Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
WORDMONKEY
Today, I’m going to give you a pair of themes.
You will choose one, and write a story using that theme.
1. Doing a good thing sometimes means being evil.
2. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Two themes in opposition to each other.
Choose one, write.
Length: ~1000 words
Due by: 3/10, Friday, noon EST
Post at your online space. Give us a link. The usual.
Needless to say, I am very excited, and I will stand quietly in the shadow of Neil Gaiman, trying not to disturb him while unobtrusively breathing this rarefied air.
Thanks all to those who bought Empire’s End and have said nice things about it.
The book also landed at #26 on the USA Today list, and #1 on Audible.
Aftermath debuted at #4 on the NYT when it debuted.
Life Debt debuted at #9.
And now, Holy Huttslime, Empire’s End at #3.
I will gladly take that, thank you.
And for some other news:
Tor.com reviewed Thunderbird — and basically gave one of the greatest opening paragraphs to a review of one of my books ever, ever, ever:
“You don’t know it yet, but you’re about to fall in love with a woman named Miriam Black. It won’t be an easy relationship, no siree. She’s going to enchant you with her psychic abilities, splinter you with her vicious tongue, lure you in with her firecracker attitude, and frighten you with cruel circumstances. Sometimes you’ll need a break from her all-consuming intensity and sometimes you’ll be so obsessed you won’t be able to let her go. The longer you stick with her, the more her icy heart will melt until she drowns you. And you’ll love every. fucking. moment.”
(Also amazing, the concluding paragraph:)
“For me, reading one of Wendig’s books, especially the Miriam Black series, is an act of complete absorption and total abandon. Your whole world narrows down to Miriam and trying to figure out how she’s going to get out of her latest death-defying scrape. Little else matters. While the book was in my greedy hands I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t even more from the damn couch. I needed to know what happened to Miriam Black as badly as she needed a nicotine fix. Do yourself a favor and buy the whole series. And if Saga hasn’t formally picked up books 5 and 6 yet, OMGYOUREKILLINGMEDOITALREADYINEEDTHEM!”
(Saga has totally picked up the 5th and 6th books, btw.)
You will also find me over at Scalzi’s Secret Internet Hut, where I talk about Thunderbird — in particular, about when your book becomes eerily prescient in ways you did not expect, and what it means to find optimism in such troubling revelation.
Also, Febreze Smoothies and Poop Art.
More as I have it.
Thanks, folks.
Well, by the mercy of Sweet Saint Fuck, here we are.
Let’s just go through the journey, shall we?
It took me five years to write Blackbirds. Or, more to the point, it took me five years to learn how to write Blackbirds. I’d written five novels before that, but this one was different. I was into it, but not getting it. A mentorship with a bad-ass dude (salute to Stephen Susco) taught me to outline, to frame it out, and then there it was: a book.
Got an agent very quickly, bing. (*waves to Stacia*)
Got a publishing deal um, not immediately. Was another two years, I think, before the book hit shelves — so, by then, you’re looking at a seven year situation for one goddamn book, and as I am wont to say to new writers: it takes the time that it takes.
Blackbirds, about a very cantankerous, cynical young woman who can see how you’re going to die just by touching you, came out in April 2012, right around my birthday.
Though I wasn’t able to announce it, we had a TV option cooking from literally the day the book came out — when the book came out, I was out in Los Angeles for the LA Book Fest (and I’m back this year, bee-tee-dubs) taking meetings on the book.
I wrote Mockingbird in 30 days. (I’ve seen some snark about how haw haw he writes fast and that’s proof Wendig sucks, but hey, fuck you. Like I said: it takes the time that it takes. And that 30 days wasn’t like, BOOM I WROTE A BOOK IN ONE MONTH, NOW TO IMMEDIATELY CATAPULT IT ONTO A BOOK SHELF — it took additional time in revisions and copy-edits.) Mockingbird, which took Miriam into the heart of a serial killer’s madness and that killer’s predations on a local girls’ private school, debuted also in 2012, about four months after the first book.
The Cormorant, which saw Miriam going up against a returning enemy — who had been upgraded with psychic powers all his own — also had her confront her past in the form of her mother. The Cormorant came out in late 2013, and honestly is maybe my favorite book that I’ve ever written. I actually freaked myself out writing the ending, and loved every moment of it.
Now, here’s where the journey gets interesting.
