See that photo?

It’s body hair.

No, calm down, not that kind of body hair. Nothing south of the border.

IT’S NIPPLE HAIR ha ha no, not really, just arm hair.

No big news to share — well, I have a couple pieces, but I can’t actually share them lest I be murdered — so I’ll just say that, had a stellar event with Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde the other day at the Free Library of Philly (and ahem apologies it’s why there was no flash fiction challenge, I had to bust out of here too early and forgot to hit POST). Huge crowd (as Kevin is wont to draw), and had a blast the whole way.

Prior to that I did one of those things that counts as PROPER ADULTING — not like, “I cleaned my counter, yay #adulting,” but rather, “I updated my last will and testament and figured out my physical and literary estate for when I finally kick off, be it today or ten thousand todays from now, and sure, hey, let’s consider the legal ramifications of my eventual hop-skip-shuffle off this mortal coil, whee #adulting.” This is a reminder that if you have not squared away the Circumstances After Your Demise, do so. Doubly so if you have children, triply so if you are a person who has intellectual property about which to worry.

Speaking of the mortal coil —

I am sad to see George Romero go. Romero created for us an entirely new mythology, and that’s no small thing. He understood that monsters were not merely monsters, but rather, that they were a commentary on us, or a reflection of us. Further, he was a paragon to both the horror community and the independent film community. Last week I had the distinct pleasure of being in a Night of the Living Dead anthology that Romero co-edited with Jonathan Maberry, and now, Romero being gone is just a kick to the teeth.

Onward, now, to a few more macro photos for the week — the first of which is from a plant that is literally called RATTLESNAKE MASTER (also my nickname in high school). Second photo is a ladybug pupa. Third photo is waterdrop on evergreen.

You’re having a shitty writing day.

It happens.

I get a crap writing day at least once a week. Maybe twice. Once in a while, I get a whole bad run of writing days, like I’ve got some kind of creative food poisoning and every day is just the urgent regurgitation of narrative fluids without aim or purpose. It’ll be five heinous days in the word mines, where I’m sweating and raging and kicking dirt.

To repeat: it happens.

Problem is, these days, these fucking days, boy howdy — they can derail your train, can’t they? Knock you right off the track.

But it’s okay.

I’m here to help you get through them.

But first you have to get in the van.

*gestures to van*

*waits*

*waits some more*

Okay, you know what, looking at the van now, I maybe see what I did wrong. Maybe we don’t get in the van. Maybe we just stand outside the van. It’s cool. We can talk here, where you can easily run screaming for help.

The first thing you need to know is that:

Bad writing days — or, if you’re an artist, bad art-making days — are normal.

They are part of it. They are woven into the fabric of what we do.

In fact, writing is supposed to be hard. Easy things are boring things. Easy is like, putting on lip balm, or making a pot of $0.19 grocery store ramen. Those are not bad things, but they are not particularly consequential things, either. Nobody changed the world by putting on lip balm. (Cue 52 comments where people tell me that Winston Churchill and Roosevelt bonded over lip balm.) Writing a story or making art is not putting on lip balm. It’s not raking leaves, even if the mechanics feel that way sometimes.

Stories are bigger, stranger, sprawlier things.

Consider: the act of telling a story is you CONJURING AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE INSIDE YOUR MIND and then using words as knives to CARVE THAT UNIVERSE INTO REALITY SO THAT OTHERS CAN VISIT YOUR IMAGINATION. “Today I am going to make a world out of my brain that you can go to in your spare time,” you say aloud, hopefully realizing that this is far more significant and far more bizarre than tying your shoes or blowing your nose. Creating whole worlds is pyroclastic. It is volcanic. It’s heat and fire, it’s molten rock, it’s lightning inside black smoke amid the nose and clamor of thundering earth and boiling air. It is an astonishing, generative act.

And it’s sometimes hard.

Sometimes what we do is stage magic. Sometimes the magic is sacrificial.

Stage magic requires hours of practice where you get it wrong.

Sacrificial magic requires blood on the altar.

In both cases, the magic — be it trick or spell — is hard as hell.

As it should be. As it must be.

