Said again and again, blurbs are weird. It’s a weird word (like blog), sometimes used to describe the marketing quote an author gives another author to go on or in their book, and other times used to describe the book itself (as in, flap copy or cover copy). And it’s a process too that seems to come shrouded in conspiracy, as if we’re all getting paid to blurb books — or as if it’s some know-who-you-know kinda backscratchy thing. Or that nobody actually reads the books at all and blurbs are instead just auto-generated by agents or editors or rogue artbarf AIs.
I’ve always considered a BLURB REQUEST to be an honor — I mean, the fact that anyone would consider my name and my dumb thoughts to be an asset in favor of a book and that book’s writer? Well, that’s too nice. And I genuinely consider it a privilege to be able to get a book in advance of publication in the hopes of supporting that book and that author. Free books? By cool authors?? That haven’t been released to gen-pop yet??? My heart, it is a-flutter.
Still! Still. A problem: this summer has seen my blurb requests go up up up to as-yet-unseen levels. I was getting multiple book requests a week. Now, this is a nice problem to have! Again: an honor. One deeper problem was that a lot of these requests had very tight deadlines — often it was, “We need a quote in a month,” and that was without understanding that I had piles of requests already ahead of them.
Now, I don’t read everything I get. It’s impossible. I don’t read them in order, necessarily, either, but obviously I try to surf through the stuff that needs to be read sooner. And I certainly don’t blurb everything that comes across my desk. Not because of quality issues — to be frank, I am of the opinion that traditional publishing has the highest quality levels of most of the, erm, storytelling media formats. If something hits my inbox, it’s probably good to great. It passed enough muster and rigor to be something solid. It may not be for me, which is where I try to find the books that tickle my heartparts.
At this point, though, it’s getting difficult to manage the sheer amount of books coming in for requests. It means I have to read them fast, which I don’t like, because I am an increasingly slow reader. And it also means I’m not reading all the books I own that I bought. Which, lemme tell ya, ain’t a small number. I buy books constantly. And I read the books I buy almost never. My TBR pile is its own wall at this point. As in, I could get some mortar and use the books as bricks.
As such, my new policy for blurbs is this:
They all have to go through my agent.
Doesn’t matter who you are, if we’ve never met or you’re my twin brother, Chnurk Mandog. They all go to my agent and my agent will help manage that process, because honestly it’s been a lot here at the Wendighaus and the blurb list actually got kinda stressful? Which is not ideal.
So, if you want a book blurbed by me — my agent is Stacia Decker at DCL. She will handle all blurb requests going forward.
Today, a real clown nose of an apple: New Zealand’s Sweetie. It’s small and red and sucks. I’d love to leave my review right there but fine, I’ll go deeper.
It’s a Gala x Braeburn situation. Two apples I like well enough, but it’s like when two people you think are great get married and have a child you hate. Two wonderful people sometimes produce a real dickhead, you know? This pair of perfectly nice apples came together and had an annoying little fuckbaby of a fruit — a long and lop-sided little munchkin drunk who is shitty and I don’t like it. No sir. Not one bit.
My review of the Sweetie, bought late Sept, Manoff Orchard in PA:
It looks cute, this apple. Like a sheepnose Black Gilliflower. It’s a punchy pink-red with a green blush and a waxy sheen to the skin and you know, fuck this apple. I wanted to like it! I did! But it’s:
a) way too fucking sweet, absolute sub-acid sugar cube madness
and
b) way too fucking chewy; the apple flesh itself is juicy but has a kind of dull-witted crunch to it, but the skin, the skin, man it’s like eating wax paper, like chewing a mouthful of fortune cookie fortunes, it’s very unpleasant to eat
I found little complexity in the taste — maybe a hint of vanilla. But otherwise, it’s just sugar. Just sweet. And not even in an overwhelming or interesting way. If you want a rock candy version of fruit, you can get sweeter apples, so this apple isn’t even really bringing the full force of its name? It’s a Judas apple, just Red Delicious — seething with the squirming worms of deception.
As for the eating itself, well. The first breaking bite felt fine, as did the subsequent chew, but then the chew went on and on and on and on AND ON AND WON’T SOMEONE RID ME OF THIS MEDDLESOME FRUIT.
