Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

Author: terribleminds (page 3 of 448)

WORDMONKEY

Cover Reveal: Monster Movie!

Hey! Look! It’s a new book! Here, then, is the cover (by artist George Ermos, who also did the paperback for Dust & Grim)! There are a lot of exclamation points! Even in the title name! Because ahhhhh! AHHHHHH!

Anyway. I’ll let the cover copy do the talking for me:


In this modern, spooky novel by New York Times bestselling author Chuck Wendig, a boy must face his many fears to save his friends from a cursed videotape.

Ethan Pitowski is afraid of everything. Luckily, his best friends don’t mind, and when their entire class gets invited to watch a long-buried horror movie at the most popular boy in school’s house, Ethan’s friends encourage him to join in the fun. But when the “scariest movie ever made” reveals itself to be not just a movie about a monster, but a movie that is a monster, only a terrified Ethan escapes its clutches. Now he must find a way to stop the monster and save his friends (and also, um, get their heads back).

With his signature balance of kid-friendly horror and humor, Chuck Wendig crafts a spookily heartfelt novel about anxiety, friendship, and finding your unique voice and inner strength.


The book comes out in September. And it is now preorderable!

First and foremost, you can of course pre-order from my local store, Doylestown Bookshop, in which case you can also ask for it signed and personalized to you. Pre-order now.

But, of course, all the usual suspects also apply: B&N, Amazon, and anywhere books are sold. (I don’t see the entry populating at places lik Bookshop.org or Powells yet, but I’m sure they’ll get there soon.)

Writer’s Resolution 2024: Pretend Trends Do Not Exist (Or, “Fuck It, This One Is For Me”)

Head’s up: what I’m about to say is probably very bad advice, and you should not listen to it. This is generally true with what I say: don’t listen to me. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Dubious distrust mode: active.

Okay, so, trends.

Book trends.

Meaning, a reading audience begins trending toward a specific genre or subject matter — like, you know, vampires is a trend once in a while. Superheroes were a trend at the movies for, well, maybe too long. One of the current trends is the portmanteau of romantasy.

Reading trends are not publishing trends.

But publishing trends sometimes like to borrow reading trends.

What I mean is this: Big Publishing looks at, say, TikTok, and sees that Sexy Frankensteins are trending because a lot of people on TikTok (or, rather, BookTok, the reading portion of the Tiks and the Toks) are reading about and recommending The Sexy Frankensteins. Big Publishing then says, “Whoa whoa whoa, we want a piece of that action. We should buy Sexy Frankenstein books, because that is what the readers want.” So they start buying up any Sexy Frankenstein books from their slush pile and they encourage agents and writers to submit to them Sexy Frankenstein books and suddenly there are new Sexy Frankenstein book deals for big money and now a reading trend becomes a publishing trend and a publishing trend becomes a writing trend, except, honestly, the whole thing went off the fucking rails the moment Big Publishing said the words, “We should buy Sexy Frankenstein books.”

It makes no fucking sense to do that. The reason it makes no fucking sense is it’s going to take, most likely, at least a full year for that book to hit shelves. Probably more? And this is assuming the book has already been written. It still has to go through developmental editing and copy-editing and get on the schedule. A year, minimum.

Do you believe a trend will last a year? It might! This of course assumes the publisher bought the trendy Sexy Frankenstein book at the very start of the trend — like, zoom, zip, right as the Hot Sensual Stitched-Together Fella subgenre was gettin’ goin’. Do you think it will last two years? Oooh, okay, now that feels a little less certain, doesn’t it? Especially since Big Publishing is not just one publisher but several (and by several, I mean, uhh, five), and you can be sure if one is chasing this trend, so are the other four, and what that means is — in a world where a lot of books come out often all the time — there’s going to be a whole lot of EROTIC MAN-MADE MEN books hitting the shelves, and as that’s happening, BookTok is going to be like, “Hey, you know what’s hot now? Cottagecore Mesopotamian Cookbook Fiction.” Which isn’t a thing yet, but who the fuck knows? It sounds great, whatever it is. We get Big Feels and Earnest Confessions and Weird Ancient Soups!

In other words, by the time the Big Publisher puts up the flag that they’re hungry for that Frankenlove Narrative, it’s already too late.

And in this sense, what we’re calling a trend could just as easily be called–

A bubble.

