Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 83

Killing Malmon: A Charity Anthology

Here’s Dan and Kate Malmon to talk briefly about a charity anthology you can buy right now (print, e-book) — get some stories and support the fight against Multiple Sclerosis.

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Sometimes – often times – life is weird.

In 2014, Crimespree Magazine held an online flash fiction contest. The theme? Somewhere in the story, “Dan Malmon” had to die. Funny, sad, serious, or scary, Malmon had to meet his maker. Flash forward to 2016, when Jon Jordan of Crimespree Magazine is talking to Eric Campbell of Down and Out Books (UGH, namedrop much?) and Jon says, “I think the stories should be collected.” Eric says, “Yeah, cool. Let’s do it.”

Kate and I say, “WhaHUH?”

The whole concept was always equal parts flattering and equal parts oogie to us. But, bind the stories up into a for-real book? That for-real people could buy? With for-real money? Call it old fashioned Midwestern values, but we weren’t down with that.

But, how about if we could sell it for charity? I’ll always put myself out on a limb for a laugh, er, good cause. Down and Out was down for it (Oh, come on). We have always been deeply invested in the fight against Multiple Sclerosis. Kate has had her own Bike MS team, Saint Kate’s Cycling Saints, which has been raising money for the MS Society for years now. We figured we could use KILLIING MALMON as another way to keep the spotlight on this horrible disease, and keep throwing cash at a good cause. But the collection needed more words than the initial online contest provided. So, we turned on the Bat Signal. Or Facebook Messenger. You get the idea.

Anyway, we put out the call. Friends, old and new, sent us story after bloodthirsty story. 360 pages of gleeful gunshots, disgusting decapitations, and pitiful poisonings. Eric Beetner created the eye-catching cover. Now the rest is up to you, the reader. KILLIING MALMON is a great experiment: How would 30 different crime writers, both amateur and professional, off the same, poor schlub? While everyone is getting their bloodthirsty kicks, the MS Society is getting 100% of the proceeds.

Now everyone can feel good about getting their bloodthirsty kicks.

KILLING MALMON is available now from all the usual suspects (click here).

Some Crass But Necessary Self-Promotional Reminders

First up, Turok #3 is out today. TAKE A TRIP TO THE STORMLANDS, Y’ALL. Meet some new friends. Ride some dinosaurs. I’m new to the comics thing, relatively, but this has been a blast to write. And Alvaro’s art continues to kick me in the teeth in the best way possible.

Second, the big-ass mega-ultra holy-shit whamma-jamma book bundle is still 50% off until November 1st — all to help you get ramped up for Nanowrimo. It’s 8 writing books and two novels, and using code NANOCTOBER gets you it for ten bucks instead of twenty.

Third, if you have read and enjoyed Damn Fine Story, please leave a review somewhere. If you didn’t like it, please paint your negative review onto the side of a goat, then feed the goat to a crocodile. If you liked the book, please tell a friend! If you did not like it, please tell an enemy that you did like it, in the hopes that your deception will cause them to read the book and be disappointed — victory for you. If you still need to check out the book: print, e-book.

Fourth, why is Zer0es $3.99? I dunno! But go grab it.

And that’s it. Naughty, naughty self-promotion is done.

*showers off the scum and villainy and capitalism*

Not Being Inclusive Is Also A Political Choice

Gonna try to keep this short and tight, like a hobbit sock.

[Edit: I fear I have failed to keep it short and tight, like a hobbit sock.]

As you well know, I WROTE A STAR WAR, and in fact, I wrote THREE STARS WAR, plus a STARS WAR SHORT STORY and a WAR STAR BOOK OF COMICS and it’s been pretty great except for the fact that sometimes I get some, ahem, interesting reviews, tweets, and emails.

Last week, a wonderful hashtag spun around the Twitters — #SWRepMatters — which is to say, Star Wars Representation Matters. Go read the tweets that line up behind it.

Someone responded to one of my tweets and said the following:

 

My response was:

1. everything is forced in a story because they’re not magic

2. stories are not a natural state and so nothing occurs naturally within them, nor can they “call for” anything

3. inclusivity is part of good storytelling

4. not being inclusive is also a political choice

This person deleted his tweet and went on to clarify that he in fact totally supported a pairing like, say, Finn/Poe, but he wanted it to have a purpose in the story and not simply be included for political purposes. Abstractly, what he’s saying is, he’s not a bigot, not a homophobe, he just cares about storytelling. Which is fine, in theory, and I’m not suggesting this person is worthy of excoriation. I’m sure he means well. But I think it’s really worth shining a big, bright-ass light on this, because I think there’s a soft, unacknowledged prejudice at work.

