Year: 2018 (page 7 of 32)

October 12, 2018 / 189 Comments

In Which I Am Fired From Marvel

Hello! I was fired from Marvel — from two Star Wars projects. The detail from the tweets I tweeted:

So, here’s a thing that has happened – I just got fired from Marvel. Taken off issues 4 and 5 of SHADOW OF VADER, and taken off an as-yet-unannounced SW book. This might be a long thread, so apologies in advance. (I hesitate to talk about this, because honestly, it gives the Worst Possible People a win, something they’ve wanted for a while. But I also feel like I’ve long held to honesty and forthrightness, and I don’t feel like lying when people realize I’m not on these books anymore.)

To rewind a little bit, when SW: AFTERMATH came out, I assume most know but maybe you don’t, I put some ahh, elements in there (LGBT characters) that were not received well by a certain subset of fandom. That resulted in both a negative review campaign, found across various FB groups and other Worst Places on the Internet, that began mounting the very minute the book dropped online. I was literally at a midnight release of the book, and when I got done, there were already a pile of one-star reviews piling up – which seemed strange, obviously. And scary, too. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time. (And as a caveat, obviously I recognize that yes, some people just don’t like the book for the Usual Reasons, and people who hold those reasons are not to be lumped in with the more septic side of fandom. Tl;dr see also TLJ reviews.)

I also started receiving TONS of harassment – harassment that has gone on for years, harassment that has required me to contact local police and warn them of SWATting attempts, harassment across all corners of the Internet, here, FB, Reddit, YouTube. Some of it was bot stuff, obviously, or sock puppets, but some of it was pretty creepy, and very personal. I didn’t call a lot of it out or even highlight, but it was there, a sort of… constant background noise. (Christ, for an extra special treat go search for my name and check out the YouTube videos if you want an eye-opening glimpse.)

And I was worried of course because, jeez, I thought I had screwed up. I wondered for a time if the book was bad. But then it hit list and stayed on list for four weeks – and the next two books hit list, too, and EMPIRE’S END landed even higher on the list than the first book. And privately, I was told by folks inside LFL that there was no worry here, that they valued that I spoke out both speaking up for myself and for STAR WARS, which has always honestly been a progressive brand and company. And it made me very proud to work for them, too, not just because — holy hell, basking in the glow of STAR WARS, but because the people were great, and they totally got it. (Hell, a lot of the people inside LFL have experience considerable harassment. I mean, that’s not news, but Kelly Marie-Tran? Bueller? Bueller?)

After I did HYPERION with Marvel, they hired me then to write the TFA adaptation, which meant I got to work with some wonderful folks – @hantos and @cracksh0t – on a project that was tricky, because it ended up being more a translation of the movie than an adaptation. (I know Heather received some of the worst harassment in the entire industry – I can’t speak to how well Marvel did or did not protect her from it, but I know she was at the bottom of a major misery funnel from Comicsgate and their ilk. Far worse than I suffered.)

Still, I thought things were good, and I hoped to do more work with Marvel or SW or a combo of the two someday – comics isn’t really my “thing,” per se, but I felt like I was getting a handle on it. Of course, the harassment continued – and it got worse again when TLJ came out. Which I’m sure is no surprise to anyone who has ever tweeted, “Hey, I really liked THE LAST JEDI!” That’s really when I started to see lots of YouTube videos and stuff about me and it was… Well, it was creepy. And I’d seen other signs of people being… fired for political reasons, or folks like @ChelseaCain who was yanked around and was also the subject of considerable nastiness.

And then we announced SHADOW OF VADER juuuuust last weekend, and people were excited, and I thought everything was good. I was not made aware of any issues, and my online self has always been my online self, so. Except, yeah, no. Today I got the call. I’m fired. Because of the negativity and vulgarity that my tweets bring. Seriously, that’s what Mark, the editor said. It was too much politics, too much vulgarity, too much negativity on my part.

Basically, because I was not civil.