And bubbles pop.

So, what does this mean for you as a writer?

Well, it means I think it’s best if you care less about trends. And I say this at a time when a not-insignificant number of my writing friends have had their agents and/or publishers tell them, “Well, can you write romantasy?” — even if their wheelhouse has not now, or ever been, romantasy. (Just to be clear, this is no judgment against romantasy or any genre or subgenre. Read what you read, write what you write, love what you love. It’s awesome.) Don’t get me wrong — if you want to write to a current trend, do it. Especially if you like that trend and think you can rock it. And also, there’s zero shame in chasing the money. If you have your Sexy Frankenstein book ready to go, and they’re buying big on the Lip-Biting Big Brute Sexmonster genre, pitter-patter, let’s get at ‘er. Do it. Take the payday. Cover yourself money from your Libidinous Patchwork Creatureman deal!

But if you’re looking to write a book, and your first question is, “What’s hot right now?” then I sorta think you’re smashing your feet with a hammer just as it’s time to race. Because you take three to six months to write the book, then months to find a publisher for it, then a year to get it out on shelves — that genre or trope that was hot right now is suddenly well it was hot two years ago, oops. This isn’t being trendy, it’s chasing a trend, and in this sense, the trend will always move faster than you do. And that’s assuming that the world doesn’t change, too, because when the world changes (like, say, there’s a big pandemic, but those never happen, right?) — reading tastes change, too. Can you predict that shit? I sure can’t. (Uhh, I mean, Wanderers aside, I guess.)

Trends are, or should be, reader-driven, not driven by writers and publishers. Readers should be in control of that, and chasing a trend overmuch does a disservice to the readers — more more more is not always good good good. It’s just a glut. Then the bubble pops. And then nobody wants Sexy Frankenstein books for the next five, ten years.

YOU RUINED IT

YOU RUINED THE SEXY MAN MONSTER

GOOD JOB, PUBLISHING

And ultimately, as a writer, I think there’s so much more delight and love in writing the book that wants to burst out of your chest like a happy little Xenomorph. “This is the weird awful amazing sad sappy splattery sweet fucked-up thing that lurks in my heart,” is way more interesting than, “Well, my publisher asked if I could write a Mesopotamian Cookbook.”

Listen, there’s no harm and no foul in writing whatever you need to do to feed yourself. This is not an effort to shame you into doing differently, and if you can make this work for you, please do, absolutely. But at the end of the day it can also be a trap: one where you think your book might become this big hit, but by the time your book is going to come out, the big hit books have already done the big hit thing, and now it’s just a series of diminishing returns. And if the publisher has detected this shift in the trend — even though they’re the ones who published you because of that trend! — then you’ll find that they’re not really supporting you like you wanted. (Or worse, even in the midst of the trend, they glibly assume the “trend” part will handle the work for them and they don’t have to do much to support it.)

Not every publisher is like this. And you really can’t blame them, either, in a lot of ways, though I also have more confidence in a publisher who isn’t chasing trends and is instead committed to making trends — or even better, just picking and producing the best possible work and then supporting it materially with actual money, and not caring about trends at all.

You can still think about writing books people want to read — which, callously and capitalistically, does translate to, which books they’ll want to buy. There’s no harm in that. Art is commerce, regrettably, and certainly when I think of what books I’m going to write, I definitely try to imagine if they’re books that an audience is going to respond to both critically and financially. I don’t write in a vacuum. I have to think about if people are going to be willing to shed coin for whatever weird shit I want to write. But I can only take that so far. And I can only be so concerned about it in the end because… I also can’t predict what the world will bring.

I’ll give you an example: Blackbirds took a long time to sell. I thought it was an easy sell — “A young woman can see how you die by touching you!” — but all the big publishers rejected it, and often with the nicest rejections. “Oh, we want to publish this but our sales team doesn’t know how to sell it.” I’d offer to tweak it to make it more sellable, and the response became, “Oh, no, don’t do that, then we wouldn’t love it the same.” Which, yes, will make your brain instantly bleed when you hear that. “I want to buy your red wagon but my sales team only likes blue, but if you make it blue, it won’t be a red wagon anymore and I won’t like it as much, anyway, sorry about all that blood squirting out of your nose, here’s a towel.”

It took over a year to find a publisher, and when we did, it was for a fairly low advance — I think after the UK conversion, it was like, $8k, maybe.

