AS THE PROPHECY FORETOLD, the holidays again gather at the margins, waiting to pounce and pin us to the ground under the weight of a cooked turkey, a tower of presents teetering above us, ready to fall. And so comes the time when you may want a TOME OF WENDIG (not a D&D artifact, though it should be) for yourself or someone in your life, and here is how you do that.
I can sign and personalize any of my books through Doylestown Bookshop, and they will ship these books right to you. Maybe via some sort of catapult device. Probably through like, the UPS, tho, but I really don’t know for sure, so let’s quietly hope that catapult is an option. You order the books and then you tell them you want the books signed and/or personalized and/or how you want them personalized, and I will do this thing.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.
If if if you order a copy of Black River Orchard…
I will do two additional things.
a) I will include a sticker for you in the book (first come first serve, though I do have quite a few) of an evil apple, likely by the delightful Natalie Metzger (her designs above at the fore of the post), though I also have some I bought from Etsy, which are cool, too.
b) I will name a brand new evil apple in the book, written in pen, invented from my own foolish mind and out of the sinister ether. This evil apple is just for you. No one else will have this evil apple. It is your evil apple alone.
But, you can request signed/personalized copies of really any of my in-print books there, too. Like Book of Accidents, Wanderers, Wayward, Gentle Writing Advice, Dust & Grim, and more. (Oh, also, if you buy any of the Miriam Black books, I will sign them and predict your demise. For fun!)
MERRY HAPPY APPLEMAS, FRIENDS
Buy books. Let me scar them with my inky leavings! Bye!
HEY THERE. If you’re a Pennsylvania (or NJ, or DE?) person, I’ve got a new event for you if you wanna come hang out with me and I’ll chat and sign your books (like ahem ahem ahem my newest, Black River Orchard) and I might even tell you my favorite apple.
I’ll be at the B&N Montgomeryville this Saturday, 11/11, at 2PM.
That’s it, that’s the lesson. I said it in the post headline. You can go home now.
OKAY FINE WAIT don’t go home.
So, it is once again National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo, and maybe you’re doing it, maybe you’re not, maybe you’ll succeed at the task, maybe you will be overwhelmed by holiday stress and global chaos, maybe you’ll be eaten by bears, I don’t know you, I don’t know your life.
What I know is this:
When writing, and that’s true for this month or any other month, it is entirely acceptable to blow up your process with a variety of metaphorical explosives. We all think we know how we do things. We think we know how we write. We think we know how we tell stories. Over time we super-glue ourselves to our process, and in fact that process can become a part of us in a problematic way as we mythologize and even fetishize said process. (Weirder still, we will then sometimes attempt to turn our process from mythology and fetish to straight up cult and religion — look no further than any TEN WAYS YOU MUST WRITE, YOU FUCKING HEATHEN lists.) I’m guilty of this as anybody, to be clear! I definitely put a ring on my process and stayed married to it long beyond its value. Hell, the very start of my novel-writing career was born out of me shedding some rather foolish ideas I had about my process and the wifty head-in-clouds notions that governed it at the time.
*clears throat, tries to escape this linguistic oubliette*
Anyway, my point is ultimately this: you’re gonna eventually hit a speedbump or even a wall where you discover that the Way You Write is simply no longer working. Why that is, I don’t know, because again, I am not you, I don’t know your life. But it’ll happen. And when that does, you have to be willing to change it up. Change when you write. Evening to morning, morning to evening. Change where you write: stop writing in that Starbucks, or fuck, start writing in a Starbucks, write in the Starbucks bathroom, get behind the counter and write your story in latte foam, go sit with a stranger at Starbucks and steal their laptop and write your story on it. Change something. Change the font. Change the genre. Genre the POV, the tense, who the protagonist is. Change the software, ditch the software and write by hand, ditch the notebook and write by carving your story into the dirt with a tame, content-to-be-clutched live raven. If you write every day, try writing only on the weekends. If you write only on the weekends, try writing every day. Write a little every day or a lot one day. Just–you know, just fuck some shit up.
Explode it. Boom.
