[img of the awesome Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington, KY]

The last Saturday in April is Independent Bookstore Day, which is to say: this Saturday.

Which means you should take the extra time, if possible, to hit such a bookstore this weekend — remember, you can find them via Indiebound.org — and if you don’t have one near you, don’t forget too that many will ship books directly to you.

So, I thought I’d take some time to talk about why I love indie bookstores — and, now, this is with the caveat that an indie bookstore is not automagically amazing just by dint of its existence. I’ve been to several that were very anti-genre, or were not friendly, or were overall standoffish both in presence and in their design. But that is the exception, not the norm.

Here then, is why I dig me some indie bookstores:

1. They Tend To Contain Actual People Who Love Them Some Motherfucking Books.

Listen, I’m sure there are bookstore employees who don’t give a rat’s salty butthole about books, but in general, I go to an indie store, I am met with people who are there because they want to work somewhere that they can be surrounded by the sweet natal embrace of the book-womb.

Bonus: the people who work there are also bonafide bibliowizards. (Same can be said of most librarians, too.) They know books. They read them. They can recommend them. They can handsell them, spreading the precious BOOK VIRUS ha ha what I didn’t say there’s a book virus, YOU said there was a book virus. Now here read this book. *you are now infected by books*

But seriously, bookstore employees are magical beings. They may not be real, and if they are, they are likely too good for this world and must be protected.

2. Um, They Actually Sell Books

I got no problem with bookstores that sell not-books — hey, I like stuffed animals and widgets and tchotchkes and book-themed dildos the same as any other RED-BLOODED AMERICAN (wait what?), but you know, I also want books in a bookstore, and indie bookstores tend to be very good ways to show them off and sell them.

Which is great for me as an author.

And even better for me as a reader and as someone raising a kid who will be a reader, too.

3. They Are Community Facing

Amazon is not community facing. They’re just not. They can’t be, because they’re not in a physical space (their kinda-creepy bookstores notwithstanding). And I say that as someone who sells books there and who has a Prime subscription, same as you, I’d bet. But they’re just not there for the community — and one of the things that’s fantastic about books is that, if you care to connect to it, books come with a bookish community.

And what I mean are: people that read, people that write, people that wanna talk about books, people that wanna talk to weirdo-beardo authors who write stories about pissed-off psychic ladies and cool wars in the stars. Bookstores host book clubs and author signings and panel discussions and they, like libraries, are a nexus of that community, bringing bookish folk from all around to share in the book virus WHOA no nuh-uh I did not say book virus, this time I’m really sure it was you that said it. Shut up.

Point is, bookstores are also Book Community Centers.

Go there and be one with the bookishness.

4. OMG, Some Of Them Have Bars

Okay, I know this isn’t all bookstores or even a majority of them, but fuck it, it’s still a thing. And increasingly so! Changing Hands has the First Draft Bar. Or the Wild Detectives in Dallas! Or BookBar in Denver! Or the lovely BookCellar in Chicago! Seriously, it’s a thing. Google it. If I can go to a bookstore and buy a book, get a coffee, or drink a fancy-ass cocktail? Pretty sure that’s what actual heaven looks like.

(Hell, on the other hand, is a defunct Hoboken Toys-R-Us full of wasps and broken prequel-era Star Wars toys. You go there when you don’t buy books, so buy more books and avoid Hell.)

5. A Great Indie Bookstore Feels Like Home

A good bookstore is like a room full of pillows for your mind and for your imagination. The shelves may not match, the decor may be weird, the people may be infected by a book virus, but it always feels like home. They radiate pure book-love. They make you wanna read books. Hundreds of narrative rabbit-holes awaiting for readers of every age. A good bookstore is an astonishing place — it’s cheesy as fuck, I know, but I am never not overtaken with the glorious vertigo of a bookstore, where you’re presented with an unholy host of new adventures and ideas, with new ones coming in every week.

So, hie thee and thine ass hence to a bookstore. Forthwith.

Buy a book.

Read a book.

Join the book virus.

BECOME PART OF THE BOOKSTORE LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY AS YOUR FLESH MERGES WITH THE SHELVES AND — ha ha ha oh you know ol Chuck Wendig he’s just being silly again this is definitely not a thing that happens, ahem.

*stares*

*blinks*

*eyelids are pages*

(Oh, and here is where I am crass and selfish and I remind you that if you want books signed by me and procured from a great indie store, you can order them from Let’s Play Books in Emmaus, PA, at this link. They will ship ’em right to you.)

So now I turn it over to you, Bookish Readers.

What are your favorite indie bookstores?

[below: Powell’s]

Fried Chicken to me is one of those fundamentally American foods. So much so that apparently I feel the need to capitalize it, like some kind of weirdo. It is as fundamental, perhaps, as barbecue — and yes, I know that neither this nor barbecue originate in these here YOO-NIGHTED STATES, but they feel keenly ours, as if they’re lodged deep in the aorta of the diseased American heart!