Which, of course, is their decision to make. I’m not their boss. (And, turns out, they’re not the boss of me, either. Har har.) (I joke because otherwise, I cry.)

My understanding over this call was that this was a Marvel decision, not an LFL decision, but I can’t really confirm that. The editor said he had made the call. He seemed genuinely upset at my tweets and profanity, so maybe that’s accurate. And again, that’s his right to do so. If they honestly feel that my presence will damage the book, I don’t want that. I want the book to shine, and artists like Juanan Ramirez and Greg Smallwood to do their amazing thing. Artists like that are gods in my mind, so I’m happy to not distract from their literal magic.

But it does set a troubling precedent. One we’ve seen already – James Gunn, Jessica White, and so on – of folks fired because they riled up the wasp’s nest of asterisk-gate. And it seems odd to be mad that I’m mad about politics when – well, look around. Climate change, kids in cages, sexual harassers at the topmost tiers of power, and so on. A call for civility as the PA GOP candidate threatens Tom Wolf with a golf cleat stomping. I dunno, man.

I know it hands Comicsgate a big win. It will embolden them. But they won — I’m out of Marvel and, I guess for now, at least, out of any kind of Star Wars. Do your victory lap, I guess. (Just please leave me out of it.) (All that being said, a lot of wonderful people still work inside those institutions and storyworlds, and I hope you’ll continue to support them and the stories they’re telling.) To conclude: this is really quite chilling. And it breaks my heart. I am very sad, and worried for the country I live in, and the world, and for creative people all around. Courage to you all. I have a dire fear this is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

P.S. Vote in November like your life depends on it. Because it just might.

October 12, 2018 / 1 Comment

Friday Funday News Dump!

THINGS THINGS THINGS

VARIOUS THIIIIINGS

*does the Things To Talk About dance*

*which involves a lot of gallumphing*

*also partial nudity*

Let us begin.

Ragnatalk: The E! True Hollywood Story

So, finally, finally, Thor Ragnatalk, Episode 2 has come out. This was — this was a hard one to record, and we really weren’t going to talk about the whys and whyfors of that situation, but Anthony and I felt we had to explain ourselves and, maybe too, tell our truths, so this episode is exactly that. As always, you can listen to new episodes at Ragnatalk-dot-com, where you can hear us reveling in the glory that is Thor: Ragnarok, taking the movie in ten-minute chunks. It’s also available where PODCASTS LIVE, like for instance, over at Appletown. Listen, subscribe, hear our great shame, our tale of woe, our journey of iniquity.

p.s. may contain pee jars

Death & Honey

HEY SO, remember Three Slices?

In case you don’t, a quick refresher:

My very good friends and authorial talent batteries Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson said, “We should do a collection of three novellas,” and I dunno what I said, I probably mumbled something and covered myself with a bean bag so I could drink more low-shelf whiskey, which legally constituted an agreement on my part. As a result, Three Slices was born. (You can get it on e-book or audio!) Kevin wrote a Iron Druid story, Delilah wrote a Blud tale, and I wrote a Miriam Black novella.

And it was a lot of fun and there was much rejoicing.

We decided to do it again.

It’s called Death & Honey.

And this time, there’s a print version.

*hold for applause*

Subterranean Press is offering 1500 signed numbered editions, and only 52 (!) signed leatherbound copies of our little collection, and you can pre-order now. (Releasing in February.)

What’s in it?

Well, Kevin wrote a new Oberon’s Meaty Mystery.

Delilah wrote a new Rhett Walker story.

And I wrote a story tied to the Miriam Black universe, starring the character Lauren Martin, aka, Wren — it bridges the gap between The Raptor & The Wren and Vultures. (It is not essential to read this to understand either of those books, but is a narrative value-add, so to speak.)

There will of course be an e-book and audio edition, too. More on those when there’s more to say.

In the meantime, here’s the cover to the print version, by Galen Dara —

Bucks County Book Fest

Aaaaand finally, I’ll be speaking this Sunday at the Bucks County Book Festival, appearing at a panel at 1pm with AWESOME AUTHOR HUMAN Fran Wilde! We’ll be speaking at the Editor Tent, talking about… ummm?

