Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

Embrace Your Personal Power with 20 Queer-Specific Rituals

Queer people go through all kinds of unique milestones and rites of passage as we grow into our true selves. Whether you are coming out, attending your first Pride parade, or changing your pronouns, this book will help you enter these rites of passage thoughtfully and spiritually.

Explore rituals for honoring chosen family, going through gender transition milestones, exploring and affirming your gender and sexuality, entering your first queer relationship, and more. Enhance your rituals with a variety of magickal allies, including deities and community ancestors (such as queer activists and leaders).

Regardless of your skill level or spiritual tradition, Queer Rites makes it simple to connect your lived experiences to your magickal practice and commemorate occasions in a way that resonates with your unique and wonderful self.

Includes a foreword by Ariana Serpentine, author of Sacred Gender, and rituals by guest writers Storm Faerywolf, Misha Magdalene, Brandon Weston, and Rev. Ron Padrón.

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It’s both satisfying and bittersweet to write the book you needed when you were younger.

As I interviewed queer people of various backgrounds and identities, it became clear how many of our landmark LGBTQ+ milestones are tainted — or worse, defined — by negative experiences. I, and many of those I spoke to, wondered how our experiences of embracing our identities would’ve been different had we celebrated them more, or at least been able to approach them more intentionally. So this book is kind of an instruction manual for how to create a sacred and empowered container for major milestones of the queer experience…and one I wish I’d had decades ago. It’s both satisfying and heartwarming to provide that experience for others, but also bittersweet knowing that I didn’t have this book when I most needed it.

No book is easy to write.

I honestly went into this one like, “Hooray, a book that’s basically an instruction manual: Easy as pie!” Um, no. As it turns out, I had to do just as much research and re-working and re-visiting and re-writing as I did with my first book, Queer Qabala. Instead of reading dusty old tomes, though, I did a lot of interviews with people whose lives and experiences were different from mine, so I could make sure the book was as inclusive as possible.

(And I also read some tomes. There was a lot less dust involved, though. There are some pretty great books on queer magick that have come out in recent years!)

A consistent soundtrack helps produce a consistent product.

While writing and editing this book, I listened to the Baldur’s Gate 3 soundtrack on a loop, and I credit that, in part, for helping me keep a consistent voice and tone throughout, and also for motivating me through the grind of writing and editing. (I even included the composer, Borislav Slavov, in the acknowledgements.) Video game music is super good at pushing you to keep going. It’s what it’s designed to do. (Though sometimes it also motivates you to play video games instead of writing. Your mileage may vary.)

Take time off the day job for every edit round (if you can).

I was lucky enough to be able to take a few days off work right before my manuscript was due to my publisher, and then again when I had to turn in the first big edit round, so that I could sit and truly focus for 8-10 hours each day and didn’t have to lose time context-switching/getting into the groove for several separate editing sessions. This made the process more efficient and it helped me keep the whole book in my head at once, so I could more easily catch things like, “Oh wait, I already said this three chapters ago” or “this contradicts something I said earlier” or “this doesn’t match the format.”

Try not to write two books simultaneously on top of a day job.

Right as I started working on this book, I got a golden opportunity to co-write another book, Sagittarius Witch, that had an aggressive deadline. I was able to put Queer Rites aside for a bit and focus on the other book, but then as soon as I turned that one in I had to shift focus back Queer Rites, and there were times when the edit rounds of both overlapped and I ended 2023 feeling super burned out. And I still wasn’t done with Queer Rites at that point! I decided to take 2024 off writing (though I still had to do a lot of editing), and now I am going into 2025 feeling like I still need more time to recover.

Bonus thing: Book launch parties don’t have to follow a standard script!

For this book’s launch, I co-produced a big queer cabaret with a friend of mine. We gathered some of the top talent in the DC/Baltimore region, hired a venue, lined up some vendors, partnered with local radical bookshop Red Emma’s to sell the books on site, found some generous sponsors, and sold 160 tickets to fill the venue. It was wildly successful — we sold over 85 copies of the book! But it was also a ludicrous amount of work for months leading up to it, and there’s no way I could’ve pulled this off without my co-producer, who had all the connections and savvy for how to pull these kinds of events together from a decade of experience. It was certainly more fun than rolling into a bookstore to talk a bit and do a signing, but it took much, much more preparation and had a lot more moving parts in the planning.

