THE MONOCLED ELK HAS BEEN RELEASED INTO THE WILD.

Hey, I wrote a book! You’ve probably heard me mouthing off about it.

This book is Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative.

It is not, precisely, a book about writing advice.

Rather, it is a book about storytelling.

Further, it’s a book about why we tell stories, how we tell them, and what we can do to tell them in a way that is clear, clever, and confident. It’s about understanding the shape of narrative and letting characters be architects, not architecture. It talks about the value of theme — giving your story an argument and a deeper point to make. It’s about how, while formats change, the bones of story are the same. It’s about squirrel sex talks, wayward surfer dogs, Star Wars, Die Hard, missing pinky fingers, the jokes of 4-year-olds, and lots and lots of really weird footnotes*.

I hope you like it.

You can find it here:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Amongst other places where disreputable, deviant books are sold.

As always, if you dig it — or any of my books, or really, any book by any author you’ve enjoyed — please leave a review, tell a friend, yell your adoration into the ear of a magic goat, whatever you gotta do to share the love.

And again, if you’re out on the Leftmost Coast, you can find me at a trio of events with Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde —

October 17th, San Francisco, Borderlands Books, 6pm — details here.

October 18th, Portland/Beaverton, Powell’s Books, 7pm — details here.

October 19th, Seattle, University Temple Church, 7pm — details here.

* no, really

It is time, good people of the intertubes, for me to leave you.

*gets in a spaceship*

*waits for spaceship to take off*

*finds out spaceship is actually just a pillow fort my 6-year-old built*

*stays in there anyway, drinking cocoa, because fuck yeah, pillow forts and cocoa*

OKAY NO I’m not actually escaping the gravity of this planet.

I’m hitting the road in support of Damn Fine Story, out tomorrow. (And, if we’re being totally honest, I have already left on a big airplane and should already be on the Leftmost Coast.)

(*waves*)

While out here, I am joining Kevin Hearne (Plague of Giants!) and Fran Wilde (The Bone Universe!) and popping off to a trio of really cool events that you should totally go to. No, I don’t care where you live, you should go. Go now. Get there. Steal a car. Cling to the wing of a plane like a gremlin, I don’t care, just get it done.

Where we will be:

October 17th, San Francisco, Borderlands Books, 6pm — details here.

October 18th, Portland/Beaverton, Powell’s Books, 7pm — details here.

October 19th, Seattle, University Temple Church, 7pm — details here.

PLEASE TO COME AND SAY HELLO.

Oh and fine, you want a macro, here goes:

Autumnal drops! Not a new shot, but I like it.

*ahem*

I have an announcement to make.

*opens mouth*

*ants pour out*

*ants collectively spell a message*

FBI Drama From Jerry Bruckheimer TV & ‘MacGyver’ EP David Slack Set At CBS

*ants return to mouth*

*maw snaps shut*

So, if you click that link, you’ll see a couple notable paragraphs:

CBS has put in development Unthinkable, an FBI crime drama from Jerry Bruckheimer Television and MacGyver executive producer David Slack. CBS Television Studios, where both JBTV and Slack are based, is the studio.

Written and executive produced by Slack, Unthinkable, based on Chuck Wendig’s 2016 novel Invasive, is about a brilliant futurist, trained to see danger around every corner, who’s recruited by an uncharacteristically optimistic FBI Agent to identify the threats only she can see coming – and stop them before it’s too late.

So, that’s the news.

It is very exciting news.

Technically, Invasive was optioned over a year ago. But, it wasn’t announced, so I sat on it, as is the way. (I may or may not be sitting on some news regarding another series, too.) And nothing was really happening, far as I knew —

Until David Slack and Bruckheimer TV got involved.

Then it got more serious.

Slack sent me the pitch for Unthinkable — which builds off of Hannah as a character, as the basis for the whole series — and it was a fucking grand slam, The Natural-style rain of glass and electricity. It’s the kind of pitch where I read it and was like, “Okay, this goes above and beyond the book, and if this doesn’t become a TV show that I can watch, I will kick over my TV in rage.” It’s that good. (Slack knows his way around a pitch. I’ve read pitches, and I’ve read pitches, and this was weaponized art. Before I day I aspire to be half that good.) Anyway! Point is, it’s jumped some hurdles, but while this is all very excited, I will caution you (and more me!) that this doesn’t mean it’s getting made into a show — just that it’s progressing forward, that it has amazing people behind it, and that there’s at least a shot. But it remains an option, so the wind blows the way the wind blows.