And now that I’ve gotten you hungry by talking about diseased hearts and clogged aortas…

I love fried chicken, but I tend not to deep fry things here at the house. Mostly because it’s a lot of mess and wasted oil and I’m vaguely paranoid about setting the house on fire, so instead I tend to pan-fry things. And one of the things I pan-fry is chicken.

Chicken thighs.

Mmm. Thighs.

*plays sex jazz*

Listen, real-talk: chicken breast has its time and its place and that time is never and that place is thrown out into the woods for the Possum King. I mean, the breast from a good, free-range, local chicken can be amazing, but otherwise, white-ass chicken breast is the Justin Bieber of meatstuff. It’s carnivore tofu, taking on the flavor of whatever sauce or soup you stick with it. But the thighs: yeah. Good, dark meat, some fat for flavor.

A few weeks ago, I went to one of our LOCAL EATING ESTABLISHMENTS and saw they had changed their menu, having added chicken and waffles. And I ordered it, because I’ve been going to this high school for seven-and-a-half years, I’m no dummy.

And what I got was a travesty.

A plate of culinary fuckery.

A verifiable restaurateur war crime.

The waffle was limp and flavorless, like an old floppy clown shoe.  The chicken — the chicken! — was a fried fucking piece of chicken fucking breast, dry as a roof shingle and half as palatable. And all of it was coated in not-real maple syrup, but rather, the high-fructose corn kind.

It was dinner sadness. It was shameful vittles.

(“Shameful Vittles: For The Cat That Deserves Scorn.”)

And I decided that one day I would rectify this.

AND THAT DAY IS TODAY.

*checks calendar*

AND THAT DAY WAS YESTERDAY.

Here’s what I did, and here’s what you can do.

First, make waffle batter.

My go-to waffle recipe for breakfasts is this.

But for this I wanted a simpler, and just slightly more savory recipe.

So I went with this.

Mix the batter, let it sit.

Now, you need chicken thighs.

*plays sex jazz again*

I went with eight boneless chicken thighs — bone-in is good (“bone-in” ha ha ha more sex jazz, garçon!), but for some reason, none of our grocery stores ever seem to want to carry them. Boneless works great, and arguably better here because you don’t have to fiddle with the bone (“fiddle with the bone” my my my, keep the sex jazz a-comin, plate captain) when you’re cutting through the chicken and the waffle together. And of course it’s chicken and chicken is basically a wad of salmonella, so you want to make sure to handle the chicken while wearing a hazmat suit. Just don’t wash it because washing chicken is legit how you spread the salmonella.

In a shallow, chicken-dippable bowl: mix one egg and a half-cup of milk.

In a bag, mix up:

A cup of Panko breadcrumbs, a 1/2 cup of flour, a TBSP of cornstarch, a little salt, a little pepper, some garlic powder, some paprika. Just shake it. Shake it like you’re shaking a baby.

*receives note*

My lawyers tell me babies are not for shaking.

Shake it like a — I dunno, what the fuck do you shake? A spraypaint can? A soda before you hand it to a prankable pal? Otters? Do you shake otters? I shake otters. They giggle when you shake them. Like the Pilsbury Dough Boy. It’s amazing. Always shake an otter.

*waits for lawyer note*

*receives no note*

Good. Moving on.

I’ll note here briefly that the Panko crumbs can be replaced with another CRUNCHY BREAD PRODUCT of your choosing — saltines? Great. Ritz crackers? Delicious. Cornflakes? Scrumptastic! Babies? Oh no, you’re not fooling me this time, we don’t eat babies, my lawyer reminds me. And babies aren’t bread products, even though they are often soft and doughy like white bread. Delicious white bread. Delicious baby bread.

*shakes self out of baby-eating reverie*

Anyway. Get you a FRYIN’ PAN, you know, for FRYIN’, and then you wanna fill that sucker up an inch or so with oil. I like peanut oil. High smoke point, like Cheech and Chong. Don’t use olive oil. Definitely don’t use motor oil.

Sidenote: I like cast-iron for this. Because cast-iron is great. I’ve really only come to terms with using cast-iron over the last year or so — before now I was kinda intimidated by its use? “What? I can’t use soap to clean it? What ninja shenanigans are these?” I’d exclaim. But then I got over it and put on my Big Boy Pants and now I’m a cast-iron convert. JOIN MY CHURCH HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD WORD.

Right. So.

Put the FRYIN’ PAN on medium heat, bring up to like, 350, adjust temperature so it hangs there. Now it’s time to BATHE THE CHICKEN IN PAIN.

