Category: The Ramble (page 181 of 478)

[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.

* * *

The Three-Step Research Tango

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.)

Research, Like Anything, Can Overwhelm The Story

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.)

If A Story Is Told In The Forest And No One Can Hear It, Was Ever A Story Told?

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.

Let Yourself Into The Story

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.

P.S. Ants Are Fucking Weirdsauce, Man

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.

PLEASE TO ENJOY.

So, the other day on Twitter I summoned up a tweetstorm about writing and publishing and the advice I gave to a power company worker who came here the other day to change out a meter.

BEHOLD THE LURID TALE.

(Original link to Storify here, if you need it.)

That is a ladybug, up close.

It is not my best photo but I wanted to post it. Why, you ask?

We think of ladybugs like they’re these cute little buggie-wuggies — and at a distance, they are. Toodling along, munching on aphids (this guy is in fact slurping up the last remains of an aphid — basically, licking his plate clean).

But look at that face.

LOOK AT THAT FACE.

JESUS GOD IN HEAVEN WHAT THE HELL, LADYBUG

And then I thought, you know what that ladybug looks like?

Snaggletooth, from Star Wars.

No, really, look.

Maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, ladybugs are super-helpful, and cute at a distance, until you look close, and then they’re a Snaggletoothed shit-show. Thus endeth the lesson, I guess?

Let’s see. Let’s bring some Invasive news, speaking of buggies.

I am told the book is selling well, and even sold out in a few stores, but of course I won’t know the reality of the book’s sales until June of 2024, or thereabouts.

One review on Amazon is titled: “Put on your shittin’ pants.” So, there’s that.

Washington Post said:

Wendig does an impeccable job blending fact and fiction as he describes invasive species and insects being used as biological weapons. This is a propulsive tale that also examines our interaction with — and ma­nipu­la­tion of — the natural world.

Men’s Journal said of the book:

…compelling, well-written, and the science (mostly about the curious habits of ants) is wholly plausible, even for folks who follow the works of E.O. Wilson. If you don’t have time to read it, expect to see it on the big screen — although reading about creepy-crawly killer ants is probably easier than watching them swarm.

(Though I’d much prefer you read it instead of waiting for the totally-not-inevitable film.)

Tor.com reviewed the book and said:

It’s no secret that I love Chuck Wendig’s books. He’s the kind of author that no matter what he writes I’ll consume it sight unseen because I know it’ll be entertaining. He writes in a style all his own, one full of intensity and fervor, like repeated shots of adrenaline. Invasive plays extensively in Michael Crichton’s sandbox, and fans of the Jurassic Park series and The Andromeda Strain will have a lot of fun here. Prepare yourself for an awful lot of Stephen King-esque body horror, not to mention the strong scent of The X-Files.

Heroes & Heartbreakers gets to the heart of the protagonist:

The consultant is the lead of the story, the one who the others depend on for survival. In other words, this character is the Chris Pratt-style lead.

But in Invasive, a woman is the lead.

She’s Hannah Stander and, unlike most leads in big action movies (or even action-adventure books), she’s given a great deal of complexity. Hannah has created a specialty and a unique career for herself but she also suffers from sometimes crippling anxiety attacks. In a nice change from the usual, Hanna’s anxiety isn’t due so much to trauma as the long-term influence of her parents, paranoid survivalists. In a way, she’s chosen to believe in the future as a rebellion against her upbringing.

In short, Hannah is confident, complex and the hero of her own story.

It’s a combination I’ve rarely seen outside of romance novels. Usually, if there’s a woman in an action-adventure thriller, she’s the girlfriend or the stereotypical badass among the guys. Wendig’s tense, action-packed book treats Hannah like a full person, not a cliché.

I answer five questions about the book at Suvudu.

In news unrelated to bugs, hey, I got my first Rolling Stone byline! Holy crap, who let that happen? I wrote a short thing about the sublimely boring space tourism of No Man’s Sky, a game I’m loving despite it’s many flaws. Check it out here.