Will it fix everything? Maybe not. Will it fix anything? Shit if I know. But it’s something to try, because —
It’s the only way you’ll know. It won’t solve every problem. It’s not a magical fix. But every story is different and some demand different processes. Further, you’re a different writer when you start a story than you were when you last finished one–guaranteed, you’re a new person. We shed our authorial skin regularly and sometimes that means you have to do some adjustments. Life is complicated. Our minds are chaos. Our biology is on a roulette wheel. Go with the flow and be willing to come at the story from different directions. Gotta be willing to get messy and get weird with it.
So, whether you’re doing NaNoWriMo or you’re just writing to write–
Go! Get out of here, you scamp. You know the task at hand.
Get messy.
Get weird.
Try new stuff.
*opens the airlock and boots you out of it*
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A small town is transformed when seven strange trees begin bearing magical apples in this masterpiece of horror from the author of Wanderers and The Book of Accidents.“
Chuck Wendig is one of my very favorite storytellers. Black River Orchard is a deep, dark, luscious tale that creeps up on you and doesn’t let go.”—Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus
It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there.
Because in that town there is an orchard, and in that orchard, seven most unusual trees. And from those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black.
Take a bite of one of these apples, and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger. More vital. More yourself, you will believe. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing—and become darker.
This is what happens when the townsfolk discover the secret of the orchard. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples . . . and what’s the harm, if it is making them all happier, more confident, more powerful?
Even if something else is buried in the orchard besides the seeds of these extraordinary trees: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town.
But now the leaves are falling. The days grow darker. It’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.
Not sure why, or for how long, but The Book of Accidents is a mere $2.99 for your various KOBOMACHINES and KINDLEDONGLES. So, if you’re like me and spooky season is an all-year-round affair, well, you know what to do.
Amazon, Kobo, B&N, though not Apple for some reason? Shrug.
Let’s unpack why, a little bit. Though some of this (maybe even all of this) will be blisteringly obvious, I feel it all needs restating because sometimes we just need to be reminded about things. I certainly do. The only reason I wear pants is my wife is always like, “hey, you, pants” before I leave the house in the morning. Admittedly the embarrassment I’d have suffered upon leaving said house would’ve been minor, since I work in a shed in the yard, so the most I’d have done would be to flash my underdrawers at various noisy robins and probably a squirrel or three. But still: it’s a helpful reminder.
And so I remind you:
Reviews matter for, say it with me, books and their authors.
Here, then, is why:
First, they’re a more generalized variant of “word-of-mouth.” It’s not you telling a single friend about a book (which is also very good and you should do that), but rather, telling the world about a book. Our online circle of trust is larger than our in-person one, these days — though fractured social media has crumbled that cookie, I fear, thus breaking the circle — and reviews can reach that circle of trust. Which allows the book to echo out like a song or a sound that others can hear. It’s nice. It helps.
Second, and please understand that this slicks my tongue with foulness just to say buuuut, THE ALMIGHTY ALGORITHM. Unfortunately, online visibility is subject to the whims of deranged digital robots, and one way to goose an algorithm is through leaving reviews for the books you love. That means leaving reviews on your choice of social media (though some are blessedly ungoverned by Algorithms), or even better, on sites like Goodreads or Amazon. (You can leave a review at Amazon even if you didn’t buy the book there!) Also true for B&N and Apple and Kobo and so forth.
Third, sometimes those reviews have other side benefits as well. Goodreads will do their Goodreads Choice Awards and also sometimes sum up some of the best reviewed books of XYZ genre — The Book of Accidents made a horror list of theirs (Readers’ Top 66 Horror Novels of the Past Three Years, which is admittedly sort of arbitrary but hey whatever) exactly because it has the aggregate review score and number to be included. Sometimes outlets will use the number of reviews to determine whether or not a book is going to get coverage or not. It’s not a great system and I don’t love it, to be clear, but it’s how shit works and we are sadly subject to its callous whims.
Third, and okay, this isn’t the most vital reason but — it’s nice! It’s nice to get positive reviews. I mean, it’s less nice to get bad reviews, and I don’t read those. (And please get shut of the notion that we should read them or that we should view them as instructive. I even hear some authors say this sometimes, “Well, I like to read my bad reviews in case they contain something useful.” They don’t. I don’t mean they’re a bad phenomenon or that people shouldn’t write negative reviews! I only mean, they’re not for us. They’re for other readers. Reviews are readers talking to readers.)