And that book has gone on to still, to this day, be one of my most lucrative. One book became three, then earned out, then got sold to another publisher where three books became six, and along the way I continued to license it for film/TV options and across foreign markets and further, it did really well in some of those markets — so much so I get royalties from those books. So, this one book that nobody thought they could sell has done me a good service.

(And, writing that book was for me, an “I hit bottom” moment. I had written five other finished novels before that, each of them being me trying to chase some trend or some voice. It was only when I was like FUCK IT THIS ONE IS FOR ME that I actually sold a book.)

Anyway. Again, this is probably bad advice. But for me, in 2024, I want to be a bit selfish and greedy and brush away trends and say, fuck it, this one is for me. Yes, it’s for you, too, but first and foremost, always and forever, I have to live with myself, I have to live with this book, so it’s for me first.

Y’know, hey, don’t listen to me — you do you! Whatever that is! And me, I gotta do me. Relentlessly, perhaps foolishly, definitely stubbornly. Queue up the Sammy Davis, Jr — “I’ve Gotta Be Me.”

Anyway. Onward we go. Into 2024. Through the door. Into the breach. Toward whatever joy we can grab and whatever fuckery we cannot avoid. We are the squirrel at the fore of this post: perched on the branch in the cold, as the sun rises ahead of us. (Okay, technically the sun is setting in that photo, don’t bother me with the details.)

Selfishly, I note that I did write a book that might help you writer-folk in the year ahead: Gentle Writing Advice. Given the way things have been going for all of us, maybe you need it.

Happy 2024.

Write on, art harder, tell your stories.

You do you.

Digging A Grave For 2023, As 2024 Struggles To Be Born

Well! I see we find ourselves once again at the turn of the tide. The one year recedes. Another year washes up in its place, eating all the sandcastles you made. Washing away your footprints. Time, and life, and the universe —

They go on.

This peculiar moment is both an excellent time for reflection and a piss-poor time for reflection — the former because, it is useful to take stock, and what better moment than during this interstitial notimeplace? The latter because, we are in the interstitial notimeplace. I don’t know what day it is, so how the fuck am I expected to look both backward and forward with any effectiveness at all? I can’t remember shit. I don’t even know who you people are or how you got here. I’m pretty sure it’s The Fifth Garblesday, or maybe Bleenstag. I’m wearing underpants on my head and pants on my arms. I am half-chocolate and half-cheese. It’s foggy out. It’s foggy in. Everything is Betwixt. But this is all my problem, not yours.

I shall rally. I shall muster. I SHALL FORTIFY.

To reflect back: 2023 was, personally, I suppose, a pretty good year. I wrote and sold a new middle grade, Monster Movie!, and yes, that exclamation point is part of the title because fuck yeah, let’s exclaim excitedly about things. I published my next adult horror novel, Black River Orchard, which to my shock and awe became a USA Today bestseller? Got to go on tour for that book, as well, which was a true delight — I met cool readers, ate weird apples, got to hang out with the writerly likes of Paul Tremblay and Aaron Mahnke and Chris Golden and Sadie Hartmann and Clay McCleod Chapman and Owen King and of course Kevin Hearne and Delilah Dawson. Plus, I got to visit some of the greatest bookstores in the country. Especially ones I’d never been to, like Montana Book Co and Gibson’s.

It was genuinely fucking great.

(And in case people are like, but book tours aren’t effective, why do you think Orchard hit the USA Today list? Because of bookstore visits.)

(Also: thanks to Powell’s this morning — particularly, Nick K! — for putting Black River Orchard on his top five staff picks of 2023.)

Plus, there was Gentle Writing Advice this past summer, too — which I hope has been helping people navigate the labyrinth of a writing life. I know I needed to write it — I needed to talk about navigating the creative and emotional challenges of the modern age, and also I needed the book as a response to me, where I got to use the book as a weird, I dunno, remix or rebuttal or reconsideration of who I am as a writer. But also ideally for those writers out there who know that this thing we do is work, that it’s hard, that it’s satisfying, that it’s challenging, and that to do it requires a measure of mindfulness and self-care. And the book is very much about that, and also about challenging the idea of self-care, too, to become a more nuanced and meaningful aspect of your work. It’s not just about HAVE A DONUT, but about how taking yourself and your work seriously is itself a form of self-care, you know? Anyway. So that came out.

