What I mean is, I’ve been writing a looong time and only now do I have a debut novel. Experience (or age) doesn’t make me unique in any sense, but it adds a certain perspective to this whole ride. My expectations are…lower? Don’t get me wrong, I’m very interested in my books existing. Being read! Selling! Made into comics, tv, and movies! But I don’t expect those things, at least, not anymore. I did, in the early days, despite telling myself I was a realist.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.
I could write pages of the things I believed before writing NINE TENTHS that I’ve since set aside, for the better. I’ll share five of them with you, because five is Chuck’s limit and he won’t let me out of the cellar if I disobey.
I’m A Morning Writer, Or You Control Your Environment
This lesson was the simplest. In the early years I worked in the late afternoon or early evening because life, or so I thought. In reality, I slept late. I could have been writing, but I chose sleep. Fine, if that works for you. It didn’t work for me. A lot of my late-day production was a slog.
Enter children and school.
What ye olde folks don’t tell you is when your kids go to school, so do you. The hours, the activities, the homework–the whole burden returns. My precious morning sleep disappeared. I wasn’t busy for an entire extra two hours, but I certainly had to function earlier in the day. I realized since I was awake, I might as well write. And at that hour (now) the words flowed easier than in the evening. My brain wasn’t mush from a full day of “other work”. I was energized and eager to attack the novel in progress. The scheduling switch didn’t occur to me organically—it took my children starting school for me to pivot to morning writing. I wish I’d learned (earlier) to play with scheduling, and jumpstart my creativity.
This is not me saying you should write in the morning. This is me saying you should learn when you’re most productive, and write then, as much as life allows. Sometimes you’ll have to make trade-offs. (Dream about donuts or wake up and finish that novel because no one else will.)
I Wasn’t The Second Coming Of FAMOUS WRITER
You’d think I’d know better. EVERYONE falls for this. And I certainly said the correct things, out loud. But inside my head, I marched to a different drum. They’re going to think you’re amazing. I could hear them. Look at this guy, he nailed a bestseller on the first try. Established authors would contemplate their own work, the horror dawning as they realized I was so much better at everything literary.
Please see extended laughter above.
Turned out, I had no idea what I was doing. I relied on plenty of cheap writing tricks. My plots lacked direction and urgency. My characters had no agency. I cobbled together approaches and themes from various authors I happened to be reading–pastiche. Again, this experience isn’t atypical. I mention it so maybe a handful of you manage to silence your early author hubris. I mean, confidence is valuable, but then there’s delusion.
I learned I had skill gaps. I still do. And that’s fine. I can be the writer I am. So can you.
What You Think Is Clever Dialog Is Not A Story
Up until very recently I wrote dialog with a blind eye. Early feedback complimented my dialog, and in a world where I had any number of other writing struggles, I was more than happy to believe I had dialog sewn up. At least I know how people talk and translate that to the page. In my head, the characters bantered endlessly, entertaining with every word they uttered and I transcribed. Cut the dialog, I thought to myself. But, it’s so good.
Again, see cruel laughter above.
At the risk of sounding like a jerk, my dialog wasn’t bad. Dialog writing was one of the easiest parts of the process, for me. The problem was failing to turn a critical eye to the words my characters spouted. Did the words matter? Did they serve more than one purpose, advance plot, or reveal character? And if the dialog did nothing else but seem incredibly fun to read, was it notable? Meaning maybe limit myself to one or two moments of clever for the sake of clever in the whole book, rather than one or two moments per page, Macfee, you dumbass.
It’s great to have a strength. But even strength needs editing. If nothing else, mine did.
A Unique Premise Isn’t The Most Important Element
When I first had the idea for NINE TENTHS, the premise of an ordinary man who repossessed augmented (superhero) devices, I knew I had a winner. At the time (I’m not going to list a year, but it will become clear it wasn’t recent) superhero media was rare. I wasn’t aware of anyone who’d taken the angle of an ordinary person in a world where superheroes were the norm. The combination of repo man and superhero felt fresh. THIS IDEA IS SO GREAT, NOTHING CAN STOP ME.
Enter the MCU. And scads more brutal laughter.
I still think my story is unique, or unique enough. But after I accepted the whole superhero market saturation thing (or mostly accepted) I realized what I should have realized all along—it’s the characters, stupid. If I cared about the characters, other people would care. If I kept the characters interesting, if I was true to the story I was telling, basically if I followed all the writing fundamentals, I’d still have a good, maybe great, story, regardless how many superhero movies and tv shows existed. “The idea” is but a small first step. Lots of people have ideas. Very few people deliver on them (or even try).
Creating A Story Is Fun (Forget, Relearn, Repeat)
The whole point of writing is that you, the author, enjoy the process. Why else are you writing? It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme—there’s not enough storage space in the world to contain the typed laughter. You’re writing because it’s fun. Making stuff up, seeing the nonsense you invented become a real live book, to have people get what you wrote, enjoy it, imagine up their own version in their heads—this is cool stuff. Most amazing of all–sometimes, every once in a while, you might even read your own writing and think–I did pretty damn good. That’s the point.