And here you’re like, Chuck don’t be mean to the chicken, and I must say, have you ever met a chicken? Chickens are motherfuckers. They’ll peck a human baby to death. And they’re dumb as paint. Any animal that can be absolved of its own head and still run the fuck around for an hour or two is either a cockroach or a chicken. And both are delicious.

Ha ha what I mean only one of them is delicious.

*stares*

Are we hungry yet? Good.

Frying the chicken is easy. You dip the chicken in the egg mix. Then you get it in the bag and shake it the fuck around — if you don’t wanna do the bag thing, you can also just mix the breadcrumbs in a second bowl and use that, I don’t care, I won’t judge you. I mean, I’ll judge you, but not for that reason. Then, once dipped twice, it goes into the PAIN JACUZZI. Two or three in the pan depending on how they fit — fry them three minutes on each side or until brown but not burny-brown. Then you’re going to set them aside in a baking dish.

Did I mention the oven needs to be at 350, too?

Get your oven to 350. You should’ve read my mind. You monster.

You’re going to do this again and again, and when you’ve got all your chicken in the dish, you wanna bake it for 20 minutes at 350.

And while it’s baking, you’ve got more work to do.

First, waffles. You know your waffle iron intimately; I do not. Mine takes about two minutes per waffle. Yours may take longer. I have spent long hours seducing my waffle iron to learn its secrets — you, too, must sensually inveigle the iron to discover its ways.

You also want to mix the salt-and-vinegar maple syrup.

And yes, that’s what I said.

Regular maple syrup would of course be fine, but fine is for sandpaper grit and Young Cannibals, not dinner-time deliciousness, and we are aiming for the sublime, goddamnit.

Here is what you do:

Melt 3 TBsp butter in your nuclear radiation cube (aka, “micro-wave”).

Then mix in a half-cup of maple syrup.

Again, the good stuff, like from an actual tree.

Then: a TBsp of soy sauce.

Now, for the vinegar —

I tried it two ways.

First batch, I used salt-and-vinegar powder. It’s this stuff here. It’s great. You can make your own s&v popcorn and it’s also awesome dusted on pork chops. I put in like, I think two teaspoons of the stuff. Mix it good so it doesn’t all glormp at the bottom.

Second batch, I just used sherry vinegar. I like sherry vinegar — it’s dark and mysterious. Very noir. But also a team player. Or something. Shut up.

I don’t know which I liked better? The sherry one is more distinctly vinegary — the powder one has more of that salt-and-vinegar-junk-food vibe.

You do as you like.

I mix that up and then give it another 20-30 seconds in the radiation cube.

Season further to taste.

If you like HOT STUFF, mix in a bit of hot sauce — Frank’s would be nice, or Cholula, or whatever. And also feel free to experiment with vinegars, too. Paul Krueger, penmonkey extraordinaire, suggested apple cider vinegar. I also wonder what it’d be like with a little squeeze of lemon?

And then…

Well, I mean, construct your deliciousness.

Waffle.

Then chicken on top.

Then the salt-and-vinegar maple syrup.

That syrup has just the right balance of sweet-to-sour-to-salty. I also popped a couple homemade quick pickles on top because I am just that kind of hipster asshole who thinks pickles should go on 49% of foods.

Whatever. Now shove all of this in the BONE CRUSHER that the FACE GODS gave your HUNGRY FACE and eat, eat, eat.

Also buy my books.

Thank you.

HELLO, I AM NOW 42 YEARS OLD NOW, PLEASE HAVE A PHOTO OF A BLOODROOT FLOWER. And yes, that’s really what it is. It’s goddamn motherfucking bloodroot, son. The root is literally red, and can be used as a dye — or a poison! So, that coffee you’re drinking tastes a little funny, doesn’t it? Ha ha I’m kidding I didn’t poison you.

*stares*

*waits*

Ahem. Anyway, bloodroot may be one of the coolest plant names ever, though it has competitors like SPIDERWORT, which if you combine with bloodroot, you get my new D&D character: BLOODROOT SPIDERWORT, Esquire.

I really need to play D&D again.

None of this is apropos of anything, except that spring has sprung and with it, the random first flowers of the season — we have swamp lilies too, which are pretty yellow flowers that grow up from mottled, curious leaves and populate the still-slumbering half-dead forest floor as spring launches its slow assault on winter. You get that nice pop of yellow and then they’re gone.

Also, my succulents (given to me by fellow penmonkey and licensed Star Warsian canon creator, Delilah S. Dawson) have begun to bloom, too:

Yesterday, I returned home from Ravencon in Virginia, which was a smallish intimate kind of SFF con full of very nice people, and I thank them for welcoming me and letting me past the perimeter. Bonus fun, I got to see the Misbehavin’ Maidens in concert, which was a bawdy, bonafide blast. Check them out! Nerdy, dirty music, y’all.

Reminder that up next for me is:

BCFL Comic-Con here in Bucks County, PA, May 5th.