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Enfys J. Book (they/them) is an author, priestx, blogger, teacher, performer, singer, songwriter, and comedian. They wrote the Gold COVR award-winning Queer Qabala: Nonbinary, Genderfluid, Omnisexual Mysticism & Magick (Llewellyn, June 2022); co-authored (with Ivo Dominguez, Jr.) Sagittarius Witch (Llewellyn, 2024); and wrote Queer Rites: A Magickal Grimoire to Honor Your Milestones with Pride (Llewellyn, 2025).

They are also a founding member of the “funny, filthy, feminist, fandom folk” band The Misbehavin’ Maidens, the creator of a website on queer magick called majorarqueerna.com, and the host of a podcast called “4 Quick Q’s: Book Talk with Enfys,” where they interview pagan authors using questions determined by a roll of the dice. They have taught many classes on tarot, Hermetic Qabala, magickal rites of passage, and queering one’s magical practice at conferences and events around the world.

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Queer Rites (U.S.): Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon | Buy an autographed copy

Author website: https://majorarqueerna.com/

There are five towns in the U.S. named “Normal” and seventeen-year-old Gemma Leonardo plans on visiting every one of them. Right after she escapes Children’ s Hospital in Harrisburg, where she’ s being treated for anorexia. Enter Lucas Polizzi, a high school wrestler with bulimia and, more importantly to Gemma, a getaway car. Sick of being told they’re sick, Gemma and Lucas team up for a themed road trip to “the Normals” on one condition— they can’ t mention food, ever. But as each passing mile puts their lives at greater risk, they soon realize it is their growing love and friendship, not a place on a map, that will put them on the path to recovery.

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Story inspiration comes from the strangest places

The U.S. is replete with weirdly-named towns. As someone who grew up in Nutley, New Jersey and drove past Intercourse, Pennsylvania on my way to and from college every semester, I kind of knew this. But when I began pouring over the pages of a Rand McNally Road Atlas and typing “U.S. towns with unusual names” into search engines, I discovered—in addition to the five towns named Normal—there’s Ding Dong, Texas; Booger Hole, West Virginia; Boring, Oregon; Toad Suck, Arkansas (don’t worry they also have Hope); and Santa Claus, Indiana. The latter inspired my characters to take a detour enroute to Normal, Illinois. Having them drive along Candy Cane and Jingle Bell lanes and visit the post office on Kris Kringle Circle provided excellent fodder for plot and dialogue.

Writing for a living is a lot like a road trip`

Some of my favorite stories to read, watch, and write, are road trips—Lonesome Dove, Thelma and Louise, Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour, and of course, Wanderers. My first young adult novel was about a teen girl who goes on a cross-country road trip to avoid violating a restraining order after accidentally blowing up her ex-boyfriend’s car. It was a breezy, summer romance published by Simon Pulse. The three novels that followed were also set in the summer and considered beach reads. One was published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, the other two by Sourcebooks. Eleven years after my debut, I tried to switch lanes, and while my latest novel is also a road trip it’s not easy, breezy, or summery. In my journey as a published author, as my writing got better, my publishers got smaller. I went from having an agent for 14 years, to selling my latest book without one. I’m not sure what point I’m at on my writing journey. Am I at a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike? Somewhere in the middle of America? Approaching my exit? I do know that this latest book has taught me that I need to take a deep breath and enjoy the ride.

The way appears

The poet Rumi said, “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” To put it in Dory-speak, “Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming.” Not sure if Rumi would agree, but that’s my take. Writing this book taught me perseverance. To wake up every day and do the work of a writer. Sometimes that means sitting in front of my laptop, sometimes it means taking a long walk, or people watching and eavesdropping and jotting down ideas on my phone. I’ve also started writing freelance non-fiction articles again. Until this week, I last published a book in 2018, though I’ve written three full manuscripts since then, including the one that became FINDING NORMAL.

The journey is better with a ride or die and a baby raccoon

My critique partners were with me every step of the way while drafting this novel. They are my ride or dies who hold me accountable. At the beginning of their road trip the two main characters in FINDING NORMAL, Gemma and Lucas, find an orphaned baby raccoon. To some people, raccoons are disease-carrying, kitten-killing, dumpster-diving trash pandas, but to me, with their five-fingered “hands” and black masks to prevent nighttime glare, they’re more like the ambidextrous (times two) quarterbacks of the animal world. Mama raccoons are fiercely protective of their kits (babies), who stay with them until they’re a year old, and researchers have found these adorable bandits are highly intelligent problem solvers. Whether or not they’re smarter than your average bear is up for debate, but their intelligence is on par with rhesus macaques monkeys, which leads me to the last thing I’ve learned.

