Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

What It Feels Like, Right Now

When I was in college in North Carolina, I flew home to Pennsylvania for the holidays. My mother and father were going through a divorce at that point (a divorce that should’ve happened many years before), and so my father had decided I had to spend my holiday weekend staying with him, not her, and given that he was paying for the plane ticket and such, I agreed. He was supposed to pick me up from the airport, but he didn’t.

His friend did. A guy I had maybe met once or twice before. I met him, went to his car, and once on the road this guy, a relative stranger, gave me shit because he was trying to hit on flight attendants in the airport and I “interrupted” him getting laid at the airport. (Note, this is pre-9/11, when you could just free range it through the airport even if you didn’t have a flight. And I guess this guy was thinking he could Get Some at the Airport Applebees counter, or some shit.)

When he told me this, I smelled the alcohol on his breath. And then I noticed his driving was, ahhh, not good. I realized he’d been in the airport, not just hitting on flight staff, but drinking. He was drunk. I was in a car with a drunk driver. And at that point, my options were minimal. Wrestling control of the car away from him would’ve probably crashed us. And he was certainly trying to crash us anyway, weaving in and out of traffic. Best I could do was buckle the fuck up and try to be calm enough so as not to rile this guy, who seemed like he was not the most stable individual.

Living here in America right now feels like that time.

Stuck riding shotgun in a car with a drunk driver.


It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front of me, that I need to do. It’s hard to focus on the news, because it’s not just one thing, it’s a hundred things, news like fire ants, like you stepped on their mound and here they are, swarming, and each ant feels meaningless in the context of all these angry fucking ants. Looking at my phone or computer or any connected device feels like tonguing a broken tooth–an electric jolt of pain but one that feels paradoxically satisfying, like if I poke the bad tooth, maybe I’m fixing it, maybe poking it makes it fall out and the pain will go away. Which I know is fucking stupid so then I stop doing it — stop looking at the phone, stop poking the tooth. But there’s a little rat scratching in the back of my head and it makes me wonder, what are you missing, what aren’t you seeing, remain vigilant, constant vigilance, there’s a great wave coming, a wall of fire, a meteor, a swarm of wasps, better look, better click, and then I look, and am rewarded. By some definition of that word, “rewarded.” My anxiety is rewarded because things are bad, and things are happening constantly. You take three hours off your Diligent Watch, twenty horrible things have happened. ICE stole your mother. Trump threw the fact-checkers in a pit. DOGE fired all the people who watch for plane crashes and tornadoes and pathogens in your food. Elon Musk smuggled a xenomorph aboard a SpaceX flight. RFK Jr is hiding a zombie bite. It’s all happening. It’s all coming for you all the time always.


It’s hard to have hope. Hope is a thing with wings, the poet lady said, but its wings have been clipped and it thrashes on the ground looking for a way to get up, get out, go go go, but it can’t, so there it is, in the dirt, thrashing.


Hope persists, though. Hope maybe isn’t the thing with wings but hope is the stubborn green thing, its stem-and-leaf pushing up through what seems to be limitless concrete. It finds a breach and it pushes. Pushes and pushes. Grows and grows. Hoping no one steps on it or sprays it with weed-killer.


Sometimes you kinda forget. That it’s all happening. Okay, maybe you don’t forget, not exactly, but it drifts to the back of your mind where you can’t hear the chimpanzee screams and the clamor and the banging of drums. And in those moments, normalcy occurs, unbidden, uninvited. A gentle soft settling into an old feeling, life like a nice pair of sweatpants. Family dinner, a funny show, birdsong. Some emotionally-dysregulating version of Severance: your innie descends into the chaos mines, reading the news, feeling the fear, making plans, enduring calamity. Your outie makes dinner and tells jokes and dances to the playlist you built. Then the phone lights up, the elevator ding, and the innie rushes back in to see how flu and measles have combined to form the superbug, flusles, or how all the turtles are dead now.