And then back to the bugs for one more moment —

Reminder I’ll be at Main Point Books on 9/10, and Let’s Play Books in 9/22, and maaaaaybe I’ll be hanging with Fran Wilde on 9/27 in Rittenhouse Square, Philly, at the B&N there — details on that event incoming soon.

Don’t forget, the Invasive photo contest is ongoing — you’ve got a week left. Take a picture of the book. Send it to me. Maybe win some stuff. Do it now or I will send the ants to your house.

*shakes ant jar*

You can nab Invasive here:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Last week I said, HEY YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN, and then I realized I wasn’t yelling at kids on my lawn but writers on my blog and so then I was like HEY YOU WRITERS WRITE ME A SENTENCE. And a bunch of you did.

Your job now is to scan the comments at that post and find three sentences you like. Use them in a single story, any genre, without any limitation except their inclusion. Be sure to provide credit to the original authors of the sentences you use.

Length: ~2000 words

Due by: Fri, Aug 26th, noon EST

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN AND GET TO WRITIN

Last year, around this time, Joe Martin invited me to co-edit an anthology with him. It was to be a celebration of strong female characters, inspired by our desire at Ragnarok Publications to diversify our anthologies a bit more. Even when we have awesome women writing for us, so often the characters were still men. We wanted to have a spotlight on the ladies, to explore new themes, to flip some tropes on their heads, and above all, to have fun. But of course, no venture passes without a few learning experiences.

Editing an anthology is a lot like gardening.

I knew going into this project that anthologies were a lot of work. I’ve worked with authors for a long time, and I am one. I know the challenges of working with creative types. It’s like herding the most awesome cats ever, and I wouldn’t change anything about it. But there is an element of acceptance you have to have when you go into it. You have to accept that some authors might need more help than others. You have to accept that some will need deadline extensions, and you have to accept that some are used to working in a particular way, and no other way will work. As an editor, you have to let go of your ego a bit. You are the curator, the cultivator, but the authors are the creators. An anthology is an organic thing that grows and surprises and amazes. When you plant a garden, you can have a plan, you can plant the right seeds, and water it, fertilize it, make sure it gets enough sun. But the most fun and rewarding part of the garden, at least I think, is seeing how all the plants work together in full bloom to make a lovely whole. And as the gardener, you have to step back and watch it grow and bloom, because if you fiddle with it too much, if you try to control the outcome too much, you over-prune and things seem forced and the plants aren’t as strong. In an anthology, it’s amazing how the stories end up supporting each other in ways that were completely unplanned, but it makes the whole book come together. You have to step back and allow that to happen.

You can’t make everyone happy all the time.

Joe Martin and I did this anthology because we felt we wanted to have a collection showing all the ways women were awesome. We really loved what we were seeing out there as far as female characters, and wanted to see how we could contribute to that. We wanted to push the limits, explore the different ways strength could be shown, etc. We invited both men and women to contribute, because I am strongly of the opinion that a good writer can write from any character’s point of view. Women can write men, men can write women. And I’m pleased with the ratio we ended up having. We selected our authors very carefully to make sure the anthology represented what we wanted it to. When we announced the anthology, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Even when I invited authors to take part, and they couldn’t for whatever reason, they expressed great regret. But then, of course, once the Kickstarter started, we began to see comments like, “I wouldn’t touch that SJW garbage with a ten-foot pole!” and “God, another thing with these people trying to take over the genre.” “Here we go again, another anthology that sacrifices quality for their SJW agenda.” Now, these things didn’t hurt me at all. First of all, I was prepared for them. You can’t celebrate women, or any other minority, without attracting the ire of certain groups. And as far as sacrificing quality, I knew I had put the weeks of work into this book, getting authors like Seanan McGuire, William C. Dietz, Lian Hearn, Carol Berg, Delilah S. Dawson, and more, to make sure we had the top level stories people would expect from any Ragnarok anthology. And that’s the thing. Go into a project knowing that you put your all into it, go into it knowing why you are going into it, and your confidence will carry you through. If people have serious constructive questions, I think about them a lot, but I’m able to answer them nine time out of ten pretty easily because I did a lot of soul searching before anything about this project went public.

Speculative fiction is literature, too.