Still, we can all cross our fingers and toes.

If you haven’t read the book, nab it where books are sold.

Or, the e-book is still $3.99 for reasons unknown: Amazon | B&N | iBooks

Oh, and since someone might ask — will there be more Hannah Stander on bookshelves? Answer unclear, ask again later. We did not work out a deal with Harper for more books, but if a TV show really does come out of this (and it probably won’t!), then I’d not say no to writing more of her adventures, but who knows?

Sorrow Lovegood’s life has been shaped by the stories of the women who came before her: brave, resilient ancestors who settled long ago on an unusual apple orchard in Vermont. The land has been passed down through generations, and Sorrow and her family take pride in its strange history. Their offbeat habits may be ridiculed by other townspeople—especially their neighbors, the Abrams family—but for the first eight years of her life, the orchard is Sorrow’s whole world.

Then one winter night everything changes. Sorrow’s sister, Patience, is tragically killed. Their mother suffers a breakdown. Sorrow is sent to live with her father in Miami, away from the only home she’s ever known.

Now sixteen, Sorrow’s memories of her life in Vermont are maddeningly hazy; even the details of her sister’s death are unclear. She returns to the orchard for the summer, determined to answer the questions that have haunted her: Why has her mother kept her distance over the last eight years? What actually happened the night Patience died? What other long-buried secrets has the orchard been waiting for her to uncover?

You can rewrite an entire book multiple times without knowing what it’s about

I’ve heard writers say that the first draft of a novel is the one where we tell the story to ourselves. What I haven’t heard is that this can also be true of the second, third, fourth, and fifth drafts, because sometimes it takes that many tries to figure out what the hell we’re doing.

The Memory Trees began life as a very different kind of book. It was a classic ghost story: creepy atmosphere, excessive melodrama, flimsy-as-fuck murder mystery. And through many drafts, I tried to make that story work. I tried to fix the murder mystery. Added ghosts. Added confrontations. Added ominous fog. My editor got a lot of practice saying, “This revision is better! …but also not really better,” in politely ruthless ways.

She was right. For eighteen months of rewrites, revisions, edit letters, phone calls, outlines followed and discarded, she was right. I wasn’t making it better.

Only when I finally discarded the ghost story framework I had started with was I able to focus on the things that actually offered the makings of a decent book: the characters, their relationships, the many ways humans help and harm each other, and how those fierce, personal acts of love and hate can have repercussions that last generations.

Second novels are for unlearning what you have learned

After you finish your first book, a lot of people warn you that the second one will be harder. I expected that to be true. But what I didn’t expect–possibly because nobody warned me, but more likely because I wasn’t listening when they did–was that I would sit down to work on my second novel and have absolutely no idea what to do.

None of the revision techniques I used for my first novel worked anymore. None of the questions I had learned to ask of my characters helped. I could not make the story’s structure feel natural. I could not strike the right tone. I could not balance the pacing. Every change only made me more frustrated with how far the story was from being what I wanted it to be.

What I eventually figured out was that I had not learned how to write a novel. I had learned how to write that novel. Now I needed to learn how to write this novel.

It’s never too late to rearrange your entire novel on a whim

And that meant learning that while plot may be one damn thing happening after another, story is something else entirely.

Two weeks before my final final final deadline–I had already pushed back the publication date twice–I was forced to admit that while individual scenes worked, the characters were distinct, the plot had no holes, and the writing was strong, something in the book remained fundamentally broken.

That’s when I got the idea to blow up the whole structure.

I thought of it while walking to the gym–all the best ideas come while walking or showering–and I had absolutely no idea if it would work. I certainly didn’t have any time to spare. But I did it anyway: I broke off the first eight chapters (roughly 1/3 of the book), reshuffled them into a different order, and stuck them elsewhere, letting the emotional progress define their placement more than the sequence of events.

