AHOY HELLO HEY. We have a pair of winners for the giveaway — and I know, I was only doing one winner, but now, I’m gonna do two. I mean, gosh, there were so many entries. I feel obliged!
The only trick is, the first winner will get a copy of Staircase + some of my other books, and the second winner only gets the other books, as I do not have any additional copy of Staircase to give, sadly.
So, the winner who gets The Staircase in the Woods plus other books–
Kris Silva! Who recommended the anthology Never Whistle at Night.
And the second winner, who gets a box of books (but without Staircase included) is:
Debra W! Who recommended The Mirror, by Marlys Millhiser.
Congrats to the two of you!
You should each email me at terribleminds at gmail —
The time is upon us: bookstores make a considerable portion of their annual profit between roughly now and Christmas, and that reason is, y’know, books make great gifts for the holiday season. (And also, hey, they make excellent gifts to ourselves during this current period of renewed fuckery.)
As such, people ask how they can get my books for others or themselves, particularly my books signed and personalized, and the way you do that is by buying books through Doylestown Bookshop.
(Their ordering system has changed a little bit, but I believe the general idea is the same: if you order online, there is a CUSTOMER COMMENTS section you can use to say, “Hello I want this personalized and signed to my nephew, Splugorth, thank you.” Otherwise, you can always just call the store, too.)
I’ll also add that, if you care to buy Black River Orchard, I’ve still got some evil apple stickers from Natalie Metzger, and will gladly furnish your orders with those stickers for as long as the supply lasts. And I’ll do one more (and likely final) round of give you your very own evil apple for all orders of that book between now and Christmas. Which is to say, I will name a unique evil apple variety all for you in the book when I sign it.
Black River Orchard paperback is here. There may be hardcovers available still but there I think you’ll need to call.
My other new one, if you’ve got kids, is Monster Movie!
And if you’ve got a writer in your life who is mayyyyyybe struggling with making the word sauce or just pushing past all the *clumsy gesticulations toward the world beyond this blog* hey, there’s Gentle Writing Advice.
(Another gift idea is pre-ordering The Staircase in the Woods, which comes out in April. I mean, maybe that’s a gift more for me than for you. It could be like, a future gift, though. From Current You to Future You. How fun!)
Okay! Merry Happy Whatever to you, and even if you’re not checking out my books this holiday season, bookstores are good, go to them, give them money, give yourself books, it’s a wonderful JOY CIRCUIT.
So, I’m not averse to a little retail therapy, as the saying goes, and given the week that just transpired, I decided to do exactly that. And it’s pretty standard that my kind of retail therapy is, well, books. Books comfort me. I like to be surrounded by them. Obviously, I also like to read them because, that’s the point. (Except when they’re just there in a tower, an obesisk of unread books, serving as a totem to whatever STORY GOD you worship.)
And I thought, hey, maybe you want some books, too. It won’t fix anything, not out there, not in the world. But maybe books fix a little something inside ourselves. One brick returned to a crumbling wall.
As such, hey, I’mma give some books away.
See, I have an ARC (advanced reader’s copy) of The Staircase in the Woods and I’d sure like to send it to one of you.
And I’ll send some other books, too. Whatever I have lying around. Might be some random stuff — I’ll definitely throw in a copy of Gentle Writing Advice and You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton, but also some other fictiony bits too. Not sure what I’ve got on the shelves but expect a box of books to come your way if you win.
I’ll sign ’em! Personalize ’em too if you want.
The way to enter is easy: just go into the comments below, and leave a comment with a book recommendation. You must leave the title and author name, at least. You’re free, but not required, to also leave more of a comment as to why you liked it or whatever. It’ll be nice to share the book love.
Share some book love, maybe get some books.
I pay shipping, you pay nothing.
Caveat here is, it’s open to US folks only. I know, I want to do international, but the shipping is high, and the chance to lose a package is also higher than domestic, and that would be sad for everyone. So, US only, I’m afraid.