First, we had a TV show with Starz — and then we didn’t. It was going really well. We had locations and offices and staff and we were talking casting and then we weren’t talking casting and then nothing. That’s the business, them’s the deals, no harm, no foul. (Honestly, I think this timed out with Starz picking up Gaiman’s American Gods. On paper, both books are dark urban fantasy about troubled anti-heroes. And if I had the choice to make a Miriam TV show or an American Gods TV show, I’d make the Gaiman show in the hair’s breadth of a heartbeat.)
Second, we were able to rescue the rights to Miriam from the original publisher, Angry Robot, and then were able to resell them to SAGA, an imprint of S&S, under editor Joe Monti.
Meanwhile, I started writing Thunderbird.
That is to say, I started writing it in 2014, and finished it in early 2015.
Which is further to say, I wrote the book two years ago.
That only struck me recently — way time and memory move, I didn’t realize there had been quite that much time in between the finishing-of-the-book and the publishing-of-the-book. Part of the delayed publication was in part to give a staggered re-release to the first three books, all with new covers. (I, too, miss the Joey Hi-Fi covers, by the way, but the one issue I had with those covers is that on bookshelves it was hard to distinguish between the separate books. And the original publisher didn’t put a series number, so a lot of people read the series out of order because they just didn’t know. The new Adam Doyle covers are dynamic and rad, and put a cool focus on the, ahem, bird component of the story.) Also, the goal was to put the final three books closer together in publication — not one a year so much as one every 6 months or so.
So, two years (!) ago I wrote Thunderbird, and then moved into writing a novella, Interlude: Swallow, which takes place after The Cormorant and before Thunderbird, so it’s something of a bridging story. You can find that, by the way, in the Three Slices anthology, which is a rad project I did with FELLOW PENMONKEY PALS Kevin Hearne and Delilah Dawson. (You’ll also find some Miriam storyworld mythology inside The Forever Endeavor, fyi.)
Then there was the Miriam Black video game, where you literally had to mash buttons in order to drink and smoke and curse at people as you watch them die.
Okay, that might’ve just been a weird dream. No video game.
(Though I’d totally play that video game.)
Meanwhile, I wrote The Raptor & The Wren (out… I think by the end of this year?) and am currently writing the last (gasp!) Miriam novel, Vultures.
And now, here we are.
It is the day.
Miriam Black is back.
Thunderbird is here.
Holy fucking fuck.
Thunderbird: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N
Obviously, I hope you’ll check it out. It’s the next stop on what has for me been a long, fascinating, and sometimes circuitous journey. Miriam is — well, Miriam is the product of a broken world full of broken people. Nobody is good. Everybody is just shades of bad. It’s a book that’s about mortality and frailty, but it’s also a book that enrobes a tiny little pilot light inside a deep dark pit. And yet, I don’t aim for the books to be bleak, either — despite all the darkness, I like to think they’re exciting and fun and funny even as they are ideally very very fucked up. I’m sometimes asked what genre these books are — I wrote them as horror-crime, they got initially branded as urban fantasy, and are presently called supernatural thrillers. I’m good with any of those, I suppose. Genre is a floating target. Either way, no matter where they fall, I hope you read them, I hope you like them, and I hope Miriam peck-peck-pecks her way into your heart as she has mine. Now, I just have to extract these angry ravens from my chest cavity.
“Despite a few years away from the series due to a change in publishers, it takes no time to feel right at home with Miriam again. Wendig slams down the accelerator on page one, and never lets up for a moment. His frenetic, shotgun style of prose is a trademark, and nowhere does it hit with as much force, drive, emotion, and explosiveness than when deployed in service to Miriam Black. His descriptions of her inner turmoil—should she get rid of her powers, when they are all she can rely on to uncover the coup—are among the best moments in the book, and truly show the growth this once-broken drifter has experienced since we first met her. Her pain is our pain and her fears are our fears as she puts her hopes on the line again and again to save a young kid who may hold in his grasp a terrifying ability. Wendig surrounds his dark knight with a cast of luridly colorful, broken, vicious, and powered people, especially the woman of the hour, Mary Scissors, whose true powers and motives are something horrifying to behold.”
“This gritty, full-throttle series is what urban fantasy is all about, with bitter humor rounding out lyrical writing. It’s easy to root for this mouthy, rude, insensitive, but innately good young woman, and her story hits the reader like a double shot of rotgut.”
