Category: The Ramble (page 174 of 463)

It begins with men. Young men, usually.

(This is a recipe that simmers a long time on the stove.)

You teach them that the world was made for them. That they own it and can do what they want and take what they desire. You also teach them that they are not allowed to express themselves. Doing that is to be like a woman, and men are told that they are very explicitly not women. Men own everything, remember. It is their right to own and to want and to take. Women are lesser, for they do not own the world. So to be like a woman — to cry and to manifest other feelings — is to be lesser. It’s not that they don’t have feelings. It is that they are taught to keep them inside. In boxes and bottles. In lead-lined trunks locked tight lest they ever escape.

We call them names if they fail this test. Thee names are slurs, and these names serve two purposes: one, it limits the victim and course-corrects them away from them being able to express themselves; two, it conveniently also reduces an entire other segment of the population and treats them as lesser. These names summarize women as their body parts, and associate men with them. These names tell us too that LGBT is lesser, weaker — gay men are really just women. Do not be like these things, we say. Or we (the other men) will call you out. We will bully you. We will hurt you. To make you better, because men are good at pain, we explain.

Giving pain. Receiving pain. Never ever revealing pain.

These slurs continue across the board, actually. If you’re lazy, you’re this group. If you’re dumb, you’re that group. If you’re a criminal, you’re like another group. And it all has the very special effect of reminding the young man that he is the most special of them all, and the only way he limits his specialness is by being not-a-man, and quite likely, not white. We have built a fence for him cobbled together of insults aimed at other people. Stay in the fence and be a man. Do not stray and we will not punish you.

Inside the fence is a too-small pasture. So little space to roam. Like with animals, the less space you have, the more agitated you become. Chickens pecking each other apart. Dogs wearing the skin off their neck from a choking chain and collar. But the fence is the man’s identity and with it, we limit his freedoms to be anything other than a pure young man, even though to limit an animal’s freedom is to drive it slowly mad. (But don’t worry, we won’t give you the mental health care you need when you have been driven to the brink. Men don’t need care, remember. Men are good at pain. Bottle it up. Don’t let it out, don’t you dare let it out.)

But the fence is the fence.

We force them to understand that they are MEN. They are MASCULINE. They are aggressive, dominant, alpha. They must be or they are weak. Big dick. Big muscles. Hot girlfriend. Prove your manhood. Wear it as an emblem. Just in case, we can make sure it’s driven home in the toy aisle, too. Make sure they play with guns and weapons of war (while at the same time limiting a young girl’s social ability to do so). Do not let them be nurturers. No dolls for the men. Men are soldiers, generals, builders, leaders. Trucks and cars. Guns and swords. But they also learn by limitation — the girls have their own aisles. They have not only dolls, but stuffed animals. They have little toy shopping carts and hair salons. They cook. They clean. They are soft like the stuffed animals. Not hard like guns. No Black Widow toys for the girls or for the boys. Even if the world gives us Ghostbusters who are women, let’s make sure that the packaging shows boys — lest they be made to believe they aren’t special, they aren’t the best, they aren’t chosen.

You’re trapped, but you’re special. Boys will be boys. It isn’t rape because she wanted it. We excuse the worst because it fits the story. We discourage anything that doesn’t fit the story.

Fences, fences, so many fences. Do not stray, we say. Do not stray.

We have reminded them not-so-subtly that everyone is different in the wrong way, and to be different is to be weak. We have reminded them that they own the world, but now they’re entering a world where the fact of that seems in dispute. Young men are not even the dominant majority, and yet, they are told they are, anyway. The world seems out to prove them wrong: women do not just fling themselves at men, after all. And for white men, it’s even more troubling, because they were sold a 1950s bill-of-sale — they were sold a group of Founding Fathers who look like them, who made this country with manhood and muskets and destiny.

And now the world isn’t that. It looks different. It feels different. And we have told them all along that they are the best, the most special, the most beautiful snowflake — no, wait, I didn’t say beautiful, I meant virile, I meant tough, I meant manly. The most manliest big-dickenist snowflake ever. Not even a snowflake, because snowflakes are fragile. They melt. They weep. No — men are special like throwing stars, like grenades going off, like the puckered hole carved into the top of a hollowpoint bullet.

To help them deal, to explain this new world, we give them enemies.

You cannot get a job because of that group.

You cannot just take what you want because of this other group.

You don’t make enough money or have the nice house because of them.