It assumes that there exists a default in storytelling — and that default is one way, and not the other. The default is straight relationships, or cisgendered characters, or able-bodied white dudes, or whatever. One of the criticisms Aftermath received was this very special kind of softball phobia, right? “I don’t mind LGBT characters, but these were forced into the narrative for a political agenda,” assuming that the characters are somehow not characters at all, but rather protest signs or billboards advertising THE WONDERS OF GAYNESS or THE FABULOSITY OF THE NON-BINARY SPACE PIRATE LIFE. The complaint then becomes that these characters are political levers, identified as such because their natures (be it LGBT characters like Sinjir Rath Velus and Eleodie Maracavanya, or a character of color like Admiral Rae Sloane, or women characters like Norra Wexley and Jas Emari) do not somehow factor into the plot. Like, Sinjir’s homosexuality is not a plot point. He doesn’t shoot gayness out of his eyes to blow up the Third Death Star, oh no, he’s only there as a commercial for GAY PEOPLE EXISTING.

And the defense these critics make is that, “Well, Anakin and Padme’s relationship is plot-entangled, because their heterosexual coupling yields children of destiny.” So too with Han and Leia. (Erm, less so with Luke and Leia, unless we are to believe Rey is the child of incest, and boy, wouldn’t that be a twist?) Basically, Anakin and Padme do blow up the Death Star with their heterosexual coupling by proxy, because their two children literally work together to do just that very thing.

Problem is, that’s a shitty defense for a lot of reasons, first because it assumes characters are on the page only to serve plot, rather than to be on the page creating plot with their wants, their needs, their problems, their fears. Characters are who they are, and are not all driven by some kind of mythic quest — it’s okay that they want love, or respect, or are the products of their history and circumstance. It’s also a shitty defense because it assumes that the existence of a relationship is not itself plot — even if two characters have an untroubled relationship and exist together, they’re still making choices based on that relationship. Sinjir and Conder have a relationship in Aftermath, and it literally affects Sinjir’s character arc. It changes who he is. Each character has gravity and affects the other accordingly. Which in turn means they make decisions based on this, and those decisions do not follow the plot — they become the plot. So, the characters actually do affect the plot with their relationship.

But so fucking what if they didn’t?

So what if they’re just… together? And it affects nothing? So what if they’re simply visible examples of LGBT characters in a relationship? Who gives a shit? (Answer: a lot of turd-people, admittedly.) So what if The Doctor is now a woman, or James Bond ends up being played by a black actor? Someone says, “WUH, PFFT, WELL, THAT’S JUST SERVING A POLITICAL AGENDA, THEN.” Except, I got bad news for you: not including LGBT characters is similarly a political choice. Same as it is to not include disabled characters, or characters of color, or women, or, or, or. You just don’t see it as a political choice because it’s the politics in which you already swim. Like a fish, you have no context for the water all around you because it is your automatic default. If you view the presence of these characters as being political in the story, then you likely view them in reality — in your really real life! — as similarly political.

As I said above, stories aren’t alive. Yes, we tell tales ideally in an organic way so that all the widgets and flywheels in the mechanics are hidden from view, and yes, sometimes it feels like the stories somehow “flow” from us, as if we are simply summoning Cosmic Creative Energy, but the truth is, none of this is natural. Believing anything to be natural about stories allows us to create uncomfortable crutches for the stories we tell. Storytellers are engines of creation, not conduits for it. We force them into being. We conjure pyroclasm and lightning to tell tales. We make deliberate choices in our narrative — and, if you don’t make those deliberate choices, then you’re likely relying on lazy tropes or outmoded prejudices to tell those stories. A lack of inclusion in narrative is one such choice — based on lazy tropes and outmoded prejudices, it’s a choice that refuses to acknowledge actual people and actual reality.

None of that is an excuse, by the way, to make the opposite choice lazily — it’s entirely worth seeing the line where inclusion stumbles into a host of other problems (white savior stories, appropriating narratives that are not yours to tell, injecting such inclusion with other shitty tropes), but that’s a reason to do it and try to get it right rather than simply not to do it at all. Because it bears repeating: not being inclusive in the work is a political choice. Stories are not real. We tell them. We make them up. We will them into being with our fucking minds. 

It’s up to us to make them right and to tell them to the widest audience we can reach. Further, it’s also up to us to help support inclusivity outside the stories and among storytellers — inclusion shouldn’t just be on the page or the screen, but also behind the camera, behind the executive desk, behind the editorial and authorial pen. We have a lot of work to do, and choosing not to do it is no longer acceptable.

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DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

What do Luke Skywalker, John McClane, and a lonely dog on Ho’okipa Beach have in common? Simply put, we care about them.

Great storytelling is making readers care about your characters, the choices they make, and what happens to them. It’s making your audience feel the tension and emotion of a situation right alongside your protagonist. And to tell a damn fine story, you need to understand why and how that caring happens.

Whether you’re writing a novel, screenplay, video game, or comic, this funny and informative guide is chock-full of examples about the art and craft of storytelling–and how to write a damn fine story of your own.

