Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

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:

---

[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]

---

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.

The wildfires in Los Angeles are as devastating as they are horrifying, upending lives and livelihoods left and right — and some people are going to need some help through this nightmare, so I’m dropping a couple links here, and you’re also free to pop into the comments to leave some donation outlets (though please note, some might get flagged as spam automagically, and I will endeavor to pluck them from that oubliette).

First up, two folks, two writers in fact, who have lost their homes —

AC Bradley, who is a most excellent writer and delightful person (and who is connected to a REDACTED project of mine) — the GoFundMe for her, her daughter and her sister is here.

And Ben Mekler, wonderful TV writer (and also very funny human online) just got a new house and had his second child, only for him and his wife to lose that house in the fire. The GoFundMe is here.

And beyond that —

California Fire Relief

California Fire Foundation

California Community Foundation

Global Giving’s CA Wildfire Relief Fund

World Central Kitchen

Pasadena Humane Society

And as always, going forward, be sure to get out and vote for people who actually believe in climate change and who endeavor to help in crises like these. Be additionally wary of misinformation and disinformation about the wildfires — seek not just information from reputable sources but confirmation from multiple reputable sources before sharing. We are in a fractured, unstable information environment and remaining vigilant against bad actors and those invested in our harm rather than our future is key.