Sci-fi and fantasy and probably knock-knock jokes and loud birds and ice cream.

TBD.

You can find the whole Bucks Book Fest schedule here.

Hope to see you there!

October 10, 2018 / 37 Comments

For World Mental Health Day: When Writer’s Block Is Actually Depression

This is not the first time I’ve noted this, nor will it be the last, but I like to occasionally put a fine point on this —

Sometimes, writer’s block is not writer’s block.

Let’s rewind a little.

I got a nice email. Part of this email contained the following:

Anyway, things have worked out and I’ve recently been trying to get back on the horse. But, I just cannot seem to make any headway. I feel as though every idea I’ve had is as useful as a paper parachute. And it feels impossible to garner any new “worthy” ideas. If I try to just push on with one, it doesn’t work. I’ve tried all the basics; Bradbury’s noun-cohesion technique (I don’t think he called it that, but *shrugs*), free writing, random word/character/title generators, fan-fiction (don’t judge me!), writing advice; books, blogs (including your own), studying my own past work; finished, unfinished, etc. But, I still feel like a fish on a beach: floundering, hopeless, lifeless. Obviously this leads to all the angst-riddled and existential questions: am I good enough? Should I give up and become an accountant? The list goes on.

So, to get to the point, can you offer me a torch or even a slither of light to help find my way through the dark?

There’s a lot going on here. Because there’s a lot going on with any writing process and with anybody’s brain, whoever they are. Our brains are fucking thorntangles of complicated business, with lots of thoughts and fears and weary worries and woes — and then adding onto that the expectations of work, of writing, of creating something in an imaginative way, ha ha, ohhh, boy, that can be like shoving a bunch of angry ferrets through a narrow pipe. It can work if all the ferrets play nice, but they won’t, because they’re ferrets. They’ll form a squirmy, ferrety ball and won’t go down that pipe.

We all have days, as writers, as makers, where it’s hard.

It’s just hard.

We maybe don’t know why. It just is.

Writer’s block — which is silly that we call it that, because everybody feels blocked and frustrated from time to time, from parents to plumbers to astrophysicists — manifests out of an unholy host of reason. And out of those reasons are a panoply of potential solutions.

Hey, maybe something in the first part of the draft isn’t working.

Maybe you’re not ready to write the book yet.

Maybe it needs more time in the ol’ THOUGHT OVEN.

Maybe you need to take a walk, move some blood from your sluggish body into your brain — blood carries oxygen and oxygen, if I remember my science correctly, CARRIES IDEA MOLECULES.

Maybe you need to eat better. It’s hard to think with a glob of corn pudding in your head — created when you’ve eaten too many damn carbs and haven’t worked them off. Maybe eat a lighter snack next time and sit down.

Maybe you could use some coffee.

Maybe you could use some liquor.

Maybe this just isn’t the book for you.

Maybe you should try something small, build up some confidence, get you that sweet, sweet dopamine hit of finishing a smaller, more doable project.

Maybe you’re just psyching yourself up and out.

Maybe it’s a normal fear of failure.

Maybe it’s the rarer, but also normal, fear of success.

Maybe you just gotta write the hell through it.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s not writer’s block at all.

Maybe it’s depression. Or anxiety. Or the one-two-punch of them together.

I’m not qualified to tell you that. Nor am I qualified to tell you how to fix it. I am qualified, though, to tell you that it’s normal. It’s not odd to suffer under the yoke of those disorders. It doesn’t mean you’re broken, it means you join millions of other human beings — and honestly, I’d bet a not-small-percentage of other artists, too — who just got a lot of shit going on upstairs. (Doesn’t help that the world is basically a Portajohn filled with yellowjackets right now, and we all feel trapped inside it.) So, you need to be kind to yourself and get the help you need for depression and anxiety — and trust me when I tell you, that help shouldn’t look like the help you’d give to fix writer’s block. The solution for one is not the other, because the problems are literally different. In that case, the block is a symptom of a larger thing — and treating depression like it’s writer’s block?

