Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 51

Writing From A Place Of Fear Versus From A Place Of Love

There is an old story that says, there is a fight going on inside every writer. A battle between two wolves. Or maybe they’re foxes? Whatever. One is named Steve, and Steve is the manifestation of fear, and the other is named Jerry, and Jerry is love and light, and Steve and Jerry are fighting over a

*checks ink-smudged notes, squints*

a bag of Hot Cheetos? Wait that can’t be right.

Never mind that story.

(Sidenote, before anyone jumps in and says something about this being a Cherokee story and I’m a jerk for mocking it, please be advised, it ain’t. Billy Graham made it up.)

So. I meet a lot of writers. I met them on book tour. I meet them at conferences and conventions. I meet them in dank basements where we trade story ideas trapped in jars like little fireflies. I MEET THEM IN DREAMS

And when I meet the writers, I often recognize something instantaneously, and that thing that I recognize is fear. Now, I don’t mean a kind of general fear; anybody with two molecules of common sense waltzing around their brain can look at the news and recognize this is a peculiarly fucked up era, and so fear about *gestures broadly* all of that is fine and sensible and trust me when I say I get it, and my writing is fueled in part by that. Putting your anxieties on the page where they can be managed and fought like summoned demons is *chef’s kiss.*

Rather, I’m speaking about a specific kind of fear, which is, fear as the first step of writing. Fear about market. Fear about audience. Fear about how no one will read your stuff. Fear about how you’re never going to be as good as [insert other author name here]. Fear about voice, fear about genre, fear about ideas. You set out on the journey of being a writer and already you have a choice about what direction you choose, right? You get this instinctual pull, as if all your intestinal flora are trying to move you in concert toward something weird, something wonderful, something uniquely your own, but — that way lies grave uncertainty. The other direction, well, that’s more sensible, isn’t it? Other writers have trod those paths. What’s popular right now is [insert trend here, like “YA medical horror featuring canine protagonists” or “grimdark geriatric erotic fantasties”]. Your voice surely isn’t as good as other voices.

So, your foot wavers. And instead of pointing yourself in the unknown direction, into the dark forest, into the layers of fog — you set forth onto the well-lit, well-marked path. The worn path. The trod path. And it’s fear that put you there. It’s fear that’s walking you forward.

Now, a caveat here that nothing I say here is particularly true, or universal — you can, of course, choose the well-trod path as a matter of fuck yeah I wanna do that, but the concern here is a lot of authors take that path less as a true choice and more as a desire for safety.

But what I want you to know is, that way isn’t safe.

It seems safe.

But it is not.

Listen, a writing career is stupid as fuck. I don’t mean choosing to be a writer is stupid — I do mean that the career itself is a hot cup of batshit. It doesn’t make a lick of goddamn sense. It is Non-Euclidian in its proportions: a blueprint made of incomprehensible angles and imaginary numbers. A writing career is a procedurally-generated labyrinth, and trying to walk it with a pre-conceived map in hand is foolishness on par with letting a toddler drive a car on the Autobahn. It’s like using cheat codes for the wrong game. You start furiously tapping UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT and your little 8-Bit avatar leaps into a pit of acid and dies.

There are writers, other writers, many writers.

And there is the writer that you are.

We grow deeply concerned as storytellers that the story we’re telling isn’t original, and truly, it isn’t. No story is truly original, but there are two places where originality shines through: the first is the arrangement of unoriginal elements. It’s like how in a song, all the notes are the notes. Or how in a painting, the colors are colors. You can’t make up new notes. You can’t make up new colors. But what you do with those sounds and those hues is where the art is made, and so too it is with story.

The second original thing has to do with the first.

The second truly original thing about any story is the teller of that story.

(Psst. That’s you.)

The problem is, if you choose to ignore the latter — and, say, try to follow the writing path of other writers, or of the market, or some other fear-based trajectory — you will also miss the former. Because that unique arrangement of elements comes from who you you are. It comes from the things you love, the ideas you have, the mad stuff that comprises your mind and your heart. You’re a product of an unholy host of elements: your parents, your friends, your upbringing, your genetics, your experiences, the books you’ve read, the stories you’ve loved and also the stories you’ve hated. You are a fingerprint. That curious combination cannot be replicated.

What that means is:

Use it.

When the time comes to write something, don’t move forward with fear in your step. Move forward with love. With eagerness and excitement. Love the story you’re telling, tell the story that only you can tell. Rest in peace and power, Toni Morrison, who said: “If there’s a book you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” This career is already fraught. It’s already weird and uncertain. The safe path is a lie — and a boring one, at that. The books that work, the books that matter, are the ones that didn’t try to do what was done before. They were a unique formulation from the author. They came from a place of excitement and interest, from love and ideas. They put aside fear and safety and ran into the dark.

That is what you, too, must do.

You must run into the dark, chasing what you love.

Tell that story. That’s the one we all want to read.

* * *

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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

Audio: Audible | Libro.FM

David Wellington: Five Things I Learned Writing The Last Astronaut

A huge alien object has entered the solar system and is now poised above the Earth. It has made no attempt to communicate.

Out of time and options, NASA turns to its last living astronaut – Commander Sally Jansen, who must lead a team of raw recruits on a mission to make First Contact. 

But as the object reveals its secrets, Jansen and her crew find themselves in a desperate struggle for survival – against the cold vacuum of space, and something far, far worse . . . 

The view of Earth from space is better than cable.

“Dave should talk to some female astronauts,” the publicist said, in a sales meeting. This was well after I’d started writing the book, long after I thought I was done with research. I had a long list of things that seemed more pressing, like finding the third act or remembering to connect on an emotional level with my wife every evening as she shoved my dinner under the locked and bolted door of my office. Interviewing actual astronauts sounded like homework. But I did it. Grumbling and cursing a lot, but I did it.

Once I was done with the interviews, I took a moment. I nodded thoughtfully to myself, cracked open another diet soda, and waited for my hands to stop shaking. Because I knew what having access to all this new information meant. It meant I was going to have to rewrite the book, almost from page one. Originally it had been packed with heavily-researched data, lots of acronyms and numbers, details about how much thrust you can get out of a Delta-IV rocket engine and what partial percentage of oxygen will make you start to hallucinate. What I got from the astronauts was something different.

I got what it meant to be human in space. To actually live there. It made the book immeasurably better. I learned things like…

A bunless hot dog might be the best thing you ever eat.

Everybody gets space sickness, to a greater or lesser extent. Your first couple of days in space are going to be miserable no matter how tough or experienced an astronaut you might be. One of the astronauts I spoke with told me about the glorious moment, three days into her mission, when she realized that she could hold down solid food again. She ate a hot dog and realized she was going to be okay. She could get back to work. Which was good, because—

They keep astronauts so busy they’re barely aware of being in space.

A lot of the questions I asked turned out to be useless, because I kept getting the same answer. “I don’t really remember, there was so much going on…” Whether I was asking about what re-entry was like, or the hours sitting on the launch pad waiting for liftoff, for instance. Such events, though they must rank as among the most memorable a human being can experience, were lost in the general business of astronaut life. NASA keeps its astronauts on a ridiculous schedule. Almost every moment of their day is spent running through safety checklists, exercising to prevent bone loss, doing media events or just the common chores required to keep people alive inside a trailer in space. There’s almost no downtime at all, very little time to sit staring out the windows (which was, hands down, the favorite leisure time activity of every astronaut I spoke to).

A lot of the checklists and rundowns and equipment inventories sounded like busywork. Like maybe NASA was just inventing things for them to do so that the taxpayers would feel like they were getting their money’s worth. The astronauts I spoke to weren’t so sure. For one thing, space is pretty deadly—there’s a whole lot of different ways to die up there, and staying alive often means double- and triple-checking every blinking light and green indicator panel. The other reason to keep the astronauts so busy was to keep them from thinking too much. Those long hours on the launch pad are a perfect time to meditate on the fact that you’re sitting on top of a ballistic missile full of highly explosive fuel. Working out endlessly on the exercise treadmill is a good way to keep your mind off the fact that you’re about an inch of metal away from the cold vacuum of space. The constant work is also good for keeping people from getting on each others’ nerves as much, which is super important because—

Everyone in space is ugly and ready for a fight.

