MERRY EVILAPPLEMAS EVE, people. Looks like Black River Orchard is $2.99 today in ELECTRIC BOOK FORMAT for various BOOK-READING MACHINES, which is to say, on Kindle, on Kobo, on Apple, on B&N and on Blitzen, on Donner and — er, sorry, got a little carried away there.
That’s a delightfully not-expensive price for a book that was a USA Today bestseller, and that was named one of the best horror novels of the year by Esquire Magazine, by Paste Magazine, was listed as one of NPR’s Books We Love in 2023, and has gotten similar shout-outs at USA Today and Den of Geek and other excellent places. Hey, it’s got small town suburban folk horror, it’s got cults, it’s got twisted American history, it’s got evil apples and various tidbits of apple learnin‘, it’s got monsters, it’s a real hoot.
So, check it out, if you’re so inclined.
And leave a review, if you can, because that’s what keeps the Review Gods happy, so they do not smite us poor blubbering authors into word gelatin.
You know how if you have, say, an Important Meeting or Significant Task To Do set at a certain time in the day, that in the run-up to that thing you mostly just sit on your hands waiting for that thing? You’ve got a 2pm whatever, and until 2pm, you’re like a LOADING SCREEN on a new PC game trying to run on a computer that can’t fucking run it. You’re an old iPhone trying to update to the newest OS. You’re stuck. Paused. Caught. Could you technically do other things in this time? Sure. Will you? Probably not. Your brain is frozen in preparation mode. It is languishing in the time-before-the-time. It is the rise up the rollercoaster. You’re buckled in until the drop.
The week before Christmas is exactly that, writ large.
At least, for me.
It’s this weird interstice, this liminal calendar hole, like a temporal trench at the bottom of the ocean into which all things eventually fall.
What I’m trying to say is, I’ve been attempting productivity during this time and it… isn’t happening. It’s not a total waste. I’m not doing nothing. I’m just not doing muchof anything. Every effort is an appetizer, not a meal, you know what I’m saying? It happened this year where I had a moment of panic and frustration at myself, YOU STUPID FOOL WHY ARE YOU NOT WRITING THOUSANDS OF WORDS, where I wanted to throw snowballs at my brain like it was an indolent sled dog licking his butthole instead of mushing us across the great ice shelf of the imagination, but then, aaaah ha ha, then I wised the fuck up and I remembered:
This happens to me every year.
Every year!
EVERY. FUCKING. YEAR.
This is just that time. It is, as noted, an interstitial time. It is a period of rest and reflection. I don’t force it to be that. It just is that, at least for me.
Here’s the thing: recognizing that quickly, that this is just Part of My Shit, was very helpful, and honestly, pretty useful in not making me hate myself for this week (and, let’s be honest, next week, too). The last two weeks in December are slow like honey. Cold honey, at that. And then, in January, I tend to pick back up and start churning out stuff, and January through March actually tends to be a fairly good time for writing for me.
The trick is, I saved myself the frustration only because I’ve attempted to take the time and the effort it takes to Know Myself. Which sounds higher-and-mightier-and-self-helpier than I mean it to — there’s no great trick to it, I don’t think, other than, it’s important to live your life and be mindful of patterns. You can then see those patterns and decide if they need to be re-examined and tweaked or if they’re just part of who you are. This is, admittedly, easier said than done — it can be hard to see if something you’re experiencing over and over again with yourself is a bad habit in need of breaking or just one necessary thread in the tapestry of you (okay that was very overwrought and purple prosey, I am sorry, trying to delete), but I dunno. I think you figure that out too by being mindful and living your life in a way where you are careful and thoughtful and most of all forgiving with your own silly ass. Be accepting of yourself, in other words, and your limitations, and your patterns. I think over time you start to see when things need to change and when you just need to realize you (and we all) are a set of imperfections. We’re all hot messes, and sometimes those messes can be cleaned up, and sometimes they’re just part of the colorful chaos of our lives. Long as we’re not hurting ourselves, our prospects, or most of all, anyone else? Then maybe we are who we are and we have to be good with that.
