I’m told now is the time to get those awards eligibility posts out there, and I don’t usually do these, but I’ve had a few people ask, so here we are.

I have complicated feelings about awards and eligibility posts — from me, not from you — because I like to think, if I wrote something really good, really impactful, you’d remember it. It would’ve stuck with you. That said, 2017 was the year that lasted ten years, and I have full-facedly forgotten what books actually came out in 2017. I only recently realized that Kameron Hurley’s STARS ARE LEGION came out in 2017? I thought it was 2016? (Probably because I read it in 2016, I think.) As a sidenote, I recommend that book and others over at the Book Smugglers.

So, given that two of my releases — Thunderbird and Empire’s End came out very early in 2017, I guess I’ll pop by and say, hey, those books.

I wrote them.

I hope you liked them.

I suspect there exists a zero percent chance anyone would nominate Empire’s End or the now-completed Aftermath trilogy for any Major Awards, because I don’t think that tie-ins tend to earn them. I am very proud of those books, though, and tried to own them and own the voice even while sharing this epic universe with all the Stars and all the Wars. And I do enjoy the fantasy of them earning a nomination, if only for the underwear-chafing that ensues amongst a certain bigoted cabal of very loud toilet-humans.

Bonus: I wrote a Jar-Jar chapter, and I think it is very good. Which I know, doesn’t sound like reality, but it is reality. It happened. Here we are.

Also, there’s Damn Fine Story, though I’ve no idea what award that would even go for, or if a book that talks about how the Emperor’s name is really a Star Wars version of “Steve” really deserves an award anyway.

So, there you have it.

Happy award season, word-nerds.

*stomps button with foot*

*trap door opens*

*quietly oozes into the open floor portal*

AND WE ARE BACK.

*waves*

The holidays are over, and the time to commence with great wordsmithy is upon us. And by “great,” I mean, ennnh, you know, a thousand words or so. Let’s jump in with a theme, or, rather, the hint of a theme — the overall topic is the danger of undeserved power. What that means to you or says to you is yours alone.

Get writing.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: Friday, January 12th, noon EST

Post at your online space.

Drop a link to it in the comments below.

Psst.

You.

Yeah, you.

If you want to pre-order a signed copy of the fifth Miriam Black book, The Raptor & The Wren, then Let’s Play Books has you covered. They’ll ship it to you for free, and I’ll sign it, and for extra fun, if the book is personalized I will predict in it your demise.

*opens up trenchcoat*

*inside are various implements of murder: a machete, a blow-gun, a garden weasel, a Venus flytrap, a cokehead squirrel, a portable black hole that spins and spins and from which emanates dread whispers of your true name and social security number*

See, some may already know that when I sign the Miriam Black books in person, I sign them with a prediction (usually batshit absurd) of your death. (Translation: “nibbled to death by grackles,” not “I dunno, bowel cancer?”) I will do this to these books. You gimme a book to sign, I will sign it with a prediction of your gloriously bizarre end. Just as Miriam would, and could. (Note: This also applies to any of the Miriam Black books you buy, which are also part of the deal.)

Details here at the Let’s Play Books website.

Order by Tuesday, the 16th, to get the book by launch day.

Also, be aware that I’ll be at Let’s Play Books to launch the book on the 23rd, if you’re in (or can get to) the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania. Details here at the bookstore’s Facebook page.

Publisher’s Weekly recently said of The Raptor & The Wren — “Wendig is in top form for his fifth horror-thriller… [he] 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.”

The description of the book:

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.

It’s out January 23rd.

Vultures, the sixth and final Miriam Black book, releases January 2019.

Pre-order your signed, doom-inscribed copy at Let’s Play Books.

Last year, the resolution for 2017 could easily be the same as 2018 — I told you to WRITE DESPITE, meaning, no matter how deep the world is buried beneath an endlessly burning pile of horseshit, carve out some time and some space and create something anyway. Because writing is a form of resistance. That one still works, should you so require it.

This year, the writing resolution is for me less political and more personal:

Write with intentionality.

