattenthecurve.com.
So, You’re Working From Home!
[image error]HELLO [work_from_home_user], I SEE YOU HAVE BEEN QUARANTINED DUE TO [current_pandemic] AND ARE NOW SEEKING INSTRUCTIONS.
GOOD NEWS, FELLOW HOMEWORK CITIZEN. I HAVE BEEN — *clears throat* — sorry, I’ve been in these here freelance mines for oh, about 22 years now, and so I am glad to share any lessons I’ve learned along the way regarding the brave, surreal act of working from home.
Let’s just get this out of the way up front: I am no expert on this, except I am, and you should listen to me, or you’ll die. It’s dangerous to go alone, except you’re going alone, and only I can save you. *checks notes* Okay, my lawyer informs me it is not best to paint myself as an “expert” or “cult leader” in this regard, so I will add the legal disclaimer that I am not an expert, but please see my vigorous winking, wink wink wink, so you know that really, you can trust me, and only me, forever.
Anyway.
Your biggest problem right up front is a bifold peril — and you will be tempted to fall one of two ways off this horse.
The first way is this:
You will fall entirely into work. You have uploaded WORK into HOME and now, everything is work. You will start work early. You will end work but then go back to it after dinner, maybe before bed, maybe at 3AM, because you’re floating in a sensory deprivation tank of PURE, MERCILESS WORK. You’re the seven dwarves now, it’s all hi-ho hi-ho until death. Worklife has no margins. It is a land without borders and you will wander it aimlessly. And worse, your employers will smell this on you like the stench of slick, fresh fearsweat, and they’ll encourage this behavior. “Hey, can you send me that file?” your boss asks you at like, 6AM, 6PM, 9:30PM, whatever. Because the boundaries of work-home have now been chewed to dust by the termites of our current apocalyptic moment.
The second way is:
You will not be able to summon the discipline to work. Listen, being at home is — well, c’mon, it’s cozy. Cozy as hell. You have everything there! Why would you ever leave your home? You have, probably, I’m guessing, ALL THE MUSIC, and ALL THE MOVIES, and ACCESS TO DAMN NEAR ANY BOOK YOU HAVE EVER WANTED and haha, woo boy, it’s hard to summon the ability to commit to actual effort when you could just eat candy on the couch. Have you ever just sat on a couch, eating candy? Not doing anything else, just peacefully staring forward and eating candy? It’s great. It’s fucking great. Why would you work on a spreadsheet when you have a book to read? Your comfortable home bubble refuses to be punctured by the needle of work. It is turgid and unyielding and your recreation will not be denied, goddamnit.
So, your fight will be against endless work… versus no work at all. Your job will be to live in the interstitial terrain where even though you are ensconced at home, you can still create a work perimeter — a safe summoning circle in which wrestle your employment demons.
And in that vein, then, here are some tips. These tips are not facts, they are just my opinions, just the way I deal with things. And certainly my job — sorry, “job” — is less strident than standard employment. I’m ruined for public life. I’m basically a creepy magical hermit at this point. So, you are wise to distrust me.
Still. Tips. Let’s have at them.
Sure, you can masturbate. I know. I know! It’s rude to be talking this way but listen, we’d be foolish not to acknowledge the self-pleasuring elephant in the room. You’re home. Jacking or jilling it is a good stress reliever and an immune-booster, so you can do it. And it’s not like you can do it at work usually, so take the tiny salacious bump in your dopamine levels as you perform the illicit act of getting paid to tickle your bits.
Set clear boundaries. Boundaries mean time and place. That means start your day at a time, have lunch at a time, end it at a time. If your boss calls outside this time, you answer it and say, THE OFFICE IS CLOSED in a nasally voice, then drop your phone in an aquarium. Also buy an aquarium, fish are very relaxing. Place also matters — if you have a home office space, use it. If not, try not to make a too-comfy place your office space. No bed, no couch, no sex furniture, whatever. (Wait, do people not have sex furniture? Hm.) Dining room table is… enngh, okay if you gotta, but the ideal is to keep your routine home space relegated to home activities. Again, form that work perimeter. It’s like caging a T.Rex. Don’t let it out, or it’ll eat all your goats. (Wait, do people not have goats?)