We sometimes get the false sense as creatives that, if this thing we do does not come naturally, then it is not worth doing — or worse, that we are somehow not meant to do it at all. I watch this with my son sometimes, where he wants to try something new and because he is not immediately successful he rules himself “terrible” at it and wants to stop. Thing is, he is terrible at it. Of course he’s terrible at it. What, he’s going to sit down on his first try at painting and summon a Mondrian Mona Lisa? No. He’s going to paint something that looks like a clown ate a unicorn and then threw it all up again. (Spoiler warning: sometimes I go to write a first draft and yeah, no, it looks like a clown ate a unicorn and then threw it all up again. This is how it goes. It’s part of the process, man.) This isn’t automatic. It’s not automagic. It takes time and effort and grit and sweat and confusion and probably hallucinogenic drugs and definitely an ingrained sense of free-wheeling foolishness.

It being hard is not a sign of it being not worth doing.

The difficulty is the point. The difficulty proves its worth.

The difficulty is not a sign that you don’t belong here.

Impostor Syndrome is real. Flip the script on it. Don’t let it have power over you. Admit you’re an impostor. Then admit that we’re all impostors — none of us belong here because art and story are forbidden, interstitial places. This thing we do is Buccaneer’s Den, it’s Mos Eisley, it’s a secret moon colony. Not a one of us “belongs” here. We all booked illegal passage through blackest night and sharky waters to get here. We’re not one ship, we’re countless life-boats strung together — a glorious flotilla of freaks.

This is who we are. It’s what we do. And what we do is sometimes hard. It’s hard for me. It’s hard for you. It’s hard for Stephen King. It’s hard for J.K. Rowling. King probably thinks that Rowling does it effortlessly, and Rowling probably thinks King sails through every draft, and the truth is, it’s hard for them, for you, for me, for every penmonkey that ever done monkeyed with a pen.

When a story reads effortlessly, it was not written effortlessly. In fact, the more effortlessly it reads, the more effort probably went into making it read effortlessly.

It took work.

Lots and lots of unholy, occasionally unhappy, hard-ass work.

Because, repeat after me: IT’S HARD.

Now, to clarify: it’s not hard in the way other work is hard. It’s not back-breaking work. Nobody’s shooting at us. We’re not training chimpanzees or wrangling eight-year-olds or wrestling bears. It’s easy, in that way. But it’s also hard in its own way, and let it be that way. If we diminish what we do, if we make it seem that the act of MAKING COOL STUFF is somehow cheap and glib and fucking throwaway, it undercuts our power. It sells short the necessary nature of art and story in the world. It makes what you do feel lesser when what you do is epic. Story moves the world. Art changes people. Entertainment gives us respite. Narrative gives us enlightenment.

It all moves the needle.

When you’re having a bad writing day, a hard writing day, remember that.

And remember too that when you sit down a week from now, or a month, or a year, the days the writing was hard and the days the writing was easy will be indistinguishable from one another. In fact, sometimes the easy days produce worse work than the difficult days. You never know. So don’t let it stop you. Put the bucket over your head and run at the wall anyway. And remember that all of this is just a draft, that it can all be fixed and changed, that what doesn’t work can be made to work. It can always be made to work with enough practice, with enough blood.

You’re having a hard day of writing, write anyway.

Do it because it’s hard.

Forgive yourself because it’s hard.

Don’t let one bad day be the gravestone for the rest of the days.

Then stop. Push a little, but don’t push so hard you drop your brain out of your ass. Go and take a walk, play with the dog, eat a churro, crank one out. Then get back to it tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be hard tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be harder tomorrow. I don’t know. Nobody knows. But the difficulty is the point. You’re ripping things out of you and putting them onto the page. Nobody said it was going to be easy. Nobody said it should be easy.

Let it be what it must be.

Look.

Looooook.

GAZE UPON THE ANTLERS AND DESPAIR.

Okay, no, wait, shit, don’t despair.

That’s just the cover of my brand spanking new writing book, even though it’s not really a writing book but rather, a book about storytelling, about how we tell stories, why we tell them, and how we can use all the fiddly bits of narrative to make them more impactful.

It also contains a deer on the cover.

And various personal anecdotes like the one about the masturbating elk.

The book is out October 18th of this year.