We’ve heard genre fiction called “the ghetto,” we’ve heard commercial fiction trashed because, *gasp* there is money involved. Lord forbid stories should be fun! And authors making money? How scandalous! It’s an age old thing that’s been going on since genre was invented. Now, I have always just dismissed this thing, but I will tell you, nothing more firmly cemented the fact that genre fiction is no less “literary” than so-called literary fiction faster than working on this anthology. Watching the process these authors went through to come up with their story ideas was both awesome and humbling. I actually get weepy when I look at some of these stories, not because of the content, but because of the work and thought the authors put into them. One could think, “Oh, a book centered on female protagonists. I’ll just have a woman save the world!” But I don’t think a single one of our authors had that thought. We have stories in there from folks experimenting with the ideas of different types of strength, different types of women. Can a story be fun while still having a message? Does a story NEED a message? Do strong women have to be young? Are women strong in a vacuum? The fact that all these questions were raised, yet all the stories in this book are amazing fun, moving, action-packed, and thrilling just really puts the argument of literary vs genre to rest for me. Words can’t express how awesome it’s been to work with these authors over the past few months.

Awesome talent doesn’t just live on the New York Times Bestseller list.

The NYT and USA Today Bestseller lists are good tools for seeing what folks are interested in reading. As a publicity and marketing person, when I was curating stories for Hath No Fury, I paid close attention to numbers. I mean, what’s the point in making a book if no one’s going to read it, right? I wanted to make sure we had some really strong names there to support us. But at the same time, it was really important to me that we had the best stories we could possibly collect, AND it was important that I gave new people a chance to be in the book. I knew, theoretically, that sales did not necessarily reflect quality. And after looking at the stories in this book, now I know it in practice, too. We have a lot of midlisters and a couple of pretty new authors in the contents as well, and their stories are all of equal quality to the bestsellers. So the lesson is, if you haven’t heard of an author, give them a chance anyway! Sure, you’ll come across some clunkers, but I find bad books on the NYT bestsellers list as well. There are some amazing stories out there waiting to be read.

Writing “Five Things” posts takes a lot of time.

My day job is as an author publicist. Authors and publishers hire me, in part, to find venues for them to talk about their work and books. And an inevitable part of any publicity campaign is the author calling me, sobbing, “OK, UNCLE, enough, I can’t write another blog post. I’m dying, plus I have another book to work on…” In response to which I usually laugh maniacally and say, “DRINK YOUR MEDICINE, IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!” Well, the shoe is on the other foot, now. I need to do a lot of publicity for the Hath No Fury campaign, while still editing the stories, and working on my own novel (I got a request from an agent the other day, so I’m scrambling to perfect the first twenty pages), AND doing day job stuff. It’s…a lot. You don’t want to just spew out posts left and right. You want the posts to represent the best of you so people will actually want to check out your work, rather than saying, “Who the hell is this quack?” So I have full sympathy for all my author clients…but at the same time, I know it’s necessary, and I actually love reaching out to readers in this way and engaging with them. So it’s all worth it in the end.

* * *

Hell Hath No Fury: Kickstarter

BIO: Melanie R. Meadors is the author of fantasy and science fiction stories where heroes don’t always carry swords and knights in shining armor often lose to nerds who study their weaknesses. She’s been known to befriend wandering garden gnomes, do battle with metal-eating squirrels, and has been called a superhero on more than one occasion. Her work has been published in several magazines, and was a finalist in the 2014 Jim Baen Memorial Science Fiction Contest. Melanie is also a freelance author publicist and publicity/marketing coordinator for both Ragnarok Publications (where she is also associate publisher) and Mechanical Muse, an independent gaming company. She blogs regularly for The Once and Future Podcast and GeekMom. Her short story “A Whole-Hearted Halfling” is in the anthology Champions of Aetaltis, available now on Amazon. She is the co-editor of Hath No Fury, an anthology celebrating women in speculative fiction, which is currently on Kickstarter and includes stories from Seanan McGuire, Carol Berg, Elaine Cunningham, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Philippa Ballantine, Anton Strout, and more. Follow Melanie on Facebook and on Twitter as @MelanieRMeadors, and visit her website at melaniermeadors.com