Phoenix Comic-fest!

And then BEA/Bookcon after, I think.

And then Writer’s Digest in August, NYC.

What else is new?

Oh, nothing.

*kicks stones*

*affects an aw, shucks face*

Just this:

That is a glorious Mike Deodato cover for the Darth Vader Annual #2, art by Leonard Kirk and words by… well, yours truly. The description of the issue:

DARTH VADER intends for the Empire to hold no secrets for him – or from him. Which means it is time to dig into the pet project of GOVERNOR WILHUFF TARKIN and ORSON KRENNIC: the massive battle station being built on GEONOSIS. Opportunity arises when the project is hindered by sabotage from unknown forces. THE EMPEROR calls on his dark enforcer to root out the source of treachery that threatens to destabilize the Empire’s galactic ascent.

That’s right. I’m all up in your Star Wars again, folks. Getting my smeary fingerprints all over the canon. In this case, I’m borrowing the Vader Car from Charles Soule, so here’s hoping I don’t muck it up too bad and it’s still in working order when I return it.

Also, hey, don’t forget — till the end of this month, you can get ten of my e-books for $10 with coupon BOOKBIRTHDAY with the Mega Biggums Gigantosaur Book Bundle. Though if you really wanna get me a birthday present, wink wink, check out one of my print books, like, say, start with Blackbirds [print | ebook] because you need Miriam Black in your life, if only because she’ll tell you how you die. And if you’ve read the books but aren’t caught up, don’t forget that The Raptor & The Wren is out now [print | ebook] and ha ha ha, oh shit that book’s a doozy.

And that’s it.

Goodbye, my sweet children.

*stares*

*waits*

*definitely not staring and waiting for the bloodroot to kick in*

In 2011, Post-Katrina New Orleans is a place haunted by its history and by the hurricane’s destruction, a place that is hoping to survive the rebuilding of its present long enough to ensure that it has a future. Street magician Jude Dubuisson is likewise burdened by his past and by the consequences of the storm, because he has a secret: the magical ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known—a father who just happens to be a god. When the debt Jude owes to a fortune deity gets called in, he finds himself sitting in on a poker game with the gods of New Orleans, who are playing for the heart and soul of the city itself.

You Never Sell the First Book, Even When You Do:

THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES is my debut novel, a murder mystery about a demigod with the supernatural ability to find lost things who gets caught up in a magical poker game. The first book I ever wrote to completion was also about a demigod who found lost things involved in a poker game, but they are not, in fact, the same book. I finished the first draft of this other, not-my-debut-novel book (which had a very different protagonist, title, and theme) at some point in 2006. I didn’t sell THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES until late 2016. Over the course of that decade, I wrote a whole new draft as my thesis for my MFA, another draft after I graduated from Clarion West, and ANOTHER draft as a “revise and resubmit” for my now-agent Seth Fishman.

Throughout this whole process I kept seeing writers saying that before they sold their first novel, they wrote two, three, even five novels and stuck ‘em in a drawer. So every once in a while I’d do a little math. “So, B,” I’d say to myself. “You’ve been writing this book for five years now. If you trunk it now, write and trunk another one, you might sell that third book. In like, a decade.”

Aaaaaand then I was Artax, and the Swamp of Sadness had me.

What I didn’t realize at the time, though, was that I had novels in the trunk already. They just happened to be clones of the book I was writing. Sad, broken clones who would never survive outside the lab. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they were Pokemon who hadn’t hit their final evolution yet. Little lizards with smoldering tails instead of the giant fuck-off dragon of wrath and terror I wanted to create.

The point is, nobody knocks it out of the park on their first at-bat, even if that’s sometimes the narrative marketing wants to sell you. Everyone has to fail at writing a book before they can succeed at it. Whether that means a bunch of different books or one book over and over again is really up to you.

Your First Draft is (Probably) Not As Good As You Think:

For every writer I’ve ever spoken to on the subject, there are times (usually for me towards the middle and end of a first draft) where you are writing with white-hot, incandescent brilliance. You’re still you, but you’re the Avatar-state you, eyes all glow-y and the four elements leaping to your whim. The words aren’t just flowing, they’re goddamn pyroclastic. You’re Odin on Hlidskjalf, the high seat, where you and your twin ravens “Hell Yeah” and “Fuck Yes” can see the entire world laid out before you. Everything fits together like you’re playing Tetris with a cheat code. Whole chapters, which seemed intimidating before, fall before the might of your genius in one fell swoop.

You laugh in the face of the publishing industry.

