Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
Yammerings and Babblings
AHOY-HOY.
It’s time to announce the Invasive Photo Contest winners!
First, you can go here and see the current entries.
Now, time to announce the random draw, who will win a Harper Voyager prize pack…
And now, my pick, which was a tough one — I kept bouncing back and forth between three of them, but in the end, this one was the inevitable winner, I think:
Congrats to both Steven Voelker and Corey Peterson! I’ll be emailing you shortly…
*stomps feet like petulant child*
I DEMAND THINGS
I DEMAND YOU, VIDEO GAME, CHANGE FOR MY FICKLE WHIMS
*kicks sand*
*pouts*
*stabs somebody*
Okay, I apologize for my tantrum.
I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky. A lot. I love it. It is oddly relaxing and calming. It is punctuated with moments of bizarre beauty. It skips along to moments of emergent narrative, like the time I lost my ship, or the time I lodged my ship between some rocks (due to a bug, admittedly) on a high security sentinel planet with few resources — I had to move hell and highwater just to repair the ship and get it summoned to an outpost I found halfway across the planet.
This is a game that highlights the journey over the destination. It is experiential and strange.
It’s also occasionally very hollow.
What I mean is, it often feels not like I’m traversing a real universe (which, obviously, I’m not, though it is the game’s job to convince me that I am) — but rather, that I’m traversing a backlot set at a movie studio. I feel like at any moment I could walk up to one of the creatures, or the cliffs, or the alien outposts, and I could kick them over. A cardboard proxy would fall with the illusion neatly spoiled. It all feels like vapor. Like none of it really matters. Sometimes I feel like a space tourist, which is exciting in its own special way, like I’m collecting postcards on my lonely voyage through the interior of the universe. Other times I feel as if I’m haunting the universe like a ghost just passing through, ineffective and unseen.
I thought it would be interesting (for me, maybe not for you) to put together THE THINGS WOT I’D LIKE TO SEE in this game. Just as an experiment of me shouting into the void to see if the void answers back. So, here we go. Things I wanna see in No Man’s Sky, starting now —
1) I WANT THINGS TO MATTER. Jesus, god, half this game feels like the knob that makes the toast darker on the toaster — it says it does something, and you spin spin spin the knob, but the toaster is gonna make the toast as dark as it jolly well fucking pleases. The knob is an illusion. The cake is a lie. And No Man’s Sky is full of inconsequentiality. The creatures you find fake an ecology, but they have none. They don’t eat. They don’t fuck. Some try to kill you and most don’t. They amble about, purely decorative. Sometimes you feed them and they shit like, nickel or other elements? I dunno. It’s not just them. So much of the game seems disconnected from the larger system. I don’t know that my standing with the alien races matters. I don’t know that me learning their vocabulary matters. If I name a creature or a place or a fucking cactus, what does it matter? Who will see it? (I’ve gone back to worlds and found my names erased or changed — some discoveries suddenly undiscovered.) The game fakes complexity. It fakes connections between systems. But most of it is a painting of complexity — the suggestion of connection without anything hooked up to anything else.
2) I WANT TO OWN STUFF. Right now, the game allows you three things: a suit, a tool, a ship. I like this, it’s simple. And I like how you upgrade these things and they stay with you. You carry them on your journey, and you have nothing else to call your own. That’s interesting philosophically and narratively, but over time, it’s less interesting as a game mechanic. What I mean is, we are given a bounty of riches in a nearly endless, infinite universe. Planets of such volatility and beauty make for interesting travel — but once in a while, I want to do more than simply be a tourist. I don’t want to be an explorer — I want to be a fucking settler. I want to find a place and stay for a while. I believe this is changing soon with the addition of building bases and capitol ships, but boy howdy, would I like a little Minecraft injected into this game. Minecraft gives me a procedural world and I can wander aimlessly — or I can hunker down and build a fort. Or a castle. Or a palace. Or a statue to my own brilliance. I want to own planets. I want to settle. I want to make mining operations and have droids do shit for me and I want to make spaceships that I can sell to other people. Or, at least, I want the ability to build a fucking house where I can live and have a Space Dog and I can park my multitool and take a shit or have a nap or — really, something, anything that gives me a sense of intimacy and permanence. Let me construct. Let me sculpt. Let me settle the world on which I’m standing should I so choose.