It did work–thank goodness, because I was out of ideas. It worked because this is a book about how the past informs the present, about the interplay between memory and truth, about how the actions of past generations still reverberate. In that kind of story, setting the past alongside the present makes sense–but I didn’t know that until I tried it.

How to delete men for fun and profit and the conscious deconstruction of internal bias

From the beginning The Memory Trees was a book the relationships between women. It’s about a teenage girl reconnecting with her mother and grandmother, all members of an old matriarchal family. That was always the plan: this is a story about women.

It wasn’t until my editor pointed out to me places where the central characters were taking a back seat to the men in their lives did I realize how deeply unintentional gender imbalance and bias can creep in. The solution, in retrospect, was obvious: for every character, for every scene, look long and hard at whose perspective is being favored, and take men out of the story when they had no reason to be there. Every single character got the “What is your purpose and does that purpose actually require a male character?” treatment.

The world has conditioned us as both readers and writers to accept that male characters are the natural default, while female characters need exceptional reasons for existing. That is both sexism and bad storytelling, and it takes conscious work to avoid both. It’s such a pervasive problem, such an ingrained habit, that even as a wildly progressive, grossly over-educated thirty-eight-year-old woman living in the year 2017, I still had to learn this lesson about letting women stand at the center of their own stories.

Stories are important when the world is crumbling

This book is forever tied in my mind to the unending escalation of horror that was 2016. There were many, many times when I looked up from my work and asked myself, “What the hell am I even doing? The world is a dumpster fire! Friends and loved ones and neighbors and strangers are in fear for their lives! Heartless sociopathic monsters are taking over our country! Why the fuck am I writing a book about magical apple trees?”

Since the mind-numbing shock of Election Day 2016–which also happened to be my birthday, fuck you very much–I’ve had many conversations with writer friends in which we asked ourselves: Why are we doing this? Who is this for? Does any of it matter?

Every writer has to find their own answers, and for me those answers are both complicated and painfully simple. Stories matter to children looking for both a mirror of their own lives and a window into a better world. Stories matter to teenagers who are righteously pissed off at how adults have fucked up the world so badly. Stories matter to anybody who needs to believe in beauty, justice, hope, and progress. A world in which art and beauty are encouraged to exist is what we are fighting for. A world in which long-silenced people are invited to shout their stories from the rooftops is what we are fighting for. A world in which young women can learn that their voices matter is the whole goddamned point.

Or maybe stories only matter because we’re all going to need to Scheherazade our way out of being eaten by roving bands of cannibals as we stumble wearily through the oncoming apocalyptic wasteland. That’s important too.

* * *

I love reading the “Five Things I Learned…” posts on terribleminds, and I’ve enjoyed writing them in the past. That’s what this post was originally going to be, and I did learn plenty while writing Spliced: about using viruses as vectors for gene splicing, climate change, animal personhood, computer implants, the difference (in my mind) between science thrillers and science fiction, and a lot about writing YA.

And there were plenty of other interesting discoveries that came before I even had the idea for Spliced. Part of what I love about writing the kind of books I write is the research. I write about things I find fascinating, so the opportunity to drill down deeper into those topics is often fascinating, too. And it invariably leads to other ideas. Some of the my best book ideas come from research for earlier books.

That’s how it was with Spliced.

I was researching Deadout, one of  my previous science thrillers, when I started reading about biohackers, who tinker with genetic engineering in their basements, much like people did with computers in the seventies and eighties. I found the notion fascinating, scary but cool—part of a long and proud tradition of citizen scientists. I knew I wanted to write about it somehow, and several more obvious ideas came to me (some of which I may revisit) before I thought of biohacking, several decades in the future, merging with body modification subculture. The idea excited me: disaffected young people splicing animal genes into their own to become chimeras.

As I brainstormed and outlined and started writing Spliced, some of the most interesting thoughts and central ideas seemed to come from within the book itself, as it basically told me what it was about.

Writers often talk about characters revealing themselves during the writing of a book, but the same thing can be true with the themes. The deeper you get into it, the more you realize that maybe it’s not about the thing you thought it was about. Maybe it’s about something else. Fortunately, as an outliner, I rely on the upfront thought work to help me figure a lot these things out before I start writing (and to avoid some of the  massive rewrites that can come from these revelations).

