Author: terribleminds (page 22 of 454)

The walking ghost phase is, for those not in the know, when one suffers a heroic dose of radiation and appears to return to full health before eventually expiring badly. It is a time of false hope before certain death.

It feels like Twitter is in that phase, right now. That might be dramatic, but Musk buying it — and in just a matter of weeks tanking it, firing everyone, trolling everyone, and allowing some of the worst people to return — does not inspire confidence. Nor should it. It’s easy to see the hemorrhaging. You feel it, honestly. This great bleeding, blanching feeling — the color going out.

I don’t wish for this. Twitter has been routinely good and bad, a place of great joy and comfort and community while also serving up a maelstrom of harassment and bad faith and mis/disinformation. It was big and messy and chaotic, but I guess it was our big and messy and chaotic. I know there’s still this feeling that it still can be, or even still is, ours — that there is value in staying and fighting, in supporting who remains, in maintaining community, and I believe that can be true. But I also am now feeling like it’s a little like insisting you can fight J.K. Rowling by promoting Harry Potter — like somehow you can take ownership of this thing from the inside when really, you’re just enriching the worst people and only helping to boost them by remaining within their ranks.

It is different than that, to be clear. The metaphor fails in a number of ways. Certainly there has been some truth that staying and resisting Musk and his influence has been… well, I don’t know how useful it’s been, but it’s been fun to watch, and certainly he’s not making any friends except for the absolute worst fucking people. It can’t be great for his public profile to be mocked relentlessly by awesome people. The joke is of course, Musk bought Twitter, but he’s the one who got owned. As a result, I think there are an increasing number of people who before might’ve thought, “Hey, maybe a Tesla might be nice,” but are now going to reconsider that decision, at the very least wondering, “Will he put Donald Trump and Kanye West into my Tesla’s OS — at least, before the car autopilots me into a wall and catches fire?”

At the same time, Musk doesn’t seem to care, and as what I suspect is a total narcissist, seems to enjoy the negative attention. (Trust me when I say, the only real way to deal with a narcissist is “flat gray rock.” They thrive on even the worst attention. Attention is attention is attention.)

There’s certainly some suspicion too that his very goal is to detonate Twitter, and I can see that from the perspective of someone who really really wants to kick the teeth out of democracy’s mouth — but it’s also hard not to wonder if he’s just, as noted, a narcissist, and an incompetent one at that. One who has been convinced by his own money that he is in fact an Iron Man genius instead of what he really is: a third-tier Batman villain shitlord eager to let every psycho jabroni out of Arkham to keep the circus going. I can’t imagine this is doing his image any good. It’s hard to uphold the notion that he’s really this Good Guy trying to Save The World and interested in Free Speech when… you just look at all the stuff he says and does over there. And after a while, it gets both ugly being trapped with that, and also, as Lincoln Michel noted, pretty boring.

And yes, I recognize the irony here: I’m linking to Twitter in a post about how Twitter is shellacking the bed with shit. Twitter is bad, yet many of us hang on, because at the moment, it remains provably the bulwark of social media. But it’s also one under siege by its owner and under revolt by its users. Maybe it’ll fall to rubble and be rebuilt. Or maybe the Chief Shitlord in charge will simply bolster the walls and build his own social media apocalypse bunker, and the rest of us will find boltholes out before the Musknauts hunt us in the vents.

As for what I’ll do?

I used Twitter a lot on my book tour for Wayward this last week, but once again I’m deleting it from my phone. I don’t need that agitation readily accessible. I will retain my account and likely transition it more to broadcast only, using it to signal boost and such, but I expect to fade away, like Marty McFly in that family photo.

(Though no, I won’t delete my account.)

As to where I am at now?

Well, I’m here, obviously.

I’ve noodled on newsletter or substack, but no firm plans there.

Instagram is reliable.

I’m at Mastodon here. I like it but it’s also still really hard to explain and in part because I’m still not sure I understand it? And individual instances seem pretty hinky and subject to fickle laws? Each instance its own weird island?

I just got onto Post.news, too, @chuckwendig there. I have little impression of it except I like the typography, and it seems like a Very Serious Place.

Then there’s the opposite — Hive.social, which so far, is the “stickiest” (honey pun?) of the sites, meaning, it’s the one I use and keep going back to because it feels pretty good, pretty natural, pretty nice. It blew up over the last day or two, I think doubling their userbase, so there are bugs — and further, it’s still in the early days, and so it only has an app, no desktop, and works better on iOS than on Android, and so forth. So it’s still rough seas, but like I said, it’s snappy, peppy, has a lot of good fun conversation already there and has been nice to see writer pals and comic folk and so forth quickly find a niche. It’s a little like if Twitter and Instagram had a baby, with Myspace as the weird uncle.