I’ll run this till Friday, November 15th, 9AM EST. I’ll pick a winner randomly, and will send the books out in the following week.
Sound fair?
COOL.
All right. You know the drill. Get to the comments. Leave a book recommendation (title, author), you might get some cool books (including Staircase!) from yours truly.
I don’t know that I’m ready to write much else since the thing I posted other day, but maybe I’m never really ready to write anything at all. And writing is what I do, for better or for worse; it’s how I engage with and interact with and challenge the world. My writing is a toddler’s hands: they reach out clumsily, grabbing stuff and shoving it in my drooling mouth.
So, here I am, and here I write.
Sensibly, or not. Cohesively, or not.
I don’t know what to do and I don’t know what to tell you to do. I’m only guessing at it. It’s purely me fumbling in the fog, through the dark. As always this place is for me more than it is for you. I can only tell you what I would tell myself in this moment.
I think first and foremost, you have to be okay with not knowing what to do. This cannot last, of course. Eventually we have to do something, we have to move forward, we have to take steps somewhere, in some direction. But it’s okay to just be all up in your what-the-fucks right now. We’re just days past the revelation of a huge reversion of our expectations and understandings of the world and people around us and it hasn’t even really happened yet. So it’s fine if you’re flailing. Or just staring into the void. The void welcomes your gaze, and the void understands.
I think it’s okay to not be okay. That’s true every day, for any reason, but doubly triply multiplicatively true now. You can just be Not Okay. Sure, sure, hashtag resist and all that, but also resist anyone telling you how you have to feel or cope or what you must do or how there are all these easy angry answers if you just look for them. I think it’s okay to sit quietly in the darkness and regard the darkness for what it is without someone telling you to turn on the light already. I used the metaphor a long time ago that there is a toilet on fire in the middle of the room, and sometimes it feels like no one else sees it. I think it’s okay right now to look away from it, to not want to sit and look at the fucking thing. And it’s also okay to see it directly, to stare right at it. It’s fine to point at it and say, “Hey, there’s a toilet on fire in the middle of the room.” And maybe we need to find others who see it, who say:
“Yeah, I see it too.”
Which means it’s important to reach out. Don’t be alone if you don’t want to be alone. (Alternatively: be alone if it’s what helps you and how you process. It’s not healthy for everyone all the time but sometimes, like I said, you just wanna sit quietly in the dark.) Community doesn’t always mean some big, broad-reaching coalition. Family doesn’t have to mean the people with whom you share blood. It’s good to extend a hand out of the darkness and see who else is there. And accept a searching hand in return. We’re going to need one another and that doesn’t mean needing everyone or being there for everyone, either. It just means reaching out to someone.
You gotta take care of yourself. Drink water, eat real food, try to exercise if you can. Brush your teeth. Floss. Shower. Seek nature. Seek people you trust and love. Be near art, make art, consider art.
It’s also fine to like, eat some fuckin’ ice cream, I dunno. There was an injury, a grievous one, and it’s okay to take a moment to not be perfect, as long as it doesn’t knock you off of a better, more essential path. I’m not saying like, “Hey, maybe cocaine?” — but I think you’re allowed a “sit on the couch and watch movies and eat a whole goddamn brick of Halloween candy” period, yeah? Day or two after a funeral no one’s like, “Hey maybe cool it on the lasagna.” Just eat the fucking lasagna. You’re in mourning. It’s mourning lasagna. You can be better next week. It’s fine. It has to be fine.
You can stay away from the news, if you want. The world will happen without your eyes on it. If your tooth is broken, no need to stick a screwdriver in it right now just to jiggle it around.
You can scream if you want to. I mean it. Yell. Howl. Primal shit.
Get an MMA dummy. Punch the fuck out of it.
Write a whole page of ALL CAPS ANGER. Or small caps love and hope.
Play Dragon Age: Dawnguard. It’s good.
Go learn a thing. A weird fact. Strange history. Learn about what lies at the bottom of the ocean. Learn how to make a better Molotov cocktail.
Find birds, listen to birds, do whatever they tell you to do.
