Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
Psst. Hey, did you want to check out Wanderers or The Book of Accidents? You did? WELL THEN HOT SACK OF HOLY SHIT, they are both on sale for your chosen electromagnetic book-ogler. (Erm, in e-book format, I mean.)
Wanderers? $1.99.
Book of Accidents? $4.99.
This is true at a variety of e-book marketplaces —
Wanderers: Bookshop.org | Kobo | Apple | B&N | Amazon
The Book of Accidents: Bookshop.org | Kobo | Apple | B&N | Amazon
Soooo, umm, have it? Tell your friends. Okay bye.
This is going to expose me as a weird dork*, but when I was a kid I’d just sit and read the fucking TV Guide like it was a novel. I read books, of course — actual novels. But I also read the TV Guide. Like, cover to cover. Cheers and Jeers? C’mon. I’d use it to plan out my Saturday cartoon watching, and also, my post-school cartoon watching, and also my late night Friday watching. (Friday Night Videos, baby.) When it added cable schedules to the book I’d read those, fascinated by a world of truly alien programming (we didn’t get cable on our dinky backroad until I was in my teens). Oh, and holy fucking shit, when the TV Guide would announce the upcoming TV shows for next season, I’d basically lock myself in my room, poring over it. My parents probably thought I was up there with a MAD Magazine or a stolen lingerie catalog. I mean, I was probably doing that, too.
I dunno what it was. Something-something TV was rotting my brain? Maybe it provided me with some comfort in a turbulent time — I lived in a pretty turbulent house, and certainly growing up just in general sucks a lot of the time, so locking down my TV watching schedule for the coming week had the power of a lifejacket in rough seas. It didn’t calm the waves, but it made sure I didn’t sink beneath them.
Or, again, maybe I was just a weird dork.**
As I noted in the post here from the other day (“A Small But Vital Thing, Taken“), it can be hard to clear your mind — and additionally, it can be tough to focus. There’s just a lot going on. A lot a lot. There exists this sort of endless noise going on in the background of American life — and the noise as of the last couple months has gone from a low white noise thrum to a screaming chatter of pony-sized cicadas. Whole skies full of them.
But, here’s a thing —
I read a fucking magazine.
Like, a physical magazine. A magazine that exists in corporeal reality. With pages! And photos! And words! I know! I know.
And here, you’re correctly like, “What? So what? What the fuck?” And you might add, “People read magazines. Like my Grampy Joe. He loves his biannual copy of The Journal of Vintage Brass Hose Nozzles, and sometimes he takes his copy of Corn-Huskin’ Hotties into the cellar for a long while.”
But I, I don’t read magazines — not in a long time, not since the internet came along and was like, HERE IS ALL THE CONTENT THAT EXISTS, FRESHLY SQUEEZED RIGHT IN YOUR EYES EVERY TIME YOU OPEN THEM. Why kill a tree to read a magazine? All that shit is right here, right now, always.
And then, some months ago, I subscribed to a new newspaper. A physically-printed, three-dimensional newspaper.
I subscribed to The Onion.
(Note: you can do this too.)
That monthly copy of The Onion serves a keen purpose: it lives around the house, and people pass by it. They pick it up, read some bits, have a good snort-laugh, maybe ask one another, “Did you see this?” and then everyone’s day is just a little more mirth-filled than it had been five minutes before.
But at some point, I also subscribed to Wired, because honestly, they’re doing great work for the most part in this current era. It was for the digital subscription — but it also came with an actual mailed, printed copy. I didn’t really want it but it was a part of the deal, so I shrugged and said, “Sure, send me your ANCIENT RAG. Why not FAX it to me, or duct-tape it to a FUCKING PIGEON, or maybe I can swing by your office on my VELOCIPEDE.”
The first copy arrived. (No pigeon. Nary a pterosaur.)
Then, the other day, that copy found its way to the dining room table.
I sat, ate breakfast, and before cleaning up?
