Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

Alien first contact tangles up with portal fantasy in this lush, adventurous tale, perfect for anyone who grew up dreaming of visiting Narnia or traveling to the stars.

Lady Ada Quintrall, heir to her grandfather the Duke of Corbridge, wants nothing more than to see her family’s new planet successfully terraformed, restoring their fortune and ensuring them a stable future. That means shutting away her whimsical side (including the beloved Chronicles of Yeneh, a children’s portal fantasy written by her own ancestor)—and refusing the requests of Dr. Zamora, the xenobiologist who is begging to study the planet’s native life before it’s driven extinct.

Ada’s own encounters with the native life are vicious and unsettling. But when Zamora trespasses into an Infested Zone, Ada goes after him and discovers the astonishing truth: Not only does this planet have native sentient life, but those beings share a connection to her family that’s older, deeper, and closer to her heart than she could have imagined.

1. Blending genres is my happy place

Genres are like ice cream. Sometimes you just want one great flavor with no distractions: your classic chocolate (sci-fi), or strawberry (fantasy). Sometimes you want a twist on the classic—I’m partial to strawberry cheesecake ice cream (let’s call that portal fantasy)—or some sub-genre toppings to add excitement. But what about when the ice cream shop offers you multiple scoops of different flavors?

Picking flavors that go together, sometimes unexpectedly, is its own sort of fun. Genre-blending, if done well, is like the most surprisingly delicious ice cream sundae.

I love the bold excitement of a space adventure, and the thought-provoking politics of a good first contact story. I also love the whimsy and nostalgia of a portal fantasy! So in writing The Final Chronicle of Yeneh, I said… why not both?

This story came out of the parallels I saw between space exploration and portal fantasies. Both involve exploring wondrous new worlds, but with different sensibilities; where most portal fantasies let us daydream about saving the world, the best first contact sci-fi confronts us with how we affect the places and species we encounter, often not in a good way. Blending these genres let me play with both that sense of wonder and the weight of planetary-scale consequences.

Add in some light historical vibes (Ada is the space-faring granddaughter of a duke) and a dose of plantpunk, and I discovered an unexpectedly fun flavor combination, which made it a delight to write!

2. Not every character wants a romance—but friendship stories are underrated

At a recent convention, I was telling a reader about Yeneh, specifically about the scientist, Zamora, who pushes Ada to let him study the planet’s native life. “And then they fall in love,” this reader said. I smiled and told her she’d have to read to find out, but she was quite certain of it.

I can’t blame her, not only because romantasy is so popular, but because I did set out for them to have a romance. But in the course of writing, every time I tried to include romantic moments or lingering glances, it fell flat. I’ve written romance subplots before, but Ada was persistently focused on more important things: first on supporting her family’s terraforming project, and then on protecting the yeheneh. Zamora kept snarking at her, but never quite flirting.

Eventually, I recognized that the romance wouldn’t be true to Ada’s character. What she needed was a friend, and Zamora turned out to be the right one. I think there’s a dearth of friendship stories, especially male-female friendship, especially where neither of them are gay. And with apologies to that one reader, in this story, friendship serves far better than a romance would have.

3. Plants on Earth are as wonderfully weird as aliens

When I want to write a truly alien-feeling alien, I turn to research about species on Earth, which can be so much stranger than what we think about day to day. In The Final Chronicle of Yeneh, I knew I wanted the native species to look and feel like plants, yet intelligent and lovable. How would they move and communicate? How would they experience the world?

Scientists are constantly discovering new things about plants that upend our old ideas. Just a few that I took inspiration from:

• The boquila plant in South America changes its appearance to mimic whatever plants are growing near it, meaning it can look completely different from one location to the next, despite being the same species. It’s well documented, but no one knows how it does this.
• In forests, trees cooperate via vast networks of underground fungi, which help spread messages and warnings and even distribute resources between them.
• Not only do plants produce chemicals tailored to ward off specific pests; some have been found to spread warnings to others of their species when they encounter a pest, so the others can get a head start on chemical production. Even more wild: some plants seem to make chemicals that attract the predators of the insects that want to munch on them!