And I think as writers this is really essential too — and I know I’ve talked about this before! — to know who you are as a writer. To know that you get really self-doubty at the 33% and 66% mark of writing. To know what burning out looks like and how to cool it down before you get cooked to cinders. To know when to push, when to back off, and when/how to refill your batteries. (I talk a lot about this in Gentle Writing Advice, by the way, which attempts to unpack a lot of stuff about bullshit writing rules, about burnout and self-care, about how to be productive without punishing yourself.)
I think knowing yourself as a writer ultimately means writing a lot and being mindful of not just the writing but all the extra stuff around the writing — time, place, people, needs, patterns, and so forth.
ANYWAY, whatever, what I’m trying to say is, this time of the year is a slow, goofy, hazy and lazy time of year for me, whether I want it to or not, and I know that trying to force it to be anything other than that is a good way to just hate myself while still accomplishing less than I want. And I know this because I know myself as a writer, and therefore, I’m writing this blog post instead of writing a story today, because hey, fuck it.
Your mileage, of course, may vary.
I’ll pop back in next week to talk about 2023 and what’s coming up for 2024 — I know a lot of people have done those posts already but it always feels weirdly too early if I do them before Christmas, so I’m just going to throw it together sometime next week. In the meantime, to all who celebrate, have a lovely holiday, whatever holiday you care to enjoy. If you want to get me, or any writer, a present, send us a photo of your pet stapled to a bag of money — erm, you should staple the photo to the bag, not show me a photo OF a pet that you’ve stapled to the bag? Shit. Don’t mess that part up, please. Also, you should ensure the bag is one of those cartoony Monopoly-type bags, the kind with the big obvious dollar sign — $ — on the fabric. Stuff it with cash, give us a pet photo, and we will be happy. I mean, fine, failingthat, you can always buy our books and leave us a nice review somewhere.
And yet, here we are — the tl;dr of this is, an upcoming debut author decided to take it upon herself to apparently create a series of sock puppet Goodreads accounts and use said accounts to both
a) boost herself
and
b) trash other books (ostensibly other debut authors, most or all of which were by BIPOC / queer authors)
aaaand then try to cover it up by making up another fake person maybe in order to pin it on, which was immediately called out as nonsense and —
You know, I dunno, it’s a lot. Point is, the author, Cait Corrain, finally claimed responsibility for it in an apology. In this apology, Corrain said it was down to, basically, a nervous breakdown due to substance abuse.
(The apology is on The Website Formerly Known As Twitter, and I prefer not to link to it, but if you wanna find her account, you should at present find the apology still up there.)
I think the… let’s call it easy, maybe even lazy takeaway from this is, hey, it’s messed up to view your fellow writers and authors as competition. They are, at their best, your community, and at worst, a non-factor. Lotta books out there, lotta authors writing ’em, and they’ll be a mix of friends, acquaintances, and people who you simply don’t know. (Okay, fine, you’re allowed one nemesis. Just one! Make it good and choose wisely! This is your nemesis for the duration of your writing career. If they die, another will be selected for you by The Council.) Other writers will lift you up and share wisdom and also share your books with their readers and it’s great. Further, you can do this in recompense to them and also for other authors — we leave a light on, a ladder out, maybe a little cheese plate in case you’re hungry. Authors love books, and as such, we tend to love other authors, too. I mean, no, not every writer is going to be amazing to you (certainly the subject of this entire post belies that notion), but pound for pound, most of the authors I’ve met have actually been pretty great? I like ’em? They’re good eggs.
A book that comes out is not competing with yours. I mean, okay, fine, in a technical sense there is the general problem of money being finite and books being practically infinite and so a reader must make some choices of what to do with their limited money (and time) and so maybe your book makes the cut, maybe it doesn’t. But this isn’t Thunderdome, they may come back for yours later, and books live on the long tail (if publishers allow it) — and, hey, this is why Book Jesus invented libraries. Lotta books there.
And guess what?
They’re fucking free! Rent one for zero dollars and enjoy.