Ergonomics. I’m gonna guess your job involves computers and desks and whatever — it’s not like you can be a coal miner and work from home. This shit ain’t Minecraft. So, ergonomics are going to be a thing. You will really dork up your back and neck if you don’t protect your haggard, bent prole-body. For the first several years of my freelance life I did not pay so much attention to this, and turns out, that’s not good for you. Once I concentrated on it, I eradicated endemic back pain I was having. All because I was sitting poorly. (Given that this is my professional life, I bought a very nice chair, a Steelcase Leap, which really helped. This is outside the range of what is likely cost-effective or normal if you do not intend to stay home for a long period of your work life.)
Those boundaries don’t need to be too strict. I see some folks advocating for strict adherence to work life protocol — like, say, dress for work. I’m pretty agnostic on this point and feel like, working from home should have some benefits, and one of those benefits is like, fuck yeah I’m wearing pajamas. If I have to Skype, I’ll put on a shirt and comb my hair, but you go to hell if you think I’m putting on pants for you, Dave. Working from home is still often more fun than working from an office, so you don’t need to make it a punishment. PANTS ARE A TOOL OF THE OPPRESSOR.
The blood must flow. Get up. It’s like washing your hands — make it a part of your routine. Move the blood around. Have some hand weights nearby. Take a walk, go for a run, take a bike ride. Take breaks and move your slugabed body around. Slosh your viscera. That shit needs to move or it calcifies. Bonus: blood flow moves blood to your brain, and your brain is where all the thinky thoughts happen. Blood makes the grass grow, or something, shut up. Move your blood. Get some sun. Listen to birds. Birds don’t give a fuck, they’ll just tweet and twoot and it’s nice, a good reminder that there is an existence beyond your own computer screen, your own anxiety.
Eatin’ good in the neighborhood. No, that doesn’t mean to eat Applebee’s, settle down. God, why would you do that? Though, I guess Applebee’s is not an uncommon work lunch joint. Anyway. Point is, don’t eat poorly whilst on your WORKHOME SOJOURN. Good, healthy snacks: nuts, jerky, fruits. Have you had an apple? They’re great. No to Applebees, but yes to apples. If you eat a lot of heavy carbs, or snack a lot, your brain will jog through concrete, and that makes work harder.
Beware your internet habits. These days, social media and the internet is a slick-lubed flume ride that will have you swiftly descending into a timeless, panic-fueled void. Now, to be fair, if you were a person with a computer in an office, this was a problem then, as well as now. And we all have a Panic Rectangle in our pockets to check like a rat hungry for its electric shock. Good news! At home, you might be able to install a product like Freedom, or I think there’s one called Cold Turkey? Point is, you can be proactive in dialing back your internet habits if you feel like that’s a problem for you.
Habit trackers are fine! Your schedule will feel a bit topsy-turvy. This will feel like a new normal. Nothing wrong with tracking your habits in a journal, or on a whiteboard, or carved into the walls of your cell. Something just to give you a sense of how much time you need to allocate to different things, and how certain habits have shifted.
Take sensible breaks. I like to work for 45 minutes, then break for 15.
See people. Unless you don’t like people, in which case, relish in your introversion and become the cave monster you have longed to be. But more seriously, social contact isn’t the worst thing, even if it’s Facetime or whatever. Just check in. Together, but separately!
Listen, hear me out: coffee coffee coffee. Failing that, tea. I brew my own pot. I bring it with me into the office with a mug. I guard it with a spear. I drink it and snarl.
Be forthright. Tell your employers when you’re having a problem or difficulty adjusting. Also tell your family. Don’t suffer alone. Not that I think working from home is suffering! For me, it’s amazing. But it will take some adjustment for some, and extroverts may find it hard. Just let people know.
Reclaim travel time. If you drove 30 minutes each way into work, don’t add that into your work time. Why do that to yourself? Use it similarly. Use it for books or audiobooks. For making yourself a healthy lunch. For playing video games, I dunno. Don’t give those minutes back to THE MAN, man.
Daydream. Real-talk, work is hard, the world is literal batshit right now, and so take a little time to just sit and let your brain percolate. Not in an anxious way — but willfully daydream, or meditate. Seriously. Deep breathing. Think about awesome stuff. Find grace and gratitude in quiet moments. Then masturbate one more time, for good measure.
And that’s it.
If you have more tips or tricks, toss them in the comments below.
* * *
WANDERERS: A Novel, out now.
A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. An astonishing tapestry of humanity that Harlan Coben calls “a suspenseful, twisty, satisfying, surprising, thought-provoking epic.”
A sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America. The real danger may not be the epidemic, but the fear of it. With society collapsing—and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers and the shepherds who guide them depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.