You know there’s ice cream and you know you shouldn’t eat it because a part of you desires to be in better shape. When the Secret Police come for you, you’re gonna have to run, and you can’t do that with a Body by Jeni’s, no, no, you must be lean protein, a gazelle to flee their nets, but also, it’s ice cream, and you crave joy, some joy, any joy, and who knows, we might not even have ice cream in a year, they’ll outlaw it, or tariff it so it costs $50 a pint, or your flavor choices will be Listeria or Ivermectin, so you say fuck it, and you eat the ice cream. Each spoonful is a little vacation. But later you feel bad and you wonder if the trade-off for joy was worth it when they catch you and throw you in the SuperDoom prison they built on the fucking moon.


Yesterday I saw a bag of chips at the store that was $14.99. Beef tallow potato chips. This wasn’t Erewhon. The bag of chips was small. Things are stupid.


Maybe it’s like turbulence on an airplane, you think. Just a bumpy unpleasant awful experience you gotta get through. But when turbulence hits it’s not because the pilot is a guy who doesn’t “know planes,” when turbulence hits they don’t disappear the ninth row people out the airlock because they “look different” and are “probably causing the problem.” Planes don’t have airlocks, do they? Whatever. My brain is spray cheese.

Maybe it’s a vaccine, you think. Maybe we need this ugly dose of What Can Be in order to avoid What Could Come. Then again we had four years of it the first time and somehow, immunity didn’t take. Maybe we fucked that up and now it’s a drug-resistant socio-political superbug. Or maybe the medical metaphor is wrong and the dude is just the antichrist. I wasn’t religious before but he’s enough to make me believe.

Maybe it’s good to look to history, you think. History goes in cycles. This is not the first Very Stupid Very Bad Time in history, and it will not be the last. Yet humanity continues on. A comfort! Then you think, yeah maybe it shouldn’t have because we seem incapable of learning from history. Sure, reading history is fascinating. But living it fucking sucks. The lesson is, we didn’t learn the lesson. The fuck do we do with that?


Sometimes I think it’s climate change. That we’ve boiled the planet thanks to capitalism and it’s boiled our brains. And our brains are already a soggy dish sponge full of lead and microplastics anyway.


Late-stage capitalism is fun to say until you realize it’s the same thing, mostly, as late-stage cancer. A disease that has progressed so far you can’t stop it now, you can just ride it out and find peace before *fart noise*


Yeah, it’s like being a passenger in a drunk driver’s car. It’s also like working in an office building where new management just took over, and they’re a bunch of old braindeads and young dipshits and all of them are running around with sledgehammers and cartoon bundles of dynamite, knocking down load-bearing walls because “it’ll open the place up.” You think you ought to go work somewhere else but they also took over those buildings, too. They’re everywhere now, like termites.


It does feel really stupid. It’s callous and it’s evil and it’s craven but it’s also very, very stupid. Clown-show, clown-shoe, clown-shit stupid. It’s like, at least once a day I’m all, these guys? THESE guys? THIS is what’s happening, and THESE fucking guys are doing it? Are you fucking kidding me? You couldn’t write this as fiction. It’d be too on-the-nose. Satire written by a concussed eight-year-old. Reality written by ChatGPT.


Writing is hard right now. Releasing a book is hard. Promoting that book is, say it with me, hard. It’s not trivial but it feels trivial. Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down. It feels good to do it and you want others to feel good while reading it but you also know feeling good right now also feels somehow bad, and maybe that’s one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange. Turned happiness into a hot stove.

Still, I write. I gotta write. Pay the bills but also because it’s an escape in its way. I like to say it’s an act of resistance, and maybe it is, because they certainly don’t want me or you or anybody doing it. They want to censor and steal and feed it all into the wood chipper of AI so it can sloppily spill all that artbarf out onto the floor and then they hire us back at half-rate or less, so we become the ones not making the art but instead scooping up the artbarf and pushing it into some kind of shape, some kind of digital particleboard. Like Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, smooshing his mashed potatoes into the shape of a mountain. This means something. But it doesn’t mean anything.