But writing is also real work. Producing a novel requires discipline. We’re not talking manual labor, but it’s structured. Regarding writing as a task requiring effort is a great lesson to learn, and learn early, but living that lesson does run the risk of obscuring the reason you started down the path in the first place. My writing benefitted from outlines, spreadsheets, supporting research, and inspirational documents. But this type of somewhat grindy work pushed the fun parts from my mind. And after long enough the “all work and no play” approach was reflected in my writing. I had to remind myself the process was fun. Who writes thousands of words with no promise they’ll earn a dime? Who sinks countless hours into creating a whole world that may never see the light of day? People trapped in hell, and those who think they’re having fun, that’s who.
I had to relearn this lesson along the way. Put on new writing music. Write a whole new section that might not survive edits. Write in second person. Forget all the writing rules for a day or two and let the crazy fly. Then I reactivated editor-brain and folded in the pieces that made my writing better. Even if zero of those tangents succeeded, I’d recharged myself.
Depressing note–I forgot this lesson more than once. You will too. Forget. Relearn. Repeat.
If I learned anything at all writing NINE TENTHS, it was to be better, at everything. The book taught me about my own life as much as writing. I need to be a better version of myself if I want to have any success as a writer. And by success, I mean regular joy in the daily writing process, regardless of how many books I ever sell.
Was that a sixth thing I learned? Of course not.
*checks lock on cellar door*
***
Jeff Macfee is a writer. His work has appeared in Needle: A Magazine of Noir, Shotgun Honey, and the anthology Killing Malmon. Nine Tenths is his debut novel.
Why yes, it is time for one of those shotgun-blast slapdash news-updates. I have more, um, cogent bloggery in mind, but I am currently under
*does a quick count*
the yoke of FOUR DIFFERENT PROJECTS right now, and am a little bit
*eye twitches*
overburdened.
(To explain, the four projects are: first draft of the Evil Apple book, second draft of my TBA new writing book, page proofs of Wayward, and outlines for a secret li’l comics project. Three of these things hit this month, while I am, as noted, trying to write a first draft of the new book. AHHHHHH.)
But! There be news, just the same, should you care to bear it —
First up, The Book of Accidents has been nominated for a Locus Award in Best Horror, holy crap. (That’s now in addition to being nominated for a Stoker, as well, hot damn.) You can find the list here — I’ll note that in horror I share the space with some amazing finalists: Premee Mohamed, Grady Hendrix, Stephen Graham Jones, Stephen King, Rivers Solomon, Daryl Gregory, Caitlin Starling, and Champion Joe Lansdale. It’s fucking cool. I’m very lucky. TBOA has gone back for another printing in paperback already, by the way, and continues to sell really well and that’s thanks to you, and to all the great booksellers and librarians who are out there shoving my MIND VIRUS I mean COOL HORROR NOVEL into people’s eyes. Thank you for that. If you’ve read the book and care to leave a nice review somewhere, I’d be thankful.
Second, the SFWA is running their silent auction with Worldbuilders, and you can find that auction right here. But you’ll also find a couple WENDIG-SPECIFIC auction items, including this lot of signed/personalized books, as well as seats for a virtual kaffeeklatsch (which is German for, “a caffeinated chat in which you are trapped in a virtual room with me and you cannot leave until your time is up”). The auction runs for the next four days, so get in and bid to support the good work done by the SFWA. Good work like, for instance, the #DisneyMustPay initiative, which LA Times just did a piece on — read it here.
Third, we’re looking for new ideas for cool WENDIGIAN VOIDMERCH. You can find what we’ve got already cooked up thanks to designer Jordan Shiveley right here — Black Swan shirts, Art Harder, Welcome to Ramble Rocks, and so forth. But! If you have cool Wendig- or terribleminds-themed things you want emblazoned upon clothing or bags or YOUR VERY SOUL, umm, you know, drop a note in the comments below. A new Certified Penmonkey shirt maybe? An Ashe & Grim Solemnities logo shirt? Scream it so the cheap seats can hear.
The Elden Ring Update
So, Elden Ring ended up one of my favorite games. Had a lot of fun with it. Again, my goal was basically this: run all the way past the scariest shit, and then scoop up all the good items I could while also leveling up along the way, and then when I was of significant level, I’d go back to the scary shit to basically just kick the big bosses’ assholes inside out. It was a fun way to play — focused largely on exploration and late-game conquest. It worked. It ended up not being a very hard game at the end of that, really. Except, well, at the end.
The end game of Elden Ring is, in my mind, bullshit. I know, I know: GIT GUD. Well, I thought I did “git gud.” I was able to basically waltz my way through nearly all of the late-game bosses — Melania stumped me, couldn’t beat her to save my life, no matter what strategy I used. But then I came to the Elden Beast and no matter what I do, no matter how pumped up I am, the Beast fucking slaughters me in a hit or two. I can kick Radagon’s ass easy. But then the EB shows up and just rains hell on my face while my Mimic Tears kinda… just waits around. It sucks. I hate it. So I gave up on that. The end.
AND THAT’S ALL.
More when I have it. Or when I’ve climbed out of this WORK HOLE.
There are a lot of rules for writing. One that I hear fairly often is write what you know. That’s fine if you’re writing adult contemporary about a penniless author. It’s less useful if your characters spend their days riding horses, practicing witchcraft, or getting into knife fights. I’m talking about fantasy, the genre where we get to make things up with very little reality required. It’s a genre built entirely around the idea of escapism. You can set your stories in spectacular worlds. Your character can tame dragons or fight monsters. You can do whatever they want.