I opened the magazine. I did this more as a curiosity — like, “Oh, I wonder what magazines these days are up to.” Would there be a Drakkar Noir cologne sample tucked in there? Were the printed pages digital now? Would the print magazine be infected with artificial intelligence somehow??
I opened it at the beginning.
And then I started to read the magazine.
I started to read the magazine cover to cover.
I didn’t just flip through it. I read it. The magazine. The whole magazine! (Now, I did not do this in one sitting, but rather, two. I had to get up because apparently I sometimes have to do things? Which is bullshit! I’ve complained to life’s manager, but so far, my complaints have gone unregarded.)
And lemme tell you — it was great.
Further, it made me remember that I didn’t just used to read TV Guide, or MAD Magazine. I read Cracked. And Cemetery Dance. And Omni. And Fortean Times. And National Geographic. And PC Gamer.
Reading a magazine felt clarifying and calm. I didn’t look at my phone once. And nothing in the magazine interrupted me, demanding attention — no email, no texts, no pop-ups. Hell, my phone doesn’t even need to interrupt me to demand my attention. I have every notification on social media turned off, off, off, and yet I’m still keenly aware of those apps in the background. Hiding behind the curtain like little chocolates I occasionally must sample. (And because it’s social media in a Currently Bad Era, it means at least half of the chocolates I sample are filled with grub guts and skin tags.) And when reading an article in a print magazine, there’s no demand I pay money to subscribe because I already did that. I don’t need to look up a password. I don’t need to constantly find where I was in the article because somehow the procedurally-generated ads keep repopulating and shouldering the text up and then down and then up again, sometimes even just covering up whole chunks of text in their entirety. It was great. It felt like being at a lake and skipping stones. A weirdly pure, unbothered series of moments.
Now, I recognize this is not revolutionary. It’s stupid. I’m reading a magazine. It’s not therapy. It feels like detoxing but it’s not detoxing. This isn’t a radical, heroic move, it’s just me being an old man at the table reading a magazine. This is advice as obvious as, “Wow, I drank water and did some stretching and now I feel better.” But it felt radical. It felt like for a moment I was reclaiming something — something from my past, sure, but also something from my present: my attention span. Plus, hey, sometimes I need to be reminded to drink water and stretch.
So, maybe, just maybe, get a magazine subscription.
A print one.
(And Wired ain’t a bad place to start, but YMMV.)
Or you know you could read books like the ones I wrote ahem ahem ahem.*
* you already knew this, I already knew this, my family knows this, it is known
** still am, really sorry
*** I have to dance for my dinner I am so sorry but seriously if I don’t sell ten copies of Staircase in the Woods before midnight tonight my writing shed will explode with me in it, this is true and not a scam probably
When I’m writing, one of the most crucial components of that process is my downtime. And I’m talking down downtime, not just like, oh I’m gonna fuck off and do something else for a while — I mean the times where I have nothing really to do, nothing to think about, and that’s when the weird hermit crab that is my brain emerges from its shell and starts to wander around its skull-shaped terrarium, finally comfortable. I’m talking about when I’m in the shower. Or mowing the lawn. Or just taking a walk. I get to perform a relatively thoughtless action, which allows my actual thoughts to focus on whatever story I am writing during that period.
So, if I’m working on a novel, I go for a walk, and during that walk, my brain emerges, and uses its various claws and pseudopods and probing tendrils to turn my current story over and over and over again. It pokes, it prods, it pulls it apart and smashes it back together again. I think about characters. I imagine scenarios. I play endless what if what if what if games. I find plotholes and try to figure out how to spackle them shut. It’s very useful time.
It is, in fact, essential time.
And the current news era has stolen this from me.
The CURRENT NEWS is like toxic groundwater — it fills all the low places. The moment my brain stops moving for a second, in seeps all the septic shit going on here in the country and around the world. I’m usually good at turning this off, at building seawalls, or at the very least finding a way to absorb that stuff — and my feelings about it all — into the work.
But it ain’t working.
The seawalls have failed.
So, instead of getting to chew on my story problems, I’m instead huffing news fumes and gargling catastrophe juice.