Human bodies were never meant to exist in weightless conditions. All the fluid being pumped around your body right now needs gravity to get it to the right place. Think about hanging upside down from a jungle gym, the blood rushing to your head. How long do you think you could handle living like that? How many days in a row?

In microgravity, all of your internal organs climb up into your chest cavity, because the mass of the Earth isn’t holding them down anymore. This makes it a little hard to breathe. Farts collect inside your intestine until the pressure suddenly forces them out when you least want them to. Fluid builds up in places it shouldn’t, and there’s no good way to pump it back out of your tissues. The most dramatic—and obvious—way this effects you is that your face gets super puffy, distorting your features. And that’s when you learn just how much of living with other people is processing their facial expressions. Since everyone in space looks like they have the mumps, people start to get irritable. Innocent comments get misconstrued, and tempers flare. I spoke with one astronaut who joked that in the future one big career option is going to be “space lawyer”. Because of all the fistfights that are sure to break out during long missions to Mars. Of course, bouncing off other people all the time and getting in their way is inevitable given the close quarters. It might be better than the alternative, though…

You definitely don’t want to be alone up there.

Alone time is something I treasure. As much as I love the people in my life, if I can’t get a little solitude every day, I get irascible. Downright cranky. Speaking to the astronauts about life in space, my immediate thought was that it would be tough when you couldn’t get away from your crewmates, even just to take a minute to yourself.

Oh, no, they told me. Oh, no, you don’t want to be alone. Now, I happened to be writing a novel that was part science fiction and part horror. The horror writer half of me perked up his ears at the sound of that.

Space is noisy, or rather spaceships and space stations are noisy, because there’s always a fan blowing somewhere and a computer beeping for no good reason. There’s always something moving, and maybe as elements of your ship heat or cool they creak and ping. But those are noises you can get used to. Those are noises you can tune out. And that’s when the real silence, the silence of the void, hits you. That’s when you curl up in your sleepsac and wonder just how far you are from home, and what your chances would be if something went wrong (not very good). Inside a space suit it’s much, much worse. The only thing you can hear is your own breathing. And then you stop hearing that, and you hear your heart beating, instead. You fight to keep it from beating too fast…

Having other people around you is crucial. Human beings need social interaction just as much as they need gravity and oxygen. In my research I found a great story about that. Back in the ‘80s, the Soviets launch a space station called Mir where two cosmonauts would spend up to five hundred days in space, simulating how long it would take to get to Mars and back. Two people living for more than a year in a space the size of, say, three minivans duct-taped together. You might think these two cosmonauts would get sick of each other in a matter of days. Instead, they made a pact with each other. If you were working in one of the minivans while your partner was in one of the other ones, you had to keep at least one foot visible in the junction between modules. No matter how much stretching and contorting it took, some piece of a human body had to be there for the other person to see, every second of the day. The cosmonauts laughed when they talked about what happened when the system broke down, and, just for a minute or so, they were all alone. The brain is a fantastic machine, very good at imagining all kinds of scenarios. It has no problem imaging what it would be like to suddenly be all alone in a very quiet, very fragile tin can, a hundred miles up. The cosmonauts laughed about the things they imagined, the little terror fantasies their minds dredged up. They laughed about these things… once they were back safely home on solid ground.

For all that, space is still super cool.

Well, it’s hard to write a science fiction novel if you don’t feel that way. But yeah, the research I did for The Last Astronaut, while it often terrified me, still made me want to be out there just so bad. To get to see other worlds, to feel what it’s like to be without gravity, even for a moment. And at the end of the day to look back and see what I’m missing, to get what they call the “Longview” effect. Astronauts talk about it in hushed, reverent tones. The sense you get, looking down on Earth from above, just how precious it is. How fragile, and how beautiful.

I wrote a book about horror and screaming panic out in space, a story of death and fear up there, but even in the midst of the scariest bits I knew one thing. Offered a chance to go up there, even for just a day, for an hour—I would give anything to make it happen.

* * *

David Wellington is the author of twenty-one novels, from his first, the zombie tale Monster Island, to this year’s The Last Astronaut. He got his start in 2003 serializing his work online and has made a living at writing ever since. He’s also worked in comic books and video games. He lives and works in New York City.

David Wellington: Website | Twitter

The Last Astronaut: Print | eBook

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry: Truths On A Page For All The World To Read

Everyone has opinions about the fiction they read, the tv and movies they watch, the art they consume, about the subjects they study.  Everyone has those opinions, and they’re entitled to them.

But there’s a category of people who take their opinions and turn them into art, or who take a deep dive on knowledge that turns into a story.

Those people are nonfiction writers.

They are able to take a personal experience, an opinion on media, a historical moment, and make it come alive. They are able to make an opinion a visceral experience, something you feel, not just something you read.

I’m one of those people.

But what I almost enjoy more than writing nonfiction, is editing it.

Joy, for me, comes from reading a piece from a nonfiction author, and being able to feel the steady beat of their heart in the cadence of a sentence. Being able to guide them towards a more impactful thesis statement, one that would cause anyone to understand them and their story.

There’s a beauty to nonfiction, both writing and editing it, because nonfiction is wildly important to the ecosystem of a writing community.

Nonfiction keeps us honest. It keeps us accountable. Nonfiction is the genre of writing that tells us in no uncertain terms where we’re going wrong – and where we’re on a steady course. It is like the algae that keeps the waters clear of pollutants.

It is in nonfiction editing where I find myself at my most empathetic, too. I find myself immersed in another person’s perspective, and my job isn’t to tell them what they think but to show the writer where I don’t understand – and how I think they can make me understand them better.

That’s the magic of nonfiction. It has the ability to change your perspective. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen people reassess their own personal opinions – often about beloved fiction – based on the essays of those whom the fiction has harmed. A few examples from Uncanny’s nonfiction section include RF Kuang’s “How to Talk to Ghosts” which spoke so deeply to my understanding of my own past, but also brought me closer to Kuang’s much lauded The Poppy War, which shares DNA with a history I do not know well.

In another essay Marieke Nijkamp searingly described what it feels like to be left out of the future in “The Future is (not) Disabled.” Editing this piece was a joy, because Marieke fiercely articulated feelings I share with them, frustrations with a genre that often go unspoken.

And in my own work for Uncanny, I wrote “How to Make a Paper Crane” which straddled the line of short fiction and essay so well, people still think it was a short story. A piece which I get e-mail for, telling me that others feel the same rage that I do.

I have seen the genre itself shift and change based on response to the work of those who are willing to put their own truths out onto the page, for all the world to read.

But why is that healthy for a writing community?

Because we can’t rely on the tropes that constantly harm people. We have to grow and change – it’s healthy. It is healthy to change and learn, and the stories that we tell only get better the more that we learn from one another.

There is no greater honor for me than to be editing nonfiction for a genre that I love, for a community that I want to support. There is no greater love from me than an essay that helps you to see the things I do, and to understand the world I live in better.

Nonfiction is one of the greatest chances we have to understand one another.

I hope you’ll consider supporting Uncanny Magazine on Kickstarter this summer, so that I can not only bring you incredible nonfiction in 2020, but so that we can raise the rates to pay our essayists a better wage. Essayists we’ve already gathered for Year Six include: Ada Palmer, Meg Elison, G. Willow Wilson, Malka Older, Fran Wilde, Brandon O’Brien, Hillary Monahan and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas.

Join me in reading the truths they’ll bring to us. Difficult, extraordinary, thoughtful truths which will change us. Which will change our genre. Which will change the world.