3) I’M SO GODDAMN ALONE. The creators have rightly and fairly said, “Hey, if you want multiplayer, then go play Destiny.” Which is reasonable. I don’t want to play a No Man’s Sky that has me running around a random planet with a thousand other yahoos — probably a gaggle of twelve-year-olds screaming racial epithets at each other as they camp a valuable mining spot. I don’t want this to be Eve Online, which is one of the most punishing, venomous galactic experiences you’ll have. But sometimes, too, this game feels so woefully, miserably alone. I like that at times. But when I name an alien critter, I want it to be like a name I carved onto a wall — I do it in the hopes someone will pass by and see it. Once in a while I’d love to experience the genuine thrill of seeing another actual living being in the universe. How sublime would that be? A moment of connection in a sea of isolation. I need a smaller universe. I need contact — once in a while, real, bonafide contact. Which seems impossible, here. The game does not merely have minimal multiplayer — it has absolutely none. The promises of some connection — a shared universe — is yet another of the game’s many illusions.
4) PIRATES ARE MY SCHEDULED “WELL I GUESS I’M GONNA FUCKING DIE” TIME. It happens every galaxy, now. I’m flying. Some turd-dick pirate scans my ship. Said dick-turd attacks. And I die. I die because the game offers me nothing in terms of beating them. Mostly I just spin wildly about as the computer lasers me to death, and then I have to go and repair my ship and find my grave and it’s like — fine, this is my DEATH TIME. But once again, the illusion is present. The game manifests this as a challenge, but it is the illusion of a challenge. You can beat the pirates, but there’s little reason to do so outside of avoiding the consequences of dying. You get nothing for it, and it’s hard and random, and again, who cares?
5) MORE COMPLICATED PLANETS WOULD BE NICE. Right now, NMS takes on the Star Wars theory of planet-building, mostly — a planet is one thing, one biome, that’s it. You don’t get snow here, you don’t get tropics, there’s nothing polar, nothing equatorial, there’s no difference between a lake and an ocean. Minecraft actually gets some of this right. At least a procedurally-generated world there has variance. This is just… the same thing with tweaks on the theme. Variety is real, but the value of that variety is (once more, say it with me) an illusion.
To sum up:
I want fewer illusions.
I want more systems to matter.
I want to feel like I’m doing something, like I’m making a difference.
I want to feel alone, but not so alone my only friend is a fucking volleyball with a painted-on face.
This is a beautiful game. It is meditative and fascinating. I love it and consider it a wild — if flawed — success, despite what you feel might be criticisms — these don’t diminish my love, I just want to love it more. Or, rather, I want it to have more longevity. Minecraft is a game deceptively simple that I’m still playing, and I can play it to survive, or to create, or to destroy, or to wander. I need NMS to have more axes of entry — more routes to affecting the universe and leaving my own footprints behind. That’s what we want to do — we want to go onto the moon and leave our bootprints in the dust. What that means to you, well, I don’t know. But the above post is what it means to me.
You playing the game?
What do you think about it?
All right, summer, you’re too damn hot to handle. It’s time to go, chop chop, let’s bring fall in. Let’s get some pretty leaves falling, some cooler air, some nice breezes, some kids back to school — hell, I’ll even take the traditional AUTUMNAL PRACTICE of the PUMPKIN SPICE ENEMA. That’s a thing, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure it’s a thing.
That macro there is, by the way, a fallen leaf with some waterdrops on it.
Now, onward, to news-shellacked tiddle-bits.
GeekDad reviewed Invasive! “Wendig’s short and sweet chapters will keep you reading ‘just one more’ because he’s an obvious master at cliffhanger chapter endings.”
Speculate SF not only reviewed it, but then had a follow-up interview with me on the podcast! Go check those out, and then support ’em.
At Bookish, I swing by and offer up a selection of my favorite CREATURE FEATURE novels! Need new books to read, then clicky-clicky.
Paul Tremblay, who writes horror that is (like True Detective in its way) what I consider “supernatural-adjacent,” said of the book — “INVASIVE by @ChuckWendig: smart, relentless, Crichton-esque (but with so much better chararcter work) fun. Get some!” Which is really kind, because Paul is an amazing author. Even though he’s a math teacher. I guess I shouldn’t let ants kill him. Fine. *calls off ant army* *sulks*
I’ve also added an appearance: I’ll be with Fran Wilde on 9/27 at B&N Rittenhouse! COME SAY HI.
Probably something else I’m forgetting, but so it goes.
Now, onward to the BAD NEWS BEAR, who bites you and infects you with bad news.