Technically, this is a me problem — but I do think it’s designed somewhat from the top down. Meaning, it’s intentional. I think flood the zone with bullshit as a strategy isn’t purely just about juking the media or one’s political opposition — I think it’s a way to synaptically overwhelm the citizenry. I think this strategy is flawed for a number of reasons (“I want to eat the bee’s honey, therefore I will throw rocks at the hive” might work but, uhhh, there are better ways), but it does overwhelm. It’s where you get the narrative of, “Don’t fall for this distraction! Wait, this thing is distracting us from that other distraction! Everything is a distraction except for that one thing, which as it turns out, is also a distraction from a thing we haven’t even seen yet.” None of it is a distraction. It’s a full slate of horrors both malicious and stupid, all of them moving forward simultaneously. It is a multi-pronged attack on our attention spans, our informational fidelity, and our ability just to deal with it all. We can juggle up to three balls, and so they throw three balls, four chainsaws, an angry octopus, and a bitey mountain goat at us.
For me, just from a practical, creative perspective, this fucking sucks. It’s very hard to escape the gravity well of Endless Hypervigilance and just sit down for a while and try to imagine what the pretend people in my head are going to do about the pretend problems I’ve given them. (Storytellers are such dicks.) It’s a small problem in the grand scheme but large in the personal, creative sense — to have a mind allowed to be free of troubles is far too big an ask, but to have a mind free of relentless, endless, unmitigated troubles feels like it should be a fair request now and again.
I don’t know what to do about it, precisely. I’ve tried just tuning out the news — which, for the record, means tuning out social media almost in its entirety — and that does work, with the exception that living in the total dark brings with it its own sense of wariness. Reading the news feels like tracking the path of a tornado, whereas looking away feels like admitting, “There’s a tornado out there, but no idea where it is or when it’s gonna pick me up and take me to Oz.” Plus, I like social media. I like being connected to other writers and readers and all the stupid shitposting that goes on. And then there’s the problem that when you do go back to social media and to the news, it’s just drinking from a burst sewer pipe. At least looking at it now and again gives you the vague sense that you’re taking small doses of iocaine powder in order to become immune to it.
(Spoiler: you’re never immune. You’re just disassociating.)
For the record, I’m managing — the greatest success I have in fixing this problem is a kind of vigorous diligence to combat the hypervigilance. Meaning, I have to be actively aware of my brain’s downtime and work very hard to try to keep it offline, so to speak, in order to let it defrag the creative hard drive. Easier said than done, and somewhat betrays the point of simply having downtime at all — downtime being a thing that is supposed to be passively automatic, not me stalking the fence with a rifle looking for whatever beast lurks there in the dark to tear through the chain-link and use its many antlers to fuck up the peace garden I’ve grown.
So, I dunno. Again, I’m managing.
But I figured I’d ask —
Anyone else have this problem?
And how are you handling it, provided you’re able to at all?
(I note here in conclusion that there are wayyyyy worse things going on than what I describe in this post. This is a woe is me boo-hoo kind of post, when there are people who have lost a lot more — there are people who have lost people. People stolen. People taken. People thrown into vans or simply churned under the propaganda machine. But please forgive me the need to talk about this small and vital thing that’s been taken, thank you.)
Anyway, buy my books or I am vanquished. Bye!
Every woman who has lived on this farm has died. Emily just moved in.
When Emily Hauk’s mother dies, it’s time for her and her husband, Josh, to finally leave San Francisco. A farm in rural Nebraska is everything they want for a fresh start: clear skies, low costs, and distance from the grief back home.
They should have asked why the farm was for sale.
Three years ago a teenage girl went missing from the farm. Soon afterward the girl’s mother mysteriously died. The deeper Emily digs the more stories she uncovers of women connected to her new home who’ve met their own dark ends.
With each passing day Emily’s sanctuary slips further away. The barn seems to move throughout her property as though chasing her. Her mother’s favorite music drifts across the cornfield. She swears she saw blood in one of the farmhand’s trucks. And the screams that wake her are not fox howls, no matter how many times her husband says otherwise. If she wants to claim this place as her own she’ll have to find out the truth before whatever watches from the cornfield takes her, too.