These groups want to limit how special we know you are. The group changes. It needn’t be just one. As time goes on, we switch enemies on them. Just to keep it interesting. Just to remind them that the whole world is against them because the world has forgotten how special they are.

And so when we tell these young men — young white men, usually — about feminism, or about how black lives matter, or how there are men who want to love other men and (gasp) get married to them, they short circuit. They hemorrhage. That doesn’t fit the narrative. Young white men are the best. Feminism recenters that conversation. BLM recenters that conversation. LGBT rights recenter that conversation. It paints for them a world where all is not a mountain and they are not at the top of it — it paints a flat plane where everyone is equal and all have a chance to breathe the same oxygen. It is a crack in the veneer and the young man must ask how true the narrative has been. Feminism says little to nothing about men. BLM says nothing about whiteness. LGBT says nothing about straightness. And yet, how can that be? The young, white, straight man is so special, though. Why do these groups so bitterly ignore that?

It’s fine, though. We will keep reminding him that the narrative is true even if the rest of the world doesn’t see it or resemble it. And we will have politicians and media who drive that home again and again. Congress is mostly men, and mostly white. The media is mostly men, and mostly white. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of mostly men, and those are mostly white. And we say to them, see? Look, these are your idols. This is the pattern. Here is the narrative. If you don’t fit it, it’s not your fault. Someone is keeping you away. It’s those people who want to blow you up. It’s those people who want to take your jobs. It’s those people who want to take away your manhood and make you like a woman. These are your enemies.

They are standing in your way.

They are not of your tribe. Your special, precious tribe.

If we need to, we can always add a dose of old-timey religion. And that adjective, old-timey, is key. Religion is not a poison, but the old ways of it cleave to a world where men are its center, where God Himself is a man and women are cattle. The laws and commandments of each religion are for your tribe only. Not for ‘them’ over there. The old-timey religion reinforces the narrative. And it repaints the enemy not just as one that is biological or cultural, but one that is spiritual. And so your crusade against the enemy is sanctified. It is holy. The Man God told you that it is, and it is kill or be killed. The things that make men as men are not sins. The fence is now built of religion. Outside the fence are the women and the queers and the heathens. They are sinners. You are pure. All you do is pure. The Man God has pre-empted you with forgiveness, he has built you of Himself and those who are not like you are not like Him. Do what thou wilt.

Politicians seize on this, too. They enact legislation that never says, but always reminds, that the men — the white men, the straight men — are so very special. We bake the identification of our enemies into our laws, and we braid in that old-timey religion to make sure that it’s all sweetened by the sanctity of a divinely-driven message. We say, these bathrooms are for you and not for anybody else. We say, this marriage is for you and not for anybody else. This job. These benefits. This life. It’s all for you, Damien, all for you. God says it. Our laws say it. And that document made of God and Man, the Constitution, says it, too. (Never mind the fact that the Constitution is just a piece of paper written by men of dubious religiousness who meant for our laws to be ever-amendable and totally elastic — that narrative must change, for you are a young man living in a country blessed by the Man God, and so that means the Constitution is as iron-clad as the Bible itself, as long as you don’t mind sanding down the rough and disagreeable parts for your own convenience.)

So, now we’ve got men of all ages. White men and straight men, too, in that pack. And we teach them that they must be manly men, and that the world is against them, and that their failures are the fault of enemies at the gates, enemies who want to besiege them and de-center them. The ingredients are in the pot, now. Been simmering and slow-cooking for days, years, centuries.

But to really make this soup pop, you gotta get it hot.

So we add some gunpowder to it.

Real gunpowder. And with it, real guns.

We say, look at those enemies. They’re trying to take away what’s rightly yours. And that anger the man feels, we conveniently don’t acknowledge that the anger is something we put in there — because we built for them a very tall fence around a very small pasture and now the men are traumatized and clawing at themselves because they can’t cry or they can’t nurture or they can’t love who maybe they really want to love. They’re like pressure-cooker bombs — their metal exterior denting and bulging like a botulism can at all the toxic shit trying to get out but goddamnit we just can’t let it out gotta keep it in gotta 

Here, have a gun.

No, no, it’s okay.

It’s easy to get one.