Well, it’ll just make the block worse.

And the depression, too.

Because you’ll feel inadequate. Frustrated. It’s like thrashing around in quicksand.

Every process is different, and every mind is different, too, and how we join one mind with its process is a tricky thing — one made trickier by depression and anxiety. But it doesn’t mean you can’t work. It just means you’ve gotta find your own way forward.

Some people sculpt a tree with a chainsaw — others use gentle little wire loops to sculpt detail into clay. Yours might require a gentler, finer detail — a slower pace, a kinder rhythm. Do what you must, but most of all, recognize that whatever’s going on upstairs is not unusual, it is shared by many of your kin, and like them, you can still keep on keeping on.

October 10, 2018 / 36 Comments

Hi, Dad, I’m In (Twitter) Jail

So, this morning I woke up to find that I had been put in Twitter Jail for *checks notes* five hours. And I was put there because *checks notes* hell, I don’t know. They didn’t tell me. They didn’t ask me to delete any tweets, they didn’t give me a sense of what rule I broke, or when, or what offending tweet had caused the world such pain.

Curiously, it tells me I can send DMs to my followers — but, that’s actually untrue. I try to send a DM and it just gives me a vigorous reminder of my lockout.

OBVIOUSLY IT WAS THIS TWEET

CLEARLY IT IS THE RED DELICIOUS APPLE LOBBY THAT HAS PUT ME HERE

SCREW YOU, LIAR APPLE, YOU FRUIT JUDAS

I WILL SPEAK MY TRUTH AND WILL NOT BE SUPPRESSED

(I stole that joke from author Allison Dickson, FYI.)

I can of course guess at what put me here — over the weekend, just at the cusp of the Kavanaugh vote, I did a tweetstorm about civility — the initiating tweet has since had 17,000 shares. Which also means it ended up drawing the attention of a series of weepy right-wing-celebrity clowndicks, including but not limited to, Ben Shapiro, James Woods, Dinesh d’Souza, Curt Schilling. It also unleashed a high tide of septic idiots, 95% of them bots or sock puppets, to harass me (often to call me some variant of “soy” or “cuck,” which is the most diapery, baby-boo-boo insult they’ve yet come up with, one based in all sorts of disproven dumdum ideas about masculinity). I blocked many hundreds of abusive users, reporting most of them — a fraction of which, Twitter dealt with, most, they did not. I also received various threats, which is always fun. (One semi-threat said that if I wanted to pull an Anthony Bourdain, they’d buy me the rope. How polite! Like Mister Rogers said, always look for the helpers.) Then the Comicsgate/Gamergate media got a hold of it and suggested I was calling for violence against Trump supporters, which takes a particularly special lack of reading comprehension to get there considering I wrote this tweet specifically to put that idea out of anyone’s heads. All this, plus the standard calls for Disney to fire me from Star Wars, which is maaaaaybe a little misguided, because Disney doesn’t employ me. I’m not an employee of Disney or LFL or Marvel. I am there on a case-by-case freelance basis. Further, the income I get from that work is, presently, insert Unkar Plutt voice, a very tiny portion of my actual YTD.)

Aaaaand then, a Twitter suspension.

Of five hours.

For unspecified, unnamed tweets I don’t even have to delete.

(I will note that I did delete two tweets out of that thread on Sunday, not because I disagreed with them or thought them problematic, but rather, because those two tweets had become the funnel for harassment. They were the gateway, and I was hoping to shut it down.)

Obviously, if I misstepped somewhere in a way I’m not aware of, I’m genuinely sorry to anyone I might’ve upset. It’s hard to see what that was, or would be, however, in part because Twitter won’t even tell me what I did wrong.

