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 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)
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 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.
The author makes a story. But a story also makes the author.
What I mean is this: I think as writers, as authors, as storytellers and artists, we build ourselves along the way out of the narrative spare parts we find on the journey of growing up. We collect them unconsciously, a crow snatching up buttons and coins, and we edit them into our own personal narratives. Some of this is obviously good and necessary; as we figure out who we are as a person, we also figure out who we are as writers. We figure out what we like, what we don’t, what challenges us, what drives us, and those becomes part of our tale. But sometimes, it presents a problem. We pick up unnecessary expectations, we gather jealousies to our chests, we clutch close many falsehoods disguised as truths, and we fuse them brutally to our idea of who we are as storytellers in this world — branches from someone else’s tree that we graft to our own.
Sometimes instead of finding our own motivations, we are handed motivations and accept them.
Sometimes, we accept the negative thoughts and problematic outcomes told to us, and they become so much a part of our story we think we told them first instead of having inadvertently copied them into our narrative.
Sometimes, the ever-shifting industry leaves us feeling rattled and false-footed and makes us doubt who we are, why we’re here, and if we can even tell the stories we once set out to tell.
We hear that we have to write this kind of story, not the one we want to write; we see that oh this writer is doing better than us so we have to change ourselves to be more like them; we make permanent decisions based on temporary conditions.
(And here I am reminded that recently I read an article about how the Broccolis, the family in charge of the creative side of the James Bond franchise, are keeping Amazon — who now own Bond! — at arm’s length because they don’t like how Amazon calls Bond “content.” And in that article there was a great quote from Barbara Broccoli when she recounts advice from her father: “Don’t have temporary people make permanent decisions.”)
Put differently, I know a lot of writers across the spectrum of experience — from neonates to published authors to bestselling ones — who are really going through it right now. They’re questioning their place in the grand spectrum of things — trying to see themselves and where they belong in the world of both authors and their stories. And to some degree, this is good! We’re supposed to gaze inward. We need to evaluate and reevaluate that about ourselves and the tales we tell. It is perhaps essential to keeping dynamic, to being active in our own upkeep and not just settling into a rut.
At the same time, it can be hard because that reevaluation can leave us wanting — it can make us feel lesser than we are, or not up to speed, or simply undeserving of a path forward. This forms a rut all its own.
I’ve noted in my book (sorry to plug, but Gentle Writing Advice is out there for you if you choose to find it) that self-doubt isn’t always a bad thing. Doubt can open a door to a better place — it can tell us, okay, the doubt is instinctive, something is off, it’s urging me to through the door to somewhere I need to go. But it can also hamstring us. It can poison us. It can be a lie, doubt born of falsehood, doubt with teeth, doubt serving only to halt our momentum through that door instead of pushing and prodding us forward.
New writers can feel like they’re never going to get there. Midlist writers can feel like they’re never going to break out. Veteran writers can feel like they’ll never do anything new. You worry you’re writing the wrong genre, the wrong way, the wrong this, the wrong that. The story we tell about ourselves darkens, suddenly turbid with this pollution of uncertainty and self-doubt, and so I think for me, maybe for you, 2025 can be a year where you change that story. Because we are authors of it. It doesn’t author us. We have the power of narrative and the power of editing that story.
Now, that doesn’t mean you can magically change conditions on the ground — you can still only control what you control, but what you control is the story in front of you and why you bring yourself to tell it. It’s that last part that maybe matters most, here. The story you tell can be less about the weight of expectation and certainly less about all the external valuations — but rather, the story you edit and rewrite and tell anew can be one about how, no matter what anybody else thinks, no matter what the conditions of the industry are, no matter what poison has been dripped into your ear —
You’re still a writer, and the writer writes.
Is this oversimplistic? Sure. Does it pave over doubt? It shouldn’t — like I said, some doubt is good. Some doubt is clarifying. A knife at your back pushing you forward, forward, ever forward. But you can relearn why you do the thing you do. You can tell the story that you’re a person who finishes what you begin, who tells the story they want to tell, who cares about the craft rather than the industry, who is good to themselves rather than cruel. You can change those parameters of your story. You are author and editor.