Hyperion, at Marvel, has been canceled. This week will see the final issue (starring Iron Man, which means I got to write Iron Man, which is a badge I will now wear forever with great bluster), and the six issues will be collected together for purchase. It’s sad. I’m super-bummed about it. But it was a strange book with a Marvel character who never really had the spotlight. I was really pleased that Katie and Christina let me do the weird small-town-horror I wanted to do with it (killer clowns and worm guy!). The art by Nik Virella and Marc Laming was swoonworthy, and the Romulo aced the colors in a way that made me not only swoon, but faint and hit my head on the coffee table. The book was honestly canceled the day the first issue came out, so it wasn’t really down to anything that we’d done on the book but rather down to the way that store orders fell off, as I understand it — again, because Hyperion is more of a fringe character. But he’s a fringe character that I hoped I got to give some more life to, pulling him away from the margins a little and making him more interesting. Marvel was really supportive and continues to be, and I hope to do some more work with them in the future. Thanks everyone for reading the book! Hope you enjoy the last issue, coming out this week. I’m sorry there won’t be more!
*belligerent sobbing ensues*
And since we’re at it, let’s deliver a second bite from the BAD NEWS BEAR.
Folks ask me now and again when the sequel to The Hellsblood Bride will hit. I had originally conceived of the Mookie Pearl stories as a trilogy. And the answer to that is… a tiny shrug emoji?
I want to do that third book, I do. I’m not sure yet the finances or the time line up.
Here’s the deal —
The Blue Blazes is the introduction to the Hell underneath Manhattan and of Mookie and Nora, and then Hellsblood Bride shows us a lot more of Hell and the mythology while complicating the hell (ahem) out of Mookie and Nora’s stories. Some may remember that there was some, um, publishing shenanigans around those books, so last year I managed to get the rights back and publish them myself in October, which means we’re coming up on one year after release. I do very little to support them in terms of pushing their sales because really, I don’t have that in me. (It’s why self-publishing is tricky — you gotta stay hungry and be as much a salesman as an author, and honestly, it’s tiring as fuck. This ceaseless parade of reminding people about the book and building buzz and juggling your strategies. I really just want to write books. An unrealistic demand, maybe, but it’s why I like partnering with smart publishers who will, ideally, do that part for me.) Even without pushing the books, they’ve done okay. First month I had already paid for the cover and the e-book design and after that, the money has been nice enough. But maybe not nice enough to justify that third book.
Which means, at present: no plans to do so. (Unless a publisher wants it? Dangle, dangle.)
Which is a bummer! I know. The second book is an ending, but boy howdy is it a rough one. The third book would pull the series out of that dark place, but again, I don’t think I’m getting there any time soon, so for now, that means Mookie’s tale ends where it ends there in Hellsblood Bride. If the book sales surge or by next year start to pick up for RANDOM COSMIC REASON, I’ll re-evaluate. This isn’t a never, but definitely qualifies as a not right now.
If you want to check out any of these books (and book sales, for the record, help support this blog and obviously the books overall):
Blue Blazes: Amazon / Buy Direct From Terribleminds
Hellsblood Bride: Amazon | Buy Direct From Terribleminds
Invasive: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N
I love it. It basically mashes up a couple-few idioms into something new and very possibly inane, and very possibly wise. (Example: “God shouldn’t cross the bridge till you come to it.” What does that mean? I don’t know! But damnit, I like it.) It forms the backbone of today’s fiction challenge.
Click it. Get a fake mash-up idiom you like. (Re-clicks are fine, obviously.)
Then use it in a story.
That’s it.
Length: ~1000 words
Due by: Friday, September 2nd, noon EST (holy shit, it’ll be September soon, you guys)
Write it at your online space, link to it in the comments, and voila.
[So, I get to do one of these right? I think I’m allowed. Don’t look at me like that. IT’S MY BLOG AND I’LL DO WHAT I WANT. *kicks sand in your face* *and by sand, I mean ants* *fire ants*]
“Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride. Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Hannah Stander is a consultant for the FBI—a futurist who helps the Agency with cases that feature demonstrations of bleeding-edge technology. It’s her job to help them identify unforeseen threats: hackers, AIs, genetic modification, anything that in the wrong hands could harm the homeland.
Hannah is in an airport, waiting to board a flight home to see her family, when she receives a call from Agent Hollis Copper. “I’ve got a cabin full of over a thousand dead bodies,” he tells her. Whether those bodies are all human, he doesn’t say.