Listen, I’m being needlessly harsh. I know that. This isn’t technically an awful apple, it’s just the epitome of things I personally don’t like in an apple. Too chewy, too sweet, about as interesting as a sidewalk. I guess it’s nice enough. Dim children will enjoy it. A donkey! A donkey will be thrilled with you if you give it this apple.
I did a video review of it here, where I also said “rawdogging an apple,” so if you need that in your life, click on over! This does present a slightly new problem in that, my initial review had me feeling a little more favorable, whereas eating the rest of the apple off-camera made me hate it more. So I’m dropping it from a 3.5 to a 2.5 because fuck this stupid clown-nose clown-shoe apple. Honka honka.
This won’t be the most articulate thing you read today. It’s fueled by absolute fucking fury and the love of children in my community.
Some quick background, I run the Scholastic Book Fairs at my neighborhood elementary school in the huge school district of Plymouth, MA. America’s Hometown. (Remember that slogan as you continue reading.) This school is so small it doesn’t have a bus. Everyone walks their kids to and from Hedge Elementary, they run businesses in this close-knit neighborhood, lead churches of all kinds in this neighborhood, contribute to events at this school—like me—long after their kids have left it.
Hedge Elementary school has less than 200 students, with the highest ratio of ELL students and learning and economically challenged students in the district. I could talk about that for a day, but that isn’t what this is about.
This is about how ICE dragged a man from his car in front of that tiny, 100 year-old school this morning as children were in the crosswalk going to get their breakfast. This is about how the middle school kids who went there, have siblings who go there, who play there after school, watched as ICE wrestled someone out of their car as they got on the bus. Here is a TikTok message that went out to those middle school parents after the bus driver reported the incident:
This is not simply to piss you off, though I hope it does. My fingers are shaking as I write this.
I named my book fairs the #NoTearsBookFair long ago because I fucking refuse to let any child go home crying because they couldn’t afford a book. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, and pride myself on filling classrooms, kids’ hands, the library, new teachers’ rooms with THOUSANDS of books that this economically challenged group would not have access to. And I don’t just send them home with “a book.” No, those kids get EVERY book they want, I don’t care if it’s the Lego book they only want for the minifigure. If they have to open it, it’s making an impact. NO child is turned away, even if they had money and they just want to read more. You can’t imagine how it feels to have a child who literally arrived in the country with nothing 48 hours ago give you a hug because you gave them a “Welcome to Hedge” stack of books.
This matters more than ever today.
My #NoTearsBookFair is starting with tear-filled eyes already. I’ll see them all in a few hours as a bunch of parents who may or may not still have kids at that school sweat their afternoon away building a book fair that’s magical and exciting.
Julie Hutchings tells scary stories with pretty insides. She also likes karate-kicking, collecting robots, guzzling coffee, chasing it with pizza, and running badass book fairs for all the little boys and girls. Julie lives in America’s Hometown of Plymouth, Massachusetts with her hilarious husband, two genius children, and an army of reptiles. They’re probably doing something Marvel or Star Wars-related right now. If you pay her, Julie also does developmental editing for your novel.
The seed in the dirt. Tendrils push forth. Roots grab the earth with clutching fingers and a tree pushes forth, desperate for sun, eager for water, and one day, a fruit grows, is picked, and ends up in my hands where I shove it unmercifully into my mouth and I choose to give this miracle of nature a crass numerical rating between one and ten, denigrating this awesome-in-the-strictest-sense-of-the-world phenomenon where the world we’re ruining grants to us the food that will sustain us.
And eventually I chuck the core of the apple into the weeds, the seeds find the dirt, and tendrils push forth once more. The cycle begins anew, as it must.
This, then, is the plan: I’m starting over, ranking apples as I eat them. This time, I’ll also identify the orchard or store I got the apple from, for comparison’s sake. Why? Well, because — take for example, today’s apple. The Honeycrisp. The Honeycrisp is easily the most popular apple and also one that has been subject to degradation of quality, if you are to believe food journalists. The Rise and Fall of Honeycrisp Apples! Why don’t they taste how we remember? They don’t taste how they used to! They’ve gone from Marvel to Mediocre! Feel free to read any and all of those, but the tl;dr on this is: the Honeycrisp is a fiddly apple to grow, and grows better in some places than others, and sadly massive apple hunger (in German: eine Apfelbesessenheit) has required the apple be grown in places where it doesn’t do as well, often by growers who maybe can’t handle the plant’s delicate needs. Plus? Grocery store apples do not abide by seasonality. They are grown when they grow, and then placed in CAS, controlled atmosphere storage. Or maybe they’re just chucked into cryosleep like any of the poor galaxy-treading fools in Alien.
