Author: terribleminds (page 168 of 454)

GET IT

BECAUSE IT’S MAY

AND IT’S THE FOURTH

OF MAY

AND THERE’S THAT THING THEY SAY

IN THOSE MOVIES

MAY THE FORCE — snicker — BE WITH YOU

MAY THE FOURTH — tee hee — BE WITH YOU

I DIDN’T INVENT THE JOKE

BUT IT’S A GOOD ONE

anyway

So!

To celebrate May the 4th, as you may know, I’ll be at the Cherry Hill Library tonight, and you can nab tickets here or, I assume, come by and buy tix at the door. I’ll talk Star Wars and other stuff and sign books and do a nude performance art piece to the Ewok’s YUB NUB song, slowed down as if in a David Lynch movie. And maybe I’ll talk a little bit about Life Debt, too. 🙂

Speaking of Life Debt, I’ve been given clearance to give away one tiny little piece of the book — an itty-bitty amuse-bouche of information, which is to say, the first sentence of the first chapter.

Which is…

wait for it

wait for it

waaaaaaaait for it

spoiler space

spoiler warning

SPOILER ALERT –!

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

SEE WHAT I DID THERE

DO YOU

SEE IT

okay fine, jeez, no sense of humor around here — tough crowd.

Here, then, is the first sentence of Life Debt‘s chapter one:

“Luke Skywalker vigorously drank a tall glass of blue milk, kicked a womprat, and died.”

Wait, no, that can’t be right.

“Call me Obi-Wan.”

huh, no — shit, wait, is this it?

“Malakili rolls over and sits up –“

GODDAMNIT, NO, hold on, hold on — *ruffles through papers*

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single Kowakian Monkey-Lizard in possession of a jaunty hat must be in want of a Hutt…”

NO NO NO NO

I’m sorry for wasting your time, hold on, just sit still.

Oh. Here it is:

“Poe Dameron and FN-2187 study each other’s bodies the way a navigator studies a star chart in the dark…”

WAIT DAMNIT that isn’t right either, sorry, that one is from my, erm, private collection.

Ah!

Ah.

Here it is.

The for-realsies, totally-legit, honest-to-Yoda first sentence of the first chapter of Life Debt:

“Leia paces.”

THANK YOU, GOOD NIGHT

Hope to see some of you tonight in New Jersey.

Life Debt comes out on July 12th, so pre-order now: Indiebound | B&N | Amazon

(And while you’re at it — don’t forget to check out Bloodline!)

May is Mental Health Awareness month.

It is now May.

So, hello, mental health. I am aware of you.

I am aware of you because my mental health is on the whole plenty good, until it’s not. And when it’s not, it’s like my brain and my heart are Thelma & Louiseing it off a cliff — driving the car right off the edge. Zoom. Crunch. Explode. What happens when this happens is I suffer rather intense anxiety. My anxiety is a many-flavored thing, though usually it focuses on DEATH and HEALTH and IMMEDIATE SOUL-SHITTING PANIC. Like, I’ll be chugging along, and things will be good? And then I’ll think I’m inexplicably dying, or that everything I have is going to go away, or my very existence is a mote of dust in the eye of a God and holy crap what if God blinks and — gaaaaasp, then I can’t breathe, and it feels like I’m trapped, and maybe I have cancer, and maybe my heart is exploding, and what if my son dies, and what if my house burns down, and couldn’t someone in the middle of the night just fucking murder me and my whole family, and —

The cascading emotions run roughshod over me: fear, panic, existential terror. It’s like an amusement park ride: once you’re strapped in, it’s taking you where it wants to go.

I do better with it now than I used to. Growing up was this, every hour. Daily. Nightly. These days my anxiety is a dull roar in the background, a psychological tinnitus that only once in a while chooses to spike into shrill, noxious signal. Mostly, I control it rather than letting it control me. Mostly. And that’s a mental luxury that a lot of people can’t afford for various reasons.