Even works of fantasy, however, still benefit from some grounding in the real world. Otherwise readers may have trouble relating to the story and its characters. One way to achieve it, while still delivering a fantastical experience, is to create verisimilitude. This is a fancy word (which I can’t pronounce) for the feeling that something seems especially true or real. In simpler terms, it means writing about something in a way that persuades the reader you know your stuff.
In my first book, a portal fantasy to a secondary world, I made up a lot of things. Flora, fauna, countries, geography, you name it. I created a pristine world for modern characters to explore. Yet one of my earliest readers shared that some of the most compelling and vivid scenes from that book were when my characters were traveling through the woods. There’s a very simple and logical explanation for that: I spend a lot of time in the woods myself. I’m a bowhunter. Between September and January, I pretty much live in camo. So I know how to write about the woods in a way that rings true.
Most writers have real-world experience or knowledge that can inform their writing. Maybe you grew up on a farm and know about agriculture. Maybe you helped your dad fix up old cars. Hell, maybe you trained in martial arts and know how to subdue an opponent. Great writers lean in to their strengths, whether it’s Tolkien with linguistics or Rothfuss with music. Their deep and personal knowledge lends a convincing realism to those aspects of their stories.
There are so many aspects of fantasy worldbuilding that benefit from a well-informed author, from the obvious (horses, warfare, political structures, and world history) to the not-so-obvious (economics, sociology, religious fundamentalism, and even culinary science). In fact, there are probably too many relevant subjects for any one writer to be an expert in all of them. There are too many topics and not enough time. How do you balance research for writing with writing itself? When research is necessary, how to you even get started?
In this age of disinformation and misinformation, the best source of information is usually a real-world expert. Someone who has spent time studying or doing the thing beyond an amateur level. Unfortunately, sometimes experts are not easy to find. If you start asking people on the street if they know much about Medieval pole weapons or some pointers on practicing witchcraft, you’ll be greeted with odd looks. But these experts do exist. I know because I’ve spent the past few years recruiting them to come to my Science in Sci-fi, Fact in Fantasy blog series.
When I speak to experts, I ask them to do two things. First, I want to know the common blunders or misconceptions related to their area of expertise – in other words, the most glaring errors that pervade books, television, and other media. The world is rife with misconceptions about things, and fantasy-adjacent topics get more than their fair share. Thanks to the Dunning Kruger effect – a cognitive bias in which people who know very little about a subject tend to overestimate their understanding of it – humans tend to be ignorant of their own incompetence. This leads to gross errors in mainstream media which are subsequently repeated in other mainstream media, simply because none of the creators were truly an expert. Avoiding these common mistakes is step one in the journey to perceived know-how.
The second thing I ask of my many expert contributors is whether there are nuanced bits of knowledge that I can sprinkle into my work to give the appearance of competence. In other words, I want them to teach me just enough to be dangerous. To convince the casual reader that hey, this author really knows what he’s writing about. This, truly, is the secret weapon of the informed author: a knowledge base about an in-depth topic that’s been curated by a real expert.
For example, I learned from a historian that one of the common causes of infant mortality in Victorian England was “teeth” – because it occurred at the teething stage of infancy – and many such deaths were likely accidental overdoses of laudanum, which was often applied to babies’ gums to sooth teething pains. I learned from a martial artist that a person with a gun needs twenty-one feet of separation from someone with a knife in order to shoot them before being stabbed. Thanks to some helpful horse experts, I also know that experienced riders guide their mounts’ movement by controlling the shoulders of the horse, not by turning its head.
These are all little details, but working them into the story adds verisimilitude. Realism in storytelling wins more trust from the reader. More trust means more leeway to write about things that are cool but have no basis whatsoever in reality, like magical swords or flying horses. So sure, write what you know. For the other things you write, find an expert. Learn enough to be dangerous.
I came to novel writing after decades working as an intelligence analyst. This means I had tons of experience as a researcher because that’s basically what intelligence analysis is: a research project where, at the end, you brief the President of the United States on your findings.
No pressure.
As an intelligence analyst, you’re given a topic and it’s your job to learn everything about it in order to understand what the key issues are and the factors driving those issues. You also must figure out what information you need to truly understand the issue, which may not be the information that comes easily to hand. You also must figure out the best way to organize that information, which might amount to thousands of factoids, so that you can not only make sense of it but instantly lay your hands on the citation for any single piece. And lastly, you learn to be quick because you can be called on at any time to brief Congress or the National Security Council.
As it turns out, these are all skills that come in extremely handy when you’re writing a novel, particularly a historical one.
The Fervor (Putnam), which came out on April 26, is my third novel of historical horror. The first was The Hunger, a reimagining of the story of the Donner Party, and the second was The Deep, which brought this treatment to the sinking of the Titanic. When I was on tour promoting The Hunger, I’d have at least one person come up to me at every event to ask how research a historical work, which led me to reflect on my research process for novels. I’ve distilled it into some tips that I hope you find useful.
The number one problem, I heard from writers, is research paralysis. Getting sucked down the rabbit hole and being unable to stop researching and start writing. I’m here to tell you research paralysis is real. The truth of the matter is not that you need more information but that you’re hesitant to start writing. It’s easier to continue doing what you can see—read one more book or spend another afternoon surfing the internet—than to start on more amorphous things like characterization.