As such, where you get an apple, and when, matters. Where it was grown matters. How long it has been since harvest… drum roll please, matters.
And so, I begin again with the aforementioned Honeycrisp.
The reason is —
Well, I’ve not been kind to the ol’ Honeycrisp, have I?
I’ve long said, hey, this is a good apple, but it’s also kind of a basic-ass apple, right? It’s THE apple right now — you say to someone, “I like apples,” and eight out of ten people will light up and say, OH I LOVE ME A HONEYCRISP. The Honeycrisp is not only THE apple, and has been for a good decade, at least, but it’s also the origin point for many, shall we say, spin-offs. The Evercrisp! The Cosmic Crisp! The Sugarbee! The SweeTango! The Ludacrisp! The Rosalee, which I’ve never had! Curiously not the Crimson Crisp!
And on and on and on.
The Honeycrisp’s own parents are reportedly a mystery — one parent is the Keepsake, the other the romantically-named MN1627. (Relax, it’s from a Univ. of Minnesota breeding program. They only get the pretty names when they get put in the game, coach.) MN1627 mayyyy come from Duchess of Oldenburg and Golden Delicious? Whatever.
(For those who don’t know, here’s a bit of hasty apple science: you can’t just take the seed of an apple, plant that seed, and get the same apple. Instead, you take a branch from the tree that produces the apple you like, cut it off in an act of botanical body horror, and furthering the grotesquerie, graft it into another tree, forcing that tree to grow your fruit.)
(Nature is a miracle, but is also a nightmare.)
(Also yes, that makes all commercially grown apples clones.)
Anyway, as noted, I’ve given my fair share of shit to the Honeycrisp. I said it’s a basic apple. I also said it’s too sweet — I prefer an apple that has a bite to it, a precious tartness. A sensation somewhere between a lick of lemon and a straight-up electric snap to the tongue. Sweet and tart in balance is to me a fully armed and operational apple, and something too sweet feels… you know, kind of American. It’s like, “Oh we will only eat fruit if it tastes like candy.”
Therefore, it only feels fitting that I begin my re-journey to re-reviewing apples with the Honeycrisp — maligned (by me, for sure, and recently by food media) and yet very popular, it’s where I start.
And, to be fair, I already fucked it up a little, because I didn’t take a proper photo of the Honeycrisp I ate, but look, there’s a whole damn basket of them up at the top of the post, as the kids say, don’t at me, bro. *receives note* I am reliably informed that the kids don’t say that anymore. “They say Skibidi Six Seven. It’s sigma fire.”
ANYWAY, this is a very long preamble to the first review (re-review?) of apples, beginning with the maligned-by-me Honeycrisp.
Let’s get to the actual review.
My review of the Honeycrisp, bought late Sept, Manoff Orchard in PA:
To start with the positive, the first thing I noticed about the apple — and the first thing I really quite liked — was how thin the skin was.* Listen, I don’t love eating apple skin. Particularly with a lot of heritage apples, you can end up with skin that’s tough, waxy, or rough. A russeted apple has skin that feels like you’re chewing on a wet brown paper bag. It’s texturally upsetting! But the Honeycrisp (at one point I mis-typed this as Hineycrisp, which I suspect is a different apple entirely, and also a very nice epithet for a loved one) has a skin so thin it’s barely there. Your teeth perforate it with ease. It does not linger long in the mouth. Some apples you end up chewing the skin like it’s appleskin bubble gum. Always there, never able to properly swallow it.
The flavor also has some complexity — there is, truly, a honeyed component to the fruit, a sweetness that isn’t merely sweet, but that brings richness, variety, a little bit of that honey funk. (Honeyfunk is a less good loved one epithet, I fear. I love you, Honeyfunk. I love YOU, Hineycrisp.) And it has a great crunch — less so a great crispness, despite its name.
(The difference here for me, at least, is notable: a crunch is heavier, crisp is lighter — a walnut has crunch, a cracker is crisp. Crispness has a snap, a slate-like breaking to it, an almost chippish quality. Crunch is deeper, denser, more resonant. I also think an apple can have both crispness and crunch? Maybe? Probably? I’m no crunchologist.)