Print: Indiebound | Let’s Play Books (signed) | The Signed Page | B&N | BAM | Amazon
eBook: Amazon | Apple Books | B&N | Kobo | Google Play | BAM
March 5, 2020
Sadly, I’m Not Headed To The Tucson Book Festival
[image error]It is with great reluctance and sadness that I’m letting you know I won’t be attending one of my favorite events, the Tucson Book Festival, next week. The desire to go is high — but I decided to withdraw for a few reasons:
First, as someone who has been prone to pneumonia in the past, I’m not exactly giddy over the idea of catching COVID-19 or even the flu that is currently spiking there — nor do I want to bring that home to my family or other vulnerable members of my local community (family, friends, school). And traveling to Tucson for me means three airpots, and four plane flights, plus hotel and such. I tend to get sick most trips, somewhat, and in fact last time I went to Tucson I came back with the flu, which progressed to pneumonia (“flumonia!”), which was my second bout with it that year. (And I gave the flu to my family. Oops?) It’s not that I expect to die (though, do we ever?), but I also will have a difficult time reckoning with a serious respiratory illness.
Second, the coronavirus is daily a rapidly shifting situation and one that remains… a little bit mysterious. For every answer, we find out two more questions about it, and though the severity is hoped to be less, we just can’t say with any certainty what this will do. The concern is multiplied by the fact our own country seems to be largely rudderless — the only trickle-down that’s happening here is the trickle of information we’re getting. While that doesn’t mean we should all panic and gargle hand sanitizer until we yarf, it probably merits caution in the sense that maybe we cut out some non-essential things. My wife was already a little freaked out with me going. So.
Third, the author panels I was on were already cut in half — a number of authors had already opted not to go on advice from family, publisher, doctors, etc.
Fourth, I’ve had some fans express reservations about going, but still wanted to go to see me… which is great, but then that makes me feel bad because I don’t want you to put yourself in harm’s way (or anxiety’s way) just to see me or get a book signed.
Fifth and finally, I’m an anxious lad who wrote a book about a pandemic.
So, with that said, I’m so sorry I won’t see you there.
I am as always glad to try to send bookplates, either to the festival in my stead, or to you directly. And certainly I hope the festival would consider having me back again in the future.
Thanks!
Be well, and wash your hands.
(No, wash them again.)
(AND STOP TOUCHING YOUR FACE, CARL.)
February 28, 2020
So, You Wrote About A Pandemic (Book Club Answers For Wanderers)
It’s weird right now, having written a big-ass pandemic book during the time of a potential pandemic. Obviously, what we’re dealing with now doesn’t compare with the disease(s?) inside Wanderers, and thankfully so — but it is sometimes a wee bit spooky to see the comparisons, and —
Ah, now is when I tell you this post is about to get a bit spoilery? Because by its nature, it must.
So let’s just put some spoiler space in the form of a novel quote from the utterly bananapants book, Finnegan’s Wake, by James Joyce — after the Joyce passage, THERE BE SPOILERDRAGONS.
haunt of the hungred bordles, as it is told me. Shop Illicit,
flourishing like a lordmajor or a buaboabaybohm, litting flop
a deadlop (aloose!) to lee but lifting a bennbranch a yardalong
(Ivoeh!) the breezy side (for showm!), the height of Brew-
ster’s chimpney and as broad below as Phineas Barnum; humph-
ing his share of the showthers is senken on him he’s such a
grandfallar, with a pocked wife in pickle that’s a flyfire and three
lice nittle clinkers, two twilling bugs and one midgit pucelle.
And aither he cursed and recursed and was everseen doing what
your fourfootlers saw or he was never done seeing what you cool-
pigeons know, weep the clouds aboon for smiledown witnesses,
and that’ll do now about the fairyhees and the frailyshees.
Though Eset fibble it to the zephiroth and Artsa zoom it round
her heavens for ever. Creator he has created for his creatured
ones a creation. White monothoid? Red theatrocrat? And all the
pinkprophets cohalething? Very much so! But however ’twas
’tis sure for one thing, what sherif Toragh voucherfors and
Mapqiq makes put out, that the man, Humme the Cheapner,
Esc, overseen as we thought him, yet a worthy of the naym,
came at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroqial
fermament one tide on another, with a bumrush in a hull of a
wherry, the twin turbane dhow, The Bey for Dybbling, this
archipelago’s first visiting schooner, with a wicklowpattern
waxenwench at her prow for a figurehead, the deadsea dugong
updipdripping from his depths, and has been repreaching him-
self like a fishmummer these siktyten years ever since, his shebi
by his shide, adi and aid, growing hoarish under his turban and
changing cane sugar into sethulose starch (Tuttut’s cess to him!)
as also that, batin the bulkihood he bloats about when innebbi-
ated, our old offender was humile, commune and ensectuous
from his nature, which you may gauge after the bynames was
put under him, in lashons of languages, (honnein suit and
praisers be!) and, totalisating him, even hamissim of himashim
that he, sober serious, he is ee and no counter he who will be
ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Eden-
borough.