Out now!

Indiebound  |  Amazon  |  B&N

Macro Monday Is Still High From Left Coast Life

AND WE’RE BACK.

Here’s a quicky trip report.

(I’ll likely miss things, so forgive me. It was a joyous blur.)

Last Sunday, I landed in San Francisco.

Apparently, so did Aaron Mahnke, creator of a little podcast-now-book-now-motherfucking-TV-show called Lore, and as we landed at roughly the same time and had hotels within (not-literal) pissing distance of one another, we got together for coffee and later, for dinner. Our forbidden romance knows no bounds.

Then, Monday, I hopped-skipped-and-jumped to a little upstart unknown company called Lucasfilm, where they told me I would be writing and directing Episode 9, and I was very excited, but then I accidentally — in my excitement! — tripped and fell into a glass case of vintage thermal detonators, which all exploded and sent Pablo Hidalgo rocketing, cartoon-like, into the bay. He could be seen in the distance, shaking his smoldering fist, so I lost the job.

The disappointment on The Carpathian’s face is as plain as my own.

But! They did let me do the Emmy-nominated STAR WARS SHOW as a second-place prize, and you can check me out on that show, just palling around with my pal, Anthony Carboni.

(Or you can just watch it here)

Tuesday, I went to the SF MOMA, and had a lovely time there, and at some point I will crystallize my thoughts on modern art and pop culture and some other random brain-squozenings, then I met up with super-pals Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde. Kevin, of course, has emerged with a brand spanking new epic fantasy series: the Seven Kennings, which begins with Plague of Giants. It is a blast. It has eleven point-of-view characters. It is a fresh take on epic fantasy. You want it. Fran was here to celebrate her now-completed planet-killing battlestation — wait, no, her now-completed trilogy of bad-ass Bone Universe books, which are dense with worldbuilding potency and sung with lyrical love, and again, are books you must read. (And I see Updraft is, right now, $2.99 for your e-book machine.) It is a wonder that I am friends with so many talented writers. Why they hang with me, I can never know.

Together, we traipsed merrily toward Borderlands Books —

— where we did a slam bang event and they sold their books and I sold my newly-released book about storytelling, Damn Fine Story, and then we went out for tacos, as is necessary to please the word gods. We got to hang briefly with some awesome folks like Richard Kadrey and Charlie Jane Anders and all was well in the world.

I also stayed in a hotel where you could buy “sex dust,” which to my surprise is not cocaine and MDMA mixed together.

Event complete, we zipped off to Portland in the morning.

Kevin and I had face-explodingly good ramen at Boxer Ramen:

And then had ice cream at Salt & Straw:

And you might say, hey, Chuck, what’s the ice cream? And I’d say, well, the bottom scoop is strawberry balsamic, and it was — you know, imagine my face making the most pleasurable face (ew, not that way) you can imagine, and that’s how good it was. Then I’d say, but the top scoop was even better. What was the top scoop? Well, it was Dracula’s Blood Pudding flavor, which is clearly a funny name for a normal flavor, right? HA HA HA NO, it’s motherfucking blood pudding flavored, people. We tasted it and the counter dude was like, “This has actual pig’s blood in it,” and I was like, okay, I’ll vamp it up.

It was maybe the best ice cream I’ve ever had.

It was warm and chocolatey without being chocolate, exactly? It had a Mexican hot chocolate vibe to it, it was richer than expected, it was creamy, it was not bloody or mineral-ish, it was just deeply, intensely satisfying. Also I am now a vampire.

Here, have some Essence of Ghost —

Then Kevin and I trekked to the downtown Portland Powell’s, where I completed a precious ritual of the SFF writer: I signed the pillar.

SEE THERE I AM SIGNING THE PILLAR.

Garbed in the PDX attire of “flannel.”

Here is Kevin, next to Plague of Giants:

We signed their stock, which was considerable. (I also like that they shelve some of my books in horror. I know that horror is anathema in the publishing world right now — a vile curse turning to ash upon the tongue — but really, I tend to write books that skew to horror. Especially the Miriam Black books.)

So, I’d also like to apologize to Powells, because I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand. I’m from the East Coast, and people would proselytize that store to me, and I’d be like, well, I like bookstores, so that sounds great. And they’d clearly see the lack of passion in my eyes and say, NO, MAN, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, and then I would just assume that, because they were from Portland, they were really high on like, sex dust or something, and would blow them off. Great, yeah yeah, sure, fine, it’s a bookstore, cool.

My turn to say —

NO, MAN, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.

It is a fully-operational book battlestation. (Second Death Star reference in a post? Shut up, it’s on-brand.) It is a temple to books. The downtown one is epic in size and stuffed to the rafters with endless books, including an awesome rare books room. I have not viscerally enjoyed a bookstore as much as I did visiting two different Powells that day.