And why yes, my deer, you can pre-order it:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

And yes, I do believe I’ll be doing a brief li’l book tour in support — I will in fact be joining word maestro Kevin Hearne on his book tour for the really-fucking-awesome Plague of Giants and story-maven Fran Wilde (of the Bone Universe series) in San Francisco (Borderlands, Oct 17th), Portland (Powells in Beaverton, Oct 18th) and Seattle (University Bookstore, October 19th).

Though you may be saying hey that’s too far away, I wanna see you guys sooner, then DEER READER, I’ll note that you can come see us this motherfucking Friday (the 14th) if you’re anywhere near Philadelphia (event details here).

So, do all of that.

Go buy all the books.

Come see all the authors.

Flail and gibber and wail.

Also yeah no, I know that’s not a macro photo, but pretend it’s a really tiny deer.

(Sidenote: I’ve been having some problems with the blog again — I think they’re solved now, was based on a wonky .htaccess file. Apologies for any downtime or unapproved comments!)

Last night, I had a dream — no, no, not the one with Mrs. Butterscotch and the strap-on dildo covered in spray cheese. This one was a dream in which a phrase figured prominently:

There is no exit.

I don’t know why.

I don’t know what it means.

It probably doesn’t mean anything, because dreams are just your brain’s way of pooping.

Anyway.

I thought it would make a very good flash fiction challenge.

So, incorporate that phrase —

“There is no exit”

— into the story. Either as a title, a line of dialogue, a theme, whatever.

Go forth and tell the story.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: July 14th, Friday, noon, EST

Post at your online space, then give us a link so we can read it.

Last week, I said, gimme some five-word-titles.

This week, I picked ten at random.

They are:

Dark Lords of Shining Sun

Paper Cuts Make Good Bait

You Don’t Steal My Shit

Once There Was Far Music

I Shouldn’t Have Swiped Right

Ghosts of the Sea Queen

Someone’s Dragon Is Double-Parked Outside

The House No One Built

Dear Robbie Benson, Save Me

Time For Tea And Treachery

Your job:

Pick one or nab one at random.

Then write a story using it.

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: Friday, July 7th, noon EST

Post at your online space. Link back here.

Pick and write.

Emmie Mears is the badass author of the Ayala Storme series. Please behold their guest post, which they wrote to let you know — you are not alone.

* * *

You need to get out of bed.

Roll for initiative.

For some reason, you’re stuck in the perma-one.

But let’s look at this from a different angle.

***

You’re probably not like Ayala Storme. You likely don’t have bright orange hair or violet eyes that clash with it. If you do have those eyes, it’s probably not because you were born a Mediator—you’re just a super rare earthling.

You’re probably a norm. A Muggle, as it were. Stuck on this rock with all seven billion of the rest of us.

But you might have something in common with Ayala anyway.

***

You don’t know exactly how it picks you. Sure, maybe it’s in your genes. Science is pretty certain of that. But why you? Why your consciousness, your soul, your essential Platonic you-ness?

Just like Ayala’s eyes, you get it when you’re born. It might not wake up for a long time. You might go years or even decades before you see your first demon.

***

When Ayala is seconds old, the doctor scoops the mucous from her mouth and waits for her to yell. Clips the cord.

At that point it’s already done.

She gets taken away from her mother and brought to a place where everyone will come face to face with demons. As soon as she can lift a stick, they teach her how to fight with a sword.

Is that how it felt for you?

That’s how it felt for me. I learned early that there were demons out there. They invaded my home, sunk their claws in my family. They lurked in my room, stalked my sister and me both until we felt we’d never be rid of their slime. They don’t make a detergent strong enough for that.

Maybe for you it was different. Maybe you were older when you saw your first one. It could have been any number of things or none. When they linger long enough in your periphery, you start fighting just to exist, even if they don’t go directly for your throat.

***

Ayala kills her first demon when her age is still in the single digits. It’s a little, stubby thing. It makes her feel strong and scared and serious…for a while.

You understand that, don’t you?

The first one you kill feels like a triumph until the second one rears its head.

The second one is always bigger, always quicker. Any arrogance you let soak into your skin scrubs away when it appears.

You’ll probably beat that one, too. And the next one, and the next one.

You’ll learn that there are lots of different kinds. Some spit at you with corrosive venom. Others shoot you full of quills. Some just have claws and teeth, and those are bad enough. Some jump up and land on your back, heavy, pendulous.