Why am I telling you all this? I talk a little bit about it here and there, but last week I acknowledged it more boldly on Twitter and also noted that generally I don’t care to speak about it, because for me, speaking about it gives it a little power. Depression lies, as they say, and so does anxiety, and one of those lies for me is that it’s an accepted (note I didn’t say “acceptable”) part of who I am — an ally, if you will, the Louise to my Thelma. Anxiety at the time you feel it tends to seem perfectly normal, at least inside my head. It feels like it’s part of the fabric, part of the Tapestry of Chuck, like the panic it creates is totally justifiable, dude, even though it’s the furthest thing from it. It’s a slippery slope, lubricated with fearsweat — THIS PLANE IS TOTALLY GOING TO CRASH, I’LL GO TO THE BATHROOM BUT WAIT WHAT IF THE PLANE STARTS TO CRASH WHILE I’M IN THE BATHROOM AND ALSO THE BATHROOM IS PROBABLY SHELLACKED WITH MRSA AND I’LL CATCH MRSA IN ONE OF THESE HANGNAILS I HAVE ‘CAUSE I CAN’T STOP BITING MY STUPID NAILS SO IF THE PLANE CRASH DOESN’T KILL ME THEN MRSA WILL AND IF THAT DOESN’T KILL ME THEY’LL STILL HAVE TO CUT OFF MY ARMS AND THEN I WON’T BE ABLE TO WRITE ANYMORE AND THAT’S FINE BECAUSE MY CAREER IS PROBABLY ONE OR TWO BOOKS AWAY FROM BEING TOTALLY OVER AND

It sounds absurd, right? But my brain will do those kinds of meth-fueled psychological calisthenics, bounding around like if the Cat in the Hat were covered in a colony of bitey fire ants. And frequently it takes just one step onto the path of anxiety to go shoop down the chute and into cuckoo-town. It’s like how if you pee you “break the seal” and now you gotta pee like, every four minutes. Except here instead of “pee,” it’s “invite a Panic Monster to nestle into your heart where she can start laying eggs.” So, mostly, I don’t talk about it. I don’t even look in its direction because I recognize it to be the lying liar-pantsed liar that it is, and I don’t feel like it’s worth it to let it have the mic. That is not something everyone can manage, mind you, and further, others are strengthened by talking about it. Me, I do better ruminating on all the things that aren’t anxiety, and that seems to serve me okay.

So again, why am I telling you this now?

Because some folks said it would be helpful to know. To know that you can do it — you can have this problem and live with it. You never really conquer it, but you can lock it away, or at least do a country line-dance on its head. I’m not ashamed of what goes on in my head, though I damn sure don’t like it. You shouldn’t be ashamed of it, either. Mental health issues are incredibly common, and I suspect even moreso amongst artists and writers and other creative types. I know that it’s always going to be a part of me even as I can stand here with my Wizard Staff, reminding the Panic Monster that YOU SHALL NOT PASS. I banish it to the dark, then I get to fucking work.

I thought, too, that I’d offer up some of the techniques that I use to manage this. I’m not on medication and I don’t do therapy — which is maybe a bad idea, I don’t know? (I’m also not suggesting you should get by the same way I do. Everybody has their own way forward here, and there is nothing wrong with meds or therapy or whatever gets it done.) I manage okay without those things and have developed coping skills outside that particular prescription.

Here are some of my coping skills:

I run. Running has done a lot for my mental health. It is a thing I am very bad at, as much as you can be bad at such a seemingly simple thing — I mean, I can put one foot in front of the other, but I do so as gracefully as a legless gazelle kicked around an ice-skating rink. Just the same, running feels like control. It is me, the asphalt, the pain, the clarity, the blood pumping. While running, I’m still alone with my thoughts, but there exists the very distinct feeling that I can outrun all the bad thoughts and keep with me all the good ones. At the end, it’s like fleeing the cops in Grand Theft Auto — eventually the bad thoughts lose their way and I’m scot-free, baby.

I avoid news whenever possible. This one’s tough, because sometimes my job is helped by looking at the news. But if I’m feeling panic settle in, I’ll turn away from news because the news is rarely good, and it’s very easy to feel a sense of distinct hopelessness. The news shows a world that is an ever-deepening sinkhole, and rarely does the news report on the things that buoy us as a society. So, for the most part, fuck the news.

I find interesting news instead. Just this morning I saw this: GIANT HIMALAYAN BEES PRODUCE HALLUCINOGENIC HONEY and I’m like, yes, fuck yeah, this is news. No presidential election will ever matter to the universe as much as hallucinogenic bees. Bonus fun: did you know gorillas make up little songs when they eat food? Finding stories like that, that show how amazing the world is? It helps. My life and my death will be insignificant when compared against the wonder of gorilla food-songs and trip-tastic honeybees.

