Category: The Ramble (page 34 of 457)

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

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?

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.

– The series has its own TV Tropes page!

– 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.

HELLO FRANDOS. Want some naturally Wendig-scented updates? Organic? Free-range? Bespoke and artisanal? Here goes.

For My Birthday I Demand Proper Paeans In The Form Of Preorders

So we’re clear, I don’t actually demand anything from you for my birthday (*stares uncomfortably*), but were you so inclined, I might suggest that for my birthday, you treat yourself and buy yourself the gift of booooooks.

Currently, B&N is running a pre-order campaign from 4/20 – 4/22 (the latter of which is in fact my bloodsoaked nativity), and that campaign — using the coupon of PREORDER25 — gets you 25% off preordered books.

And, my my my, it sure looks like I have books you can preorder.

What books, you ask?

Well, first up, Dust & Grim is hitting paperback on October 4th, and you will note here that it has a brand new shiny cool cover, by artist George Ermos:

Behold! It is very cool! Look at that very nice blurb!

And then of course, on November 15th, the sequel to Wanderers, Wayward, also arrives. It’s a big motherfucker, that book, over 280,000 words of Weird Post-Apocalyptic American Sci-Fi Horror, so, that’s also an option on the table for your pre-ordering needs.

You can preorder Dust & Grim here from B&N.

You can preorder Wayward here from B&N.

But you can also preorder these from your local booksellers, and if you’d like a signed/personalized copy, you can nab a copy from Doylestown Bookshop.

In that B&N preorder sale, by the way, you can also seize on a number of excellent upcoming books, including but not limited to: The Fervor, Alma Katsu; Ghost-Eaters, Clay McLeod Chapman; The Pallbearer’s Club, Paul Tremblay; The Devil Takes You Home, Gabino Iglesias; The Clackity, Lora Senf; The Appearing House, Ally Malinenko; Camp Scare, Delilah Dawson; Hide, Kiersten White.

Munchings and Crunchings

The ever-delightful Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Red Scott had me on their podcast, Failure to Adapt, which is a show where hosts and guests pick a book that has been adapted onto the screen, and then they talk about the book and its adaptation. We chose Lloyd Alexander’s Black Cauldron.

It was a blast.

The book is great.

The movie is uhhh.

Not?

Embrace your inner assistant pig-keeper and listen here.

A Hug Is Like Violence Made Of Love

I am told that Mister Bones, the lovable murder-droid from Aftermath, is a playable character in the new LEGO Skywalker Saga game, if this is a thing that intrigues you, my dearest Frandolorian.

The Birds Are Back, Baby

We’re not in full migratory swing here, but already I’ve seen brown thrashers, Eastern towhees, Eastern Phoebes, ruby-crowned kinglets, and more. Photos to come. Also a Carolina wren couple has taken over our watering can, laying eggs in it. I tried to pick it up the other day and one of said wrens flew directly into my face, so now I probably have some kind of rare WREN FLU. You’re welcome. This is why you should keep wearing masks everywhere because I might sneeze weird WREN GERMS onto you and accidentally end the world.

OKAY BYE.

*Accepts the mic from Chuck.* Thank you, Chuck! *clears throat awkwardly* Hey, everybody! Can y’all hear me? Yes? Okay — here we go:

The Pixel Project, a 501(c)3 anti-violence against women nonprofit, has been running our Read For Pixels program since September 2014 when Chuck himself, Joe Hill, Sarah J. Maas, and nine other award-winning bestselling SFF and YA authors answered our call-to-action to help us reach out to their readers and fandoms about violence against women (VAW) and raise funds to keep our anti-VAW work alive.

That inaugural Read For Pixels livestream author interview series and fundraiser was a smashing success and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history. Over 180 authors, 16 campaigns, and almost nine years later, we are continuing to build what is probably the world’s largest repository of recorded livestream interviews and panels with authors speaking out about VAW. These are easily accessible on our YouTube channel to parents, teachers, kids, readers, writers, and fandoms worldwide who can either watch the videos to learn more about VAW while fanning over their favorite authors or use the videos to start conversations about VAW in their communities. Authors and publishers have also helped us raise approximately $10,000 per year by providing exclusive goodies as giveaways for readers, fans, and book collectors who donate to support our work.