It’s not just easy, it’s part of who we are, we say. It’s baked into the Constitution. Never mind that the Constitution was written by men who had muskets which took about, oh, three years to load and fire. Never mind that the guns we have today are concealable and have bits of lead that travel hundreds or even thousands of feet per second and that they can discharge these little angry metal wasps at an alarming rate of however fast your finger can twitch. We say, it’s right there. In this holy, God-sacred document that governs our nation. And just so nobody gets any fancy ideas we remind them that this document is unswerving, unchanging, etched not just in stone but in our God Damn DNA — and we lionize the Founding Fathers and their AR-15s even though they made a document meant to change, a document written for a time over two centuries ago when it is safe to say that things were just a little bit different.

We make sure that the men can have as many guns as they want, as easily as they want them. It’s harder to get a driver’s license. You don’t need training. You don’t need insurance. You only need a cursory background check, and that’s only if you buy it certain ways. Any little change to that is the slipperiest of slopes, a slope slick with your future blood, young man. They try to modify anything about your right, and you might as well just put on a dress and start kissing some other religion’s god. Doesn’t matter how sensible it is. You’re special, remember. Sense has nothing to do with it. This is manifest destiny. This is manhood’s destiny.

You’re special.

Those people aren’t like you.

They’re your enemy.

You get to have what you want.

You get to do what you want, take what you want.

(Nobody will do anything to stop you anyway.)

Just don’t cry. Don’t feel. Bottle it all up.

God says it’s okay.

The law says it’s okay.

Long as you’re a man, a manly man, not a pussy, not a queer.

Here, now. Have your gun. Go on, take it.

Don’t use it, of course.

Wink, wink.

Don’t use it.

Don’t stray.

Those are your enemies.

Here is your gun.

At Tor.com, you can snag a copy of Zer0es and an early copy of Invasive.

You can do so by clicking right here and leaving a comment at the Tor site.

If you have not read the starred Kirkus Review of Invasive:

After the events of the last novel, FBI Agent Hollis Copper is understandably spooked by a world that’s becoming increasingly threatened by expanding technology. To help him push back against the things going bump in the night, he’s seconded futurist Hannah Stander to his department to help shine a light on bleeding-edge tech gone awry. She’s suitably intrigued when he calls her with a dilemma: “I’ve got a cabin on the lake with more than a thousand dead bodies in it….Think of it like a riddle.” What she finds in rural New York is a dead man with no skin, surrounded by hundreds of dead ants. Hannah’s investigation leads her to Ez Choi, a punk-rock Asian-American entomologist. Ez discovers that the ants weren’t just unleashed, but engineered, and they bear the same genetic markers employed by biotech billionaire Einar Geirsson, a reclusive Icelandic billionaire operating a secret biotech lab off the coast of Hawaii. If the setup sounds very Crichton-esque, it is, but Wendig puts his own stamp on this propulsive techno-thriller with his signature action set pieces, a deeply damaged heroine, and a pervasive threat that will give all but the most hardened readers the creepy-crawlies. The book makes some very salient points about the ethics of genetic engineering but doesn’t forego action as the book culminates in a biological catastrophe, not to mention a deadly cat-and-mouse chase on the treacherous Kalalau Trail on the North Shore of Kauai. Hannah Stander is a standout heroine—raised by survivalists and gifted with an unparalleled ability for predictive analysis. 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.

The contest runs until 6/14.

Enjoy, and thanks to Harper and Tor!

Today’s challenge: write a piece of flash fiction that begins with a visitor at the door. A guest. Or a villain. Or something altogether stranger. Any genre will do. But someone is at the door.

Who? Why? For what purpose?

Length: 1000 words-ish

Due by: Friday, June 17th, noon EST.

Post at your online space, drop a comment here.

Knock, knock. Who’s there?

It’s a big day. I don’t have adequate words to express how big — but this country just told its daughters what other nations before it have said: you can go all the way to the top. You can be a nominee for president and soon, I believe, the president proper, because I’m with Hillary Clinton. She’s got my vote in the general, which admittedly may sound like faint praise given her opponent. Honestly, a lawn chair would have my vote. I’d vote for a bowling ball covered in dog shit and pubic hair before I vote for Trump. But even if the GOP had a more-human, less-lotion-soaked-Hitler-merkin on their side, I’d still be voting for Hillary Clinton. I think she’s a strong leader. I think she’s done a lot for this country and for the world through charity. I think she’s smart, savvy, a good speaker. I think she understands compromise and coalitions. I’m proud to have her as our candidate. She is easily one of the most qualified candidates we’ve ever had, given the number of roles she’s occupied. And she’s been vetted left and right, often by Republicans wanting to knock her back every time she blinks funny. Little did they know, they were just toughening up her chitinous exoskeleton. None of the scandals stuck. Their messaging failed to prevent her candidacy. She’s still here, and I’m with her, and I hope you are, too.