Speaking of the second Powells —

Off to Beaverton to rejoin with Wild Fran Wilde, where we did an awesome event and answered lots of questions and sold lots of books and met scads of rad people.

Clearly, we are living our best author life:

Then in the morning, Fran wisely eschewed eating GIANT DUTCH BABY PANCAKES, unlike Kevin and I, pictured here in our pre-carb pre-coma state —

And then it was off to Seattle. We drove. Fran kept the conversation smart and literary, whereas Kevin and I talked about secret buttholes? We’re sorry, Fran. Then, a brief rendezvous with Cherie Priest and her Famous Doggos, followed by Thai food with Holy Shit It’s Kace K.C. Alexander, Y’all and why haven’t you read Necrotech yet?

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Finally, onto the signing at the University Bookstore in Seattle, except they actually did the event in a church? Thankfully it was a very nice church and not the kind where, y’know, all three of us authors burst into flames upon entering the building.

Scads of cool-ass writer mofos were there: Laura Anne Gilman, Adam Rakunas, Jason Hough, Phil Brucato and Sandra Swan, E. Lily Yu, Cherie Priest, Harry Connolly, Dennis Bakriges, Luke Matthews, Amanda Cherry — and surely more that my jet-laggy brain is missing.

Bonus excellence: Kevin and I met one of the narrators of our books, Xe Sands, who helped narrate Plague of Giants and who narrated Invasive:

You can see we were having no fun at all:

And clearly none of us were the least bit drunk there. Not me, nor Kevin, Amanda, K.C., Adam, nor that guy in the background. I was definitely not drunk on an $8 (!) pint-glass sized gin-and-tonic (!!) featuring a really lovely gin called The Botanist (?!). Point of trivia, the only reason Kevin in this image is not joining our orgy of delight is because he’s buying us all shawarma, because he is just that kind of best person.

Then it was time to say goodbye to people — Kevin was off to MORE TOUR, Fran was off to DIFFERENT MORE TOUR, and I remained in Seattle for a day, where I met with a kick-ass artist named Steven Belledin, who does work for Magic: the Gathering amongst other things (seriously goddamnit go look at his art right bloody now)– oh, and he’s also my second-cousin? — and then I wandered the city, taking in the sights, eating piroshky and BBQ pork buns and then passing out because I had a 6AM flight back home.

Seattle did not leave me disappointed, of course:

I love all three cities immensely and miss them already.

Not as much, though, as I miss my traveling companions — if you ever get the chance to hang with Kevin and Fran, do so immediately. And if you can’t hang with them in person, by gods, go buy their books. And thanks too to Del Rey for helping arrange this tour.

And that’s it, that’s me, I’m out.

More soon.

*ejects*

P.S. don’t forget about Damn Fine Story, out now in print and e-book — if you’ve read it, please tell folks, leave a review?

Out Today: Damn Fine Story

[image error]THE MONOCLED ELK HAS BEEN RELEASED INTO THE WILD.

Hey, I wrote a book! You’ve probably heard me mouthing off about it.

This book is Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative.

It is not, precisely, a book about writing advice.

Rather, it is a book about storytelling.

Further, it’s a book about why we tell stories, how we tell them, and what we can do to tell them in a way that is clear, clever, and confident. It’s about understanding the shape of narrative and letting characters be architects, not architecture. It talks about the value of theme — giving your story an argument and a deeper point to make. It’s about how, while formats change, the bones of story are the same. It’s about squirrel sex talks, wayward surfer dogs, Star Wars, Die Hard, missing pinky fingers, the jokes of 4-year-olds, and lots and lots of really weird footnotes*.

I hope you like it.

You can find it here:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Amongst other places where disreputable, deviant books are sold.

As always, if you dig it — or any of my books, or really, any book by any author you’ve enjoyed — please leave a review, tell a friend, yell your adoration into the ear of a magic goat, whatever you gotta do to share the love.

And again, if you’re out on the Leftmost Coast, you can find me at a trio of events with Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde —

October 17th, San Francisco, Borderlands Books, 6pm — details here.

October 18th, Portland/Beaverton, Powell’s Books, 7pm — details here.

October 19th, Seattle, University Temple Church, 7pm — details here.

* no, really

Macro Monday Hits The Road

It is time, good people of the intertubes, for me to leave you.

*gets in a spaceship*

*waits for spaceship to take off*

*finds out spaceship is actually just a pillow fort my 6-year-old built*

*stays in there anyway, drinking cocoa, because fuck yeah, pillow forts and cocoa*

OKAY NO I’m not actually escaping the gravity of this planet.

I’m hitting the road in support of Damn Fine Story, out tomorrow. (And, if we’re being totally honest, I have already left on a big airplane and should already be on the Leftmost Coast.)