You start to notice that some kinds scare you more than the others.

Ayala understands that. She learns early on that behind every demon is another one, waiting.

***

How do you fight when that is the truth? How does she keep picking up her sword, first as a terrified kid, later as a gawky adolescent, finally as a resigned adult?

How do you?

Ayala knows in every molecule of her being that her world is ever only inches away from sliding right into hell. Not even sliding. Becoming hell.

Even though she knows there are thousands of people just like her out there, picking up their swords day after day to stab the same slime over and over—even though she knows that, she believes she’s in this alone.

It’s easy to think that. So easy to feel it, and when you feel it, it feels true.

It feels true because we see people we love lose their lives to the demons. Sometimes people we see every day. Sometimes people we know through their art.

It feels true because of the endless scroll of social media. How could we feel anything but small in the face of a fragile world so often led by fear?

Ayala see that too.

But believing that we fight alone doesn’t make it true.

***

Ayala’s not the only person who sees demons and fights them. In her world, plenty of people don’t see what she sees.

The same happens here.

Telling Ayala to just buck up and look at the good in her life? She’ll laugh in your face. Telling her not to worry? She knows damn well the danger is real.

You know that too. It’s just harder when the demons you fight only show their faces to a relative few.

There’s no secret to surviving this fight. It gets harder every time we lose another one of the good folks. When you’re knee deep in the shit, it makes you sink a little bit more.

The best weapon we have, though, is one another.

I know, I know. Ayala’d say that’s cheesy too.

Here’s the thing: Ayala’s world needs her. Just like this one needs you.

Those demons you’re fighting? You’re not fighting them alone. They only come out in the dark, and they do it so we can’t see the soldiers around us. It’s their single best tactic, isolating you from your comrades.

Fuck that.

Fuck that right to all six and a half hells.

I’ve fallen on some black days these past few years, deeper still the past few months. One look at my social media feeds tells me I’m far from being the only one, but still so many times, I don’t know how to reach out a hand.

So I’m asking you: do you know that we’re here?

For anyone fighting demons, that’s one of the biggest lessons to learn. It’s not a one time deal, either. We learn it once, we forget, we learn it again. Sometimes with some bruises to show for it.

You don’t get to choose your genes, your brain chemistry, which traumas hit you and when. You don’t get to choose those things. Ayala doesn’t get that choice either.

If we can’t see the others fighting their own battles around us, what we can choose is to raise our voices. Let them hear us scream defiantly into the faces of our demons.

A couple weeks ago, I had a night where I wasn’t sure I’d see the morning.

I shared this on Instagram:

Depression is a motherfucker. I’m trying to be open about it because if you’re fighting the same monster I am, you deserve to know you have comrades in this. When you’re in the shit and depression blurs your vision and you’re up all night trying to hang on against the claws dug deep in your heart and mind, it’s hard to remember that mere inches away in this battle there are others. Depression isolates. It lies.

This is my face. I fought all night, and hands of friends held me up, and when dawn came, they cradled me.

You might think you have no one to do that for you. It’s not true. I may be fighting my own battle, but you can reach out your hand and we can fight together.

Ayala’s story is complete, but it’s not over. When I wrote these four books, I didn’t consciously realize I was writing a big metaphor for depression, several hundred thousand words long.

She’s never alone in her fight.

Neither are you.

***

Ayala Storme’s series is complete at four books, countless butts, a lot of really cute bunnies, and heaps of hellkin—she’s also queer. She’ll fight you if that’s a problem. In her world, they’ve got bigger frahlig demons to fry.

All four books are now available at your choice of snazzy retailer. If you want a chance to win this entire series in paperback (signed!), audio, or ebook, enter here. (terms and conditions on page).

* * *

Emmie Mears is also M Evan Matyas. You can call them Evan or Emmie—they’ll answer to either. Their pronouns are they/them. Evan is about to puddle hop over to Scotland with their partner and two cats. If you want to catch an exclusive Stormeworld short story, check out their Patreon [patreon.com/emmiemears]. There’s a whole world of exclusive content over there that you can get your paws on for a dollar a month. It helps Evan keep writing and fighting.