Sometimes it feels like the pandemic. But that was better, in a lot of ways. Because we were all together in it, at least at first. Singing for health staff and staying home and whispering sweet nothings to our collective sourdough starter. But then we stopped singing and we politicized staying safe and we stopped feeding our sourdough starters and now the ghosts of those sourdough starters are really fucking pissed at us. Honestly maybe they’re the ones doing this to us. Maybe we stopped tending them and then they died and now they’re seeking revenge on us. Maybe this is a metaphor for democracy. We should’ve tended our democracy yeast goo better.


One weird thing that gives me hope, real hope, is that for the last eight-plus years, I could drive around this area and I knew, I knew there were houses that you could count on to have all the TRUMP SHIT out. The banners and flags and crazy-person signs and rah-rah-rah, Dear Leader, Dear Leader. I drive around now and those houses, almost all of them, have taken down their Dear Leader shit. Maybe it’s because they know it’s not popular but I think for some of them it’s because they’re finally starting to see. Eight years of cult propaganda on their lawns, gone. I drove up through Pennsyltucky last weekend, a good hour’s drive, a drive I’ve made before. And I knew I was going to see a lot of gloaty-bloaty Trump shit on their lawns, porches, houses. I saw one. One house with signs out. The house was condemned. Half of it, falling down. Junk all over the lawn. Nobody lived there anymore, by the look of it. And even if they did, they didn’t.

It’s that. It’s the protests, too. Big protests. Just getting started. People are mad. Big mad. There’s a feral Philadelphia energy afoot. I do like it.

So that’s where I get hope. People are waking up. They should’ve woke the fuck up a while ago, but we started to pretend woke, being awake, was a bad thing, when it’s really the most important thing.


Onward we go. Upward, we hope, but let’s remember, the wings are clipped. So it’s probably flat or even downward for awhile. Sometimes sharp drops, other times a spiral. Like a flushing toilet.


The postscript to the drunk driver holiday story is, I got back to the house alive, the driver managing to keep on the road. My father was at home, also drunk. Probably too drunk to have picked me up. We had a bad, bad couple days after that. And before Christmas I fucked off out of there, wrote him a note that said fuck you, I was gone, and he could do whatever he wanted to do with that, cancel my plane ticket or cut me out of the will or whatever. At the end of the trip, he called me and told me he’d take me to the airport. He was nice in the car. Not drunk. Told me how bad drunk driving was and I should never do it — after all, my sister had been hit by a drunk driver a few years before, and it fucked up her leg permanently. He told me this with what seemed to be no awareness that he had sent a friend to pick me up drunk, but I also knew he was telling me it because he damn well knew he had sent someone to pick me up drunk. Sometimes we learn lessons, other times we don’t learn shit and stuff just happens, but we pretend we had it figured out all along and we hope everyone just forgets.


Buy my book or I perish in the abyss, please and thank you.

Psst, One Week Left For Exclusive Staircase Preorder

PSST. One week left — less than one week, actually, since it ends 4/29 — to get in your preorders from Doylestown Bookshop. Which means you get cool stickers (long as the supplies hold out) and also a unique [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS] personalization —

And, to talk about that personalization for a moment, some people have asked what it is, and I’ll say, it’s similar to the “I invent an evil heirloom apple all for you” vibe, but, uhh, specific to this book.

For those who really, really gotta know, I’ll spoil it now under this ROT13 cipher, which you can decipher here

Lbh jvyy trg lbhe irel bja ebbz vafvqr gur ubeevoyr ubhfr gung jnvgf orlbaq gur fgnvef

That deadline is not a deadline to preorder the book in general, just the preorder deadline for Doylestown Bookshop to ship to you with all goodies and such intact. You can of course still preorder from your local, or get the book from the events I’ll be attending —

So! Yes! Book! Soon. Sorry for shouting and doing the marketing book promo dance, as certainly there is A LOT OF STUFF GOING ON RIGHT NOW and this kind of thing feels trivial and silly. But hope you need a good book as much as I do right now, and further, I hope this book, my book, fits that bill.