(*waves*)

While out here, I am joining Kevin Hearne (Plague of Giants!) and Fran Wilde (The Bone Universe!) and popping off to a trio of really cool events that you should totally go to. No, I don’t care where you live, you should go. Go now. Get there. Steal a car. Cling to the wing of a plane like a gremlin, I don’t care, just get it done.

Where we will be:

October 17th, San Francisco, Borderlands Books, 6pm — details here.

October 18th, Portland/Beaverton, Powell’s Books, 7pm — details here.

October 19th, Seattle, University Temple Church, 7pm — details here.

PLEASE TO COME AND SAY HELLO.

Oh and fine, you want a macro, here goes:

Autumnal drops! Not a new shot, but I like it.

Invasive At CBS — “Unthinkable”

*ahem*

I have an announcement to make.

*opens mouth*

*ants pour out*

*ants collectively spell a message*

FBI Drama From Jerry Bruckheimer TV & ‘MacGyver’ EP David Slack Set At CBS

*ants return to mouth*

*maw snaps shut*

So, if you click that link, you’ll see a couple notable paragraphs:

CBS has put in development Unthinkable, an FBI crime drama from Jerry Bruckheimer Television and MacGyver executive producer David Slack. CBS Television Studios, where both JBTV and Slack are based, is the studio.

Written and executive produced by Slack, Unthinkable, based on Chuck Wendig’s 2016 novel Invasive, is about a brilliant futurist, trained to see danger around every corner, who’s recruited by an uncharacteristically optimistic FBI Agent to identify the threats only she can see coming – and stop them before it’s too late.

So, that’s the news.

It is very exciting news.

Technically, Invasive was optioned over a year ago. But, it wasn’t announced, so I sat on it, as is the way. (I may or may not be sitting on some news regarding another series, too.) And nothing was really happening, far as I knew —

Until David Slack and Bruckheimer TV got involved.

Then it got more serious.

Slack sent me the pitch for Unthinkable — which builds off of Hannah as a character, as the basis for the whole series — and it was a fucking grand slam, The Natural-style rain of glass and electricity. It’s the kind of pitch where I read it and was like, “Okay, this goes above and beyond the book, and if this doesn’t become a TV show that I can watch, I will kick over my TV in rage.” It’s that good. (Slack knows his way around a pitch. I’ve read pitches, and I’ve read pitches, and this was weaponized art. Before I day I aspire to be half that good.) Anyway! Point is, it’s jumped some hurdles, but while this is all very excited, I will caution you (and more me!) that this doesn’t mean it’s getting made into a show — just that it’s progressing forward, that it has amazing people behind it, and that there’s at least a shot. But it remains an option, so the wind blows the way the wind blows.

Still, we can all cross our fingers and toes.

If you haven’t read the book, nab it where books are sold.

Or, the e-book is still $3.99 for reasons unknown: Amazon | B&N | iBooks

Oh, and since someone might ask — will there be more Hannah Stander on bookshelves? Answer unclear, ask again later. We did not work out a deal with Harper for more books, but if a TV show really does come out of this (and it probably won’t!), then I’d not say no to writing more of her adventures, but who knows?

Kali Wallace: Five Things I Learned Writing The Memory Trees

Sorrow Lovegood’s life has been shaped by the stories of the women who came before her: brave, resilient ancestors who settled long ago on an unusual apple orchard in Vermont. The land has been passed down through generations, and Sorrow and her family take pride in its strange history. Their offbeat habits may be ridiculed by other townspeople—especially their neighbors, the Abrams family—but for the first eight years of her life, the orchard is Sorrow’s whole world.

Then one winter night everything changes. Sorrow’s sister, Patience, is tragically killed. Their mother suffers a breakdown. Sorrow is sent to live with her father in Miami, away from the only home she’s ever known.

Now sixteen, Sorrow’s memories of her life in Vermont are maddeningly hazy; even the details of her sister’s death are unclear. She returns to the orchard for the summer, determined to answer the questions that have haunted her: Why has her mother kept her distance over the last eight years? What actually happened the night Patience died? What other long-buried secrets has the orchard been waiting for her to uncover?

You can rewrite an entire book multiple times without knowing what it’s about

I’ve heard writers say that the first draft of a novel is the one where we tell the story to ourselves. What I haven’t heard is that this can also be true of the second, third, fourth, and fifth drafts, because sometimes it takes that many tries to figure out what the hell we’re doing.

The Memory Trees began life as a very different kind of book. It was a classic ghost story: creepy atmosphere, excessive melodrama, flimsy-as-fuck murder mystery. And through many drafts, I tried to make that story work. I tried to fix the murder mystery. Added ghosts. Added confrontations. Added ominous fog. My editor got a lot of practice saying, “This revision is better! …but also not really better,” in politely ruthless ways.

She was right. For eighteen months of rewrites, revisions, edit letters, phone calls, outlines followed and discarded, she was right. I wasn’t making it better.