I curate my social media with angry laser-beam eyes. I like to obsessively prune my social media feeds because I consider it my living room — admittedly, a very loud living room — and as soon as someone becomes more noise to be instead of signal, I have to shut them out. It may not even be their fault, but I gotta practice self-care online because if I don’t, looking into the dark heart of social media is like having Sauron’s eye fixed on you. It’s not drinking from a firehouse so much as it is standing underneath Niagara Falls and opening your mouth. So, I unfollow, mute and block on a hair trigger. Sometimes that’s not your fault, it’s just a thing I gotta do.

I write. This seems obvious, and it’s not always the thing that helps everybody, but for me, writing is purgative — the creative act of sucking out venom. I suck it out, then spit it on the page. Not just as anger, but as everything: it’s a way for me to address the the wasp nest that lives inside my skull. All the ideas, all the fears, all the questions. I squirt them onto the page, then fingerpaint with all the bad stuff and see what stories I can tell. I’ve got Invasive coming soon and the protagonist is a futurist who consults with the FBI. Hannah Stander is the daughter of doomsday preppers, and she’s a character who walks the line between hoping to have optimism about the future and trying not to fall into the chasm of fear about the future we’re creating — climate change, antibiotic resistance, artificial intelligence. She’s not me, but she has that part of me. Her struggle gets to be my struggle, a little bit. It helps me deal. Miriam Black from Blackbirds is like this, too — she helped me come to terms with death and the helplessness we experience around it. She was such a vital character to help me dissect fatality.

I write horror. More to the point, I write horror. Most of my books are horror, even though none of my books are labeled as horror. (A curiosity of the industry.)

I meditate. Meditation for me isn’t meditation for you, necessarily — like, I don’t sit in a space and clear my head, but I do go out into nature and take pictures, or I walk, or I read escapist fiction, or I go to the movies. Anywhere to get out of my own head.

I am the Zodiac Killer. Just kidding. Seeing if you were still paying attention. Besides, we all know that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer.

I actively think of good things. Sometimes, my mind needs to be forced — a square peg hammered through a circle hole until its sharp corners are sheared clean off. That means I have to will myself to think of good things. In my life, in your life, in all the world.

I practice empathy. My anxiety is a very selfish liar and it is very solipsistic and would like me to think about ME ME ME and that’s a good way to center panic in your heart. Instead, I look beyond myself at other people and — I mean, in a way empathy is selfish, too, but moving beyond my own margins tends to put my anxiety off-center. Put more plainly, thinking about other people helps you stop thinking about yourself. It robs power from my anxiety.

That’s it, I guess? That’s what I got.

I have anxiety.

And it’s okay.

You’re okay, too.

No shame, no stigma, we are who we are.

Go forth and be awesome. More importantly, go forth and know you’re not alone.

I issued a photo challenge last week to Paul Weimer and Sarah Chorn last week about capturing a dandelion macro — a dandelion gone to seed with waterdrops. I’ve seen such beautiful photos and I’d never been able to capture one myself that I was really happy with. And then lo and behold, we had one of those rains that was less a rain and more a persistent mist, and whenever that happens, I tend to get very interesting waterdrop shots.

And so, I hunted up a dandelion and finally got a couple photos I like:

So, yeah. There you go.

What else is going on?

Reminder that I’ll be in Cherry Hill, NJ this week talking STAR WARS.

Speaking of Sarah Chorn, she did a fabulously nice review of Zer0es at her blog — “This book is full of ideas, and complex insights into our global economy and many situations that have faced societies around the world, and plenty of science woven in to keep you happy. In some ways this is a David and Goliath story, and it is so very well done. The giant and the little guy, in conflict, as told only the way Chuck Wendig can tell it.” And given recent news, the book becomes all the more relevant, ahem. If you’re now frothing and flailing and wondering how you get the book, well, behold your local bookstore, or hey what about here?

Also, looks like Invasive ARCS are starting to make their way into the world…

Did you see that I’ll be at the Orlando Book Festival on June 18th? COME SAY HI.

And I think that’s it.

TAKE NO SHIT FROM MONDAY, Y’ALL.

From last week’s selection, I’ve got ten titles for you. Pick one and go. (Note that the parentheticals are who came up with the title.)

The rules are standard:

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: 5/6, noon EST

Post at your online space, drop a link in the comments, and boom.