You’re probably thinking: “Awesome! I’ll go check it out. So why the guest post on Chuck’s blog?”

The short answer: 2022.

The long answer: If we thought 2021 was bad, 2022 basically said hold my [insert your cuss word of choice here] beer.

Like many small nonprofits, this year we are not just dealing with the fallout from the pandemic, but also global inflation and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Women’s organizations have experienced decades of scarce funding for the overall women’s rights movement and women’s human rights are often one of the first casualties in turbulent times such as these. So, with our current Read For Pixels fundraiser moving at the pace of a hobbit wading through the malodorous mud pits of Mordor (it’s been over a month and we’re stuck at $2,787, which is only 55% of the way to our modest $5,000 goal), you can imagine our growing alarm. While we are 100% volunteer-staffed, we need to ensure that we can keep our campaigns, programs, and services running, especially now, when rates of VAW have been spiking so badly the UN calls it “the shadow pandemic”.

Chuck noticed our predicament and, being the mensch that he is, kindly offered to boost the signal for our fundraiser.

So here I am, as Sexual Assault Awareness Month 2022 rolls on, presenting five reasons why you should consider donating to our fundraiser to help get us to our $5,000 finish line by our extended deadline of April 30^th 2022:

Reason to Donate #1: Treat yourself while supporting accessible information for victims and survivors of VAW

From signed first editions to goodie bundles to flash fiction/poetry written especially for the donor, we have something for every donation level. (Though, alas, no goodies from Chuck are available during this fundraiser because this is our International Women’s Day fundraiser powered exclusively by women writers.)

And while you’re savoring your goodies, also savor the fact that your donation will be going towards keeping our programs and initiatives that connect victims and survivors of VAW with the help that they need. Programs such as our daily helpline retweet session on Twitter which tweets out domestic violence and rape/sexual assault helplines for women in 205 countries worldwide from 8.00PM to midnight Eastern Time, 24/7, 365 days a year.  Right now? Our research and editorial team are working on putting together a starter list of organizations and groups specializing in assisting Ukrainian women and girls who are casualties of wartime sexual violence and human trafficking.

Reason to Donate #2: Treat yourself while supporting resources for educating the world about VAW

We have a stellar line-up of acclaimed authors who have donated critique bundles for WIPs (works-in-progress), including Adiba Jaigirdar (Contemporary YA Romance), Amanda Bouchet (Fantasy Romance and Space Opera), Jeffe Kennedy (SFF, Romance, and Women’s Fiction), and Pintip Dunn (YA Romance).  Some have a video chat bundled in; others allow for up to five questions from the donor about the critique; still others offer to look at a query letter draft in addition to your WIP.

All these authors are willing to take time out of their packed schedules to help you when you help keep our anti-VAW educational resources alive. Through our 16 For 16 blogging campaign, we have built an ever-growing archive of over 190 resource articles to date about everything from how to stop street harassment to lists of organizations tackling everything from child marriage to MMIW (Missing and murdered Indigenous women). Additionally, our website has plenty of beginner-level primers about VAW and our Facebook page and Twitter account are excellent just-in-time sources for the latest headlines and articles about VAW.

It’s totally win-win!

Reason to Donate #3: Treat yourself while supporting digital platforms for people to speak up about VAW

It’s good to talk… and even better to talk with your favorite author in the name of supporting a good cause. For this fundraiser, Jeffe Kennedy (Fantasy and Romance), Meg Gardiner (Crime/Thriller), Roseanne A. Brown (YA Fantasy), and Sue Ann Jaffarian (Mystery/Crime) are all happy to spend some quality 1-to-1 time on a video chat with donors to natter about everything from books and writing, to RV life, furbabies, and geeky hobbies.

