So, yesterday, I went to the airport to catch a flight. I was there appropriately early (I think at this point they ask you to be there 72 hours before your flight), and I waited around and fucked about on my phone. Then I went to the bathroom because boarding was going to begin soon.

When I came out, the departure time increased by 20 minutes.

No big deal. Tiny delay. Doable.

Then the time changed in front of my eyes and it became two hours.

The gate did not announce it (it’s United, after all, which means I should probably just be happy they gave me a seat in the plane and not on the wing), and I went to the counter to see if it was real or just some kinda funky glitch.

The woman behind the counter made a face. Not a good face.

Do they know what’s wrong, I asked her?

Another face. No, she told me, but whispered: I think it’s mechanical.

By now, a small line of people had gathered behind me. (One guy said last four United flights he was on had mechanical trouble, and were delayed or canceled. Another guy told his friend, “WHAT IF WE TRY TO GET ON THE DETROIT FLIGHT, THEN WE RENT A CAR IN DETROIT AND DRIVE TO CHICAGO.”)

Then she said that they were authorized (and told) to rebook passengers where possible — problem is, it was a small airport, so I had to rebook for today, a day later. All told, not a giant woe for me, because the airport isn’t far from my house, and the event at my destination (the Elgin Lit Fest) doesn’t actually require me until tomorrow anyway — so, ideally, all good.

But it did prompt people to share various travel woes, of being stuck in places for hours or days, of dealing with Planes, Trains & Automobiles levels of frustration. So, I thought, that would make a good cornerstone for some flash fiction.

So, do that.

Write a piece of story which revolves around travel woes of some kind.

How you interpret that is up to you. Get inventive. Any genre is fine.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: February 2nd, Friday, noon EST

Write at your blog.

Drop a link to the story in the comments below.

Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and he wanted to pop in to talk about those New Year’s Resolutions you might have — especially the ones that might be waning at this point in the new year.

* * *

One day a year or so ago, I was going through some old papers, and I discovered a notecard with my 2003 New Year’s resolutions on it. The depressing thing was that I hadn’t carried out any of the resolutions in the last 15 years: I hadn’t developed a regular meditation practice, I didn’t exercise regularly, and I’d not only failed to lose 5 pounds, I’d gained 5 pounds.

I’m not alone in living a life of good intentions and unfilled resolutions. Approximately 80% of those who join a gym in January with the aim of getting fit stop going by February. My guess is that a similar stat might apply to those who resolve to develop a year-round writing habit.

I have a theory: I think most people give up on their resolutions because they focus too much on the uncomfortableness of the what they aspire to do—whether it’s sweating on a stationary bike or over their laptop—instead of focusing on the why they want to do it. Think about it. Why should you wake up and write when you could immerse yourself in endless entertainments literally available at your fingertips? Why not just binge watch shows on Netflix and eat handfuls of gummie bears?

A few years ago, I met a famous novelist at a conference. He’d sold millions of books. It seemed like he published a new book every time the wind changed direction. As we talked about NaNoWriMo, though, he asked me, “How many novels does the world need, anyway? Why should so many people write?”

I sometimes twitch with churlishness when I hear questions like this. Somewhere within the question, I hear a gate crashing down on people’s creativity. I see a sign, “Don’t presume to call yourself a writer.” I feel a judgment: Why write a novel unless it’s going to get published and made into a product to be purchased and consumed? Why write a novel if you’re not going to make money from it?

The question disregards the spirit that has guided every writer since the beginning of time: the need to create just for the sake of creating. The need to shape the world, see through others’ eyes, tame reality, find oneself, lose oneself—to touch what is magical, astonishing, and wondrous; to exult the possible, to make the strange obvious and the obvious strange. And much more. This need is what we need to remember every day in order to show up at our writing gym and write the story that is demanding to be told.

Such questions dog every writer, though, and they too often smother their creative impulse and prevent them from showing up. In fact, each year I talk to hundreds of people who have perfected a peculiar and disturbing art: the art of telling themselves why they can’t jump in and write the novel of their dreams.

“I’ve never taken any classes. I don’t have an MFA.”

“I’m not a real writer. Other people are real writers.”

Or, worst of all, they say, “I’m not a creative type.”

I call this the “other syndrome” — as in “other people do this, but not me.”