A slightly more nuanced conversation about this is, you know, we live in this sort of deranged hustle-culture capitalist fuckscape world where all our engagement is driven by an algorithmic alchemy of clicks and looks and scrolls and outrage, and we’re all in a box screaming to be heard, and certainly places like Amazon and Goodreads and social media only encourage us to YELL LOUDER and BE BOLDER and GET ATTENTION however we must. Publishers, too, can encourage this when they don’t put their back into marketing a book — when it’s all on the author, the author might start to feel like a frenzied weasel in a box, gnawing for egress. Certainly the GET ON THE STAGE AND PERFORM action is not always the healthiest for authors, nor a skill we are practiced in or have prepared for, and as such, maybe that can crack our shells. We’re good eggs until something chips our shell, and then our mess spills all over the internet.
Thing is, and here’s the real point, ultimately none of that really suggests you should go out and sandbag your imagined authorial rivals in a bigoted push to be the Highlander of Books. What happened here, in this particular situation, definitely feels like some racist shit and I don’t think “engagement farming” or “seeing writers as competition and not community” entirely explains this truly bizarre situation. It definitely seems like a soupçon of mental health issues coupled with some active (or at least poorly-concealed and realized) racism had to be in play. This was a book, after all, that had from what I can tell a pretty good amount of buzz — it had a deal with a big publisher (confession: my own publisher, Del Rey), it had reach, it had a nice cover, it had an Illumicrate placement and —
I mean, the book was going to be fine, maybe even blow up and do pretty well, and now it won’t, because it blew up in a different, and worse, way. The book is gone and I’m not sure the author will easily recover. Again, they’ve apologized, and it’s not on me to decide whether that’s a good apology or a bad one — that’s only on the aggrieved. (And here it’s gotta be worth the mention that you can support the authors targeted and victimized: Bethany Baptiste, Molly X Chang, KM Enright, Kamilah Cole, Frances White. All but the last of those are Bookshop.org links where you can preorder the books — the last is Goodreads, as I couldn’t make Bookshop give me a link for that one, but I’m sure it’ll manifest at some point.)
There’s no real good lesson here — outside of obvious things like, “Hey don’t be weird and do racism and bigotry against your fellow authors?” I want to say, again, be aware of your fellow authors as community rather than competition and try not to fall prey to the teeth-grinding hustle-culture “don’t gotta run faster than the Obscurity Bear just gotta run faster than the author next to me” attitude but mostly, it’s the “don’t be weird and creepy” thing. Be good to other authors, be good to yourself, don’t make it weird. I’m not sure it gets much more complex than that.
So, once again this year I tackle the onerous task of offering you COOL GIFTS FOR COOL PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE. Once upon a time, this was more a “gifts for writers” but honestly, the best thing you can do to the writer in your life is to be nice to them, read their stuff, laugh at the parts you’re supposed to laugh at, review their books fondly, pet them, and then leave them the hell alone. (Oh, also, buy for them this neat book I totally didn’t write called Gentle Writing Advice, ahem ahem ahem, okay, sorry, sorry, trying to delete this brash and rampant self-promotion but it just won’t go away oh shit.)
Anyway! Mostly, this is just a “THINGS CHUCK WENDIG LIKES” and you can do with this list as you see fit.
I know, I know, sorry about the self-promotion. But please buy my books or Santa dies. Ha ha just kidding. *gently gesticulates toward a closed closet door where you can hear mumbled muffled cries for help and also where you detect the faintest scent of gingerbread and elf cologne*
BOOKS
You know what everyone likes, including writers? Books. In no particular order, here are some books I liked this year, and you should buy them all and read them because you are a cool person with impeccable taste:
There is, of course, more that I’m forgetting and my brain is a leaky tugboat, plus there are amazing books by authors like Hailey Piper and Cynthia Pelayo that aren’t even out yet until next year.
Really, though, just get books. Any book. Get a bookish giftcard. Maybe hijack the person, throw them in a car, drive them to a bookstore, hand them thirty-five dollars and see what they buy. Books are the best.
(Oh, my kid recommends Lora Senf’s newest Blight Harbor, The Nighthouse Keeper, sequel to the excellent Clackity.)
TAROT CARDS
Like a big dork I used to read Tarot for people and while I don’t do that anymore, I do occasionally like to use them not to predict any kind of future, but simply to have as a) objects of pretty fascination and b) objects of inspiration. You can use them as storytelling devices, after all.