AH, good, there we go.
As I was saying, it’s a bit eerie some of the similarities. Black Swan event. AI prediction models. Election year with one candidate being a belligerent bigoted businessman. Rise of white supremacy. Incompetence and indolence from the top-down responses. Asymptomatic transmission of a cold-like sickness. Zoonotic jump from, theoretically, bats. Drones. And so on.
I was in many ways attempting to write about 2016, but ended up writing about 2020.
(I also didn’t expect people to still be reading it by this point, but it seems like more people are reading it now, not fewer. I do like to think the book lends hope and light to a dark situation, even if it’s not precisely a “happy” book. Plus, sometimes if you’re scared of sharks, you read about sharks.)
Regardless, I sometimes get questions about the book, and I’m not always able to answer them all — but I did get a small battery of questions from a friend for their book club, and further, I figured I could source a few more questions from social media.
So, I’mma answer some Qs with some As and we’ll see where we land.
Again, as above, WHO RULES SPOILERTOWN, MASTER WENDIG RULES SPOILERTOWN.
If you had to describe Black Swan as a character, how would you describe it?
Oooh. Oh. Hmm. That’s a curious question because ultimately, Black Swan is a character, and the description of it is… spread out all across the book, as prose ejecta. Is it ultimately good, or bad? I don’t know. Is it utilitarian? Almost surely. A bit narcissistic? In its way. I don’t even know if I can pin down its D&D alignment? Lawful evil? Chaotic good? True neutral? Hmm.
As a reader, I really enjoyed how the pacing of the novel was a reflection of what was happening in the novel itself – i.e. slow when the characters were feeling the slog of the long walk and fast when the action was quick and (perhaps) overwhelming to the characters. Was this an intentional crafting choice of yours as an author?
Yes, to some degree — I think action and event is married to prose in its shape and tenor. Not to say you can’t do interesting things by making, say, a thriller scene feel slow, or a slow scene feel tense, but those are tricks more than they are trade, maybe. If I’m to take people on a journey, then the goal is for the writing to match the shape and the speed of each step of that journey.
Part of this too is just rhythm — music is best when it isn’t just one thing over and over again. A meal is best when it’s not one food on our plate. Which calls to mind that study they did as to why we always have room for dessert — it’s sensory-specific satiety. We tire of the same thing again and again, but when you change it up, our brain craves it.
This is true, I think, in fiction as it is with music, or food, or anything.
We need that rhythm change — we need slow parts and fast parts, we need humor and horror, we need a lot of different flavors and feelings. And the bonus with going slow and taking your time in certain books is that you’re filling up the room with pure oxygen, and it’s that oxygen which neatly ignites and allows us to blow shit up. The creation of tension isn’t in the blowing-up-of-stuff, but rather, in the filling up of oxygen — or, more crassly, the tension isn’t lightning the match, but watching one person get splashed with gasoline as another with an unlit match stalks nearby. Further, the more we can give ourselves time to care about characters, the more we actually worry about them.
Storytellers are monsters.
How was the title chosen? Can you discuss its meanings for you as an author?
Its original title was “Exeunt,” which is a fancy Shakespearean word that means Exit, or Egress. An eschatalogical word — the eschaton of leaving this world.
It’s a cool title.
It’s also an awful title. Nobody could pronounce it. Nobody could spell it.
So, we ached over titles and this idea of those who wander are not lost became a thing — the Sleepwalker flock walkers have purpose. They’re not lost. Even as the rest of the country most certainly is.
How important was it for you as the author to make the Shana character a female character? What went into that decision?
I don’t know, exactly — she always was who she was. It felt right. But I was also conscious of making the rest of the cast more inclusive, as well — though I don’t think inclusion stops at white dude authors like me, and is best when it’s about way more than characters on a page (meaning, about people working across the industry, about broad author inclusion, about embracing all readers).
I think there’s still value in it because, hey, if this thing gets made into a movie, maybe you see that inclusion translate to actors and roles on screen, too.
How did you decide who would “make it” in the end (i.e. live)?