While you’re chatting away, our Giving The Devil His Due blog tour this April is chock-a-block with book bloggers using our first charity anthology to speak up about VAW during Sexual Assault Awareness Month. We are also working on our Fathers For Pixels program which provides dads worldwide with platforms (blog interviews, panel sessions etc) for sharing their ideas with other dads about raising kids and engaging with their peers and communities about sexism, misogyny, and VAW.

Reason to Donate #4: Treat a friend while supporting signal boosts for anti-VAW activists and advocates worldwide

Do you have a friend or family member with a birthday coming up? Do you see a Read For Pixels goodie offered by their favorite author available on our fundraising page? Donate to snag that unique treat and delight them.

Bonus: You’ll have an interesting story to tell them about where the gift came from. It might even be a great opener for chatting with them about VAW.

Meanwhile, your donation will support our Inspirational Interviews series which has been running for a decade and counting. This blog series shines a spotlight on anti-VAW advocates, activists, and organizations worldwide with a focus on how they are changing the world for women and girls as well as their ideas about what people can do to help stop VAW in their communities and countries.

Reason to Donate #5: Treat yourself because you support the right of women and girls to live a life without VAW

Nearly 1 in 3 women and girls worldwide experience some form of VAW in their lifetime. In terms of domestic violence alone, over 1 in 4 women under 50 have experienced physical or sexual violence from a male partner.

So donate to our fundraiser because you believe in supporting efforts to prevent, stop, and end VAW. Whether you can give us $5 or $500 to help us reach our $5,000 goal, every cent counts.

(And when you donate to us, please also consider donating either cash or supplies to your local women’s shelter or rape crisis center. Like us, they need all the help they can get.)

It’s time to stop violence against women. Together.

***

Interested in checking out The Pixel Project’s anti-violence against women work? Visit us at https://www.thepixelproject.net/

Interested in checking out our Read For Pixels fundraiser and making a donation to help keep our work alive? Go here

***

Regina Yau is the founder and president of The Pixel Project, a virtual volunteer-led global 501(c)3 nonprofit organization on a mission to raise awareness, funds and volunteer power for the cause to end violence against women at the intersection of social media, new technologies, and popular culture/the Arts. A Rhodes Scholar with a double Masters in Women’s Studies and Chinese Studies, she has a lifelong commitment to fighting for women’s rights. In addition to running The Pixel Project, Regina also teaches English to middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, writes stories about cheeky little fox spirits and terrorist chickens, and bakes far too many carb-and-sugar-loaded goodies

HELLO, FRANDOS.

Once again I return from the digital void to grant you a scattered, smothered, covered, chunked pile of steaming news food. It’s like a newsletter, if you subscribe, and if you don’t, then it’s just a regular old blog post. Magic.

Off Roadin’

So, if you missed it, and I don’t know how you would have given how often I hollered about it, I went out on a mini-book-tour with amazing author friends Kevin Hearne and Delilah Dawson. It was a goddamn delight. If you came out to see us, thank you for doing so. If you didn’t come out to see us, I totally understand and will apply only the gentlest of mystic curses to you and your home. If you find that there’s a piece of furniture on which you stub your toes a lot, that’s probably my fault, but really, isn’t it your fault?

Anyway! We bopped from NYC to Westerly, RI to Framingham, MA, and we got to see fans and readers, plus we got to hang with authorial cohorts like Marko Kloos and Elizabeth Bear and Julie Hutchings, plus wonderful publishing pals like Lauren Panepinto. Plus we got to hang with our friends at Del Rey? And we met a beluga whale. We did not steal it to ride it around, even though we definitely should have. Alas.

It was great, but also, weird? This was our first larger exposure to the “post-pandemic,” and I put that in quotes because hey, as it turns out, there’s still a pandemic even if we choose to ignore it! NYC had pretty solid mask uptake in places, even outside, though that faded a bit once we left the city. There was something mildly rapture-like about heading into the PRH offices, and seeing calendars on the wall last left at February 2020, and seeing galleys from that same year, a place frozen in time. And also meeting people who, like us, really hadn’t been outside of their caves in two years. It was good, and it was necessary, and it felt invigorating in an essential way. Numbers were low, we took our shot, and it paid off. Plus, we sold books. Which is always nice.