And hope to see you out on the road so we can commiserate about, well–

*gesticulates wildly*

OKAY LOVE YOU BYE

Kevin Hearne: Five Things I Learned While Writing Oberon’s Bathtime Stories

If you give Oberon the Irish wolfhound a bath, he’s going to ask you for a story. Fortunately, his human, Atticus, has many centuries of life under his belt as the Iron Druid, and a whole lot of stories to share. Enjoy twelve new short stories from the New York Times bestselling series the Iron Druid Chronicles.

Join Oberon and his Boston terrier buddy, Starbuck, in the tub as they hear about Corrie Ten Boom, Junko Tabei, Francisco de Miranda, Johannes Kepler, and many other figures from history spanning centuries. Sack Rome with King Alaric of the Visigoths or have a think with Auguste Rodin! Let the sparks fly with Michael Faraday or go down to the crossroads with Robert Johnson! And witness the fulfillment of the prophecy regarding the Triple Nonfat Double Bacon Five-Cheese Mocha, wherein a man in white with poor eyesight will craft a liquid paradox…!

Oberon’s Bathtime Stories are a wonderful addition to (or entry into) the Iron Druid Chronicles. 


Writing short stories as serial fiction is fun.

Short stories are usually one-off enterprises that show up in magazines or anthologies, but these stories were written once per month in 2024 for my newsletter subscribers, and while each is self-contained, there was also an opportunity to develop a bit of a story arc across several of them that allowed me to finish a piece of esoterica from the Iron Druid Chronicles. In book 3, Hammered, Oberon briefly mentions to Atticus that one day a man will emerge from a secret lab near Seattle with a liquid paradox: the Triple Nonfat Double Bacon Five-Cheese Mocha. Atticus is quickly distracted and the matter is dropped, seemingly forever—there really wasn’t a way for me to revisit it because circling back would do nothing to move the plot forward or develop a character. But as a short story, revisiting that prophecy was tremendously entertaining for me, and it did afford the chance to develop some things once it was located outside of the novels. I’m writing stories again this year but focusing this time on the Druids and a character from the Ink & Sigil series, Gladys Who Has Seen Some Shite, rather than Oberon. All of the stories take place chronologically after the novels, so it does feel like serial fiction.

Empires rise and fall over groceries.

A large part of the joy in writing a character who’s two thousand years old is figuring out where he was and what he was doing throughout history. Since the Druids were wiped out by the Romans, for example, he’d have a huge beef with them, and might be interested in the downfall of Rome. The research for the second story, “The Grocery Sack of Rome,” taught me that the Visigoths were just trying to grow some food, but they were squeezed between the Romans and the Huns, never left in peace, so they had to do something. Sacking Rome worked out for the short term, but it still didn’t give them a land to settle and prosper. They wound up heading to modern-day Spain, gradually morphing and blending with other tribes into the Spanish, and they became a colonial power centuries later—expanding and exploiting (or stealing) resources just as the Romans did, but with bonus religious fervor. It gave me some insight into why men supposedly think about Rome so often. The legacies (and consequences) of that empire are still around today.

History classes leave out the coolest stuff.

While researching the last story in the collection regarding Francisco de Miranda, I became a bit miffed that I’d never heard of him before, because he lived one heck of an interesting life. He dodged the Spanish Inquisition over and over—they wanted him bad—and then he dodged the guillotine during the French Revolution twice. He tried to invade Venezuela to overthrow the Spanish colonial government with like two boats and a handful of dudes, indicating he had a gigantic pair of cojones, but when that didn’t work out, he became the president of the First Republic a bit later and got to use the flag that he’d come up with during the invasion. But it was just one adventure after another with this guy. He liberated the Bahamas during the American Revolution. An empress took him as a lover (Catherine the Great). At the end, he was betrayed by a friend and handed over to the Spanish after he’d dodged them for so long. The guy’s life was a series of action films and yet I’d never heard of him. History textbooks need to do better.