I decided early on that I wouldn’t decide this until the end. Usually with a book I know my ending pretty much down to the paragraph, though certainly I’m able to and willing to change that if I see a better “exit” off the highway, so to speak. But this one was way more intuitive. Whole book was like that. I outline nearly all my books but this one did not have so robust an outline. It was definitely more feeling my way through the darkness of a night-time forest.
As to how I ultimately decided that, I am honestly a coward, and more survived than I expected. But part of this too is that I think it’s interesting when characters live — not just in a shit, I chickened out way, but their continued existence is a complication, whereas their death is a solution. It’s a finality — a door closed. I like them left alive. It’s more interesting to watch them deal with the world and their choices instead of knocking them off the chess board. Because stories aren’t chess.
Would you be wiling to talk a bit about the intersection of art and politics from your point of view as an artist?
This is one of those big unruly questions that has no great answer. I think all stories and all art are political, not in that they must include modern politics as in conservative and liberal parties and votes and processes and such — but at the base level, the politics of people interacting with people, people interacting with systems that govern them, people dealing with the power they possess and the power that rules over them in a socio-political way. Once upon a time, some ding-dong on Twitter challenged me to explain, gotcha-style, how THE THREE LITTLE PIGS was a political story, because of course it could never be.
You can find that thread here.
But the tl;dr is, it’s hella political.
All things are. Even attempting to write something apolitical is itself political — you’re a fish swimming in water who doesn’t know what “water” is. Just because you’re ignorant of it doesn’t mean you’re not soaking in it, and further, choosing what “politics” to keep out means some politics are left in. You just don’t see it because it’s wallpaper to you — it’s your chosen decor, and so it doesn’t contrast with or disrupt your comfort levels.
So, do you have to be political? No. But you will be, anyway.
So you might as well think about it and be willful in your narrative choices.
As it stands, Wanderers is more explicitly political because it includes actual American politics, as it’s about America, and there’s an election. How the hell would I tell that story and not be staring down the double-barrel of American politics?
Who is your favorite character in the book and why?
HARDEST QUESTION EVER. Easy to say I don’t have one, but I do — it just changes from time to time. They’re all glorious disaster children. I can say with clarity though that Pete Corley was the most fun to write, because any time you have someone who is a force of chaos, you end up with interesting choices and with someone who jukes left whenever regular people would go right.
And now, let’s move on to some social media questions! (Some of these are paraphrased, but I’ve linked to the original tweet asking the Q.)
I’ve always maintained that if sales supported it and the story demanded it (meaning, I had a story in mind), I’d write a sequel. *furtive glances*
The book is in fact made of cocaine, and I hope Cassie is okay. Maybe we’ll find out some day.
I don’t mind the comment, I’m just glad people are reading the book. Like I said, I wasn’t trying to write a warning about 2020, I was trying to write about 2016, and also about… like, history. I mean, it’s a little eerie that some of this stuff has lined up how it has, but I also didn’t just pull this stuff out of the clouds. The trick, I guess, was in the arrangement.
When you were sketching out the book, did you have an inkling it was going to be an epic tome?
(No link, because sourced from FB.)
I had a pretty good idea it would be long, but I figured like, 150-175k, not 280,000 words. Oops? It just kept getting bigger and bigger and then I blew my first deadline and ahahaha oh shit. Thankfully, the publisher was cool with it. All of it. Wonderful publisher, amazing editor in Tricia (Narwani).
The book is the length that it needs to be. Stories are like that, sometimes. It’s not about filling space — but about growing to the size that accommodates the story.
I mean, I don’t really worry about that sort of thing — Aftermath taught me I was gonna catch shit for whatever I wrote anyway, just for the gall of including different types of people in the GFFA, and I figured if I was going to write about this kind of thing, you can’t avoid it. I grew up in a gun-totin’ family, my father was a gunsmith, and so I’m comfortable with guns — and the protagonists in the book are wont to use them when necessary, too. It’s the characters in the book (and the people in reality) who fetishize those firearms, who think their right to carry a military-grade rifle is more than the right of someone to not get shot by one, that you need to worry about.
Not to endeavor to “both sides” this thing, but it’s always interesting to me when people come into the reviews of this book to claim, I dunno, I hate Republicans and love Democrats — I did endeavor to give some nuance and depth to that, and ensure that the Democratic president was not particularly effective in her leadership during this thing, and that politics as a whole was standing in the way of good science. And I also see reviews that say I’m demonizing Christians, even though two of the protagonists are Christian characters — one, admittedly, gets a bit suckered in by the Evangelical white supremacy going on, but that’s not an indictment against Christianity, just a particular brand of it. And that’s ultimately the thing — I suspect anybody who feels attacked by this book feels that way because they’ve recognized something of themselves in the antagonists. Which is to say, they’ve seen white supremacy, which is at the heart one of the big thematic enemies of the book.