Ideas like these melded together into the aliens that became the yeheneh, the native beings that turn out to be far more than they first appear.

4. Rewilding has its problems—but it still matters

Rewilding was one of the original sparks of inspiration for Yeneh, and as I learned, it’s more complex and less ideal than it might seem. More common in the UK and Europe than here in the US (where we still have some larger areas of minimally-disturbed wilderness—did you know that England, too, was once covered in forests? Can you picture it?), rewilding is the careful, deliberate process of restoring ecologically wrecked landscapes to active ecosystems resembling what they once were before humans intervened. As a nature lover with a background in environmental advocacy, of course it appealed to me!

Rewilding involves bringing back plants that control drainage and erosion, attract pollinators, feed birds, and provide shelter for other insects and critters. You need insects for the birds to eat, predators to control the smaller animals, keystone species like beavers and wolves… An ecosystem is an endlessly complex web of relationships that we humans still don’t fully understand, no matter how much we study it. The best we can do is help foster the basic necessities for the system to right itself.

(The same would be true for terraforming, which is Ada’s family’s goal in Yeneh. Starting with—or making—a blank slate might seem easier, but an artificially created ecosystem could only be a gross simplification, with a tiny fraction of the species you’d find in any ecosystem on Earth.)

The name “rewilding” implies going back to what was there previously, and as I learned, that’s not actually possible. The exact balance, the full range of species and relationships, can never be entirely reproduced. It’s gone forever. But I also learned that that’s okay. Nature changes over time on its own; if rewilding yields a new balance of biodiversity, it’s still better than barren landscapes. The important thing is finding ways to act in harmony with nature, not wiping away the parts we don’t like.

5. Cynicism doesn’t have to kill our childhood dreams

I started writing The Final Chronicle of Yeneh during the pandemic—not a time that inspired optimism about humanity, to say the least. Perhaps the recent memory of lockdown was part of why weaving some portal fantasy into the heart of this sci-fi story was so appealing to me. Portal fantasy is nostalgia and escape from the everyday. No matter how old I get, I still find delight in the idea of experiencing fantastical new places.

Some adult portal fantasies keep that sense of wonder, while others show them dark and tarnished, made gritty by real-world concerns. There are some heavy themes in Yeneh—colonization, genocide, ancestral guilt—but it was important to me that there also be light, hope, and joy. Ada feels a deep connection to the portal fantasies she read as a child (especially the in-world series The Chronicles of Yeneh, written by her own ancestor), and still daydreams about having her own portal fantasy adventure. I wanted to give her a real adventure when she meets the native beings, the yeheneh—and you, dear reader, get to come along with her.

Jo Miles writes optimistic science fiction and fantasy, including the Infinite Pantry series. Their short stories have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, and more. Jo lives in Maryland, where they help nonprofits use the internet to save the world, but mostly serve the whims of their two cats.

The Final Chronicle of Yeneh: Bookshop | Amazon | B&N | Horned Lark Press

Follow Jo Miles: Website | Newsletter | Bluesky | Instagram

Return to the mushroom metropolis of Neo Kinoko, immerse yourself in a sinister world of gangsters, blackmail, and fungal cuisine, and prepare for a Michelin-star tragedy in six courses.

The knives are out in this fast-paced, standalone Fungalverse novel. Set several months after the events of the award-winning Mushroom Blues, this side story combines the culinary wonder of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the kitchen chaos of The Bear, and the explosive tension of Hong Kong crime thrillers.

In the aftermath of the “Fuyu Massacre,” riots and whispers of revolution continue to plague the Hōpponese capital of Neo Kinoko. As a result, the iron grip of a foreign military occupation tightens day by day. Amidst this, Pocho Jiro, a once-renowned makizushi chef, has chosen to cook for Duncan MacArthur—the Coprinian Military Governor in Hōppon—as his personal chef… and indentured servant.

A run-in with dangerous fungal gangsters sets off a chain of events that Pocho cannot escape from. He’s left with two choices: Assassinate MacArthur, or watch his beloved sister die in front of his eyes. Will Pocho take up his knife and prepare MacArthur’s final meal?