This can be a period of radical, intense self-care. That can mean whatever it can mean. It can mean administrative shit like getting your vaccines up to date, renewing your passports, getting any healthcare done that needs imminent doing. A small act, “Oh, I need to renew my car’s registration,” can feel fulfilling. No, this does not change the world, but it feels good, it gives you motivation to do more, to steady and strengthen yourself for whatever is to come next — little bricks making up the house that is you.
(And hey, nobody hates a dopamine hit.)
Plan a trip. Take a drive. Pet a dog. I dunno.
Be angry or be numb or be sad. Be horrified, be optimistic, be pessimistic, be the light, be the void. As long as you’re still here, being.
Get off social media if it makes sense to do so. It’ll be here later.
If you’re still on it, maybe block wantonly. Don’t wade into it with silly, shitty people. They’re vampires looking to drain away your life, leaving you enervated and raw, doing little for you but wasting your time.
I also think this is a good time to resist easy answers about *gesticulates broadly.* We will be looking in the coming days for simple correctives, as if the bullet that killed our hope came from one gun instead of from a firing squad holding AK-47s. As if all we have to do is find the one magic thing to fix. But nothing works like that. Especially something this big, this deranged. The fallacy of the single cause is real, and for things like this, there’s never one reason, one answer. It’s ten things. It’s a hundred. I have long been fascinated with the discord and complexity found in cascading failures, and there’s no reason to believe that the sheer intricacy of human society is not subject to the will of such unpredictable waves of chaos and failure.
(That said, were I pressed to point out some of the big issues, I’d say it sure doesn’t help having a profit-poisoned media environment, a propaganda-poisoned social media environment, and billionaires running rampant without any checks on what they can say or do or buy. That’s a good place to start, and even there, perhaps you’ll find a few hesitant steps forward: you can remove from your life those mainstream media outlets who sanewashed Trump but who will now be championing the resistance against him. Give money to Propublica. Subscribe to the Philadelphia Inquirer or Rolling Stone or Teen Vogue. I do not endorse it yet because I’m only just poking around it, but Adam Conover seems to recommend Ground News, which would appear to provide glimpses of news narratives from varying partisan angles. Though it may also be a sponsor of his show, Factually, and in that sense may be a biased recommendation on his part. I don’t know!)
(Also, I can assure you the reason for the loss was not trans people or “the woke mind virus” or “women aren’t nice enough to men.” Do not throw vulnerable people under the tires of democracy just because you think they’re in your way. That’s how the other side talks and thinks, okay?)
I don’t really know. And it’s important to recognize, you don’t know either. We don’t know what’s to come or how bad it’ll get it. It may be worse than we expect or a little better, and it’ll almost certainly be stupider than we think, because fascism is surprisingly oafish, which makes it feel all the worse that it succeeds when it does, because of how fucking ridiculous it is. We don’t know why this all happened or what. We can only know that we are here in this moment and we are together in some capacity, and we will have to form or reinforce coalitions and communities with as much grace as we can muster, but right now, it’s okay to just sit in the darkness and regard the void and think about trees and Thanksgiving and somewhere you’d like to visit and an errand you need to run and a video game you’d like to replay. Just be good to yourself and then, by proxy, to those around you. The work will come. The work will get done. For now, breathe and think of birds.
A biting, post-modern horror about day jobs and monsters – one of which will devour you whole, but perhaps not the one that you think. What will you put up with to not have to go back to the day job you hated? A lot apparently, a whole HELL of a lot.
Noah desperately needs a new job that involves less blood and piss than his current one. So, when he spots an ad for a newspaper with ‘No experience preferred’, he puts on his good shirt and marches down to their average-looking office to unknowingly sign his life away.
Malachia is the only human left in the City of Silence and she spends her time wandering its empty, bone-filled streets. Until one day she finds a lone figure hunched over a typewriter, his fingers enmeshed with the keys. Could he be the answer to finding her missing girlfriend?