“Once again, Wendig finds a way to blend startlingly powerful descriptions and deep emotional gravity into a gritty, cynical narrative. The action comes fast in this fourth Miriam Black novel and the pace is relentless, but Wendig has control, carefully building his heroine and her world with each chapter in a way that is fascinating and thoroughly entertaining. New readers will have a good deal of catching up to do here, but for those who have followed Miriam’s remarkable adventures to date, the chance to watch her character, and her personal relationships, grow ever deeper and more complicated should not be passed up. A final, utterly devious premonition is sure to leave readers feverish for further installments of this haunting and ever-entertaining series.”
back off man i’m a word scientist
Hello, America. I am the Internet’s Chuck Wendig, and contrary to what I usually do on this here Website, I’m going to offer some Vital Writing Advice. I am the recipient of a lot of emails, and between the emails where people are mad at me for ruining Star Wars are the emails where people ask me for advice on buying various chairs and pastries, and in between those emails are the writers who want to know how to write. “Internet’s Chuck Wendig,” they plead, “please tell us the secret that will turn us into Super Mega Ultra Rockstar Writers like yourself.”
It’s true that I am a Super Mega Rockstar Writer, though I have not yet earned the Ultra adjective yet because I have not yet fought and killed the Chaos Leopard and taken its sapphire eyes as a trophy. One day!
ONE. DAY.
*a distant leopard’s growl fills the sky*
It’s also true that I am in possession of a great many Author Secrets — that’s right, it’s not just one Author Secret, but an entire liquor cabinet I mean regular cabinet of Author Secrets.
I will share them with you now, in defiance of the Galactic Author Guild’s autocratic laws. YOUR OPPRESSION ENDS HERE, G.A.G., I AM BRINGING THE TRUTH TO THE PEOPLES.
Quickly now, absorb this information before it is taken down! HURRY
1. Finish What You Start. A story is not a story without an ending, and so you must practice to that point. Plus, finishing a thing makes you feel good. It gives you momentum.
2. Write Who You Are. We worry so much about originality in stories, and I’m here to tell you, no story is original. What is original is the arrangement of the story, and that arrangement comes from you. Do not run away from your authorial intent. Run toward it.
3. Also Run Screaming Past Your Self-Doubt. Your self-doubt is a jerk. It’ll jog alongside you, trying to convince you to just stop and lay down and give up. You can’t give up. Keep running. Run faster than your self-doubt. Steal a car. Steal an actual car. Drive fast past it. Then reverse and back over it. Hear the crunch of its bones. That’s what it gets for sassing you.
4. Write What You Know. And what you don’t know, you can always learn. And what you can’t learn, you can always steal from other authors by hitting them with rocks and opening their heads like coconuts. Each writer’s brain is like a fruit containing many seeds, the seeds of knowledge. Kill authors and eat their brains.
5. Don’t use adverbs. Adverbs are witch’s traps.
6. WWFD? Ask, what would Jonathan Franzen do? And then listen to the answer. That’s Franzen speaking to you from his cosmic prison. He wants to be free but you mustn’t let him be. Squeeze your eyes shut and command him to leave this plane, reminding him that he has no power here. In the wake of his absence, you will feel cleansed and ready to write.
7. Panic. Just freak out, man. Seriously what the fuck are you doing. You’re a writer, that’s a bad decision. You should’ve gone to school and been an accountant. People need accountants. You fucked up but now here we are and the only choice you have is to lose your shit and go for broke.
8. Show, Don’t Tell. Don’t say anything. Don’t even use words. Use pictures and sounds. I wrote a whole novel in grunts and pictograms. That novel was called The Chronicles of Narnia.
9. Fuck the First Draft. As Hemingway said, the first draft of everything is shit. So don’t write a first draft. Just skip it. Start with the second draft. Boom. Now you’re a published author. Next secret? Skip the second draft, too, and start with the third. Kapow. Now you’re a bestselling author. That’s how it happens. That’s the magic.
10. Write 1,000 Words A Day. But don’t write them in order. That’s how you confuse the witches. You can put the words in order later when the witches are asleep in their tower.
11. Study Other Successful Writers. Other writers have done this well, so study what they do. Look at their sentence structure. Examine the rhythm of their storytelling. Chart the map of their many footsteps, ideally tracking them with RFID tags. Rifle through their trash like a raccoon. Steal their debit cards. Eat their food and their bank statements and the hair you find in their shower drains, all while miming their mannerisms in a mirror. Live under their floors or behind their walls. That way, you find the ideal time to strike — pop them with a tranq dart and once asleep, search their bodies for ancient sigils and secret messages tattooed there. Then lock them in a cage and steal their manuscripts for your own. Become them by performing The Rites. Or say fuck it and then go back to number four, where you bludgeon them and eat their brains.