What it means, is this: you can write a story by simply wanting to tell it, and then telling it. You can let the story be, if you will, a river into which you have been tossed. And this can feel right and proper, because a story feels like a winding, animated thing. It pulls you along, and ideally, pulls the reader along, too. A lot of storytelling comprises, as Bob Ross calls them, “happy accidents.” Meaning, moments and pieces that seem serendipitous, that seem born of some strange narrative alchemy that is not precisely in your control — you just slapped together a couple of elements and it made, I dunno, a new element, or a lightning strike, or a rainy day, or a magic wish-granting bear. (What, you don’t have a magic wish-granting bear? WRITE HARDER.)

Happy accidents are good. Storytelling should be that way, sometimes.

But it isn’t always that way, either.

In writing comics, I’ve learned the power of really taking the time to — for lack of a better term — practice your aim. Writing a novel often feels like spraying the pages down with machine gun bullets, just chewing prose until you rat-a-tat a story into the fucking wall. But comics, man, you have a narrative economy to deal with. You have so much of a page, and only so many ways to frame out what happens. It’s fucking hard. It’s like writing a kid’s picture book. You ever try writing one of those? Haha, you think they’re gonna be easy, because it’s like, 100 words. But turns out, making 100,000 words work is easier than making 100 work. Because in a hundred-thousand-words, you can spackle over a lot of dents. In a hundred, every tiny ding, every off-angle, every bit of dirt on the lens — it is keenly seen, diminishing the potency of the tale told.

Film, too, works this way: you only have two hours-ish, and you have to make each moment on the screen, with image and dialogue and music, a goddamn triumph. (Might I recommend EVERY FRAME A PAINTING? It is now retired, but the archive exists, and go right now to check out “Edgar Wright, How To Do Visual Comedy.”)

This year I wrote a monster-sized book. I’ve gone on about it (sorry!) because holy shit, I have never done this before. Before this year, the longest book I’d ever written was Zer0es, which was 125,000 words (and is on sale, along with Invasive, for $3.99 right now, prod, prod). The average Miriam Black novel is around 70-80,000 words. This book, Wanderers, ended up at 260,000 words, more than twice my longest book.

I have no idea what the final word count will be. I await edits from the (truly spectacular) editor, who I trust will help me shape this thing into the massive epic horror-ish siege weapon I need it to become. But in writing this thing, I tried to take it slow, even as I wrote it fast. I tried to pause with scenes and chapters and ask myself along the way: why is this here? Not only that, but what do I want this scene, this chapter, to do? Specifically, what do I want it to do to the reader? I want them to feel a certain way, so how do I engineer that feeling with story and character? Often, first drafts involve me rolling myself into a ball-shape and then pitching myself down the side of a mountain, screaming as I tumble unstoppably forward… but this time I tried to be more deliberate, more aware, of what I was doing, and how, and why. I tried to feel every step of the thing. That doesn’t mean I was successful, mind you. But it does mean that I tried to develop a keener, more highly-tuned sense of what the story was as I was writing it.

I tried to treat every page like a frame in a comic book.

What’s happening?

What’s the economy?

What’s the point? What am I saying? What should you be feeling?

And I would engineer it ahead, too — I would think, okay, this is a downbeat, I need an upbeat soon. This is some dark shit, how do I intersperse with humor for contrast? This next bit, I want to hurt the reader, I want to hurt ’em so damn bad, so how do I reach through the page, grab the reader by the heart, rip out the heart, then force them to re-eat their own heart again?

It was difficult.

Again, no idea if I was successful.

It’s like playing chess instead of checkers. It’s not chopping onions; it’s filleting a fish.

It helped me understand the story better, that intentionality. Usually it’s a thing I tend to in subsequent drafts, but now I try (key word: try) to get my hands around its throat on the first draft. I want a firm grip from the first page. Hell, the first line.

That’s not to say there are not, contained within, a number of happy accidents — there are, and ideally, always will be. (In Vultures right now I wrote a random Uber-driver character who I liked so much he has become a primary supporting character with agency to push and pull on the plot. He was an extra, but now he’s got a supporting role.) And it’s not to say it made a cleaner first draft; arguably, I think it made it messier, because if things didn’t quite fit for my vision of how a chapter or scene needed to go, I’d just scrap them, leaving the floor littered with plot scraps and swatches of ill-fitting narrative. But it helped me get a larger sense of the thing. And it helped me focus up what I’m trying to do, not just in the macro, but in the micro, too.