It’s a sign of insecurity, and the answer for that insecurity is to build rigor into your research process.
The number one tip is to define the scope of your research. If you don’t know what your book is about, everything seems important. So: define your book as much as possible before you start researching. Can you limit it to a single historical event—say, one battle instead of all of WWII? You’re writing a novel, not non-fiction: don’t forget that your book is about the characters, a specific plot or story, dialogue, voice, theme. Once you know what it is you’re truly writing about, it becomes easier to rule out huge swaths of background.
Your research should serve the story, not the other way around.
A lot of research these days is online, which raises the question of evaluating your sources. Can you trust what you read on the internet? Yes, but only with some vetting. Even experienced researchers can have difficulty determining the reliability of sources. Stanford professor Sam Wineburg found that it’s best to think like a fact-checker when evaluating online sources. Think laterally, in other words, checking a fact against a number of different websites/sources, rather than deciding whether to trust a fact based on how reputable the source website looks.
For The Hunger, I had to rely on the work of homegrown genealogists or from diaries, so the question was how to decide whether a piece of information was reputable. In intelligence, we develop confidence scores: it’s a way of putting all information on a level playing field. You can work up your own system, but generally it’s done in three tiers:
Probably – very confident; you’re 75-90 percent sure that the information is correct
Possibly—confident, 50 – 75 percent
Unlikely—less than 50 percent
Lastly, consider taking your notes in the most efficient way possible. For me, that means spreadsheets and no (or very little) paper. This might be a tip for writers of a certain age; the younger generation is already comfortable with spreadsheets. Paper and journals get romanticized, but spreadsheets are efficient. You can arrange information in a way that visually makes sense. If you need to move a piece of information, you can do it easily and don’t need to recopy a lot of work. You can hyperlink citations or other material. You can make as many timelines as needed, and they’re great for keeping track of characters’ vitals. And they’re searchable! What’s not to love.
Now, put your fear of research aside and go work on your novel.
Alma Katsu is the award-winning author of seven novels. Her latest is The Fervor, a reimagining of the Japanese internment that Booklist called “a stunning triumph” (starred) and Library Journal called “a must read for all, not just genre fans” (starred). Red Widow, her first espionage novel, is a nominee for the Thriller Writers Award for best novel, was a NYT Editors Choice, and is in pre-production for a TV series.
Twitter fucking sucks. It has for a while, and it doesn’t suck entirely, all the time, in every direction, but in a general miasma-sort of way, it definitely fucking sucks. Elon Musk happens to agree that it fucking sucks, and so he wants to buy it. Only problem is, he and I do not agree about what makes it fucking suck. What he wants to fix are things that will, at least for my mileage, make it fucking suck worse. And so here we are with the big question:
What to do about that?
I have no goddamn idea.
But first, more on why Twitter sucks now, and why it’ll suck worse soon.
(Probably.)
And yes, ironically I’m writing this on a blog, which is like putting your podcast on vinyl, but this is what I got, so this is what you’re getting.
Twitter’s Three Phases
Twitter used to be my watercooler. I wrote from home, which is to say I was alone in a shed bleating words into a book that wouldn’t see the light of day for at least twelve months, so it was where I went to to meet other authors, editors, publishing professionals, and readers. From there it cascaded out to other creative folks too: comic artists, voiceover folks, and the like.
Then, somewhere along the way, it became a stage. Because that watercooler? It was public. Everyone was privy to it. It wasn’t a private Slack channel. Other people could watch your particular community gather around its communal watercooler like they were checking out a nature documentary. You were on a stage. You were performing, even if you didn’t mean to be. And everyone reacting to your performance was also on that stage and also — whether they meant to or not! — performing. Everybody was audience, everybody was performer, and after awhile, that gets messy.
Somewhere, it entered a third phase — again, without warning. I expect this was sometime in the 2015-2016 leadup to That Election. Twitter stopped being a watercooler, it stopped being a stage. It became a Fight Club.
And no matter what night it was for you, you had to fight.
(It’s tempting to blame this on the individual. And it is on us, somewhat. But don’t neglect to throw blame at the platform itself: rewarding agitation and doing far too little to mitigate harassment, bot activity, and propaganda.)
The Personal
For me personally, Twitter was a place where I met some of the greatest people I know. I’ve made genuine friendships. And it also had profound impact on my career. I did not set out on social media to have it be that impactful professionally, I just wanted to go somewhere and have fun and make friends and, even when that meant being sort of messy, say the stuff that was on my mind. I’m also definitely a better person because of Twitter, full-stop. I like to hope I’m a work-in-progress: soft clay rather than something carved into stone. Twitter has opened my mind in myriad directions. I have at times been a person whose empathy was at a deficit, and I believe social media has genuinely helped change that. It has given me some of my best days.
However.
It has also given me some of my worst days. Like, not just worst days online, but literally some of my worst actual days. I’ve been on Twitter for (insert a too-large number here) years, and every year the ratio of GOOD FUN to NIGHTMARE REALM changes — the good stuff dips, the nightmare shit rises, and that see-saw never seems to bounce back the other way. It’s probably not healthy that it’s turned into a place where one stupid tweet can bury you in harassment for days, weeks, even years. I still get people telling me I want to burn down libraries (uhh, I don’t) or that I suck for hating Tolkien (I don’t, and all those criticisms you think I made against Tolkien were not against Tolkien) or, oof, do I need to remind you of this? Cancel culture isn’t real, except that it is, and it’s shitty trolls wielding it. I’ve received death threats and doxxing over the absolutely dumbest shit. And you probably have, too. Because that’s Twitter. And I don’t know that a platform like that is all that great if it’s giving you literal days where the goal of people is to make you want to kill yourself — and they succeed at making you feel that way, even for just a moment.