(If you wonder just what the fuck she’s done, well, I got a website for you.)

It’s funny, I remember in the 90s that HRC was accused of being too progressive — some liberal lawyer who wanted to ruin America with her BASICALLY COMMUNIST values. And now we’ve gone the other way with it, where we worry that she doesn’t pass the progressive purity test. And as a women, she faces criticism that men generally don’t or won’t get. Certainly there’s a vanity to politics, but she seems to catch more heat for whether she smiles or doesn’t smile, whether she’s too loud or not loud enough, whether she wears clothes appropriate enough (too dowdy, too matronly, too expensive, too mannish). The fact she persevered in both 2008 and now again eight years later is pretty amazing all by itself. She’s earned so far the lion’s share of the popular vote — 15.5 million people is no small scratch.

Also she did an episode of Broad City, which in my mind is good as gold.

GOLD, PEOPLE. PRECIOUS GOLD. Because seriously, Broad City.

I recognize she is not the perfect candidate, but the perfect is the enemy of the good — further, I’ve never met a perfect candidate. I like Sanders and I adore Obama, and at the end of the day, each are politicians, and each have stances or actions that I just don’t dig. You don’t get into this big game without some blood on your hands. (We all love FDR, and conveniently forget that he put Japanese-Americans in internment camps.)

Politics can’t be a game of polarities, because that’s how nothing gets done. It’s a game of elasticity and compromise. I think Sanders rocked up a helluva campaign — historic, really, both him as a candidate and with his top-notch grassroots campaigning. (And I hope now to see that campaign pivot to continue pushing that agenda across all the tickets, both in supporting Hillary and in pushing her to be a better candidate for the common man.)

At the start of today, I see a fair amount of joy and anger in equal measure this morning on THESE HERE INTERNETS, and I think that’s okay and understandable — primary season is tough and it divides us for a time and we back one candidate with our hearts and often enough with our wallets, so to see it go one way over another makes us worry. The anger’s normal, and nobody should shame you for it. The joy is normal, too, and likewise, you shouldn’t be made to feel bad for that kind of pride. With hearts on sleeves, I know that the primary season has left things a bit heated, but that’s okay. I think it’s also vital to remember that at the end of the day, we had two real candidates. Two candidates who could’ve run this country well and who each ran a really spectacular campaign based on actual values rather than discussing dick sizes and walls and being basically horrible to each other. That side is a urinal on fire. Our side, no matter how much we disagree on the minutiae of these two candidates, is the real deal.

My hope is that in the coming weeks we’ll see unity start to emerge, and bridges we set on fire will cool down and get some much-needed repairs, because coming up in the general election we have to defeat an ACTUAL SEPTIC SYSTEM who gained life and sentience upon being struck by lightning. We have a Cheeto-fingered, tanner-drinking, democracy-dismantling Hutt-slug to beat back in the general election. Further, we have a Congress to overturn, and we have to act like we can paint the road the blue from one coast to the other. If we want a progressive agenda in place, then we have to start building that infrastructure now — Sanders showed very clearly that this country hungers for a progressive, common man approach to politics, and to earn that out means we’re going to have to do more than elect just one person — we’re going to have to take it all the way down to every itty-bitty district, to every voter.

Be well. Find joy. Express anger. And soon, I hope, we unify.

I’m with her.

Comments off, because c’mon.

A fine human being (or a very savvy robot) emailed me to ask a really important — and head-bonkingly difficult — question.

This human-slash-robot said:

I’m good at idea part. I have lots of notes for several novels on characters, who they are, how they know each other, what they want, their backstories. On settings, where and when everything takes place. I’m also good at the “sit down and shit out words” part. I can knock out 10k words in a week if I’m really in a groove.

But what I’m bad at is the STORY part. I’m horrible at getting from “I know the basic setup” to “I have an outline for where this is going”. Lately, most of my abandoned projects are abandoned because I just don’t have an idea what these people do or what happens to them once I’ve created a situation. I write 4k or 10k words and realize, “I don’t have a real story here.” Any pointers you have along those lines are greatly appreciated. It’s the one thing I haven’t found so far in your book or on your blog: how do you create enough story-stuff to build a novel around? And if I can’t seem to do it, should I just give up on novels?