Shit… writing a second book really is hard

Just before I published my debut novel, Mushroom Blues, I had all these grand, ambitious publishing plans, and even a projection timeline that lined up release windows years in advance. I told myself, “I’ll write and release book two by X date, and then do book three by Y date, et cetera et cetera.” But, well… all of that fell apart faster than a goddamn fungus grows after a rainstorm.

Turns out, writing a second book can actually be as challenging as people say—it certainly was for me. “The Sophomore Slump,” “Sequelitis,” “Second Book Blues” or whatever you want to call it, it’s real! The thing is, as much as I’d prepared myself mentally (even talking to numerous published authors on my podcast about this very concept), I wasn’t ready for how I would actually feel once Mushroom Blues was published, nor was I ready for the weeks and months that followed. I put so much of my mental and emotional energy into that book that I didn’t leave room to enjoy the achievement of debuting, or the successes that followed, or the fact that I had other stories that I wanted to write.

And that’s not to be negative and poo-poo my whole experience—on the contrary. For a self-published debut, Mushroom Blues has done really well: it has sold thousands of copies; it got nominated for a bunch of awards and won many of them; and it even landed 2^nd place (out of 300 books) in Mark Lawrence’s tenth Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO) competition. That’s a lot to live up to for a project that started out as an experiment and has developed into something far beyond my expectations. But that comes with a lot of baggage, too. I set the bar pretty fucking high for my first go at this, so the aftermath of my debut was riddled with starts and stops, ideas that burst into my brain, only to fizzle away after a few self-conscious pages. I found myself plagued with questions that did more to break me down than build me up: Was Mushroom Blues a fluke? Would I be able to write a good book again? What the hell am I even doing? A second book became something that felt more and more distant, even unattainable. 

All this to say, writing a second really can be that hard, because it comes with all of the internal and external expectations of that first book. At least, that was the case for me. I didn’t just produce my first novel through some divine act of inspiration, and I didn’t forget how to write, either. A Murder Most Fungal is proof that I was able to write, finish, edit and publish a second novel, but it took me not writing a direct sequel to get there. (Side story standalones, for the win!) Now, looking back, I realize I was too caught up in the perceived requirements of being a debut self-published author, and I let my entrepreneurial pursuit override the fact that I’m a creator first and foremost. In a kind of self-destructive way, I took the fun away from myself by prioritizing the business side of things far more than the act of writing the stories that would fuel that business in the long term. Speaking of which…

Creativity is sacred (and marketing can only take you so far)

Truthfully, my debut broke my creative spirit. In hindsight, a major reason why the sophomore slump hit me as hard as it did is because I didn’t stop marketing Mushroom Blues for a year-and-a-goddamn-half. I was so wrapped up in making that book a success that I created this tunnel vision scenario for myself, where nothing felt as important as the thing that already existed—this tangible book that had already been published. “I can hustle and get that book into more readers’ hands!” I repeated to myself again and again.

But there was a convergence point that snapped me out of my marketing-induced fugue state: all of my marketing efforts started to plateau, the book had developed its own word-of-mouth snowball effect, and the creative parts of my brain were screaming at me to “WAKE THE FUCK UP AND WRITE!” I realized I couldn’t market this book forever, and the best marketing I could and should do was write and publish the next book. After all, I’d spent far too long desecrating the most sacred aspect of being an author: writing.

With that in mind, I went through a period of serious self-reflection, thinking on how I could move forward in this industry in a way that was creatively sustainable for me. It took a lot of effort, but I began to find joy in the process again. Drafting A Murder Most Fungal really helped, as did my folktale novelette “The Stem-Cutter’s Daughter” (featured in The Book of Spores anthology). Another thing that aided my creative rejuvenation was collaborating on projects with friends, including a graphic novel and an audio drama. I didn’t need to make a sacrifice at the altar of some creative deity, but I did find my way again, bit by bit. And the newfound respect I have for my process is invaluable, such that marketing can occupy the sidecar of my creative motorcycle as opposed to riding the bike itself.

