Another mantis shot.

We are inundated with praying mantises this year. So many my dog stepped on one while walking. (It was okay, to my surprise.) I daily help at least one mantis across the road. In just the past few days I’ve seen them on our fence, our mailbox, on various trees and shrubs.

They are everywhere.

Curiously, we’ve also had a (very welcome) uptick in honeybees and monarch butterflies. Why? No idea. I usually spy a couple monarchs a day. And honeybees — dang, if I took all the honeybees I’ve seen in the last 5 years and added them up, they would still fall seriously shy of how many I’ve seen this summer. They are everywhere around here. It’s been good.

I’m sure it’s some apocalyptic burst: the insects have figured out that THE REIGN OF MAN IS AT AN END, and they’re retaking territory. But hey, whatever, they deserve it.

ANYWAY, still sick over here, still on deadline, so go forth and have a good one. Maybe I’ll see you at B&N Bethlehem (4-6pm) this Saturday, or B&N Rittenhouse next Tuesday giving big ups to Fran Wilde’s Horizon launch, byeeeee.

So, every good story has an argument.

It has more than a point-of-view — it has a point. Maybe it’s one you intend, maybe it’s one that crawls up out of the wet goop that is your unconscious mind. Who knows? Either way, the story exists and the story says something. It’s not an obvious thing. It’s more the plumbing behind the walls than the walls themselves. But it’s there. Whispering its message through the vents.

That’s a story’s theme.

Today, I’m going to give you a theme.

And you’re (duh) gonna write a story using it.

That theme is:

“To fix something, you first must break it.”

That’s it.

You have 1500 words.

Due by: Friday, 9/22, noon EST.

Write it at your online space. Link back here. Etc.

Nearly ten years ago, two LOST geeks decided to start a book review blog. They determined that together they would read the latest and greatest releases in genre fiction and aspired to post at least one review a week each. Most importantly, they were eager to create a conversational space dedicated to discussing genre fiction online.

Those two women — spoiler alert, it’s us — created The Book Smugglers. Since its inception in 2008, The Book Smugglers has grown and changed in many ways, from the genres of books covered to the types of reviews and conversations held in this space. The one thing that remained constant, however, was our desire to discover and share new books and authors with the world.

Three years ago, we Book Smugglers found ourselves in a unique position, as first time nominees for a Hugo Award for our blog for Best Fanzine, and contributors to Best Related Work finalist, Speculative Fiction 2012. For a while, we grappled with our next Big Step. Other bloggers before us had gone the writer route–they became authors in their own right by penning their own SFF narratives, or compiled and sold rights to collections of nonfictional writings. Neither of those routes seemed completely right for us Smugglers–although the idea of publishing new voices appealed to us strongly. We had just finished editing our first nonfiction anthology, Speculative Fiction 2013, and hungered to do more–but this time, we wouldn’t just scour the internet for essays about SFF already written and posted by others.

This time, we wanted to take it a step further, to discover, edit, and publish brand new short fiction.

And so, in 2014, Book Smugglers Publishing was born. Our mission was (and remains) to find and publish diverse, subversive fiction about and from underrepresented perspectives, for readers of all ages. We launched our very own short fiction program by opening submissions in April 2014, and publishing our first season of stories in October.

From the outset, we were determined to make Book Smugglers Publishing’s short story program distinct from other SFF zines and publishers in terms of content and structure. Instead of having a rolling call for submissions timed to specific magazine issues published throughout the year, our submissions would open for a limited time and focused on a central theme that would change each year; e.g. subversive fairy tales in year one, first contact stories in year two, superhero fiction in year three, and gods and monsters in year four. We would comb through hundreds of submissions to find the best, most interesting, most subversive stories, publish them for free online, but also make each individual story available as an ebook for sale. Some stories we even made available as limited prints or via more broadly available print on demand editions, as either stand alone pieces or collected in larger anthologies.

Starting a short fiction program from scratch has been one of the most rewarding things we’ve ever done–but it also was one of the hardest things we’ve ever attempted to undertake. As we head into our fourth year as publishers and tenth year as bloggers, with an active Kickstarter campaign to help us continue to find and publish awesome new short stories from different voices–here are a five things we’ve learned in starting our short fiction program from scratch.

THERE WILL BE A TON OF SUBMISSIONS.