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I Have Returned From The Wanderin’ Wendig Wanderers Tour

I HAVE RETURNED. Where is my parade? Where is my palanquin? Where are the bleating trumpets and booming drums? AM I NOT YOUR KING?

*receives note*

Oh. Oh. I am not your king. Well. This is awkward.

Anyway! Hey! Hi! Hello! For the past two weeks I have been wandering the country (get it?) in support of my new 800-page narrative leviathan, Wanderers — leviathan describing its size, not its quality, to be clear — and I never know exactly how much to recap for you, because are my travels and trevails exciting? I don’t know that they are.

Still, I feel like I should recap some bits, so —

• We had such great turnout for events! Holy shit, was that rewarding. I always said that I could reliably pull about 20-30 people to an event, but that has since changed. At each bookstore stop we had somewhere between 50-90 people, which is honestly really huge for me — the one exception being Mysterious Galaxy, and that I think was because we did an event riiiiiight after SDCC, when every nerdly reader in that city was likely fatted on too much pop culture.

• I met a ton of wonderful readers, and it was additionally gratifying to see that an audience is earned not in one great gulping go, but rather, like layers of geological sediment — I had people who got on the Wendig Train (not a real thing) at various divergent stops. Some were Twitter followers only, or some had read Blackbirds, some had jumped on with Star Wars, others still were fans all the way back to my RPG-wranglin’ days. Which is ideally how it should be, and I hope that sends a message both to writers and publishers that a career takes time — and you have to give it that time and that opportunity to build. Not everything needs to be a slam-bang-holy-shit-hit out of the gate.

• At every bookstore event, someone asked about the foxes. Which is so great.

• In Austin, I met Alex Wild, whose photography I’ve long admired — and he took me to the entomology lab at UT Austin, and look:

(those butterflies were fucking delicious, by the way — Austin really does have good food)

• A few bookstores noted that they’d seen a dip in author appearances recently — and I feel like I must be a proselyte for you WRITER TYPES to try to get out there and do events, whenever possible, with independent stores. Even just your local! A good indie store operates at such a high level in terms of sharing book-love, while also operating at often very low profit margins, and yet they’re on the frontlines of the book ecosystem. They’re fostering good relationships between us, the writers, and the audience — both existing and potential audience. So definitely throw them some love, and they will throw you some love in return. (At least, the good stores will. Admittedly, some indie stores are not so good, especially those who turn away from genre entirely.) So, shout-outs to the stores I visited on this trip: Eagle Eye, Bookpeople, Murder by the Book, Powell’s, Elliott Bay, Mysterious Galaxy, Tattered Cover, and of course my locals, Doylestown Bookshop and Let’s Play Books.

• SDCC was, oddly, my relaxing time? Which is weird, because SDCC is a fucking meat grinder, but this year was pretty chill for me — did some panels, some signings, and mostly just got to hang out with people I consider friends and even family. I mean, Delilah S. Dawson, Erin Morgenstern, Mallory O’Meara, Paul Krueger, Sam Sykes, Pierce Brown, Adam Christopher, Rob Hart, Peter Clines, and plus I got to hang out with my exceptional editor, Tricia Narwani, and my equally amazing agent, Stacia Decker — like, it’s a fucking dreamcast of people to hang out with. We drank lots of fancy cocktails and shared many good-to-astonishing meals. And ice cream. Hell yeah, ice cream. Oh I ate oysters for the first time and they were fancy as fuck.

• I also met Julie Nathanson, VO and writer and awesome person extraordinaire —

• Oh I also met this guy? I dunno if you’ve heard of him —

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So, I mean, that’s a thing that happened. We had breakfast! He’s as lovely as you imagine him to be, which honestly is kind of mind-blowing. Yay for awesome-seeming people who are actually awesome somehow? It was good just to hang out and chat.

• That was the trip. Travel was surprisingly good? I flew eight times and had no delays, which I’m pretty sure is either a miracle, or a weird near-death coma fantasy where actually on that first day my plane crashed and I’m in some kind of suspended utopian mindscape? It is weird traveling that often — I’d often be checking in for the next day’s flight as I was boarding that day’s flight, and people would ask me what city I came from and I’d be like, ha ha ha, I don’t remember? Even after coming home I’d wake up at night being totally uncertain as to where I was or what hotel or what city and how do I get to the bathroom again? I can’t imagine what a more protracted tour would do to my brain.

• Oh and I finished up a great book — Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger. It’s epic fantasy, but a standalone, and it’s glib and underselling it to say it’s Pokemon meets Airbender, but also, it’s that? And so much more? It’s fun and funny, but also exciting and heart-rending. Out in Sept/Oct.

And now, I’m home.

And now, we talk about Wanderers —

So, Wanderers has done pretty dang well. It hit a number of lists — USA Today, LA Times, SIBA, MIBA, Vancouver Sun international, plus it popped around on B&N and Powell’s lists. Plus it was one of the best-reviewed books in July (according to Book Marks), and Paste listed it as a top book and Amazon called it one of the best mystery/thrillers of July.

Outside of, say, my Star Wars books, this is far and away the biggest book I’ve had (er, in size, obviously, but I’m speaking to sales). And it seems like it has really good word-of-mouth. I wake up every day to new emails and tweets and such from people telling me how much they loved it. Which is really, really gratifying. Obviously the big dream is that the word-of-mouth is so good that people keep telling other people about it and they do the same, and eventually the book becomes an unstoppable mind virus that takes over the country and — to bring this full circle — makes me your king. And I don’t think that’s at all unreasonable.

Ahem.

What I’m trying to say is, if you’ve read it and enjoyed it, you owe me nothing — but but but, the best thing you can do for the book, and any book really that you have read and enjoyed, is talk about it. Not with me! But with your friends, family, and cherished foes. And whenever possible, leave reviews at places like Goodreads and Amazon.

And, of course, if you haven’t checked out the book yet —

Print: Indiebound | Let’s Play Books (signed) | The Signed Page | B&N | BAM | Amazon

eBook: Amazon | Apple Books | B&N | Kobo | Google Play | BAM

Audio: Audible | Libro.FM

My SDCC Schedule

Hey, I guess I should post my San Diego Comic-Con schedule, huh? Well, here it shall be, for your perusal. Also don’t forget I’ll be at Mysterious Galaxy the following Monday with Adam Christopher. We’ll be signing books and engaging with various shenanigans.

Hope to see you there!

THURSDAY the 18th

Panel: D&D: All Bards, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Horton Grand Theater

Post-Panel Signing, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM

Autograph Area Row 9

FRIDAY the 19th

Penguin Random House Signing, 4:00 PM – 4:45 PM

Random House Booth #1515-B 

Panel: How Our Present Impacts Today’s Speculative Fiction, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Grand 12 & 13, Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina

SATURDAY the 20th

Penguin Random House Signing, 3:00 PM – 3:45 PM

Random House Booth #1515-B

Panel: What’s New from Del Rey Books?, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Room 5AB

Kali Wallace: Five Things I Learned Writing Salvation Day

A lethal virus is awoken on an abandoned spaceship in this incredibly fast-paced, claustrophobic thriller.

They thought the ship would be their salvation.

Zahra knew every detail of the plan. House of Wisdom, a massive exploration vessel, had been abandoned by the government of Earth a decade earlier, when a deadly virus broke out and killed everyone on board in a matter of hours. But now it could belong to her people if they were bold enough to take it. All they needed to do was kidnap Jaswinder Bhattacharya—the sole survivor of the tragedy, and the last person whose genetic signature would allow entry to the spaceship.

But what Zahra and her crew could not know was what waited for them on the ship—a terrifying secret buried by the government. A threat to all of humanity that lay sleeping alongside the orbiting dead.

And then they woke it up.