12. Eat Bees. You gotta eat some bees, man. C’mon. Just fuckin’ eat ’em already. We all do it. They’re full of protein. They also sting you as you eat them which activates your Imaginatory Gland, so eat a handful of bees and then you get jacked on cool thoughts and ideas. Eat the bees. Don’t be a baby about it.
13. Stop Eating Bees. All right, you’ve eaten too many bees. It’s weird. You got a problem. Go to a meeting. Bees are going extinct the fuck is wrong with you.
14. Don’t Ever Look At The News. Because like Fiona Apple said, “This world is bullshit.” It is. It’s all bullshit. It’ll just make you sad and then you won’t write, you’ll just sit around eating cheesecake and offering up stupid writing advice on the Internet. The news is dumb. The world is dumb. Retreat into your land of unicorns where it’s safe.
15. Read The Work Aloud. Reading the work aloud lets you hear the rhythm, the flow, the inconsistencies. It’ll help you catch any awkwardness or word choice problems. It’ll also help you catch the witches. The witches are coming but they are easily confounded by stories. They are held rapt by them, and as you mesmerize them with narrative, you can kill them and take their hats and wands. Fuckin’ witches, man. Every writer’s enemy, those witches. If witches are not your enemy, you’re not a writer. And no, I don’t mean COOL witches, I don’t mean your friend, Zelda, who’s a witch and who casts spells to protect your third-floor condo from bad spirits, I mean like, ANCIENT FUCKING WITCHES, I mean, eldritch crone-hags who are eternal and who have haunted the Earth from its earliest pyroclastic days. Those witches.
16. When In Doubt, Pterodactyls and Frankensteins. Stuck in your story? Just throw in some pterodactyls and Frankensteins. Always peps up a dull story!
17. Scream At Ponds And Rivers. Water contains mystical properties and is also where the Muses hide. When you are passing by any body of water, yell at it and command it to inspire you. Yell at it until you are frothy and hoarse. Demand the Muses rise from murky turbidity and deliver inspiration unto you. That or a sword. Sometimes Muses hand out swords.
18. When In Doubt, Cats Grant Wishes. That’s true. That’s why authors always have cats because those are the cats that granted those authors their wishes to become authors. I have two cats, and they’re from a rare breed called “dogs.” They’re pretty weird looking but whatever.
19. Listen To Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau said, “Write while the heat is in you.” Which is another way of saying, Thoreau ate bees and so it’s time to start with the eating bees thing again. I know, we were past this, but now we’re not, so num-num some bees. That’s what Thoreau was doing when he fucked off to the woods. He was destroying trees, looking for bees and honey to eat. Thoreau was a bear. What I’m saying is, be a bear. Part-time, at least. A were-bear. A lycanthropic ursine. Margaret Atwood is also a lycanthropic bear-person, because she’s Canadian, and all Canadians are lycanthropes. But I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know.
20. Molt. When in doubt, shed your flesh. Let your true author spirit emerge from the leavings of your discarded scale and leathery epidermis.
21. Listen to Le Guin. Ursula K. LeGuin once famously said of writing, “Writing is a toilet-man’s job.” I don’t know what it means but she said it to me last night in a dream. Always follow your dreams, is really the larger point I’m trying to make.
22. Fuck It, Just Pretend. You can get all the benefits of being a writer just by telling people you’re a writer. It’s okay. They won’t follow-up. Nobody reads books. You can just say it. “I’m a writer.” “Oh, really?” “Uh-huh.” Then you name some made-up books you wrote. “Oh, I wrote The Judas Contingency, and its sequel, The Red Pumpkin.” Nobody will ever go check your work. They won’t buy it. They’ll probably tell you they already read those books. “My Mom loved that one,” the person will say. God people are the worst.
23. Reject Rejection. If someone rejects your work, reject their rejection of your work. Write a formal letter on some fancy stationary telling them categorically that you have read their rejection and you found it wanting, please and thank you. That’s how you get published. It’s like a double-negative. It’s a trick we all use now and again. No shame in it!
24. You Must Join A Critique Group. Stories are best when they are formed by committee. A critique group is an excellent way to ensure that your story is something everyone agrees on. Many bestselling novels have maximized mediocrity, turning it into a bonafide art form, and a critique group is a very good way to achieve that weaponized cromulence quickly. Bonus: a critique group, if given enough time, soon becomes a cult, and if you write really well, your story can become the cult’s holy book. And then one day you’ll be naked in the woods summoning LORD VURBILEX, THE RECONDITE SCION OF TURGID WORDSMITHY, HERETIC OF THE PROSELANDS, and he’s your god, now, so kill a goat and get to writing, you stupid vessel.