Don’t make eye contact with the monkeys

This is something I didn’t necessarily learn from writing this book, but something I’ve learned from writing books in general, and from my critique partner who recently visited Bali. Upon checking into her motel, she and her partner were warned to not make eye contact with the long-tailed macaques on the property. “They see it as a sign of aggression,” she was told. Similarly, author-types who value their stomach linings and sanity should not engage with reviewers, booktokers, bookstagrammers, random Goodreads folks, and any other readers who take to social media to insult a novel that may have taken you six years to complete and feels more like your third child than a story. Take it from someone who learned early on, no good can come from engaging. Even when it’s obvious they’ve never read your book and/or published a review that got key facts (like the main character’s name) wrong. Do what I tell my dog Molly when she’s running around the house with a spent toilet paper roll in her mouth. Leave it!

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Jennifer Salvato Doktorski received a 2024 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She is the author of five young adult novels including, FAMOUS LAST WORDS (Holt), a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year; THE SUMMER AFTER YOU & ME (Sourcebooks), a YALSA Teens’ Top Ten nominee; and FINDING NORMAL (Fitzroy Books 2025). She has published articles and essays in national magazines including Cosmopolitan and began her writing career on the obit desk of a local newspaper, where she learned the importance of deadlines and developed a lifelong love of news and coffee. She lives with her family in New Jersey and spends summers “down the shore,” where everything is always all right.

Finding Normal: Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon | Asbury Book Coop

Jen Doktorski: Website | Instagram

It’s gonna be a stupid, horrible day. We all know that. It’s going to be full of what passes for pomp and circumstance amongst the set of rich tacky dickheads that are about to take full control of the country (they had most of the control anyway, to be fair), and then there will be a bunch of shock and awe, except I dunno how shocked we’ll be, and we definitely won’t be in awe, and many of us will want to break our Dry January streak to drink vodka from our toilets, only coming up for air long enough to shovel more ice cream into our mouths. It’s the first day of our new kakistocracy slash oligarchy, the kakistoligarchracy. It’s going to be like if William Gibson wrote Idiocracy. It’s going to be a stupid, horrible day.

But I think there are things you can do.

None of these things are revolutionary.

I don’t think today is the day for revolutionary.

I think today is the day you do the best you can do.

I think first thing you do is you donate to a charity, maybe a few charities, especially one who are going to have to do some heavy lifting in the years to come. And it’s MLK Jr. Day, too, so maybe factor that into your giving efforts. Some options could include: Southern Poverty Law Center, National Black Woman’s Justice Initiative, RAICES, ACLU, Center for Reproductive Rights, Trevor Project, Trans Lifeline, Arbor Day Foundation, Woodwell Climate Research Center, World Central Kitchen, and so forth.

Charity Navigator is a good place to find and vet charities, btw.

Giving directly to folks in need too is good, via GoFundMes — no links here because those are populous and fast-moving, but I’m sure you’ll see ’em on social media today and in the days that follow.

Reading books is wonderful. Read a book. Reading any book — from a bookstore, from the library (which to be fair are not open today), from your own shelves? Yeah. Books are good food. Doubly so if you take the time to read a book by, you know, anybody who will be hurt by today’s chaos. Author Jessica Conwell has a list over at Bluesky, for instance, of trans authors — it’s a fount of books to be bought and read, including Jessica’s own Ghost Flower. Go read some Hailey Piper, Eric LaRocca, Colson Whitehead, Charlie Jane Anders, Kosoko Jackson, V Castro, Cassandra Khaw, Cynthia Pelayo, the river of reads that awaits you is wide and it is deep. Here’s a good list of Black Authors, too. Shit, you want a great book to read today that’ll be fast and ferocious? Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark. Go find that, read it. If you’ve read it, re-read it. Memorize it.

Look away from the news if you gotta, or stare dead at it if you feel so inclined. (You gotta look eventually. Apathy will serve no one in the years ahead.) You don’t have to do it all today. You don’t have to do anything today. You can just try to be happy today, or calm, or whatever you need to be. Nobody’s asking you to spend it all and burn it up and out.

Look out for your heart and help others with theirs.

Reach out to folks. Accept others reaching out to you if you can.

Check in with your communities, with whoever comprises them.

Take a walk, if it’s not too cold where you are (and it probabably is, shit). Do a little exercise. Breathe in and breathe out. Think about something you wanna do, something good, something nice. Plan a little vacation. Write a little poem. I don’t know. Distract yourself with small pulses of love and light.

Listen. It’s gonna be a weird bad day.

It’s just the first of the weird bad days.

And if we’re being honest, it’s not even the first of them, it’s just another in a long line of weird bad days where the weird part and the bad part are spiking simultaneously, like an outbreak of a particular kind of illness. It’s not just turbulence on a flight, it’s a turbulent flight, from start to finish, snout to tail.