* * *

Trial and error is part of writing

I suppose this is a lesson I’ve learned with every book, but I feel like I learned it extra double well this time around. Maybe it will stick this time! (Probably not.) But even if it once again slips from my mind like morning mist chased away by the first rays of the dawn, it is important enough to keep learning again and again.

This is the lesson: I have to spend a long time thinking about a novel before I can write a novel.

It is a necessary part of my writing process. Sometimes that thinking involves writing thousands of words toward a dead end, words I inevitably delete, on a version of the story that looks nothing like the final book.

I wrote tens of thousands of words on a wrong version of this book before I admitted it was wrong and started over–and that’s not all that unusual for me. I do that a lot. It feels terribly inefficient, but I’ve learned time and again that this is part of what I have to do. No matter what I think I know ahead of time, no matter how certain I am this time will be different, I don’t truly know what I want to write until I’m writing it. I don’t know what my story is until I’m telling it to myself.

Fast pacing and strong atmosphere are not in opposition

Before I wrote Salvation Day, nobody had ever accused me of writing fast-paced stories. The pacing of my previous novels tend toward measured and leisurely. Mostly by choice, to be clear, because I write stories that I would want to read, and when I read I want to sink into a book thoroughly, to luxuriate in the depth of its world and characters, to revel in the strangeness of taking a wander through an unfamiliar world–whether that world is fantastical kingdom ruled by magic, a sentient spaceship a million years in the future, or a misty English village beset by murders. I love to create atmosphere when I write; I want readers to feel the story wrap around and draw them in with every one of their senses.

But I kept running into a tiny little problem while writing Salvation Day: there is no time. There is no time for luxuriating in the setting, for wallowing in the senses, for exploring the world. There is no time for anything. I very cleverly handed myself a plot that takes place in an extremely limited environment (a single spaceship) and an extremely limited time frame (a single day), and on top of that I decided to put my characters in a new kind of mortal peril on every page.

It took me a while to figure out that didn’t mean I had to abandon my love of richly atmospheric stories. I just had be more smarter about it, which is a skill that I’m glad to have finally acquired, even though it did take four novels and some dozen-plus stories. But, in all fairness, I did also cheat a little bit, because a story set on an abandoned literal spaceship full of literal corpses rather provides its own moody, intense atmosphere. I just had to describe the corpses.

Which I did. With great frequency, in great detail.

Gravity: still my favorite fundamental force

I’ve always thought of myself as a writer who hates writing action scenes because I’m not very good at them. Then (ref. clever decisions, cited above) I decided to write a book that is basically nothing but action scenes. Oh, and those actions scenes all take place in the microgravity of a very distant orbit around Earth. Mostly involving people who have never been in space before.

Now, I have a fairly strong science background. I have a PhD in geophysics. I know enough to know where and how I need to research. But, man, did I run into some unexpected problems while writing action scene after action scene in microgravity. Time after time I caught myself having characters stand up, or set something down, or even bleed or cry the way people normally bleed or cry, and none of that works the same without gravity. It was an epic and ever-evolving learning curve for me to remember, on every single page, that the rules of movement were different.

(But maybe I didn’t learn my lesson after all, because I’m currently working on a novel that takes place on a small, irregular asteroid, where gravity gets even more complicated! I love you, gravity.)

That old man in that one scene in The Avengers was right

You know that scene in Marvel’s The Avengers when Loki shows up in Stuttgart and tells everybody to kneel and one of man stands up and, deeply unimpressed, dismissing the bratty trickster by saying, “There are always men like you”?

You know that scene? That scene is correct. There are always men like that.

Men who want people to kneel before them. Men who rant and rage and splutter and demand obedience and loyalty and admiration. Men who get those things, and declare it’s not enough, and demand more. Men who claim to have the answer to all of humanity’s problems, an answer nobody else could provide, an answer they alone are capable of delivering. There are always men like that.

I did a lot of research into cults as I was writing this book, and the one thing I learned that surprised me–although perhaps, in retrospect, it shouldn’t have–is how very ordinary the infamous, terrifying cult leaders of history seem once you learn about them in any depth. They are pretty much all cruel, petty, narcissists with delusions of grandeur who want people to cower before them. They rant and rage and splutter. They might gather a handful of followers, or hundreds, or they might be elected president, but that doesn’t make them extraordinary. There is nothing more ordinary, more mundane, more common, than a cruel, petty man who rants and rages and splutters and wants to rule the world.

Trust your gut when it comes to both your stories and your career

I was about halfway through the first draft of Salvation Day when I had to make a pretty huge decision about it. The publisher I was with at the time wasn’t interested in it; they wanted another book from me, one I had pitched but hadn’t started writing beyond a few sample pages. I had to make the choice between the sure thing of staying with the publisher who’d handled my first three novels, or turning down their offer and taking the chance that somebody else would want my grim little sci fi nightmare about a spaceship full o’ corpses.

It was the sort of decision I had always assumed must be hard for authors to make. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t a difficult decision at all. I knew what I wanted to do as soon as the choice was before me. I knew I had a good thing going with this book. I knew I would regret setting it aside to work on something else, something I wasn’t fully invested in yet. I made myself pause and breathe and look at the more practical consideration–and talk to my agent–about the risks and challenges of changing publishers, changing genres and age groups, turning down certain money now for uncertain money in the future. But in the end in came down to the fact that I felt good about this book and what it could become. My gut instinct was that I wanted to write it, because it was worth the risk.

Writing stories is the best job in the world, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But it is basically a never-ending series of jumps into the unknown. I don’t know if I’ll be in the same position or have the reasons to make the same choice again in the future, but I’m glad I learned that I could take that jump when I needed to.

* * *

Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. Salvation Day is her first novel for adults. She is also the author of the young adult novels Shallow Graves and The Memory Trees, the middle grade fantasy City of Islands, and short stories that have appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Asimov’s, Tor.com, and other speculative fiction magazines. After spending most of her life in Colorado, she now lives in southern California.

Kali Wallace: Website | Instagram

Salvation Day: Mysterious Galaxy | B&N | Indiebound | BAM | Amazon

Hey, I’m Going Places! Bonus: Wanderers Wrap-Up

WELP, Wanderers Week is over, and now (well, tomorrow), I hop on a series of planes and go to a series of places where there are, ideally, my books and people who want me to devalue them with my signature. I’m told the book did okay out there in the wild? It seems like a bunch of you are reading it and maybe even enjoying it, so that’s really nice. This has been the nicest launch week I’ve had in a long time, in part thanks to Del Rey, the bookstores that hosted me, the sites that featured the book, and of course, ALL Y’ALL. For being rad. For being readers. My readers, in particular. *freeze-frame high-fives all around*

If you can? Keep yelling about the book. Keep leaving reviews. Keep gesticulating wildly about it. Not just to me! To all of them. If the book is gonna maintain, I need people to talk about it. Share the book-love, if you’re so inclined to do so.

With my many many thanks. And a bucket of bees.

Anyway, come see me at these places:

ATLANTA. Eagle Eye Book Shop, 7/11: details

AUSTIN. BookPeople, 7/12: details.

HOUSTON. Murder by the Book, 7/13: details.

SEATTLE. Elliot Bay Books, 7/15: details

PORTLAND. Powells in Beaverton, 7/16: details

SAN DIEGO. San Diego ComicCon, 7/18-7/21

SAN DIEGO AGAIN. Mysterious Galaxy, 7/22 (with Adam Christopher!): details.

DENVER. Tattered Cover, Colfax Ave loc, 7/23: details.

And for some quick review wrap-ups:

NPR reviewed the book!

“Wendig takes science, politics, horror, and science fiction and blended them into an outstanding story about the human spirit in times of turmoil, claiming a spot on the list of must-read apocalyptic novels while doing so.”

And the Toronto Star!

“Wanderers is a book resolutely, powerfully of its time, and it is this sense of urgency and verisimilitude that places it firmly on the shelf of epidemic classics including Stephen King’s The Stand, Justin Cronin’s The Passage, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.”