(And note, I’m saying all this as a cisgendered white dude with buckets of privilege. If this is my experience, I promise you it’s worse for everyone on the spectrum of marginalization and under-served communities.)
All that is in addition to the fact the algorithm seems to be more and more punishing in terms of helping reach. I don’t see half my mentions anymore. Some posts reach a lot of eyes; many seem to hit few. It’s a mess. I don’t even know what I’m gaining over there, and it’s starting to definitely feel like there’s a sunk cost fallacy at work in terms of me staying…
The Global
And of course all of that is just at the human level. At the sociopolicial nation-to-globe level, haahha aaahaahaAAAAHHHHH I mean, Jesus Fucking Christ, it’s hard to reckon with the fact that Facebook and Twitter helped give us Trump. Like, do you ever stop to think about how this massive digital brain-dump gave us the literally dipshittiest person to ever become president? This place? Gave us that guy? As president? Fuck. Fuuuuuuck. Fuck.
Twitter didn’t create the post-truth era, but it certainly feels like it helped hammer in the last nails into truth’s coffin. Pick a reality, and you can find it on Twitter. To be clear, you can find this anywhere — it isn’t unique to Twitter, and is probably even worse on Facebook and YouTube. Twitter, in fact, has gotten a little better in this regard — way too slow, and way too late, and way too fucking little, but something is something, and I can guarantee you that Elon Musk is not here to keep that kind of moderation in place.
Ultimately, Twitter is this big giant glom of thoughts all connected together in one big ugly stew. It’s no wonder it gets hard to separate out the protein from the filler, to figure out what’s edible and what isn’t, to have a hard time telling if you’re eating something healthful or swallowing a hot quaff of poison. I don’t think it’s doing us any good. It’s not helping our anxiety (at least, not mine). Yes, it disseminates good information, but usually only after bad information (misinformation or worse, disinformation) has taken the good seats and has to be forcibly kicked out. Nuance goes there to die. The service thrives on outrage, and while often that anger and that outrage is justifiable and even reasonable, it can also shortcut the part of our brains that make us feel like we want to get up and do something about it — Twitter tricks us into feeling like, well, hey, we did something about it. We tweeted about it. Didn’t that fix it??
(And never mind the dunk culture stuff. All the dunks are funny and fair, I get it, but you have to realize that at the end of the day it’s like throwing the seeds of an invasive plant in your shitty neighbor’s yard. Yeah, you really got them good, until you realize you just spread the invasive plant further, and now it’s growing into your lawn anyway because that’s how plants work.)
I don’t know that social media helped end the world.
But it sure didn’t save it.
And Now, Elon Musk
I don’t need to tell you who he is. You can Google that for yourselves. Think of him as the ultimate troll. A billion-dollar troll. King of the Trollkin, that guy.
Maybe he’ll do right by Twitter. Maybe he’ll make it better. Or maybe he’ll give it autopilot and it’ll crash into an orphanage. I’m betting on the latter.
The question is, what do you do about it?
I don’t know.
I really don’t.
You can leave. You can stay. No judgment on either. Leaving, you think, well, I can’t give him that win. Every person on Twitter is, essentially, a resource for and of Twitter. You are to him a Tesla driver — if he owns it, you’re driving one of his cars, just digitally. Every tweet is an Elon Musk tweet and you might think, well, you don’t want to give him that satisfaction. And you’d be right not to want that.
You can stay. You can resist and use his platform against him. That’s also good and fine and fair. I dunno that it works or not. It probably just generates more of the anger that the platform thrives upon. It probably gives him the win either way, to destroy Twitter or to have it be like a kicked over beehive.
It’s an ethical conundrum no matter how you slice it. You abandon friends on that platform, or you stay and justify his ownership of it. And it’s not like Facebook is good — or Instagram, which is just Facebook with photos. Again, no judgment here. You do what you gotta. I know that nuance is not a thing we are well-practiced at anymore (in part thanks to, drum roll please, Twitter), but for real, I don’t think there’s One Good Moral Answer. As with many things, you pick a path and make your peace with it, and course-correct when you get better, more useful information.
For me, I dunno what I’ll do. I don’t feel comfortable using a Musk-owned Twitter in a big way. What few gains Twitter has made will, as noted, be almost certainly rolled back. Trump is likely to return. As such, I’ll probably turn it over to a broadcast-only announcement-based Twitter, and see what happens from there. I’ll kill it from my devices, leaving it on like, some sad old iPad with a cracked screen and a stuck button that smells curiously like raspberry jam. I signed up for counter.social today, @chuckwendig, but that site crashed about ten minutes later and has locked me out since. I’m on Instagram @chuck_wendig, but it’s not a great place to have conversations. I have a blog at www.terriblohh right you’re already here, never mind. Should I start a newsletter? Is Ello still a thing? Myspace? Friendcircle? Faceyplace? Gleem? Plumbob? Are any of these real or am I just having a stroke? Oh god, do I have COVID? Is COVID a social media network? Shit, should I fire up my old Gateway 486 and start a new BBS? You know what, fuck it, send me your physical mailing address, I’ll write my posts on various rocks and logs and throw them through your window. Open or closed. ROCKLOG, I’ll call it. Maybe I’ll duct-tape an apple to each post. For health.