What Hannah finds is a horrifying murder that points to the impossible—someone weaponizing the natural world in a most unnatural way. Discovering who—and why—will take her on a terrifying chase from the Arizona deserts to the secret island laboratory of a billionaire inventor/philanthropist. Hannah knows there are a million ways the world can end, but she just might be facing one she could never have predicted—a new threat both ancient and cutting-edge that could wipe humanity off the earth.
* * *
Both Zer0es and Invasive are very research-intensive books. Not to say every book doesn’t require a little bit of research — but the further you drift into fantastical territory, the greater license you are given to say hey, fuck it, and then, barf up a glowing river of unicorn slurry and get on with your life. But these two books, not so much. Sure, I could just make everything up — fiction gives you a pretty long leash. But I wanted to get things right. Or at least so they felt right — authenticity being the illusion of truth.
So, that meant research.
With Zer0es, I researched by disappearing from my family for a year and joining a Russian hacker cabal. They called me Yuri, and I ended up in prison for a while, and got a bunch of really rad Russian prison tats. Then, for Invasive, I rolled around in brown sugar and slept on my lawn overnight until in the morning I was colonized by ants. I’m still colonized by them, even now. I feel the ants inside my face. I am not their queen but rather, their king. Ha ha ha, Ant #91,812, you’re tickling the inside of my nose! Ha ha ha. *sneezes* *ants everywhere*
Okay, maybe not.
For me, research takes three stages.
First stage is, read a lot about it. Scour the Internet. (Might I recommend beholding Alex Wild’s macro ant photography?) Read expert texts on the subject. (For Invasive, anything by Holldobler and Wilson. Journey to the Ants is wonderful. As is The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization By Instinct.)
Second stage is, talk to people who know things. Speak to experts. In this case, talk to entomologists. Make phone calls. Ask questions. Kidnap them. Force them to yield all their secrets to you. DISCOVER WHICH INSECTS CONTROL THEM. Wait, no. Just ask questions.
Third stage is, try to get hands on. Obviously, we have ants all around us — the ants outnumber us by an epic factor. (The Earth is home to roughly ten thousand trillion ants.) It was easy enough to watch ants at work, and present them with challenges — disrupt a pheromone trail or establish for them an American Ninja Warrior course. But also, that meant for me heading out to the wonderful Bug Barn at Purdue University under the care of Gwen Pearson. I got to see ants! And hold a tarantula! And behold the OBT, the Orange Bitey Thing, the Orange Baboon Tarantula. (You don’t touch the OBT without a hazmat suit.)
That third stage is one of the most important because you pick up things that are more impressionistic than they are fact-driven. Like, anybody can read about a subject. But to experience it — even in the tiniest way — gives you little bits of information that are all yours. And you can use them. (Example: in writing The Cormorant, I went to Florida to travel where Miriam was traveling. Way better than doing the same journey on, say, Google Maps.)
The story is everything, and all serves the story. If something does not serve the story, then you must lay it upon the altar and chop off its fool head. The reality with research and the facts it yields is that you can first only use so much. When something doesn’t match the narrative — getting it to fit means cramming it, and nobody likes anything crammed anywhere.
Everything cannot be slave to fact. That’s not to say to try to get it right! But you can only get it so right before your story ceases to be possible and the whole thing just becomes non-fiction. Invasive involves genetic modification of a creature in a way that is not yet possible and may not ever be possible. The goal then is to support the outlandish sci-fi components with a backdrop of reality — it creates (as noted above) what I think of as authenticity. Authenticity isn’t fact or reality. It is a feeling of fact or reality. It feels true. It feels real. The other thing is that research is going to give you an overfull bounty, a veritable cornucopia of material. You can’t use it all. Bank it, and save it for later.
At the end of the day, you can’t let anything — research, worldbuilding, preachy thematic resonance — take over the narrative. All things buoy the story.
Otherwise, the story sinks beneath.
(Related: this also means you can’t be afraid to cut material from a book. Invasive‘s first draft was around, I believe, 120,000 words. The final was around 90,000 words. So, 30k hit the floor thanks to suggested edits from my agent, my editor, and my own cuts. Gotta be merciless when it comes to cutting the flab from the story. But not all the fat — fat provides flavor in small amounts. AND GREAT, NOW I’M HUNGRY.)
It’s easy to line up all this big, crazy stuff — OMG ANTS AND GENETIC MODIFICATION AND HACKERS AND OH GOD WHAT IF THE WORLD ENDS, but all that is meaningless without a great protagonist. Character is everything. Character is the lens that focuses all these wild, erratic rays flashing around the room like you’re in a lightswitch rave. For me, pieces of this story were bobbling around the sensory deprivation tank of my own skull for a long time. The one thing that brings those elements together for me is the protagonist.