And the NY Journal of Books!

“It is quite simply the novel Chuck Wendig was born to write.”

And the book comes out tomorrow in the UK!

AHHHH

LOUD NOISES

*clangs pots and pans*

All right, time to pack some suitcases, and hit the road.

Friday Launch Week Wrap-Up

Let’s be clear: book release week is weird. You spend a year-ish writing a book. You spend time selling it. Then there’s time piled on top of time in order for the publisher to wind up the pitch and let the ball fly — and the ball flies slow, as marketing ramps up and people get galley copies and, and, and, and then the day actually happens —

And it can feel a little anticlimactic. That’s nobody’s fault — it’s just how books are. When a movie comes out, everybody gives a shit. Lots of press and box office reports and interviews and lights and sound and candy and also probably mountains of cocaine? I don’t know about that last part. I just assume if anybody is out there still just railing on cocaine, it’s Big Hollywood.

(I kid, of course. They’re not doing cocaine. They’re gently sipping kombucha-charcoal smoothies micro-dosed with artisanal psilocybin.)

But books aren’t that. Your new book isn’t launched from a trebuchet into the sky for all to see. They are (hopefully) unpacked gently from boxes, and placed on shelves during release day, and then… people maybe buy them, maybe they don’t right away, maybe they never do. Obviously, this is different if you’re releasing a new Harry Potter novel, but since most people are not releasing a new Harry Potter novel, it can feel a little bit less like the dramatic pop of a Champagne cork and more like the ginger, hesitant unscrewing of a screw-top wine bottle.

So, that’s what I expected here, with Wanderers.

I expected poorly.

I mean, okay, no, we weren’t sucking down hallucinogenic smoothies or whatever, but you all made this release week feel like something special, and that’s been great. It’s honestly been nice to see the enthusiasm for people both going out and getting the book — and then following along on the journey as people are reading it. Further, the book seems to be doing okay, too, which is really nice to see. It’s been bopping around the Top 20 on B&N (where you can still get a signed copy, by the way) and I’ve heard of libraries ordering more copies and bookstores running out. Not that I want anyone to run out of the book, obviously, but as an indicating it’s maybe selling okay? I’ll take it.

Thanks, all, for checking out the book, if you have. And if you’re able to go and crow about it and put up reviews at Amazon or Goodreads or wherever, I’d be in your eternal gratitude. ETERNAL GRATITUDE, I SAID. YOU WILL HAVE ENSURED THE SERVICE OF MY SPECTER ACROSS ALL OF SPACE AND TIME oh am I yelling again, sorry.

Ahem.

Also don’t forget, I’ll be bopping around the country in my Writer Shed, which has spontaneously grown a giant pair of chicken legs, and —

*checks itinerary*

Oh! Oh. Haha, I’m just going to using planes for this trip. Cool.

But I’ll be at —

Atlanta/Decatur (Eagle Eye!), then Austin (BookPeople!), Houston (Murder by the Book!), Seattle (Elliot Bay!), Portland (Powells in Beaverton!), San Diego (SDCC, then Mysterious Galaxy!), and finally, Denver (Tattered Cover!). Starting next week. Details here.

And just to clarify, you don’t need to wait to purchase your book until my visit — I’ve reminded some folks you can go buy the book from the store in question now, then visit me at that store on the date of the appearance. As for what to expect at each appearance? I’ll mostly do a short introduction about the book, then do a Q&A, then sign some books. Plus some general mayhem and unmitigated pantslessness. There may even be a pants-off dance-off.

(There will be no pants-off dance-off, it’s fine.)

And that’s it.

Thanks again to all the writers and readers and followers who have shouted about this book. It means a lot — to me personally, and for the book’s chances to make its way in the world. And thanks to the two launch stores who helped me flail and shake the book around — Let’s Play Books and Doylestown Bookshop.

Gonna do a brief Wanderers-related news/review round-up, and then I’m off.

BLACK SWAN SAYS BYE

* * *

“Wanderers doesn’t just settle for a plot twist or two. He plot twists the plot twist then plot twists the plot twist’s plot twist. Reading his books is like standing super close to a painting and seeing only the smudges of paint then taking a step back to see those brushstrokes form a flower. Step back again and now you see the flower is in a vase. Another step back and the vase is in a room. One more step and the room is in a house and the house is on fucking fire and there’s blood everywhere and people are running and screaming… the book is 800 pages and I read it in two sittings. I forgot to eat. Twice. I sat on the couch enraptured by the story. It’s that good. No, it’s that incredible.” — Alex Brown, Tor.com

“It’s a rare find: an 800-page novel about the end of the world that manages to be riveting and prescient while delivering thrills like a big summer blockbuster.” — Ardi Alspach, B&N SFF Blog

“Wanderers is a few things: a tense mystery; an Outbreak-style medical thriller; a sprawling, Stephen King-esque epic. But mostly it’s a book about America right now—and much like America right now, it’s a potent blend of fear, confusion, and guarded, fragile hope.” — Erik Henriksen, Portland Mercury / The Stranger

“The true success of Wanderers, though, is not just in its ability to show us the grim scenarios that could play out across a divided nation; it’s in its heart. Whether he’s writing about rage or faith or the faintest glimmer of light, Wendig brings a sincerity and emotional weight to his prose. That’s why the scariest parts of Wanderers work, but it’s also why the most hopeful ones do, too.” — BookPage (starred review)

“Maybe my favorite read of the season. “Wanderers” reminds me of the books I loved to read years ago for all the right reasons: Mainly pure, unadulterated, page-turning fun. Mash up ideas from “The Stand,” “The Hot Zone,” and every classic Crichton thriller and you get “Wanderers.” It’s every bit as good as those classics, but Wendig has created a (terrifying) world solely his own.” — Tom Beans, The Source Weekly

Read an interview with me at Booklist.

Wanderers makes EW’s list of 20 new books to read in July, as well as Amazon’s best SFF of July, and B&N’s best SFF of July. And The Verge’s SFF of July list, too! Though it’s tricky to list, it made Apple Books’ list, too. Finally, SyFy Fangrrls shouted it out!

I think that’s it for now.

See you next week, frandos.

Print: Indiebound | Let’s Play Books (signed) | The Signed Page | B&N | BAM | Amazon

eBook: Amazon | Apple Books | B&N | Kobo | Google Play | BAM

Audio: Audible | Libro.FM

And you can add it on Goodreads.

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S.A. Hunt: Cover Reveal and Excerpt for Burn The Dark

[image error]Robin is a YouTube celebrity gone-viral with her intensely-realistic witch hunter series. But even her millions of followers don’t know the truth: her series isn’t fiction.

Her ultimate goal is to seek revenge against the coven of witches who wronged her mother long ago. Returning home to the rural town of Blackfield, Robin meets friends new and old on her quest for justice. But then, a mysterious threat known as the Red Lord interferes with her plans….

* * *

Look at that! What a thing! Calloo callay! The cover of my very first traditionally-published novel. How shiny and bloody—and I didn’t have to lift a finger this time. That’s the incredibly talented Leo Nickolls up there with the dark devilly masterpiece, and you can find more of their stunning work here. I am a particular fan of the covers for For a Muse of Fire, Rotherweird, City of Crows, Damselfly, Anassa, Ariadnis, and, and . . . hell, you know what? I love all of them. I can’t believe they paired me with such an amazing artist.

Hi, I’m Sam. You might have heard of me, you might not. I’ve been creeping around the internet self-publishing fantasy since late 2012, and I’m not gonna lie, it’s been a bit of a deathmarch, plodding through the desert of obscurity with my wordslinger sixgun and a swig of water in my canteen.