I dunno. It sucks. I’ve made a lot of friends there. I’ve had wonderful times. I’ve also had some of the worst moments of my life there, and I get a little frisson of secret joy at the opportunity to escape it. Because, as noted, Twitter fucking sucks a lot of the time. And I fear it’s about to fucking suck a whole lot more. But I also get a crushing sense of sadness. I don’t want to leave people behind. I love some folks there. But am I having fun there? Am I helping anyone? Am I even helping myself? Or is it just an anxiety oubliette, now lorded over by an even shittier billionaire than before? One who punishes his critics and hates trans people and comes from blood diamond money and, and, and…
So, it was about ten years ago I was in Los Angeles on the day of release for my first original novel, Blackbirds. (For the sake of the pedant, this was 4/24/12.)
I was there for a twofold purpose: first, to launch the book that night at Mysterious Galaxy’s Redondo Beach store — a branch that has woefully closed, though the flagship store remains (whew) — and second, to meet with various film and TV folks about the book.
Both of these things were pretty weird for me. In terms of launching a book, I’d never done a proper book signing before for one of my own books. I’d been to Gen Con and a few other gaming conventions to sign some of my White Wolf game work. And I’d had a novel out previously, the yes-it’s-my-idea-but-sadly-it-was-still-work-for-hire-so-I-own-no-part-of-it Double Dead. But this was different. This one was mine. It had taken me a long, long time to get to this point (more on that in a moment) — and the book had a little tiny dollop of buzz humming around it. In part I think because of the stunning Joey Hi-Fi cover, in part because my blog at the time was something of a known and growing commodity in the writing/writer space, in part because (er, so I hope) it was an interesting book with a compelling hook —
Miriam Black can see how you’re going to die when she touches you. She knows the time of your demise, but not the place. She believes, falsely, that she can do nothing to change the course of fate.
That, I think, led to the film and TV interest.
The first meeting I took was near ICM, the agency representing the book, and I met David Knoller and Byron Belasco, and it was nice — they totally grokked the book, didn’t want to softball it, were looking to roll hard with the adaptation. And they said a thing I found hilarious at the moment: they said someone else is going to try to ruin it. Someone were going to want to turn it into like, a TV primetime police procedural and they’d water it down and change it entirely away from its premise, and I laughed that off, said my goodbyes, and immediately drove to Beverly Hills for a second meeting. (Where, incidentally, I did not know of byzantine LA parking rules where if you park on X street between certain random minutes, there are street-sweepers or something and you get a big fine, oops.) Upon taking that meeting, they proceeded to pitch me a version of the show that (wait for it) would air on primetime CBS and (wait for it) would be a police procedural (wait for it) where Miriam had a cool ghost for her detective partner (what the fuck) and they solved murders before they happen. I was like, “That sounds great, so you should go make that show and not put my name on it.” (I was probably more polite than that, if we’re being honest. But my enthusiasm for their idea was not present.)
I took other meetings, and none of them really sang, and eventually the show landed at Starz for a while with David Knoller and John Shiban. It never quite made it to the starting line, but got close. (Rumor has it Starz was ready to roll, but then American Gods came into their stable and they didn’t have the money to make Blackbirds, nor were they enthusiastic about having two ‘urban fantasy’ shows on. And so my eternal battle against Neil Gaiman continues.)
(I have no battle against Neil Gaiman, in case that’s not clear. I met him once and he was genuinely polite and lovely.)
The book launch that night was stellar. Stephen Blackmoore, excellent friend and also the author of the fucking badass Eric Carter series which you need to be reading right now JFC FFS, drove me to the event, and he was like, “So the event is at 7PM, I’ll pick you up at 4PM.” Which I thought was laughable because it was maybe fifteen miles or something, map said 30 minutes, and then I heard the direness in his voice when he said, “I’m picking you up at 4.” And he did. And we were nearly late. Los Angeles traffic is a sluggish Mad Maxian nightmare realm, a slow-moving digestive track in some great macadam beast.
Anyway! We got there. We did not die on the highway.
The launch was great. People showed up! Mysterious Galaxy had evil cupcakes with sinister predictions! I signed books! It was great. Ten out of ten. My career had begun in a rush of black feathers and cupcake frosting.
For better or worse, it was the moment that you all were stuck with me.
What Happened Before
(art by Adam Doyle)
Blackbirds took me years to write. Five years. Five fucking years.
The book came out of a feeling of powerlessness over death. It’s trite, probably, but sometimes the simplest and most guttural of urges connects easily — I was young, and grappling with the reality that people around me were getting sick and dying, and that I too one would day take the eternal dirt-nap, and I thought, well, fuck, that fucking sucks. I was a hypochondriac and anxious all the time and so death felt like a rheumy-eyed chihuahua ever biting at my heels, so I wanted to write something about death. I wanted to explore a twisted, grim power fantasy of someone who sees how people are going to die, but can’t see her own death, and further, isn’t sure she can really do anything about it. Again, probably trite, but that fate vs free will struggle was one that had some tasty meat on the bone. It’s also where I found power in writing about my own anxieties, about using books as a summoning circle in which to conjure those demons and Fight Club the fuck out of them wherever possible.