We’ve all been there, right? We open up the pages of a magazine, and we read a profile of a magnificently cloaked and coiffed artistic being—a twirling scarf, moody eyes, locks of hair falling over a pensive brow (an artistic version of that super fit creature with the rippling abs at the gym who makes us feel inadequate). We read the witticisms and wisdom the celebrated artistic being dispenses while drinking a bottle of wine with a reporter one afternoon in a hamlet in Italy. The artistic being tells of creative challenges and victories achieved. There’s a joke about a movie deal that fell through, and then the one that won an Oscar. There’s talk about a recently published book, the one that called to them and gave them artistic fulfillment like no other book ever had.

And, as we sit in our house that is so very far from Italy, and we look across the kitchen, over the dishes on the counter, to the cheap bottle of wine from Safeway, and the phone rings with a call from a telemarketer, just as a bill slides off the stack of bills, we tell ourselves, “Other people are writers. Other people get the good fortune to have been born with a twirling scarf around their neck. Other people get to traipse through Italy to find a fantastic novel calling them. Other people get to be who they want to be—whether it’s through family connections, blessed luck, or natural talent. But that’s not me. That’s other people.”

And you know what, we’re right. The life of an artist is for others — because we just said so, and in saying so, we make it true.

But here’s the rub. Even after negating our creative potential, we’re bound to wake up the next day to a tickle of an idea dancing in a far corner of our mind, a memory that is trying to push a door open, a strange other world that is calling us. We wash those dishes, we pay that stack of bills, we drink that cheap bottle of wine, but we know there’s something else—we know there’s something more.

And there is something more. There’s the creative life. You don’t need a certificate for it, you don’t need to apply to do it, you don’t even need to ask permission to do it. You just have to claim it—and claim it every day by showing up to do it.

It’s not easy, of course. There will be naysayers, those people who think it’s silly or trivial to be a “creative type”, those who think it’s audacious and pretentious for you to write a novel, those who think you can’t do it because you lack the qualifications and the training. Unfortunately, because humans are social beings by design, we tend to measure our worth according to the opinions of others. Opinions that come from who knows where, but most likely others’ own insecurities, their need for you not to fulfill yourself—because if you fulfill yourself, you might make them feel small.

The arts don’t belong to a chosen few, though. Quite the opposite: every one of us is chosen to be a creator by virtue of being human. If you’re not convinced of this, just step into any preschool and observe the unbridled creative energy of kids as they immerse themselves in fingerpainting, telling wild stories, banging on drums, and dancing just to dance. They’re creative types because they breathe.

So, when I’m asked what happens to all of those novels—as if they only matter if something happens to them beyond the wonderfulness of their creation—I always see a world of writers with an unquenchable thirst for storytelling. Nearly 500,000 people, including 150,000 kids and teens, participate in National Novel Writing Month each year. They write because humans are wired to make meaning of the world through stories. They write because stories are the vehicles that we navigate the world with.

You’re a writer because you write. There’s no other definition. Your task as a human being is to find that maker within, to decide that you’re not “other,” you’re a creator. That impetus is what makes life meaningful. After food, shelter, and love, I believe it’s what we need most in life.

So, please, if one of your resolutions is to develop a writing habit this year — to be a writer! — think about your why. Your why will help you wake up early or stay up late to put words on the page. It will help you slay naysayers and elbow aside negativity coming from your Inner Editor. It will push you forward to “the end,” and then onward to your next story. Those mythical “other people” aren’t writers. You are. It all starts with that simple belief.

Grant Faulkner is executive director of National Novel Writing Month and co-founder of 100 Word Story. He recently published Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, where portions of this essay originally appeared.

I live in a building with hundreds of other families, maybe thousands. We live here, eat here, sleep here. Our kids learn here. The adults work here. And once, maybe a few times a week, people enter into our building and they take our people away from us. They rob them in the dark. They steal them from us forever. Many times they take our children, sometimes they take the adults.

This building has no doors.

We tell the keepers of this building, the Doormakers, “We have no doors. That’s why they can get in and take our people. We don’t have doors at the front of the building. Our homes inside the building have no doors. Our rooms inside our homes have no doors. They can just walk in. They can just take us whenever they want.”