So, for me, and maybe for you, that’s my way forward in 2025 — just making sure that the story I tell about myself as a writer is the one I want to be telling, not the one I’ve just unconsciously and unwittingly accepted. It’s about a surefootedness and confidence in myself, and less about the outcome others control and more about the outcome I can command.
Don’t like the story you have about yourself as a writer?
Tell a simpler story. A kinder story. And most of all, a better story.
I should note here I was going to do a RAH RAH RAH FUCK ‘EM 2025 IS GONNA BE A KICK TO THE DICK SO KICK IT IN THE DICK INSTEAD kind of a post, but that just feels like — well, you’ve heard it before. You know it already. We’ve been there on and off for the last eight years. It’s gonna get bad and weird and we will have to meet it on the battlefield, and we can use our work as opposition, as therapy, as vengeance, as admonishment and as optimism and as escape. But for today, I felt like it was better to get at the deeper heart of who we are as writers, and how our own perverted (no not that kind of perverted, relax) narratives about ourselves can fuck it all up.
Maybe that helps you.
Maybe it doesn’t.
Either way, I hope 2025 is a year of many words for you. And I hope just as you give those words your power, those words give you power, too.
Blah blah blah, some stuff happened in 2024, stuff’s gonna keep happening in 2025, woo hoo, we did it, there’s your recap and your look forward all rolled up in one HASTY AND MEDIOCRE BURRITO, huzzah, *kicks sad burrito under couch, sits down on couch to play more Balatro*
*waits*
*stares*
*stares harder at you*
*because you’re still here*
UGH GOD OKAY FINE
I usually take this time at the end of the year to recap the year prior and to gaze longingly ahead at what’s to come, and as noted in an earlier post, I’m feeling this year like my mind is firmly rooted in the present moment, unwilling as it is to step one foot backward or forward lest my aforementioned mind get swept away in the whole uh-oh oh no of it all.
Globally, news-wise — I mean, haha, what the fuck is there to even say? The enforced rise by rich techbros of shitty environment-killing resource-stealing content-thieving AI? The ascent of the combo-pack of oligarchy and kakistocracy (oligkakistrarchy?)? The incoming administration? The less said at this moment is probably for the best. It’s all going to be very very stupid and very very demented and we all have a front row seat. I’m not looking forward to it! The end.
Personally, you know… for me, I think things are good? Happy family, a pleasant existence, still two dogs (though one is really slowing down now, poor Loa) — and I dunno, surrounded by good people. Went to Portugal for a couple weeks and that is the most delightful, most beautiful place. The soft, gentle decay of it! The street art! The thousands of hills! The food, the people, the architecture, the natural beauty. Truly a favorite place.
Speaking of travel, I also had the fortune of getting to hang with a couple of my besties, Kevin and Delilah, this year, as we went on a short mini-tour of the Midwest, and found that fun and impactful. Which I suppose bleeds over into the professional, but note that first and foremost those tours are personal, because I like those two people a whole lot and would gladly follow them into heaven or hell just for the company. It’s simply convenient that we’re all writers and have a tax-deductible reason to hang out and meet readers and booksellers and the like.
Professionally, things are… also good, for the most part? This past year, Monster Movie! came out and, I dunno, middle grade is tough right now but I had a blast with it and hope readers do, too. I did some school visits there and found them both a) really rewarding and b) very very difficult, like, off-the-charts hard for me. Not because I don’t love hanging out with students and talking about books and horror and stuff, but boy, if you’re in any way an introvert who drains their batteries having to be “on” in front of people, ha ha holy crap, talking to kids is triple the energy drain for me. It’s a lot, a lot a lot, like, you can’t just be on, you gotta be ALL THE WAY ON, every slider set to max, every knob spun to the top and then broken off. (I think this is a controversial opinion as, having talked to a lot of kids’ authors, they don’t seem to suffer this effect, so this is very likely just me!)