Political science kinda nailed it though.

Back in this whole other century, when I was in college pursuing one of those liberal arts degrees, I took an introductory class where one of the texts was Long Cycles in World Politics by George Modelski. It basically laid out the argument, looking at history, that hegemonic powers like the United States come and go, and judging by the signals—signals we picked up by looking first at The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon—the United States was on its decline and would be giving way to some other hegemonic power in the decades ahead. That was in the early nineties, and speculation abounded: Who would rise to be the new hegemon of the next cycle? Nobody really thought it would be the USSR—they had just shat the bed with Chernobyl and the Berlin Wall crumbled soon afterward. Smart money was on China or Japan. And now…here we are, witnessing the end of America’s global leadership, and it’s pretty clear that China is positioned to lead. In an attempt to address the cycle, I wrote “A Riotous Distraction,” set in September of 1922, the time of The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the immense carelessness of the rich and warned us about them, but in spite of everyone reading it (or maybe twenty percent of everyone because we know lots of folks never did the assigned reading), we let the wealth disparities grow and grow until we have a whole bunch of Tom and Daisy Buchanans now, smashing lives with their casual cruelties and heading to the golf course or sailing away on their yachts. The orcas know what’s up and they’re trying to help, but they can’t save us.

Stories help us process and cope.

Whether it’s reading them or writing them, I take comfort in stories set in various historical periods because people have been enduring (and triumphing over) one kind of nonsense or another for centuries. Writing these stories that spanned history from the Roman empire to the 1970s showed me that people have been surviving and thriving in every era, despite their circumstances, and it helped me manage my angst about the future throughout 2024. Writing and reading them this year is practically necessary to function. And I’m finding that short stories are perfect when my attention span is under assault by the news. These twelve stories—all frame stories where Oberon introduces the bathtime story Atticus tells him—actually work great as bedtime stories (I’ve heard from early readers). I hope you will enjoy, stay hydrated, get enough sleep, and defy fascism.


Kevin Hearne hugs trees, pets doggies, and rocks out to heavy metal. He also thinks tacos are a pretty nifty idea. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling series the Iron Druid Chronicles, the Seven Kennings trilogy that begins with A PLAGUE OF GIANTS, and co-author of the Tales of Pell with Delilah S. Dawson.


(Oberon’s Bathtime Stories is also available on the billionaire’s site but I’m not going to link to a damn billionaire.)

Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Apple Books | Libro.fm

Meredith Lyons: Five Things I Learned Writing A Dagger of Lightning

Forty-five-year-old Imogen has always struggled to fit in, never finding her passion in life. And while that may include having cold feet in her impending nuptials, that doesn’t mean she’s ready to ditch planet Earth—and her entire life—completely.

When Imogen is kidnapped by an alien prince in disguise, there’s nothing she can do to stop him. He’s sidhe—a being with powerful abilities—and he’s grown up used to getting what he wants. The prince is convinced Imogen will fall in love with him, and that her new powers, once she’s turned sidhe, will help his country win a centuries-old feud.

With the help of the prince’s much more tolerable brother, Imogen starts to get her feet back under her, but even he can’t protect her from those who would use her for her powers. If Imogen can’t find a way to fight for herself, she’ll become a pawn in a world that has already decided what she’s going to be.


As cool as it might seem, getting abducted from Earth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I did an ARC giveaway for A Dagger of Lightning recently. To enter, you had to answer one question, “Would you like to be kidnapped from Earth?” The overwhelming response was, “Yes, get me out of here.” However, my protagonist, Imogen can tell you, it’s anything but fun. Her autonomy is completely stripped, for one. She doesn’t get to say goodbye, her entire family likely assumes the worst, and the alien prince who kidnapped her keeps blithely reassuring her that she’ll get over it. Not to mention, the country he’s at odds with keeps trying to abduct her for their own purposes. Fortunately, his more empathetic brother is around to help her get her footing.