I’ve told this all before, so I’ll try to keep it capsule, but the gist was, I’d get about 75% of the way through the book before it would unspool like a ruptured testicle. I was lost in the story. Couldn’t figure out where to go or what to do. So I did what any floundering novelist would do: I won a screenwriting competition. (Yeah, no, I dunno either.) The prize: a mentorship with screenwriter Stephen Susco. I chose to ask him help me adapt the unfinished piece-of-shit book I was trying to write into screenplay form, so then I could use the screenplay as an outline to write and finish the novel. I had zero interest in actually writing movies or television at the time, though that would change soon after (and that relationship is what ended up getting me to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab with writing partner Lance Weiler).
Anyway. It worked. He told me to outline, I said, ha ha, we novelists don’t do that, we speak to horses, we listen to the windswept grass, and that’s how we find our muse. He said, well, how’s that going for you? Which, okay, good point. So I learned to outline, and from that wrote a script, and from the script wrote a book. (As a sidenote, some people take this story as suggesting that you, too, must learn to outline. That’s incorrect. The only advice to take here is that, when your process isn’t working for you, change your process.)
From there, I queried a bunch of agents. I’d done this dance before, and was disappointed with the results of it — my fault, not theirs, to be clear, as I was writing and querying all the wrong books. Books that weren’t really mine, but rather, books that were my idea of what would get me published. I was chasing the wrong genres, the wrong voices, trying to be like other authors instead of trying to just be like me. Blackbirds came out of me hitting rock bottom with my writing. I hesitate to suggest I was depressed, but I’d written five novels before that, none of them good, and I’d queried a couple to no good result.
So when it came time, I thought, I’m going to try one more time. One more novel. And this one, I don’t give a shit. I’m going to fling all the fucks but one last lonely fuck out of my fuckbasket, and I’m going to write a voicey book in third-person present-tense and it’s going to have an unlikable character who starts the book by looking in the mirror and it’s going to be horror-crime and it’s going to be violent and it’s going to vulgar and weird and I’m just going to put it all out there. The book itself felt like a big angry middle finger, both as a story and in its writing. It was enough to get me going. To get me to start — and eventually, after those five years — to finish it.
So it shocked me that the agent hunt yielded almost immediate results. I had a range of agents interested across the spectrum. My query letter was probably a middling one, but the hook of the book was enough, and so quite a few requested the manuscript. I had one bigger agent at a bigger house who was on vacation, but his assistant kept emailing me, “Oh, he’s on vacation and isn’t technically reading anything, but he’s really loving this.” “Oh, he’s supposed to be out canoeing today but he can’t stop reading your book.” “Oh, he forgot to feed his children and they wandered off into the woods and had to wrestle a meal away from some coyotes, that’s how much he loves this book.” And I was like, ooh, okay, that’s rill good. A week or so of this went by and then:
Radio silence.
So I pinged a few days later, hey, how’s he liking that book?
No response.
A few more days went by, as I chewed my fingernails down to the bloody quick.
A response finally rolled in: “He’s just not feeling it.”
End of conversation!
Needless to say, he’s not my agent.
Which, as it turns out, is a good thing.
Thankfully, at this time I was also having a conversation with Stacia, who would eventually become my agent. She’d been an editor but was newer as an agent, and she really just understood the book from the get-go, and had good suggestions to bring out the best version of that book. She offered to represent me, and at that point I think you’re supposed to do the polite, politic thing of emailing all the other agents who have the book and saying, “I have an offer, and if you’re considering making an offer of representation please do so by XYZ date,” except I was so happy to have the agent I had, and I felt like the fit was really right on, that I just emailed them all and was basically like SORRY YOU MISSED OUT, YOU SNOOZE, YOU LOSE, AND YOU SNOST SO YOU LOST. I don’t think it was quite that aggressive, ahem, but it was definitely a “the door is now closed” kind of email.
(It was the right choice. Stacia’s still my agent today, even though I’m sure there’s days she resents that decision due to my relentlessly anxious author emails. Sorry, Stacia!)
Blackbirds got me an agent quickly, but not a book deal. It went around and around and around, from publisher to publisher, and uniformly I received what were the nicest rejections possible. They would follow a rough pattern: “Oh, I love this! This is great! But our sales team doesn’t know how to sell it, so it’s a no.” And at that point I was still desperate enough that I’d plead with them, “Just let me know what to change, how to make it work for sales,” and the editors would say, “No! We like it as-is. We just can’t sell it.” And so the book fell into this widening chasm of art vs. commerce. Great story, can’t sell. The end.
I don’t quite remember how long it took to actually get to a sale, but it was a good while. Over a year out on submission, if I recall. But then suddenly, there arose a sudden effervescence of interest over the book, and we landed with Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris at Angry Robot, and from there, ended up with the fucking amazing cover by Joey Hi-Fi, and then? HISTORY WAS MADE. I CONQUERED ALL OF PUBLISHING IN A ROAR OF BLOOD AND FROTH AND
Uhhh, I mean, okay, maybe not.
What Happened Next?