Still Turnstiles at Station 6 (Lori Schechter)

The Girl Who Surfed Tsunamis (Christopher)

Murder and Wine and the Oblong Door (Migo)

The Blood Lottery (Marion)

A Pretentious Title For a Pretentious Story (thisdamkid)

The Blind Tattooist (Russell)

Jeremy Pocket and the See-Through Wall (Naomi)

Malwhere (cjaybee)

I’m In Love With A Zombie But He Doesn’t Even Know I’m Alive

They Sat Outside Eating Cake (Tom Byrne)

I am going to warn you up front that this post will offer little of value. You won’t find much focus here. I don’t have any great takeaways. I don’t have any solutions. I stand here between the polar forces of optimism and anger, trying to reach for one while shielding myself from the other. Part of me wants to retreat from the conversation entirely, to escape the culture and to settle down in a shack and sit and put on headphones and just wait it all out.

The culture I’m talking about is geek culture. Nerd culture. Pop culture.

Really, our entire culture, because our entire culture is pop culture these days. Geek culture is dominant. News is entertainment. Politics is run in part by a man right now who calls himself an entertainer and whose version of “telling it like it is” means telling us anything at all in order to provoke precious attention.

We have a problem. Really, it’s a man problem, and I don’t mean that it’s a problem that affects men but really, it’s a problem driven by and created by men — and yes, I know, it’s #NotAllMen and yes, I realize that men can be victims, too, especially LGBT men. Of course, most of the problems men suffer as victims are caused by the culture of men in the first damn place…

Let’s switch gears for a second, actually.

Right now, for whatever reason — let’s say El Nino when really we all know it’s climate change — the temperature is hella warm. It’s been 80 degrees here in Pennsylvania a few times already, and it’s only April. That means the ticks are out, and already in the last few days I’ve picked more ticks off me than I did all last year. I’ve seen more deer ticks, too, and deer ticks are more insidious. They bite fast and burrow quick, so by the time you’ve found them, they’re not just crawling up your skin, they’re already dug in. Their mouthparts are doing their hungry work. You gotta be real careful how you get the ticks out, because if you rip them out, they leave bits of themselves inside you, and then you get an infection — and that’s presuming you got them out quick enough, before they transmit Lyme Disease or whatever other parasite-in-a-parasite they aim to barf up into you.

I mention ticks because they’re tricky. You don’t see them. They serve mostly only themselves (though possums are good to have around because they eat hella hundreds, even thousands of ticks, a week). They’re parasites. Sucking blood and bloating like tumors — they’re an arachnid version of cancer. You have to remain vigilant. Nightly tick-checks on everybody, even the dogs, because otherwise, you’ll miss them.

That feels like what we have going here. We’ve got ticks in our culture. Latching on. Leeching blood. Staying hidden until they’re bloated up and by then, you’ve got a real problem.

The Hugo nominations came out yesterday, and in there are contained some genuinely talented and deserving candidates. (Please read Bo Bolander’s “And You Shall Know Her By The Trail Of Dead,” which is a story I love so hard I wish like sweet hot hell that I wrote it. Then go read Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti. And then check out Alyssa Wong’s “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” since you’re a smart person looking for great things to read.) Of course, the mangy curs and distempered doggies also got their grimy jaws around the throat of the thing. Inside those nominations you’ll find some, ahh, real eye-openers. I won’t go into specifics — you either know what I’m talking about or you don’t. And if you don’t, just trust me when I say, some of those categories are a real diaper fire. (Actually, if you do want a peek, Scalzi is over at the LA Times talking about it, so go point your eyeballs there.)

It’s not just in SFF.

In pen-and-paper gaming, harassment is endemic (read: “Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem” — but be advised, big blinky trigger warning there).

Harassment has been a specter hovering over the comics community, too, and that pot is set to maybe boil over (read the latest CBR article on the subject).

Nintendo kowtows to Gamergate and fires Alison Rapp, which only empowers them more.

People get pissed when there’s a woman lead in gasp two Star Wars films in a row, missing the fact that if Hollywood were really aggressive about equality, they’d make sure the next 20-30 years of action films were 90% cast with women action stars, and men in those movies would be sexy lamps in need of saving — or fridging so that the heroine is properly motivated.