People are actually really interested in a middle-aged “chosen one.”

When I first got the idea for Dagger, I was concerned that no one would be interested in an older protagonist, but I couldn’t stop writing it. I finally showed the first few pages to a friend, eliciting promises of honesty if this concept was a waste of time. “It’s not stupid. I think you should write it,” she said. I wrote the first draft in twenty-eight days, which is insane and has never happened again. Of course, there were a lot of beta reads and rewrites over the years before it sold. One thing remained consistent, however, people loved a fierce, fully-adult woman main character. The early reviews have also been overwhelmingly positive in this regard.

Coming of age stories don’t have an age limit.

Not one aspect of a person freezes the moment they turn twenty-one. At least it shouldn’t. Personal growth should be continuous. I have reinvented myself professionally at least four times during my life, and I’ve experienced my share of internal growth spurts as well. Creating Imogen as she learns to fight for what she wants while slowly allowing herself to become emotionally vulnerable was one of the best parts of writing this book.

Sometimes not getting what you want is the best thing for you.

In the beginning, all Imogen wants is to get back to her life on Earth. Although change is foisted upon her in the worst way possible, she finds something worth fighting for in her new life and grows in ways she never would have on Earth. Likewise, A Dagger of Lightning grew in spite of my frustration—I wanted the book to sell right away—I continued to rewrite Dagger after each failed pitch. The book that comes into the world on April 1st is the same at its core, but it is so much more vibrant and nuanced than the original inception. Just as Imogen fails to get what she initially wanted so desperately; each rejection pushed me to make this book the best version of itself.

It’s okay to have fun.

Coming off my first book, Ghost Tamer—where, yes, there is humor, but it’s inserted intentionally to offset the exploration of grief, loss, and moving on—writing A Dagger of Lightning was honestly a joy. When I started writing, my intention was merely to explore what it would be like to be yanked from mortality and a normal life at middle age, I didn’t have any intentions to go deeper. The comments on misogyny, friendship, self-growth and so on emerged on their own. Mostly, I just wanted to have a good time and I think readers want that, too. But we can have a good time while raging against misogyny and the abuse of privilege. Part of the reader’s catharsis is watching Imogen establish a sense of self while fighting against a system that wants to use her and force her submission. Just like in life, the fight isn’t over with the final pages, there’s always room to grow and more battles to win.


    Meredith grew up in New Orleans, collecting two degrees from Louisiana State University before running away to Chicago to be an actor. In between plays, she got her black belt and made martial arts and yoga her full-time day job. She fought in the Chicago Golden Gloves, ran the Chicago Marathon, and competed for team USA in the Savate World Championships in Paris. In spite of doing each of these things twice, she couldn’t stay warm and relocated to Nashville. She owns several swords, but lives a non-violent life, saving all swashbuckling for the page, knitting scarves, gardening, visiting coffee shops, and cuddling with her husband and two panther-sized cats. Her first novel Ghost Tamer is an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best SciFi Fantasy, an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Gold Winner for Best SciFi Fantasy, an IPPY Award Winner for Best First Book, and a Silver Falchion Winner for Best Book of 2023 and Best Supernatural. A Dagger of Lighting releases April 1, 2025, both with CamCat Books.

    Meredith Lyons: Website | Instagram | Threads

    A Dagger of Lightning: Bookshop.org | Camcat Books

    Delilah S. Dawson: Cover Reveal (Plus Five Writing Tips From It Will Only Hurt for a Moment)

    [Delilah is not merely one of my BFFs in this life, and not only someone whose posts here from time to time are quite popular, but also, she’s someone who wrote this very excellent book that you should most definitely check out — but first, cover reveal + writing tips from The Delilah Her Own Self –]


    1. Write what you know. For example, I now know that getting roofied SUUUUUUUCKS.

    Back in 2019, my husband and I went to one of our favorite fine dining restaurants in Tampa. I ordered a drink, and someone (not my waitress), brought me a different drink because they were apparently out of some of the ingredients of what I’d ordered. No problem! I’m easy! It was a fancy restaurant with a great bar! I like adventures!