And the Doormakers tell us, “I’m so sorry.” They clasp their hands together, and they wring them together like they’re squeezing water from a sponge. The look shared on their faces is one of pain. “You are in our thoughts,” they say, sympathetically. “You are in our prayers. It’s the Shadow People,” they say. “From out there. From beyond the Building.”

“So you’ll make us doors?” we ask. “You’ll put them on for us?”

“Doors won’t help,” the Doormakers say, regrettably. “The Shadow People will just open them and walk right in anyway.”

“I have a solution to that,” you tell them. “Locks. We lock the doors.”

“But then all doorways will be impassable,” the Doormakers say. “You’re talking about closing off all the doorways, forever. We can’t do that.”

“No, what we can do is give everyone keys. Keys to those who should be able to use the doors. We’ll all have keys to the building. And those who live in their homes will have keys to their homes. And those who live in the rooms of our homes can have keys to those rooms.”

“Keys are very costly,” the Doormakers say.

“So are our lives,” we answer.

“You’re trying to restrict all freedom of movement,” the Doormakers say.

“What? No, no, no, we’re just trying to stay safe.”

Here, the Doormakers pull out The Document. We all signed the Document in order to live here, and the Doormaker points to a part of The Document that has long been underlined, underlined so many times the pen has nearly worn through the paper. (No other of the Document’s precepts have been underlined in such a way, and the Doormakers don’t seem to remember what the rest of The Document even says.) “Look here,” the Doormakers say.

They point to the precept which reads:

The well-regulated hallways will represent the right of the Building’s people to have unrestricted freedom-of-movement.

“See?” the Doormakers say. “We cannot restrict movement.”

“But that’s not precisely what the precept says,” you explain. “It suggests that first, this is about the hallways, not our homes or the front of the building, but it also notes that the hallways are well-regulated. The hallways have no doors, no cameras, no regulation at all. Anyone can walk down them and enter our houses, our bedrooms, our most private places. That’s how they’re taking us.” Whoever they are, we think but do not say.

“That is the cost of freedom,” they say.

“But this isn’t freedom, this is the opposite of freedom.”

Being taken is not freedom, we point out.

“Why do you hate freedom?” the Doormakers say. They tut-tut us, and hurry back to the stairway, to head to their penthouses which we have never seen. We feel uncertain of what to do. We don’t want to restrict all freedom, do we? This seems like common sense, but now we’re left wondering — are the Doormakers right?

At night, more of our children are taken from us.

We announce it over the intercoms, to the whole building. Every day or three, a tally of those who were taken from us. We’ve grown resistant to it. The most we do is listen to hear if the names are names we know; if not, maybe we don’t listen so hard. In part because it’s too sad to think about for too long. In part because it’s just becoming noise. The background sound of the tragedies of the universe, unstoppable and implacable, we tell ourselves. Like old age. Like entropy.

But sometimes we get mad again.

We get mad when we know the names, when we know who were taken.

We try to talk to the Doormakers about it, telling them, “At least do something. Put some boxes in front of the door. Or half-doors. Even an alarm so we can hear when people are coming through. Or cameras, to see who is taking us.”

They say they know who is taking us. The Shadow People. And they mumble at us about how sad they are for us, and how we are in their hearts, and then they hurry back to their penthouses.

One of us looks up the history of The Building, and they find documents from The Architects who built it — the Architects didn’t intend for the Building to have no doors, it turns out. They wanted doors. It’s why they created the Doormakers to govern the building. They didn’t want people from inside or outside the building to be able to enter our homes! They wanted the hallways to be clear, yes, but that’s it — just the hallways. Our homes are our homes. We send a missive up to the Doormakers — they’ve stopped meeting with us — to tell them what we found. We receive a message over the intercom as a result thanking us for our due diligence, our time, our thoughtfulness, and that’s all they say.

“Does that mean they’ll do something?” we ask one another.

“Maybe,” we tell one another. “Maybe they’ll make us doors.”

But weeks go by. We lose dozens again. Some point out, “Really, as a percentage, it’s not that we’re losing that many. Do we really need doors?” But they say it with a kind of listlessness, like they’ve given up, given in. Someone else says, “Acceptable losses, really, for our freedom,” but no one seems to believe that. We want our doors.

So we decide to make them ourselves.

