Year: 2019 (page 5 of 16)

Defeated in a devastating war with China and ravaged by climate change, America is on the brink of a bloody civil war. Seizing power after a controversial election, the ruling regime has begun cracking down on dissidents fighting the nation’s slide toward dictatorship. For Donny Kimoe, chaos is good for business. He’s a lawyer who makes his living defending enemies of the state.

His newest client, young filmmaker Xelina Rocafuerte, witnessed the murder of an opposition leader and is now accused of terrorism. To save her from the only sentence worse than death, Donny has to extract justice from a system that has abandoned the rule of law. That means breaking the rules—and risking the same fate as his clients.

When Donny bungles Xelina’s initial hearing, he has only days to save the young woman from being transferred to a detention camp from which no one returns. His only chance of winning is to find the truth—a search that begins with the opposition leader’s death and leads to a dark conspiracy reaching the highest echelons of power.

Now, Donny isn’t just fighting for his client’s life—he’s battling for his own. But as the trial in the top secret court begins, Xelina’s friends set into motion a revolutionary response that could destroy the case. And when another case unexpectedly collides with Xelina’s, Donny uncovers even more devastating secrets, knowledge that will force him to choose between saving one client . . . or the future of the entire country.

Perry Mason is cool.

I never paid much attention to lawyer stories until I decided to write one—in my case, about the lawyers you call when you get arrested in dystopia. Courtroom scenes are so pervasive in our popular culture and newsfeeds that we learn their basic rules almost by osmosis, but I wanted to dig deeper. The mediascape of my youth was full of black and white lawyers in suits, from Raymond Burr’s darkly impish portrayal of Erle Stanley Gardner’s model defense attorney to Sam Driver, the two-fisted legal aid lawyer who was the real star of the Judge Parker comic strip. For research I read a lot of smarter lawyer stories, real and fictional—including transcripts of William Kunstler’s defense of the Chicago Seven, oral histories of the pro bono defenders of the Guantánamo detainees, the sharply observed Boston lawyers and preppy crooks of George Higgins’s Kennedy for the Defense novels, and the morally compromised defense lawyer who drives David Peace’s stylistically innovative 1983. But it was Perry Mason and his lookalikes who really nailed the archetype when given a fresh look—not noir, but noir-adjacent, the grey flannel tricksters who mediate the ambiguous territory between the moral complexity of real life and the false binaries embodied in the rules we are supposed to live by. These pinstriped anti-paladins usually protect their clients from the system by breaking those rules themselves—tricking people into giving them information that will change the case, and tricking the judges and prosecutors into letting them get that information in front of the jury. Revealing the secret code of lawyer stories: they aren’t really about getting justice for the innocent, but about protecting people from an unjust system, by helping people get away with it.

Science fiction is full of law, but devoid of lawyers.

Can you name a single lawyer from the vast oeuvre of science fiction? There are plenty of laws, from Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to the Prime Directive, but almost no lawyers. Trust me, I looked. And when they do show up, they feel like anachronisms, because they ape the advocates from our contemporary adversarial justice system, which is a very peculiar product of our own culture, and a very old one at that. As a consequence, the lawyers who do show up in sci-fi futures feel like Perry Mason in space. Consider Samuel T. Cogley, Esq., the scenery-chewing suit who defends Captain Kirk from charges of dereliction of duty in the Season One episode “Court Martial”—a character so out of place in the futuristic utopia of the Federation that he first appears literally buried in a pile of actual 20th century law books. The reason is that the creators never seem to ask the predicate question: what does justice look like in the society of the future?

Legal thrillers are never about the law.

Courtroom dramas are all about the legal system, but they take the law for granted. They focus entirely on the process of determining whether someone is innocent or guilty, and meting out punishment. Just the facts. The archetypal client is someone who has been wrongfully accused of a horrible crime, and the defense lawyer’s job is to prove it. What those stories never do is interrogate whether the law itself might be unfair—as is often the case in real life. By remixing a lawyer story with science fiction—the self-proclaimed “literature of ideas”—I found a way to remedy that. In Rule of Capture, the clients are guilty—it’s the laws that are unjust (and the punishment is straight out of Dante).  Which makes the lawyer’s job that much harder.

Dystopia is real.

I try to ground my science fictions in the material of the observed world. So when I set out to invent the imagined legal system of my dystopian mirror America, I went to the law library and researched it from real precedents. Martial law? I found a whole section of dusty tomes on how to administer it, whether in a recently conquered foreign territory or an American state that’s getting too rowdy (which usually meant workers acting up and asserting their rights to strike). Getting locked up without even being told the charges? That’s right there in the federal constitution, the power to suspend habeas corpus in times of insurrection or emergency. And we know how easy it is to declare an emergency in this country. Just ask the detainees awaiting their trial date before the Kafkaesque tribunals at Guantánamo—which I used as the principal basis of my dystopian courtroom.

Property really is theft.