25. Never Take Advice From Writers. We don’t know what the hell we’re doing, either, and if we did, we wouldn’t spend time telling you how to do it, we’d just be doing it.
* * *
COOL SO NOW BUY MY BOOK OF WRITING ADVICE OKAY GREAT
DO IT OR YOU’LL DIE
THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO BE A WRITER. READ IT AND IT BECOMES A GATEWAY ALLOWING YOU TO MANIFEST YOUR FINAL FORM. IT IS FULL OF BEES-FOR-EATING AND WISH-GRANTING CATS.
BUY THIS BOOK NOW BEFORE THE GALACTIC AUTHOR GUILD SUPER-BANS IT FROM ALL CORNERS OF THE INTERSTITIAL REALM
HURRY GODDAMNIT SHIT
Okay, it’s like, 25 degrees right now, but last week it ticked up to 76F, and stayed warm for days — and it’s getting warmer again this week. In February. Fucking bleak-ass winter-faced February. Now, I’m a confessed hater of winter, but when it’s this warm in a month normally hella cold, it’s hard to enjoy the weather when you’re casually imagining polar bears drowning in a boiling sea, y’know? BOY IT’S NICE HA HA HA THE WORLD IS DYING
But, I guess fuck it, it gets me some okay macros. The macros at the very bottom of this post are quick snaps I took outside one warm morning — already some spiders had been out, weaving webs, and the webs had dew on them. Hence, photos. Not great ones, but alas.
Beyond that, anything else going on?
HMM LET’S SEE.
Oh, I dunno, could tomorrow be the return of Miriam Motherfucking Black? It sure is. Miriam is back in Thunderbird, and she’s in Arizona looking for a woman who she believes can end her curse — but in hunting that woman, the path cuts clean through the wrath of a local militia hell-bent on bringing down the government.
The Miriam books are always a blast to write, in that they’re just — you know, they’re full of bad people. Nobody’s really good, everybody’s just various shades of wrong, and yet, Miriam — no angel herself — has to navigate this troubled land to try to find a way forward for herself and those she meets. It’s good bad fun.
If you wanna check it out —
Thunderbird: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N
Also, here’s a great Thunderbird review from B&N:
“In many ways, this is Wendig at his most Wendig-ian: a noir woman kicking ass in the name of truth, justice, and whiskey, doing her best to avert the worst, gritting her teeth through it all. Miriam is not the character we met back in Blackbirds, though her bad habits have stuck around, along with a penchant for the most inventive cursing in the lexicon of the English language. She is more than just an avatar of death: she’s a bonafide hero, damn it. And from the way her journey ends in Thunderbird, with a twist that plunges in like a knife, she’s going to have her work cut out for her over the next two planned books, hero or not. This is a triumphant return to a series that pushes the boundaries of urban fantasy into stranger territory.”
Also, if you want a great Empire’s End review from the New York Daily News…
“The pace really picks up in the final major confrontation of the Galactic Civil War, with plenty of tension and personal sacrifice in the various narrative threads, and Wendig’s writing style lends itself well to action here…
Ultimately, “Empire’s End” provides fans with a vital part of the puzzle that links the Original Trilogy and “The Force Awakens” as it finally tells us how a brutal regime came crashing down.”
Seriously, thank you to everyone who has been writing me nice things about the final Aftermath novel. The first book had some, erm, challenging responses, but the response to this book has been way above my expectations. I FLAIL AND GESTICULATE IN YOUR GENERAL DIRECTION.
Oh! And for the answers to last week’s MYSTERY MACROS:
1. dog tongue / whiskers
2. passion fruit aral inside the fruit itself
3. dog snoot
4. dog eye and fur
5. mesh on a trucker-style baseball hat
6. human tongue (mine)
7. dog tongue (snoobug’s)
8. old tea strainer
9. stikbot toy dog
10. dog snoot 2
11. clothespin spring
I may have to do that again — mystery macros. Maybe a contest?
Now, for this week’s (non-mystery) macros:
That will get you a set of random photos on Flickr (based on their “interestingness” algorithm).
Pick a photo from that spread.
Use that photo as the inspiration for a new piece of flash fiction. When you post the story at your online space, please also link to that photo on Flickr (not to the random generator) and give credit to the poster/taker of said photo.
That’s it. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.
Length: ~1000 words.
Due by: Friday, March 3rd, noon EST
Post at your online space. Give us a link in the comments.