(Note, they are not the Trump-affiliated Hive, that is a different company.)

(Oh I’m also chuckwendig there.)

There has also been some agita about this, that Power Users such as myself [lol] are Pied-Pipering other people off of Twitter to this new, untrustworthy island run by untrustworthy people. So please let me assure you, I am not standing on virtue for Hive.social. Assume it could be wildly unstable. Pretend it’ll go away in a week or Milkshake Duck itself into oblivion. I dunno. What I know is that I like it right now and it’s fairly happy over there and it seems like it has its heart in the right place in terms of community and harassment and moderation, but again, it’s new, run by people I can’t vouch for, and for all I know it’s operated by a sentient Russian botnet. No idea.

I do think panic over this is a little ironic if it’s coming from people still on Twitter, because Twitter is verifiably owned by a fucking lunatic, now, hemorrhaging staff and operating with almost no actual content moderation, with a steep rise in fresh harassment — so it’s not like Twitter is somehow stable and safe. Some have said not to trust my “information” with a new social media site like Hive, but I dunno what information one thinks I’m giving them. I didn’t send them a vial of my genetic material or something. If it sucks, I’ll ditch.

Certainly there is also some feeling too of betrayal, that leaving is abandoning, that choosing to not use the site as vigorously or remain at all is tantamount to watching others drown, and I understand this. At the same time, I don’t think anyone should remain on that place if it’s not fun or interesting or if it’s serving them up a largely negative experience. I think there’s a dangerous path thinking we must somehow be obligated to a space that could become harmful. I think that stops being community and starts being a cult.

Right now, it’s just nice to feel nice somewhere that isn’t Twitter.

ANYWAY.

I may write up a more proper tour report, but I am pleased to say that the book tour was really nice, I met some very cool readers, and if you were one of them, I thank you. I also signed a lot of books for folks who couldn’t make it (often due to sickness, since there are a passel of respiratory bugs parading around out there, which I was afraid to bring home but as it turns out it was already here waiting for me since my kid is sick, oh shit).

I hope people enjoy Wayward and I’d love it if you told folks about the book and shared reviews and also bought seven more copies for yourself and then seven more copies for those copies so they can each have a family, and soon you will have a pyramid of books, and from this pyramid you can command armies. Or something. Whatever. What I mean is, leave a review if you’re able?

The holidays approacheth so if you want me to sign and personalize Wayward –or any of my books! — then you should go through Doylestown Bookshop.

Also remember I’m doing Let’s Play Books (12/4) and B&N Bethlehem (12/10) still, so you can grab books from there and come see me.

Okay! See you… *checks notes* somewhere on the internet? I’m sure there will be another dozen new social media sites next week. I will be chuckwendig on Circlezero, Frandspottr, Apple-Eater, Gl0rm, Pfft, and Substation 69. Bye.

Tomorrow, 11/15, Wayward, the sequel to 2019’s Wanderers, is released. (Though some stores are already carrying it, and if you saw me at Doylestown Bookshop on Saturday, you may already have a copy!)

The book, as described by its cover copy:

Five years ago, ordinary Americans fell under the grip of a strange new malady that caused them to sleepwalk across the country to a destination only they knew. They were followed on their quest by the shepherds: friends and family who gave up everything to protect them.

Their secret destination: Ouray, a small town in Colorado that would become one of the last outposts of civilization. Because the sleepwalking epidemic was only the first in a chain of events that led to the end of the world—and the birth of a new one.

The survivors, sleepwalkers and shepherds alike, have a dream of rebuilding human society. Among them are Benji, the scientist struggling through grief to lead the town; Marcy, the former police officer who wants only to look after the people she loves; and Shana, the teenage girl who became the first shepherd—and an unlikely hero whose courage will be needed again.

Because the people of Ouray are not the only survivors, and the world they are building is fragile. The forces of cruelty and brutality are amassing under the leadership of self-proclaimed president Ed Creel. And in the very heart of Ouray, the most powerful survivor of all is plotting its own vision for the new world: Black Swan, the A.I. who imagined the apocalypse.

Against these threats, Benji, Marcy, Shana, and the rest have only one hope: one another. Because the only way to survive the end of the world is together.