The main client my lawyer protagonist Donny Kimoe represents in Rule of Capture is a young documentary filmmaker and ecological activist who witnesses a political assassination and is accused of terrorism to silence her. Because the normal justice system has been suspended a fair trial is impossible, Donny must come up with a counterintuitive strategy—by attacking the system from a totally different angle, but one that is supported by his client’s work. Theirs is a society ravaged by climate change, in which land (and the resources it contains) is the most precious commodity. Donny sets out to hack the operating system of power by chipping away at the property law regimes at its foundation. Researching those doctrines to help Donny make his case, I rediscovered the early Supreme Court cases that openly acknowledged most of the land in the USA had belonged to the sovereign tribal nations that had lived there for generations, and that the only “legal” justification for the transfer of title to the United States government was the law of the conqueror. When you learn that even the lawyers who invented American law admit that it is founded on theft, it puts the system of justice in a different like. It gave a deeper charge to the idea of writing a legal thriller that puts a mirror up to the dystopia we already have, and the bigger project of imagining what a more just future would really look like.

* * *

Christopher Brown is the Campbell and World Fantasy Award-nominated author of Tropic of Kansas. His new novel Rule of Capture is now available from Harper Voyager.

Christopher Brown: Website

Rule of Capture: Print | eBook | Audio

Cloud isn’t just a place to work. It’s a place to live. And when you’re here, you’ll never want to leave.

Paxton never thought he’d be working for Cloud, the giant tech company that’s eaten much of the American economy. Much less that he’d be moving into one of the company’s sprawling live-work facilities. 

But compared to what’s left outside, Cloud’s bland chainstore life of gleaming entertainment halls, open-plan offices, and vast warehouses…well, it doesn’t seem so bad. It’s more than anyone else is offering.  

Zinnia never thought she’d be infiltrating Cloud. But now she’s undercover, inside the walls, risking it all to ferret out the company’s darkest secrets. And Paxton, with his ordinary little hopes and fears? He just might make the perfect pawn. If she can bear to sacrifice him. 

As the truth about Cloud unfolds, Zinnia must gamble everything on a desperate scheme—one that risks both their lives, even as it forces Paxton to question everything about the world he’s so carefully assembled here. 

Together, they’ll learn just how far the company will go…to make the world a better place. 

Set in the confines of a corporate panopticon that’s at once brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real, The Warehouse is a near-future thriller about what happens when Big Brother meets Big Business–and who will pay the ultimate price. 

Dream a Little Bigger, Darling

You know that scene in Inception, where Tom Hardy tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt, “You musn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.” And then he dreams up a grenade launcher to blow the shit out of a bad guy? I think about that scene a lot, and not just because Tom Hardy is a snack. It’s because that has become my mantra.

My first five books, which followed amateur private detective Ash McKenna, was small—one POV hardboiled first-person… intimate, almost, in large part because it was me working out some of my own shit related to growing up.

Those books came out from a small press, and they sold pretty well for small press books, but I knew when I was done with the series, I wanted to level up. That’s the goal, right? Yes, I wanted a bigger publisher and, potentially, a bigger payday, but I also wanted to push myself and do something that scared me. I wanted to grow as a writer. Which meant looking for a bigger sandbox to play in.

It paid off—foreign sales in more than 20 countries and a film option with Ron Howard. Yes, that’s a flex. And all I had to do was write a book I wasn’t sure I was capable of even writing. Which brings me to my next point…

Trust Your Guts

Your guts are smart. They will often tell you what you should be doing. I like to pretend mine sound like Gilbert Gottfried, which brings a great deal of urgency to the proceedings. Unfortunately, I am not always smart enough to listen to them.

I’d been laying down notes for The Warehouse since 2012. My first novel, New Yorked, didn’t even come out until 2015! And then I wrote four more books. This thing has been percolating for a loooong time.

So when I finished out the Ash books, instead of writing The Warehouse, I wrote an entirely different novel! It was a shiny-thing idea, a horror novel with an insane meta narrative that, looking back, I’m not even sure makes sense? I did it because I was afraid to write The Warehouse. Despite what my guts were telling me—Warehouse is the book, do this one—I thought I wasn’t smart enough or a good enough writer.

Eventually I realized that if I didn’t write this book, someone else would. And hey, maybe I needed that 70,000-word detour. I was scared, but it’s always scary to start a new book, because you’re staring down the barrel of months of work that may or may not pay off.

But sometimes you need to use that fear to push you forward, rather than hold you back.

The Value of Bestsellers

Before I wrote The Warehouse, I spent about a year reading bestselling fiction. Like, a lot of it. Because it’s not usually what I skewed toward, and I felt like there was a gap in my writing education—that elusive skill of readability. The thing that keeps a reader hurtling through a story. I read a whole bunch of James Patterson—hell, I even wrote a novella with him—and let me tell you, I am out of runway with people who bash the dude.

Here’s the thing: if he’s not your jam, fine, don’t read him. This is America, where you are free to do anything! *checks earpiece* …you are free to do most things! *checks earpiece again* …um, well, shit.

Seriously though, Patterson clearly understood something about the writing process I did not, because he has sold more books than I had. Millions of them! (He also makes a ton of money for his publisher, which allows them to take risks on debut/midlist authors, and he donates a ton of money to bookstores and libraries, so maybe chill just a bit…)

Here’s the distinction, though: I didn’t want to write like him. I don’t want to write like any other writer. I want to write like me. But other books are an opportunity to learn. It’s why the advice I always give younger writers is to put down the pen for a bit and read like a lunatic.