Wayward hit paperback. That’s good, too, though I still meet people who loved Wanderers and don’t realize it has a sequel? (Whispers: it has a sequel. It’s called Wayward. Pass it on.)

Oh, and I was on the cover of a magazine?? What the fuck is that? Who lets that happen? Writer’s Digest did, apparently.

Life was, mostly, pretty good? My family is good. Kid is nailing school and now, the electric guitar. (He’s been playing since he was in kindergarten but I think the electric opened him up to the experience in a big way.) He’s getting older now and that’s weird and wonderful and awful, because you see TIME ITSELF cascading past like the scenery on a long car ride, and you see it in their faces and how tall they’re getting and in the cracking voice and in the books they’re reading, and, and, and. It’s great. But also, oof.

Saw Yeah Yeah Yeahs in concert. That was amazing. Some bands you see live and you realize, yeah, fuck, they’re better on the album. But YYYs fucking bring it. Legit amazing show.

Went to Europe for the first time — Netherlands, Germany, Spain. Truly amazing. Beautiful experience. Best travel I’ve ever done, hands down. Thinking of going back this next year. Portugal, maybe.

Got COVID. Wouldn’t recommend it. Zero stars. Had Pax-Mouth, which was like licking a robot’s corroded asshole. Was not the worst I’ve ever been sick but you can definitely feel like, without vaccines and other remediations, COVID could definitely kick down the gate and escape containment inside your body real fucking quick.

Globally, shit kinda sucked. All over the place. I mean, I suppose in a ‘grand scheme’ sorta way, there’s a lot of THINGS SUCK every year, and I do think it’s important to also recognize THINGS DON’T SUCK IN EVERY DIRECTION AND SOMETIMES GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TOO. But it’s hard not to look at climate change and rising vaccine denial and Israel/Palestine and marching fascism and feel like, “we’re really nailing it right now.” But, but, but, locally, at least, I’ll note: we kicked Moms For Liberty out of our school district. And M4L is dying fast on the vine right before our very eyes, and that’s something I’ll cherish forever.

The death of Twitter was a real good news bad news thing — good news because, honestly, Twitter had gone rotten long before Musk took over, and he just pulped it into rancid wine and tried to make everyone drink it. But losing it sucked, too, because you lose real connections, real community, and also for creatives, we lost a pretty useful way to reach the audiences we have earned there. But it’s hard to be there and stay there and support that place. (See also: Substack, now. If you’re on it, I’d start finding a way off it.) Bluesky has been a pretty great replacement. Threads less so — it’s good in a lot of ways, but just this week alone there’s been a lot more FIGHTY RAGEBAIT ENGAGEMENT going on and it’s tiresome and also the UI is fucking Byzantine.

The continued rise of AI in art and writing is hopefully soon going to do what all of these (at the core) lazy get-rich-quick bullshit jawns do over time — like NFTs and all that shit, I’d love to see the air leak out so I can watch the balloon squeak around the room in a pathetic death spiral. It’s theft, and a lazy theft at that — you know it’s theft because, as others have said before me, it wouldn’t exist without other art and writing doing the work of pre-existing. It feeds on that, chews it up, spits it back out. Folks who use it, they just have an idea and want a Work Button to make the robot shit out their idea. But even there, the execution is based on everybody else’s work, not your own mind — you just fed it a line of words and now it’s crapping out a digitized regurgitate of someone else’s effort. (Never mind the environmental impact.)

Let’s be shut of it.

ANYWAY.

So, 2024.

Um. Whew. Yeah. I dunno!

There are of course concrete things I’ve got going on — I have to finish The Staircase in the Woods and send that off to the editor. I have to pitch my next middle grade. I’ll have Monster Movie! out in the world come late September. I’ll soon show you a cover for that and a cover for the paperback version of Black River Orchard, too.

I think the hardest thing that’ll happen professionally this year will be having to pitch new books — you know, a writing career, I often note, is one of peaks and valleys, and more to the point, cliffs you’re always about to drive off of, and so much of our careers are spent simply trying to furiously get a ramp built at the edges so we can jump the valleys instead of crashing down into them. And that means this year is one of those inflection points where I have to see if the ramps I’ve been building will carry my ass over the void and to the next stable landmass, or if I’m going to be extracting myself from a fiery wreck and have to climb back up and out. There’s no shame in that, it happens to all of us, we all have careers that catch fire once in a while, but obviously the hope is, the ramp holds, and I jump the gap.