I got two new ones this year —
Shin Yin Khor’s STRANGE BEAST Tarot is easily one of the coolest things I own, honestly, and you should get it.
Also the Erin Morgenstern Phantomwise deck, painted by none other than, Erin Fucking Morgenstern, is straight up gorgeous.
AMAZING ART
As we descend into a Hell Era of artificially-generated garbage shit, I do think this is therefore an excellent time to lean extra-hard into supporting art by actual humans and not regurgitating copy-paste machines.
Having worked with Natalie Metzger, I will always tell you to support her work — either buy something directly or join her Patreon either to treat yourself or for a fellow art-beholder.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know. I know! But I have merch and you can check it out and buy it and then I’ll see you wearing your cool evil apple shirt or a Black Swan pin and I’ll know we are kin and then we will freeze-frame high-five in front of the world and it’ll be great. Go check it out.
Said it before, will say it again, Brandywine roasts some of the best coffee around. Small farms, kindly-sourced. Go get it.
FOODS FOODS FOODS
Some foodstuffs I like, and maybe you and your loved ones will dig:
This Little Goat’s chili crunch collection is fucking legit, in particular the chili lime one, mmm. It passes the Flavortown “would eat on a Flip-Flop” test, so, there’s that.
I really like vinegar, and Acid League’s citrus vinegar gets regular use in our house. Also their Meyer Lemon Honey, but that doesn’t seem to be on their website anymore — but is in grocery stores I think now. We get it from Thrive Market sometimes, and also, Thrive makes the very best ketchup, it’s Heinz-vibe but even more Heinzy? Or something? Whatever. (I have a referral link to Thrive if you want it. It’s 40% off your first order. I feel like an influencer. Nobody is paying me for this shit, I just found Thrive during the pandemic and like them a lot. Shut up, don’t look at me like that.)
I have become a fan of fizzy non- slash less-sweet beverages. Like, I’m an unabashed Spindrift fan, and CulturePop is really good, and I’d kill a dude for the Sanzo Calamansi sparkling water. Also “Sanzo Calamansi” is the name I use to check into hotels to hide my identity. Shhh.
If you need good tech organization for computers and phones and such, I’m really quite a fan of TwelveSouth’s products — they’re hale and hardy, they go the distance, and their iPad stand could be used as a bludgeoning baton in a pinch. (It’s actually gotten me pulled at security checkpoints at airports once in a while. “Is this a weapon, sir?” *unfolds stand, places iPad upon it*)
I’ve gotten a couple print magazine subscriptions again — Atlantic, Wired — and not only does it unlock the online versions, but also I’m kinda enjoying reading a thing without getting pop-ups for other things. I am reminded of the BeforeTimes. The world prior to us nuzzling an ever-present digital teat. It’s nice! I mean, I still nuzzle. I’m only human.
Ok fine fine fine here’s a gift for writers — it’s a walnut box. It’s for writers. It isn’t cheap, but it’s cool, and you can feel DISTINGUISHED as you get it out at your local Starbucks, light up a meerschaum pipe, and begin constructing your next bestseller. I snark, but it is a nice box. (The company also makes a lot of nice pen/pencil cases, too.)
So, how are the various social media platforms doing? Are they worth your time as a person, as a writer, as seven possums in a trenchcoat? Given that community and audience are both found and earned through these social networks, I figure it’s worth taking a gander at them again as I’ve done a number of times over the last year — in part because the social media landscape has broken into a number of little islands thanks to various tectonic shifts beneath the internet crust and we’re all just trying to find a place to rest our digital heads at night. Also in part because, as a writer, I need to find not just a place to HAWK MY WORDY WARES, which is of dubious value, but rather a place where I can meet writers and readers and agents and publishing folks and bookstore people and in general contribute to a larger, greater, cooler bookish ecosystem.
That said, as always, this is all purely my perspective. It is zero percent useful wisdom and one hundred percent just some bullshit that passed through my head like a cloud of stupid. I am not to be listened to. I’m just some jackass with a blog. Proceed with that situational awareness.
That’s more or less my capsule review. It’s fine! It’s fine. It’s fine.