Let’s get your procurement options out of the way right now:

Indiebound | Bookshop | B&N | Amazon | Apple | Google | BAM | Powells | Kobo

There’s audio, too, narrated by the glorious Xe Sands and Dominic Hoffman:

Libro.fm or Audible are your options there.

If you want a signed, personalized copy, Malaprops has an order form, but note that the order cut off time is tomorrow (11/15) at 5pm EST.

After that, I can still sign and personalize through Doylestown Bookshop.

And, I will be on tour starting tomorrow (hence why this is posting today) — and you can definitely come see me at those stores.

Note, too, that two of these events — Malaprops and The Fountain — are hybrid events, meaning they are also broadcast virtually.

(The Fountain in-person event is at Sam Miller’s restaurant, btw, not at the bookstore. FYI!)

I think most of the events require registration, and some require masking, so check with the bookstore for sure.

There are of course many ways to support the book — you can absolutely get it from your local library, because libraries are awesome. And if they don’t have it, you can always request it. It’d also be great if you shouted about the book to the rooftops. Hell, beyond the rooftops. To the sky. To the moon. To that stupid car Elon Musk launched into space for some reason? To the furthest-flung black hole and whatever Bizarro Civilization lurks on the other side of it! It genuinely helps when you tell other human beings about the things you are excited about, so if you are so inclined to tell people this book exists, I would be grateful.

To talk a little about the book…

Why write a sequel?

As I noted when Wanderers launched, I intended for that book to be a standalone. I wanted to do a big chonky epic, and then walk away from it like it was an exploding building. That said, I said then that if people actually read the book and I had an idea for a sequel — then that would be the important chemical reaction that would get me to write a follow-up. And the first book ended up being, to be honest, more of a success than I thought it would be. It continues to do really well, and I’m really proud of that and really happy people liked the book and that the readers are showing up for it and sharing the love. It means a lot and that’s why Wayward gets to exist at all.

I’m fundamentally aware though that writing a sequel to a well-regarded book is a bit of a risk, right? Because if I write something worse, I arguably make the first one worse by proxy. It’d be like hitching a shit wagon to a Maserati — it’s only going to slow the fast car down and, y’know, probably get shit all over it.

It was a calculated risk and ultimately, selfish: I really wanted to go back to this world. I had the idea for the sequel while on tour for the first book, and these characters are characters I love very, very much. They are a cast of people I wanted deeply to revisit, to continue their stories, and see where they land.

I admittedly read one review recently of Wayward that suggested, in what I feel was a negative connotation, that it was really only for fans of the first book. Which… I mean, yeah? Obviously? I’m not going to write a sequel for people who didn’t like the first book. Isn’t that the intrinsic nature of writing a follow-up? It just seemed like such an odd comment to make. So, yes, I wrote it for the people who read the first one and who, gasp, liked it a lot. It’s not that I would be mad if this somehow broadened total readership, but the goal is to serve the people who came to the story the first time.

But, again, the real goal is to serve myself. Which sounds selfish and awful (and it is), I only mean, at the end of the day, I had more story to tell, and sometimes, that’s the thing that drives us. Also I am a monster.

Do I need to read the first book?

I would say yes, that’s the ideal. I’ve seen some folks who read only this one, and they seemed to like it and understand it — and Wayward does some work at reminding you what happened in the first one. But… yeah, it’s a follow-up. Read the first one first. I don’t know that you need to re-read it, unless you’re really hankering to, but a first read on the first book is the way to go.

Is this a big book?

It is a chonky book. It’s almost exactly the same size as the first one, weirdly. It’s around 800 pages, 280,000 words.

What did you predict now, you bastard?

Ummm. Well. I dunno. You’ll just have to read it and see? Sorry? (Real answer is of course I predict nothing on purpose. And at least in this one the pandemic from the first book appears to be over? Sorta? Maybe kinda? Ennh?)

Is there going to be a third book?

Well, same rules as the first time: if enough people check this one out and like it, and I have a story figured out — well, then away we go. (I do have a story in mind, though I wouldn’t yet call it “figured out.”) It’d definitely be a departure from these two, though, which definitely form a more complete package, narratively speaking, at least.

Does this book contain a possum?

It does! It contains at least one possum. Also, a couple of wolves. Maybe a fox. Some other animals. Definitely a golden retriever named Gumball who is, I must note with great vehemence, a very good boy.

Anything else we should know?

Just that I really appreciate you checking it out. And if you didn’t check it out, that’s fine, too, I have just taken a mental snapshot of your face and have telepathically uploaded it to the Black Swan servers so that it will forever remember who you are and what you’ve done! I’m sure it’s fine!