    I did not like this adventure.

    Because someone put something in that drink, and I blacked out while appearing fully functional, lost eight hours of my life, and woke up on the shower floor covered in puke with RACCOON BLOOD ZOMBIE EYES from the power of all my yarking. That experience heavily informs this book, but I’m not going to tell you why because [spoilers]. I will tell you this: You might think getting roofied is something that only happens to young party girls who leave their drinks sitting on the tables of clubs while they figure out how to pee in a jumpsuit, but if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. There are sociopaths out there, and they do not care if you’re in your forties with your spouse eating $40 scallops.

    Does that make you mad?

    Then you’ll like this book.

    2. It’s okay to write from spit.

    No. Spite. Write from SPITE.

    I have an art degree and have dabbled in every artistic medium that doesn’t involve—

    Well, no, I have used live fish as an artistic medium, so I guess that’s ALL OF THEM.

    But while I was taking my umpteenth pottery class, I was reading a book that started with a potter in a pottery studio, and the book got every. Single. Thing. Wrong.

    I threw the book across the room.

    I mean, take a pottery class, or ask your artsy friend to do a quick read-through, or just watch a YouTube video. There’s no excuse for getting pottery SO WRONG. And that was part of the genesis of this book:

    I wanted to write about a potter who knew about the pottery studio.

    And a calligrapher and a fiber artist and a stained-glass artist and a sculptor—

    So, yeah. It’s okay to be powered by spite. Or spit. That’s your personal business.

    3. Go out and get some XP.

    By which I mean EXPERIENCE.

    See, I’ve done tons of different artistic media, but when I wrote It Will Only Hurt for a Moment, I’d never been to a retreat. Not an artists’ retreat, not a writers’ retreat; I had never retreated at all! And as mentioned before, I like to know that if I’m writing about an experience, I’m getting it right, because I don’t want you to throw my books across the room.

    I mean, at least not until the end, and then only because I’ve blown your mind.

    That’s totally fine.

    Anyway, I needed to go to a retreat, stat. But I couldn’t find an artists’ or writers’ retreat during the right time frame, so I ended up going to a Spiritual Renewal retreat for women, which advertised yoga, meditation, reiki, sound healing, past life regression, and dance parties. I was open with the people there about my motives, but I am always up for healing, so I did my best to take part with an open heart—except for the dance parties, because there’s only so much time you can dance in a room with eleven other women while monks chant from a portable speaker. I studied how the retreat center was laid out, went on hikes, peeked in the kitchen, and even burned myself with tea while gazing off into the mountains.

    It left a bitchin’ scar.

    4. Do your research, even when it makes you want to pull out your own hair.

    It Will Only Hurt for a Moment takes place now, but parts of the book hearken back to an earlier time when women could be sent to an insane asylum for, oh, say, reading novels, talking back, or being in love with someone too poor. My main reference for this phenomenon was the book The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore, which chronicles the life of Elizabeth Packard, a nineteenth century wife and mother whose husband had her committed to an insane asylum to put her in her place. But Elizabeth, of course, was sane, as were many of her fellow inmates, and she dedicated her life to fighting for her freedom—and theirs. This book was one of the most infuriating things I’ve ever read, and it certainly helped fuel the fire of female rage that leads to my own novel’s cathartic end.

    5. Do something audacious.

    This book cover is undoubtedly gorgeous. It’s by one of my favorite cover mavens, Regina Flath, who also did the covers for my books Hit and Servants of the Storm. But as we learned once I started printing swag, the hardcover art disappears when it’s thumbnail-sized. Seriously, it just becomes a gray smudge. Thus, we’re spicing it up for the paperback with some brighter colors that will hopefully grab the eye from the bookstore shelves.