You would not believe the sheer volume of submissions received. When we first announced our short story call to action, both of us were slightly terrified that no one would want to submit to us–after all, we were bloggers and writers/editors of nonfiction, so maybe authors would scorn this small indie venture from two nerds. We needn’t have worried–in our first year of short stories, we received over five hundred submissions. That number increased exponentially with each subsequent call for submissions, as our program grew and became more established in the SFF world. So you think you want to start a short fiction program? Make sure you have a lot of time built in so you can read through the inevitable inbox-slaying digital reams of submissions.

MAKING CHOICES IS HARD. YOU WILL ALWAYS WANT TO BUY MORE THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY AFFORD.

Just as you will receive hundreds, if not thousands, of short stories, you will inevitably find that there are many awesome stories in the batch and you will want to publish more than you can possibly afford or handle. If you’re running your short fiction program with other editors and have to jointly determine which stories will make the cut, be prepared for an editorial battle royale. (And also be prepared to be sad because you won’t be able to publish everything you want. Choices are hard.)

SHORT STORIES ARE A TON OF WORK.

This seems like something that everyone knows. But, in the sage words of MTV’s Diary, you think you know… but you have no idea. (Until you’re actually in the heart of it, that is.) Reading through submissions and selecting the stories you want to publish are just the tip of the iceberg–there’s the entire editorial process, the commissioning and editing of cover art, the actual digital creation and distribution process, the wrangling of contracts and royalty statements, and so on and so forth. All of the different touchpoints that are involved in the genesis and life cycle of a short story are the same as they are for longer form fiction–you just have a much shorter window to turn it all around and make it real.

YOU WILL SECOND-GUESS YOURSELF. A LOT.

Did we pick the right short story? Did our editorial direction actually make the story stronger and more cohesive? Do people care about what we’re doing? Do they want more stories? Less stories? Should we open up submissions to include reprints or translations? There are a myriad of questions that will haunt your every move, especially as you start out on your first short fiction publication endeavor–we just remember to trust our gut, and believe in our authors and our choices.

DAMN, DO WE LOVE READING SHORT FICTION.

The most important thing of all, the best takeaway and lesson we’ve learned over publishing short fiction, is that we love reading short fiction. Even when we’re slogging through some weaker submissions, even when we’re facing impossibly tight deadlines and the specter of Real Life is threatening to interfere with our ongoing pub schedule–the constant that remains is how much we love SFF short stories. We have the joy of reading and working on some truly unique, memorable, and poignant SFF that challenges the status quo. We have the incredible honor of finding and nurturing new and burgeoning voices in speculative fiction from around the world–who otherwise may never have been published or discovered. We love what we do. And, at the end of the day, publishing short fiction reinforces why we do all of this in the first place.

(Our first ever Kickstarter campaign is in its second week and we are hoping to fund a brand new season of short stories – under the theme “Awakenings” – at a higher pay rate to authors, along with commissioning paid non-fiction work for The Book Smugglers.)

* * *

The Book Smugglers are:

Thea James is a Hapa Filipina-American who works for Penguin Random House by day, and is a Book Smuggler by night. When she’s not at The Book Smugglers or swamped in pending papers and proposals, she can be found blogging over at Kirkus with Ana. (If she’s not there either, try the local bar.)

Ana Grilo is a Brazilian who moved to the UK because of the weather. No, seriously. She works with translations IRL and hopes one day The Book Smugglers will be her day job. When she’s not at The Book Smugglers, or hogging our Twitter feed, she can be found blogging over at Kirkus with Thea or podcasting with Renay at the Hugo Award-nominated podcast Fangirl Happy Hour.

I am sick and on deadline, so this is not a particularly good time to unpack this into a post, as my head feels like an in-play kickball and my throat feels like a factory where they work overtime to manufacture infection. But here we are. Let’s do this.

I saw IT.

I loved IT.

IT has, um, its problems, of course. Chief among them, to me, is the bit of power it robs from Bev’s character, and a lot of the power that it robs from Mike’s character — if you want a good unpacking of the latter, I recommend Zak Cheney Rice’s bit here.

(Note, some spoilers at that link.)

Just the same, it worked for me.