Up until now, I’ve been doing all my own covers, dragging photo after photo into Photoshop and chiseling away at raw photos until I reveal something serviceable. If you know anything about book covers and commercial psychology you might say, “Gosh, that’s a bad idea, pardner,” and normally I’d agree with you, but after a lot of banging my head against the wall they eventually turned out all right. I learned a little something about commercial psychology, at least where it concerns book covers and literature marketing. For a while I even did covers for other authors on commission—enough to pay a few bills!

One of the things that I learned along the way, other than that the real treasure was the friends we made, was that whether it’s in the Kindle section of Amazon, or the fiction section of your local Books-a-Million, every single time someone picks up your book and skims it, that is a job interview.

You have walked into that person’s metaphorical office and you have sat down in front of them on a squeaky-farty leather chair and smoothed out your shirt, ready to be questioned and weighed, ready to demonstrate to that person why you deserve to earn that person’s money.

Your back catalog, the books you’ve already written? That’s your work history.

Your Amazon reviews? The blurb on your front cover, and the snippets of praise trickling down the back? That’s your professional references.

And your cover is your interview suit. Neatly pressed, squared away, laced up and gleaming. Four-in-hand cranberry tie, or razor-sharp makeup. It’s how you communicate your integrity, your fortitude, your competence, your cleanliness. It’s how you let people know I’m here, I know what I’m doing, I know what you need, and I know how to make it happen. And maybe a little glitter in your eyeshadow or colorful dress socks, as if to say, I might be a professional but I’m not boring stick-in-the-mud turtles all the way down.

So it’s nice to have that taken off my hands for a change. Instead of having to tailor my own outfit from scratch, Tor Books graciously took me to get fitted for a professional suit—and boy howdy, it turned out great.

When my editor, the talented Diana Pho, first described what she had in mind—a simple silhouette in strong colors like the one on Josh Malerman’s Unbury Carol—I have to admit I was a little worried at first. While that style worked well for Malerman’s dirt-road supernatural thriller, evoking the old-timey gunslinger dime-novels like Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, and Max Brand, I wasn’t sure it would translate well to a rock-and-roll dirty-south horror-fantasy like Burn The Dark and its sequels. To my astonished surprise, however, what we got was something more like Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds covers, with less of an avian bent and more of a Satanic tone.

Other than the three-quarters-turn Robin centerpiece and her blue hair and stony glare, I think one of my favorite parts of this cover is also one of its more subtle aspects—the vascular tree-branches worming into the image’s outer limits, insinuating both arteries and roots, evoking the central concept of the tree.

As I zoom out and look at the image as a whole, I’m quite satisfied with the heat and intimacy of it. The artery-branches enclose the viewer’s eye, fencing it toward the center of the image, and the warm colors lend the whole thing an almost biological claustrophobia, as if you were looking at the splayed-open chest of a body, and the organs inside. I’m really looking forward to seeing how all these reds and purples look on the book’s physical jacket.

S.A. Hunt is a non-binary U.S. veteran, speculative fiction author, and Winner of Reddit.com/r/Fantasy’s “Independent Novel of the Year” Stabby Award. They live in Petoskey, Michigan. Burn The Dark is the first volume in the Malus Domestica series.

* * *

Excerpt from Burn the Dark: 

OVERGROWN GRASS AROUND A lemon tree, shadowy front porch with no porch light. A rocking chair lurked in the gloom.

The girl in the video crept up the front walk of the tract house.

Hoo, hoo, hu-hu.

Halfway across the yard, she paused and turned to point the camera up into the branches of the lemon tree, the aperture whirring as she zoomed in on it.

A snowy owl perched in the masterwork of shadows some eight feet up, throat pulsing, hoo, hoo, hu-hu. The camera zoomed out as the owl took flight and left the screen stage right.

“Hello, honey,” croaked a subtle voice.

She whirled around and the world whipped to the left, revealing the front of the white tract house and its shadowy porch, arrayed with boxes of junk, chairs, yellowed and fraying newspaper. A tribunal of cats sat on their haunches all over the porch, fifteen or twenty of them: calico, tortoise-shell tabbies, midnight-blacks, two Siamese, an orange Morris with brilliant green eyes.

Someone stood behind the screen door, a smear of gray a shade lighter than the darkness inside the house.

At the top of the faint figure was the gnarled suggestion of a face. “What brings you round at this time of night, young lady?” An old woman, her voice kind but deliberate, with a hint of accent. British? Irish? Whatever it was, it wasn’t midwestern or southern.

Motionless cats reflected the streetlight with their lantern-green eyes.

Neva Chandler, said a voice-over from Robin. The self-proclaimed King of Alabama. Her voice was soft, introspective, an inside-voice that belonged more at a funeral than a YouTube video. Tinged with a faint southern twang.

The girl threw a thumb over her shoulder. “Ah, my car broke down. I . . . I was hopin’ I could use your phone.”

“Ah.” The old woman paused. She might have been folding her arms, but it was hard to tell. “I thought all you young ladies these days carried those—those cellular phones, they call them. With their tender apps and GPS-voices. Go here, go there, and so forth.”

“No, ma’am,” replied the girl. “I’m kinda old-school that way I guess.”

The old woman scoffed. “Old-school.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, if you’re going to come in, it would behoove you to do so, and get clear of the street,” the old woman said in a warning way, even though the girl was fully in her front yard by then. “It’s a dangerous place for dangerous people.”

The stoop leading up to the porch was made of concrete painted in flaking gray, and the porch itself was as well. Columns of wrought-iron curlicues held up the roof. At Robin’s feet was a china bowl with a few pebbles of dry cat food.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Stepping up onto the porch, she tugged the screen door open with a furtive hand. The old woman behind the mesh faded into the darkness like a deep-sea creature and Robin stepped in behind her, filling the video window with black.

Click-click. A dingy bulb in an end-table lamp burst to life, brightening a living room positively crowded with antiques.

A grandfather clock stood next to an orange-and-brown tweed sofa, tiny black arms indicating the time was a few minutes to midnight. Four televisions of progressive evolution clustered on top of a wood-cabinet Magnavox, rabbit-ear antenna reaching over them for a signal no longer being broadcast. No less than three pianos filled one end of the room, two player and one baby grand, all covered in dust.

All of a sudden the smell hit her, a wall of rotten musk. Boiled cabbage, farts, cigarettes. Dead old things, burnt hair, burnt popcorn. Cat shit.

Gangs of unlighted candles stood atop every surface, halfway melted into the saucers and teacups that held them. Lines of runic script decorated the windowsills and, apparently, the threshold of the front door between her feet.

Another cat sat on top of a piano, running its tongue down the length of one leg. Robin let the screen door ease shut. “I’m so sorry to bother you this time of night.”

Chandler shuffled over to a plush wingback chair and dropped herself into it, crumpling. She wore a pink bathrobe, with steel-gray hair as dry as haystraw tumbling down the sides of her Yoda face. A whisper of mustache dusted her upper lip. She could have been a thousand years old if a day.

An old glass-top coffee table dominated the space in front of the sofa and armchair. Occupying the center of the table was a wooden bowl, and inside the bowl was a single pristine lemon.

“No bother at all, my dear,” the old woman said, peering up at Robin with the baggy, watery eyes of a basset hound. “I’m usually up late. No bother at all.” As she spoke, she flashed black gums and the pearlescent brown teeth of a lifelong smoker. “Ah, the phone,” she wheezed, curling a finger over the back of the chair, “over in there, in the hallway, on the little hutch. Do you see it?”

The camera soared past the armchair and toward a doorway in the back of the furniture-crowded room.

As it did so, Robin softly interjected with a pensive voice-over. Sometimes when the witches have completely drained a neighborhood down to the bones and they’ve used it all up, all the—whatcha call it, the “life,” the soul, there ain’t nothing left to move with. They can’t migrate to a new town, they get stuck, and slowly wither away. They starve. They die from the inside out. The deadness slowly makes its way to the outside. Heinrich and I think that’s what happened here.