Hopefully this summer or fall I’ll get back out on the road again. Stay tuned!

Speaking Of Selling Books

Now that The Book of Accidents is out in paperback, looking over the numbers from that week it sure looks like people came out to support it, so thank you for that. At a rough estimate, the paperback release of TBOA was 4-5 times what we sold for the paperback of Wanderers, and the latter is a book whose sales were routinely pretty solid, even through the pandemic. Not that sales are a metric of a book’s quality, to be clear, but they certainly are a metric of its success in the market — so, thanks for making both books a success.

Reminder that if you missed our tour and you still want signed, personalized copies of The Book of Accidents (or really any of my books), then click on over to Doylestown Bookshop. They can help facilitate and ship the books to you.

The Words Continue Until Morale Improves

I figure I’m due some updates to you, too, about the other books I have in progress, so here’s what’s up with that:

Wayward is now done with copy-edits, and moves onto page proofs. It’s now officially a slightly bigger book than the first book, by about 5000 words, I think. Like Wanderers, it is authoritatively designated an Official Bison Bludgeoner. But please do not bludgeon any bisons with it. The title is symbolic, not instructive. You can preorder Wayward here. It’s out November this year.

I got edits back on my New Writing Book, and that probably deserves a bit of its own story: so, I pitched a book that was essentially a sequel to Damn Fine Story. It was more genre-focused, meant to drill down into how genre affects narrative. But with Writer’s Digest going away for a minute before getting bought by PRH, and with the pandemic, the book’s future was in question — and then I also felt like, hey, I don’t know if I even have the interest in writing that particular book right now. Never mind the fact that I don’t want to launch internecine genre battles on Twitter, I also just felt like my heart wasn’t in it. But there was a different book I had in mind, so I pitched something else to replace it: a book based off my gentle writing advice threads on Twitter and here at the blog. So I wrote that book, and that’s now the book that should one day exist. I suspect it’ll just be called Gentle Writing Advice? We shall see.

I’m currently writing my new apple horror book, which uhhh, is a horror book involving apples? Yeah. It’s a thing. (I think of it as a vampire novel without any actual vampires in it.) It was once called The Orchard, it may now be called The Apple of Harrow, or it may land on a third title, but I’m like, 30-40k into it, and I’m digging it so far, so I’m hoping y’all will dig it, too. That should be out… ennnh, roughly fall 2023? Good Lord Willing and the Covid Don’t Rise, that is.

Folks have asked about a sequel to Dust & Grim and as yet, there’s no news there — we pitched sequels, and are waiting to hear back. More as I know it.

I miiiiiight have some fresh tasty comic work coming out in the next year.

I have film and TV news that I can’t share, because such is the way.

Ta-da.

Petrified Oranges

Please, if you love excellent things, watch Our Flag Means Death. A deeply earnest, weird, wonderful, empathetic, murderous, pirate-based rom-com.

And Now, Photos

Photos from the trip, below!

Wait One More Thing

Kevin made me partake in something called either a New York System Wiener or a Rhode Island Hot Wiener, the former of which sounds like a thing an artificial intelligence made up, the latter just, y’know, porn.

It is a kind of chili dog unique-ish to Rhode Island — a red hot on a toasty bun covered in yellow mustard, a kind of meaty treacle adjacent to chili (which may or may not be made of beef heart) and raw onions. They were horrible and delicious, as many things of their ilk are. (Spam, f’rex. I love Spam. It’s horrible.)

The hot dogs haunted me for the rest of the day, first as a kind of volcanic heartburn, and later as, uhh, well let’s just go with, “if my bowels were haunted by oniony meat-ghosts.”

Even still: worth it.

OK BYE

The time has come! The paperback of The Book of Accidents has taken flight and landed on your doorstep like a wooden owl come to life. May contain: a missing serial killer, a haunted coal mine, an interstitial amusement park, an eerie felsenmeer, a soot-caked spellbook, generational trauma, art as magic, empathy as a weapon or weakness, and the power and problem of emotional seawalls.