There’s a sickness here. We’re covered with ticks. We call them trolls, and they are, but that’s also a way to dismiss them — as if they’re just cantankerous outliers hiding under bridges. People say, “Don’t feed the trolls,” as if that’s ever worked. I remember in elementary school they told you to ignore bullies, too, and that never worked worth a good goddamn because they just came harder at you next time, pissed that you didn’t give them the time of day. You can’t ignore ticks, you can’t ignore tumors, and you can’t ignore trolls. Ignoring them means emboldening them.

Of course, we all know that trolls aren’t contained to pop culture. This problem goes well beyond our wells, well past the geek margins we believe contain us. Pop culture is a bellwether for things. It’s the canary in the coal mine. It presages the discrimination, the transgender bathroom bills, the Trumps and the Cruzes. And it’s a mirror, too. We see in it reflected the true face of the culture, sometimes. Other times, a distorted image, like you get from a circus mirror.

Here’s what I want to believe: I want to think this is normal, and it represents overall a good thing. I want to cleave to optimism. I want to think that all of this is like a bug zapper, summoning these human horseflies to the bright and angry light where their blind rage causes them to frizzle-fry while fixed fast in the fence of coruscating electricity. As social change starts to take hold, as attitudes shift toward including more people, as the cultural landscape rumbles and shifts in a bigger and broader way, well, that’s a milkshake that brings all the manboys to the yard. And they run to the yard, angry as hornet-stung bears, and they fall into the sinkholes and crevasses, and there they lay as the ground seals back up over their heads. Their mournful stung-bear howls trapped under the mantle of a changed world.

Like I’ve said in the past:

Dinosaurs squawking at meteors. Shaking tiny, impotent arms at the sky. The Empire, wondering where the hot hell all these goddamn X-Wings came from. Shitheel harasser assholes wondering when the world stopped listening to them and their diaperbaby bleats.

The other side of me thinks this is something deeper, darker, a vein of bad mojo thrust through the whole of the culture. Sepsis, toxic shock, an infection in the blood resistant to antibiotics.

But then I look and I think how thirty years ago I didn’t know what transgender meant. How three years ago I didn’t know what genderqueer was, and now it’s in the dictionary. I think about how we’re maybe on the cusp of having our first woman president. I think too about how social media has made the assholes louder — but it’s also amplified the voices of the non-assholes, and how conversations happen, tough as they are, across an Internet that moves fast and furious with both enlightenment and ignorance. I don’t know where we are or what’s going to happen next, and I know that I ping-pong between feeling optimistic about tectonic change and pessimistic about what that change has wrought.

I also know that no matter what we can’t just sit idly by. We push back. We vote no award when shitbirds nest in our award categories. We stand by those who are harassed by the worst of our culture. We stop sheltering the monsters and start protecting the victims. We amplify voices. We close our mouths and try to listen more. We master the one-two-punch of empathy and logic. We try to be better and do better and demand better even when we ourselves are woefully imperfect. I speak to geeks and I speak to men when I say: we need to get our house in order.

We have a problem.

But I hope we also have solutions.

At the very least, let this be a call that we need to do better by those who need us. Out with the bullies. Out with the terrorists. Gone with the ticks. We find those ticks and we pluck ’em out. Then we burn them, toss them in the toilet, rain our piss upon their parasitic heads, and say bye-bye as we flush and fill the bowl with clean water once more.

(Comments closed, because, c’mon.)

I have the pleasure to know the spectral presence known as “Leanna Renee Hieber,” who does not write books so much as she breathes them effortlessly into being with sheer pneuma. She’s awesome, and so you will sit very politely and listen to her tale of publishing woe — a tale with a much happier ending, a tale that tells the message of how the best thing you can do as a writer is hang the fuck in there. Because you’re only out when you bow out.

* * *

Peoples of the written word,

I’m very lucky to call Mr. Wendig here a friend, and I’m a huge fan of his talent, sense of humor and genuinely being a good guy. I also appreciate how open and unafraid he is to talk about the most brutal sides of the publishing industry, the equally intense difficulties and joys of being a writer. So with this in mind, I bring you my personal tale in hopes of helping someone else who has hit a wall and needs to commiserate as much as needs a sign of hope, to draw back a curtain on the vagaries of publishing and the difficulties of a writer’s emotional landscape when things go wrong and right.