Reading a lot of bestselling books was a chance to see the mechanics of how successful authors constructed their plots and build their worlds. And after a little while, you do see the Matrix code behind it. Not to call it formula. But, for example, short chapters with hooks at the end are popular for a reason—they give the reader a sense of accomplishment and compel them to read just one more…

Point/Counterpoint

I knew The Warehouse was going to have two narrators—Paxton, the company man, and Zinnia, a corporate spy who saw through the bullshit. And as I was chipping away at the story, it just was not clicking for me. It felt like there was something missing.

I needed a third voice. I needed someone to make the argument that the kinda-shitty world they were living in was actually good. So I created Gibson Wells, a messianic, Steve Jobs-like figure, and the owner of Cloud. And I had him announce to the world he is dying (which is like the first line, so it’s not a spoiler). And I had him write a series of blog posts, recapping his life, but also litigating the company’s history.

Which is exactly what the story needed. Paxton and Zinnia are caught up in the system, and even though Zinnia is a touch sharper, they’ve both been gaslighted into believing that sometimes you should consider yourself lucky just to have a job. They’re not freedom fighters. They’re not trying to destroy the machine. They’re cogs stuck inside. Which is fine—but it limits the view into this world.

Introducing Gibson allowed me to fuck with the reader a bit—because even though he’s a corporate overlord who is worth more than $300 billion and has single-handedly taken over the American retail economy, you can kinda sorta see where he’s coming from. Not all of his points are bad, and it helped underscore what I think ultimately made the book effective—calling out large corporations, sure, but also calling out us, for buying into and perpetuating that system. Without him, you don’t get that.

Draw a map!

The hardest part of the worldbuilding process was constructing a Cloud facility. Because I was literally creating a city from the ground up. How the hell do you even do that? I struggled a lot, and would sometimes sit down and work on the draft and realize… I don’t know where my characters are standing, or what they should be walking to, because all I could picture was this gigantic, formless facility… and that was it.

So I drew a map. I got a big piece of poster board and, first, I made a list. What’s supposed to be in a city. Hospital, transit, police, fire, Starbucks, etc. Then I roughed out the major components that made up the facility, starting with the main one, and then adding dorms—three sounded good!—and then the energy processing facility, which I made further away from the rest of the compound, for plot reasons…

I realized, wow, this place is so vast, I should have a regular transit system, but also, one that was dedicated to ambulances, so they could all get to the health care facility, which I called Care, which felt creepy.

Then I put that map up in my office. I even screenshotted it and made it the background on my laptop, so when I was working on the road and wanted to reference something, all I had to do was minimize a window. Turns out, I’m a visual thinker. And this was like having the Marauder’s Map. Once it was in front of me, I could see the paths the characters were tracing.

* * *

Rob Hart is the author of the Ash McKenna series and the short story collection Take-Out. He also co-wrote Scott Free with James Patterson. His latest novel, The Warehouse, sold in more than 20 countries and has been optioned for film by Ron Howard. He is a former journalist, political aide, and book publisher. He lives in Staten Island, NY, with his wife and daughter.

Rob Hart: Website, Twitter, Instagram

The Warehouse: Print | Kindle | Apple Books | B&N | Kobo

A gripping courtroom drama, perfect for fans of Anatomy of a Scandal, He Said/She Said and Apple Tree Yard.

The victim: A sixteen-year-old girl with facial deformities who accuses four classmates of something unthinkable.

The defendants: Four handsome teenage boys from hard-working immigrant families, all with corroborating stories.

Whose side will you take?

Former barrister Zara Kaleel, one of London’s brightest young legal minds, takes up Jodie Wolfe’s case; she believes her, even if those close to Jodie do not. Together they enter the most explosive criminal trial of the year in which ugly divisions within British society are exposed. As everything around Zara begins to unravel, she grows even more determined to get justice for Jodie. But at what cost?

* * *

Even I default to white

Take It Back includes several characters from a South-Asian background, a fact made clear by their traditional names and the context of the novel.

About two thirds into the book, there is a scene on a football field which initially included ‘Stephen, a black boy who was light on his feet’. A draft or two later, I realised that I hadn’t described any of the Caucasion players as ‘white’ – so why single out Stephen?

This gave rise to a dilemma: do I comb through the novel and clumsily add ‘white’ to every Caucasion character, or do I take out the ‘black’ attached to Stephen? I opted for the latter – but does that now mean there are no black characters in my book, or just that they’re not described as such?

I’m a woman of colour from a working-class background so you would think I’d have this worked out by now, but even I default to white.

Experts are incredibly generous

I don’t have a legal background so I knew that writing a courtroom drama would involve some intense research. I started (rather misguidedly) on Reddit and posted a question on the ‘LegalAdviceUK’ subreddit asking if anyone knew a barrister who might consult on the novel.

I received a dozen snide comments (“you clearly have no idea how much barristers charge”) and I soon deleted the post. I approached some lawyers separately (via Googling) and was stunned by their generosity. One barrister invited me to chambers and a solicitor read the whole novel to root out faux pas. Between them, they answered a hundred of my questions. Five other lawyers gave me specialist advice, as well as two sexual assault counsellors and an ex-police officer. Experts can be incredibly generous if you ask nicely and respect their time.

Freedom.to is a lifesaver

Freedom is a productivity app that has been a complete lifesaver for me. In the age of social media, distractions are relentless; always at the fringe of the page, calling you away. I use Freedom to block out all social media while I write. I’ve created custom blocklists and can set the length of individual sessions.

The app isn’t free, but if you have trouble staying off Twitter, it’s completely worth the price tag. (They’re not paying me to say this!)