Our floor, and the people of other floors, take it into their own hands to put together doors. We’ve never made doors before, and it’s not our purview, but we manage to cobble together crude gates and hatches with rough hinges and uneven knobs. Someone on our floor is even good with metal, so he makes for us locks and keys for our homes. And that night we hear knobs rattling. Our doors shudder against their frames. But none come in. And that night, none go missing.

In the morning, the Doormakers appear.

They have hammers. They strike the knobs off our doors. They pry the hinges off the wall. “No restricting freedom of movement,” they say firmly, hammers in hand. Then they head back upstairs in an incredulous huff.

We look at our handiwork, smashed. We wonder what will come.

That night, more of us are taken again. Nineteen children.

The night after that, a respite, and same with the two nights hence, but then it begins again in earnest, three children, then four women, then some of those who work in the offices of the Building — they are taken, pulled from their desks and hiding places through the open doorways, and then they’re gone from us forever. Maybe to join the shadows, we don’t even know.

The intercom announces the lost and the taken.

Sometimes we’re not even sure if it’s announcing everyone or not.

Then more on our floor have been taken. We know them. We know their names. When they come on over the intercom, we weep.

“We have to do something. We have to make the Doormakers listen.”

So, we decide to go against protocol. Together we march to the stairs and up, up, up we go, to the penthouse. To the Doormakers. But there, we find the most curious thing:

A door.

They have a door.

And it’s locked.

“This must be a mistake,” one of us says. “That’s not possible.”

“Hypocrisy,” another says.

“Maybe they need the door to protect themselves.”

“From who? The Shadow People?”

But we fear the real answer: it’s to protect them from us. (Some of us wonder aloud: who are the Shadow People? Are they even real? Are they even a threat?) So we work very hard to take down the door. We use our bare hands. We use tools from our kitchens. We chip away at the mortar and brick, we pull away hinges with our now-bloodied fingers.

The door falls.

The penthouse is revealed. A beautiful world. Gold and silver. Polished wood. And doors everywhere. Doors to every room. Some locked, some not. We hear voices behind one, and this time we offer no finesse — we simply slam ourselves up against it again and again, the bulk of us forming a battering ram, until the door falls and we tumble into a room.

In this room is a table, big and grand.

One one side of this very long table are the Doormakers. On the other are figures in suits. They look like us. We’ve seen some of them here before — they live here. In the Building, on the upper floors. A briefcase sits between them on the table, a golden glow coming from within it. The Doormakers quickly snap the case shut, but when they do, a piece of paper — a contract — slips off the table, stirred by the breeze of the closing lid. The paper lands at our feet. It contains a list of names. We know some of those names. Names of those who have been taken.

Before we know what’s happening, bodyguards of the Doormakers are wrestling us back out of this room, then out of the penthouse. They quickly put up another door — thicker, made of metal, with hinges thick as our arms. All the while we wail and yell and kick and thrash. They’re the ones taking us, we cry. They’ve made a deal with those who take us. There aren’t any shadowy people. It’s them. They’re taking us. They’re paying the Doormakers to not build us any doors, to keep the hallways open. The guards drag us down, down, down, past the floors on which we live, all the way to the basement.

There, too, we find doors.

We’re thrown into rooms. The doors slam shut behind us. We’re left in the dark. The guards hiss at us, tell us we’re the Shadow People, now, and we can have doors if we want to. These doors. Doors we can’t open. Doors that are locked tight, sealing us shut behind them. We realize too late that the freedom they talk about isn’t our freedom, but theirs.

We pound on the doors, screaming to be let out.

These are the doors the Doormakers made.

And we will help to make them.

* * *

THE RAPTOR & THE WREN: Miriam Black, Book Five

Miriam Black, in lockstep with death, continues on her quest to control her own fate!

Having been desperate to rid herself of her psychic powers, Miriam now finds herself armed with the solution — a seemingly impossible one. But Miriam’s past is catching up to her, just as she’s trying to leave it behind. A copy-cat killer has caught the public’s attention. An old nemesis is back from the dead. And Louis, the ex she still loves, will commit an unforgivable act if she doesn’t change the future. 

Miriam knows that only a great sacrifice is enough to counter fate. Can she save Louis, stop the killer, and survive? 

Hunted and haunted, Miriam is coming to a crossroads, and nothing is going to stand in her way, not even the Trespasser.