It is nominated for the Stoker Award this year. It was a national bestseller. And I’m very proud of it. I don’t think we’re really supposed to say that, but it feels good and healthy to say, so goddamnit, here we are.

It’s a book that, as I’ve noted, means quite a lot to me. I’ve tried writing it throughout my life a number of times, and it was only now, with the me that is me at present and not the me of the past, that it made sense and became a proper story. The iterations before were odd, off, not done baking. This one, I think, did what I wanted it to do. And I hope it has, or will, for you, too.

You of course have ways to procure!

Tomorrow I’ll be at The Strand with Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson, and you can order a signed/personalized copy through there, and pick it up or have it shipped. Order here. Or you can also ask for a signed/personalized copy through my local, Doylestown Bookshop. Note that Kevin and Delilah and I will also be in Westerly, RI (United Theater with Savoy Books!) on Thursday, and Framingham, MA (B&N!) on Friday. In-person! For real! Holy crap!

You can of course also check out the book in other places:

Bookshop

Indiebound

Amazon

B&N

Apple Books

Kobo

Google Books

Audible

Libro.fm

And more.

PLEASE TO ENJOY.

Tell your friends.

Leave a review.

Huzzah.

Hey! It’s one of those posts where I unceremoniously shower you in various, unconnected updates, which rain down upon you like glitter and blood. I mean, just glitter. Did I say blood? Ha ha. Hah. Aahhh. Ahem.

Der Eldenringen

I continue to play this game that doesn’t know I’m alive. It’s like the world in that it is a place that exists that I exist inside, but it doesn’t know I exist inside it, for it is a cold and uncaring place with little situational awareness or empathy.

My playthrough at this point has me finally, at like, level 40-something, feeling vaguely powerful. I can walk up to most mobs and wipe the rancid ruined earth with their asses. My strategy became: gallop around the world at top-speed collecting every smithing stone, golden seed, and sacred tear I could fucking find, and juice my gear to their limits. I found a Twinblade, which was a good weapon to bisect chumps with. I also learned the attack move which is called “hop around like an executioner rabbit,” or “like Mario on bloodlust and cocaine,” which is how I mostly engage with enemies. I just jump at them, shrieking, cleaving them in twain. And it mostly works. I do like that no matter how powerful you are, if you don’t pay attention, even a low-ranking mob of dickheads will put you in an early grave.

Apparently I’m also supposed to be… crafting things? I have not been. Uh?

I don’t find the game… difficult, exactly, not in the traditional sense, not in the way it was sold. I just find it distant and disinterested. As I said in my earlier post, it’s not there to help you out. Mostly it shrugs at you and says, “Good luck,” but it says it in a way where it definitely doesn’t mean it. (Here, I recommend Swapna Krishna’s very good Wired piece, ELDEN RING ISN’T MADE FOR ALL GAMERS. I WISH IT WERE.)

I think where the game is going to lose me — though it hasn’t yet, not quite — is that it so relies on you to engage with it on your terms (which is good!) that at a certain point it loses narrative urgency. There’s a threadbare narrative blanketing over what is ostensibly a merciless grind. There isn’t a story so much as there’s “worldbuilding,” and the worldbuilding is mostly a thing to be unearthed actively rather than a thing that matters very much at all. So, I don’t find a great deal of urgency to continue. There’s no mystery to solve, no plot hook to answer, no great revenge, no personal stakes. My motivation is thinning. It was, initially, exploration, but I’ve explored a great deal and at a certain point — you know, I get it. Everything is ruined, everything wants to kill you, I’m something called a Tarnished, blah blah blah be the Elden Lord, as if I want to do that.

I did kill a few bosses, though, which was fun.

Anyway, people ask me why I’m still playing, and I remind them that it’s still friendlier than Twitter.