And then the high passes, hopefully after you’ve gotten to the end of the thing you’re writing, and you re-read this deathless prose of yours which you just know is going to change the world and it’s . . . fine. Some of it’s probably pretty good, and some of it needs some work. But you can’t really distinguish an “I am a Golden God” day from any average day of word-smithing. “But I was in god-mode,” you whine. (Maybe you don’t whine. I do.) “Where did all those amazing words go?” The fact of the matter is that they weren’t all that amazing to begin with. They just felt amazing, because you felt amazing, because you were actually doing the thing. You were riding a joy-wave of progress, not brilliance.

I think this is why some writers say they hate revision. Nobody truly hates making their story better. What they truly hate is returning to the words that felt brilliant when they wrote them and realizing that they’re just as first-draft-y as the rest of it.

What I learned in writing draft after draft of CITY is that this surge is normal, universal, and damn near predictable. Knowing that this surge of good vibes comes from effort and progress and not some ethereal muse means you can try to work towards it instead of worrying that you’ve lost the magic forever, and the knowledge that a writer in the unrelenting grip of the work is an unreliable judge of the quality of that work means . . .

Your First Draft is (Definitely) Not As Bad As You Think:

For every day that you are a literary Titan striding across the land with a fistful of linguistic thunderbolts in one hand and a Leviathan-sized cup of coffee in the other, there are about a dozen at least a few days where you are laying down the fiction at a blistering speed of a word every other minute and then deleting the sentence as soon as it’s finished. It feels like you’re attempting to build one of those mortar-less walls where every stone has to align perfectly, but instead of trying to fit different sizes and shapes of rock together without seams, you’re working with a wide variety of excrement. “Gee,” you wonder, “does this dog turd go better with this pile of wet cat crap, or should I pair it with that mound of elephant feces over yonder?” Word after word, sentence after sentence, and all it feels like you’re doing is mashing together two fistfuls of shit. And what’s worse, you’re not even doing it correctly.

The thing I learned, the unfair, maddening secret that I’ve stumbled across in writing and rewriting and rewriting this book is this: when you’ve finished your 70 or 80 or 100 thousand words of this thing . . . you’ll find it difficult to know which of those handfuls of words came on a brilliant day or a crap one. The words are just the words, by and large. The struggle is in your brain.

And speaking of brains, let’s talk about revision!

Fear is the Mindkiller:

When I first sent the full manuscript of the novel-just-before-my-debut-novel (which was still pretty different from THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES) he kicked it back to me with some notes. The beginning and the early part of the middle moved a little too slowly. The main character’s motivation needed clearing up. It took too long to get to the crux of the conflict. He used the word “muddled.” (That’s always the description you want your agent to use.) “Take another crack at it,” he said, “give’r a whirl ‘round the ol’ revision wheel and see how she spins out.” (Seth doesn’t actually sound anything like this, but in my head, all literary agents are barkers in an old-timey travelling carnival. Don’t ask.)

So I re-read my book, and I made a list of all the things Seth suggested I should change . . . and I froze. Like an antelope in headlights. You see, I was this close. Big time agent! Revision instead of rejection! We talked on the phone! I could see it all so clearly: I would sign with Seth, who would sell my novel for an embarrassing amount of money, and I could quit and work full time as a writer and I’d look good in photographs I didn’t even know people were taking and then Gaiman and Valente would show up to invite me to the secret cool writer club and . . . all I had to do to get everything I’d ever wanted was to not fuck up these revisions. Let’s skim right over the part where “everything I’d ever wanted” didn’t actually hinge on this one moment, and go right to the part where I approached these revisions from a place of fear. A place of “there was this one little spark of magic in the book, and if I change too much, I’ll ruin it.” So I changed as little as possible. I sweated and panicked and fretted and doubted everything I did. Three months of working with a constant refrain of “please don’t fuck up, please don’t fuck up” running through my head, and then, bitter and defeated, I sent it back to Seth.

Spoiler: I fucked up.

His reaction was, essentially, that it looked like I’d changed as little as possible. That my problems were bigger than a couple of shifts and adjustments. He told me, a little less gently than he did the first time, that I needed to rewrite the book instead of tinkering with it.

That kind of failure was strangely freeing. The thing I feared most, taking my one shot and missing, had happened. So I could do whatever the hell I wanted. Turned out, what I wanted most was to write the book I should have written all along. And so I came back to the book without fear, took it apart, and rewrote it. I took a reveal which It took me a year. I won’t tell you how much of that year was spent getting over my abject failure and how much of it was spent actually writing, but when that year was over, I had the final draft of the book, signed with Seth, and sold it.

Well, almost.

If You’re Gonna Stay, You’re Gonna Work:

After a year of writing the final-ish version of this book, I’m not sure what reaction I expected from Seth. If I had made a list of potential responses, though, suggesting that the novel was pretty solid except that I should maybe delete a character who was in the entire goddamn book probably wouldn’t have made the list. But that’s what he said. After a few minutes of full on shock, I considered the idea. It took pretty much everything I’d learned in the previous decade or so to be able to do what I did next. Knowing that I’d already written multiple versions of a novel told me that I had the faith in the book to suffer through a major revision. Knowing that my fond memories of how brilliantly I’d written the character were unreliable made me comfortable with cutting the character out entirely. Knowing that fear only leads to failure but determined gets shit done helped me crack my knuckles and wade on in.