That’s not really an answer to the question, I guess. Mostly for me it’s about letting characters be characters and not mouthpieces. Some people will still see them as mouthpieces, and I can’t help that, but I endeavored not to make it that way.
I mean, it’s not supernatural, but it is firmly in the realm of imaginative science-fiction — so, the answer is in the book (it’s the nanites, silly), but it’s definitely a more science-fictiony answer and less a science-y answer. It’s make-believe. But the key part of make-believe is… making you believe.
So hopefully I did that.
At the end of the day it’s all as the narrative dictates — the whole thing is creative license because if it weren’t, it’d be non-fiction. But there are ways to make it work, I think, to make it seem real, and part of that is a sort of connect the dots process that goes like this:
You have to tell three true things before you tell one false thing. And those things, the three truths and one lie, connect. If I’m going to make up this weird science behind this, I need real science to back it up, so I have to find facts that move in the direction of what I want, so when I take the leap to the lie (aka the fiction), it feels like a natural course. It feels like instead of just making up something out of nowhere, I’ve given you three stepping stones, and on the fourth stepping stone, I’ve simply chosen to direct you to a nearby lie instead of the next truth.
So, if something feels too out of line, too impossible to connect to the chain of true things, it becomes magic, and then it’s not really science-fiction anymore. But even with magic, in fantasy, you still have to draw that line to make everything feel organic and connected.
That was a hard section to write and there was some question as to whether it should remain. At the end we decided it should remain for a handful of reasons. First, I wrote the assault from the victim’s POV, so I did my best to center it that way. Second, it wasn’t written to be lurid or sexy, as sometimes those scenes are. Third, I do feel like male sexual assault scenes are not common, and they’re often written in a way that feels like an attack against women, but assaults on men happen, too, and I felt like maybe there was some value in centering that fact. Fourth, you know, thematically and metaphorically there’s something to be said about what happens there, about how Matthew is used, about how his faith is used, about who Ozark is and what he represents and, ultimately, about the dynamics of power and the dangerous crossroads of white supremacy and vicious masculinity.
What was your research process like, and how long did It take?
A lot of it was a kind of rolling research — I was reading about this stuff already because I was fascinated in it. A lot of it was just reading books and asking questions, which is admittedly super-boring sounding, but BOOKS and QUESTIONS are kind of the best weapons in a writer’s arsenal. But I did take a road trip, too, to get a flavor for some of the places and routes they’d be traveling.
Bats are wonderful, necessary creatures that get a bad rap — technically, and again, spoilers here, but what’s in Wanderers is not actually a bat virus but actually something modeled off of white-nose syndrome, a fungus that affects and kills bats, but that also has cousins that kill snakes and frogs and such. You think we’re not ready for a virus? Hahaha, you better hope we don’t meet a fungus we can’t beat. Because we really don’t know how to beat them easily. Anyway. Bats are great, they’re not cauldrons of disease or anything, but our intersection with them (and their intersection with other animals that we eat) is the problem. Leave them alone and we should be good. Definitely don’t kill them. Let bats be bats.
It’s mostly like… creepy apocalyptic thinking. It’s extrapolating what’s already true. Healthcare is already hard to access; ambulances aren’t guaranteed, hospitals aren’t either, hell you might not even have a fire company nearby. But you’ll still see late-night TV. A not-small part of this country already experiences something semi-apocalyptic every day — a kind of poverty and illness that I don’t think we really have a grasp of, as yet. But life goes on just the same, and sometimes in weird, eerie-seeming disproportionate ways. We think the apocalypse ends everything all at once, but it really doesn’t, and won’t. It would more likely be slow and erratic and strange.
As hopefully we will not find out any time soon!
Be good. Stay safe. And wash your damn hands.
* * *
WANDERERS: A Novel, out now.
A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. An astonishing tapestry of humanity that Harlan Coben calls “a suspenseful, twisty, satisfying, surprising, thought-provoking epic.”
A sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America. The real danger may not be the epidemic, but the fear of it. With society collapsing—and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers and the shepherds who guide them depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.
Print: Indiebound | Let’s Play Books (signed) | The Signed Page | B&N | BAM | Amazon
eBook: Amazon | Apple Books | B&N | Kobo | Google Play | BAM