That is true here, too — Hannah Stander is the knot binding all these threads into one. She’s a character at the nexus of a lot of anxieties both personal and impersonal. As the daughter of doomsday preppers, she’s subject to a great deal of anxiety about how the world works and what her place is in it. Further, her line of work is literally to look to all the wonderful technologies and advances mankind is creating — then figure out how someone might use those things to kill us. I feel her pain, man. You look on Facebook or watch the news and it’s a very good way to feel like everything is collapsing, like we’re under constant threat from everything and everyone. It engenders this intense fight or flight response, and it’ll stir your anxiety like the wasps from a yellowjacket nest hit with a rock. Hannah is throttled by anxiety but desperate for hope.
Finding the right character is a way into the story. Every character is a door.
When I said above, “I can feel her pain,” I mean it. Every character is a way into a story, yes. And you’re a way into every character. I wrote about my anxiety a few months back without ever thinking I really would — but I did, and I’m glad I did. Another way to acknowledge my anxiety was to put it into this book. What exists there is a (fictional) embodiment of what I sometimes feel. And it’s what I sometimes see when I see other people who share anxiety.
We authors are bundles of emotional, intellectual baggage. We’ve got bullshit piled up to the rafters. We have fears and experiences and ideas. We have peccadillos and desires and secrets. All of those things glom together in a mounding, steaming heap. And in the act of writing a novel, we are given a shovel. And we are allowed to take as much or as little from that heap as we want, and use it to fertilize the story. Let yourself speak. That’s not to say the book should be overwhelmed by your presence, or that you should bury the book under that same steaming heap — but just as every character is a doorway into a story, every story is a doorway into you.
The lesson too is that it makes writing the story easier. WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW is, to me, an oft-misunderstood nibblet of advice. I never see it as a castigation — I see it as a challenge. We treat it like it’s a limitation instead of an opportunity to dig deep. It’s a challenge to take not just what I know up here *taps head* but also what I know here *taps butt* — WAIT, sorry, that was rude, I mean, *taps heart* — ah, yeah, there we go. Heart, not butt.
Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. If your story is a house, you get to live in the walls and haunt those who pass through the dwelling.
Ants are a bottomless well of weird. And given that we’re currently in the middle of a nationwide ant epidemic, seems like a good time to discuss just a teensy tiddle bit of that.
– Some ants taste lemony because of their formic acid (and yes, you can eat many ants — though I wouldn’t recommend just grabbing some from your lawn.)
– Honeypot ants store a food slurry (think bug bits, nectar, whatever) in their bodies, their butts (sorry, “gasters”) swelling up to the size of grapes. Other ants then tap them like living beer kegs to get the deliciousness out.
– Leafcutter ants do not cut leaves because they eat the leaves, but rather because the leaves will act as a kind of mulch on which they grow a fungus — meaning, they’re farmers. And it creates a kind of mutualism, because the ants need the fungus and the fungus need the ants.
– Many ants are mutualistic — some with trees or other plants, protecting them from other animals big and small who want to eat the plant. Ants milk aphids, and even carry them to new locations on given plants. Some ants suck sweet nectar from caterpillars in exchange for saving the caterpillars from other, more vicious ants.
– Ants have gained a reputation for being hard, diligent workers — and that’s true, as a colony — but up to 25% of a colony consists of ants who really don’t do much at all. That’s right — ant colonies have lazy-ass ant slackers. (And the story goes that if you eradicate the lazy ones from the population, the ratio remains as previous workers stop working to become lazy. Suggesting there’s more going on here than we grok.)
– Heck, I just learned that Argentine ants will purge their queens — over 90% of them.
Ants are weird. And fun. And in many cases, terrifying.
What I’m saying is —
You should check out Invasive.
OR I’LL COVER YOU IN BROWN SUGAR AND LEAVE YOU ON THE LAWN OVERNIGHT.
Invasive: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Goodreads | Invasive Photo Contest
Recently, there had been that Twitter meme going around about your first seven jobs — I played, did my list, and I put “writer” on there because it was, is, and hopefully shall remain, a job. But it’s also not a job — for some, it’s a hobby, for others, an art form, for others still, merely an aspiration. And for many of us, it’s all of those things bound up with duct tape and shoved in the trunk of a fast-speeding car about to careen off a cliff.
I had thoughts on writing as work — and as not-work — which I’m putting in here.