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

PSST, HEY YOU

REAL QUICK

C’MERE

*opens trenchcoat*

*trenchcoat contains an infinite cabinet of birds, good birds and bad birds and strange birds and mad birds, from the hooded pitohui to the Eastern Phoebe to the grebe to the rough-faced shag, and they all whisper to you in tandem: you really want the Miriam Black books*

Okay so — last night, I launched The Raptor & The Wren to a full house of wonderful readers last night at the also wonderful Let’s Play Books in Emmaus, PA. And I’ll be at the Elgin Literary Festival (ELF!) this weekend to give a talk and also attack you with owls. I mean, sign your book?

Ahem.

So — note that if you want a signed book from me, whether it’s the Miriam Black books or really, any of my other books, then Let’s Play Books has you covered. They will ship to wherever you are. Check out their website and contact them via their email or via this antiquated device I’ve heard about called a “pa-honie” —

*receives note*

Ahh, it’s pronounced FONE. Cool.

Also!

Tor.com is doing a giveaway of the series, so go check that out. Their giveaway runs till January 26th, so you’ve got a couple days.

If you’ve checked out this series, thank you — it’s been a long, weird, wonderful labor of love. Please to enjoy, and tell your friends. Or don’t tell them, I’m not your father. But I will be when I get this time machine up and running, just you wait.

P.S. one more quick thing — if you’re going to ECCC in Seattle, I will be there. My schedule is here! Also, I’ll be attending the Worldbuilders Party that Friday (details here), and I’ll be running a game of Balderdash at my table, so donate to the charity, come hang out, play a wordsmithy game about lying liars who lie, come out to the coast, we’ll have a few laughs.

With the passing of Ursula Le Guin — whose short work I read very early, and whose longer work I only read much, much later — I am reminded of some advice she’d given about writing, and given what is sometimes the focus of this blog, I thought I’d highlight her words here.

(Note: do read her original answer here.)

When asked how one writes something good, she responded with:

The way to make something good is to make it well.

If the ingredients are extra good (truffles, vivid prose, fascinating characters) that’s a help. But it’s what you do with them that counts. With the most ordinary ingredients (potatoes, everyday language, commonplace characters) — and care and skill in using them — you can make something extremely good.

Inexperienced writers tend to seek the recipes for writing well. You buy the cookbook, you take the list of ingredients, you follow the directions, and behold! A masterpiece! The Never-Falling Soufflé!

Wouldn’t it be nice? But alas, there are no recipes. We have no Julia Child. Successful professional writers are not withholding mysterious secrets from eager beginners. The only way anybody ever learns to write well is by trying to write well. This usually begins by reading good writing by other people, and writing very badly by yourself, for a long time.

There are “secrets” to making a story work — but they apply only to that particular writer and that particular story. You find out how to make the thing work by working at it — coming back to it, testing it, seeing where it sticks or wobbles or cheats, and figuring out how to make it go where it has to go.

And on the subject of writing to a market or following prescribed rules:

If your manuscript doesn’t follow the rules of what’s currently trendy, the rules of what’s supposed to be salable, the rule some great authority laid down, you’re supposed to make it do so. Most such rules are hogwash, and even sound ones may not apply to your story. What’s the use of a great recipe for soufflé if you’re making blintzes? The important thing is to know what it is you’re making, where your story is going, so that you use only the advice that genuinely helps you get there. The hell with soufflé, stick to your blintzes.

We make something good, a blintz, a story, by having worked at blintzmaking or storywriting till we’ve learned how to do it.

With a blintz, the process is fairly routine. With stories, the process is never twice the same. Even a story written to the most prescriptive formula, like some westerns or romances, can be made poorly, or made well.

Making anything well involves a commitment to the work. And that requires courage: you have to trust yourself. It helps to remember that the goal is not to write a masterpiece or a best-seller. The goal is to be able to look at your story and say, Yes. That’s as good as I can make it.

(I find that advice to be very, very freeing.)

Le Guin, having been done with novels, gave herself in 2015 to the task of answering a considerable number of writing questions at Book View Cafe, and I think you’ll find much of what she says there interesting and useful, and I encourage you to read the literally hundreds of answers she gives. I’ve popped in a few more delightful bits here —

On being asked the difference between literary fiction and genre:

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog about Genre Fiction vs Literary Fiction in which I stated Le Guin’s Hypothesis:

Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it.

I find this saves a lot of head-scratching.