    I’ve also been told this version is giving Wicked, which works.

    There is a lot of defiance in this book, after all.

    Point is, sometimes you’re chugging along while writing, and you’re not quite sure what happens next, and that’s a great time to do something unexpected and shake things up. What Lucas finds at the bonfire? I didn’t know that was going to happen. He just wandered off into the woods and screamed, and then I started the next chapter and had to figure out why. What Sarah finds in her cabin? Same thing. It’s a fun challenge, to figure out what will make sense narratively while also surprising both the author and the reader.

    6. Rebel.

    Yeah, it’s always five things around here, but I’m giving you six because the very nature of art is rebellion.

    I hope you’ll pick up a copy of the paperback on July 1, or, heck, just preorder it now as a gift for yourself then. Or, if this listicle (a horrid word, that) is quite simply too enticing, it’s available immediately as a hardcover, e-book, or audiobook, and I bet your local indie bookseller or bookshop.org would be delighted to procure a copy.

    Delilah S. Dawson: Website | Bluesky | Instagram

    It Will Only Hurt For A Moment: Bookshop.org | Publisher Website

    Soon, We Climb The Staircase

    We are nearly one month out to the release of The Staircase in the Woods, and it’s very hard to get one’s head above the mad clanging din of news noise to deliver bits of cool news, and yet, I must try, so here we go —

    First, hey, holy shit, Staircase is now a LibraryReads book for April! Libraries are amazing, librarians are amazing, and to have the support of them for this book is beyond amazing. (Link here.)

    Second, it landed in the New York Times as one of the 24 Works of Fiction to Read This Spring, which — wow. It’s nice to see horror show up in a list like this, for one thing, and to also be paired with SGJ’s Buffalo Hunter Hunter? C’mon. This is dream-come-true stuff here.

    Third, it’s also listed at the Saturday Evening Post as a book to read this spring (alongside pal John Scalzi).

    Fourth, I’m just seeing now that holy crap, it’s an IndieNext pick for May — ahhhhh. Thanks to the ABA and to booksellers and bookstores for that, and I am excited to visit a bunch of you when the book launches.

    Speaking of that, at the Nashville Parnassus stop, I’ll be joined in conversation by super cool writer person Lauren Thoman, author of You Shouldn’t Be Here.

    Finally, Staircase gets a really lovely review by Anna Dupre at Capes and Tights — “Wendig manages to shatter your heart and stitch it back together with this unique group of folks each complete with their own idiosyncrasies, flaws, and merits that feel so real. We all know the past comes back to haunt us, a truth that is all too real for these characters. Yet, we get a fresh spin on this narrative with a unique setting that lends itself to the feelings, thoughts, and emotions that fall through the proverbial cracks as we grow older. … To say this is a haunting novel is a vast understatement with every choice existing as a ghost that lingers much longer than the turn of the page.”

    Oh and though it’s not Staircase-related — this next weekend I’ll be at the Lehigh Valley Book Fest! Saturday, 3/29, 4:15PM, details here. I’ll be hanging with Paul Acampora, Aggie Blum Thompson and Lisa Williamson Rosenberg to talk… thrilling and scary fiction? I dunno! It’ll be great!

    Ummm. Is that it? For now? That’s it! For now! I’ll maybe have a few more tidbits and such before launch, and you can expect me to get steadily more noisy about the book as the day approaches…

    To remind, too, if you wanna pre-order the book and if you’re not going to come get the book at one of the events I’m doing out in the world, then Doylestown Bookshop has you covered — you’ll also get some cool Staircase stickers and a special personalization. (Note that folks who see me on tour can also get those, too, though. Stickers long as supply lasts.) Order from Doylestown Bookshop here, and they’ll ship right to you.