Spliced is not about biohacking, and it’s not about body modification, either, or at least not in the sense that we know it today. It’s about this other thing that came out of those things. I knew when I had the idea for Spliced that if such a technology became as readily available as it is in the book, there would be those who would use it. But what I didn’t know, at first, was why. Why would people choose to do this thing that was so drastic, dangerous, and disruptive to their lives? In order to understand, I had to more fully understand the world in which the book would take place.

I had realized early on that when writing a book set decades in the future, you either acknowledge climate change or deny it. But what began as an almost logistical consideration, unavoidable but peripheral, became one of the central themes. Peak oil had come and gone, and while energy usage has become smarter, the supply has become scarcer, with far-reaching implications. The climate has been knocked askew, and the extinction event that looms over us today is by then well underway.

These environment factors came to define the world of the book in many ways, and they also informed the motives of many of the characters who get spliced: For some, being a chimera is a fashion statement or an act of rebellion, but for others, it is an homage to extinct species, or a declaration of a symbolic separation from a humanity that seemed so intent on trashing the natural world. It is a statement—or many statements—and important ones, at that.

Once I had a grasp on the world that would give rise to chimeras, I had to consider what chimeras would give rise to: How would their presence shape the world around them? Unfortunately, I didn’t have far to look in our own world to see how some in society react with fear, anger, disgust, and hatred to those who are different—whether they ‘choose’ to be different or not—and to anything that upsets their perceived natural order or blurs lines they consider absolute. And, alongside them, of course, would be those ready to capitalize on that fear and hatred, to inflame it and use it as a wedge for political gain.

Once you have a wedge, you need something to drive it deeper. The biggest and most powerful hammer in the demagogue toolbox may be the dehumanization of the other, and that is the focus of the anti-chimera backlash: a law that declares anyone whose DNA is not one hundred percent human a legal nonperson.

Ironically, the person leading the charge to declare chimeras nonpersons achieved his wealth and prominence as a pioneer in computer implants—another form of transhumanism. Though maybe that’s more about hypocrisy, something that has never stopped a demagogue.

More ironic, maybe, is writing a book about people who choose not to be one hundred percent human being persecuted and oppressed by those who seek to dehumanize them. But a little irony has never stopped a writer.

In the end, as always, I did learn a lot while writing this book, and from many sources — web research, interviews with experts, other writers, and of course books. But as it turned out, this time, one of the books from which I learned the most hadn’t yet been written.

Jon McGoran: Website | Twitter

Spliced: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

The game is rigged.

It’s not a surprise, not a mystery, definitely not news to a majority of the country’s population — women, people of color, the LGBT community, the disabled, immigrants.

But the election of the Naughahyde Narcissist to the Highest Chair in the Land has given 2017 a near-perfect view of the game, exposed — all its crushing gears and choking chains, all the mechanisms laid bare. All the uneven scoring, all the tilted fields, all the corrupt umps.

Harvey Weinstein is a serial abuser, and Hillary gets the blame. The women who never spoke out get the blame. Obama gets the blame. Harvey’s own agency in his own rapist predations is cast further and further from Harvey himself. The women are told, yet again, they were wearing the wrong clothes. That they probably egged him on. And on the other side, the fact they didn’t protest, didn’t fight back against a system that would’ve crushed them, didn’t do more to protect other women, that’s a scarlet letter staplegunned to their sleeve.

Black Americans get executed in the streets by a police force out of control, so Black Americans stand in the streets to defend against that — but they’re tear-gassed, beaten, made to disappear, threatened, sued, told to find a place to protest quietly, peacefully, non-violently. They’re called animals and thugs, treated like criminals even when they’re just standing there. Colin Kaepernick kneels during an NFL game — protesting the deaths of Black Americans quietly, peacefully, non-violently — and he’s a traitor, a quisling, shut up and play ball, dance when we shoot at your feet, hurt yourself for the pleasure of those in the stands. Use your platform for good, they cry, and he does, every day, but they don’t notice, and they don’t care.