On those who believe that one style of POV is correct when writing prose:

Distrust anybody — fellow writer, agent, editor — who tells you that fiction must use only limited third person.

It’s trendy at the moment, sure. But the surest way to go out of vogue is to be in it.

As currently practiced, limited third person is (like the present tense) a kind of flashlight beam — it gives a brilliant, narrow, simplifying intensity of vision. It’s well suited to many short stories and to the kinds of novel where a fast pace and a tight focus are prime values. It lends itself to detachment and irony.

The unlimited third person, the de-centered, flexible, moving point of view, is natural to stories and novels in which character and emotional relationships and interactions, cultural contrasts, etc., are important, in which problems aren’t solved by a gunshot or a bomb but by being worked out (or not worked out) over time.

Forcing such a narrative into a single POV will limit it and may cripple it. Write your story the way it wants and needs to be written. Change your POV when you feel like it!

Only, be really, really sure that you know how to do it…

On writing to, and thinking about, your so-called audience:

“Audience” literally means “the people listening” – which tells you what an odd business writing stories down is. We are silent performers in an empty room. We lack the instant feedback that maintains and sharpens the story-teller’s consciousness of and relationship with the audience. So, does the writer consciously try to imagine a reader? An ideal reader? A whole lot of readers? Or are we each our own audience, writing a book we’d like to read, the way we’d like it written? Or do we seek a peer-group for the feedback? Such choices are entirely up to you the writer. And nobody can say what the right balance of conventionality and expectability, challenge and originality, is for you. Tailoring your writing to a specific audience/market is good for writers to whom salability is a prime value, for others it can be demoralizing, a sell-out.

The only advice I can offer is tentative: If you imagine your “audience,” your readers, imagine them as intelligent and sympathetic — ready to read you if you give them the chance.

And really, one of my favorite bits, she talks about success as a metric in writing:

Esme, I think the word success confuses people. They get recognition mixed up with achievement, and celebrity mixed up with excellence. I rarely use the word – it confuses me. I didn’t want to be a success, I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t set out to write successful books. I tried to write good ones.

Receiving recognition is very important to a young artist, but you may have to settle for achievement with very little recognition for a long time. You ask about me. I wrote and submitted my work to editors for six or seven years without getting anything published except a few poems in poetry magazines – as near invisibility as you can get in print. It kept me going, though. Then I got two short stories accepted within a week, one by a literary quarterly, the other by a commercial genre magazine. From then on I had some sense of where to send the next story, and began to publish more regularly, and finally placed a novel. Each publication added to my self-confidence. Growing recognition added more. But the truth is, I always had confidence in myself as a writer – I had arrogance, even. Yet I had endless times of self-doubt. I think what carried me through was simply commitment to the job. I wanted to do it.

Talent is no good without commitment. I’ve had students who wrote very well, but weren’t willing to commit to write, to go on writing, and to go on writing better. But that’s what it takes.

“Feeling successful” – well, that’s something you have to work out for yourself, what it means to you, how important it is. You’re quite right that very good and highly celebrated writers may not feel “successful.” Maybe they have unhappy natures, and the Nobel Prize would just depress them. Or maybe they aren’t fully satisfied with what they’ve done so far, don’t feel they’ve yet written the best book they could write. But they have the commitment that keeps them trying to do it.

Hang in there. And don’t push it. No hurry! Writing is a lifetime job.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg.

I confess, I’ve never before read her book on writing, Steering the Craft, but I’m going to, now.

And, while you’re at it, given all that’s going on in the world, I suggest seeking out and reading (or re-reading) “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It was the first thing I’d ever read from Le Guin and it has stuck in my craw (in the best worst way) since, imprinting in ways most stories never do. It’s a near-perfect example of how science-fiction and other imaginary narrative is uniquely posed to challenge us and trouble us and make is think about who we are and what we do.

[photo credit: AP]

WELL, HELLO THERE.

I WROTE A BOOK.

Actually, I’ve written six of them in this particular series — I finished a draft of the sixth Miriam Black book, Vultures, yesterday, and today sees the release of the fifth and penultimate book, The Raptor & The Wren. Available in both hardcover and paperback on the same day, and also, obviously, ebook.

Buy in print (Indiebound), or in e-book (Amazon | B&N | iTunes)

I’ll leave you with the official description* first:

Miriam Black, in lockstep with death, continues on her quest to control her own fate in The Raptor and the Wren, the brand-new fifth book in the Miriam Black series.