So, for me, and maybe for you, there’s power in writing with intentionality.

Decide how you want the reader to feel, and write that way.

Decide what you’re trying to say, and why, and then fucking say it.

Know the purpose, aim your voice, write with vigor and deliberation.

Take command. Be confident. Be willful.

And play, too, to find out how to make it work. Compose and recompose a scene. Go one way with it, then rewrite it another way. Learn to see how intentional changes make for a butterfly effect in the work. Learn the weave and the weft of it. Don’t just go down the river. Put objects in the water, see how fast they move. See if they block the flow or speed it up or break the river in twain.

Write with intentionality.

Try it out.

Let me know how it goes, how it feels, how it works.

And I’ll see you in 2018.

* * *

DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

What do Luke Skywalker, John McClane, and a lonely dog on Ho’okipa Beach have in common? Simply put, we care about them.

Great storytelling is making readers care about your characters, the choices they make, and what happens to them. It’s making your audience feel the tension and emotion of a situation right alongside your protagonist. And to tell a damn fine story, you need to understand why and how that caring happens.

Whether you’re writing a novel, screenplay, video game, or comic, this funny and informative guide is chock-full of examples about the art and craft of storytelling–and how to write a damn fine story of your own.

Out now!

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

A week or so before Christmas, I had the following thought:

What if we’ve ended the world and just haven’t realized it yet? What if we’ve entered the walking ghost phase of Humanity Poisoning, and we’re all walking around, toodling about on our social media and taking selfies with dogs, but we haven’t yet realized that the world has already gone beyond the brink and no part of it can be saved — but we just haven’t caught up to the reality yet? Meaning, we’ve flipped all the switches, spun all the dials, then caved in the control panel with a crowbar to make sure you can’t undo any of the settings. Electing the Fucking Asshole to the highest office of the land was like setting off a chain of dominoes, except the lead domino is actually just a giant concrete slab that crushes the entire domino chain before they can clickity-click-click together, one after the other. We careen toward economic depression and climate catastrophe and each mass shooting bigger than the last. And now we wait as this unfixable machine slowly rattles itself to pieces, largely unaware and at least vaguely, foolishly, spitefully optimistic even as we watch the pieces fall off or burn up.

I don’t believe it’s true, to be clear.

But I had the thought, and it’s a pretty good indicator of where my head is at in this, the Year That Took Ten Years, 2017.

I’ve been ping-ponging between optimism and pessimism in a nearly manic fashion. I began this year fearing the worst, but then took some comfort that the monsters that grabbed the wheel of our democracy are actually very, very stupid. My evaluation: they’re not good at it. They are comically inept, in fact, and it feels less like watching the Wehrmacht and more like watching ten clowns fuck each other in an over-inflated bouncy-house. Less like watching a finely-tuned military operation, and more like watching a drunk guy running around Disneyworld hitting people with a hammer. Less like pure evil and more like weaponized dipshittery.

On the other hand, the clown orgy, the hammer-smacking, the rampant dipshitty — well, like I said, it’s fucking rampant, isn’t it? It’s ceaseless. And that’s where my optimism suddenly rides the roller coaster into a deep valley — these people are stupid fucking assholes, yes, but they are tireless at it, and there are many of them, and though they are not efficient, they are still doing damage left and right, en masse. You let one guy with a hammer run around Disneyworld all day, he’s gonna brain a lot of people. And the news is just like, ohh, goddamnit. You open social media and it’s like, the Thing That Should’ve Been A Scandal Yesterday has now been replaced by seven more, and that last Shoulda Been A Scandal feels like it happened six years ago even though it happened six hours ago. And it’s so ceaseless I fear we’re becoming inured to it. “Ahh, I see President Asshole has changed the law so now it’s okay to enslave children at factories, that’s cool. And he personally killed the last bald eagle before tweeting his 3,412th tweet this week about how Hillary Clinton is the head of ISIS and how she and the FBI should be sent to a Moon Prison, except he misspelled Moon, which is a thing I didn’t know you could do. Cool. Everything’s cool. This is normal.”