Again, I don’t believe readers owe us authors anything at all. You are not obligated morally or spiritually to leave a review if you read a book of ours, though not leaving a review does damn you to a purgatory where you never get to read a book again and instead have to watch endless Life Hack TikToks except they’re the kind of life hacks where they’re not life hacks at all but just people discovering how a product is actually already supposed to be used? Or like, basic-ass life hacks like the kind your mother would’ve told you had you listened to her years ago about how to open a pickle jar or stop pasta water from fizzing over? Beyond that, you’re not obligated at all. BUT it is nice and we appreciate it and you get a gold star in our hearts if you do.
So, if you’ve read Black River Orchard — or really any book by any author — and loved it, it’s great to talk about it, and also amazing if “talking about it” includes leaving a review somewhere out in the world.
We love you. If you love us. OUR LOVE IS CONDITIONAL I AM SORRY okay not really we love you anyway. Even if you don’t leave a review.
*side-eye*
LET’S SEE WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON
Well! I am back from my second leg of the Black River Orchard tour — this one, out west! — and it was pretty gosh dang spectacular. The events were all stellar and so many great readers came out to these wonderful bookstores and I felt bathed in booklove and and probably also apple sweat. I do think a special shout-out must go to Montana Book Company, in Helena, MT, not just because Charlie and Chelsia are an absolute delight, and not just because they’re a great bookstore fighting the good fight in honestly a pretty red-red-red state, but, selfishly, because they fucking brought it. Like, real-talk, I went there expecting a good event but maybe not a huge one? Something fun, intimate, easy, chill. Well, I was wrong — er, not about the fun or chill part, but about the size of the event. It was huge. They put out all these empty chairs and in my heart I was like, yeah no they’re not filling these seats, and then they pretty much filled those seats? It was wild. Such a cool crowd and the two of them also showed me around their town and — it was the best.
Also shout-out to Sadie Hartmann, YE MONSTROUS MOTHER HORROR, who has been a pal for a long time (and who long time readers of this site should know) — Sadie was my conversation partner in Seattle and is unsurprisingly so thoughtful with her questions and I hope to have more events with her in the future. (And please, if you’ve not checked out 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered, uhh, hello, do so immediately? Do not wait! Horror doesn’t stay trapped by Halloween, you’re gonna need this book every day of the year, it’s that good. The coolest thing is that the authors recommended in that book will then sign the book, and I tend to sign it like it’s a yearbook. It’s slick and cool and go get it.)
And a final shout-out goes to Natalie Metzger, who came to the Portland event at Powell’s and handed me a whole container (which I erm stole) of amazingly creepily delightful EVIL APPLE stickers, which some of you will receive in your prize packs from the pre-order contest. Natalie also did the wallpaper at the fore of this post. Natalie’s art is ever-delightful and I remind you that she was the artist on our book, You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton, which ahem ahem ahem is a good gift for people who need a weird pick-me-up in their lives. Ahem ahem ahem, holidays, ahem.
(Thanks also to all who brought me apples and books and other treats along the way, including those intrepid readers who realized I was travel-weary from traveling all day into Denver and they procured for me a LIFE-GIVING container of Panera’s mac and cheese which honestly is RILL GOOD?)
Also I’m literally just noticing right now, while Googling the book for some reviews, that, uhh, Black River Orchard was a USA Today bestseller last week?? It came in at #59??? I had no idea. I am not lying to you when I am saying I am truly just seeing this now as I type this paragraph. You can check the list yourself — I am stunned. Am I hallucinating? Huh. Wow. Whoa.
*clears throat*
*stares at the wall for a bit*
*shakes it off*
Anyway here are more nice things people said about the book!
“Pour yourself some cider when sitting down with this huge (609 pp.) tome, set in small-town Pennsylvania. After several painstaking years, Dan Paxson’s apple trees have finally fostered a fruit his teen daughter has named the Ruby Slipper. Local residents become ravenous for its delicious taste – and the apple’s powerful aftereffects – but there’s something much more evil at root in this story of social status and rural terror.”