Also, check me out on the Dead Headspace podcast!

So, the monthly bestseller list for Middle Grade Paperbacks landed aaaaand, to my genuine shock, Dust & Grim is a New York Times Bestseller? It hit #10 on that list and — I mean, wow, whoa, what? What?? Obviously a lot of you bought the book and that’s amazing, and now here we are? I’m floored. Thank you, all, and thanks to B&N for making this book the October Monthly Pick. Thanks to my agent, Stacia Decker, and also to to my editor, Deirdre Jones, who helped make this book as weird and scary and funny as it could be. FLORG BLESS.

In other news:

Tomorrow, 3pm, I’ll be at Doylestown Bookshop at a pre-launch for the Wanderers sequel, Wayward. If you’re in the tristate area, I sure hope you come by. Event deets here. I signed a bunch there, too, for shipping pre-orders — you can see the epic stacks over at my Instagram.

And next week I will be on a tour through parts of the south! Going from Atlanta to Asheville to Charlotte to Richmond to Alexandria, then home before hitting up a few more Pennsylvania dates. All the details are here.

A reminder too that if you want a signed, personalized copy shipped to you, right now Malaprops has a special order form for exactly that purpose right here.

You will find me here at the Boston Globe talking about BOOKS I DONE LIKED and about how reading horror fiction brings me comfort.

Some places included Wayward in their NOVEMBER BOOKS coverage: Yahoo, Book Riot, tor.com.

Gonna be on some cool podcasts coming up — Dead Headspace, Terrifying Tomes, and some others. More when I have the links.

Twitter appears to now be violently diarrheaing the bed, so you can find me at the Instagram link above, or at Mastodon, which is still a thing. Maybe I’ll go back to Tumblr or start an OnlyFans page. One never knows.

Meanwhile, here are some nice things people have said about Wayward recently:

Princess Altagracia has lost everything. After a bloody civil war, her twin sister has claimed both the crown of their planet, Szayet, and the Pearl of its prophecy: a computer that contains the immortal soul of Szayet’s god.

So when the interstellar Empire of Ceiao turns its conquering eye toward Szayet, Gracia sees an opportunity. To regain her planet, Gracia places herself in the hands of the empire and its dangerous commander, Matheus Ceirran.

But winning over Matheus, to say nothing of his mercurial and compelling captain Anita, is no easy feat. And in trying to secure her planet’s sovereignty and future, Gracia will find herself torn between Matheus’s ambitions, Anita’s unpredictable desires, and the demands of the Pearl that whispers in her ear.

For Szayet’s sake and her own, she will need to become more than a princess with a silver tongue. She will have to become a queen as history has never seen before.

A storyteller’s job is the photo-negative of a biographer’s.

A biographer begins by establishing the bare facts of a life: birth and marriage, work and death. From there, she helps the reader work inward: putting the subject’s actions into context, helping the reader understand what they indicate about her and her world.

A storyteller, on the other hand, begins with the inside and works out. When I decided to restage the lives of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar as a space opera, the first thing I had to do was learn who my Cleopatra and Caesar, Gracia and Ceirran, were: how they thought, what they feared, what they hoped for, what their voices sounded like. Only from there could I begin to reveal to the reader, bit by bit, what people like this might do.

Through the what-ifs of speculative fiction, history can reveal itself…

For hundreds of years before she was born, Cleopatra’s family were priests of the cult of Alexander the Great. They considered themselves his heirs, and his memory legitimized their rule. In a sense, all of the Egyptian kings and queens of that time carried Alexander’s ghost.

Who could resist making that ghost literal? Gracia inherits an AI that claims to be Alexander the Great’s digitized soul. This meant I could write dialogue for Alexander himself—such a delight to do that it still feels like it must be cheating somehow—but it also allowed me to bring abstract ideas into the realm of the physical: legacy, royalty, succession and monarchy, cults, civilization and barbarism.

Sci-fi lets a storyteller enlarge everything. A conqueror doesn’t just burn down a village; he blows up the moon. A would-be king doesn’t just want to establish a dynasty; he wants to live forever. At the galactic scale, details become sharper, clearer—at their very best, more real than reality.

…but what-ifs don’t stop at the scientific.

There was no question of populating my imaginary galaxy with modern American views of gender and sex. For one thing, those ideas wouldn’t exist in their current form without Roman law and custom around gender, so the whole exercise would be circular. For another, Roman sex beliefs weren’t just antiquated—they were different. Making the majority of my female characters the legal property of my male characters would have been a tough pill to swallow. Having a male character explain that it’s not gay for him to have sex with a man if that man is an actor would throw the reader into a very foreign world.