Only when I finally discarded the ghost story framework I had started with was I able to focus on the things that actually offered the makings of a decent book: the characters, their relationships, the many ways humans help and harm each other, and how those fierce, personal acts of love and hate can have repercussions that last generations.

Second novels are for unlearning what you have learned

After you finish your first book, a lot of people warn you that the second one will be harder. I expected that to be true. But what I didn’t expect–possibly because nobody warned me, but more likely because I wasn’t listening when they did–was that I would sit down to work on my second novel and have absolutely no idea what to do.

None of the revision techniques I used for my first novel worked anymore. None of the questions I had learned to ask of my characters helped. I could not make the story’s structure feel natural. I could not strike the right tone. I could not balance the pacing. Every change only made me more frustrated with how far the story was from being what I wanted it to be.

What I eventually figured out was that I had not learned how to write a novel. I had learned how to write that novel. Now I needed to learn how to write this novel.

It’s never too late to rearrange your entire novel on a whim

And that meant learning that while plot may be one damn thing happening after another, story is something else entirely.

Two weeks before my final final final deadline–I had already pushed back the publication date twice–I was forced to admit that while individual scenes worked, the characters were distinct, the plot had no holes, and the writing was strong, something in the book remained fundamentally broken.

That’s when I got the idea to blow up the whole structure.

I thought of it while walking to the gym–all the best ideas come while walking or showering–and I had absolutely no idea if it would work. I certainly didn’t have any time to spare. But I did it anyway: I broke off the first eight chapters (roughly 1/3 of the book), reshuffled them into a different order, and stuck them elsewhere, letting the emotional progress define their placement more than the sequence of events.

It did work–thank goodness, because I was out of ideas. It worked because this is a book about how the past informs the present, about the interplay between memory and truth, about how the actions of past generations still reverberate. In that kind of story, setting the past alongside the present makes sense–but I didn’t know that until I tried it.

How to delete men for fun and profit and the conscious deconstruction of internal bias

From the beginning The Memory Trees was a book the relationships between women. It’s about a teenage girl reconnecting with her mother and grandmother, all members of an old matriarchal family. That was always the plan: this is a story about women.

It wasn’t until my editor pointed out to me places where the central characters were taking a back seat to the men in their lives did I realize how deeply unintentional gender imbalance and bias can creep in. The solution, in retrospect, was obvious: for every character, for every scene, look long and hard at whose perspective is being favored, and take men out of the story when they had no reason to be there. Every single character got the “What is your purpose and does that purpose actually require a male character?” treatment.

The world has conditioned us as both readers and writers to accept that male characters are the natural default, while female characters need exceptional reasons for existing. That is both sexism and bad storytelling, and it takes conscious work to avoid both. It’s such a pervasive problem, such an ingrained habit, that even as a wildly progressive, grossly over-educated thirty-eight-year-old woman living in the year 2017, I still had to learn this lesson about letting women stand at the center of their own stories.

Stories are important when the world is crumbling

This book is forever tied in my mind to the unending escalation of horror that was 2016. There were many, many times when I looked up from my work and asked myself, “What the hell am I even doing? The world is a dumpster fire! Friends and loved ones and neighbors and strangers are in fear for their lives! Heartless sociopathic monsters are taking over our country! Why the fuck am I writing a book about magical apple trees?“

Since the mind-numbing shock of Election Day 2016–which also happened to be my birthday, fuck you very much–I’ve had many conversations with writer friends in which we asked ourselves: Why are we doing this? Who is this for? Does any of it matter?

Every writer has to find their own answers, and for me those answers are both complicated and painfully simple. Stories matter to children looking for both a mirror of their own lives and a window into a better world. Stories matter to teenagers who are righteously pissed off at how adults have fucked up the world so badly. Stories matter to anybody who needs to believe in beauty, justice, hope, and progress. A world in which art and beauty are encouraged to exist is what we are fighting for. A world in which long-silenced people are invited to shout their stories from the rooftops is what we are fighting for. A world in which young women can learn that their voices matter is the whole goddamned point.

Or maybe stories only matter because we’re all going to need to Scheherazade our way out of being eaten by roving bands of cannibals as we stumble wearily through the oncoming apocalyptic wasteland. That’s important too.

* * *

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. She is the author of the young adult novels Shallow Graves and The Memory Trees, and the upcoming children’s fantasy novel City of Islands. Her short fiction has 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 | Twitter | Instagram

The Memory Trees: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Book Depository

Jon McGoran: What Spliced Taught Me About Spliced

I love reading the “Five Things I Learned…” posts on terribleminds, and I’ve enjoyed writing them in the past. That’s what this post was originally going to be, and I did learn plenty while writing Spliced: about using viruses as vectors for gene splicing, climate change, animal personhood, computer implants, the difference (in my mind) between science thrillers and science fiction, and a lot about writing YA.