Paperback for Black River Orchard landed, and I will say it’s gaining its second — or even its true — life in that format. I’m sure a cheaper buy makes it easier, but also the new cover is slick, and also maybe it just needed time to find its readership. But I think it has! Big jump in readership on that one in just the last few months. (Weirdly, or maybe not weirdly, actual apple-picking season seemed to be the biggest juice-up for sales?) I’m glad people are finding it and ohh hey it won the Dragon Award for best horror?!
(You can grab Black River Orchard in paperback here.)
I guess there were new editions of my Star Wars Aftermath books out — these in trade paperback. And if that makes you happy, then I am happy for you. I understand those books are controversial to some people, and not much I can do about that, but I had a lot of fun writing them and playing in that sandbox, and I try not to succumb to abject bitterness at how I was treated by those in charge of that storyworld, but mostly I fail, and bitterness continues to be the primary taste in my mouth after having worked in that universe. But if you enjoy them, I am truly glad. And if you don’t like them? Then hey, sorry, can’t be helped, go write your own.
Ummm. What else?
I post APPLE REVIEW REELS now at Instagram. Why? I dunno! I like doing them though. Maybe I should start a TikTok account, perhaps mere hours before it is made illegal and ejected from the app stores!
(Don’t worry, I won’t pollute anybody’s TikTok with my presence.)
I’m on Threads now, obviously, though I still far prefer Bluesky. A lot of user control there, and zero algorithm. That said, social media is a slow poison! But it tastes like candy, so there I go, like a squirrel slurping up antifreeze.
What does 2025 hold?
I’ll probably get to soon announce the two-book-deal I can’t yet really talk about (just know it’s about demons demons demons baby woooo demons).
I might get to talk about some of the new Wanderers TV developments.
I might get to talk more about my next middle grade, too, which is less horror and more “weird Wendigian meta-take on portal fantasy.”
In April, I get to release a book I am truly proud of, The Staircase in the Woods — it’s still very much a Chuck Wendig book, but at the same time, I feel like it’s something different for me, too, in a variety of ways. It already has a lot of early reviews over at Netgalley, and I’m really happy to see people responding well to it. The book means a lot to me and maybe it’ll mean a lot to other folks, as well. I almost think of Book of Accidents, Black River Orchard, and now Staircase in a kind of thematic trilogy. Maybe you’ll see what I’m talking about. You can preorder from Doylestown Bookshop, to remind you, if you want an early jump at the book and also some additional book-related goodies. I also might have something neat to announce about Staircase soon enough.
I will almost certainly be doing some bookstore-a-go-go visits for that book, so keep your apples peeled for that. Trying to figure out with my publisher what the shape of that tour can and should look like!
Where else will I be? Updated schedule so far —
Jan 10th, at Doylestown Bookshop in support of Clay Chapman’s wild new horror, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes. (Details here.)
Jan 30th, I get to chat with Eric LaRocca at the NYPL in NYC, in support of his darkly wonderful At Dark I Become Loathsome. (Deets.)
I’ll be at Emerald City Comic Con in March, I think.
More stuff as I have it!
EDIT: oh fuck obviously too there’s THE STAND anthology, holy crap. I’ll be doing a signing for that, too, more as I know it. You can preorder it here.
I’ll be traveling, only semi-professionally, to Scandinavia over the summer — kinda doing a Denmark -> Norway -> Sweden thing. For kicks, and also for some researchy things.
(So if you have advice on traveling in that region, GIVE ME IT NOW.)
(Please and thank you.)
As to what else 2025 brings? Man, I do not know. I really feel like we traveled off the edge of the map, into that hazy, unwritten “here there be dragons” part. At least from a professional standpoint I’m… growing concerned that publishing is really starting to build for itself a certain genre bubble (I say that without any issues regarding any genres or the writers of said genres) and I worry what happens when that bubble pops, as it inevitably will. (And if TikTok really does go the way of the dodo, what happens to BookTok? Which is, as with many things, both an excellent and problematic influence on books, authors and publishing?) I dunno. I think it’s gonna get weird. All of it. Everything. Gonna get weird. So I’m gonna get weird in response, and maybe you can do the same and we will overwhelm the Bad Weird with the Good Weird and return balance to the Force.