The Real World Is Bad, Too

It’s getting fucking scary out there. There is a deep, and successful authoritarian push into all corners of this country — attacking everything from abortion rights to the existence of trans and gay kids (and adults) to the very acknowledgment of slavery and the Holocaust. It is a grossly revisionist take on people and history, attempting to erase them instead of reckon with a changing world. It’s bad news. And we’re letting it happen because we aren’t voting. I know, there’s a problematic push to “vote harder,” and I get it, and agree. Just the same, our school board locally is transphobic, antisemitic, and all-around fucking awful, and they’re making some horrific entreaties — they were against masks, they’re for banning books, they’re against trans kids in sports (and in existence, it seems), and the reason they get to do what they do is because not enough people came out to vote in the smaller elections, like the ones that help us decide our fucking school board compositions.

So, I dunno. We gotta stand up for everyone, stand against the erasure, hold back the tide of once-creeping-but-now-sprinting fascism. It isn’t just Texas and Florida, it’s everywhere. Donate to Trans Lifelife, to Trevor Project, to Audre Lorde Project, to Transgender Law Center, to Southern Poverty Law Center, to Planned Parenthood, to the ACLU (national and local). And vote. I don’t know what to tell you. I know it sucks that our choices ain’t great, but if we don’t get up and get out to work against the malefactors, they’re going to win. It’s already hard enough given how voting rights have been chewed apart. So we only get to help others if we show up in numbers big enough to bury their efforts.

Oh Yeah And Ukraine

OH RIGHT, then there’s that war going on. Fucking hell. On my mother’s side, we’re pretty Eastern-Europe-flavored — Lithuanian and Ukrainian. We still have family there. Not family I know, to be clear, but related humans. So, I dunno. Donate to IRC, Doctors Without Borders, to World Central Kitchen. It breaks my heart seeing what’s happening over there. And I try not to engage in the cruel thrill of seeing Ukranian victories happen, because intellectually I recognize that death in war is death, and it’s brutal and bloody and shouldn’t be championed, but I also… can’t help but giving a little fist-pump when they take down a Russian warship or some shit like that. I dunno. We’re complicated creatures. War is horrible, but I’m just glad Ukraine isn’t going quietly.

Anyway.

Hey, could the world calm down a little bit? Please? Like, a little? No? Okay.

Wayward’s Gone Wayward

So, did I mention yet that if you were hoping to get your hands on Wayward in August that you were now going to maybe be a teeny-tiny bit disappointed?

Oops!

Sorry? Wayward is now coming out on November 15th.

Why is that, exactly?

Well, the reason is actually a good one — the publisher believes in it, thinks it’s really good, and is moving it to a competitive season, aka, oooh, the holidays. This is of course terrifying to me, because, holy shit, I’m a little fish swimming in deep waters, or so it feels. But I believe in the book. I think it’s actually maybe not terrible? We shall see. I hope you all like it. Obviously, the coolest thing you could do is pre-ordering it — which you can do from your preferred BOOKMONGER, whoever that may be. But I’ll note here that you’ll be able to get signed, personalized copies from Doylestown Bookshop. You can also preorder from Bookshop.org or find an indie at Indiebound.

Speaking of Signed Copies

Reminder that I’ll be on tour next week with Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson, because we someone managed to con, er, convince our publisher to give us a reason to hang out together in person. NYC, Rhode Island, and Boston-area. More details here. But I also remind you that if you want signed/personalized copies of our books but can’t be there in-person, you are free to order from those stores and we will sign the books and they will send ’em right to you.

Huzzah.

Just a reminder that I’ll be out there in support of The Book of Accidents, out next week in glorious three-dimensional paperback. Order a signed copy from:

The Strand

Or nab a copy from Doylestown Bookshop, Bookshop.org, Indiebound.

The Work Continues Until Morale Improves

Meanwhile, work continues apace! Wayward is in copy-edits, and I’ll have that done in a couple weeks. Meanwhile I continue to write this new book — my horror novel about, well, apples? Was originally called The Orchard, but I’m not feeling that title. Presently, at least in the draft, it’s called The Apple of Harrow, but that may change. Though I love the title quite a lot.

OKAY BUY MY BOOKS BYE