So, to clarify —

The ideas are easy. (And they are. Ideas are baubles — cheap, chintzy, shiny, and freely available.) The writing is easy in the sense that, okay, you can sit down and dig the word ditches in Unicorn Land till your fingers go black and rot at the knuckles.

But story.

Story.

That’s the hard part, this humanbot is right. Story is an unruly beast.

Plot? Plot is easy. Plot is simple. Plot is just: the order of operations and events within the story as revealed to the audience. It’s a sequence of happenings — ideally, those happenings are driven by characters rather than by a COLD AND UNFEELING UNIVERSE, and in a perfect world the plot is a road built by the wherewithal of those characters, but either way, the plot is just the program. They do this, they do that, this happens, this happens, then that happens, he does a thing, she does a thing, the end, go home.

But plot is not story.

Plot is the arrow, and story is the apple that it punctures. Story is all the stuff. All the fibrous material and intangible air surrounding the fiddly bits. The story is the whole beast. It’s the whole animal. And you have to use the whole animal.

But here, I’m saying a lot of words, and I’m not helping you understand story very much at all. And that’s because story is a hard thing to understand. Writers put words to paper, but storytellers take those words — or images, in the case of film and TV and comics — and spin that dross into candy floss. Writers make horses. Storytellers fucking make unicorns, man.

So, what is story?

At the simplest level, story is a mechanism of desire and denial, of conflict and escalation and complication before resolution. I, the character, have a problem. I seek to solve my problem, but between me and the solution wait an obstacle course of other problems and other people and those people have competing desires. And I, the character, navigate that Scylla and Charybdis to either answer my desire or fail to manifest my desire. I solve my problem or I jolly well fucking don’t. That’s the story. There will be some shape to it — a rise to a mountainous peak, a slithering heavenward curve, a jagged line of fanged peaks, a rollercoaster going left and right. (See an earlier post of mine about story shapes and narrative architecture.)

I said once (“In Which I Critique Your Story That I Haven’t Read“) that story can look like:

1. HEY LOOK A PROBLEM

2. HEY LOOK A SOLUTION

3. THE END YAY

But, really, it probably ends up looking like:

1. HEY LOOK A PROBLEM

2. I’M GONNA JUST GO AHEAD AND FIX THAT PROBLEM AND –

3. OH GOD I MADE IT WORSE

4. OH FUCK SOMEBODY ELSE IS MAKING IT WORSE TOO

5. WAIT I THINK I GOT THIS –

6A. SHIT SHIT SHIT

6B. FUCK FUCK FUCK

7. IT’S NOT JUST WORSE NOW BUT DIFFERENT

8. EVERYTHING IS COMPLICATED 

9. ALL IS LOST

10. WAIT, IS THAT A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?

11. IT IS BUT IT’S A VELOCIRAPTOR WITH A FLASHLIGHT IN ITS MOUTH

12. WAIT AN IDEA

13. I HAVE BEATEN THE VELOCIRAPTOR AND NOW I HAVE A FLASHLIGHT AND MY PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED IN PART BUT NOT TOO NEATLY BECAUSE TIDY, PAT ENDINGS MAKE STORY JESUS ANGRY, SO ANGRY THAT STORY JESUS GIVES EVERYONE MOUTH HERPES

Still, that’s a program. It’s not quite plot, but it’s plotty — because it suggests a series of events. Or, at the very least, it suggests a mechanism. And a mechanism is a cold, implacable motherfucker. Story, on the other hand, isn’t cold. Story is a warm whiskey burn.

On the one hand, any character-conflict-escalation-resolution narrative probably ends up being “a story.” A man catches a fish isn’t much of a story, because his problem isn’t a problem. His desire isn’t denied. (A fish catches a man — now, that’s a story.)

Story is a sum greater than the parts of the plot. It is more than the mechanism.

I’m still not helping, I know.

Story is all those things, but it connects to us. A story is interesting. A story lets us see ourselves in it — and it is in that way both a unique snowflake and a universal precept. Or, more to the point, the story is the unique delivery system by which we get to talk about universal concepts and problems. We can talk about a THING WE ALL UNDERSTAND by framing it around a narrative unique to the author — every character and setting and conflict is a potential lens through which we can look upon this universal problem. Story takes this lens and it helps us to see old problems in new ways. Stories make us feel and think. Stories have power. Stories move us, shape us, and do the same to the world. It does this in the way that a song can do it. It has rhythm, like a song — slow to fast, up and down and then up again. Pause, leap, wait, then run. Stories are not a manicured garden. They’re an unruly forest —

A tangle of thorns in which we find ourselves happily ensnared.