Some general thoughts about it:
a) It’s obviously tied to Instagram and Facebook and therefore is tied to Zuckerberg which is bad and not good. No, it’s not awesome having to pick your social media platform based on which billionaire sociopath upsets you the least? But it is what it is, I guess. Our choices in life do not always amount to great ones, woefully.
b) If you want the place where the celebrities, the brands, the media outlets, are all going, it’s probably there. It’s got a big crowd — a lot of transfers over from Instagram, I guess? Despite the big crowd I don’t think it feels that peppy as yet. I can’t actually tell how many people I’m following (?) but it seems like a good group. That said, I do see a lot more general activity happening on Bluesky. Still, Threads is not precisely quiet, either, and even in the week since I’ve joined it looks to have picked up a bit.
c) There is a “who you follow” feed, which appears to present the posts of your followed accounts in the order they are posted. But it defaults to an algorithmic FYP feed, which shows a random disgorgement of… I mean, I assume it’s whatever the Insane Robot That Governs The Place wants you to see. It definitely seems to prioritize verified accounts over non-verified.
d) There does seem to be a pretty good bookish crowd of writers and readers.
e) The vibe there is… I dunno, is it wrong if I say, Ruby Tuesdays? Applebees? Like, if Twitter is currently your local Nazi Bar, and Bluesky is your local Eclectic Diner, this definitely feels like a popular-but-functional chain restaurant. People are having a nice enough time and it feels pretty reliable. It’s the “Hey, let’s go to Chili’s” variant of social media. Sometimes, you want that, and that’s okay, no shame.
f) The one thing I like about it in theory but not in practice is the granularity of how you can see your engagement — there’s All, Follows, Replies, Mentions, Quotes, Reposts, Verified, Dunks, Trolls, Posts By People Who Don’t Know What They’re Talking About But Probably Mean Well, Devil’s Advocates, Robots, Dog Photos, Replies From Stalkers, and People Who Still Think NFTs Are Cool. Or something like that. Point is, it’s definitely more granular but… I also don’t feel like each tab works great, and I’m really not seeing a lot of actually existing replies, and the overall GUI of those pages feels noisy and hard for me to parse, for some reason. That might just be me, though.
So, it’s fine! I don’t hate it. I don’t yet love it. It exists and I’m using it and have found some value there and in part that value is finding friends who are using it, too. Which is nice. I wasn’t going to join it but… real talk, writing is a lonely gig and sometimes you want to feel like there’s a room you can go into and hear some voices. Further, publishing is in a place where it’s still not sure exactly how to navigate the shattered social media landscape, and as much as I hate to say it, that means it’s (yet again) on writers to actually carve out their spaces and — well, we’re all just trying to either not die in the abyss or, at the very least, find other people dying in the abyss with us so we can commiserate with one another as we sink softly into the pudding of oblivion.
(Also, The Pudding of Oblivion is my next next novel, out in 2026.)
At the very least, Threads is not Twitter.
Which brings us to —
Twitter.
For a while now, my interaction with Twitter has largely been:
Posting promo. Replying to a few people. Reading DMs. Boosting the signal on stuff that needed (in my mind) boosting. I spent very little time on the site daily. But my new book is finally out on shelves, plus the local school board election is over (we won thank fucking god, the M4L nightmare people are out the door, though not before handing their partner in crime, Superintendent Abe Lucabaugh, a whopping $700k+ retirement package ahhh what the actual fuck), so given that the site is a demented disinformation machine run by a racist emerald mining antisemite fuckface who is now winking at Q-Anon bullshit, I’m all the way out. Account is still there but I’m happy to be not in it. It is a hollow shell.
The bar is a Nazi bar, snout to tail, now.
Bluesky.
I dunno if we’re still calling it BLOOSKY and SKEETING SKEETS or whatever, but I still really like the platform and it works for me. It’s peppy, chatty, and increasingly engorged with good people. It does seem to have lost some of its weird, feral edge — that edge, I think, dulled by a lot of news-flavored stuff getting posted. On the one hand, I really like that it’s becoming more a place to get informed about stuff — on the other hand, I miss people posting Alf Hog and Gandalf Tits and Bird Photos. There was a powerful chaos energy to the earlier days akin to walking into any Waffle House at 3AM — you just had no idea what was going to be on the menu that night. Now, it’s settling into something that feels a little more predictable, like it’s speed-running the Midseason Twitter era. Again, this isn’t necessarily good or bad in terms of assigning it a value — and I may be experiencing something different from what others are experiencing. I do like it though and it remains my Social Media Network of choice.