1. The reason you can feel “seasick” in the plains is the same reason it might feel like a barn or silo is chasing you.
The story seed for The Farmhouse came during a discussion about Baba Yaga folklore with a group of writers at The Storied Imaginarium. This witch’s house was built on chicken legs to move where she needed, the people who would come to ask for help, and those who would actually be granted it. It was a great conversation, but I kept thinking back to when I lived in the Midwest.
Landmarks like silos or barns were harder to track without any reference point on the horizon. It was just a sea of green or gold and this building jutting up from it. Almost as if it were on legs.
And then all I wanted to do was write a story where the barn was chasing my main character. Because that’s how it feels driving along a two-lane road for miles.
Digging into it, the phenomenon is the same reason some people may experience “seasickness” while driving along I-80 cutting their way across the middle of the US. Much like being in the ocean, the horizon is endless without a mountain or collection of buildings to center you. And so you drift. Even in the corn.
2. I needed readers to feel seen
I set out to write The Farmhouse as an “onion book.” I want readers to have the choice to escape with Emily as she solves the mystery around the missing girls. But if they have the appetite for something more, I hope they’ll dive into the way we process grief, the fear of not trusting their own mind or feelings, and the complicated dynamics within her marriage. Readers who want the thrilling mystery, horror atmosphere, and the depth can peel as deep into the book as they want. All flavors of readership are welcome.
But while I’d always intended the plot to include gaslighting, in writing I was forced to face the systemic way many of us self-gaslight. The “I’m overreacting” or the need to justify feelings because you don’t want to be seen as overly emotional. While this book is centered on Emily getting justice for herself and for the women who have died on her farm, by the time I finished this book all I could feel was the need to tell readers “I believe you.”
There are so many women and female-presenting persons who have their voices diminished and their knowledge dismissed. I hope this book helps them feel seen and understood.
But also if they’re just there for a creepy moving barn, ghosts, and gaslighting…that’s rad, too.
3. Chickens Could Eat Your Teeth
Look, writers have to research unique things. Did I need to find out about what chickens are capable of eating? Yes. Did I need to find out if they could eat human teeth? Yes. Now you have to know, too.
While they can eat human teeth and be totally fine, it would not be a great way to hide any evidence, because they wouldn’t break it down. The hens would be fine though. It’s a bit like how some birds eat gravel to help break down their food.
Anyway, chickens could eat your teeth. You’re welcome.
4. Turns out I really miss writing about music
I’m a former music journalist. It was my first career and I wrote for popular alternative newsweeklies and music magazines, and I loved it. Because I love music. I actually started writing fiction after leaving the journalism industry because I missed writing daily.
The Farmhouse has a soundtrack. The main character Emily’s late mother was a music producer. So part of her grieving her and remembering her are moments tied to specific songs. Building out the music layer of this book with songs that would give insight into who her mother had been added this extra spark for me in writing the book. I had to pick the perfect tracks for you to hear the book, too.
5. Home is always home
This book is also a bit of a love letter to Nebraska. I grew up in rural Nebraska—although I lived in a town much larger than the one nearest Emily and Josh in the book—and there was something nostalgic about getting to write about the beauty there. (I really regret having to cut a scene about Runzas, because iykyk.)
I wanted this book to capture the beauty of rural living. Nebraska is gorgeous. The sunrises are stunning. There’s a peacefulness and a slower pace that can provide respite and a place to be with your thoughts. But it’s also isolating and lonely. There is a lag to get to places, to get to your friends, to get help. Farm life is a hard life. It’s a different way of living, and while the characters in this book don’t work the land, they still have to adjust to being twenty minutes from an emergency vehicle arrival.
Many years ago, I brought my husband to visit my family in Nebraska (who absolutely still live there!) for the 4th of July. He was most excited about doing his own fireworks. We were driving along country roads, as is the way of things, and had to pull over so he could go into a cornfield in real life. The experience (and, yeah, there’s a pic) blew his mind. Being inside real cornfields is far more disorienting—and beautiful—than the corn mazes you find at fall festivals and pumpkin patches. That fish-out-of-water surprise and curiosity definitely fed into The Farmhouse.