My father was a storyteller, and he used to tell stories about his day at work or this time he got into a knife fight or that other time he and my mother jumped a ravine on his snowmobile, and often enough, his stories had the feel of a joke or a magic trick. There was the sense of a turn in there, a pivot, a punchline. A snake twisting in the margins. A sudden turn left when you thought you were going right. And you waited for that. You weren’t just interested to see what was going to happen — because, obviously, he survived — you waited to see the complications. You wanted more than just what was tied to the end of the rope, you wanted the kinks and knots in the rope itself. You want an interesting journey, not just a desirable destination.

It’s why if you want to be more than just a writer, you need to look at good storytellers. Comedians are a good place to start: Tig Notaro, Aziz Ansari, George Carlin, Louis CK. Listen to songs that tell stories — not just pop songs, but songs with tales to tell. Watch documentaries: note that documentaries are a good example of taking the mechanism of plot (by which I mean, a sequence of events) and translating that in a bigger way, finding messages, finding a throughline that hangs it all together and allows the material to transcend just THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED. (Actually, that calls to mind a book which is not a documentary: The Things They Carried, which is as much about war as it is about story. In fact, I’d argue it’s more about story than it is about war.) Best of all, find those people in your life who are natural storytellers. That guy at work. Your cousin. Your grandmother. Get them to tell a story. Listen to how they do it. How do they frame it? How do they ease you into it? What’s the hook? Why is it interesting?

None of this answers the question, of course.

None of this really explains story.

To do that, I’d probably need a lot more room. But maybe it helps. And maybe it gets you thinking about some of this stuff, even though it fails to properly finish the job or give hard answers to the tough question of how to make story work.

As such, I figure this is a good place for an announcement:

I’ve got a book coming out next year with Writer’s Digest that will tackle exactly this. The book is called Damn Good Story and I’m not sure of a release date yet, but I suspect latter half of 2017. It tackles all this unruly stuff — and it will be less about providing concrete answers to the question of what makes a good story and will instead just attempt to crack open the geode that is your head so we can all get access to the shiny bits inside. And in the meantime, if you’d like to check out some of my other writing books, you can nab the Gonzo Writing Book Bundle (that’ll get you eight books for $20), or you can go grab The Kickass Writer, also from Writer’s Digest. So, coming soon: DAMN GOOD STORY. Until then, we’ll keep talking here at the blog, see what we can figure out together.

A quick homework assignment if you’re so inclined:

Drop into the comments and recommend what you consider a real good story (or who you consider a damn good storyteller) — bonus points for something that isn’t just a book or a movie. Songs. Documentaries. Comedy routines. Whatever.

BEHOLD THESE LITTLE LADYBOOGERS.

I’m warning you, too, I have some new spider macros.

And I’m gonna post them.

Not this week. But next week, mos def.

I KNOW. I know! I said I wouldn’t. But they’re so cool. And spiders, c’mon — spiders are helpful little beasts. All those times you went to the doctor and you’re like LOOK AT THIS SPIDER BITE, and the doctor reminds you that 90% of spider bites aren’t actually spider bites? Spiders are great. They eat bad bugs. They’re like possums in that way — we hate on possums (sorry, “opossum”) but they eat thousands of ticks a week. And ticks are little monsters.

Anyway! Cool spider photos incoming next week. I will give you enough white space at the fore of the post so you never have to scroll down and see them ever, ever, ever.

What else is going on?

In a couple weeks I’ll be at the Orlando Book Festival, giving a keynote, signing some books.

On 6/22, I’ll be at Doylestown Bookshop, hanging out with Paul Tremblay and talking about his (really fucking amazing) newest, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

I may be at Let’s Play Books in July, too, to talk Star Wars.

I’ll be at SDCC in July.

Then in August, I’ll be back at the Doylestown Bookshop for the launch of Invasive!

You can preorder the book, signed, from Doylestown Bookshop here. (And if you don’t know, pre-ordering helps the author and the publishing ecosystem in a whole host of ways. It conveys to the seller and publisher that the author is in demand. It helps the seller stock the book. It helps the author FEEL GOOD ABOUT HIMSELF AND NOT WEEP OPENLY INTO HIS FROSTED FLAKES and stuff like that.)

I think that’s all, folks.