(And, currently, also the one where I get the most outright engagement. Even compared to places where I have more followers.)
(Also, I have a few Bluesky codes I’m just noticing — if you want ’em, comment below and I’ll toss one atcha.)
Instagram.
I continue to like it. I see photos of dogs and birds and food and books and as such, it is vaguely relaxing and a place to stop. Increasingly it’s pivoting to video and I hate that, mostly, though I’ve popped a few reels up there and they’re fun enough, I guess.
TikTok.
I continue to not be on there or literally see anything that happens there and I’m probably better for it, and you’re probably better not seeing me there, and I think that’s a good decision we’re all making. I do understand that BookTok is currently *checks notes* kind of in control of publishing, whether it realizes it or not, and as such, I guess I should probably be there and be paying attention? At the same time, I can’t control it, and I suspect it would just cause my brain to swell up like an overfed tick and then it would pop and there’d be anxious brain goo everywhere. So, again, I remain here. Without the Tiks or the Toks to keep me warm at night.
Mastodon.
Listen I don’t hate Mastodon at all but I can only do so much. So it’s currently not on my menu. My mind can only handle so many social media platforms before it shits its brainpants. Sorry!
Facebook.
If you need to know what your racist aunt or that guy from high school is up to, Facebook is your jam. I dunno. It seems to throttle links now and ennh. I use it as a walled garden to keep up with family and friends, that’s it.
The Others.
Is Post still a thing? Spoutible? Ello? MySpace? Bramble? Bumblr? Faceyplace? Me-Cave? U-Circle? Hangzone? Lasertag? Are any of these even real? What is happening? I dunno. I’m not on these.
[update! we are now out of MAGIC SKELETON copies — like, out out. so that’s no longer a part of the promo! sorry! ahh!]
PSSST. Hey, if you were thinking of ordering one of my books from Doylestown Bookshop for the holidays, the last day they guarantee shipping by the holidays is if you order by December 4th. (That’s not to say you can’t order after that, but at that point, they won’t make the guarantee it’ll get to you in time for whatever mirthful celebration you, um, celebrate.)
Reminder that if you nab a copy of Black River Orchard for me to sign and/or personalize, you also get some manner of EVIL APPLE STICKER and I invent an EVIL APPLE VARIETY all for you, Damien, all for you.
And I’m throwing in a new offer here, too, as I found these:
And here you might say, “Chuck, these look like shiny possum stickers, but the possum is also an astronaut,” and you might further surmise, as you are smart, “Hey, I think the brilliant Natalie Metzger designed these,” and on both counts, you’d be right. Ring the bell, you win. The Cosmic Possum is from You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton, which Natalie illustrated.
I also have a smaller amount of her Bagel Possum stickers.
So, here’s the new deal —
Order any non-Black River Orchard book of mine from Doylestown Bookshop to be signed and personalized, you get a shiiiiiny Cosmic Possum sticker. (Supply limited, and when I’m out, I’m out.)
Order You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeletonspecifically, you get both the Cosmic Possum and the Bagel Possum sticker. (Supply limited here, too.)
The same order deadline applies — December 4th.
Again, you can order from the bookstore’s website or call the store directly.
THE COSMIC POSSUM DEMANDS YOU DO THIS.
Or something. Shut up.
ANYWAY.
If you’ve read and enjoyed any of my books, please leave a review somewhere. Amazon, Goodreads, Storygraph, wherever. It helps! It’s nice! It’s a treat! It gives us a small frisson of joy before we sink again into the dark depths of our imagination prisons where we are forced by the demons inside us to continue mining our misery for your entertainment!! Ha ha ha! Just kidding! That doesn’t happen! I have to go now! Definitely not because the DEMONS are getting PUSHY please leave a REVIEW jesus christ