Having been desperate to rid herself of her psychic powers, Miriam now finds herself armed with the solution — a seemingly impossible one. But Miriam’s past is catching up to her, just as she’s trying to leave it behind. A copy-cat killer has caught the public’s attention. An old nemesis is back from the dead. And Louis, the ex she still loves, will commit an unforgivable act if she doesn’t change the future. 

Miriam knows that only a great sacrifice is enough to counter fate. Can she save Louis, stop the killer, and survive? 

Hunted and haunted, Miriam is coming to a crossroads, and nothing is going to stand in her way, not even the Trespasser.

(*Actually, I see a different official description on bookselling sites, which is honestly a little spoiler-iffic? Dunno what’s up there.)

And maybe we should jump into a couple-few reviews…

“Wendig expertly splashes Miriam’s considerable emotional pain across the page, never sparing her the price of her gut-wrenching circumstances, and closes with a shocking twist that is a true game-changer.” — Publishers Weekly

“With a dark storyline and an even darker protagonist, this vivid adventure takes readers on an emotional, violent ride. VERDICT: The fifth book in the series (after Thunderbird) drives further down the road into Miriam Black’s life: the trauma, the fears, and the forgiveness. It will please fans of Joe Hill and Joe Abercrombie.” — Library Journal

“Wendig dials to eleven the violent maelstrom that is Miriam’s life, pulling in a gaggle of familiar characters from past installments along the way, tying them together into a tangled rat king of death and discovery. This time around, the narrative hits even harder than before, propelling Miriam well beyond her comfort zone and forcing her to dig herself in even deeper to survive. As usual, Wendig writes like he’s driving a truck full of dynamite downhill, on ice, and his brakes are out, careening madly from one absurd action beat to another, with black humor keeping pace all the way.” — Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog

“The Miriam Black series flips between genres, blending together elements of horror, mystery, psychological thriller, and urban fantasy into something deliciously addictive. Raptors is more on the thriller/horror/dark UF bent, a novel full of sharp writing, harrowing plot and subplots, and devastating characters. The Raptor and the Wren is an heartbreaker of a book that’ll leave you gasping for breath by the final page. Bring on the finale!” — Tor.com

If you haven’t seen the series trailer:

My own thoughts?

I wrote this book in the fall of last year, which was, umm, an interesting time politically, and one in which I found myself getting very little sleep, so this book was sort of stolen from and produced by a ongoing fight with insomnia. Not that I recommend it as part of your writing regimen, but honestly, I think that contributed well to the overall vibe of the book.

This is a pretty, um, rough book. Like, if you imagine the Miriam Black books to be an entire series of Empire Strikes Back-level downers, then this book is the Empire Strikes Back of that series. It represents a hard row to hoe for poor Miriam, and shows her growing and changing while also grappling with a series of new existential threats for her and those around her.

It also contains an owl called BIRD-OF-DOOM, so there’s that.

I never know exactly where to put the Miriam books on a genre-scale — some call these urban fantasy, but this book has no “urban” in it, nor is it particularly fantastical, though the supernatural is an everpresent backdrop. It’s a little bit crime, for sure. It’s a little bit horror, most definitely. They’re thrillers, no doubt, supernatural thrillers, written with the kind of (hopefully) relentless pacing where you read it with a breathless pace — the pace of someone being chased through a house by a machete-wielding murderer.

Yesterday, as noted, I just finished the sixth and final (!) book, Vultures — which should come out a year from now, roughly. That one is a bit longer than all the others, and it both sad and exhilarating to have finished a six-book series. I won’t spoil what’s to come in that book, because then I’d spoil what’s to come in this book.

Beautiful cover, by the way, is from Adam S. Doyle.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy it, and the series. If you have enjoyed any of these books, I’d sure love a review written at a site like Amazon or Goodreads, or spraypainted on a city bus, or written in elegant calligraphy on the side of a whale, or burned into the moon using a big laser. Thanks!

A note: do not start with this book. You need to read the rest first.

The Miriam Black series is, in order:

Blackbirds — print | ebook

Mockingbird — print | ebook

The Cormorant — print | ebook

Thunderbird — print | ebook

The Raptor & The Wren — print | ebook