Food makes for excellent worldbuilding fuel

I love me some food. Cooking, too. But at the outset of writing A Murder Most Fungal, I had a lot of trepidations about centering an entire story around food. Not only that, centering it around a chef who is also a mushroom person. Yet as I delved deeper into the role food plays in the culture of the fungal people of my secondary world, the more doors I opened into what it means for them to be them. Ultimately, every biological being requires some degree of sustenance, and that sustenance can take many forms. But once a living being reaches a level where they manipulate their food beyond its natural state, oooooh, that’s when things get fun! After all, even mushroom people have to eat.

That’s because food is a fundamental pillar of most any culture (real, fantasy or otherwise), and it can reveal so much about a people once it becomes cuisine. The food itself represents a culinary chronicle, allowing readers a peek into a culture’s geography and the resources they have access to, the structure of a society and its ability to coalesce around systems like agriculture, manufacturing, transportation and commerce, or how institutions of control (such as governments) impose their authority on how food is handled and distributed. There is also language, storytelling and other forms of communication and how they revolve around eating practices, or the fact that recipes passed down from generation to generation are essentially an adaptive, edible history. Add to that celebrations, festivals and religious practices that incorporate eatables and banquets and the like.

Food is a literal feast of worldbuilding opportunities. You can present these details to readers in a subtle, piecemeal way, through the context of a character and a setting, such that they eat up this information without feeling bogged down or pulled out of the story. I utilized this approach a lot in A Murder Most Fungal, offering readers simple, throwaway details that could add to their immersion and engage their imaginations in the possibilities of this world: “If Adrian describes the main character preparing a meal of fungalfin tuna, what does that mean about other animals in this world? Are they also merged with mushrooms?!” That layering—both by the author and the reader—makes a world feel so much more believable.

So, with that in mind, I will never take the worldbuilding potential of food for granted again—hopefully you won’t either.

Kitchens are a perfect setting for high-stakes drama

Another thing I was hesitant about with A Murder Most Fungal was the narrative potential of a restaurant setting. It’s a pretty confined environment without a lot of space to work with, so would there be enough tension and drama, or opportunities for character and relationship development? But once I started writing the story, my worries were quickly swept away like a crumbs on a kitchen floor. Why? Because I discovered that kitchens are actually an ideal breeding ground for storytelling possibilities!

I look at it this way: kitchens are the modern-day equivalent of a pirate ship. You throw a bunch of random people together, each of whom has a unique background, temperament, skillset, et cetera, and you push them to produce high quality products in a high-stress environment (plus, that environment is filled with things that can burn and stab you). It’s a narrative goldmine! Add to that the interpersonal developments, where intense camaraderie is formed in an almost trauma-bonded kind of way. Or even more complicated if sexual tensions or in-fighting evolve between employees.

So, during the drafting of A Murder Most Fungal, I thought deeply about this particular kind of setting and what it could provide and accomplish. I also spent a good amount of time going back and watching movies, shows and documentaries that I’d seen in the past, sort of as a refresher on how kitchen drama can be done well. There’s the comedic approach of Pixar’s animated masterpiece Ratatouille (chef’s kiss, such a good film!), or the foul-mouthed, fiery approach of Gordon Ramsay cooking shows like Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares. But there’s also a lot to draw from a documentary like Jiro Dreams of Sushi, where the tension stems from an obsessive master chef with high expectations doling out subtle criticisms to his sons and his chefs, in a way that reflects his desire for perfection. And then there’s a show like The Bear, which delivers these anxiety-inducing family struggles and arguments, or coworkers who are at odds, or a business that is falling apart—it’s a shit show, but in the best way possible because you can’t look away. This is trainwreck-style drama, and the restaurant setting is so well suited to it.

Suffice to say, my early doubts were absurd, because restaurants are a perfect scenario for high-stakes drama. After all, a kitchen is bound to get messy at some point, and that mess makes for great stories.

I’m obsessed with fungal body horror

There’s something weirdly captivating about body horror. It’s visceral and unsettling, especially seeing something as familiar as the human body being deformed and altered in ways both subtle and overt. But when it comes to fungi specifically, I love how these organisms can infect the body, making changes from the inside out, until suddenly it becomes this grotesque eruption of mold and mushrooms manipulating flesh and bone.