(The last bald eagle’s dying whisper: “This is not normal.”)

Then I feel optimism again because despite the gerrymandering and suppression and winnowing of our voting laws, we’ve made some real strides there. I mean, Virginia? Alabama? (Yeah, know Doug Jones is a Milkshake Duck, but he’s a Democrat in Alabama, who’d you think he was gonna be?) But then it goes back to pessimism again because dear god how did the GOP ever support Roy Moore and wait how the fuck did they ever support President Asshole and god if I have to see Paul Ryan’s smug, gormless face anymore I think I’ll literally take a shit on the Constitution, and don’t even get me started on the melting candle that is Mitch McConnell and —

See what I’m saying? Back and forth, back and forth.

I guess that’s the best thing I can say about 2017, in terms of all that out there *gesticulates in the general direction of the real world* — at least it coulda been worse. That’s 2017, to me: it coulda, maybe shoulda, been worse.

Personally and professionally, I’m doing pretty all right.

I released Empire’s End, aka the last of the Star Wars: Aftermath trilogy (Print | eBook). It hit list, landing at number three on the NYT Bestsellers list, which truly proves the hater’s narrative that these books are terrible and don’t sell any copies. (Which I see is also the narrative now somehow surrounding The Last Jedi — the very bad movie that no one saw, and is so bad and is performing so poorly that it has buried Disney in piles of money, oh well, guess they won’t make Episode IX after all.) I think we’re supposed to do AWARDS ELIGIBILITY POSTS, and I’ll casually note that I’d love for the Aftermath trilogy to get an award nod somewhere, just to put a burr in the bigots’ panties. Sidenote: the Aftermath trilogy continues to pop up at the Locus Bestsellers List.

Also out: the fourth Miriam Black book, Thunderbird (Print | eBook). This did not sell as well as I’d hoped, and continues to kinda… poke along. As to why that is, I have some ideas, but I’ll unpack them at the close of the series in a year’s time. I’m proud of the book, regardless. I hope that over time it finds its audience. If you’re a Miriam Black fan, please: proselytize the books as you can! Books like that do well with word-of-mouth. So. OPEN MOUTH, SHOOT OUT WORDS.

Damn Fine Story (Print | eBook) also came out this fall, and has had sales that surpassed my wildest dreams — people seem to be responding to it very well, I think, and they seem to dig that it’s like Stephen King’s On Writing, if Stephen King were instead a drunken, lusty elk who had learned the Ways of Man and how to tell stories to his fellow elkfolk. The greatest compliment I get on this book is that people have read it and emailed me or tweeted at me to say that it helped them figure out a problem in their work, which is ideal. It’s the whole point!

Had a short story in From A Certain Point-of-View about Wuher, the cantina barkeep on Tatooine, and why he hates droids so damn bad. Very proud of it, even though it clearly proves that Lucasfilm would never hire me again after the dismal failure that was Aftermath (*snerk*).

I wrote some more comics: in this case, a relaunch and reboot of the Turok character for Dynamite. The last issue, number five, comes out this Wednesday, so if you want a dude kicking the ass of fascist dinosaurs, I got you covered. Lot of fun to write, and working for Dynamite has been a blast, so: woo and hoo.

Invasive was optioned for TV with David Slack and Jerry Bruckheimer, imagined as a show called Unthinkable — technically, it was optioned in 2016, but only this year did it start to get some power behind it. I’ve read the script this past week and it’s amazing, and I’m hopeful it lands on your television sets this next year if only because the script is so good I want to see it myself. (Slack is a fucking master.)

I wrote a 260,000-word book this year. That book is Wanderers.

I’m also currently finishing up the final Miriam book, Vultures.

And personally, family has been great — B-Dub continues to grow up and be an amazing little dude. He’s eager and engaged and he reads and writes, and he sits every day at his drawing table and draws amazing things. He plays guitar and can read music. We’re good here. I traveled a lot. California. Vegas. Utah. Colorado, NYC, Florida.

Unsure exactly what 2018 will bring.

Politically, probably more manure.

Though hopefully elections in 2018 will be decisive.

Professionally, well.