So, this is a good reminder that:

a) Twitter is an arbitrary company with a great product and shitty enforcement tools that routinely allow for the worst among users to thrive and for others to get caught up in brute force suspensions driven by those same worst users

b) You do not own your tweets or anything you put on Twitter (trust me on this one, I have practical experience on that), and so you should always have a centralized backup that you own and control

c) Twitter has one helluva bot/sock puppet/troll problem, and won’t address it

d) This is not a first amendment issue, and I won’t frame it as such — despite the ironic fact that the same dipshits who probably mob-reported me would exclaim exactly that upon their own suspensions. Twitter can do whatever it wants. It can ban me arbitrarily for posting too many heirloom apple reviews. (YOU’LL NEVER STOP ME.) Twitter, again, is an amazing service governed by a shit company with zero ethos

e) This country is in dire fucking straits, and my call for a lack of civility remains true, no matter who that offends — which, arguably, is the point. Civility means saying things that aren’t troublesome, that don’t upset the balance, that acquiesce to abusive powers. And make no mistake, these powers are abusive. Children in cages, abusers and criminals at the highest levels of government, a willful acceleration of climate change, voter suppression, Russian meddling, tax breaks for the richest while the poor and middle-class continue to flounder… well, that list goes on and on. And both social media — and mass media — are helping to aggravate that problem rather than grapple with it, because it is advantageous to them to do so. A civil response is a complicit response. We must not be civil. Again, to be clear, violence isn’t the answer, either — but you don’t have to be polite in your protests. You don’t have to curtail vulgar language. They’ll reframe any protest you make as being uncivil, down to the notion that they will call protesting itself an uncivil act. Don’t buy it. Stand up, be counted, make your voice heard as loudly and as firmly as you must.

And to reiterate —

Do not rely on Twitter to be your pal.

This is doubly true if you’re a creator of any stripe — do not, not, not, use Twitter or IG or FB as your Authorial Homebase. Don’t do it. They own it. You don’t. If it goes away, either because it shuts down or because they shut you down, you’ve just cut off a vital avenue.

Find a place to call yours, and own it. I see too many authors with disused websites — or no website at all! — and they rely solely on someone else’s social media service to exist and conduct marketing and professional work. Be wary of that approach.

OKAY SEE YOU IN FIVE HOURS, FRANDOS

(Related: another sci-fi author, Patrick Tomlinson, was fully suspended, and you can read his account of how that happened at his site.)

p.s. vote like hell in November

October 8, 2018 / 7 Comments

Macro Monday Is A Dark Lord Of The Sith

Soooooo, some news! With the wrap up of the brilliant Darth Vader run by Charles Soule, I will be writing a five-issue miniseries for Marvel Star Wars called:

SHADOW OF VADER.

*thunder rumbles*

It was announced at NYCC this past weekend!

Each issue takes the POV of someone affected by Vader — i.e. someone cast into his literal and figurative shadow. The first issue is a riff on Friday the 13th, with Vader as our slasher killer. The second is basically Willrow Hood: A Star Wars Story. Third issue is about a morgue attendant on the Death Star who becomes somewhat… obsessed by a series of unusual deaths, deaths that ahem, might have been caused by a mysterious choking sensation. Fourth issue shows the return of Aftermath‘s Acolytes of the Beyond. And finally, the fifth issue shows a conflict between Leia and a new Resistance pilot who has learned of Leia’s grim, Vader-flavored bloodline.

You can check out the first two covers, both by Greg Smallwood:

I mean, right? So cool.

Art on the first issue will be by Juanan Ramirez.

You can read more about it at StarWars.com, plus read about tons of other cool SW-related publishing announcements. (Including Alphabet Squadron!)

The day that was announced was also the day that You Might Be The Killer premiered on SyFy, and though I did not get a chance to watch it live, I did DVR it and watched it last night. I also followed along as it aired, checking out the hashtag and it was great fun to watch people… well, having great fun, especially on a day so deeply shitty and divisive as Saturday was. (Goddamn, this country cannot get its head out of its ass, can it?)

I think that’s it for news from me, so here you go, have a butterfly, just don’t eat it.

…

You ate it, didn’t you?