No one owes you anything

Here’s the thing: no one owes you anything. You are not owed an agent. You are not owed a book deal. You are not owed a big advance. And you are not owed your partner’s time.

Your book is your dream so don’t expect others to prioritise it.

My boyfriend and I have a deal whereby he does all the cooking and I do all the cleaning. In the darkest depths of deadline, I found myself feeling tetchy that he wasn’t offering to do the dishes after cooking a meal. But here’s the thing: writing a book is my dream, not his and after he’s spent the day working at our co-owned business, doing a grocery shop, getting our car fixed and cooking a meal, the least I can do is the damn dishes. Writing a book is my dream and I’m not owed anything.

I do crave validation

I recently listened to a podcast in which a popular influencer and artist spent a long time extolling the democratising powers of social media and the fact that we can all become publishers and bypass the gatekeepers.

Later in the podcast, he spoke about his desire to be taken seriously as an artist and explained that he had published a book with Penguin Random House. “The biggest publisher in the world!” he exclaimed – twice.

It was an interesting illustration of how artists crave external validation even when they say they don’t. I thought I’d be happy in doing good work, but if I’m to speak honestly, I crave validation too. Getting a book deal with HarperCollins and reading positive feedback feels good, and while it’s dangerous to peg your happiness to external forces, I’ve learned that I’m not immune.

Sign up to Kia’s newsletter to read the first chapter of Take It Back now.

Kia Abdullah: Website | Twitter

Take It Back: Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Goodreads

Today, a guest post from friend, author, editor, and general ne’er-do-well gadfly, Alex Segura, who wants to talk to you about how your brain is cooking? Which I think is a drug metaphor from the 1980s? Whatever. Point is, Alex isn’t cooking his books with drugs, he’s cooking his books with cool influences, so here he is to talk about that. Don’t forget to check out Miami Midnight, out today!

Let’s talk about the ingredients that bury themselves in your brain to cook your book, okay?

As we all know, books are a lot of work. It is HARD to write a novel. Literal months, maybe more, spent clacking away at your keyboard trying to make this amorphous pile of words into something resembling a story. Then reading and tweaking and rewriting to make that story decent. Then good. Then hopefully the best thing you can write.

But the work itself isn’t all that goes into making a book, y’all. As writers, we’re always absorbing things – whether intentionally or not. I wanted to clue you in a bit on my own process – which I call “obsessive research.” Basically, I end up writing about things that I’m obsessing over…genres, themes, or topics that I’m gobbling up because I can’t get enough of it. Whether it’s cults, pre-Castro Cuba, serial killers – they all end up in my novels to varying degrees. The same thing happened with Miami Midnight, my new novel (out today!). The added wrinkle, though, was that this would be my last Pete Fernandez Miami Mystery – I not only had to write a new adventure for my tarnished knight PI, but I had to close out everything that had come before. It was daunting, and kind or whacked out my usual process.

Now, I always knew Pete’s story had an ending. I just didn’t know when. I still don’t know, but this is the closest thing to an ending-ending I’ve ever written. But getting to typing “The End” was hard – harder than anything I’d done before as a writer.

This book almost didn’t happen, honestly. When I finished up work on the previous novel in the series, Blackout, I figured there’d be one more. I mean, I couldn’t leave Pete dead . . . could I? Maybe, I thought. I go through this to some degree with every book—is this the one where I finally kill the guy? But this time it felt a bit different, because there wasn’t anything to immediately replace that thought. There was no new obsession pulling me back into Pete-mode.

And, as the days became weeks and the weeks became months, my mind started to seriously flirt with the idea. Maybe this was it. Maybe it was the ending Pete deserved? Most writers, especially those that write series, can relate to this nihilistic feeling. That desire to just chuck the whole thing and move on. It usually fades, replaced by an idea for another book.

I mean, there were certainly desires. Things I wanted to say. Topics I wanted to hit. When preparing to write a novel, I usually immerse myself in research. I call it research, which sounds very formal and professional, but, as I noted, it’s really just me reading whatever I’m obsessing over at a given moment. Obsessions and passions make for good art, I’ve found. In the wake of Blackout, I found myself reading a lot about jazz, the mob, Cuba, and—most importantly—about loss.

So, the pieces were floating around. I knew I wanted Pete to investigate the murder of a fallen jazz musician. I knew I wanted it to deal with Pete’s relationship with his dead father, as all the books do to varying degrees, and I knew I wanted it to leave Pete somewhere, well, conclusive.

And there was the speed bump. This was the end. Or “the end for now.” I’d seen Pete through so much—death, relapse, recovery, romance, careers, exploding houses, and more—that I knew it was time to take a break, if not let him ride off toward Miami Beach for good. I’d never envisioned Pete as an evergreen type. There are many authors who do those kind of characters well, but I’m not one of them. I want each book to serve as a step in my protagonist’s evolution, and I want them to feel different by the end of the book. To have experienced something.

From Silent City through Miami Midnight, I’ve tried my best to have the stories work on two levels—one being the big picture plot, the other more personal. What happens to Pete? Often, the two threads will cross. Ideally, they blend into one. I didn’t have that yet. I didn’t even have a title. I needed the heart of the story. The reason it was a Pete Fernandez Mystery, and not just something that happened to Pete. And it had to count, because it was going to be the last Pete book for a while.

