Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

I’m a new writer who’s not a new writer.  What I mean is, I’ve been writing a looong time and only now do I have a debut novel. Experience (or age) doesn’t make me unique in any sense, but it adds a certain perspective to this whole ride. My expectations are…lower? Don’t get me wrong, […]

Why yes, it is time for one of those shotgun-blast slapdash news-updates. I have more, um, cogent bloggery in mind, but I am currently under *does a quick count* the yoke of FOUR DIFFERENT PROJECTS right now, and am a little bit *eye twitches* overburdened. (To explain, the four projects are: first draft of the […]

There are a lot of rules for writing. One that I hear fairly often is write what you know. That’s fine if you’re writing adult contemporary about a penniless author. It’s less useful if your characters spend their days riding horses, practicing witchcraft, or getting into knife fights. I’m talking about fantasy, the genre where […]

I came to novel writing after decades working as an intelligence analyst. This means I had tons of experience as a researcher because that’s basically what intelligence analysis is: a research project where, at the end, you brief the President  of the United States on your findings. No pressure. As an intelligence analyst, you’re given […]

Twitter fucking sucks. It has for a while, and it doesn’t suck entirely, all the time, in every direction, but in a general miasma-sort of way, it definitely fucking sucks. Elon Musk happens to agree that it fucking sucks, and so he wants to buy it. Only problem is, he and I do not agree […]

So, it was about ten years ago I was in Los Angeles on the day of release for my first original novel, Blackbirds. (For the sake of the pedant, this was 4/24/12.) I was there for a twofold purpose: first, to launch the book that night at Mysterious Galaxy’s Redondo Beach store — a branch […]