Propelled by their pursuits for rent money and truth, Noah and Malachia are pushed to their limits by a sinister media powerhouse. Will either of them survive the darkness that ensues?
Writing dialogue is fun and that’s how books get huge
Before this novel, I had, obviously, never written something this long before. I had always marveled at the PHYSICAL MASS of words that some writers could commit to the page. I had also sort of rolled my eyes when a writer would talk about being SURPRISED by what the characters had to say or where conversations went. (I mean you’re writing them how the fuck is it a surprise) And then I started writing character dialogue regularly and I had that AHA moment. They were right and I was wrong, these characters who I thought I had known were some CHATTY MOTHERFUCKERS and were just going on for thousands of words when my mental outline had been much, MUCH shorter. In fact, I had to reign them in often to keep from just bloating the book with constant banter. That’s how books get big, uncontrollable literary ghosts that just whisper nonstop in your ear and demand that you transpose all their inane conversations.
The whispering shadow behind my fridge has some very good ideas and is not just always a judgy jerk
This writing experience also taught me that you need to let go and rely on others in the writing and editing process at times. Other writer friends, editors, the WHISPERING SHADOW THAT LURKS HUNGRILY BEHIND YOUR FRIDGE. That last one was a true treasure of a discovery. I mean I had always known it was there right? But normally it just would comment on the ripeness of my teeth, the ripeness of my friends’ teeth, the ripeness of…well you get the picture. But while I was working on this book it really had some insightful things to say about the pacing and overall structure of the novel. We would stay up late many nights workshopping particularly tricky sections of the book . . . and commenting on the ripeness of the character’s teeth.
Characters and books really do have a voice that surprises you
I did not set out to write a funny book. I have been informed that I have written a funny book. Just like being surprised by character dialogue spooling out of control prior to writing this I had been skeptical of statements like “I had no idea the plot was going there” or “I am as surprised as you are that X character did X action” Like how is that possible when you are the brain it is coming from? Whelp. It is possible. In my little secret writerly heart I had hoped to write something in the tone of someone like Brian Evenson and instead the novel has been described as “Douglas Adams lit on fire and with row after row of glistening teeth” which I am totally okay with, but it was quite the experience to be writing and just watch it run away into this entirely different tonal direction that what you had first set out to write.
There are many variations of ripeness for human teeth.
I heard something once call the human mouth an orchard planted in secret and waiting for the harvest. That kinda sticks with you and in fact there are like whole charts for judging the ripeness of human teeth and when they are best plucked. Who knew? Now you do.
Sometimes done is good and you can always write a sequel
This book took far too long to write and if my editors had let me continue pecking away it would have been twice as long. It is good, I think, to allow wiser heads to guide you towards the exits when you’ve started building hallways over where the doorways used to be and adding new wings and subterranean annexes on what was meant to be a summer cottage. That is not to say you can’t immediately start working on that cabin in the woods for the upcoming winter. I’ve already started outlining the sequel to HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA and am champing at the bit to really dig into the writing of it. But I would still be probably adding new parapets and linen rooms to this house if left to my devices. I am happy to be instead poring over the blueprints of what is to come.
Jordan Shiveley is a writer and designer who lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their work has appeared in venues such as Nightmare Magazine, Baffling Magazine, The Best Horror of the Year Volume 15 and various anthologies from Neon Hemlock among others as well as roleplaying games. Their Debut novel HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA is now available from Unbound. (Also, editor’s note: Jordan is the one responsible for Voidmerch, of which there is WENDIG MERCH if you are so inclined to seek it.)
There are bluebirds in our apple tree this morning and I am sad for them. Sad for the tree, too. The tree is a crabapple tree, technically. It’s an old tree, bursting with fruit. The tree doesn’t know who won or lost an election or what an election is. The birds don’t know, either, and I’m happy they get to have that. We also haven’t had meaningful, measurable rain in five, six weeks now. We’ve wildfires popping up just a few miles away. It’s November 6th and will be 80 degrees today. The tree and the birds must know they’re thirsty. They will know if fire comes for them.