ABOUT CHELSEA CONRADT
Chelsea Conradt (she/her) writes twisty speculative thrillers and horror including The Farmhouse. Her books are packed with both murder and kindness because we can be more than one thing.
When not writing stories that make you question what’s real, she is likely watching a baking show or a true-crime documentary. She is nothing if not on brand. Chelsea lives in Texas with her husband, son, and two big dogs. Find her online at chelseaconradt.com.
The Farmhouse: Bookshop.org | Libro.fm | B&N | Amazon | Kobo
Heracles was raised to revere his Auntie Hera, Goddess of Family. As he grows up to become the strongest man in the world, he spreads word of her glory and raises a family of his own. Then an Olympian God strikes, driving him mad and destroying his family. Shattered, Heracles embarks on a series of labors, confronting the greatest minds and monsters in the world to find which Olympian is responsible. The only god he still trusts is Auntie Hera.
There’s one problem: Hera is the one responsible, and she’ll do anything to hide the truth. She’s always detested Heracles, the illegitimate child of her husband Zeus. As Goddess of Family, Heracles is a living insult to her entire being. She only realized what she’s set in motion once it was too late, and now Heracles discovering the truth would destroy them both. She must keep him from solving the mystery. Desperate, she stalls by sending him off to face impossible monsters, but each time he winds up adding another creature to a newfound family. A family that could wage war against the entire heavens.
Yes, this is a story where Heracles tries to befriend every bloodthirsty monster in the world.
The legend of Heracles was one of the first things my parents read to me, and I definitely pretended to be him as I ran shirtless around my backyard. As I grew up, I wondered about all the gaps in those stories, like why Heracles wasn’t more haunted by his actions, and where the heck Hera went after starting everything. Writing this book was about finding a beating heart in the mythology. I learned a lot, including…
MY FAVORITE GREEK HISTORIAN WAS A FRAUD
Ever since college, I’ve loved this little green book called The Library by Apollodorus, translated by the famous James George Frazer. The Library is a concise collection of Greek myths, often telling an entire myth in a couple of pages. It’s so plain, never pausing to dwell on the magnitude of what’s happening. The old generation of gods has been wiped out? Next. A huge war comes to a bloody conclusion? Next.
But “Apollodorus” was a popular name in ancient Greece, and sometimes Romans would write under that name when they wanted to sound authentic. The “Apollodorus” who wrote The Library was an impersonator, living centuries after the time of the actual Greek Apollodorus, and long after the time of Homer and Sophocles. Historians often call him “Pseudo-Apollodorus.” He was trying to garner fame by collecting the great Greek stories in a single space—a library, of sorts—while also mixing some Roman values into them. Such cultural prickles wound up influencing my book in ways I won’t spoil.
HERACLES HAD A TWIN BROTHER (WHO WASN’T A DEMIGOD)
Heracles’s story is weird from his very conception. One day Zeus spied an attractive queen named Alcmene. Being the absolute worst, Zeus decided to woo her by shapeshifting to look like her husband, Amphitryon. That night, Alcmene conceived the demigod Heracles, Zeus’s new favorite son. You’d think the story would end there, with everyone mad at Zeus. But no.
It turns out that Alcmene and Amphitryon were super into it. They hopped into bed and, in defiance of medical science, conceived a second child immediately. This child was Iphicles, totally mortal, no superpowers whatsoever. Iphicles and Heracles coexisted as wombmates, and then Iphicles immediately cut in line to be born first.
If you think this is weird, imagine being Hera: both Zeus’s wife *and* Goddess of Fertility, meaning her phone was blowing up all night.
EVERYBODY YADDA-YADDAS THE GIANT BULL
One of the issues with Heracles retellings is that after a few labors, the audience gets tired of him punching yet another giant animal. It starts with an invincible lion and then moves to a many-headed hydra. After that, do you really care that he’s fighting a really big boar?