That’s where my head was at around March of last year, when I was a guest at the excellent Virginia Festival of the Book. If you’re ever in the area, make a point of visiting. It’s a spectacular event and heaven for readers (and authors). I was sitting in a giant ballroom, after one of those “speed dating”-style events where you meet a number of readers and pitch your books. These things can either be a lot of fun or painfully awkward, but I remember this one being pretty pleasant, and by the end of it, I got to sit back and listen to Attica Locke speak—something I’d been looking forward to.

I’m a big fan of Attica’s work, and a big fan of her as a person—she’s genuine and thoughtful and an amazing writer. I wish I could sum up what she said, because it was a lovely speech—but my mind went into overdrive when she said a few words. She was talking about the protagonist of her latest novel, the superb Bluebird, Bluebird, and his dynamic with his mother. An alcoholic.

His mother. My mind flipped over to my own work. It was like I’d found a note I’d left for myself years before.

See, when I wrote the first Pete novel, Silent City, I had no idea it’d be a series. I had no idea it’d be published, if we’re being honest. But by the end of it, I hoped I’d at least find the time to write one more. There’s a lot of stuff about Pete’s past in that first book—his dad, his ex, his job—but I purposely danced around any mention of his mom. My gut told me there was a story there. My brain told me I wasn’t ready to tell it. Not yet.

Over time, as the series progressed, I’d hint at Pete’s mother—she’s mentioned briefly in Dangerous Ends, the third novel in the series, for example, but never given a name. As far as Pete knew, his mother had died in childbirth. End of story.

But hearing Attica talk about her own character’s alcoholic mother brought it home to me. Of course Pete’s mom didn’t die in childbirth. She was murdered. And she was an alcoholic—just like him.

That was it. The heart of the book. Everything else, at least in terms of theme and big beats, seemed to appear. As I sped out of that ballroom, my brain buzzing and fingers aching to type, I even got a title, two words that I felt perfectly captured the noir feeling I wanted this book to evoke: Miami Midnight.

What case could be more important to Pete than the murder of his mother?

For some, addiction springs out of the ether—you just get hooked and it goes bad. For many, it’s genetic, a family curse. Your parents drink, so you drink. I figured Pete was part of the latter group. The idea of having him solve the murder of his own, long-lost mother, and—on the way—realize she’d been in the same predicament he’d barely survived proved too good to ignore. So we were off.

So the final piece fell into place – but I’d thankfully been gathering the ingredients to make the meal long before I heard Attica speak. Now, I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve as a person and as a writer. I don’t hide my influences and I am happy to scream from the mountaintops when I like a book or writer. Especially when I like a book and it helps me write my own. When I told Attica the story of her speech and how it influenced me, she said that she felt “all books are in conversation with each other.” I think that’s very beautifully said, and I tend to agree. So, as promised, here are some of the books I was talking to before and during the writing of Miami Midnight, which I hope you’ll consider picking up today.

T.J. English’s cinematic and crisp The Corporation was invaluable to me, as it explored—deeply—Miami’s crime-riddled 1980s, specifically the bolita craze spearheaded by Juan Miguel Battle. I was amazed I hadn’t known his story until reading English’s book, and I became fixated on the idea of an alternate world where Battle lived on into the present day, trying desperately to stay relevant while competing gangs nipped at his heels.

Dead Girls, a masterful essay collection by Alice Bolin, was the perfect prelude to writing about, arguably, the most formative person in Pete’s life. So much of crime fiction is rife with young, virginal, beautiful women beaten and brutalized (often sexually) in the hopes of furthering a given book’s plot, to showcase just how grim and gritty an author’s work can be. I won’t say I wasn’t mindful of this before, but Bolin’s book was the jolt I needed to be extra mindful of it, and to make sure that if this book was going to hinge on the murder of a woman, I’d better damn well bring the readers in and let them know this woman as a fully-formed person, not a statistic. It’d be presumptuous to say I was trying to invert this trope—which has infected TV, movies and any kind of “crime”-themed entertainment—but I sure as hell wanted to sidestep it and be true to the story I wanted to tell. The story of Pete and his mother sending smoke signals to each other through time. To do that, I needed to make people care, instead of grimace from shock or disgust. Breezy and bursting with a modern, fresh sensibility, Dead Girls helped me figure out how I wanted to flip that script.

I spent a lot of time reading memoirs, usually those that involved the author’s searching for connection with a lost parent or friend. I wanted to better understand the emptiness someone feels with such a massive, gutting loss, but I also just found the books compelling and hard to put down. Leah Carroll’s Down City rests atop this list, and does a great job of recounting her youth and her parents’ own misadventures and tragedies. It’s honest, direct and immediate. I felt an instant connection to her from reading the book and I’m lucky to call her a friend. I read it long before I even knew where I wanted to take Miami Midnight, but once I did, I found myself thinking about it often. A few other notable memoirs that were important to me during this period: Piper Weiss’s haunting and jarring You All Grow Up and Leave Me; Carolyn Murnick’s The Hot One; Leslie Jamison’s addiction memoir The Recovering; plus rereads of Domenica Ruta’s underrated With or Without You; Joan Didion’s unforgettable Miami; and James Ellroy’s disturbing, manic, and electric My Dark Places.