HOLD MY HAND LIKE WE’RE THELMA AND LOUISE

Publishing is definitely continuing its trend of “going through some things,” and it’s always weird any given year but the weirdness quotient seems to have gone up, up, up. And that’s for a lot of reasons, I suspect. The rise of AI, the impact of pandemic emotions and trauma, the cascading weirdness of inflation slash greedflation, the crash-and-burn of reliable social media. Best we can do is hold tight to the bucking beast and try not to get thrown.

Otherwise, who knows? I can’t predict what the year will bring. I will try to enter it creatively and with curiosity and with compassion — I enter it with the desire to keep telling stories and keep reading them in turn. I’ll travel, long as the pandemic lets me. I’ll keep trying to blog here, because it remains a stable place for me to set up shop and say my silly bloviating shit. And I hope you’ll keep coming along with me here, too, on whatever this odd journey is, until this odd journey ends. (Which, hopefully, will be a good long time from now, but that’s never guaranteed, is it?)

All right. To close it out, here are some of my favorite photos of the past year.

Have a wonderful NYE, don’t drink lighter fluid, do kick 2023 out the door with the heaviest boot you can find, let’s all wish each other the best version of ourselves in the year going forward, and I’ll see you next week sometime with my “writerly resolution” for 2024.

BYEEEEEE

Why Aren’t There More Pandemic Novels, Anyway?

It’s weird being in the midst of a pandemic and then watching a film or a show or reading a book set in the absolute present where… there appears to have never been a pandemic. Right? Everybody just gets in elevators and on planes, unmasked; they share food; they cram into crowded bars; nobody tenses up when they’re in a movie theater and they hear someone cough not once, not twice, but three times which to me is always the Bat Signal for, “this motherfucker is about to give me COVID, isn’t he?”

Why is this, exactly? Why does fiction — whether on our screens or on the page — seem to want to avoid the subject? This question popped up on Bluesky (Katie Mack was talking about it, and Sarah Weinman, and then some other authors jumped in) and I find it to be a really interesting question without any single answer, but I do feel like I wanna explore it a little. So here are my (admittedly quite hasty) thoughts —

a) If it’s a book, you have to understand, publishing is glacial. A book you read in the last year was written more than a year before it hit shelves, and maybe even longer ago — as such, it was possibly being written in the midst of the first year or two of COVID, which is to say, during a rather chaotic period of history that is hard to immediately replicate. The story you want to tell may not easily accommodate a months-long lockdown or mask-wearing or even the political shit-show that (by and large) right-wingers turned basic science into. It’s like, once you start talking about the pandemic, you kinda have to talk about Trump and maybe Biden and honestly, a lot of that actual reality ended up more surreal and satirical than your average bit of popular fiction. I mean, we had a president more or less advocating for shoving light bulbs up your ass to burn out the mean-bad virus, yeah? It feels like once you start to get into the weeds on COVID, you’re really really in the fucking weeds and — honestly, current fiction is not up to the task of merely glimpsing our current reality. It’s either a snout-to-tail full-throated turn-your-head-and-cough exam or it’s going to do a weak, watered-down job of it.

b) And, you know, fiction — particularly popular fiction — doesn’t often acknowledge The Big Shit. It just doesn’t. It’s safe to say that most fiction exists in a sort of interstitial alt-universe of each author’s making — most fiction doesn’t sit there and reference the dozen-plus Very Bad Things currently happening, from 9/11 to Trump to Ukraine to Israel/Palestine to school shootings to whatever. They might become background information — something a character says or thinks, or a news story someone hears. But it’s rarely foregrounded, because once you foreground, say, school shootings, now it’s a School Shooting Book or a School Shooting Movie and it’s almost as if the Troubling Topic becomes a subgenre in and of itself.