So many versions turn the middle labors into a montage. He chases a deer, he fights a bull, who cares, what else is on? For a story that is essentially about twelve amazing feats, storytellers clearly find some more amazing than others. It actually gets funny, looking out for which labors an author skips over.
If you know my writing, you know I love monsters. My answer in all these cases was to explore the personality of the creatures. What is life like for a boar on an otherwise desolate and abandoned mountain? Which other hunters have come after it before? By treating the creatures as characters, many of the middle labors became my favorites. Having a Heracles who collected the animals in a found family rather than fighting them allowed so much more meaning to pour out.
HERACLES’S WIFE DOESN’T HAVE TO DIE
Among the many retellings, Megara often lives! My novel pivoted the moment I realized this. The classic story is that Heracles is driven mad by the Furies, and in his madness he slays his wife and children. He destroys the very family life that Hera is supposed to enshrine and protect. Everything he loved is gone.
But as I read more historians and versions of the Heracles myth, his wife Megara kept popping up. One time, she saw him off on his labors and wished him luck. Then at the end of Heracles’s labors, she appeared and married Heracles’s nephew. There was even an anonymous poem about Megara commiserating with Heracles’s mother over how their family was destroyed.
She was very busy for a dead person.
Megara’s fate changed wildly depending on who was telling it. Realizing that I wasn’t mythologically obligated to fridge Megara changed how I breathed. The entire book pivoted. While grief over loss is important to Wearing The Lion, this change allowed both parents to process the grief in different ways. I got to dig into the clash of their attempts to help each other, how they succeeded, and how they failed. The entire arc of the book changed with Megara’s influence.
NAMES MEAN THINGS? WHAT A CONCEPT!
Heracles wasn’t born with that name. He was “Alcides,” named after an ancestor of the mortal family. There are several explanations for why he took up his new name, but it always means the same thing: “Glory of Hera.” It carried a bitter irony, given how much Hera hated him.
This scheme of new names with serious meanings runs through Ancient Greece. Take Diomedes as an example. Meaning “Cunning of the Gods,” it was a powerful name, suggesting a brilliant tactician. That’s why everybody wanted to be Diomedes. Heracles tangled with a Diomedes who owned man-eating horses. A while later, another Diomedes popped up alongside Odysseus and Achilles in the Trojan War. Yet another Diomedes tried to conquer Hindu-Kush around 95 BCE.
They all wanted the cool name. Every kid on the playground wants to be Spider-Man.
This practice was so common that Heracles wasn’t even the only “Heracles.” Other people sought to suck up to Hera for luck.
About John Wiswell: John Wiswell is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. He won the 2021 Nebula Award for Short Fiction for his story, “Open House on Haunted Hill,” and the 2022 Locus Award for Best Novelette for “That Story Isn’t The Story.” He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, British Fantasy Award, and World Fantasy Award. He is the author of Someone You Can Build a Nest In, a Nebula award winner and Year’s Best pick by NPR and The Washington Post, and Wearing the Lion. He can be found making too many puns and discussing craft on his Substack, johnwiswell.substack.com.
Wearing the Lion: Bookshop.org | Libro.fm | B&N | Amazon
The year is 10151. For the last ten thousand years, Nick Hindman—a microbiologist and member of the prestigious research team the Centauri Project—slept in a state of cryogenic suspension as a quantum-powered system originally designed for interstellar travel propelled him forward through the millennia, a test subject for an emergency project to secure the survival of the human species by colonizing not the stars, but a deep future Earth. His protocol? 1) Survive. 2) Find if there are any other humans left alive. 3) Hope against hope for the arrival of a second test subject, a female.
Featuring a plausible mechanism for one-way time travel, a voyage across the post-apocalyptic seas, and lovers separated by ten thousand years, The Afterlife Project is a meditation on the future of humanity and the natural world we have unbalanced, the true meaning of deep time, and the possibility of hope in the darkness.
Dark fiction is good for you.