So I looked at this character who had been in every previous version of the book. Who was one of the suspects in a murder mystery. Who showed up both the first chapter and the last, and more than a couple in between. And over the course of three days, I snipped that character out entirely.

Because Seth was right, the character didn’t do much. I narrowed it down to a single scene where, if they weren’t there, the book didn’t work. Was there another character who could fill that role? Turned out there was. Which leads me to the last thing I learned writing this book, which is that every part of the book has to carry its load. Character and tone and setting and sentence structure and on and on. It doesn’t just have to fit, it has to work. And if it doesn’t, it’s gotta go.

All in all, it took me ten years to write my debut novel. It took me about ten months to write my second one. I learned a lot writing that one, too. But that, as they say, is another story.

* * *

Bryan Camp is a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop and the University of New Orleans’ Low-Residency MFA program. He started his first novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, in the backseat of his parents’ car as they evacuated for Hurricane Katrina. He has been, at various points in his life: a security guard at a stockcar race track, a printer in a flag factory, an office worker in an oil refinery, and a high school English teacher.  He lives in New Orleans with his wife and their three cats, one of whom is named after a superhero.

Bryan Camp: Website

The City of Lost Fortunes: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Google | Kobo | Audio

And here is writer Michael Moreci to talk about his newest comic, Wasted Space — out today from Vault Comics. Go grab from your LCS.

As a writer, when you’re on the book promotion road, you find yourself repeating things you’ve already said a lot. I mean, there’s only so many questions interviewers can ask, and there’s only so many ways you can answer them. It’s just the way it goes. And one of the questions writers most commonly gets asked is “Where did this story come from?” For Wasted Space, the story is actually kind of a funny one, and though I’ve told it a few times, I’m going to tell it again. Because I like to, but also because there’s more I want to say about this origin story that I haven’t said before. So, here goes:

Wasted Space—my new sci-fi comic that’s a pinch of Preacher, a dash of Star Wars, and a smidge of Philip K. Dick—was born on Christmas day, 2016. I’ll never forget this day, because it’s hard to shove out of your mind being so unbelievably miserable. I was sick. Sick as a dog. Sick as a dog who’d eaten something out of a dumpster that he knew he shouldn’t have eaten but, being a dog, he couldn’t help himself and now he’s so sick and all he has to show for it is being part of a dumb human’s simile.

Anyway. I was really sick.

It sucked, because it was Christmas day, and I’m a dad of two, which means Christmas is a pretty special time around the Moreci household. Any parent knows that we don’t get sick days. There’s no PTO plans. We wake up already on stage, mic in hand, and the crowd is just waiting. And your only choice is to put on your best Liza Minnelli face because, sick or not, this show is going on. Especially on Christmas, which is, like, the Liza Minnelli Broadway spectacular blowout. It’s a day you not only have to be on, but you especially want to be on. But I couldn’t get there—I was that sick.

I did manage to pull myself together enough to see my kids open my gifts. Then I crawled to Walgreens, bought enough cold medicine to tranquilize a horse, loaded up, and slept until it was time to visit my in-laws.

None of that helped.

So there I was, driving out to the in-laws, hopped up on cold medicine, and generally miserable about the state of the world. This was December 2016, and I hardly need to remind you what happened just a month beforehand. Things took a turn for the catastrophic, and I was still angry/befuddled/outraged/despondent over the lunatic who was about to become the leader of the free world in just a few weeks.

And that’s when Wasted Space was born. In the car, sick as hell, my head swimming in cold meds, still reeling from our national tragedy. The entire story came to me in like forty minutes.

But Wasted Space is more than that. Yes, it is very much meant to be a book for our unbelievably chaotic and troubling times. I don’t talk politics much online, for my own reasons, but I sure as hell wear them on my sleeve in this story. I wanted to make something that grabbed people by the lapels and gave them a good shake, like Preacher, like American Flagg, like Transmetropolitan, like so many other comics that I adore, and I hope I hit the mark. But buried beneath that story is something more personal, and certainly more intimate, that’s a little difficult for me to talk about.

Let’s rewind to a few years before Wasted Space, back to another sci-fi comic I wrote — Roche Limit, which came out in 2015 from Image Comics. I guess you can say it’s my breakout book; it was awarded numerous ‘best of’ lists, it was a commercial success, and it’s currently being made into a pilot for SyFy.

And I hardly remember writing a word of it.