Once you read the book, you’ll notice Miami Midnight spends a lot of time in the worlds of jazz and the mob. I’ve always had an obsession with the Mafia, and the book I often go back to is Selwyn Raab’s The Five Families, which tracks the mob’s rise, fall, and inevitable resurgence. I read it during the writing of the previous Pete novel, Blackout, and into the planning stages of this book, so its influence can be felt over the two novels. It’s as comprehensive a tome as you could want, and spotlights all of the Mafia’s key players up until the end of the last century. Equally helpful was Misha Glenny’s exhaustive look at the global criminal underworld in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, McMafia. Now more than a decade old, the book still holds some vital information on how the global underworld capitalized on the world getting a bit smaller.

The jazz thread came more organically—a by-product of my own musical tastes changing. By immersing myself in the music, though, I began to meet these really interesting characters, and a few stood out—pianists Bill Evans and Lennie Tristano, in particular. Evans was a superlative talent felled by his addictions while Tristano faded into obscurity and lived the latter part of his career as a hermit of sorts. I merged elements of both men to create the idea of Javi Mujica, and I wouldn’t have gotten there without the work of Ted Gioia, whose The History of Jazz managed to smartly cover decades of information while still interjecting thoughtful analysis and stylistic insight. It’s a long book, but well worth it. Gioia’s How to Listen to Jazz also proved essential, adding a deeper layer to the musical experience and giving me a stronger sense of how these musical pieces fit together to create the myriad forms of jazz. Also worth noting: David Hajdu’s magnificent Billy Strayhorn biography, Lush Life; Jazz by the incomparable Gary Giddins; and pretty much anything by Nat Hentoff—Jazz Is in particular.

The most important crime fiction influences on Miami Midnight were Philip Kerr’s much-beloved Bernie Gunther novels—of which I devoured the first three, often known as “The Berlin Trilogy.” Gunther is probably the most direct successor to Marlowe since Lew Archer, and, combined with Kerr’s deft scene-setting and crackling characters, make for mesmerizing works of crime fiction. I regret never getting the chance to shake Kerr’s hand to thank him for his amazing work.

The Gunther books, along with the aforementioned Bluebird, Bluebird, proved important guides on the journey to crafting Miami Midnight, but they’re not alone. I wanted Pete’s final (for now, for now) adventure to be coated in a sense of dread—a looming doom, a growling noir. To accomplish that, I found myself pulled toward books like Walter Mosley’s first Easy Rawlins novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, which I’d read years ago but which seemed to land more clearly this time around. A classic in every sense of the word, and the kind of book all P.I. writers dream of writing.

And, well – there you have it. Not only the books and stuff that inspired my novel, but the moment that allowed those elements to really simmer together and help me make a (hopefully) compelling read. It all goes back to the basic idea – writers have to read. A lot. Keep your mind open. Listen to people talking. Absorb as much as you can. Be ready for the inspiration, because it only knocks once.

* * *

Alex Segura is the author of the acclaimed Pete Fernandez Miami Mystery series, which has been twice-nominated for the Anthony Award. The latest – and last – in the series, Miami Midnight, is out today. You can find him at www.alexsegura.com, or on Twitter @alex_segura.

There is an old story that says, there is a fight going on inside every writer. A battle between two wolves. Or maybe they’re foxes? Whatever. One is named Steve, and Steve is the manifestation of fear, and the other is named Jerry, and Jerry is love and light, and Steve and Jerry are fighting over a

*checks ink-smudged notes, squints*

a bag of Hot Cheetos? Wait that can’t be right.

Never mind that story.

(Sidenote, before anyone jumps in and says something about this being a Cherokee story and I’m a jerk for mocking it, please be advised, it ain’t. Billy Graham made it up.)

So. I meet a lot of writers. I met them on book tour. I meet them at conferences and conventions. I meet them in dank basements where we trade story ideas trapped in jars like little fireflies. I MEET THEM IN DREAMS

And when I meet the writers, I often recognize something instantaneously, and that thing that I recognize is fear. Now, I don’t mean a kind of general fear; anybody with two molecules of common sense waltzing around their brain can look at the news and recognize this is a peculiarly fucked up era, and so fear about *gestures broadly* all of that is fine and sensible and trust me when I say I get it, and my writing is fueled in part by that. Putting your anxieties on the page where they can be managed and fought like summoned demons is *chef’s kiss.*

Rather, I’m speaking about a specific kind of fear, which is, fear as the first step of writing. Fear about market. Fear about audience. Fear about how no one will read your stuff. Fear about how you’re never going to be as good as [insert other author name here]. Fear about voice, fear about genre, fear about ideas. You set out on the journey of being a writer and already you have a choice about what direction you choose, right? You get this instinctual pull, as if all your intestinal flora are trying to move you in concert toward something weird, something wonderful, something uniquely your own, but — that way lies grave uncertainty. The other direction, well, that’s more sensible, isn’t it? Other writers have trod those paths. What’s popular right now is [insert trend here, like “YA medical horror featuring canine protagonists” or “grimdark geriatric erotic fantasties”]. Your voice surely isn’t as good as other voices.

So, your foot wavers. And instead of pointing yourself in the unknown direction, into the dark forest, into the layers of fog — you set forth onto the well-lit, well-marked path. The worn path. The trod path. And it’s fear that put you there. It’s fear that’s walking you forward.