And there were plenty of other interesting discoveries that came before I even had the idea for Spliced. Part of what I love about writing the kind of books I write is the research. I write about things I find fascinating, so the opportunity to drill down deeper into those topics is often fascinating, too. And it invariably leads to other ideas. Some of the my best book ideas come from research for earlier books.

That’s how it was with Spliced.

I was researching Deadout, one of  my previous science thrillers, when I started reading about biohackers, who tinker with genetic engineering in their basements, much like people did with computers in the seventies and eighties. I found the notion fascinating, scary but cool—part of a long and proud tradition of citizen scientists. I knew I wanted to write about it somehow, and several more obvious ideas came to me (some of which I may revisit) before I thought of biohacking, several decades in the future, merging with body modification subculture. The idea excited me: disaffected young people splicing animal genes into their own to become chimeras.

As I brainstormed and outlined and started writing Spliced, some of the most interesting thoughts and central ideas seemed to come from within the book itself, as it basically told me what it was about.

Writers often talk about characters revealing themselves during the writing of a book, but the same thing can be true with the themes. The deeper you get into it, the more you realize that maybe it’s not about the thing you thought it was about. Maybe it’s about something else. Fortunately, as an outliner, I rely on the upfront thought work to help me figure a lot these things out before I start writing (and to avoid some of the  massive rewrites that can come from these revelations).

Spliced is not about biohacking, and it’s not about body modification, either, or at least not in the sense that we know it today. It’s about this other thing that came out of those things. I knew when I had the idea for Spliced that if such a technology became as readily available as it is in the book, there would be those who would use it. But what I didn’t know, at first, was why. Why would people choose to do this thing that was so drastic, dangerous, and disruptive to their lives? In order to understand, I had to more fully understand the world in which the book would take place.

I had realized early on that when writing a book set decades in the future, you either acknowledge climate change or deny it. But what began as an almost logistical consideration, unavoidable but peripheral, became one of the central themes. Peak oil had come and gone, and while energy usage has become smarter, the supply has become scarcer, with far-reaching implications. The climate has been knocked askew, and the extinction event that looms over us today is by then well underway.

These environment factors came to define the world of the book in many ways, and they also informed the motives of many of the characters who get spliced: For some, being a chimera is a fashion statement or an act of rebellion, but for others, it is an homage to extinct species, or a declaration of a symbolic separation from a humanity that seemed so intent on trashing the natural world. It is a statement—or many statements—and important ones, at that.

Once I had a grasp on the world that would give rise to chimeras, I had to consider what chimeras would give rise to: How would their presence shape the world around them? Unfortunately, I didn’t have far to look in our own world to see how some in society react with fear, anger, disgust, and hatred to those who are different—whether they ‘choose’ to be different or not—and to anything that upsets their perceived natural order or blurs lines they consider absolute. And, alongside them, of course, would be those ready to capitalize on that fear and hatred, to inflame it and use it as a wedge for political gain.

Once you have a wedge, you need something to drive it deeper. The biggest and most powerful hammer in the demagogue toolbox may be the dehumanization of the other, and that is the focus of the anti-chimera backlash: a law that declares anyone whose DNA is not one hundred percent human a legal nonperson.

Ironically, the person leading the charge to declare chimeras nonpersons achieved his wealth and prominence as a pioneer in computer implants—another form of transhumanism. Though maybe that’s more about hypocrisy, something that has never stopped a demagogue.

More ironic, maybe, is writing a book about people who choose not to be one hundred percent human being persecuted and oppressed by those who seek to dehumanize them. But a little irony has never stopped a writer.

In the end, as always, I did learn a lot while writing this book, and from many sources — web research, interviews with experts, other writers, and of course books. But as it turned out, this time, one of the books from which I learned the most hadn’t yet been written.

Jon McGoran: Website | Twitter

Spliced: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

The Game Is Rigged

The game is rigged.

It’s not a surprise, not a mystery, definitely not news to a majority of the country’s population — women, people of color, the LGBT community, the disabled, immigrants.

But the election of the Naughahyde Narcissist to the Highest Chair in the Land has given 2017 a near-perfect view of the game, exposed — all its crushing gears and choking chains, all the mechanisms laid bare. All the uneven scoring, all the tilted fields, all the corrupt umps.

Harvey Weinstein is a serial abuser, and Hillary gets the blame. The women who never spoke out get the blame. Obama gets the blame. Harvey’s own agency in his own rapist predations is cast further and further from Harvey himself. The women are told, yet again, they were wearing the wrong clothes. That they probably egged him on. And on the other side, the fact they didn’t protest, didn’t fight back against a system that would’ve crushed them, didn’t do more to protect other women, that’s a scarlet letter staplegunned to their sleeve.