Maybe that’s an exaggeration, I don’t know. But I was drinking a lot during that time, alone, mainly while writing. It was a tradition for me to drink—bourbon being my drink of choice—while I wrote, and I wrote nearly every night. It’s weird, because there’s no episode of drunkenness that stands out in my mind, where I did something outrageous that showed I needed some help. It was just this steady stream of drinking—too much, too frequently—and an overall sense of unhappiness.

I won’t dive into personal details, but suffice to say, eventually, I found my way out; I left my day job and went full-time freelance, I’ve spent more time with my kids than ever, and I hardly drink at all anymore. And though I feel better and happier, I do look back on that time of my life with a lot of regret. I know I wasn’t present in my world, not totally. I wasn’t my best, not anywhere close to it, and I mourn that. I mean, this was a time when I was writing a book that was finally breaking me out as a writer, and I hardly remember its creation. It’s just a haze in my mind, as much of that time is.

That’s where Wasted Space’s main character, Billy Bane, comes from. He’s a man rotting away, drowning in booze and drugs, who is forced to ask himself the question I had to ask of myself—“Am I better than this? Can I be better?” Granted, Billy’s story is a lot more dramatic than my own—a lot. But the kernel is the same, this struggle of being awakened from your own crappy misery and forced to make a choice—to do better, to be better, or to just aimlessly wallow.

Of course, I took that kernel and surrounded it with a blue, beefcake Fuq bot (it’s pronounced exactly as you think!), the apocalypse, and giant red entity known as Legion who likes to smash people’s faces. So, there’s that stuff as well.

Like my recent novel Black Star Renegades (also Star Wars inspired, though to the extreeeeme in this case), Wasted Space is a crazy, fun romp. These two books taught me how to enjoy what I love, how to be joyful in my writing, and I’ve never been more happy with the products of my work. My hope is that everyone who reads these books sees the fun in there as well—because as much as we need the outrage over every second of every day, we can use some good times as well.

Michael Moreci: Website | Twitter

Wasted Space: Vault Comics

Last month, I went to Austin to give a workshop to the local RWA, and while there, I had the chance to pop into a brand spankin’ new Amazon Bookstore.

Now, stepping foot into a physical Amazon bookstore is immediately surreal, in part because Amazon has for so long been a purely digital entity — so, when you enter this space, you become momentarily concerned that you have just shoved your Meatspace Body into a Cyberspace Realm, like you’ve broken some critical rule of reality. “WAIT IS THIS THE MATRIX. IS THIS THE OASIS. IS THIS REAL. ARE MY FINGER-TOUCHES ANALOGOUS TO MOUSE-CLICKS. IF I TOUCH A BOOK DO I BUY IT. AM I JUST TALKING IN BINARY CODE NOW.” (“Sir, you’re being weird,” one of the booksellers helpfully whispers into my ear.)

The other aspect of surreality comes from the fact that all the books are face out.

This is amazing.

This is terrifying.

This is weird.

Bookshelves as a rule are a great way to store books, but not a great way to display books to make them enticing. Authors and publishers gnash their teeth over book cover design, and all for books that are then turned sideways and slotted intimately next to other books, rendering the attractiveness of their covers utterly moot. A shelf is a great way to demonstrate books-as-information-clumps and a poor way to put them forward as tantalizing culture products.

Amazon has solved this by making every book a superstar.

Face. Out.

Glamour Shot.

RAZZLE FUCKING DAZZLE.

Again, this is:

Amazing, because it gives the book covers their due, and makes the books seem as much like art and culture product as they are wads of content.

Terrifying, because I’m pretty sure it feels like all the books are watching you.

Weird, because this is… not how we use bookshelves, generally. It’s so out-of-sync with how we experience bookshelves and bookstores, you get the feeling that the person who set them up doesn’t know what bookshelves do. It’s like seeing someone wear a boot on their hand or use food as a hat — it looks interesting, but it also looks like something a moon alien would do when trying to masquerade as a human meatbag. So, it’s jarring enough to feel like you’re in a bookstore that doesn’t know it’s a bookstore, even though it’s ostensibly a much sassier, sexier way of displaying the books for sale.

“Look at me,” the bookstore says, “I’m a real bookstore.”

“But this isn’t how real bookstores look,” you say.

And then the bookstore morphs into a fist that punches you and a mouth that eats you as you realize far too late that it’s actually just a Mimic from the old-school D&D Monster Manual.  [Edit: or home to the Lurker or Trapper from the same book!]

The other side effect of this display is, of course, that the bookstore features… well, very few books. It’s like an art gallery — you can only hang so many paintings on the wall. A single shelf on a bookshelf with the books spine-out can fit, let’s say, 20-30 books. But you can only display one face-out book per, I dunno, five or six spine-out books, so you’ve seriously limited how many books can be on display.

And what I found there was a mix of three kinds of books:

New, popular books — bestsellers or bestseller-adjacent.