It worked for me hard. It was one of those movies I came out of and immediately wanted to go back in and see again. I wanted to run out, gesticulating wildly, showing it to anybody who would listen. I wanted to come home and show my wife and six-year-old son the movie — uhh, obviously that’s a bad idea! HERE TINY PERSON, LET US FIRMLY EMBED THE SEED OF UNBRIDLED CLOWNFEAR INTO YOUR MENTAL EARTH. I don’t mean this to be a rational thing, it’s just the thing I felt. I wanted to show it to babies. To old people. To dogs and birds.

I felt like I hadn’t seen a movie like it in a while.

I unpacked this a little on Twitter the other day, but for me it ties into something about the horror fiction I read in the 1980s, which was more comfortable coming down on the side of good versus evil — a worldview admittedly without nuance, but one that’s worked its way through myth and story since the a caveman painted his first Nazi Velociraptor on the wall of his grotto. (Shut your goddamn mouth, that happened.) I read works by folks like King, Koontz, and especially McCammon, and found there a worldview where good would eventually dispatch evil. That’s not to say this battle was pure, or without complexity — in a story like IT, the people are often human shitbags. The Evil Alien Horror Clown (aka Pennywise, aka Donald J. Trump) does not make them do evil, he simply encourages them to make those choices. And he’s there when they do, slurping it up like sinister consommé. One could argue that the majority of people in the town of Derry are, at best, complicit in the evil done there because they’re fucking lazy, and because it’s easier to keep on driving then it is to stop and save a kid who’s about to have his belly carved into by the town boy-monster. At worst, they’re active participants in the evil.

So, we’re not talking some shiny happy worldview here.

And yet, just the same, it’s a place where that evil can be defeated. It is a place where, moreover, it can be defeated by children — the unlikeliest of combatants, the scrappiest of heroes, the Gooniest of champions. Adults are hardened to fear, and children are like a tooth without enamel — they feel this negative shit keenly. But there they are. Friends till the end. The ones who stand by each other. The ones who delve into the Barren Kingdom of Graywater to battle the Doom Clown which may or may not be a giant spider who may or may not hate a giant turtle.

The worldview posits a lot of evil. And it further presents that evil being diminished or defeated by a very small group of the truly noble.

It is, in a sense, the D&D model. Buncha wacky fantasy assholes in a tavern decide to go on an adventure to find loot and slay evil dragons. It’s also Star Wars: a small group of good people — friends, really — who help bring down a massive monolithic force for oppression and terror.

And of course, Star Wars represented a pivot point away from more serious fare back into that mythic mode and away from morally complex (aka ethically clusterfucked) work in the Apocalypse Now mode. Jaws too had that — a simple-to-understand foe, a shark gone bad, and the rag-tag band of unlikely heroes who took down the SEA BEAST.

It’s a simple mode of storytelling. I suspect that in the late 70s and 80s it grew out of fears about the world — the Cold War and nuclear fear in particular — and allowed fiction to manifest those things in a form that we can, at least in a mythic scope, fight. That’s IT in a nutshell: here is human evil, here is a cycle of abuse, and it is encouraged by and manifested as a demonic sewer clown. You have summoned it and stood against it, now go beat its ass back into the muck.

IT in this way is different than the earlier King book (the first, actually), CARRIE — in that, the evil is also human, and Carrie’s unconscious psychic response to that is to become effectively more the monster than the monsters who bullied her.

I think part of why I’m responding so strongly now to STRANGER THINGS and to IT is not the nostalgia for the 1980s — the 80s were mostly a turd bucket. I mean, the 1980s gave us the Mannequin movies. But I have missed that more mythic, more simplistic story aspect of scrappy band against overwhelming evil. The 1990s saw a greater complexity and a return to the nuance and moral grays of the 1970s — and nothing wrong with that, as those were stories that well-served their times, too, I think. Certainly in the 1990s I read Poppy Brite and Clive Barker and liked Se7en and all that shit. Maybe it was my late-teen brain. Maybe it was that the tumult of the 80s softened and gave us some time to breathe, lending storytellers the room for rumination on what was really going on in the world. Now, though, I wonder if my return to more simplistic stories — escapist stories, arguably — has to do with the world around us. This epic shitshow, this constant parade of fear-bugling and rampant fuckwittery. I don’t respond well to Captain America being a Nazi, I respond to him punching a Nazi. I don’t want to play the vampire right now so much as I want to play the vampire hunter. I don’t want to find out that Ellen Ripley has sided with Weyland-Yutani in bringing the Xenomorph to Earth — I want to watch Ellen Ripley jump in a robotic autoloader and fling that Alien Queen out into the void of space. I don’t want every episode of Scooby-Doo to be about how the Gang had to lower themselves morally to the level of Old Man Withers just to win the day. I don’t want them to pull a mask off Shaggy and it’s really the fucking Devil underneath. I sometimes just want them to find the monster, unmask the bad guy, and solve the goddamn mystery, Scoob.