But we can get through it, we can land the plane.

This country is a mess, it’s always been a mess, always will be a mess, but it’s our mess. We’re with it, in it, and have often helped to make it, and that’s not defeatist, that’s not apathetic, it’s just realist to see that we’re a fucking goofy nation that has stumbled and staggered up and down some big hills and into some mucky fucking ditches. Just try to remember we need to climb the hills to see the beautiful views, you know? And first we gotta get up and out of the damn ditch. Beyond that? I think at the end of the day the people we’re with, that we surround ourselves with — that matters. It’s the people we love and care about and who care about us in return. I think it helps me to remember that it’s not like we’re some shining castle in the clouds. We’re a messy place full of messy people and I think it’s good to recognize that, and to see that we can still make motions to make it better than it is, even when it fights us like a bucking, sweat-foamed horse.

Then again, I don’t know shit about shit and might feel different tomorrow. Don’t let anyone chastise you for feeling sad or upset. Toxic optimism isn’t going get us through shit. We feel how we feel and those worries, those concerns, they’re valid. It’s okay to see that shit’s gonna be hard.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of others. Be taken care of when needed.

We’ll need your fight soon. The fight continues. The fight always continues.

Good luck. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Thanks for being here.

(As a postscript, I took that photo of the frozen flag back in 2009 — and I looked at the date, and the date was Jan 20th. Who knew.)

(Anyway, here’s a final photo I took of a squirrel doing a bump of Nature’s Cocaine. May it bring you some measure of joy.)

Dear Writer Types: a reminder that this blog is a place where, if you have a book coming out, you can submit to me for a Five Things I Learned Writing [insert your book name here] guest post! If you’d like a good example of one, look no further than Alex White’s Five Things I Learned Writing August Kitko and the Mechas from Space.

How this works is:

You email me, at least a month before the release date of that book — email me at terribleminds at gmail dot com. (Don’t use the contact form here, I’m finding it’s kinda broken and I need to figure out why.)

You tell me what the book is, when it’s coming out, all the details, and then I email back and I say YAY, and then you make sure I have the guest post a week before it’s going to post. (It will usually post on the Thursday of your launch week though that might shift a little given what other posts are going live that week.)

The guest post should be in *.doc or *.rtf format, ideally, and with minimal formatting. I’ll copy/paste right into WordPress here and do the light formatting myself.

I’ll also need a high-rez, good quality copy of your cover! If it’s too small or low quality, I won’t post the post. I tend to lead with that cover and it’s the first thing people see here or, more likely, in their inboxes.

The format of the post is pretty easily discernible from the one I linked above, but the gist is:

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[cover image]

[book flap copy/description, sans endorsements]

[no intro, just hop right into the first thing you learned]

[then list, y’know, in order, five things you learned, and these five things don’t specifically have to be about writing — they can be something you learned about yourself, or other people, or weird facts, or literally anything that falls under the umbrella of “I learned this while writing this book”]

[alex wrote a bonus thing; you do not have to write a bonus thing]

[then: author bio]

[finally, any author or book links we need to reach you and buy the book — buy links, author website, any social media we need to see, etc. — and please note that I prioritize Bookshop.org links and use affiliate links there]

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And that’s it.

You do not have to be an author to send me this — agents and publicists/editors are welcome to be the ones to submit!

Please also note, this is open to traditionally published authors first and foremost, and that includes from smaller publishers, too. This is not an open call for self-pub folks, not because I don’t like you or your books, but rather, because in the past when I’ve opened to self-pub folks, it has bombed my already-under-duress inbox with a lot of submissions that I have no real ability to vet — and now, in an era of AI garbage and glurge, I don’t want people to buy some awful ChatGPT slurry from a link here. While I’m not responsible for the content of the books, obviously, I can still do my best to curate a trustworthy experience and, as much as it is wise to be wary of gatekeepers, sometimes a kept gate is a good thing when it comes to stuff like, again, Gen-AI slop. Apologies in advance!

Why submit for this at all?

Well, it won’t make your book a bestseller. But it does go out to over 11,000 subscribers (and you can also subscribe below, at the bottom of this page, to receive this blog and therefore receive the excellent FIVE THINGS I LEARNED entries that roll up in here), and is probably better than most social media posts thrown into the void.

How best to write such a post?

You know, I kinda feel like your best approach is not to try to sell the book. Obviously, you want people to read it, and you want to talk about it — but I just mean, don’t view this as a Capital-M Marketing opportunity so much as a chance for you to speak earnestly and excitedly about the thing you wrote. Naked promotion is pretty easy to reject — BUY MY BOOK is just noise. But telling us a story about the book — because all stories have stories — is interesting, and personal, and I think connects us to you and the work.