I wanted to create a foreign world, but—selfishly—I wanted it to be my world, with characters’ assumptions and dreams constrained by my rules, not by Cato’s. That meant entirely abandoning the enforcement of gender roles, legally or socially. I had to put characters of all genders in every part of my story, dressing in all sorts of ways, having relationships and children in all sorts of configurations.

Now I had room for all sorts of tense gender dynamics that the reader could bring their own interpretations to—for instance, Caesar could still be a powerful, privileged older man, which the reader would certainly bring their own modern-world assumptions to! But I also had room for imagination: what if swaggering, sly, rough-and-ready Mark Antony were a woman? What if dour, proper Calpurnia, seen in history only as Caesar’s long-suffering wife, were a man? What if the real-life queer love affairs of Alexander, Caesar, and Antony were conducted openly?

History doesn’t have a beginning…

What is the beginning of the history of me? Was it when I was born? Was it the moment my parents first spoke to one another? Was it the moment my grandfather decided to move to California? Was it the moment my great-grandmother’s nephews were murdered, and her family was given their spare tickets on the ship to America? Was it the moment the tsar sent his soldiers to the town where they would commit those murders? Was it the moment my father first read me a story?

Ask the person on the street to describe Cleopatra, and they might give you an image of a queen in a snake crown, or a girl rolling out of a carpet. But Cleopatra’s history doesn’t begin in the carpet, any more than Julius Caesar’s life began when she landed on his floor. So where does it begin? With the civil war that forced her to sneak into Caesar’s rooms through subterfuge? With the death of her father, which caused that war? Does it begin with the decision of her ancestor Ptolemy to found a kingdom in Egypt after the death of his general, Alexander the Great? Does it start with the first time Alexander dreamed of conquering the world?

…but stories do.

So choosing to begin a retelling of Cleopatra’s life with any event at all felt like an oversimplification—shrinking a brilliant, complex woman to a single narrative.

But in fact, no one knew those limits better than Cleopatra herself. From the carpet to the barge to her coins to her statues, she understood the spectacle of her life: the theater of herself, its boundaries and its potential. She understood the importance of telling her own story—and she understood the difference between a story and the truth. Doing justice to her wouldn’t mean never telling a story at all. It would mean holding space for that difference, the way she would have. And this gap ended up being the central engine of The Stars Undying, and of its unreliable narrator.

Human beings are infinite. Choosing a beginning for them is reductive. But the job of a story is to reduce—and by reducing, to expand: to use something simple to reveal something complex. It is to use something as small as a map to reveal something as big as the territory. It is to use something as small as a galaxy to reveal something as big as a soul.

***

Emery Robin is a paralegal, recovering Californian, and sometime student of propaganda and art history living in New York City. 

Emery Robin: Website | Twitter | Instagram

The Stars Undying: Bookshop | Indiebound | BAM | Amazon | B&N

Sometimes I ask myself if humans are good or bad or somewhere in the middle. I wonder if we are worthy of the world, if civilization was worth its cost. Then I remember that humans invented the leafblower, and I decide I can’t wait till the octopuses and crows take over.

Right now, as I type this, a neighbor — not even a next-door neighbor, but one several houses removed — has a landscaping service featuring a trio of young white jabronis with leafblowers. These are gas-powered leafblowers. The property is, I’d guess, around a half-acre in size.

They have been there for an hour and a half. Leafblowing this entire time.

It is incredibly loud.

It sounds like this:

vvvvWWAAAHHHHHHHH

mmmMWMAAAAAAWAAAAHHHHH

NNNNAAAAHHHHHHHHHH

VVMMMAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

brum brum brum brum

HYYYAYAAAAAAAHHHHHHHNNNNHHHHNNN

It is the sound of machines screaming. Angry hot hell-machines screaming their torment into the world. And, for an extra bonus, I’ve watched these fucking dickheads doing their leafblowing, and it is, as anyone who has ever used a leafblower knows, wildly fucking inefficient. It’s like herding butterflies. It’s just trying to move a swarm of bees with a box fan. You watch these shitheads wave their black tubes around, blasting clouds of leaves and dust into the air — leaves that will not be so casually commanded, oh no. Leaves that the wind gladly puts right back from whence they came. They’re not moving leaves in a straight line. It’s chaos theory. It’s water on back of Ian Malcolm’s hand. It’s limbs akimbo, a nightmare dance of nothing done.