(art by Galen Dara)
It took me five years to write Blackbirds.
It took me 30 days to write the sequel, Mockingbird.
Angry Robot had me write a third book to complete that trilogy, The Cormorant, and they were not keen on extending that trilogy — and so we were able to get the rights returned to us, where we sold to S&S and got an additional three books, Thunderbird, The Raptor & The Wren, and Vultures. All six books got a reskinning with the wonderfully ethereal bird art of Adam Doyle. Nobody ever really knew how to label them in terms of genre — I wrote them as horror-crime, Angry Robot called them urban fantasy, S&S called them, if I remember correctly, supernatural suspense? (Powell’s Bookstore in Portland shelves them all under horror, which is baller, and I goddamn fucking approve.)
If I can offer a little toothy commentary, I don’t really think that the new publisher handled the series well. They released hardcover and paperback at the same time in a confusing manner. They advertised a TV show that wasn’t a done deal on the re-release of the first book. I spoke to bookstores who wanted to have me tour there with the series and who wanted to support the books and who never got a response. There were cover SNAFUs and branding/rebranding issues and the edits on the latter three books were late not to mention very sparse when they finally did arrive — listen, things happen in publishing, and sometimes it’s nobody’s fault, but some of this stuff felt really problematic. Needless to say, the books didn’t really set the world on fire, but I had a great deal of fun writing them and was at least afforded the chance to do something a lot of writers don’t get to do: finish out a series. Hell, not just a series, but six full books.
And it’s not all bad news, to be clear: weirdly, because of film/TV options and because of foreign rights sales, the series has been one of my most profitable in terms of actual income. Some of the foreign editions have been huge. There was a flashmob event for the books in Poland because wtf? The initial advance for the first book was like, I dunno, after the exchange rate, somewhere around $6-7k, and to have a book with a low advance end up being really successful in the long run shows the value of the long-tail in publishing if you can manage it. And somehow, these books managed it.
So. Six books. Not to mention a pair of novellas (one in Three Slices, one in Death & Honey, and in each you’ll also find stories by best pals/excellent writers Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson). I feel very lucky that these weird books got to exist. It felt like a gift and I’m glad still for the chance.
What Comes Next?
I mean, nothing, technically? Six books and two novellas exist of Miriam Black, my favorite asshole protagonist. And that’s it. It’s done. Game over. Will there be a TV show? I’d love for there to be. Despite having lost the Starz option way back when, I will note that someone else did option it and the show continues to be wrapped up there, though I can say no more than that. I’ve long thought a comics adaptation would be cool, though to what end, I dunno. I’d deeply love a six-book special edition set that allows for each to have a Joey Hi-Fi cover — not that I don’t adore the Doyle covers. I do. But there’s something lurid and puzzle-boxy about the JFH covers that make me happy every time I look at them. I find my eyes roaming over them like ants searching up a crumb of human food.
Would I ever consider continuing the series? If there was a story there, sure. The last book ends in a way that definitely wraps everything up, but leaves a different door open for a different kind of story, but the vagaries of publishing make it difficult to get anyone to want to buy and produce those books.
So, they exist as they are, out in the world.
Maybe you wanna check ’em out, I dunno.
You can, of course. Doylestown Bookshop has them and I tend to sign them by predicting your demise, so that’s fun. But any bookstore will get you there.
Miscellaneous Debris
Hey! Here’s some random trivia bits about the series.
– It’s the only series of mine that I think has inspired both tattoos (!) and cosplay (!!). If you haven’t seen the amazing Sadie Hartmann’s cosplay, well, click.
– Very early on, the book was under consideration as a movie and not a show — using my original script developed during that mentorship. Trivia nestled within the trivia, that ended up poorly, and I got horrendously yelled at over a voicemail by what is now a major producer of films for reasons unknown to me, but he was super jerky and that pretty much made sure I wasn’t going to go that route.
– Mila Kunis reportedly had interest in playing Miriam Black, which, if you’ve seen Black Swan, totally would’ve worked.
– I’ve had many fan-castings sent to me as to who could or should play her, though my current personal choice after watching Only Murders in the Building is: Selena Gomez. Her dry, dark delivery in that show? Chef’s kiss.
– The Starz TV show originally would’ve been set in the Southwest, not the South. Which I like! Desert motels and shit. Very Breaking Bad — which, given John Shiban’s influence, made sense.
– If I had to list the books in order of my most to least favorite, I’d say The Cormorant, Vultures, Blackbirds, The Raptor & The Wren, Mockingbird, Thunderbird. I love them all, I really do, and I haven’t gone back to re-read them — but that’s my gut-check on remembering writing them.
– I remember getting to talk to a Penn State class about the books, as they were doing a whole class about women and feminism in genre books and comic books, and one of the young women students was like, “I loved how you totally inverted the PRINCESS IN THE TOWER motif by putting Louis in the lighthouse to be saved by Miriam,” and I was like, “Yes, that was definitely on purpose, thank you for noticing that,” which was a huge fucking lie. (I copped to that then and there, giving the woman full credit for totally picking up on something I didn’t even realize I was laying down. I confessed I had no idea I was doing that.)
– The Chinese covers for the books are super weird, almost Celtic.
– And that’s it. Ten years. Holy fucking shit. Thanks for reading. And thanks to Miriam Black for living inside my head like a chatty, beautiful tumor.