You can see why people are responding well to IT.

Shit has gone wrong. A lot of people don’t see that shit has gone wrong, or are sitting on their hands and shoulder-shrugging it off. But but but — evil can be thwarted by the truly just. We want to believe that right now in this time of history. We need to believe that, now just to wake the fuck up in the morning, just to get through the day and not collapse like a house of cards.

You may want different things. And further, I am aware of the possibility that leaning too hard into simplistic stories is how we get simplistic worldviews. Stories about the world and are not the same as the realities of that world; good and evil are not so clearly defined beyond the pages of a horror novel or off the screen. But in those pages, and on that screen, I find that fight empowering in a way. At least, I do right now. And it’s what I’m trying to write — Exeunt is (so far) 160,000 words of a small group of people making their way through a collapsing world, and trying to find nobility and truth and goodness within it. They’re trying to be good in a bad situation full of evil people.

Maybe that’s a sign of the times. Maybe it’s a hardening of my brain into a calcified walnut as I have now crossed the geriatric barrier into my 40s. Maybe it’s just that all of us have differently-shaped story-holes in our hearts, and some stories fit well into them and some stories don’t. And maybe those story-holes change, over time. A lot of hay has been made recently about how Hollywood is blaming Rotten Tomatoes for the worst summer movie season in decades — which is a whole lot like shitting the bed, then blaming your Mom for yelling at you for shitting the bed. Just the same, I do worry that our mode of critique is more about GOOD or BAD and less about what the story means, what it does, what it says, what it gets wrong and what it gets right. Sometimes a story everyone hates is a story you love. Sometimes a thing everyone loves is a story you can’t stand. And that has to be okay. We are who we are, and the stories to which we respond speak to us in a way that is more unique than broad-spectrum pop culture.

* * *

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.

The 5th Miriam Black book — out January 23rd, 2018

Preorder Raptor & Wren: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

WELL, SOMEBODY WAS HUNGRY.

I encourage you to read the sordid tale of The Mantis And Two Ants, which begins with this tweet right here on my tweetypants timeline.

I also really like this photo:

I took off my shoe the other day and found a teeny little snail shell in it. So I put the snail shell on the edge of my sink and said, “I should take a photo of that shell because, hey, snail shells are cool.” When I returned, I saw that the shell was still a home for this little goober.

Then I ate him.

*crunch crunch crunch*

OKAY NO FINE I put him outside, sheesh.

Let’s see, what else is going on?

I’m sick, so that’s fun. CHILDREN ARE NEVER-ENDING PLAGUE FACTORIES, JUST SPEWING BACTERIA AND VIRUSES AND FUNGAL PATHOGENS INTO THE AIR, A CONSTANT MIASMA OF ILLNESS. My son’s been back at school one week and we’ve all got Ebola.

Invasive is still $3.99 for your digital devices.

I’ll be hanging out at B&N Bethlehem on 9/23 for their B-Fest book fest thing, which is kinda teen-oriented but not explicitly teen-oriented? I’ll be signing there at 4pm and then at 5pm will be doing a short writing workshop for teens.

Then, I’ll be hanging out at B&N Rittenhouse with the ever-charming and talented Fran Wilde for our annual FRANK AND CHANK SHOW, where she reads her beautiful prose and I read something about vulture barf and then she tells a knock-knock joke and we all eat cupcakes with my face on them. It’s weird but awesome. Also probably a Satanic ritual of some kind. Whatever, you need to go. That’s Fran’s Horizon Launch Party, on September 26th at 7pm. BE THERE OR BE FED TO THE BLOOD ENGINE.

And I think that’s it.

BYE.

*dissolves into a pile of fizzing bacteria*

Given my choice of mid-day horror film (IT, which was great), I ask that today’s flash fiction challenge be a simple one:

You have 1000 words to write a story about good versus evil. In whatever context you choose, in whatever genre you choose.

Do that, and do it well.

Post at your online space.

Due here by September 15th (Fri), noon EST.