“Chuck Wendig will make you think twice about autumnal apple picking in this contemporary fairy tale with a spooky bite. When Calla’s dad Dan plants an unusual orchard in their town of Harrow, it initially bears uniquely delicious fruit that makes everyone’s lives better, brighter, stronger. But the townspeople aren’t just consuming apples; they’re inviting madness into their hearts, turning more violent and inhuman, as a dark force waits over a century to reap its own harvest.”
“Chuck Wendig masterfully explores the irresistible allure of the Ruby Slipper apple, the darkness it awakens within the human psyche, and the powerful forces that seek to exploit its supernatural abilities. In the midst of this tantalizing mystery, the characters are forced to confront their deepest desires and confront the repercussions of their actions, in a thrilling narrative that leaves readers both enthralled and haunted until the very last page. One of the finest works from Mr. Wendig to date.”
“Wendig’s skill in weaving together the small and large, local and universal, personal and political, so it’s clear that they are so enmeshed that the one is informed by and influenced by the other and cannot be extricated without great effort—in fact, cannot be extricated without delusion—renders this novel a cautionary tale well worth reading in our current sociopolitical climate. His ability to tell a compelling story with lush description, humor, and empathy amid the horror renders it just plain fun to read.”
Culturefly included it on a list of horror novels to get you in the Halloweeny er okay that sounds weird HalloweenISH? mood:
“Black River Orchard is a big book, but boy does Wendig make the most of the daunting page count. With elements of folk horror and psychological suspense, this multi POV, character-driven novel is atmospheric, unique and downright weird in the best of ways. You’ll never look at an apple the same way again.“
“So yes, this is a big book, like many of Wendig’s books are, but like his previous novels Black River Orchard is paced so well and is so addictive that it reads very, very fast. This nearly 700 page books took me maybe four days to finish because if I wasn’t dealing with the day to day responsibilities of my life, I was reading.”
Say hello to Mike Lucifer, Spiritual Consultant. He’s back in town to take care of business. Unfortunately, when business is good, things must be very, very bad. After two years trying to run away from his past, Mike Lucifer’s back in his office less than ten minutes when a persistent young woman shows up asking for help: her boyfriend’s been possessed by a demon.
That’s exactly the kind of mess that drove him from his hometown of Boston to a sunny beach—and the bottom of a bottle—in the first place. But there are some problems that even booze can’t drown, and while Lucifer may be no hero, his dwindling bank account provides a thousand reasons to take the case.
No sooner is he back in the game then the complications and corpses start to add up. The boyfriend’s not possessed—he’s dead. The tech company where he worked is looking shadier by the second. And Lucifer’s client definitely knows more than she should…about everything. The deeper Lucifer digs, the more he wonders if whatever sinister entity lurks behind this case wants him to be the last to die…
In the immortal words of Whitesnake, here I go again. You might think that I, having already published a handful of books, have nothing left to learn, but I’m here to tell you that—surprise!—the world is just chock-a-block full of things that I haven’t learned yet. Or things I have learned but forgot because my brain has got a real unhelpful “last in first out” system going on.
Anyway, let’s learn some stuff. Together.
First things first
After four books written in third-person narration that jumps between protagonists, All Souls Lost is the first time I’ve written a novel focusing on a single protagonist, written entirely in first person. (Well, one that saw the light of day, anyway.)
What I learned from that is that I absolutely love it. So much so that I’m writing in first person RIGHT NOW.
Being inside a character’s head, finding their own unique voice, is a blast. And it gives me the freedom to do all sorts of things that I at times struggled do in even a close third-person narration, leveraging an almost stream-of-consciousness style. It doesn’t hurt that my protagonist, Mike Lucifer, is a bit of a smart-ass, and yes, before you ask, writing that does come rather naturally to me.
I also learned that first-person narration has its challenges: for example, your character can only ever know what your character knows. It’s like going from a big blockbuster to shooting an indie movie with a handheld camera. Plus every sentence, every paragraph, has to be infused with the character’s sensibility—you can’t really take a page off. Still, it’s the good type of challenge to have.
Terminate with extreme prejudice
Okay, I admit it: I have a tendency to the tangential. A predilection for digression. A whim for wandering. Basically, I like putting extra shit in my books. I’m not going to say that’s unequivocally bad; sometimes a little detail that seems unimportant adds color, or sometimes it’s just fun (never underestimate the value of fun). But when I set out to write a taut 80,000 word novel, all those extra bits can add up and detract from that nice, tight story.