Point is, the Honeycrisp brought crunch, and a lot of juice.
The complex taste was welcome.
Less welcome was the fact it was very sweet — and only that. Barely any tartness to talk about. And for me, an apple should have a clear and present tartness. As I noted above, it should have bite. This is a sub-acid apple, for sure. And the final problem was — and this is a trait shared with Red Delicious, though here to a much lesser degree — an odd bitterness that arrived with the aftertaste. Not right away! But over time, a foul tang lingered. Which is also the first line of my new epic fantasy novel. “A foul tang lingered, thought Gormox the Evercrisp. He had expected this to be a day of honey, but it had turned with haste to a day of bitter rot upon his rough and russeted tongue.”
Anyway.
The Honeycrisp is fine! I get it. It’s a nice apple. A friendly apple. A total fucking crowd-pleaser of an apple. It’s Optimus Prime. It’s a Marvel movie. It’s one of those books that lives for a really long time on the bestseller list even though you read it and thought it was perfectly cromulent. It’s the Yankees. It’s a beach vacation. It’s good. As an agricultural product, maybe even great. But also, for me? More than a little boring.
Nesi is desperate to earn the patronage of one of the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven. As a child with godly blood in her, if she cannot earn a divine chaperone, she will never be allowed to leave her temple home. But with ninety-six failed auditions and few options left, Nesi makes a risky prayer to T’sidaan, the Fox of Tricks.
In folk tales, the Fox is a lovable prankster. But despite their humor and charm, T’sidaan, and their audition, is no joke. They throw Nesi back in time three hundred years, when her homeland is occupied by the brutal Wolfhounds of Zemin.
Now, Nesi must learn a trickster’s guile to snatch a fortress from the disgraced and exiled 100th Pillar: The Wolf of the Hunt.
1: A Story Is As Long As It Needs To Be But Won’t Tell You Until It’s Done
First, it was a 5000 word tennis match of dialogue, back and forth over the narrative net, the rookie hotshot with anxiety clearly losing to the seasoned pro, a fox with a tennis racket in their mouth talking circles around the poor thing. Amusing, but not a story. Then, it was a very long short story, something close to 8000 words, which was stuffed to the gills with plot, and not the good kind either, no, this plot was stodgy and puffed up weird in the oven and it’s not that it was bad, per se, it just wasn’t done. Then, when it became a very short long story, what the French among us call “le novelette,” it was, how you say, still not awesome. 11,000 words and it was either bloated or too lean, like a funhouse mirror that changed depending on the angle you were looking from. No, it wasn’t until an editor encouraged me that maybe it was book-shaped, or at the very least book-hopeful, that everything began to fall into place. From the outset, I couldn’t have told you it was going to be a novella, (let’s be honest, it’s three words from being a teeny-weeny novel but that’s for the judges to argue about), but I did learn through the six years it took to transform: as always, your story is going to be whatever it needs to be and changing forms to figure it out is all a part of the process.
2: Tricksters Are Tricky On Purpose
Let them be tricky! Let them be a little scamp! No air jail for little fox, no, let them nom upon the hands of those who would lift them from the ground and bite at the ankles of the cruel! Part of figuring out the balance of this story was knowing when, where, and how to deploy the tactical trickster nuke that is the Fox. A being of mischief, lessons, aforementioned scampery, and pranks, the Fox is a god. And a god has very few things to bind them, unless they wish it. Letting the Fox tromp across the narrative is fun, but not engaging. Holding them back is maybe logical but it’s boring, and disappointing to boot; they’re a trickster! If they don’t at least try to tie together the boots of everyone within a mile, readers will be unhappy. Nailing down what made my trickster tick, reasons the Fox would and wouldn’t respect certain boundaries, were essential in showcasing them to the best of my ability. That, and it helped that having a protagonist undergoing a trial; even a god of tricks has to respect that, (kind of).