Now, a caveat here that nothing I say here is particularly true, or universal — you can, of course, choose the well-trod path as a matter of fuck yeah I wanna do that, but the concern here is a lot of authors take that path less as a true choice and more as a desire for safety.

But what I want you to know is, that way isn’t safe.

It seems safe.

But it is not.

Listen, a writing career is stupid as fuck. I don’t mean choosing to be a writer is stupid — I do mean that the career itself is a hot cup of batshit. It doesn’t make a lick of goddamn sense. It is Non-Euclidian in its proportions: a blueprint made of incomprehensible angles and imaginary numbers. A writing career is a procedurally-generated labyrinth, and trying to walk it with a pre-conceived map in hand is foolishness on par with letting a toddler drive a car on the Autobahn. It’s like using cheat codes for the wrong game. You start furiously tapping UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT and your little 8-Bit avatar leaps into a pit of acid and dies.

There are writers, other writers, many writers.

And there is the writer that you are.

We grow deeply concerned as storytellers that the story we’re telling isn’t original, and truly, it isn’t. No story is truly original, but there are two places where originality shines through: the first is the arrangement of unoriginal elements. It’s like how in a song, all the notes are the notes. Or how in a painting, the colors are colors. You can’t make up new notes. You can’t make up new colors. But what you do with those sounds and those hues is where the art is made, and so too it is with story.

The second original thing has to do with the first.

The second truly original thing about any story is the teller of that story.

(Psst. That’s you.)

The problem is, if you choose to ignore the latter — and, say, try to follow the writing path of other writers, or of the market, or some other fear-based trajectory — you will also miss the former. Because that unique arrangement of elements comes from who you you are. It comes from the things you love, the ideas you have, the mad stuff that comprises your mind and your heart. You’re a product of an unholy host of elements: your parents, your friends, your upbringing, your genetics, your experiences, the books you’ve read, the stories you’ve loved and also the stories you’ve hated. You are a fingerprint. That curious combination cannot be replicated.

What that means is:

Use it.

When the time comes to write something, don’t move forward with fear in your step. Move forward with love. With eagerness and excitement. Love the story you’re telling, tell the story that only you can tell. Rest in peace and power, Toni Morrison, who said: “If there’s a book you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” This career is already fraught. It’s already weird and uncertain. The safe path is a lie — and a boring one, at that. The books that work, the books that matter, are the ones that didn’t try to do what was done before. They were a unique formulation from the author. They came from a place of excitement and interest, from love and ideas. They put aside fear and safety and ran into the dark.

That is what you, too, must do.

You must run into the dark, chasing what you love.

Tell that story. That’s the one we all want to read.

* * *

WANDERERS: A Novel, out now.

A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. An astonishing tapestry of humanity that Harlan Coben calls “a suspenseful, twisty, satisfying, surprising, thought-provoking epic.”

A sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America. The real danger may not be the epidemic, but the fear of it. With society collapsing—and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers and the shepherds who guide them depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

Print: Indiebound | Let’s Play Books (signed) | The Signed Page | B&N | BAM | Amazon

eBook: Amazon | Apple Books | B&N | Kobo | Google Play | BAM

Audio: Audible | Libro.FM

A huge alien object has entered the solar system and is now poised above the Earth. It has made no attempt to communicate.

Out of time and options, NASA turns to its last living astronaut – Commander Sally Jansen, who must lead a team of raw recruits on a mission to make First Contact. 

But as the object reveals its secrets, Jansen and her crew find themselves in a desperate struggle for survival – against the cold vacuum of space, and something far, far worse . . . 

The view of Earth from space is better than cable.

“Dave should talk to some female astronauts,” the publicist said, in a sales meeting. This was well after I’d started writing the book, long after I thought I was done with research. I had a long list of things that seemed more pressing, like finding the third act or remembering to connect on an emotional level with my wife every evening as she shoved my dinner under the locked and bolted door of my office. Interviewing actual astronauts sounded like homework. But I did it. Grumbling and cursing a lot, but I did it.

Once I was done with the interviews, I took a moment. I nodded thoughtfully to myself, cracked open another diet soda, and waited for my hands to stop shaking. Because I knew what having access to all this new information meant. It meant I was going to have to rewrite the book, almost from page one. Originally it had been packed with heavily-researched data, lots of acronyms and numbers, details about how much thrust you can get out of a Delta-IV rocket engine and what partial percentage of oxygen will make you start to hallucinate. What I got from the astronauts was something different.

I got what it meant to be human in space. To actually live there. It made the book immeasurably better. I learned things like…

A bunless hot dog might be the best thing you ever eat.

Everybody gets space sickness, to a greater or lesser extent. Your first couple of days in space are going to be miserable no matter how tough or experienced an astronaut you might be. One of the astronauts I spoke with told me about the glorious moment, three days into her mission, when she realized that she could hold down solid food again. She ate a hot dog and realized she was going to be okay. She could get back to work. Which was good, because—

They keep astronauts so busy they’re barely aware of being in space.

A lot of the questions I asked turned out to be useless, because I kept getting the same answer. “I don’t really remember, there was so much going on…” Whether I was asking about what re-entry was like, or the hours sitting on the launch pad waiting for liftoff, for instance. Such events, though they must rank as among the most memorable a human being can experience, were lost in the general business of astronaut life. NASA keeps its astronauts on a ridiculous schedule. Almost every moment of their day is spent running through safety checklists, exercising to prevent bone loss, doing media events or just the common chores required to keep people alive inside a trailer in space. There’s almost no downtime at all, very little time to sit staring out the windows (which was, hands down, the favorite leisure time activity of every astronaut I spoke to).