Black Americans get executed in the streets by a police force out of control, so Black Americans stand in the streets to defend against that — but they’re tear-gassed, beaten, made to disappear, threatened, sued, told to find a place to protest quietly, peacefully, non-violently. They’re called animals and thugs, treated like criminals even when they’re just standing there. Colin Kaepernick kneels during an NFL game — protesting the deaths of Black Americans quietly, peacefully, non-violently — and he’s a traitor, a quisling, shut up and play ball, dance when we shoot at your feet, hurt yourself for the pleasure of those in the stands. Use your platform for good, they cry, and he does, every day, but they don’t notice, and they don’t care.

Nazis in Charlottesville are just good old-fashioned protesters, though, just exercising their First Amendment Rights — and, more importantly, their Second, am I right? — they’re ‘white activists,’ they’re ‘historical cosplayers,’ they’re ‘Nazi-adjacent freedom-seekers.’ They kill a woman, but it’s okay, and besides, didn’t someone introduce legislation where it would be okay to mow down a protester with a car? That makes it okay. It must.

A white man opens fire in Las Vegas, he kills scores, wounds ten times those that he murders, and so begin the stories of what a good man he was, how nice he was, he was a lone wolf, not one of our tribe, oh no, just a man without a home, a family man, a friendly man — and we’re told now isn’t the time to talk about guns, not now, and not tomorrow because another shooting will come, and not the day after that, because another shooting will come. But he’s not a terrorist, he’s not a thug, not an animal or a criminal, just a good man who went bad. Not his fault. Never his fault. If he were Muslim or black, well… those people…

Puerto Rico drowns in darkness. And it’s their fault. Something about loans or their economy, something about their woman mayor playing politics, and all the while the Ding-Dong Dictator pisses and moans about how now one appreciates him, how no one sees what he’s doing, because really, isn’t he the victim here? Isn’t he the victim because we don’t see the hero that he truly is, our Orange White Man, our Rubbery Russian Puppet, our Inglorious Leader?

Protections for our LGBT population are whittled once again to splinters because really, aren’t protections for them actually the opposite of that for us? What about our freedoms to religiously persecute them? Giving them equal freedom surely, surely means taking away the freedom we have now to discriminate against them. The disabled, too — why should they have access to healthcare and bathrooms and compassion, isn’t it really their fault for being born this way, and if they weren’t born this way, certainly they must’ve done something to deserve it in this Ayn Randian Hellworld we’ve built for ourself, where the rich are special, where geniuses deserve their power, where altruism is a disease and the uneven distribution of wealth is simply a rational principle like the way water and shit both run downhill.

Isn’t it really just about ethics in videogame journalism? It’s definitely not about the unwelcome presence of icky girls or queerness or disability or differently-colored skin in our videogames, oh no. It’s about objectivity in game reviews, obviously, definitely, don’t you say differently, SJWs, or we’ll dox you and SWAT your house and unleash literal years of abuse online, abuse that nobody ever does anything to fix, because that abuse serves the platform on which it is trafficked. And then that platform, unmitigated and unrefined, still trafficking in abuse, will help to elect the Grabber-In-Chief, the Racist Ringleader, the Tiny-Fingered Tyrant, to the most powerful office in all the world, and we will stumble, shrugging, toward nuclear war, toward unstoppable climate change, toward a depressed economy, toward the throat-cutting of American nobility on the world stage…

Toward both the bang and the whimper.

But don’t worry. It’ll be okay.

Are you white? Then we will protect you.

Are you also a man? Oh, boy howdy, then do I have good news for you.

Cisgendered? Able-bodied? Right this way, sir.

Are you wealthy? Then please, accept this bag of money, and this nice car, and this beautiful house, not to mention these endless safety nets, these trampolines to always catch you and bounce you back up no matter how rampant your mediocrity, we will always protect you, here is your blame-resistant tuxedo, here is your bubble of clean air, here is your perfect place at the center of the universe where nothing can touch you, nothing can hurt you, everything is warm like bathwater. Nothing is your fault, don’t worry. You will be safe. Because the game is rigged in your favor. The doors will always open for you. We’ll give everything to you. It doesn’t matter if it destroys the world — there’s an underground bunker with your name on it, and a rocketship that will allow you to depart for cleaner, freer skies.

* * *

I don’t have any good call to action here.

I wish I did.

Just be aware of this stuff, People Like Me. Elevate voices that aren’t your own. Listen to those voices. Hear them. Pass the mic. Boost the signal. When you see the system working for you and against others, say something. Try to do something. Don’t worry about perfect, just be better, for Chrissakes. Stand tall for people who can’t, for people who will be crushed underneath the machine. Get out of the center of the universe. Give money to good causes. Vote for interests other than your own. Find empathy and critical thinking. Do something. Don’t just sit there and be the casual, happy recipient of love and favors. Share the road. And see the game for what it is, and how someone has cheated for you on your behalf.

[Note: comments are on and open, but the spam oubliette is open and ready for trolls and other shitbirds. I need not abide your nonsense.]