Classic books, like, in SFF, analogous to Dune or ASOIAF or Wrinkle in Time.

Buzzy books, books you have heard about — at least, books you would’ve heard about if you pay attention to books and book-related things.

Folded into those three categories are a reasonable mix of Amazon-specific books, meaning, books published by the various wiggly arms of Amazon Publishing. (I’ll quietly make a sad face here and note that none of my A-Pub books were in the store, but that’s just me being mopey. Still: mope, mope, mope, you can’t stop me from moping, just you try.) My thing when I go into any bookstore now is to go to the SFF shelves and, honestly, look for the work of my friends — like, lately, B&N has been falling down on that front, especially when it comes to new releases. The Amazon store had a mix of SFF cohorts (Myke Cole, Delilah Dawson, Erin Morgenstern, NK Jemisin, and A-Pub author Marko Kloos), but the overall representation was fairly slim. But a great deal of SFF isn’t represented there at all. Again, in part because (I assume) you just don’t have much room on shelves.

(The perhaps ironic component of this is that the online Amazon store is theoretically limitless, while the physical location is eerily finite.)

I can contrast this with two other bookstore experiences —

First, that same day, I visited BookPeople in Austin (and signed some stock there), and that is a well-managed, beautiful store — a lot of stock, huge SFF and horror section with a deep bench for readers and authors. And then their whole children’s section was — *whistles* — imaginative and alive. I wanted to stay, play, frolic amongst the book garden.

Second, with B&N, which I just visited yesterday — our local B&N is starting to worry me. There were a few end-caps and central display shelves that had no books on them at all, giving them a ghost-town feel (and this was on a weekend, when foot traffic was high). And the SFF shelves had very few new releases by authors — no Cat Valente’s Space Opera, nor Fire Dance by Ilana Myer. (Their website says the former is in stock, but the person there didn’t know where, which tells me maybe it was in a box in the back.) This hurts first-week sales and so when B&N does their metric on subsequent books by those authors they’ll cite those first week sales as a reason to not carry the books, which of course wasn’t the author’s fault and — well, you see how it goes.

(Also, B&N feels less and less like a bookstore. My son breaks my heart whenever we go there because he always acts like he forgets they sell books. Which isn’t surprising, given how books are pushed to the margins while the ‘stuff’ like toys and such are brought into the center of the store. I can’t blame him for failing to realize B&N is a bookstore. He has no such confusion at our local indie, Let’s Play Books. Or same with Doylestown Bookshop.)

The Amazon Bookstore is a curious interstitial, then — it’s somewhat sterile, having none of that warm, lived-in reading-nook feel you get from a lot of indie stores. But it’s also surprisingly book-facing. Yes, there’s your standard part of the store dedicated to selling you the Kindle, but the rest is pretty much all books. Very few toys or other dongle-widgets to compete with the books. And this is Amazon we’re talking about. They could use those stores to sell books plus leaf-blowers plus pet food plus stuffed animals plus literally anything else Amazon sells. So, it’s nice to see… a bookstore that displays and sells primarily books in an attractive, book-forward way. But then they kinda fuck that up by putting front-and-center reader reviews and star ratings, which introduces something… off-kilter to the whole proceedings. When I’m in a bookstore I care very much about what the booksellers are reading, not what Guy In Aisle Five likes. And knowing how easily the ratings at Amazon can be manipulated… and having heard that the stores don’t tend to carry books with ratings below four….

…nnnyeah that’s a bit anxiety-inducing as an author.

And all told, there’s something icy and inert about the store. It didn’t really make me want to buy any books? It had that Silicon Valley vibe to it, a too-clean, tech-industry standoffishness. The staff stayed off in corners, talking to one another. The selection was sadly slim and if they had a big space (similar to the old Atlantic Book Warehouses) it might feel like more of a fun shopping experience instead of a sterile book boutique. I didn’t hate it, but didn’t love it. It felt more like an augmented reality experience of a bookstore than an actual bookstore. I don’t mind if more show up elsewhere, but also hope like hell they don’t replace any actual bookstores, because… well, it just isn’t a 1:1 replacement. It can’t be, the way it’s designed. There’s simply more pleasure walking around and exploring a nice indie store or a B&N (especially a well-curated B&N, like the Rittenhouse Square store in Philly) than this place.

(Here is where I make my plaintive cry to support indie bookstores whenever possible. And here you may say, ah, but I have no such store in my area, to which I give the retort: ahhh, oh-ho-ho my good book-buying friend, many such bookstores now ship to you wherever you are. You can find some such bookstores via Indiebound. And if you want signed books by me, you can buy them direct from Let’s Play Books in Emmaus, PA — I’ll sign, they’ll ship. And note if you can’t do a bookstore, always check out the library. You can even ask your local library to order books by your favorite authorpeople.)