A lot of the checklists and rundowns and equipment inventories sounded like busywork. Like maybe NASA was just inventing things for them to do so that the taxpayers would feel like they were getting their money’s worth. The astronauts I spoke to weren’t so sure. For one thing, space is pretty deadly—there’s a whole lot of different ways to die up there, and staying alive often means double- and triple-checking every blinking light and green indicator panel. The other reason to keep the astronauts so busy was to keep them from thinking too much. Those long hours on the launch pad are a perfect time to meditate on the fact that you’re sitting on top of a ballistic missile full of highly explosive fuel. Working out endlessly on the exercise treadmill is a good way to keep your mind off the fact that you’re about an inch of metal away from the cold vacuum of space. The constant work is also good for keeping people from getting on each others’ nerves as much, which is super important because—

Everyone in space is ugly and ready for a fight.

Human bodies were never meant to exist in weightless conditions. All the fluid being pumped around your body right now needs gravity to get it to the right place. Think about hanging upside down from a jungle gym, the blood rushing to your head. How long do you think you could handle living like that? How many days in a row?

In microgravity, all of your internal organs climb up into your chest cavity, because the mass of the Earth isn’t holding them down anymore. This makes it a little hard to breathe. Farts collect inside your intestine until the pressure suddenly forces them out when you least want them to. Fluid builds up in places it shouldn’t, and there’s no good way to pump it back out of your tissues. The most dramatic—and obvious—way this effects you is that your face gets super puffy, distorting your features. And that’s when you learn just how much of living with other people is processing their facial expressions. Since everyone in space looks like they have the mumps, people start to get irritable. Innocent comments get misconstrued, and tempers flare. I spoke with one astronaut who joked that in the future one big career option is going to be “space lawyer”. Because of all the fistfights that are sure to break out during long missions to Mars. Of course, bouncing off other people all the time and getting in their way is inevitable given the close quarters. It might be better than the alternative, though…

You definitely don’t want to be alone up there.

Alone time is something I treasure. As much as I love the people in my life, if I can’t get a little solitude every day, I get irascible. Downright cranky. Speaking to the astronauts about life in space, my immediate thought was that it would be tough when you couldn’t get away from your crewmates, even just to take a minute to yourself.

Oh, no, they told me. Oh, no, you don’t want to be alone. Now, I happened to be writing a novel that was part science fiction and part horror. The horror writer half of me perked up his ears at the sound of that.

Space is noisy, or rather spaceships and space stations are noisy, because there’s always a fan blowing somewhere and a computer beeping for no good reason. There’s always something moving, and maybe as elements of your ship heat or cool they creak and ping. But those are noises you can get used to. Those are noises you can tune out. And that’s when the real silence, the silence of the void, hits you. That’s when you curl up in your sleepsac and wonder just how far you are from home, and what your chances would be if something went wrong (not very good). Inside a space suit it’s much, much worse. The only thing you can hear is your own breathing. And then you stop hearing that, and you hear your heart beating, instead. You fight to keep it from beating too fast…

Having other people around you is crucial. Human beings need social interaction just as much as they need gravity and oxygen. In my research I found a great story about that. Back in the ‘80s, the Soviets launch a space station called Mir where two cosmonauts would spend up to five hundred days in space, simulating how long it would take to get to Mars and back. Two people living for more than a year in a space the size of, say, three minivans duct-taped together. You might think these two cosmonauts would get sick of each other in a matter of days. Instead, they made a pact with each other. If you were working in one of the minivans while your partner was in one of the other ones, you had to keep at least one foot visible in the junction between modules. No matter how much stretching and contorting it took, some piece of a human body had to be there for the other person to see, every second of the day. The cosmonauts laughed when they talked about what happened when the system broke down, and, just for a minute or so, they were all alone. The brain is a fantastic machine, very good at imagining all kinds of scenarios. It has no problem imaging what it would be like to suddenly be all alone in a very quiet, very fragile tin can, a hundred miles up. The cosmonauts laughed about the things they imagined, the little terror fantasies their minds dredged up. They laughed about these things… once they were back safely home on solid ground.

For all that, space is still super cool.

Well, it’s hard to write a science fiction novel if you don’t feel that way. But yeah, the research I did for The Last Astronaut, while it often terrified me, still made me want to be out there just so bad. To get to see other worlds, to feel what it’s like to be without gravity, even for a moment. And at the end of the day to look back and see what I’m missing, to get what they call the “Longview” effect. Astronauts talk about it in hushed, reverent tones. The sense you get, looking down on Earth from above, just how precious it is. How fragile, and how beautiful.

I wrote a book about horror and screaming panic out in space, a story of death and fear up there, but even in the midst of the scariest bits I knew one thing. Offered a chance to go up there, even for just a day, for an hour—I would give anything to make it happen.

* * *

David Wellington is the author of twenty-one novels, from his first, the zombie tale Monster Island, to this year’s The Last Astronaut. He got his start in 2003 serializing his work online and has made a living at writing ever since. He’s also worked in comic books and video games. He lives and works in New York City.

David Wellington: Website | Twitter

The Last Astronaut: Print | eBook