The old woman’s telephone turned out to be a rotary phone. Robin picked up the handset and pressed it against her ear, listening for a dial tone. She put it against the GoPro in her hand.

After a while they’re just a rotten corpse in a living-human costume.

Nothing came from the earpiece but a muted ticking, as if she could hear the wind tugging at the lines outside.

Death masquerading as life.

“So what is a beautiful young lady like you doing in a trackless waste such as this? This is a hobby town—there’s nothing to do, so everybody has a hobby. Painting model airplanes, collecting stamps, making meth, doing meth. Can’t be that, though. You’re not around to buy drugs.” The decrepit crone sat up, leaning over to pluck the lemon out of the bowl with one knobby monkey-paw hand. “No, Robin dear, ohhh, you don’t look like the others. You don’t look like shit.”

“No, ma’am, I don’t do drugs. I mean, other than medication.” Robin put the handset down. “I’m from out of town, visiting a fr—”

Chandler’s breathing came in phlegmy gasps and sighs, tidal and troubled. Sounded like she’d been running a marathon.

“How did you know my name?” asked the girl.

“Oh, honey, bless your heart,” said the crone, “I been expecting you all day.” She pricked the rind of the lemon with a thumbnail and peeled part of it away, revealing not the white-yellow flesh Robin had expected, but the vital and fevered red of an internal organ. “It took you longer to get here than I expected. But then Birmingham is rather Byzantine, isn’t it? I remember when I was a child, when it was all gaslights and horse-drawn carts, the layout was so much simpler then.”

Blue veins squirmed across the lemon’s surface in time to some eldritch beat.

The lemon had a pulse.

Lifting the thing to her mouth, Chandler bit into it, spritzing fine droplets of blood into the air.

Ferocious wet devouring-noises came from the other side of the chair, like wolves tearing into the belly of a dead elk. More blood sprayed up, dotting the wallpaper, the lampshade. The remains of the lemon’s rind dangled from the crone’s hand like a fresh scalp, bloody and pulpy.

Red dripped on the filthy carpet.

“My last lemon,” said Chandler, twisting slowly in the chair.

One twiggish hand slipped over the back, gripping the velvet and cherrywood. “I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, you know.”

Rising, she stared Robin down, eyes that flashed with a red light deep inside. Her teeth were too many for her mouth, tiny canines, peg-like fangs. The wrinkles across the bloody map of her face had smoothed. Her schoolmarm hair had gone from corn silk to black rooted in steel. “You think you’re the first to seek me?” asked the witch, her lips contorting over the bulge of teeth. The longer she spoke, the deeper her voice got, dropping in pitch like a toy with a dying battery. “My trees are composted with the rot of a dozen just like you.”

“There ain’t nobody like me, lady. I eat assholes like you for breakfast.”

The monstrous witch blinked. “You eat assholes?” She giggled, which coming out of her throat sounded like a horse.

“I, uhh—well—”

“If you’re gonna be a witch-hunter like your friends, you need to work on your one-liners!” Chandler spidered over the chair, pink bathrobe flagging over her humped back.

“Shit!” Robin ran. “Shit shit shit!”

Darkness swallowed the camera, shredded by light coming in through the witch’s window blinds. The image went into hysterics as Robin pumped her arms, running through the house.

Tripping over something, she went sprawling in a pile of what sounded like books. “Goddammit! Aarrgh!”

The witch came through the house after the girl, her bare feet thumping the carpet, then bumping against the linoleum, meat clubbing against wood. “God won’t save you. You’ll not have me, little lady,” gibbered Chandler, invisible in the dark. “You’ll not have me, you’ll not have me.”

Robin pushed through the back door of a kitchen, bursting out into a moonlit backyard. Turning, stumbling, she aimed the camera at the house.

Shick, the sound of metal against leather. Robin drew the silver dagger.

The back door slapped open. Something came racing out, a wraith shrouded in stained terrycloth, the lemon-heart blood coursing down her chin and wasted xylophone chest—and then the old woman was gliding across the overgrown yard, reaching for her with those terrible scaly owl-hands.

“Hee hee hee heeeee!” cackled Chandler, instantly on her, shoving her into the weeds. Both went down in a heap and Robin lost the camera.

Whirling around, the video’s perspective ended up sideways on the ground, peering through the grass, barely capturing the melee in one corner of the screen. Neva Chandler landed on top of the girl’s belly cowgirl-style and raked at her face with those disgusting yellow nails, deceptively sharp chisel-points, laughing, crowing in her harsh raven-rasp of a voice.

Even though Robin was fighting with everything she had, she couldn’t push the old crone away. An astounding strength lingered in those decrepit bones. Tangling her fingers in the girl’s hair, Chandler wrenched her head up and down, bouncing it uselessly against the grass.

“Get off me!” shrieked Robin in her thin, high video-voice, thrusting the silvery dagger through the pink bathrobe and into the witch’s ribs—SHUK!

Time seemed to pause as the fight stopped as suddenly as it had started. Chandler’s arms were crooked back, her fingers clawed in a grotesque parody of some old Universal movie monster. Her face was twisted and altered by some strange paranormal force, her mouth impossibly open until it was a drooping coil of chin and teeth. Robin withdrew the dagger, releasing more of the black syrup. Then she plunged it deep into the old woman’s chest again, shuk, and twice, and thrice, and four times, shuk shuk shuk.

Black liquid like crude oil dribbled out around the blade of the dagger. The witch exhaled deep in her throat, a deathly deflating.

“Knife to meet you!” shouted the girl.

Not my best, said the voice-over. I’m learning, okay?

With a shrieking snarl, “Grrraaaaaagh,” the witch leapt backward—propelled, more like, as if she’d been snatched away by some invisible hand—and scrambled to the safety of her back stoop, cowering like a cornered animal. A stew of red and black ran down her sloped chin and wattled neck. “That won’t work!” she choked through a mouthful of ichor. Chandler had taken the dagger away, and now it glittered in one warped claw. “It’ll take more than bad puns and pigstickers to—”

Hands shaking, Robin produced the Gerber jar full of water and threw a fastball.

The jar went wide, whipping over the old woman’s head.

Glass shattered against the eaves, showering her with the contents. Chandler flinched, blinking in confusion.

“This ain’t The Wizard of Oz, honey, I ain’t going to melt. You was having more luck with the dagger.” She flourished the dagger as if she were conducting a symphony with it. “You want this back? Come get it, little girl!”

The witch-hunter reached into her jacket.

She whipped out a Zippo, the lid clinking open.

“What you got there?” The witch sniffed the arm of her bathrobe and grimaced. She looked up. “Oh hell no.”

Alcohol.

Flick, a tiny flame licked up from the Zippo in Robin’s hand, brightening the backyard. “Get away from me!” the witch shrieked, trading the dagger to the other hand and flinging it overhand like a tomahawk. Robin recoiled. The blade skipped off the side of her collar, inches from her throat, a sharp pain just under her ear as the blade nicked her skin.

Chandler turned and ripped the back door open, scrambling through. Robin snatched up the GoPro and followed, camera in one hand and lighter in the other. She caught the witch just inside the threshold, touching the Zippo’s tongue to the edge of her bathrobe.

The terrycloth caught, lining the hem with a scribble of white light, enough to faintly illuminate the grimy kitchen.

“Oooooh!” screeched Chandler, tumbling to her hands and knees. “You nasty, nasty girl! You trollop! You tramp!” The witch stood, using the counter as a ladder, and fumbled her way over to the sink, smearing black all over the cabinets. Raking dirty dishes out of the way, Chandler disturbed a cloud of fruit flies and turned on the faucet. “When I get this put out, I’m going to—I’m going to—” She tugged and tugged the stiff sprayer hose, trying to pull it out of the basin.