c) And that means you really don’t want to get it wrong. Or half-ass it. How often have you been watching a TV show where they’re like, “wow this pandemic is bad” during one episode and then by the next they mostly aren’t really acknowledging it anymore? It has this hand-wavey vibe to it. “We acknowledge the Very Bad Thing and made serious sounds and nodded our heads concerningly, but now it’s fixed.” It has that Very Special Episode vibe. “This episode is about Sexual Abuse, but next episode, nobody is going to remember any of this shit, welcome to the memory hole.” On the one hand, I suppose this is actually a fair representation of reality — because in this reality, we memory hole a lot of shit, including but not limited to the pandemic. And certainly both in fiction and in our lives we’ve seen or even experienced that sense of “well of course it’s real, but oops, I forgot my mask and I’m in a crowded grocery store, fingers fucking crossed, I guess, I’m sure it’s fine.” And it usually is fine, mostly, generally, so we grow comfortable and forget to do it more the next time and… so our overall carelessness grows. As such, I guess it’s fair to see that on TV, but it also feels all the more dismissive and shitty, somehow, and so I think I’d prefer to see it not acknowledged at all instead of just half-assedly pointed at as if to say, “Wow, remember that? Glad we dealt with it for one episode. Moving on, now.”

d) I’m very, very sure there is some pressure from publishers and film studios and such to scrape the pandemic from fiction. I’ve struggled with this in regards to climate change — it’s like, climate change is real, climate change is daily, and I often have characters reference it in passing, sometimes in real moments of anxiety and hey, sometimes as jokes. Not because it’s not HUGELY SERIOUS but because people are messy and we often deal with the absolutely worst shit with gallows humor. And I’ve gotten notes from editors that are like, is this too much, should we pull some of it out? Not the jokes — I mean, the inclusion of it at all. As in, if it’s not relevant to the story, why are they bringing this up? Nobody is forbidding me from including it, to be clear, but I think the note is a fair one. I’m writing books that ostensibly are meant as entertainment. I’m not actively trying to bum you out or remind you of the very real nightmares at your door. There’s a lot of talk sometimes about the “responsibility” an author has and I honestly cannot say what that responsibility is — it’s certainly not a hard-coded one, not a responsibility that is a true moral obligation, because that’s a slippery fish. But at the same time it’s kinda hard to try to write about real people and not have them suffer from… real problems and real anxieties and sometimes that means pointing at real shit going on. Which leads me to:

e) I don’t know that I always want to see it. Listen, sometimes I read books as a way to escape the *gestures broadly toward the outside world* — I think it’s fair to say the pandemic was, and arguably is, a mechanism for a certain kind of trauma. It was, and is, traumatic. And while fiction can be a uniquely good place to deal with that kind of trauma, fiction is also a very good place to either come at that trauma at an oblique angle or simply be a portal away from it. I’d argue this is probably why genres like romantasy and horror are both having a moment right now — they are particular forms of escapism. Horror is about the trauma, but not about the specific trauma: it’s like a narrative vaccine where we deal with existential terrors and the varieties of evil but at a way that is either parallel to or perpendicular to our current actual horrors. Side-booted exposure therapy, of a sort. Whereas romantasy — still dealing with and offering some very big feelings — is maybe a more overt doorway out of the current reality in which we live. And while I think some might have a dim view of both of these genres, I think readers are smart people who know what they want and know what their needs are — ironically, sometimes the effects of the pandemic on us (and lo, those effects are many) force us to mitigate the trauma of that time in whatever way we can. Fiction can deal with things head-on, at a side-angle, or by looking the other direction entirely — and sometimes that’s a fault of how we memory hole things, but sometimes I think it’s also a mentally protective measure.

More to the point, sometimes we want to look at a thing and study it.

And sometimes we’re too close to it, the wounds are too fresh — and all we can do is look away.

Meaning, while I think sometimes this is an act of culturally memory holing the pandemic, I also think it’s sometimes just our way of dealing with big, horrible shit. Is that healthy? Probably not? I don’t know? It’s also probably not healthy to sit and think about any one horrible thing all the time? Ennh? You know how a lot of people don’t want to read books where the dog character dies? Dogs actually die, we know. We’re not trying to memory hole the reality of dog death. We already know how absolutely fucking shitty a dog dying is in real life, and I think it’s that we don’t want that in a story we’re reading, particularly escapist entertainment.

So what does this mean?

I have no idea! Like I said, I just wanted to… talk it out, think about it a little bit. See what jostles loose.