I’m sure the rain will come, and I’m hopeful we will be untouched by fire, but I also know the lack of rain will dry us out more often, just as I know it’ll flood more often, and I know the fires will come more often, and the tornadoes, too. And you like to hope that someone in charge has a plan, that they believe in this reality going on around us, that they share in the same reality we do. But we’re not there anymore. We lost that yesterday. We lost a lot yesterday. (Perhaps chief among them the illusion that we shared one country, or even one collective reality.) I don’t know why or how we lost it, precisely. We can unpack it however we want to — the mainstream media sanewashed the man; the woman was a woman and men would rather choose to control women than vote for them; don’t forget the racism, can’t forget the racism; the woman ran the wrong campaign and cozied up to the GOP and didn’t say enough about Gaza and global warming; it was the economy, stupid; it’s Russia; it’s disinformation and misinformation and Musk and RFK and the price of milk and the cost of rent and something about the border and something about COVID and —
What I know is that I don’t know. What I know is the things I thought I knew, or that I believed were true, really aren’t, and that once more I exist in need of a word, perhaps a German one, that expresses both the act of being shocked and a total lack of shock at the exact same time.
I knew he could win. I half-expected it. And yet all parts of me strained against the illogic of it, the sheer incredulity of the possibility of his win. People looked at his first four years, at COVID, at January 6th, at all his promises, his crimes, at all his people, at all the ones who told us he was a fascist, a dictator, an anti-democratic nightmare, and they said, “Yeah, him again, let’s fucking go.” And they pressed the self-destruct button, using the system of democracy to attempt to undo the system of democracy.
People chose this. In considerable number. This, grotesquely, is democracy in action. Though a democracy mauled into a cruder shape by disinformation.
This is a doom post. I don’t want it to be (and I’m sorry for it) but I also don’t want to be flippant or twee. I don’t want to hashtag-resist you into trying to have hope on a dark day. Perhaps some dark days must simply be dark and we must be in that darkness. Maybe we need to let people have their hopelessness today. Let them have their doom. Do not scold. Give them no stirring platitudes nor poetry of resistance. Just let people sit and ruminate however they must on the hard mad road ahead.
Because that road ahead is hard, and it will be maddening. We’re in some very serious trouble. The climate, the environment, those bluebirds and that tree, are at stake here. Our friends — especially transgender folks, cisgender women, really anybody who isn’t a straight white Christian dude with money — is going to be worse for wear at some point soon, even if they voted for him. It’ll be up to us to help them, to protect our friends, even when we don’t know how, even when we may need that protection ourselves.
Our democracy is in danger — all the lights on the console are blinking red, and the klaxons are deafening. Is there a deportation force coming? Are we really going to ban vaccines? Are we going to put Musk and RFK Jr. in charge of important levers and buttons? How deeply will we cement a corroded, cruel SCOTUS majority and for how long, and will we even be able to turn the tables on that again? I don’t know. It really isn’t good. A lot was on the line yesterday and while I like to think we, as the at-this-point-cringey-cliche goes, left it all on the field. The stakes were high and we lost. And there may be a lot of suffering in the wake of that.
This isn’t a post with a plan, this isn’t a pep talk, this isn’t about hope. I’m wallowing in the doom for a moment. Maybe it’s foolish. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing that, or telling you about it. But I wanted to say it, to be true to where my head and my heart are at. I want it to be okay to feel shitty. To not force joy. I don’t want some artifice of hope. To be a lantern in this tunnel right now feels false. I feel like I need to be in the darkness here, to be one with it, to become part of this new, lightless reality. I’ll get there. I’ll get back to a better place. But right now I want to realize how much trouble we’re in before I tell you how we deal with it. Maybe the worry and the fear will motivate me. I don’t know. I’m sitting with it. I’m considering the trouble, the doom, the darkness. I’m thinking about the bluebirds and the crabapple tree. And I’m hoping somewhere in the darkness I find a way forward.
If you need it, there’s 988 Lifeline — call or chat.