The “good” thing about working on a book for many, many years is that you spend a lot of time revising. I mean, I hate revising (don’t believe any writer who tells you they like revising, they’re damn liars—we all prefer to write it correctly the first time), but all that time and repeated exposure does help you get some distance from a piece. You stop looking at it as your adorable little baby, cooing and gurgling in soft focus, and start seeing it as the toddler it is, screaming as it throws a bowl full of spaghetti onto the floor for the third time today.
Let me tell you, it gets a whole lot easier to start paring words, sentences, and even whole chapters out of your draft after you’ve read it six or seven times. Here’s the thing, though: I’m an inveterate hoarder when it comes to writing. I don’t delete things; I just shunt them off into a separate file because you never know when you might want to drop something back in. Or use it somewhere else. But I can honestly say this book got more trims than any I’ve written before: the novel ended up around 77,000 words while my file of cuts and trims clocked in at 69,000. That’s where you’ve got to be brutal: If it doesn’t fit, lose it. If only I could bring myself to apply the same principle to my sock drawer.
Write what you know
It may surprise readers of my space espionage novels to know that I have neither been to space nor ever been an intelligence operative. (That you can prove.) Did that make readers thrown down my books in disgust as the fabricated work of a charlatan? I don’t know, maybe! People are weird like that.
But one big thread in All Souls Lost involves some shady goings-on at a big tech company and, as it happens, that’s something I do know a thing or two about: I’ve covered the tech industry as a journalist for the better part of two decades. Might Paradigm, said company in the book, bear a surprising resemblance to a noted big tech company in our own world? I’ll never tell! (Unless you ask me.) Does that help infuse it with a real sense of vraisemblance, as the French say? Look, I don’t know what that means, but those folks invented the croissant, so they’re clearly onto something: let’s say yes.
I also chose to set this book in my own backyard of Somerville, Massachusetts. As a result, a lot of the locations are lifted directly from real life, which helps add both a bit of realism and some local flavor. Though I do have to cop to the fact that I idealized some elements of life in this city—specifically how fast you can get between any two places.
Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know
You can’t know everything. Believe me, I’ve tried.
But that’s okay. Every writer, sooner or later, is going to run into something that they don’t know. I’m here to tell you that not only is it okay not to know something, but it’s okay to make it up. I’m not talking “I don’t know what the capital of Oklahoma is”—if you can look it up, by all means, do so—but it’s okay if you don’t know exactly what thek interior of a 1983 Volkswagen Rabbit smelled like after baking in the sun all day, or exactly how many steps are at the entrance of the Boston Public Library. It’s cool, I’m giving you permission to fudge it. Because unless it’s absolutely critical to the story, you can just make it whatever you want—that is, hands down, the best part of being a fiction writer.
Besides, readers love to tell you when you got something wrong, so just look at it as giving them something to look forward to.
I just want to celebrate
This book’s path to publication didn’t go the way I expected. I started writing it nine years ago, and when it debuts next week it will be primarily as an ebook (though audiobook and print-on-demand versions will be available as well). I’d had dreams of a big publisher deal with a huge publicity campaign, maybe even my first hardcover release, but that simply wasn’t to be. While the book got close to acquisition several times, it never could quite make it over that last hurdle.
But my agent, Joshua Bilmes, believed in the book, and proposed that rather than simply shelving it on the island of misfit stories, the agency itself publish it as part of its ebook program. The support and enthusiasm for All Souls Lost from everyone at the agency who’s been involved in the process has been a bulwark against the sometimes unforgiving world of publishing, and given that writing is usually a pretty solitary occupation, it’s always nice to feel like you’ve got people in your corner.
So even though it’s not exactly the scenario I had expected and dreamed of, I’ve learned to be okay with that. I dearly love this book—I’m not afraid to say it, and my straight-shooting wife says it’s her favorite too, so take that for what it’s worth. But the important thing is that you get to read it. No matter how it sells, no matter how it’s received, I wrote a story that I love and put it out into the world; everything besides that is gravy.
But, uh, I would really appreciate if you’d buy it.