I think certainly it’s easy (“easy”) enough for writers of contemporary fiction to reflect our present reality, whereupon there is a pandemic, but it’s more naturalized — vaccines and masks and tests and all that. So if you’ve come here looking for writing advice on that front (ha ha, a huge mistake, you fool), then I guess it would be that. Let the pandemic become background noise in your contemporary fiction because, it’s kind of that now, already, in our reality. (For the record, this is not a sentiment as to how we should view the pandemic as some second-tier, half-existent thing. The pandemic is active and many still suffer from debilitating effects, and if you’re inclined to seek out the work of Ed Yong, particularly on the subject of Long COVID, I encourage you to do so immediately.) I think further, when you do include it, it should be done with empathy, because to me, empathy is king when we write our characters (of any genre!) and the realities in which they live.

I do think discussion around all this ends up (inadvertently, at least) also asking the question again of “What are fiction’s responsibilities and obligations are when it comes to…” Okay, yes, the pandemic, but also, well, anything, really. And I don’t know what that answer is, or if there’s even a single answer. I think when you assign fiction too many obligations as to how it relates to reality, you end up assigning moral rules to fiction, at which point it runs dangerously close to becoming preachy and self-indulgent, if not outright propaganda. I’ve seen some uncomfortable assertions that a character who does bad things is an authorial endorsement of those bad things — which, wow, what? No! We’re not writing instruction manuals over here. We’re writing fiction. It’s a playground, it’s shadow puppets, it’s a safe space to poke at the edges of empathy and fantasy and reality.

But it’s also pretty wacky to suggest fiction exists in a null void with no consideration for how it deals with readers and the reality of that readership. Stories are an echo and they bounce around and reach all kinds of ears and it’s worth thinking about what that means for those who receive the stories and how they’re going to receive them.

Anyway. Fuck. I dunno. This got much, much longer than I thought it was going to, so whaddya gonna do?

The answer, like many things, is probably somewhere in the hazy middle, and I think the best thing we can do is be suspicious of easy answers and of people who demand everything be one way, and not the other. People are messy. Writers are messy, readers are messy, and the world in which we live is real fucking messy, and how fiction presents that mess is not easily designed. We’re all shooting arrows at teleporting bullseyes.

I’d also guess we’ll start to see more pandemic reality reflected in contemporary fiction, but again, in that “background noise” way — and we may also see overall less contemporary fiction just because it’s more pleasant to not deal with reality right now. And honestly, I get it.

Anyway!

Good luck. Also, there’s a lot of COVID out there right now, the pandemic is no fiction, so maaaaaybe put a mask on your face when you’re out there?

Black River Orchard Is $2.99 Today

MERRY EVILAPPLEMAS EVE, people. Looks like Black River Orchard is $2.99 today in ELECTRIC BOOK FORMAT for various BOOK-READING MACHINES, which is to say, on Kindle, on Kobo, on Apple, on B&N and on Blitzen, on Donner and — er, sorry, got a little carried away there.

That’s a delightfully not-expensive price for a book that was a USA Today bestseller, and that was named one of the best horror novels of the year by Esquire Magazine, by Paste Magazine, was listed as one of NPR’s Books We Love in 2023, and has gotten similar shout-outs at USA Today and Den of Geek and other excellent places. Hey, it’s got small town suburban folk horror, it’s got cults, it’s got twisted American history, it’s got evil apples and various tidbits of apple learnin‘, it’s got monsters, it’s a real hoot.

So, check it out, if you’re so inclined.

And leave a review, if you can, because that’s what keeps the Review Gods happy, so they do not smite us poor blubbering authors into word gelatin.

OKAY BYE, HAVE A NICE HOLIDAY

The Weird Holiday Nowheretimes (And Why Knowing Thyself Matters)

You know how if you have, say, an Important Meeting or Significant Task To Do set at a certain time in the day, that in the run-up to that thing you mostly just sit on your hands waiting for that thing? You’ve got a 2pm whatever, and until 2pm, you’re like a LOADING SCREEN on a new PC game trying to run on a computer that can’t fucking run it. You’re an old iPhone trying to update to the newest OS. You’re stuck. Paused. Caught. Could you technically do other things in this time? Sure. Will you? Probably not. Your brain is frozen in preparation mode. It is languishing in the time-before-the-time. It is the rise up the rollercoaster. You’re buckled in until the drop.

The week before Christmas is exactly that, writ large.

At least, for me.