I’ve maintained a writing habit since I could hold a pen. I don’t remember a time without writing. I went to school for Theatre performance, writing on the side, toured around the country doing Shakespeare, got my Actor’s Equity union card and moved to New York City to decide between a life on stage or in the page. I was at a Broadway callback and all I could think about was the book I’d started 6 years prior when I was an intern at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival. Turns out I loved The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker far more than I loved Broadway (and that was A LOT). I thought to myself in that moment: if I do ONE thing before I die I HAVE to publish my wildly Gothic novel about Victorian Ghostbusters! I did that thing they tell you to do: I wrote the book of my heart and my heart was ready.

So I stopped auditioning cold, joined writers’ groups, networked, took classes, revised my book countless times after getting any valuable feedback from the few rejection letters that weren’t form- I was earning a huge stack of rejections after going through THE ENTIRE Writer’s Market and querying anyone and everything that might accept Historical Fantasy with Romantic, Suspense, Mystery and Horror elements. (I’m the epitome of cross-genre.) And then finally, after a revise and resubmit, I landed an agent. Thanks to published writer friends pointing me to a specific editor, after another revise and resubmit, my baby sold to a New York house! The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker came out in the fall of 2009, nine years after I’d begun the draft. It was a good first experience, with a great editor and team, a healthy mass-market print run that soon became 4 print runs and a Barnes & Noble bestseller. The book garnered genre awards, critical acclaim, drew some fire because my heroine is the sweetest, dearest creature in the world and some people just didn’t care for that, but the sequel came the next year, and the prequel the following.

Then the bottom dropped out. The publisher, Dorchester, went bankrupt and closed its Madison Avenue doors. Three books into a bright start, right after winning an award for the third book, I was in free-fall. I held out after the very first signs of trouble in hopes the company could turn it around, while other authors yanked their rights, I stayed on that sinking ship until there were no more lifeboats. Let me be clear that none of this was the fault of my editor or the immediate staff around me. The meltdown came from high-ups I’d never met. Authors are the lowest on the totem-pole and we were all out of luck, out lots of money, out of rights and out of print.

I tied up far more of my self-worth and emotional life into these books of my heart than I’d advise another writer to do, simply for sanity and health. It felt like my children were taken away as wards of the state. And the $20k I had put on credit cards to invest in my career, in ads, travel, conferences, author swag, etc, confident at the time that the books were doing well and I’d get that back in royalties, was $20k I was entirely on the hook for. Yes, my agent helped, but there was only so much anyone could do. There was a fight to get paperwork, a struggle to know what to do when, a mess to untangle and when Amazon bought all of Dorchester’s rights, I was in a fog. I didn’t want to be published by Amazon, that much I knew, and I didn’t want to have to self-publish. I wandered lost in the thick of a brutal depression for a long while. I somehow managed to crank out another book to get my mind off of the pain and in a desperate attempt to still stay relevant in the industry.

But there was dark stuff going on within me. Everything in the industry felt like it was on the rocks. Once rights were wrested away from Amazon’s clutches, I knew that I should do what others were doing and self-publish, but I hadn’t enjoyed what little self-publishing I had done and I didn’t have the finances to do it right in terms of hiring formatters, editors and art staff. I didn’t have energy for the marketing. I was exhausted, having a hard time making a go of it as a New York City artistic freelancer, and I was just really, really damn sad.

I was overwhelmed by massive, complicated feelings of betrayal, of incapacitating rage at being robbed of thousands upon thousands of dollars of lost payments and royalties, of no small amount of unhelpful self-pity. I was in the throes of vocational materialism; I wanted external achievements like someone else might want a Porsche. Feelings of failure were incapacitating. I didn’t know what to do artistically for comfort. I knew I couldn’t let what happened to me kill my ability to write, writing is like breathing, but my muses were in limbo.

The characters in the Strangely Beautiful saga had been my bedtime story to myself for nearly a decade. I’d envision entering the quaint little London pub where my characters all hang out together and we’d sit, chat, drink and tease Alexi, my Gothic hero until I drifted off. These particular characters are my beloved friends, a priceless flock of treasured souls. But after this happened I couldn’t even think of them anymore. They were covered by a death shroud I couldn’t seem to peel off, buried in my own complicated emotional earth. I was numb, disconnected and fragile. While I hated the prospect of self-publishing and all the logistics it entails, I couldn’t let them languish. And even though I started the process, I wanted there to be another way. Miss Percy Parker has a certain magic about her and I prayed that something out there might see her and me through.