Whatever the case, thanks for being here, thanks for reading. I’ll see you tomorrow with a fresh tasty WRITERS RESOLUTION 2025.
I think my brain is not okay. I don’t mean to suggest I’ve got actual worms up in there, but the Current Era combined with Holidaytimes has really just turned my skull into a malfunctioning music box. First, I whiffed on ever doing a Terribleminds Gift Guide for the year — I blame this in part on the fact Thanksgiving was later than usual, and by the time I was like, “Yeah, let’s do a gift guide!” it was way too late to make that actionable. Second, I’m now tasked (by myself) to offer up the Books And Other Stuff I Liked In 2024, and when I go to access that file folder inside my head-computer, I just get a series of pop-ups and janky ads.
I suspect this is in part because my brain is choosing to live implicitly in The Present. It’s trying not to look too close in the past, lest it accidentally traipse across one of the various news-related landmines there. And it’s definitely not looking forward because that feels like time-traveling to the inside of a black hole. So mostly my brain is in goldfish mode. It exists in this moment and blinks blissfully inside its glass uhhh — and here I’m going to note it took me about 60 seconds to conjure the word “fishbowl.” I was like, “well, aquarium, obviously, but that’s not the right image. It’s like, there’s this glass orb where you put a newly-acquired fish? A fish orb, a fish jar, a spherical fish apartment, a goldfish palantir,” before finally landing on oh right —
Fishbowl.
Brain not okie-dokie.
It’s fine. It’s fine! I’m sure it’s fine. Everything is fine and nothing hurts!
So, here is a list of some of the things I liked in 2024.
This list will be far from exhaustive because, again, my brain is just moths and dust, I fear. (Further, on the topic of books, it gets weirder because I read a bunch of 2025 releases in 2024, and do I mention those here? Or not? Or what? I may! I may not! Even I don’t know what I’ll do!)
Let’s begin.
Books
Right out of the gate, I think my favorite read of the year was Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest. It’s perfect. She’s an astonishing writer. Everything she writes is great, but this is one of those books — like Sara Gran’s Come Closer — that I know I’ll read again and again. It’s eerie and empathetic and pointed and uncanny and written in such a way so as to not be full of itself, to be fully accessible to any reader, while still being both small and profound in equal measure. It’s a treasure.
Actually, it’s been a damn fine year for novellas — M.L. Rio’s Graveyard Shift and Delilah Dawson’s Guillotine both come to mind. DARK, SINISTER SNACKS, these books, and you need them. Oh! Oh also: When Among Crows, by Veronica Roth. I read that in… January last year? So it counts.
Other books of note: A Mask of Flies by Matthew Lyons is fucking great. Paul Tremblay rocked Horror Movie, a filmic head trip through the remake of a purportedly cursed film. Gabino Iglesias’ House of Bone and Rain is some dark, powerful, vengeful stuff. CJ Leede’s American Rapture is an absolutely A+ unique take on the apocalypse, and honestly pairs really well with Clay McLeod Chapman’s upcoming Wake Up And Open Your Eyes. Oh! And At Dark, I Become Loathsome, by Eric LaRocca.
Weirdly, I read both the Chapman and the LaRocca on vacation in Portugal this past year, and also, I’m going to be doing events with them both next month — Chapman and I at Doylestown Bookshop on Fri, Jan 10th at 6pm. And LaRocca I’m joining in NYC
In nonfiction I really, really loved A Natural History of Empty Lots, by Christopher Brown. That and I also read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which is not new, but was very important to me this year, both personally and in the writing of Staircase in the Woods.
I know I read other books this year, right?