3: Bitter and Sweet are the Predator Handshake of Narrative
Jokes all the time rob a story of meaning; if nothing is taken seriously in the context of the book, why should the reader take any of it seriously? And if every single thing is treated with the held-breath seriousness of open heart surgery, then are we saying that even in fiction, life is grim, difficult, and needs to be struggled through? I have always been a huge believer that you need the bitter and the sweet working together to create a strong story. If we weren’t able to laugh once in a while, the darkness would crush us. If we didn’t work to overcome the hard times and push through the dark, then the joy of the sun would be rote. Audition For The Fox is a dark book, let’s be clear: it deals with empire, colonialism, torture, oppression, occupation, and more. It looks at these things with clear eyes, and does not flinch from the truth of them. But it is also a book about the very real debate between coffee and tea, a book that laughs when someone falls in shit, that highlights the small joys to be found in community, that sees the world the way it could be, when we lift one another up and help each other smile. I can’t say I did it perfectly, but I did try my very best.
4: Worldbuilding is Scaffolding Around the Building, Not the Building Itself
I’m a firm believer that worldbuilding is awesome, one of my favorite parts of writing, and often, real fucking tedious. Not because it isn’t awesome, mind you, but that I think a lot of writers often mistake worldbuilding to be the creation of a literal building with hundreds of rooms and halls and windows and paintings and stairs and-and-and . . . but it’s not. Your story is the building. That is what needs all that space, those apertures, those details; your worldbuilding is the scaffolding that provides you with the narrative structure to make that building as strong as possible and gives you as many essential parts as you need for the reader to feel welcome, and to help understand the story of the world, and the world of the story. I had loads of fun in Audition For The Fox when I was worldbuilding Oranoya and the Ninety-Nine Pillars of Heaven and everything else but at a certain point, you need to ask: am I adding this explanation, this detail, this texture because the building needs it? Or because I’m worried someone won’t like my building without it? It’s a really hard thing to learn and I know I’m still learning it, but something I really embodied throughout this writing and editing process is that scaffolding, if you can remember to see it that way, helps you build the strongest story possible, and don’t forget: worldbuilding is awesome, yes, but it is NOT the story.
5: Swing For the Imaginary Fences
Publishing is fucking weird, man. It’s picky, it’s hesitant, its non-committal, and nothing is a guarantee. Truly, nothing is certain; even contracts can be broken. So with that being said, if you have the chance to publish and tell your story as close to the way you want to tell it? Fucking go for it, friend. Swing for the fences. Swing like there are no fences. Send your ball into orbit. Blah blah blah you’ll end up among the stars, fuck that, make a new crater on the moon you swung so hard. Who cares if that doesn’t get you “moon points,” right? They made up the rules anyway. This is a weird book. It’s weird! Interstitial linked stories, time-travel-fantasy, non-binary trickster energy by the barrelful, and more. It’s a weird little thing, this book, but you know what I can say, wholeheartedly? It’s mine. It’s a book of my own weird little heart, and at the end of the day, sure, maybe that isn’t for everyone. But I know I took a heckuva swing. And I hope wherever the ball lands, it surprises someone and makes them smile.
Martin Cahill has published short fiction in venues including Fireside, Reactor, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and Nightmare. Cahill’s stories “The Fifth Horseman” and “Godmeat” were respectively nominated for the Ignyte Award and included in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019. He was also one of the writers on Batman: The Blind Cut and a contributor to Critical Role: Vox Machina – Stories Untold. Cahill, who works at Erewhon Books, lives just outside New York City.
EDIT: By the way, the two winners were picked and their emails sent off to Tananarive and Steven! Congrats, Micah Southwood and Katharine Dow! Expect emails soon, I wager.
HEY. You. Horror-writing-in-training!
Courtesy of Tananarive Due (the “Queen of Black Horror” and author of the truly vital The Reformatory) and Steven Barnes, I’m giving away two scholarships to Dark Dreams: Writing Horror That Kills.
This is a 3-hour intensive on how to craft haunting horror fiction. How to write horror that lets characters take the lead? What’s the plot framework look like? How the heck do they do it, and how do you do it?
(This class will be live both on Zoom and in person in Southern California.)
Way to be a potential winner —
Drop in the comments below.
Just tell me two things:
a) What’s your favorite horror novel from the last ten years?
b) What are you reading right now (doesn’t have to be horror!)?
Do this by Thursday, noon EST, and I’ll approve all comments and pick two random winners from the commenters to receive those scholarships.
Easy-peasy, blood-a-squeezy.
Just make sure that your account here is using an email address someone can use to reach you; otherwise, you won’t know that you won!