In January, The Raptor & The Wren lands (Print | eBook), and it’s a book I’m particularly proud of — Miriam Black’s penultimate adventure is an unholy ride, I hope. I wrote it in the midst of some serious insomnia last year, but honestly, I think that helped produce the book that it became.

In fact, hey, look, I just found the Publisher’s Weekly review:

“Wendig is in top form for his fifth horror-thriller (after 2017’s Thunderbird) featuring sharp-edged psychic Miriam Black, who has the power to learn how and when people will die. Miriam has discovered a new ability: she can control birds with her mind. It’s a neat trick, and one that will come in handy in the days ahead while she helps former FBI agent Thomas Grosky track down a killer who looks just like her and is a blast from her very messy past. Miriam’s search takes her into the darkest, most vicious depths of her talents, and back into the arms of former lover Louis Darling, whose eventual fate Miriam has already glimpsed. She knows fighting her destiny is a losing proposition, but she tries anyway, all while dodging a horrifying entity that wants to annihilate her. 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.”

And then after that —

Then after that —

*checks notes*

*shakes notes*

*stares at them for a while*

I got nothing.

That’s it for 2017.

One book.

That’s because Wanderers, my Very Big Epic Horror-ish Novel, is now publishing in 2019.

This is a very new phenomenon for me.

One book? In one year? WHO AM I AND WHAT HAVE I BECOME

Real-talk, though: this is essential, because when I publish too many books traditionally, I end up competing with myself on bookshelves. That’s a hard, weird reality to being an over-productive writer. Bookstores can only carry so many of my books, and so — I make it harder for them to do this. That’s just the reality of physical shelf-space, sadly.

So, I’ll take 2017 and just write more fucking books, I guess. Comics, too, I hope.

As is my way.

Anyway.

That’s it for me. I’ll be some places, if you care to find me.

I hope you’re well.

Let’s kick 2017 to the fucking curb and let’s make 2018 better than the last. Which means we have to be invested and involved. It means we gotta work toward the light and fight the dark. It means we have to champion causes and our principles even when it hurts, even when it’s hard. It means we have to vote. It means we have to create, not destroy. It means we have to share love, even if we have to do so aggressively and in the face of danger and oppression. We have to see our privilege and demand restitution. We gotta do better. So let’s do better, together.

Fuck off, 2017.

Hello, 2018.

See you on the other side, my precious muffins.

P.S. no matter what happens, at least we still have dogs, btw

P.P.S. me and drunken bad-ass Kameron Hurley show up on the Ditch Diggers End-of-Year podcast with Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace, so give that shit a listen, you silly little wizards, you

I WILL SHOW UP IN PLACES IN 2018, and I figure it’s best I don’t do this randomly, without warning, like some kind of ghost or gopher.

Or gopherghost.

I figure to maximize my appearances, I should actually…

…well, tell you about them? It’s a radical idea, and I’m running with it.

Let us begin:

January 23rd

Book launch, The Raptor & The Wren, Let’s Play Books, 6:30PM, Emmaus, PA. Details here on the bookstore’s Facebook page. Come by, I’ll sign books, we’ll have a few laughs, we’ll talk about life and death and fate and free will and also porgs.

January 27th – 28th

Elgin Literary Festival, near Chicago, IL! I’m one of the guests, I’ll say stuff, we can talk about writing. It’ll be nice. Details here.

March 1st – 4th

Emerald City ComicCon! Very excited for this. Not sure of my schedule as yet but I hope it’ll be cool. Seattle is awesome and I’ve heard only aaaamaaaazing things about this con. ECCC Website.

March 24th

RWA Workshop (“Characters as Architects, Not Architecture”) in Austin, TX! 9AM to 2PM. Details here. Come say hi! Bring me a taco!

April 20-22nd

RavenCon in Williamsburg, VA! I’m the Author Guest of Honor, yay. You should go and it will be grand. Ravencon Website.

May 24th – 27th

Phoenix ComicCon! I again return to the scorching dry demon’s mouth that is Arizona — always a great time, let’s eat tacos and drink Cartel Coffee together and I mean, sure, something about books? PHXCC Website.

And I think that’s it for now, though I’m probably missing something.

SEE YOU IN THESE PLACES, hopefully.