It’s this weird interstice, this liminal calendar hole, like a temporal trench at the bottom of the ocean into which all things eventually fall.

What I’m trying to say is, I’ve been attempting productivity during this time and it… isn’t happening. It’s not a total waste. I’m not doing nothing. I’m just not doing much of anything. Every effort is an appetizer, not a meal, you know what I’m saying? It happened this year where I had a moment of panic and frustration at myself, YOU STUPID FOOL WHY ARE YOU NOT WRITING THOUSANDS OF WORDS, where I wanted to throw snowballs at my brain like it was an indolent sled dog licking his butthole instead of mushing us across the great ice shelf of the imagination, but then, aaaah ha ha, then I wised the fuck up and I remembered:

This happens to me every year.

Every year!

EVERY. FUCKING. YEAR.

This is just that time. It is, as noted, an interstitial time. It is a period of rest and reflection. I don’t force it to be that. It just is that, at least for me.

Here’s the thing: recognizing that quickly, that this is just Part of My Shit, was very helpful, and honestly, pretty useful in not making me hate myself for this week (and, let’s be honest, next week, too). The last two weeks in December are slow like honey. Cold honey, at that. And then, in January, I tend to pick back up and start churning out stuff, and January through March actually tends to be a fairly good time for writing for me.

The trick is, I saved myself the frustration only because I’ve attempted to take the time and the effort it takes to Know Myself. Which sounds higher-and-mightier-and-self-helpier than I mean it to — there’s no great trick to it, I don’t think, other than, it’s important to live your life and be mindful of patterns. You can then see those patterns and decide if they need to be re-examined and tweaked or if they’re just part of who you are. This is, admittedly, easier said than done — it can be hard to see if something you’re experiencing over and over again with yourself is a bad habit in need of breaking or just one necessary thread in the tapestry of you (okay that was very overwrought and purple prosey, I am sorry, trying to delete), but I dunno. I think you figure that out too by being mindful and living your life in a way where you are careful and thoughtful and most of all forgiving with your own silly ass. Be accepting of yourself, in other words, and your limitations, and your patterns. I think over time you start to see when things need to change and when you just need to realize you (and we all) are a set of imperfections. We’re all hot messes, and sometimes those messes can be cleaned up, and sometimes they’re just part of the colorful chaos of our lives. Long as we’re not hurting ourselves, our prospects, or most of all, anyone else? Then maybe we are who we are and we have to be good with that.

And I think as writers this is really essential too — and I know I’ve talked about this before! — to know who you are as a writer. To know that you get really self-doubty at the 33% and 66% mark of writing. To know what burning out looks like and how to cool it down before you get cooked to cinders. To know when to push, when to back off, and when/how to refill your batteries. (I talk a lot about this in Gentle Writing Advice, by the way, which attempts to unpack a lot of stuff about bullshit writing rules, about burnout and self-care, about how to be productive without punishing yourself.)

I think knowing yourself as a writer ultimately means writing a lot and being mindful of not just the writing but all the extra stuff around the writing — time, place, people, needs, patterns, and so forth.

ANYWAY, whatever, what I’m trying to say is, this time of the year is a slow, goofy, hazy and lazy time of year for me, whether I want it to or not, and I know that trying to force it to be anything other than that is a good way to just hate myself while still accomplishing less than I want. And I know this because I know myself as a writer, and therefore, I’m writing this blog post instead of writing a story today, because hey, fuck it.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

I’ll pop back in next week to talk about 2023 and what’s coming up for 2024 — I know a lot of people have done those posts already but it always feels weirdly too early if I do them before Christmas, so I’m just going to throw it together sometime next week. In the meantime, to all who celebrate, have a lovely holiday, whatever holiday you care to enjoy. If you want to get me, or any writer, a present, send us a photo of your pet stapled to a bag of money — erm, you should staple the photo to the bag, not show me a photo OF a pet that you’ve stapled to the bag? Shit. Don’t mess that part up, please. Also, you should ensure the bag is one of those cartoony Monopoly-type bags, the kind with the big obvious dollar sign — $ — on the fabric. Stuff it with cash, give us a pet photo, and we will be happy. I mean, fine, failing that, you can always buy our books and leave us a nice review somewhere.

ANYWAY MERRY HAPPY TO YOU, FELLOW APPLE-EATERS