Looking back, there are two properties that really instilled this fascination in me. One is The Last of Us video games and TV show, which did an incredible job of showing how spores and mycelia creep into hosts, then convert them into freakish fungal zombies with mushrooms blooming from their faces, or bloated bodies that ripple with fruiting bodies and spore-filled pustules. It’s so gross and terrifying, but I always found myself wanting more—even when I was scared shitless.  The other property is Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance). Those books took a different approach to The Last of Us, instead delving more deeply into the psychological and philosophical aspects of being infected and having your mind taken over by an alien entity. Both are creepy as hell in their respective ways, but the result was that I became a massive fan of how fungi can change a host, both in mind and body.

Now that I write my own fungalpunk fiction, it was inevitable that body horror would play a part in it. And while I dabbled with fungal horror a fair bit in Mushroom Blues, it’s nothing compared to A Murder Most Fungal. This obsession I have took a disturbing turn in the latest book simply because of the story’s focus on food. While planning out the climax, I thought to myself, How could food and fungi come together to create a truly fucked up body horror extravaganza? Well, you’ll just have to read A Murder Most Fungal to find out.

Adrian M. Gibson is an award-winning Canadian SFF author, podcaster, book designer, illustrator and tattoo artist. He is the creator of the SFF Addicts podcast, which he co-hosts with fellow authors M. J. Kuhn and Greta Kelly. The three host in-depth interviews with an array of science fiction and fantasy authors, as well as writing masterclasses. He is also the Publishing Project Manager at Grimdark Magazine, heading up their line of fantasy and science fiction novellas. He lives in Quito, Ecuador with his family.

Adrian M. Gibson: Website | Instagram | SFF Addicts Podcast | YouTube

A Murder Most Fungal: Amazon | The Broken Binding

Psst. Psst. New book alert. Middle grade. My weird take on portal fantasy. Out February 2027. Preorder here, or here.

(Cover by the amazing James Firnhaber!)

Visceral, gritty, and unforgiving, GRIEF EATER is a zombie story like you’ve never read before. 

When Kristina rises from her violent death, she’s not the same fragile woman her family once abandoned. She’s rageful, powerful, and hungry—for the blood of the ones who were supposed to love her. With a newfound craving to see vengeance and grief served, she launches into a once-in-an-undead-lifetime journey across blood-slicked highways to the scorched Australian bush and her hometown. As her body fails and her mind fractures, she’s left with one final question: Is she here to forgive, or to feed? 

A transgressive, gory examination of queer identity and found family, GRIEF EATER sinks its teeth into trauma and what it means to be devoured by grief.

Flashbacks can work if you do it right. 

When I was at Clarion West, pretty much ten years ago exactly, our very first instructor, Paul Park, dropped some wisdom into our heads that makes a whole lot of sense. He told us to “Stay in the present moment.” Keep stories in the present. Don’t jump away into flashbacks (unless, presumedly, you know what you’re doing). His reasoning was that flashbacks can end up pulling a reader away from the main narrative at the cost of momentum. I think he’s right, but I also think that sometimes you can justify flashbacks, if you can make them work for you the right way. Now, there are plenty of people who don’t love the flashbacks in Grief Eater (according to early reviews, thank you for reading, reviewers!) and some who find that they really work. I’d like to think that by and large they do!

In Grief Eater, Kristina, the main character, dies in the opening chapter and is turned into a zombie. Uh, spoilers, I guess? Anyway, her story, which becomes a revenge narrative, needed to have context if it was going to hit with any emotional weight. I suppose I could have started the story earlier and showed the reader selected scenes from her childhood and young adulthood, but that didn’t feel right. I wanted to drop you into the action, so you learn about her past while she stalks her way into her future, her teeth and fingers sharp.

Short stories sometimes birth novellas and novels.

There are many writers who try out a story idea with a short story first. My favourite is probably “The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Her Field-General and Their Wounds” by Seth Dickinson which became the novel The Traitor Baru Cormorant (💔) or “The City Born Great” by NK Jemisin, which became the novel The City We Became. 