October 4, 2018 / 10 Comments

S.L. Huang: Let’s Also Write Our Joy

SL Huang wrote a book that turns math into a goddamn superpower, which is a thing I’d love to have because I have the math skills of a stump. I love too her journey for this book, as it is now released with Tor in a bee-yoo-tee-ful hardcover edition that you totally want. For the record, here’s what I said about this book: “This book lines up like a perfect, elegant equation — it’s fast, furious, and adds up to one of the coolest, most crackin’ reads this year.” So, here she is to talk about the supremely rad Zero Sum Game:

* * *

Coming off of a pretty damaging week in the news cycle, I was having a difficult time writing this post. I finally said to my partner, “what on earth should I write about?” and gave her a list of topics I was considering. She said, “You know what? Right now, I want to read about something fun.”

So I’m going to talk about math.

WAIT WAIT WAIT DON’T RUN AWAY!

I’m going to talk about math as something that gives me joy, and how much it matters that we put what gives us joy into our books. Because it does. It matters. It’s important.

People often do a double-take when I say my antiheroine’s violent superpower is math. Then they see I have a degree in it from MIT and they kind of nod and say, “ah!” It fits with the old chestnut of writing what you know, sure—but I’m not only writing what I know. I’m writing what I love.

Even before I chose it as my major, math has always been something that has delighted me on a personal, visceral level. Like burying your face in a cat’s fur—that’s what I want to do with math. I remember in college sometimes curling up with my favorite Apostol textbooks and falling to sleep on them, just because they were freakin’ comforting to have next to me.

One memorable time, I blurted, “Antiderivatives give me orgasms!” and someone wrote it up on our dorm whiteboard, where it stayed for about six months, in infamy. Later, my friend and I wanted to get T-shirts with our favorite topological space, because it’s a COOL SPACE and it makes me grin and gives me warm fuzzies and if you catch me at a con and ask me about it I will squeal and tell you JUST WHY IT’S SO COOL.

(Most people laugh and tell me I’m cute when I do this. A small percentage back slowly away.)

Just like any other pursuit, even for people who love it, math can be horribly hard—I’ve had struggles with it throughout my studies, often. But at the core has always been that delight.

So in interviews, when people ask me why I chose to write a superheroine whose power is being good at math, my answer is always the same: Because I love math. It gives me joy. It makes me want to jump up and click my heels together. And I want to share that joy with others—even people who personally hate math, I want them to be able to read and glory in an entertaining ride, just for the few hours they’re with me, and say afterwards, holy mackerel I hate math but that was SO FLAT-OUT FUN.

Right now especially, I feel like we need that. You need that, I need that, we all need that.

When it feels like the world is burning down around us—both metaphorically and literally, because holy hell climate change and I can’t even hold that in my HEAD—it’s so easy to feel helpless. Utterly powerless. And, as a writer—it’s so easy to feel like our writing is pointless, like why are we even crawling up another day and banging down fake words on a keyboard when so much else is all going wrong.

Sometimes we can answer that bleakness by writing our rage—which I fully, thoroughly encourage. But I also want to encourage everyone out there, everyone who writes, or reads, or reviews… goddammit, let’s also write our joy. Claim it, celebrate it, blow it into the book marketplace for everyone else to escape into also. Don’t let the abusers in power take that away from us, too. Dig down and find the good things that matter to you, that make you want to laugh out loud or dance and twirl or give someone bone-crushing hugs—and grab those things with both hands and claim them and celebrate them. Whether it’s bees or languages or feminism or your family, let’s take those moments of glee together and share them with each other. Let’s glory in all our vast diversity of geekery and passions, and remind each other of all the reasons, small and large, why our world is worth fighting for.

Find your joy. Write your joy. That, too, is resistance.

* * *

S. L. Huang has a math degree from MIT and is a weapons expert and professional stuntwoman who has worked in Hollywood on Battlestar Galactica and a number of other productions. Her novels include the Cas Russell series (formerly known as Russel’s Attic). Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Nature, Daily Science Fiction, and The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016.

S.L. Huang: Website | Twitter

Zero Sum Game: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N