Thankfully, enough of my self-preservation auto-pilot was on to know to say yes to opportunities, so when I was asked to attend conventions, I did, again, to stay relevant in the industry, and to be ‘seen’ even if the books I was most known for couldn’t be accessed. A performer by nature, I took to the stage of public appearances in hopes of figuring out what was next. A Paranormal Romance convention in New Orleans is where I met the knight in shining armor who rescued my children. It was a ‘right place at right time’ for me and Melissa Singer at Tor, and thankfully she was already familiar with Strangely Beautiful and wanted to do something about it. Tor had been my dream house, but I hadn’t been able to get past the front door. Now Melissa wanted to work on a new series (THE ETERNA FILES) as well as publish the STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL backlist, including the never before published finale.

Strangely Beautiful being first published when it was, despite all the things that happened to it and to me, still put me on the radar enough for this second chance. Maybe that whole idea of ‘things happen for a reason’, or even that bit about lemons and lemonade is true and wise. I learned (and am still learning) so much from that initial disaster. I’m much more cautious about how I manage investments in my career versus money coming in the door, (ProTip, by all means make time for writing and make certain reasonable investments in your work but don’t go all free-fall without a safety net). I’m aware that I have publishing PTSD so I try not to let paranoia and anger about the industry color my every thought or displace worry onto the next series. I’ve learned to examine my emotional state and artistic process as separate engines to calibrate, and give both breadth and gentleness. I must keep worry/anxiety about the industry far, far away from my writing, like going into a room where the noisy zoo of the industry isn’t allowed in. I am trying to learn that my self-worth is not defined by my books. That’s a hard one, because I feel that I was put on this earth to be a writer. But I’m better emotionally balanced when I can make that distinction. One cannot take the industry personally. You just cannot.

I’ve learned there will always be another chance, opportunity, way forward, but only if you show up. Even during this fog and tribulation, I did manage to write a YA series, the MAGIC MOST FOUL saga. All the while worried and fretting about my original babies, my favorites. I still had to do something. That writing compulsion thing came in handy. Staying busy isn’t a bad idea, treading water is better than drowning.

But my babies are back today. Today is release day for the STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL omnibus. Tor put the first books in the series together into one volume, Melissa helped me re-edit and polish both, with new scenes and content. It’s a dream come true made all the sweeter for the difficulties. Not to mention the most gorgeous cover! When I first saw the cover I wept. I can envision my precious flock again and can visit their pub in my dreams again, their death-shroud lifted like Lazarus.

I’ve shared all of this because I appreciate when other artists talk about their ups and downs, it helps with perspective. If my worst artistic nightmare can happen and those books can resurrect like the mythical Phoenix I use as a character in this series, let it be a sign of hope for all who struggle with the work that they are most passionate about, through thick and thin.

Your desire for your art and talents to go out in the world has to outweigh the fear of what will happen to it out there, because anything could. There is no more safety for your art than for any of us on any given day. Things happen. Keep writing. Keep being ‘present’. Say yes to opportunities even when everything in you wants to curl up and cry. Network, work hard and consistently. Be nice to people in the industry because you never know who might be your knight in shining armor when you most need help. Learn about the craft and yourself in equal measure. Face your fears and do it all again the next day. Because none of this ever stops or gets any easier. If it was easy, no one would write any books, because easy is boring to read.

Now this story of renewal can really grow. It is release day, so your support, purchase and interest in this series is at critical peak, and I appreciate your participation in this second chance. STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL is a Gothic styled Historical Fantasy saga (two books in one edition!) about Victorian ghostbusters saving the world, featuring quirky and lovable characters, Greek Mythology, Jack the Ripper, and love conquering evil and death. PG-13 content, good for a wide range of ages and interests. It will certainly scratch your every Gothic and Victorian itch. (Please help me make some money on these damn ghosts for once…)

Thank you and happy haunting…

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LEANNA RENEE HIEBER’s first novel, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, won two Prism Awards from RWA’s Fantasy, Futuristic & Paranormal Chapter: Best Fantasy Romance and Best First Novel and is currently in development as a Broadway musical, with Hieber writing the script. Her YA novel, Darker Still, was a Scholastic Highly Recommended Title, an INDIE NEXT selection, and a finalist for the Daphne du Maurier Award.

Leanna Renee Hieber: Website | Twitter

Strangely Beautiful: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N