Can I just send you the guest post directly?

Hey, please don’t! I’d rather give you a green light first.

Do you edit the post?

If I see light tweaking is needed, I may do that instead of passing it back to you. If more than that, I’ll just not post and ask you. (Though please also recognize my time is limited, sadly.) If the post is just a hot mess, then I’ll let you know sorry, it’s not going up. So, y’know, please don’t send me hot messes! Please and thank you.

What if you don’t respond?

I try to respond quickly when these come in, but also, life is both busy and my inbox is a garbage scow moving down a river on fire, and further, the spam folder is occasionally randomly hungry. Pinging me again usually does the trick, and apologies in advance!

And I think that’s it!

If you have one dollar and ninety-nine pennies laying around, you could take that filthy lucre and shove it into your computer or other digital device and that device will then give you 800+ pages of pre-peri-post-apocalyptic goodness, a sci-fi-horror AI-slash-pandemic novel.

That’s right, Wanderers is on sale today in its electromagnetic book format for $1.99 for some reason? It’s a book I wrote before 2020, I book I started before 2016 — and it definitely has a lot to say, somewhat inadvertently, about our present moment and our emerging future.

So, should this tickle your bits, go grab it from any of the electric bookmongers out there — Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple, etc.

And hey, maybe you’re like, but that’s too cheap, I feel bad, and I say to you, don’t! Get what you can while the gettin’s good! But if you were so inclined to give a little more, you could add on its sequel, Wayward, and wouldn’t that be fun?

Anyway. Wanderers. Cheaper today, so maybe go grab it if you haven’t, and check out the sequel, too, if you’re so inclined.

Hello! Preorders of books are good! I’m just over here saying that for no reason at all, and definitely not because I have a book called The Staircase in the Woods coming out on April 29th ahem ahem cough cough. Why are preorders good, you ask? Well! For one, they’re good for the bookstore — a bookstore can ensure that they have the stock in place and also, hey, it’s an early sale, which is a win for them. It’s also good for the publisher but who cares, they’re publishers, they’re fine. But it’s good for, y’know, the author because it’s good for the book. A bookstore receiving some preorders knows to ensure that book is on their shelves in good number — maybe even putting it on a display. It also sends a good message to the publisher about the author, saying, hey, this person has readers who are willing to preorder their books.

And hey, one could argue it’s a good thing for you, the reader. In part because, hey, you guarantee you get the copy you want on the day you want it. And sometimes, preorder comes with other little bonuses or swaggy bits. (More on that as to how it relates to Staircase in a moment.)

Of course, you don’t have to preorder. It’s not essential and you should never feel bad for not being able to do it. Listen, the book will be out there whether you preorder or not. It’s just a nice thing you can do, if you wanna do.

(You can also instead ask your library to order a copy for you to read.)

And Staircase is getting some nice early press.

It’s on Paste’s Most Anticipate Horror of 2025.

Screenrant shouts out 15 of 2025’s horror releases to watch out for.

Goodreads calls it one of readers’ most anticipated horror novels of 2025.

And hey, I also remind you that if you pre-order from my local, Doylestown Bookshop, you’ll also get some bennies —

a) it’ll be signed and personalized to you, and mailed to you directly

b) you’ll get some very excellent Natalie Metzger STAIRCASEy stickers

c) you’ll receive a personalization that includes your very own

havdhr ebbz va gur ubhfr orlbaq gur fgnvef

(no, that was not a cat walking across my keyboard, I don’t have a cat, unless maybe there’s a ghost cat nobody told me about — it’s a code, which means you’ll need to use a ROT13 generator to solve that, as it contains a spoiler for the book, so decipher only if you want that spoiler)

You can get that pre-order here from Doylestown Bookshop.

If you don’t care about the signed/personalize/sticker/secret thing angle, you can also preorder from your own local, or from Bookshop.org.

OH, and a final reminder —

Book clubs!

If you’re choosing this book for a bookclub, and that club is five or more people and we can finagle a time, I will gladly do a 30ish minute virtual visit with your book club to discuss the book after you’ve read it. (These are a blast to do because at a book launch, I have to talk around a book rather than address a lot of the fiddly fun bits. At a book club we can get right into it.)

(You can ping me at terribleminds at gmail to set that up — don’t use the contact form on here, it seems to be busted and I’m working on it.)

OKAY, that’s it, thanks for checking out the book and spreading the word.