Flames trickled up the tail of Chandler’s bloody bathrobe, but they were going much too slowly for Robin’s liking. She reached over and touched the fabric with the Zippo again. This time the alcohol on Chandler’s back erupted in a windy burp of white and orange. The flames billowed toward the ceiling, a cape of fire, whispering and muttering.

As Robin lunged in to ignite her sleeve, Chandler reached into the sink with her other hand and came up with a dirty carving knife.

She hooked it at the girl, trying to stab her and spray herself with the sink hose at the same time. Robin jerked away. The plastic nozzle showered the witch’s head with cold water, soaking her hair and running down her face, washing away the blood and oil-slime. Chandler maneuvered around, trying to spray the fire on her back, but all she could seem to manage was to half-drown herself and shoot water over her shoulder onto the floor.

“Help me!” cried the flame-ghost, water arcing all over the kitchen. “Why would you do this to an old lady like me? What have I ever done to yoooouuuuu?”

“You witches killed my mama!”

Flinging the refrigerator door open, Robin flinched as condiment bottles and a stick of butter clattered to the floor at her feet. Reaching in, she grabbed the neck of a bottle of Bacardi. The last bit sloshed around in the bottom.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Chandler shoved the fridge door closed, almost on Robin’s head. “HELP ME!” roared the slack-faced creature in the bathrobe. Her jaw had come unhinged, and two rows of tiny catlike teeth glistened wetly in the pit of her black maw. Her eyes were two yellow marbles, shining deep in bruise-green eye sockets. “HELP ME OR YOU’LL BURN WITH ME!”

Pressing her ragged stinking body against Robin’s, Chandler wrapped her arms around the other’s chest in a bear hug.

Prickly, inhuman teeth brushed against the girl’s collarbone.

Burn the Dark releases January, 2020.

Five Things I Learned Writing Wanderers

So, people do their “what I learned writing MAH BOOK” guest posts here and so I thought, well, hell, why shouldn’t I do one, too? So, here we go, a five things I learned post, this time about what I learned writing that big-ass apocalyptic book, Wanderers.

Let us begin.

I Have No Idea What I’m Doing (And That’s Maybe A Good Thing?)

Let’s just get this out of the way right now: I do not know how to write a book. By which I mean, I do not have a reliable way to write a book. I thought I did. We begin as authors, I think, to take in and accept certain truisms — if not about Writing In General, than about Our Individual Processes. We just say, “Well, this is how we do this. I outline the book, I think up some character arcs, I pray to the Dark Goat Slorgath, I pour a phial of demon saliva in a cursed inkwell, and then I write the book, two thousand words a day until it is done.”

This book just didn’t conform.

It was big and wiggly.

(That’s also the name of my Morning Zoo radio show. Big and Wiggly 97.5! BIG AND WIGGLY ON YOUR FM DIAL. Wait. Are there still Morning Zoo shows? Is there still an FM dial?!)

This book just didn’t conform to the way I thought I did things. The words came steadily, but in great swings of word count amounts, and sometimes the words came in huge fits and starts. I didn’t even outline it the same way: it was more I wrote a series of chapters and then kinda filled in the blanks. And there came a point where I was coming up on deadline and… wasn’t anywhere near finished. When that happened I snapped into freelance mode and was like, “Boom, I can hit deadline, just let me do a time jump and we’ll get to the third act and I can make it work with some killer thriller pacing and–” And blessedly, my glorious editor, Tricia Narwani, told me not to do any of that. She just said to write the book. Let it be long, we can always edit it down later. Forget the deadline: just get the best book I could out of it. And I think that’s what happened. I think this is my best work, and it was done by doing almost everything… differently.

I don’t mean to suggest we’re not, in a way, experts at what we do. And I think we do need to sometimes trust the process. But sometimes we need to go beyond that, outside that, and trust ourselves more than the process. The process is not the book, and the book is not the process.

Size Doesn’t Matter, And Neither Does Time

It’s a big book. Let’s just get that out of the way. It’s 800 pages, ~280,000 words. And surprisingly, we didn’t cut much out of it. Maybe 5k, and mostly as line edits. And it took four years for the idea to marinate, six months to write, six months to edit, a year to shelves.

Books are gonna be what they’re gonna be. They’re gonna be as big as they gotta be and take the time that they need to take. That’s not to say every book should be this — and I don’t want you to think that the book is somehow sentient and will defy editing wisdom in order to stay a THICC, LORGE BOOKSON. And real talk: in most cases, if you’re a debut author, you’re not gonna have an easy time securing an agent with a 400-billion-page book. But sometimes, you just know what a book is, and what it has to be, and this book had to be what it is. Which is to say, a bonafide bison bludgeoner that took a long time to get here.

The First Steps Direct The Journey

In the first round of edits, there was one big problem with the book — one of the main characters, Benji Ray, a CDC EIS investigator, felt off. He was too together, too competent. He was too good and there wasn’t much struggle in the story beyond external circumstances. He felt more a mouthpiece than anything without much story to call his own. But characters need stories of their own; they must have agency and problems unique to them and separate from (if eventually intertwining with) the Bigger Story. Benji felt hollow, sadly.

Turns out, stuff like that nearly always cascades from the very beginning: stories can suffer from step on a butterfly here, make a hurricane there problems, and turns out, if you point the story in the wrong direction, even subtly so, from the get-go, you end up way off the fucking mark.

Took some changes at the beginning to his story to lock his whole narrative in, and braid it with the rest. And that change — which was adding the “disgraced” part to his role as “scientist” — lent not only him clarity, but also clarity to other aspects of the plot, complicating the entire moral dimension of the thing. This is a riff on the old saying that third act problems are really first act problems, and it’s true, to a point: sometimes you just have to fix the beginning to fix the ending.

A Good Editor Is Everything

Apropos to a number of these things I learned is a thing that I did not learn so much as was reminded of consistently through this process: a good editor is gold. Tricia is an astonishing editor. Her edit letters nail that perfect balance between being kind and brutal, and they aren’t afraid to really get into what the book is doing and what it’s saying. It means so much to have someone there who you trust with the story as much as, if not more than, yourself. Especially in those curious, vulnerable times where you’re just not sure what to do or where to go.

Trust me when I tell you: you won’t always have great editors. But when you do — it’s revelatory.

Light and Dark

In a book about the end of the world, you run a real risk of just being too damn dark. A ceaseless, grimdark parade. THINGS ARE BAD. DID YOU KNOW THEY’RE BAD? BAD BAD BAD BAD.

But I just can’t have that. I can’t have that first because I don’t want you to have to endure that kind of book, and also, I don’t wanna write that kind of book. Obviously, it’s not going to be a wacky fun-fest, writing the End Times, but my goal is to see that darkness and crank up some serious candlepower to blast a hole through it. And that means writing the darkness away with hope and heart and even humor. A campfire to push back the night.

The horror I like to write isn’t the kind where the horror wins. I think evil can be beaten — if only temporarily, and only after a vicious, sometimes Pyrrhic victory. I just can’t give into nihilism. Not now. Not with all that’s going on — both in the book, and off the page.

Part of the thing with this book is, it’s full of anxieties, right? My anxieties, but I’m betting, yours too. (I mean, have you read the news?) But I don’t want those anxieties just to be there on the page, running rampant, only there to scare your pucker shut. I want to treat it like a summoning circle: I’m summoning the demon and trapping it into the circle —

Because there, we can kill it.

Or at least wrestle it. Learn from it. Maybe even calm it down a little.

So, for me there’s value in bringing the darkness in —

And then pinning it to the floor with a spear of light.

You can’t beat all the darkness.

But you can beat back a little of it. And I hope Wanderers manages to do exactly that.

Hope you check it out and enjoy.

Print: Indiebound | Let’s Play Books (signed) | The Signed Page | B&N | BAM | Amazon

eBook: Amazon | Apple Books | B&N | Kobo | Google Play | BAM

Audio: Audible | Libro.FM

And you can add it on Goodreads.

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