For me, the Grief Eater world began with the protagonist of my short story “Don’t Pack Hope”, who would later be named Josh. I put several fragments of my heart into that story and was delighted when it was picked up by Nightmare Magazine, and then reprinted in Wastelands 3: The New Apocalypse edited by John Joseph Adams. Still, I knew I wasn’t done with that world. I knew that Kristy, Josh’s best friend, who became Kristina, had her own story. And I knew that, unlike beautiful Josh, Kristina didn’t make it out of the city alive.

Josh is a very special character to me, so I hope you enjoy a story from his perspective if you check it out.

The lightning bolt moment is incredible.

Grief Eater is a revenge story, but it didn’t start out that way. No, the first draft had my protagonist, Kristina, being pulled towards her terrible family by an invisible compulsion, a need to find them, to stand before them, to find herself seen. It wasn’t a particularly bad book, but I knew that something wasn’t quite right with it. As I usually do, I let the idea roll around in my head for a while. The narrative made itself comfortable in my lizard-brain until one day in the shower, it hit me. Kristina shouldn’t be pulled. She should hunt. It was an oh god, eyes wide, am I really doing this moment, and it was incredible to experience. I think I literally laughed out loud.

That moment and that feeling will always remind me to look at my protagonists and make sure they’re strong and active. They should move as quickly as they can towards the things that they want. And what Kristina wants is the blood of the people who wronged her.

Music can unlock incredible things. 

I generally listen to instrumental music (usually Zoe Keating, Explosions in the Sky or various video game soundtracks) when I write. For Grief Eater, I knew that I needed to play something savage while I wrote. I needed something heavy, something post-rock. And fuck, I love post-rock. I love big bold ridiculously long songs that swoop through a bunch of different time signatures (Schizm by Tool, I’m looking at you). I love songs with melody and beauty but also with droning guitars and flickering drums and distortion. Enter the incredible post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor. “Mladic” from their album ALLELUJAH! DON’T BEND! ASCEND! became the theme song for the novella. If you haven’t heard it, it goes for a full twenty minutes (!!!) and changes and evolves throughout. I only did a little music theory in school, so there are people that can probably explain exactly why it’s so cool in technical terms, but all I know is that it fucking rocks. It genuinely helped me to take the story to darker and more intense places. Have a listen.

Villains are sometimes unrealistic, but sometimes their people really are that bad.

The villains of Grief Eater are Kristina’s parents and her older brother. When I was editing the novella, I had a conversation with my editor, Holly, about whether I should tone things down a bit, particularly their violence, neglect and homophobia. We decided not to go in that direction, and I am so glad that we preserved the characters as they are. I can appreciate that such horrible characters may seem a tad unrealistic, but also, people like that, unfortunately, absolutely exist. Indeed, the sins of Kristina’s family have all been pulled from situations I have personally experienced (not the homophobia, thank god!) or that my younger brother experienced, or that have been experienced by friends of mine who are also in the LGBTIQA+ community. Queer and trans people do experience violence and homelessness due to being expelled from their family homes, although we of course take care of each other in our chosen families. There are, however, plenty of villains whose violence and hate we do experience, sometimes from a very young age.

In his novel “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, he writes of the horrors of the Vietnam war. He talks about “story truth,” as in, sometimes real truth is so unbelievable that you need to write about it in stories to fully understand the weight of it. Trauma and villainy are like that sometimes.

While Kristina’s family are horrendous people, she also has her best friend, Josh, and a supportive Aunt, Jill. I wanted to make sure that though dark, her story still has elements of light. I hope you enjoy it.

Emma Osborne (they/them) is a queer fiction writer and poet from Naarm Melbourne, Australia. Emma’s writing has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Shock Totem: Tales of the Macabre and Twisted, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, Podcastle, the Review of Australian Fiction, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, GlitterShip, Kaleidotrope and WASTELANDS 3 edited by John Joseph Adams. They are a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop. “Grief Eater” is their debut novella. They currently live in Sunbury with their girlfriend and three wonderful cats.

Emma Osborne: Bluesky | Instagram

Grief Eater: Bookshop.org | Amazon