One of the things fiction does better than any other art form is to allow us to vividly experience the world through a consciousness not our own, imagining alternative lives and alternative futures—sometimes very dark ones—from the relative safety of our favorite reading nook.
Dark fiction isn’t for everyone, but if you like it—if you’re drawn to the writing of Stephen King, for example, or Shirley Jackson or Margaret Atwood or our own Chuck Wendig—then it’s possible that you’re the kind of reader for whom the horrific offers a particular kind of reading pleasure.
Because let’s face it: there’s power in darkness. It’s an essential source of narrative drive for one thing—what keeps the pages turning—and it’s also a healthy response to personal stress and the ongoing shit-show of current events.
Putting ourselves in the position of fictional characters as they confront tense and difficult challenges, then processing those experiences and the emotions they evoke into wisdom or at least working theories about life, is a cathartic, healthy, uniquely human practice. “We need to play out our fears within the safe confines of the imaginary,” wrote Ian McEwan, “as a form of hopeful exorcism.”
Life on this planet is going to be okay in the long run. But humanity? Well . . .
if there’s one piece of wisdom I’ve taken away from researching and writing The Afterlife Project, it’s that we’re not facing the end of the amazing, ever-evolving panoply of life on Earth. Far from it. Rather, we are—or should be—facing the end of the illusion that the human species is not part of nature. That we haven’t from our very emergence as a species been embedded in the ebb and flow, the stew and ferment, of this complex and beautiful 4.5 billion year-old planet. The widespread adoption of this way of thinking would be a timely and necessary paradigm shift. Because it’s still not too late to save ourselves.
One-way time travel into the deep future isn’t all that far-fetched.
Part of the inspiration for The Afterlife Project was a conversation I had with an eminent astrophysicist in Tierra del Fuego (it’s a long story) who was kind enough to give me his opinion on the plausibility of one-way time travel into the deep future. Using quantum physics and a series of complex mathematical equations scribbled on napkins, he was able to theorize a mechanism based on existing or easily foreseeable technology to send a test subject 10,000 years into the future.
There are good reasons we should want to explore this option—for example to facilitate the kind of interstellar travel that would us to colonize the nearest viable exoplanet, or, as in the case of the team of scientists in The Afterlife Project, to colonize a deep future Earth after the current iteration of humanity has done its worst.
Time’s a river, not an arrow
Time doesn’t actually exist in the way we perceive it. It’s not an arrow, it’s a river. This is mathematically proven.
The water in the river of time does flow downstream, but if you were to trace the river back upstream a few miles you would find the same water flowing between the same banks—so in a certain sense all the moments that have ever passed are still unfolding.
Because of the way it feels for us to live in our aging bodies, it’s almost impossible for us to to accept this truth intuitively, but rest assured: it’s one of the fundamental precepts of physics.
Forget about the market. You really do have to write what’s in your heart.
I know you’ve heard this before, but you really need to listen. I know novelists who haven’t listened, and it never ends well.
I mean it’s okay to think about the market before you start, and you’ll need to think about it eventually if you want to pitch and sell it, but don’t focus on the market when you’re writing!
I wrote a weird, dark novel. I didn’t set out to make it that way, it just happened. It turned out to be one of those books that felt like it was being dictated from on high, though, and when a story feels like that—when it starts to tell itself like this one did, you just ride the wave and hope for the best. As a well-known Mexican novelist and filmmaker recently reminded me, you’re writing for your own particular “species.” You just have to trust that there are other members of that species out there, and that they will find your book.
Learn about the market, of course; study it and understand your genres. But if you try to write purely for the market, the muse will turn her back.
Tim Weed is the author of three books of fiction. His work has won or been shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Writer’s Digest Annual Fiction Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Fish International Short Story Award, the New Rivers Many Voices Project, and many others. Co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program, Tim is on the core faculty of the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University. His new novel, The Afterlife Project, was a finalist for the Prism Prize in Climate Literature and Uncharted magazine’s Novel Excerpt Award.
The Afterlife Project: Bookshop.org | B&N | Amazon | Audible | Podium