I watched a guy (different lawn) two weeks ago herding about a half-dozen small leaves back and forth, back and forth, with his leafblower. He’d blast them one way, but then they’d escape his intended path, so he’d go the other way, and end up back where they came from. He would’ve been more efficient had he blindfolded himself and used a pair of fucking chopsticks to do the job.

Listen.

It’s a come to Jesus moment.

Fuck your gas-powered leafblower.

Get rid of it.

Your gas-powered leafblower is a fucking nightmare. It’s a nightmare first and foremost for the environment. Just on a basic exhaust level, the pollutants a two-stroke engine leafblower emit into the world are hundreds of times worse than a goddamn automobile. (Source: Sierra Club.) I need you to reckon with that because it’s worse than even I, a person who Deeply Detests Leafblowers, expected. From Edmunds: “A consumer-grade leaf blower emits more pollutants than a 6,200-pound 2011 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor.” Also from that article: “The hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor,” said Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor at Edmunds.com. “As ridiculous as it may sound, it is more ‘green’ to ditch your yard equipment and find a way to blow leaves using a Raptor.”

Holy fucking shit. That’s awful. It’s like the leafblower was a device designed by an actual demon in order to help destroy the world.

Plus, the noise pollution is bad for people and for nature. For extra fun, the leafblowers just kick up everything you really don’t want kicked up. Dust? Yup! Mold and spores? Absolutely! Pesticides you don’t wanna breath in? Sure! Aerosolized raccoon shit? Hell yeah, bro! Time to take a big ol’ lungful of POSSUM DUNG. Mmmm. Get that all up in you.

And here’s the thing: leaves? They’re supposed to be there. They fall from trees for a reason. It’s not fucking random! They’re not mad at us and puking leaves onto our lawns because they hate us (though trees should definitely 100% hate us). Nature is a circuit! A glorious, sometimes-simple, sometimes-elaborate circuit. Trees soak up all these nutrients, some of those go into the leaves, the leaves fall to the ground, and ta-da, they redistribute those nutrients into the ground. The health of the ground is based on this very cycle. It is an essential loop. You further will discover that there are other natural necessities that come with leaf cover and leaf litter, as well. Little wonderful creatures like to chill out over the winter under leaf litter. You know how we’re killing all the insects in an insect apocalypse? Yeah. This is part of that. You ever lament the loss of fireflies (around here, we call ’em lightning bugs)? You say, “Gosh, I don’t see as many of those little glowing butts these days.” Well, this is part of why you don’t. They love those leaves. They need those leaves. (Also, they don’t need the pesticide. Relax with the fucking pesticide.) And then the birds are happy too because sometimes they like to eat those bugs.

And here someone says, “But the leaf cover kills my lawn!”

Riiiight, yeah, here’s the thing, your lawn is also bad. It is a weak, whimpering monoculture. It is a sad, non-native, largely-lifeless inert carbon-useless golf-green that has somehow become The Way Our Lawns Must Look. The reason leaf cover kills it is because your lawn is shit. It’s thin piss. It is landscaping gruel. You ever walk through a forest, an actual forest, and lament how the leaves have killed the grass there? No? You know why? BECAUSE THAT’S HOW IT’S SUPPOSED TO LOOK. That’s just nature! It’s supposed to be that way! The leaves fall! It’s fine! It’s good, even! Even if you really really want that lawn, did you know there are native grasses you can use? And you don’t even need to use grasses? Our lawn is a diverse nonsense array of dozens and dozens of different plants that we don’t fertilize and we don’t spray with pesticide or herbicide and even on drought days it’s green and healthy-looking and yes, some of it is invasive, and I combat the invasive stuff with aggressive native spreaders, and turns out, those native spreaders have flowers and they bring bugs and pollinators and birds who want the bugs and who want the seeds and it’s really pretty and I love it and I don’t ever have to strap a soot-belching silence-murdering jet engine to my back to protect it from the big mean leaves that fall from the big mean trees. What a wonder!

(Oh, and we get so many fireflies it is legit like a religious experience.)

And yes, I acknowledge here that sometimes you have to move some leaves around. You want to clear walkways. You want to clear some ditches and drains. You may even want some yard space where kids can run without slipping on wet leaves. I acknowledge this.

But have you ever considered… using a rake? Hell, okay, even if you really love the (in)efficiency of a leafblower, they make electric ones! They’re really good now! And super quiet! And not barfing shit into the air! It’s amazing!

Anyway.

To sum up:

You’re literally killing the world to crappily usher leaves around, leaves that should be largely left alone because they’re supposed to be there.