Nazis in Charlottesville are just good old-fashioned protesters, though, just exercising their First Amendment Rights — and, more importantly, their Second, am I right? — they’re ‘white activists,’ they’re ‘historical cosplayers,’ they’re ‘Nazi-adjacent freedom-seekers.’ They kill a woman, but it’s okay, and besides, didn’t someone introduce legislation where it would be okay to mow down a protester with a car? That makes it okay. It must.

A white man opens fire in Las Vegas, he kills scores, wounds ten times those that he murders, and so begin the stories of what a good man he was, how nice he was, he was a lone wolf, not one of our tribe, oh no, just a man without a home, a family man, a friendly man — and we’re told now isn’t the time to talk about guns, not now, and not tomorrow because another shooting will come, and not the day after that, because another shooting will come. But he’s not a terrorist, he’s not a thug, not an animal or a criminal, just a good man who went bad. Not his fault. Never his fault. If he were Muslim or black, well… those people…

Puerto Rico drowns in darkness. And it’s their fault. Something about loans or their economy, something about their woman mayor playing politics, and all the while the Ding-Dong Dictator pisses and moans about how now one appreciates him, how no one sees what he’s doing, because really, isn’t he the victim here? Isn’t he the victim because we don’t see the hero that he truly is, our Orange White Man, our Rubbery Russian Puppet, our Inglorious Leader?

Protections for our LGBT population are whittled once again to splinters because really, aren’t protections for them actually the opposite of that for us? What about our freedoms to religiously persecute them? Giving them equal freedom surely, surely means taking away the freedom we have now to discriminate against them. The disabled, too — why should they have access to healthcare and bathrooms and compassion, isn’t it really their fault for being born this way, and if they weren’t born this way, certainly they must’ve done something to deserve it in this Ayn Randian Hellworld we’ve built for ourself, where the rich are special, where geniuses deserve their power, where altruism is a disease and the uneven distribution of wealth is simply a rational principle like the way water and shit both run downhill.

Isn’t it really just about ethics in videogame journalism? It’s definitely not about the unwelcome presence of icky girls or queerness or disability or differently-colored skin in our videogames, oh no. It’s about objectivity in game reviews, obviously, definitely, don’t you say differently, SJWs, or we’ll dox you and SWAT your house and unleash literal years of abuse online, abuse that nobody ever does anything to fix, because that abuse serves the platform on which it is trafficked. And then that platform, unmitigated and unrefined, still trafficking in abuse, will help to elect the Grabber-In-Chief, the Racist Ringleader, the Tiny-Fingered Tyrant, to the most powerful office in all the world, and we will stumble, shrugging, toward nuclear war, toward unstoppable climate change, toward a depressed economy, toward the throat-cutting of American nobility on the world stage…

Toward both the bang and the whimper.

But don’t worry. It’ll be okay.

Are you white? Then we will protect you.

Are you also a man? Oh, boy howdy, then do I have good news for you.

Cisgendered? Able-bodied? Right this way, sir.

Are you wealthy? Then please, accept this bag of money, and this nice car, and this beautiful house, not to mention these endless safety nets, these trampolines to always catch you and bounce you back up no matter how rampant your mediocrity, we will always protect you, here is your blame-resistant tuxedo, here is your bubble of clean air, here is your perfect place at the center of the universe where nothing can touch you, nothing can hurt you, everything is warm like bathwater. Nothing is your fault, don’t worry. You will be safe. Because the game is rigged in your favor. The doors will always open for you. We’ll give everything to you. It doesn’t matter if it destroys the world — there’s an underground bunker with your name on it, and a rocketship that will allow you to depart for cleaner, freer skies.

* * *

I don’t have any good call to action here.

I wish I did.

Just be aware of this stuff, People Like Me. Elevate voices that aren’t your own. Listen to those voices. Hear them. Pass the mic. Boost the signal. When you see the system working for you and against others, say something. Try to do something. Don’t worry about perfect, just be better, for Chrissakes. Stand tall for people who can’t, for people who will be crushed underneath the machine. Get out of the center of the universe. Give money to good causes. Vote for interests other than your own. Find empathy and critical thinking. Do something. Don’t just sit there and be the casual, happy recipient of love and favors. Share the road. And see the game for what it is, and how someone has cheated for you on your behalf.

[Note: comments are on and open, but the spam oubliette is open and ready for trolls and other shitbirds. I need not abide your nonsense.]