Oh! I know. I read my first proper Stephen King in a long time — I am, like many, a student of his earlier works. Sadly, though, I’m less studied when it comes to the stuff he wrote in the last 10-15 years. I read Fairy Tale. I liked it a lot. Took a while to get going to where it was going but even there, you’re just happy to spend time in the world of his writing. I have deeper thoughts that maybe I’ll get around to sometimes in the future.
Did I read more this year? Surely. Do I remember what those books were? Not at the moment. Forgive my porous mind. Onward.
TV
What We Do In The Shadows ended, and it was perfect. Shrinking and Bad Monkey continue to prove that Bill Lawrence knows what he’s doing (see also, Scrubs, Ted Lasso, Cougar Town). The Penguin was surprisingly excellent. Diplomat season two was not as strong as the first season but I still loved it a lot. Was Shogun this year? Amazing, obviously. Ripley had a whole different vibe than the film, closer to the book, and I found the black and white cinematography of it truly stunning, one of the most stunning shows I’ve laid my eyes on in recent memory. Arcane, also, totally beautiful. I needed time with it to remember what the fuck happened in season one, but it’s really staggering in terms of how well that animation looks, how perfect the action scenes are, how not video gamey it is even as it’s very video gamey? It’s something special.
Oh and maybe my favorite thing?
True Detective: Night Country. The best. Give Issa Lopez all the things. The money, the awards, the laurels, the high-fives.
I very much did not like The Bear S3, and I generally love that show. Hm.
Movies
Were there movies? Did I watch them? *grits teeth, takes a bumpy ride in the time machine*
Longlegs, Alien: Romulus, Challengers, Dune Part Two, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Babes, My Old Ass, Problemista, The First Omen, Late Night with the Devil, and what else?
Oh wait, no, I know — my two favorites this year:
Love Lies Bleeding, and Monkey Man.
There were other movies, I’m just not calling them my favorites of the year.
Moving on.
Games
Balatro is easily the most addictive game I played this year. So addictive it may have just eaten all the other games.
Favorite game overall might be Rise of the Golden Idol, which is just a delight.
Alan Wake 2 was amazing, though I think that came out in 2023 initially.
Thank Goodness You’re Here was incredibly funny and clever. Not necessarily a great “game” in the sense of “contains puzzles and various challenges,” but was a delight to go through and experience.
Pacific Drive was rad.
Animal Well consumed my life for a while, and I felt like it was nearly perfect in understanding how to create a challenging game that still builds you up to those challenges well? A game that hard that never feels frustrating is aces.
Very much wanted to love both Star Wars: Outlaws and Veilguard, and very much did not love them. Liked both. But neither really sang and I tapped out of Outlaws (though I’m told I should go back and try again) and Veilguard just feels like a weirdly watered-down Pixared version of a Bioware story. It’s good. But it also feels very video gamey — the maps don’t feel like maps, they feel like “levels,” and you’ll come upon an area of glowy, patiently-waiting bad guys same as you would in, say, Halo. The whole thing just isn’t coming together for me, but a lot of people I know love it, so maybe it’s just me.
Music
This year, loved new music from St. Vincent, Jack White, the Linda Lindas, Phantogram, The Last Dinner Party, Carter Veil, Louis the Child, Sprints, Sleater-Kinney, Rosie Tucker, Remi Wolf, Oceanator, Amyl and the Sniffers, Crobot, Childish Gambino, plus holy shit there was new Poe this year? Poe. POE. Just a little bit — all tied to Alan Wake 2, but hey, I’m a man thirsty in the desert, I’ll take whatever drops of water I can touch to my tongue.
I think one of my favorite and then saddest discoveries was Mama Zu — it’s like, “Wow, she’s great, I love this,” *googles* “oh god she died??” Crushing discovery of such a vital talent just showing up and then being gone from us too soon — sad for us, for her friends and family, fuck.
Your Turn
Okay. Flood the comments — what’d you like from this past year? Recommend me something. A song, a book, a game, whatever.