Stop trying to control nature. You’re a part of it, not above it, not separate from it, you are not its master. We have to start learning to live in synchronicity with the world, because right now? We are the invasive species.

Your gas-powered leafblower is shitty and bad and should be banned.

The end.

P.S., the leafblowers finally stopped. It took them almost two hours. Christ.

Effects Vary features 22 stories of dark fiction and literary horror that explore the shadow side of love, loss, and family. From an aging TV star’s murderous plan to rekindle her glory days, to a father who returns from war forever changed, from human lab rats who die again and again, to a farmer who obeys the dreadful commands of the sky, these stories, four of them award winners, blur the thin line between reality and the darkest reaches of the imagination.This collection contains a decade’s worth of stories, 22 in all. Paring 22 different writing journeys down to five lessons-learned is a challenge, and a lesson itself. Each story posed its own creative puzzle and obstacle course.

***

Each writing voyage had its own taste of heaven and hell.

Maybe that’s best the place to start? Heaven and hell. Why not? Hell first, then we ascend.

1. Writing Is Hell

While writing many of these stories I experienced the same amnesiac moment, either when I jotted the first words or stumbled through a later draft: “How did I do this last time? And the time before that?” Or the more pressing question, “How will I do it again?”

I sometimes feel writers exist in some cosmic game of Chutes and Ladders. No matter how high we climb the board we must always start from scratch, and story progress is almost never linear.

Sometimes a story starts like a downhill slalom on virgin snow, pulled by the gravity of the imagination. Other times it’s a tortuous mountain ascent, through prickly trees that obscure the view, over shaky ground that crumbles underfoot.

What I’ve learned writing this collection—and continue to learn—is that each story teaches you how to write it. Eventually. Often, it’s a matter of trusting and following the character’s voice. Sometimes it’s a simple matter of erasure. On revisions, I often realize the first two pages are merely throat clearing; punch delete and with the verbal phlegm cleared, things, miraculously, fall into place. As if the story were a sculpture, and once the excess material is chiseled away, a better, truer, form reveals itself.

On occasion, the end comes first. You throw it like a stone in the distance, then the writer ambles toward it, on a trail you make as you go.

Word by word, draft by draft, ass in chair, the writer climbs the ladder out of hell, till the story is done. Until the next story starts, you slide back to the beginning, and amnesia strikes again.

2. Writing Is Heaven

Occasionally, though, you get a gift from above. A story springs straight out of your head, Athena-like, fully born, and ready to amble into the world. No 18 drafts to reach a publishable stage. Rather, the dictation comes from above or below and you just surrender and follow. “We Is We” was one of those rare stories. I wrote it in two sittings and the published version is barely altered from the first draft.

I suppose this isn’t so much a lesson learned as an appeal to the forces. Send me more of that mojo. Teach me the order of sigils and sacrifices. I’ll sharpen my knives and prepare the altar. I’ll watch the clouds, augur the birds, and await your reply.

3. The Power of Reefer Madness

I have a friend, a talented writer, who decided Bombay Sapphire was the ultimate lubricant for his creative machinery. Yes, it’s an old myth that never seems to die, a kind of broken syllogism fashioned from a causal fallacy: So many great writers were heavy drinkers, therefore heavy drinking makes you a great writer. My friend, sadly, failed to become a great writer. He did, however, succeed in becoming an alcoholic—though he’s ten years sober now, bless him.

I love whiskey, wine, and gin, but I don’t find drinking and writing to be an especially fruitful combination—alcohol can make me sleepy or fuzzed, the opposite of what a writer needs. I’ve always been more of a pot smoker and I’ve learned, for me, writing and editing with marijuana can be hugely beneficial.

I don’t think there’s a story in this collection I didn’t work on, at least once, stoned. Of course, I edited all of them sober as a flagpole, too. But writing stoned offers invaluable, temporary powers—if you’re seasoned enough to read and write while high.

For one, pot offers new perspective. It alters the angle on the work. It allows the mind to spread a bit wider when faced with a story dead end or a line that refuses to hammer into shape. It also makes the scary, scarier. Reading high, I’ve felt my heart stutter when working through many of these stories, spellbound—largely thanks to Maryjane—by my own creations.

It’s not an infallible method. But what creative method is? For me, I’ve learned writing high can take off the guardrails. It can free the imagination and silence the censor (or turns it up to 11, as needed). It can also make you vulnerable and open in the best of ways. Rimbaud said it better than anyone: “The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.” I love the decadent writers and their lineage. They, along with many other writers, exist in the cornerstone of this collection.

If I lived in the States maybe I’d market my own pot strain. I’d call it The Green Muse and I’d be rich enough to retire.

4. Creative Theft or How I Learned to Ignore the Anxiety of Influence and Steal Better

Speaking of cornerstones, as the recently deceased genius Jean-Luc Godard said, “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.” I think this collection taught me to be a better thief, and I’m hard-pressed to think of someone I’ve stolen more from than Brian Evenson.

I had the good fortune of meeting Evenson at Brown, my last year in the MFA program there. He was applying for a teaching job and I was a student rep. on the search committee that eventually hired him. Unfortunately, as I graduated that year, I didn’t get a chance to study with him, not until he taught a seminar on horror fiction in Romania.

In Romania, Brian lived up to his reputation. Not only is he one of the greatest living writers of dark fiction, he’s also a superb teacher—not to mention one of the nicest, most generous, humans I’ve ever met. He gave us three writing prompts and two of those turned into stories in this collection. The titular story, Effects Vary, was based on a prompt he gave about meeting your own doppelgänger. The story, like many others, expanded from a flash piece to a full-blown tale of cosmic weirdness. It was only after I finished that I realized I’d been channeling Brian throughout the piece, long after Romania. Rather than rework the piece to cut the Evenson-esque bits, I embraced his influence on the final edits. Á la Evenson, I stripped the language barer, and veered the end toward more uncertainty. Sometimes leaning into your influences works wonders.

That’s what I learned. Steal smarter and deeper, for the work will always be your own in the end. So, for Effects Vary, additional nods to Laird Barron, Cormac McCarthy, George Saunders, Samantha Hunt, Flannery O’Conner and so many others. These authors knit their work into my flesh, and thus they bleed into the stories here.

An interesting addendum: when Brian generously agreed to blurb this book, he said that particular story was his favorite in the collection. Perhaps we most love the children of others who resemble our own.

5. Embrace Your Terrified Inner Child

As a kid, I was a scaredy-cat with an overactive imagination. I saw monsters in closets and dark corners. I couldn’t finish the local carnival’s haunted house, though its effects were cheap and poorly done. I had to exit, shamefaced, back through the entrance right after the first gimmick—a lit-up wolfman accompanied by a piercing buzzer.

Once, on the only sleepover night of my day camp, a counselor told a scary story about a queen ant crawling in a camper’s ear and laying its eggs. “It happened right where you’re sleeping,” he said. “Sleeping on a tarp on the grass, just like you guys.” You can guess what happened to the camper. Yup, she scratched her face off when the eggs hatched. The story left me terrified and in tears. They had to call my mother to pick me up and drive me home.

It’s embarrassing to remember these incidents and the cowardly child I once was. Though I’m grateful for that scaredy-cat kid. My fantasy-prone imagination has served me well as a writer. And something shifted in my teen years, part of that weird and terrible morphing called puberty. I began to crave that rush of fear, to seek it out in films and books. It took more and more to scare me and still does. Few movies or books do it. I might get creeped out, grossed out, or filled with dread, but rarely am I terrified.

That’s what I learned to seek in many of these stories. That vulnerable, naked terror, where the earth beneath grows flimsy and the world stops making sense. I tried to reach my inner child and scare the crap out of him.

Among other reasons, I realized I write horror to make that kid in all of us want to sprint out of the haunted house or call her mommy to take her home. Only she can’t because she’s trapped by my story, compelled to turn the page.

Children feel terror differently. The earth wobbles when they’re afraid. And true terror makes children of us all. Thank you, scaredy-cat child, for teaching me the meaning and value of bowel-loosening, eye-widening fear. Now let me tell you another story…

***

Michael Harris Cohen has published stories in Conjunctions, The Dark Magazine, Pseudopod, Apparition Lit. and numerous anthologies. He’s a recipient of the New Century Writer’s Scholarship from Zoetrope: All-Story, a Fulbright grant for literary translation, and fellowships from the OMI International Arts Center for Writers, Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Artist’s Residency, the Künstlerdorf Schöppingen Foundation, and Hawthornden Castle. He’s won F(r)iction‘s short story contest, judged by Mercedes M. Yardley, The Modern Grimmoire Literary Prize, as well as Mixer Publishing’s Sex, Violence and Satire prize, judged by Stephen Graham Jones. He lives in Sofia, Bulgaria with his wife and daughters and teaches creatives writing and literature at the American University in Bulgaria. You can find him online at Michaelharriscohen.net and @fictionknot.

Effects Vary: Amazon